De Luca’s Urban Populism: Migrations, Securitization and Post-raciality in Messina (Italy)

Despite the traditional narratives on the rise of populism, several scholars have recently underlined what is now called ‘urban populism,’ i.e. the relationships between medium or large cities and the spread of populism in contemporary societies. One of the major arguments that urban populism exploits to ensure its impressive growth is the presence of migrants in cities, especially when the latter are already on the verge of economic crises caused by health emergencies and international wars. Many European states have ambiguously wavered between the rejection of supranational entities and the desire to strengthen European borders, considered culturally homogeneous, against the ‘threat’ of foreigners arriving from Africa and Asia. Likewise, populism has been ambiguous with regard to cities, which are sometimes considered the receptacle for all evil, while at other times they are a political model (with obvious reference to the Greek polis) to be defended, once again, in the clash of civilizations that characterizes our era. If, in fact, there are many studies on the construction of the populist discourse at the national or supranational scale, less attention has been paid to the urban scale, which also plays a key role in the articulation between identity rhetoric, practices of confinement, and spatial imagery. In this turbulent context, Messina has also experienced some episodes, albeit not very well known, of populist anti-migrant rhetoric. Here, Mayor Cateno De Luca achieved regional and then national notoriety for his aggressive campaigns against both internal and external enemies. By building on the existing scientific literature on populism, and through the use of a qualitative methodology based on critical discourse analysis, this contribution aims to outline the links between migration and urban populism, starting from a theoretical framework and then describing the specific case of De Luca’s narratives about the Gasparro reception center in Messina and its contested geographies. Although the article should be considered a result of the common work and reflection of the two authors, Marco Picone took primary responsibility for Sections 1 and 2, while Chiara Giubilaro took primary responsibility for Sections 3 and 4.