Italy’s new interior minister calls for Roma registry

Matteo Salvini unveils plan to expel all
non-Italian Roma

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Salvini, the leader of the far-right populist Lega party, told a
local TV channel on Monday that he had ordered officials to prepare
a dossier on Italy’s 130,000-strong Roma population to find
out “who [they are], how [they live] and how many of them
there are”, the BBC reports.

The dossier would be the first part of an
“answer to the Roma question”, he said. Those without
Italian citizenship –  around 57% – would ultimately be
deported.

Mainstream politicians have roundly condemned the idea as
illegal and morally unacceptable.

Luigi Di Maio, leader of the Five Star Movement,
the Lega’s left-leaning coalition partner, said that such a
registry would be “unconstitutional”.

Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte said that Salvini had gone “too
far”, while opposition centre-left Democratic Party (PD) said the
plan was “abhorrent”, news agency Ansa reports.

The proposal has also attracted the attention of the European
Commission. Asked about Salvini’s plan, spokesman Alexander
Winterstein said: “A European citizen cannot be expelled on the
basis of ethnicity” and said the Commission “could not exclude” the
possibility of intervening with the Italian government.

Noemi Di Segni, president of the Union of Italian Jewish
Communities, said that the tactic was reminiscent of Nazi
persecution.

“There is no public safety justification for the
alarming proposal to single out specific categories of people,
register them and subject them to special laws that only apply to
them,” she told Rai News.

However, “polls show that Italians are backing the interior
minister, who is now polling about equal to Di Maio, at 29%, in
terms of popularity,” The Guardian reports.

Hours after the controversial announcement,
Salvini attempted to soften his initial remarks, “saying he did not
want to create a separate list of the Roma, and that his intention
was to protect Roma children and ensure they were going to
school”.

Today, the far-right leader posted images to his
official Facebook page showing the destruction
of a house in an unauthorised Sinti gypsy camp in a Lega-controlled
district near Turin.

“From words to actions,” he wrote in the
caption, along with the hashtag “Italians first”.