Democracy

• He is on a secret mission to meet representatives of Britain’s ruling Labour party – including, he hopes, the recently elected prime minister, Ramsay MacDonald.
• The 38-year-old Matteotti, a tireless defender of workers’ rights, still hopes Mussolini can be stopped.
• For Matteotti, this new British government – the first to be led by Labour, although not as a majority – is a beacon of hope.

Four days in London

• Britain’s new prime minister was a working-class Scot who had made his way up via humble jobs and political activism.
• In contrast, Matteotti hailed from a wealthy family that owned 385 acres in the Polesine region of north-eastern Italy.

• The team is working with academics from different backgrounds who have been engaged in projects aimed at tackling societal and scientific challenges.
• But something else may have troubled Mussolini about Matteotti’s visit to London – part of a European tour that also included stops in Brussels and Paris.

Death of a socialist

• He had reportedly been working on this speech day and night, studying data and checking numbers for many hours.
• This secret group, known as Ceka after the Soviet political police created to repress dissent, had been following Matteotti for weeks.
• The squad’s leader, US-born Amerigo Dumini, reputedly boasted of having previously killed several socialist activists.
• Socialist MPs, alerted by Matteotti’s wife, denounced the MP’s disappearance – but were not altogether surprised by it.
• For a few days, it appeared that the resulting public outrage – much of it aimed at Mussolini himself – might even bring down Italy’s government, spelling the death knell for fascism.

Why was Matteotti murdered?

• His death can be seen as one of the most consequential political assassinations of the 20th century.
• Yet for the Italian right, Matteotti is a ghost.
• Throughout her political career, Italy’s current prime minister, Giorgia Meloni, has hardly ever spoken about the historical crimes of fascists in Italy, and not once about the murder of Matteotti.
• The historical debate about the murder has also never reached a unanimous conclusion about who gave the order to kill Matteotti and why.

The LSE documents

• The story of how the documents came to be secreted away in the LSE library takes us back to London for another clandestine visit – this time by Gaetano Salvemini, an esteemed professor of modern history who fled Italy in November 1925.
• In December 1926, while still in London, Salvemini received the secret package which he soon passed on to the LSE.
• But they were driven by the conviction that these documents could one day prove beyond doubt that Mussolini had orchestrated Matteotti’s assassination.
• Salvemini may thus have considered the LSE a safe haven – and there the documents have remained ever since.

A voice from the dead

• Rather, the move allowed Mussolini to legislate unchallenged while the seats of the 123 MPs who had joined the rebellion were left vacant.
• Matteotti’s article, entitled “Machiavelli, Mussolini and Fascism”, was a response to an article published in the magazine’s June issue by Mussolini himself.
• The Italian prime minister’s translated essay about the Renaissance intellectual Niccolò Machiavelli had carried the provocative headline “The Folly of Democracy”.
• The article was widely commented on in the British press, which had been following the story of Matteotti’s murder almost daily.
• His funeral was rushed through very quickly, with the coffin being transported overnight in an attempt to prevent public gatherings.

The end of Italian democracy

• In a speech to parliament on January 3 1925, he took “political responsibility” for the murder while not admitting to ordering it.
• Mussolini’s speech ended with a rhetorical invitation to indict him – to a parliament now populated only by fascists.
• The speech signalled the end of Italian democracy.
• The nature of Mussolini’s involvement was little discussed in the wake of his execution in April 1945 and the end of the second world war.
• Was it the evidence of the Mussolini government’s corruption that he planned to reveal to the Italian parliament the day after his kidnap?

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• He has also received funding from the Fondazione Giacomo Matteotti to study the LSE documents.
• Gianluca Fantoni does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

• So much so that after his visit to the UK in January, Michel Forst, the UN representative for environmental defenders, stated that he found their treatment “extremely worrying”.
• This ambitious international environmental agreement, which I have spent more than ten years studying and writing a book about, was designed to empower and protect environmental defenders.
• But environmental defenders insist that these desperate and disruptive actions are nothing compared to the risks that political inaction pose to human health and that of our planet.
• Here are three reasons not to be mad at the protestors.

1. Democracies depend on citizen engagement

• Healthy democracies welcome and depend on an active and engaged citizens to thrive.
• These examples are all worrying signals for the state of our democracy, and our planet.
• The repression and criminalisation of environmental protesters and those undertaking acts of civil disobedience spells trouble for our democracies as well as our planet.

2. Environmental problems need diverse solutions

• Environmental harm can operate in ways that are not always well understood by those in power.
• Planetary problems therefore need a diverse range of solutions and everyone affected needs to be represented and have their interests heard.
• The Aarhus Convention also promotes active public participation in relation to environmental decision-making.

3. Suppressing protest won’t solve the planetary crisis

• Lethal air, filthy rivers, collapsing food chains, the climate crisis – these problems will all continue unabated, and soon become much more inconvenient than having to get off the bus to walk the last mile to work.
• Forst, in his report, puts it like this: “states must address the root causes of mobilisation” not the mobilisation itself.

Emily Barritt is a trustee of the Environmental Law Foundation

• 2024 LUX European Audience Film Award: press conference with the winner
  A press conference with a representative of the 2024 LUX Award winner will take place on Tuesday, after the announcement at the award ceremony.
• When: 16 April at 19.15 CET
  Where: Parliament’s Anna Politkovskaya press conference room in Brussels (SPAAK 0A50)
  Participants: representative of the winning film, EP Vice-President Evelyn Regner (S&D, AT) and Honorary President of the LUX European Audience Film Award and Chair of the European Film Academy, Mike Downey
  How: Accredited media representatives can attend the press conference physically.
• Journalists who have never used Interactio before are asked to connect 30 minutes before the start of the press conference to perform a connection test.
• The award ceremony
  The ceremony will start at 18.00 in the Hemicycle of the European Parliament in Brussels.

The European Parliament’s last Eurobarometer survey before the elections in June reveals awareness among citizens and concern for the current geopolitical context. Source : © European Union, 2024 - EP