Sitting in the dark, cramped dining room of her home in Tor Bella Monaca, a densely populated council estate on the outskirts of Rome, Giovanna has just returned from one of several cleaning jobs the 70-year-old does to keep her family afloat. Her husband works on construction sites intermittently. The couple, whose youngest son, Cristian, 26, lives at home, might be depicted as borgatara, a slur in Roman dialect that, loosely translated, means a poor person living on the socially deprived fringes of the Italian capital.
Referring to her own upbringing in Garbatella, a traditionally working-class district within easy reach of Rome’s famed monuments, the Italian prime minister Giorgia Meloni said earlier this month she was “a proud borgatara”.
It was not the first time Meloni has identified with people in the marginalised peripheries. The prime minister is depending on this cohort to boost her far-right Brothers of Italy in this week’s European parliamentary elections. The 47-year-old is running in the elections as a tactical move, using her still-high personal popularity to boost her party, even though if she wins she would immediately have to resign her EU seat due to rules for those who hold a ministerial post.
Announcing her candidacy in late April, Meloni told supporters to simply “write Giorgia” on the ballot paper. She added: “Because I am, and always will be, one of you. Power will not change me.”
That won’t be enough to win Giovanna’s vote. She is unsure who to back in the 6-9 June election, although she is certain she won’t be writing “Giorgia”. “Her words are just blah, blah, to obtain votes. Meloni is doing nothing for the poor,” Giovanna said.
Giovanna’s family has lived in Tor Bella Monaca, where poverty is extreme and drug dealing and shootings, sometimes in broad daylight, are the norm, since the large-scale development of grey towers was built in the 1980s.
Visits from politicians are rare. The only time Meloni is known to have held a rally there was in 2016, when she wrapped up her Rome mayoral election run with an event that transformed one of its squares into an idealistic Italian village complete with replicas of ancient Roman towers, food stands and children’s play areas. She didn’t win, but the general political disillusionment that followed over the years provided fertile ground for Brothers of Italy, which, since October 2021, has led the local district council and in 2022 emerged as the area’s biggest party in the general election.
Meloni has promised to crack down on organised crime and bring prosperity to long-deprived neighbourhoods such as Tor Bella Monaca.
She has a mammoth challenge. Crime gangs rule the roost while feeding off economic hardship: more than 40% of families here live in absolute poverty – six times the national average. Many people are forced to work for pitiful wages, exploited by some of the same businesses that support Meloni’s government. The area has among the highest school dropout rates in the Italian capital, along with a high level of juvenile detention. Tor Bella Monaca was also among the Roman districts with the most claimants of the citizens’ income, a poverty relief scheme, before it was axed last year by Meloni’s government on the premise it was being taken by people fit to work.
The measure was replaced with the “inclusion allowance”, which the European Commission said last month would increase absolute poverty due to the stringent restrictions on claiming it. The benefit lasts for a maximum of 12 months, during which recipients must take a training course. “There are many fragile individuals and families who found they didn’t qualify,” said Chiara Saraceno, a sociologist who was on a committee appointed by former prime minister Mario Draghi to examine their income. “Those who do then have trouble finding a training course –and it’s not as if this government has any real job-creation policies. So people are in disarray. This measure will keep many people poor.”
Data from Istat, the national statistics agency, shows that the previous citizens’ income went some way to alleviating poverty, lifting 1.3 million families above the breadline between 2020 and 2022.
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Alessia Pesaresi, who works for Sant’Egidio, a charity in Tor Bella Monaca, has seen an increase in families turning to food banks since the measure ended last August. “The income was that little bit extra for people who struggled to make ends meet,” she said. “Yes, there were those who took advantage, but many poor people ended up being penalised.”
Despite the myriad issues, Meloni and her Brothers of Italy, which is forecast to obtain about 27% of the vote in the European elections, still maintain a strong appeal, mostly owing to her tough rhetoric on criminality and illegal immigration but also because of weak opposition.
Tiziana Ronzio lives under police protection after receiving death threats in response to her work as president of TorPiùBella, a civic group dedicated to improving life in Tor Bella Monaca. She said: “I must say, there is more police presence than before, and they are evicting many criminal families and carrying out more controls.”
Alessandra Laterza, owner of Le Torri bookshop who, until last September, was also under police protection after death threats believed to have come from rightwing extremists for refusing to sell Meloni’s book, begs to differ. “There has been no real change. Instead, I think there has been a regression in terms of helping families in need. Let’s not forget that turnout was low around here in the 2022 elections, and I believe it will be the same this week.”
After years of living in a poorly maintained home, Giovanna’s family will soon move to a new one as part of a housing regeneration project approved by Draghi’s government and financed by the EU’s post-pandemic recovery fund. But the family’s main glimmer of hope is Cristian, who, against the odds, is one of very few young local people to have graduated from university. “I am the real underdog,” he said. “The Meloni government flexes its muscles but is not really achieving anything.”