The Italian government will send 500 soldiers to “defend Milan” after two days of unrest that saw protesters clash with police, loot stores and vandalize property, Deputy Prime Minister Matteo Salvini said on Monday.
The deployment is expected to be part of a package of security measures to be approved at a cabinet meeting scheduled for Tuesday, and comes as stores in central Milan closed prematurely and boarded up their windows, fearing a new outbreak of violence in Italy’s financial capital.
“From words to actions: 500 additional soldiers to defend Milan,” Salvini, head of the ruling right-wing League party, wrote on social media.
Most stores in Milan’s luxury shopping district Via Montenapoleone, home to brands including Chanel, Tiffany and Dior, had removed merchandise from their windows as a precaution, while police patrolled the street and a handful of tourists looked on.
Several hundred hooded protesters, many believed to be minors, set fire to trash cans and looted stores in the city center over the weekend, following an initially peaceful protest on Saturday against poor public services and rising costs.
Among the ransacked stores were sports retailers Decathlon and Arc’teryx as well as mobile phone operator Vodafone, television footage showed. Clothing brands Levi’s and Under Armor, as well as Decathlon, covered their windows with cardboard and wooden panels.
Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, who “faces national elections next year, condemned the violence and chaired a meeting with ministers and security chiefs on Monday to discuss the situation.
“The government will respond firmly to these attacks on the state, including with measures to reduce violence by minors,” Foreign Minister Antonio Tajani, who is also deputy prime minister like Salvini, wrote on X.
As part of the planned crackdown, the Corriere della Sera newspaper said Meloni was considering expanding preventive detention of minors and cracking down on youth gangs, while advancing some provisions contained in a draft security law currently being considered by parliament.
Italian police said they arrested 271 young people during unrest in Milan on Sunday. Among the people taken to the police stations, 32 were arrested, including 23 minors and 13 foreign nationals, the police said on Monday. Twenty-eight other people were reported to judicial authorities.
The unrest follows clashes on Saturday in other northern cities, including Bologna, Brescia, Bergamo and Turin, where 28 protesters were arrested, according to a police report released on Sunday.
The unrest echoes unrest in neighboring France, where hundreds of thousands of people angry over the rising cost of living and declining public services took to the streets on Saturday in some of the country’s most violent protests in years.
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