Progressive and anti-fascist groups in Turin, Italy mobilized to condemn the police action on students at the Einaudi Campus of the University of Turin. On December 5, students who had protested the campaigning of right-wing student group University Action on the campus were brutally beaten up by a big group of police.
Students allege that the police rushed into the campus to protect the right-wing student group which is affiliated to the Giorgia Meloni led neo-fascist government in Italy. Meloni herself used to be part of a similar far-right youth and student group.
Various groups including the Turin Anti-Fascist Coordination, Communist Youth Front (FGC), Potere al Popolo, Cambiare Rotta, and others protested the police action on students and also raised their concerns over the spike in far-right activism in and around universities and schools across the country.
The anti-fascist groups have accused the police of using disproportionate force to suppress the students who protested hate-mongering campaigns and pamphleteering by the right-wing student group on the campus premises. Earlier in October, police were involved in the campus to protect an initiative of the same right-wing group University Action. Azione Universitaria (AU) is a right-wing student group in Italy, founded as the University National Action Front (FUAN) in 1950, and became the university students’ organization of Giorgia Meloni’s party Brothers of Italy (FdI) in 2014. In February this year, members of Student Action (AS) brutally attacked three students at the Michelangelo School gate in Florence, courting widespread protests.
Under the patronage of the far-right coalition government in Italy, right-wing groups have been making concerted effort to gain a foothold within universities and other academic spaces. Meanwhile, progressive, anti-fascist student-youth groups in universities and colleges continue to resist the state-sponsored far-right machinations in academic spaces. Progressive student groups form an active contingent in the protests and strikes against the anti-worker, neoliberal, imperialist policies of the government.
On December 6, Cambiare Rotta accused that “the fascists from FUAN, authorized by the University, tried to carve out a space for themselves to carry out their hate campaigns and warfare, but the students managed to drive them out. The police, after the fascists were driven away, decided to beat the students several times furiously and without reason, hitting even two professors and breaking heads, in a vindictive-flavored impulse.”
“This episode is not only yet another sleepless night of hate propaganda from fascist groups within university spaces, but it fits into a much wider climate of violent closure of political aptitude spaces and repression of any kind of dissent involving all political colors”, added the group.
