The secretary of the Democratic Party Enrico Letta compares the Marcinelle massacre to the drama of migrants and Giorgia Meloni is not there.
It all starts with a tweet yesterday in which the dem leader announced that today he would be at the Bois du Cazier to commemorate the 66th anniversary of the tragedy in the Belgian coal mine , now a Unesco heritage site which, on August 8, 1956, cost his life to 262 miners, of which 136 Italians.
"To die thousands of kilometers from home . From emigrants, immigrants, migrants, all ways to avoid using the right word: people. Tomorrow I will be in Marcinelle to pay homage to the Italian workers who lost their lives in the 66th of the massacre", his words.
But even before the ceremony staged today, with the reading of the victims' names and the 262 bell tolls that mark the minutes that, 66 years ago, were the scene of the tragedy, the president of Fratelli d'Italia Giorgia Meloni has raised a fuss with a letter to the Corriere della Sera.
"Using Marcinelle's tragic recurrence for forced and instrumental comparisons is not a correct way either to remember the Italians of yesterday, or to address the issue of today's foreigners - he writes -. I don't think it is difficult to notice how the painting" then "was radically different from that of the current situation of immigration to Italy. Here and today, alongside regular immigration, made up of millions of foreigners who have positively integrated into our society and who deserve our appreciation, we have known for years flows of irregular immigrants that left-wing governments (or in which the left participated) have never been able or wanted to stem ".
"A substantial part of these irregular workers become labor for organized crime, others, of course, for unscrupulous corporals and pseudo-entrepreneurs, who use them to review downwards the social and wage conditions of Italian workers", adds Meloni: " to this daily drama, it is necessary to re-establish the elementary principle that in Italy it is possible to access and persist only ".
