One month before Italy goes to the polls, the conflict over immigration, and the future of migrant communities, has exploded. The European question has disappeared. For a moment, discussions around universal income and other forms of poor relief entered the stage. But these too have quickly receded in the wake of the attack on the morning of Saturday, February 3, when a fascist shot eight West Africans on the street in Macerata.

Faced with mass youth emigration and a stalled economy with seemingly no way out, practically all of the electoral parties have scapegoated immigrants for years. The days are over of praising migrant rescues at sea and the welcoming nature of ordinary Italians. For two years both the opposition parties and the government have shifted to the right, the former through ratcheting up racist, xenophobic rhetoric and the latter in criminalizing solidarity and all but closing the Mediterranean route, effectively condemning hundreds of thousands of people to the Libyan inferno.

In the Macerata attack, all the racism which has been fostered by the media and political class to create an ideological distraction from the material problems of the working class boiled over into a horrific act of fascist violence, in the process accelerating the tendency as the election nears: a train of hatred hurtling towards the end of the track.