Original article by Ana Vračar republished from peoples dispatch under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 (CC BY-SA) license.

Potere al Popolo is pressing the Meloni government to explain five police infiltration attempts targeting the party’s youth organizations.

Italian left party Potere al Popolo! (Power to the People!) continues to demand full government transparency following revelations that multiple police agents infiltrated the party’s youth groups, Collettivo Autorganizzato Universitario (Self-Organized University Collectives, CAU) and Cambiare Rotta (Changing Course). For approximately eight months, undercover police officers infiltrated or attempted to infiltrate chapters in Naples, Milan, Bologna, and Rome, only to be uncovered through by the party’s internal investigation and independent media outlet Fanpage.

Speaking to Peoples Dispatch, Giuliano Granato, one of Potere al Popolo’s spokespeople, stated that the party is exploring all potential avenues for action, emphasizing that it will not wait passively in the meantime. A key priority is compelling the relevant institutions, including Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni and Interior Minister Matteo Piantedosi, to publicly explain what happened. “They owe the public some answers,” Granato says. “Who ordered this operation? Who planned it? And on what grounds?”

Read more: Italian left party uncovers more cases of police infiltration in their ranks

Meloni’s government and institutions, however, are not known for responding transparently to uncomfortable questions. This became evident again after the first case was exposed in May, when official statements ranged from evasive to outright absurd. One explanation offered, Granato recalls, was that the officer who infiltrated the youth group in Naples had done so not as part of an official assignment, but rather because he had “fallen in love with a Potere al Popolo activist.”

“Are we now supposed to believe five officers from the same training course all suddenly fell in love with five of our activists at the same time?”

Another line of defense claimed that while the infiltrations were official operations, they did not target Potere al Popolo as a political party, but only the specific youth collectives. Yet, even if one was to accept the dubious legitimacy of undercover operations in youth organizations on campuses, that explanation raises new questions. As Granato notes, there are many youth collectives across Italy active on similar issues, including Palestine solidarity and housing. “And yet, the only ones where infiltrators were discovered are the ones organically tied to Potere al Popolo.”

A state increasingly intolerant of dissent

Granato also stresses the importance of keeping public attention on the issue. Since the revelations in May, Potere al Popolo! has received solidarity from grassroots networks and trade unions, civil society organizations, and even a few opposition parties that submitted formal inquiries to the government. “In contrast to this, there has been no media uptake of the case,” Granato said. “Apart from Fanpage, only Il Fatto Quotidiano and il manifesto covered it. The rest of the mainstream media landscape? Radio silence. All the big self-declared progressive media ignored it.”

“This is a very grave thing,” he continues, “because these are the same center-left media that now and then raise concerns about Meloni’s authoritarian drift.” By choosing not to cover the infiltrations in Potere al Popolo, Granato suggests, they show that they will only raise issues when it benefits them, ignoring the public interest when it doesn’t.

The tendency is particularly worrying in the current context, Granato says, considering the infiltration of Potere al Popolo is not an isolated case but part of a broader trend. He points to connections to other recent cases, such as the surveillance of Fanpage journalists and of activists from Mediterranea Saving Humans, who have challenged the government’s deadly migration policies through their work. He also mentions the government’s so-called security decree and an ongoing campaign against the right to strike. “If we connect all these little dots, what emerges is a picture of a government and institutions that are less and less tolerant of dissent,” Granato explains.

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Yet it is not individual dissent they are afraid of. Instead, what state authorities and institutions fear is collective dissent that organizes people and gives them the tools to change the status quo, Granato says. This fear is one of the reasons why they would want to infiltrate Potere al Popolo, as they recognize it as a political force capable of posing a real threat to the structures they want to protect.

One way to resist this tendency, Granato concludes, is to remain persistent in showing solidarity, including to those who have been infiltrated by the police. “Publicly showing solidarity means publicly showing there’s still a democratic fabric that hasn’t been destroyed, both in Italy and beyond.”

Original article by Ana Vračar republished from peoples dispatch under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 (CC BY-SA) license.