The Celebration of Mamdani
Italy’s Second-Generation Immigrants and the Hypocrisy of the Italian Left
By Dalia Ismail
While progressive Italian parties were enthusiastically celebrating the victory of a young Muslim openly supportive of Palestine across the Atlantic, in Italy several second-generation people describe a sense of exclusion and disillusionment toward those very same parties.
The image of Zohran Mamdani, the new mayor of New York hailed by the Democratic Party (PD) and by the Green and Left Alliance (AVS) as a symbol of renewal and inclusion, coexists with a contradictory fact: in 2025, in Italy, more than one million people born and/or raised in the country still do not have the Italian citizenship.
One of them - who prefers to remain anonymous for safety reasons - is over thirty and actively took part in the campaign for the June 8–9 referendum on citizenship reform. She told Voice Over about her disappointment with the attitude of the parties and many associations:
“In the committee - the National Promoting Committee for the Citizenship Referendum - very few associations and very few parties got involved. Many joined only at the last minute, like the PD, in May, with
5 000 euros - or not at all - and in any case contributing very little funding.
The message that came through was clear: citizenship reform is not an issue that unites us. The CGIL did not join our national committee".
Publicly, the PD began supporting the referendum in April. According to the witness, despite the referendum having collected signatures in record time, it was “the poorest in Italy’s history,” and this reflects, she explains, “the very fact of not believing in it, of thinking that this reform is asking too much to Italians,” and of “not connecting the issue of work with citizenship.”
A request for comment sent to a national PD representative received no reply. However, Voice Over spoke with Alessandro Corti Nan, a PD councilor in Milan’s District 7, who acknowledged the need for greater internal clarity: “I don’t know whether what has been stated is true or not. It would be appropriate to have some clarification from the Nazareno on this matter, which certainly deserves a clear and honest response. The party’s difficulty in making quick decisions on this and other issues has been evident more than once. Often this immobility stems from the fact that there are many factions with different sensibilities on many - perhaps too many - questions. I obviously think this was an initiative that should have been supported from day zero, or rather from day minus one.”
After the negative outcome of the referendum, the association Italiani senza cittadinanza (Italians Without Citizenship) stated on social media that they had received no support from the major parties: “We did grassroots politics, without major parties, without adequate funding, without fair access to traditional media.”
A few days ago, the young Mia Bintou Diop (PD), an Italian-Senegalese, was appointed Vice President of the Tuscany Region, demonstrating that the PD is aiming for real inclusion of Italians with a migrant background. However, many of them still feel differently.
Hadil Tarhouni, an Italian-Tunisian student and activist with Italiani Senza Cittadinanza, gave several examples to Voice Over of what she calls
“the crisis of representation and the political hypocrisy of the Italian left, which prevents genuine inclusion and the recognition of voters from Arab and Muslim communities and other minorities.”
She cited the positions taken on the Palestinian genocide, migration crisis management policies, and also on citizenship law.
“The Ius Soli Temperato, one of the most significant reform attempts, stalled in the Senate in 2017 during a government led by the PD. I do not forget that, even though they had the numbers and government responsibility,
the Italian left did not want to give absolute priority to this reform, probably out of fear of losing electoral support,”
said Tarhouni.
Tarhouni also participated in an event promoting the referendum, organized by the regional branches of progressive parties in the Marche region. “The host, Cora Fattori, a representative of +Europa Marche, asked me how to pronounce my name, and I also told her which association I represented. However, on stage she mispronounced my name and never mentioned Italiani senza cittadinanza. The impression is that first the experts and politicians speak, and then an emotional story is told - so it feels like we are being listened to, but only superficially.”
The struggle for political representation
Antonella Bundu, former city councilor in Florence - with an Italian mother and a Sierra Leonean father - ran in the 2019 municipal elections, becoming the first Black woman to run for mayor in a major Italian city. During the last term, under a PD-led administration, she directly experienced the contradictions of a center-left that, in words, promotes inclusion but in practice continues to erect barriers.
“Despite proclamations about recognizing the rights of all citizens, including those who are Italians without citizenship, many concrete measures were voted down,”
Bundu explains. “The City of Florence, for example, promoted symbolic honorary citizenships for those born in the city, but rejected several proposals aimed at removing real obstacles for those who do not have citizenship. The measure against rental discriminations, for instance, was rejected”.
Among the examples she cites is one related to the city’s historical memory: “We repeatedly asked to name a street after Alessandro Sinigaglia, a Black and communist partisan, recipient of the Silver Medal of Military Valor for the Italian Resistance (during WWII) and one of the founders of the GAP (Patriotic Action Groups).
During the discussion in the Council, we were told multiple times not to ‘stress’ the fact that he was Black. And still today, in Florence, no street has been dedicated to him.”
Bundu highlights that despite the presence of racialized people in Italy, their representation in institutions is lacking.
“In Florence, 15–16% of the population is of foreign origin and resides legally in the city, yet this reality is not reflected in the places of political representation. We had proposed a resolution to extend local voting rights - for municipal elections and referendums - to non-EU residents, as already happens in some European countries. If you are French and live in Florence, you can vote for the mayor of Florence; if you are a non-EU resident who works legally, pays taxes, and sends your children to school in the city, you cannot. Our proposal was rejected.”
Omar Korichi, an Italian-Moroccan trainee lawyer, has been a city councilor in Rovereto since 2020. In 2023, he was expelled from his party for supporting the Palestinian resistance. He told Voice Over that “immigrants are often instrumentalized by both political camps.”
“If the right uses immigrants as scapegoats, the left tends to turn them into objects of pity, functional to building a superficial moral conscience or to adding a multicultural veneer to its public image.
Concepts like ‘integration’ and ‘citizenship’ are repeated as slogans but remain political rhetoric,” he continued.
Korichi describes a system in which parties “involve candidates of foreign origin only at the last minute, right before elections, as a tool to gather votes, without offering real spaces for dialogue.” “When they asked me to run on a left-wing civic list - composed of former PD members - they told me they needed someone who could represent the Muslim and Moroccan community. All very noble, if only it hadn’t been mere political rhetoric.”
Once elected city councilor, Korichi explains that, despite being the second most-voted candidate on the list, he was given “a portfolio-less delegation for the promotion of cultural networks,” an assignment unrelated to his expertise.
“I had requested a competency-based delegation, since I graduated in law with a thesis in tax law, not one based on my cultural background.
But the message was clear: I was useful to represent diversity, not to truly contribute to decision-making.”
During his term, Korichi proposed establishing an Immigrants’ Commission similar to the one in Padua, as a tool for civic participation. “My proposal was dismissed on the grounds that it ‘was not among the city’s priorities.’ In that moment, I felt deeply used.”
One of the most emblematic episodes concerns his opposition to a motion to grant honorary citizenship to people born in Italy. “I refused to support it because it was yet another form of instrumentalization. Honorary citizenship is granted to those who distinguish themselves through special merit, not to people who should have it by right. After that discussion, the party leader excluded me from the group chat for months.”
After six months of isolation, he was contacted only on the eve of two different electoral campaigns: “They called to ask me to convince my community to vote for the PD. I replied, provocatively, that I would cut off my hand before supporting those who have always used us.”
“They use our struggles to wash their dirty conscience and keep calling themselves ‘left-wing’”
Italy’s opposition parties have adopted cautious, calculated rhetoric when it comes to taking positions or measures against Israel. On June 7, 2025, they organized their first national demonstration “for Gaza,” which various associations within the Palestinian community - such as the Association of Palestinians in Italy (API) - did not join because of the lack of clear positions on crucial issues: the siege on Gaza, the illegal settlements in the West Bank, the Nakba, the liberation of Palestinian political prisoners, and the right of return for Palestinian refugees, as well as the amplification of fake news such as the claim of mass rapes on October 7, 2023, repeatedly debunked by independent journalists.
Mariam Ahmad, an Italian-Palestinian student and activist, told Voice Over:
“We Palestinians have always had to push our way in to make our voices recognized and to gain space in the Italian political landscape. Today’s left is no longer the historical left that represented a real opposition:
today it calls itself ‘progressive,’ but it’s only a reflection of its own privilege and convenient narratives.
The same parties that shook hands with governments complicit in genocide and defended Israel’s ‘right to exist’ while Gaza was being destroyed now use the Palestinian cause as a political ornament to appear on the right side of history.
We don’t need people who get emotional in theory and then demonize actual practices of struggle.
It’s infuriating to see leaders of the Italian left call Palestinians ‘terrorists’ while we are fighting for our freedom. We have always spoken of decolonization as a living practice of liberating minds and bodies - in the streets, in universities, in assemblies.
And this is why I am disgusted today to see the Italian left celebrating Mamdani’s victory in New York. They applaud him because he is far away, because he is ‘safe’; but if his words ever became uncomfortable, they would be the first to distance themselves. We want them to stop using our struggles to wash their dirty conscience while continuing to call themselves ‘left-wing’ even as they remain complicit in colonialism and genocide in Palestine.”
Laila Sit Aboha, an Italian-Palestinian researcher at the Scuola Normale Superiore in Pisa and an expert on generational dynamics in the Palestinian diaspora, offered Voice Over a reflection on racism and colonialism shaping Italy’s center-left.
“When these things happen far away from us, the figures who call themselves progressive in Italy manage to support them without issue. But when criticism comes from within - from racialized Italian communities like the Palestinian one - regarding their political hypocrisy, they react with violence: silencing, ignoring, erasing our demands,” Sit Aboha says.
“I believe there is an unresolved colonial issue at the root. Zionism calls into question the stability of the West, its institutions, and its very idea of ‘culture.’
In this imaginary, Palestinians must match the model of the ‘good savage’: the one who stays quiet, lowers their head, and repeats what the Italian left wants to hear.
Or they must embody the role of the ‘perfect victim,’ without voice, agency, and collective political analysis.
It’s no coincidence that the Palestinians allowed into these parties’ debates are almost always individuals unconnected to political organizations, precisely because a structured, collective Palestinian analysis destabilizes this balance,” Sit Aboha explains.
The researcher concludes that the Palestinian community is viewed through a “racist and Orientalist” lens. This enables a treatment that assumes “we lack the political tools to speak about our own situation. For them, we must rely on what the West has produced about us, or at most on the paradigms of human rights and international law. Speaking about settler colonialism and Palestinian resistance is completely unacceptable to the Italian ear, because it brings down the house of cards of the institutions they rely on.”
Silvia Pegah Scaglione, an Italian-Iranian artist and activist, referring to the behavior of Italian progressive parties during the genocide in Palestine and the Israeli‑U.S. war on Iran, told Voice Over:
“During the war I had the strong impression that many people hold such a deep-rooted prejudice that they prefer a genocidal government that drops bombs rather than siding with a people under attack. The rhetoric around the veil seems to have more appeal than simple logic: dropping bombs on people’s heads is not a way to liberate them from the veil. It’s as if there were a system error, a moral bug that prevents any sense of priority - as if it were better to die than to live with the veil.”
“We exist in the political sphere only as tokens”
“The hypocrisy of the Italian left is now visible to everyone,” says Sara Tanveer, an Italian-Pakistani journalist.
“The same left that today celebrates a Muslim, socialist, feminist man as the new mayor of New York has always refused our presence and our capacity for political struggle. We, racialized political subjects, exist in the public sphere only as tokens. And tokens, as we know, are forgotten once they are no longer useful.”
Tanveer recounts that she tried local politics before dedicating herself to journalism: she joined a left-wing party at a very young age, convinced that just “being there” would be enough to change things. “I was wrong,” she says today. “It’s not our voice that’s missing; it’s their interest in seeing us as political subjects”. Today, she refuses to engage with “comrades” who consider racialized people “merely tools to display in electoral campaigns or collectives.” “This left has dehumanized us and endorsed Islamophobic positions whenever we failed to meet their standards of model citizens”.
For Tanveer, the double standard is clear:
“The same people who signed the Minniti-Orlando decrees, funded the camps in Libya, expanded the CPR (detention centers), and blocked the citizenship reform now celebrate the ‘migrant who made it in America.’ It’s ridiculous”.
Writer Laetitia Leunkeu, Italian-Cameroonian, recognizes the same problems. “Italian left-wing people - especially white people - applaud overseas achievements but struggle to look at what happens here.” Her first article was born in the wake of George Floyd’s murder, when protests inspired by the Black Lives Matter movement multiplied in Italy. “Many mobilized against American racism but didn’t want to admit there was Italian racism. They would tell me, ‘It’s not the same thing; it’s different here.’”
Since then, she explains, she has observed how interest in racism emerges only when something happens far away, and quickly fades when media priorities shift.
“In the media and cultural world, tokenism is the rule. As long as a Black person speaks about their own suffering, they are invited everywhere; if they try to talk about anything else, they disappear. It’s as if our role is to teach Italians the ABCs of racism, without pushing for real political change”.
Journalist Adil Mauro, Italian-Somali, recalls 2020 as a collective illusion: “After George Floyd’s murder, it seemed like everything was possible. Media and parties were discovering systemic racism; many of us had the opportunity to write and be consulted. But that visibility was not ours - it was granted from above, temporarily. A door that opens for a limited time, then closes again”.
For Mauro, the mechanism repeats every time a figure like Mamdani emerges: “Italy observes and celebrates these examples as if they were miracles, while here people with migrant backgrounds remain exceptions. From the right we are attacked, from the left we are displayed as symbols of a ‘different’ Italy. But if visibility doesn’t translate into concrete opportunities, it remains another form of exclusion”.
Writer Fatima Bouhtouch, Italian-Moroccan, reflects on the disillusionment with this scenario: “For a long time, I confused being listened to with being welcomed. I thought passion and authenticity alone could change things. Instead, I found myself echoing a prewritten discourse, useful only to legitimize a façade of inclusion. I wasn’t part of the change, but part of the narrative of change”.
Today, she says, she no longer believes “in the purity of parties” or “in window-dressing campaigns”:
“It hurts to see the left praise international figures like Mamdani, while here it continues to exclude or silence those who bring lived experiences and complex perspectives.
It’s a cruel paradox: celebrating distant diversity while marginalizing the nearby one.”
Marianna Kalonda Okassaka, an Italian-Congolese social media manager and communicator, recounts being invited to an international party event of the European Greens. “There was a panel with many racialized people, a completely different approach from the Italian Greens. I felt comfortable: I met people who were aware, who understood the weight of words and the complexity of the topics they discussed.
According to Okassaka, the real difference lies in rejecting the establishment. “Mamdani won because he refused large funding and powerful backers. Our parties, on the other hand, continue to wink at the establishment, which makes them incapable of taking truly progressive stances.”
In her view, even the internal structure of Italian parties contributes to their inertia. “There are too many factions, too many balances to maintain. In the PD, for example, very different currents coexist, including openly pro-Israel members, which in practice prevents building a coherent agenda on rights and justice”.
For Okassaka, the solution is not to create new symbols, but new autonomous political spaces, capable of escaping the logic of economic power - a model of participation starting from communities.
At this point, the shared desire is no longer to ask for space within existing parties, but to imagine another idea of politics: one that starts from communities, recognizes differences as expertise and complexity, not as symbols, and stops treating diversity as a favor granted from above, but as an opportunity to engage, once and for all, with the most uncomfortable issues.
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