Italian Far-Right MEP Dismisses Roma Inclusion As ‘Futile’ in Racist Rant
30 January 2026
In her latest anti-Roma tirade on social media, Lega MEP Silvia Sardone from the Patriots for Europe group, castigated the EU for:“throwing millions away on an unachievable goal: trying to integrate Roma”. Citing nine Roma inclusion related projects, she accused the Commission of allocating ‘a whopping €2.2 million’ since 2022, and declared, "Enough with the money wasted on the non-existent integration of Roma.”
Ridiculing projects which covered support for performing arts, mental health awareness, environmental issues, and inclusion of Romani youngsters through sports, Sardone accused ‘Europe’ of ignoring citizens’ priorities, and claimed to have discovered “millions of euros in European Union funds for Roma-related projects: from theatre to tennis, from food to golf... it's truly absurd. Listen to yet another scandal in this Europe of waste!"
She described the goal of inclusion as futile, because: “Roma trample on the law 24/7, with thefts and illegal landfills, adults who don't work and children who don't go to school, unpaid bills, and illegal camps: and the EU, so dear to the do-gooder left, pampers them."
This is far from an isolated rant, as the ERRC’s recent report on forced evictions and hate speech in Italy clearly demonstrates. The extent to which anti-Roma racism had become normalised in Italy has long been evident not just in the persistence of mass evictions and demolitions of Roma camps, but in the dehumanising language that accompanied threats of expulsion and banishment targeting Roma. And it is the Lega that most often takes the lead when it comes to inciteful speech.
The landslide victory for the radical right in Italy’s 2022 national elections was the product of longer-term socio-political processes, which led to a progressive radicalization of the mainstream, “in which political and cultural positions inspired by ethno-pluralism, sovereignty, and anti-immigration rhetoric have been imposed, giving indirect legitimacy to taboo ideas of an extremist matrix and becoming an agent of their dissemination. So much so that today, the Italian mainstream right has become so radicalised that it is extremely difficult even to define what ‘radical right’ means.”
While recognizing what’s radical might be trying for some, for those at the receiving end of racist and dehumanizing public rhetoric, the impact is crystal clear. In the wider world, there is plenty of evidence that dehumanising language accompanies violent behaviour towards despised and distrusted groups.
In Italy, there can be little doubt that dehumanising anti-Roma rhetoric, which is commonplace among right-wing politicians and public officials across Italy, facilitates injustice and cruelty among ‘the truly committed’ and cultivates ambivalence and indifference to the plight of the Roma among the many. When dehumanisation becomes an everyday social phenomenon, rooted in ordinary social-cognitive processes, there is little outrage when a Lega city councillor, calling for a camp eviction, declares that the “The Roma are the parasites of our society.”
Two recent reports attest to the persistence and virulence of anti-Roma racism and discrimination in Italy. In UNCERD’s 2023 Concluding Observations on Italy, the Committee expressed deep concern concerning racist political discourse by members of the government, and “the persistent and increasing use and normalization of racist hate speech against persons from ethnic minorities in the media and on the Internet … and the fact that the increasing use of racist speech in public discourse is leading to a proliferation of racist hate incidents.”
In a similar vein, the 2024 ECRI report on Italy noted with “serious concern that Italian public discourse has become increasingly xenophobic in recent years, and political speech has taken on highly divisive and antagonistic overtones” particularly targeting visible minorities including Roma. Of particular concern to ECRI was the fact that many of the hateful comments came from high-profile politicians and public officials, especially during election periods, both online and offline: “This reportedly led to a form of ‘trivialisation’ of hateful remarks in public life and generated sentiments of marginalisation and exclusion among several segments of the population.”
The spectre haunting Europe
For those heavily invested in recycling decades-old World Bank talking points as novel insights, and making the economic case for Roma inclusion, the rhetoric of the still-ascending far-right across Europe should give pause for thought. As the political centre of gravity lurches rightwards, and nativism gains ground, the defence of the social and civil rights of Roma and other racialised communities, cannot be up for barter on the basis of prospective economic returns in a future ‘Europe of prosperity and growth’. The political lines have been drawn, and the crusading intent of the far-right is clear. In the face of imminent barbarism, the starting point of resistance must be that human rights are universal, inalienable and indivisible.
This new year of 2026 has opened with Hungary’s shamelessly racist Viktor Orbán openly declaring that while 320,000 Roma have no running water, they will have to hang on and wait, because “first the middle class must be given the opportunity to have their own apartment, because if we start with the lower class, the two classes will turn against each other.”
Just days later, his Minister of Construction and Transport, János Lázár, decrying the need for a single migrant in the country, described Roma as Hungary’s ‘internal reserves’ to clean the nation’s ‘shit-covered toilets’. As for Italy’s Silvia Sardone, she has dismissed the very idea of Roma inclusion as ‘futile’, running directly counter to ‘real’ citizen’s real priorities, and monies spent on it simply wasted.
Inequality and racism are not incidental to market economies, the racialised division of labour is not just a simple twist of fate, and racial justice in the 21st Century demands something more fundamental in terms of redistribution than cheap training for meagre opportunities to fill the ranks of the reserve armies of precarious labour.
