[Discussion] European Politics Discussion

LECCE, Italy (AP) — It was a scene straight out of “The Godfather.” On the night of Feb. 1, a bloody goat head with a butcher’s knife through it was left on the doorstep of Judge Francesca Mariano’s home in southern Italy, with note beside it reading, “like this.”

Mariano had already received threats, including notes written in blood, after she issued arrest warrants for 22 members of a local mafia clan that operates in southern Puglia, the heel of Italy’s boot.

Puglia is known for its olive groves, cone-shaped “trulli” white-washed houses, and spectacular coastlines that will provide the backdrop when Premier Giorgia Meloni hosts Group of Seven leaders for their annual summit this week.

But the region is also home to the Sacra Corona Unita, Italy’s fourth organized crime group. It is far less well-known than Sicily’s Cosa Nostra, the Calabrian ‘ndrangheta or the Camorra around Naples, but just as effective in infiltrating everything, from local businesses to government.

And yet, a remarkable array of women like Mariano is challenging its power structures at great personal risk. They are arresting and prosecuting clan members, exposing their crimes and confiscating their businesses, all while working to change local attitudes and cultural norms that have allowed this mafia to establish roots as deep as Puglia’s famed olive trees.

“I don’t believe anyone who says they’re not afraid. That’s not true,” said Marilù Mastrogiovanni, an investigative journalist and journalism professor at the University of Bari who has written in-depth stories about mafia infiltration for her blog.

“Courage is moving forward despite the fear,” she said.

The Sacra Corona Unita, or SCU, is the only organized crime group in Italy whose origins are known: A local criminal founded it in the Lecce prison in 1981, in part to push back other mafia groups that were trying to infiltrate the area.

Its name and initiation rites are linked to the Catholic faith, with the “corona” or crown, referring to the beads of a rosary.

Slowly but steadily, the SCU wove itself into the fabric of Puglia’s society, mixing its illicit activities in with legitimate businesses. Today, it has roughly 30 clans and some 5,000 members, almost all of them men.

“ Drug trafficking is the main business,” said Carla Durante, head of the Lecce office of the Anti-Mafia Investigative Directorate, an inter-agency police force. “That is always accompanied by extortion, usury. And now, like all over the nation, we have infiltration into the public administration.”

The SCU takes the billions of euros it earns from drug trafficking and launders it through legitimate business, often in Puglia’s booming tourism industry.

One of the most effective ways to fight it has been by confiscating mob-owned assets. Durante’s team sequesters mafia properties, such as vineyards or farms, which are then turned over to local organizations to be transformed into socially useful community centers or projects.

“By now we have learned that this is really the most incisive tool, because taking assets away from mafiosi means disempowering them,” Durante said. Since 1992, the national office has confiscated more than 147 million in mafia assets.

But the SCU has in some ways become more effective than Italy’s other mafia groups in inserting itself into the local community and gaining social acceptance. In recent years, it generally avoided headline-grabbing acts of violence in favor of more nuanced forms of intimidation.

“Organized crime is still organized, in the sense that it enjoys a certain consensus in Italy,” said Sabrina Matrangola, whose mother, a local politician, was killed by the mob in 1984 after she campaigned to preserve a coastal park from illicit development.

“And as long as there is this consensus, as long as not everyone chooses the right side, and someone will not be willing to roll up their sleeves to help, these places will always be in danger,” said Matrangola, who now works as an activist with the group Libera, which converts mob assets to serve the community.

For those who challenge it, danger persists.

Two weeks after Mariano sent out her arrest warrants for a mob crackdown dubbed “Operation Wolf,” the lead prosecutor on the case, Carmen Ruggiero, nearly had her throat slit by one of the suspects.

Pancrazio Carrino, one of the 22 people named in the warrant, had signaled his desire to collaborate with Ruggiero’s investigation. But when Ruggiero showed up to interrogate him in the Lecce prison, he had other plans: He had chiseled a knife out of a porcelain toilet bowl in his prison cell and hid it in a small black plastic bag in his rectum, planning to “cut her jugular” during the meeting, according to court documents.

“If I had been as lucid that day as I am now,” Carrino later told investigators, “Carmen Ruggiero would already be history.”

In the end, a suspicious guard searched him before he could strike and found the makeshift knife.

Sevens months after the threat, Ruggiero walked confidently into the Lecce prison courtroom for a recent hearing in the case, accompanied by a three-officer police escort.

She has remained undeterred by the death threats, as have the other women who have challenged SCU’s power. But they have had to take precautions, including with around-the-clock security.

Mastrogiovanni, the journalist, moved her young family out of her hometown after her reports on her blog “Il Tacco D’Italia” about SCU’s infiltration so angered the local government that at one point, the town was plastered with giant posters attacking her work. One depicted her up to her neck in a hole.

According to the patriarchal culture of the SCU, “a woman shouldn’t have a voice,” all the more if she uses it to write about the mafia, she said.

Mariano, the judge, also lives with around-the-clock police escorts but believes that her job challenging the SCU goes beyond the halls of the courtroom. In her downtime, Mariano uses her passion for writing books, poetry and plays to try to change attitudes at the grassroots level. Recently, she staged a play about the mob in Lecce’s Apollo Theater.

“We have to start with communication, which is fundamental to transmit values of dignity, courage, responsibility,” she said. “The ability to say no, the ability to be indignant in the face of things that are wrong.”

Not a big thing but Sunak says he often visited St. Mary's to see his beloved Saints play as a kid.

When he was a kid, and until he was an adult, Saints didn't play in St. Marys. They played at the Dell.

Paul Friedrich, 16, could not wait to cast his first ballot and had no doubt which German party had earned his support in the watershed European elections.

“Correct, I voted AfD,” he said proudly in the bustle of the commuter railway station in Brandenburg an der Havel, an hour from central Berlin.

The far-right Alternative für Deutschland made particularly stunning gains on Sunday among young voters. For the first time in a national poll, 16- and 17-year-olds could cast their ballots – a reform that had been strongly backed by left-leaning parties.

After overwhelmingly supporting the Greens five years ago, Germans under 25 gave the AfD 16% of their vote – an 11-point rise – helping place the party second behind the opposition CDU-CSU conservatives and well ahead of the Social Democrats of the chancellor, Olaf Scholz.

The AfD tapped deep wells of support in the former communist east, winning in every state including Brandenburg, where it claimed 27.5% of the vote.

With a budding wisp of a moustache and an oversized hoodie, Friedrich looks like many of his peers heading home from school in Brandenburg, the riverside city that gives the state surrounding Berlin its name.

And his concerns echo those of many teenagers and twentysomethings in town: fears of war spreading in Europe, inflation, economic decline, “unchecked” immigration and, above all, violent crime, which they say is rampant when they use public transport or hang out in public spaces at night.

“A lot of things are moving in the wrong direction with the current government,” Friedrich said, referring to Scholz’s increasingly loveless centre-left-led alliance. “I want to change things with my vote – I want the AfD to shape that.”

That would include, for many of the party’s young supporters, explicit backing of “remigration” of Germans with immigrant roots who “fail to integrate”. News in January that top AfD officials had discussed such a proposal prompted widespread outrage and sent tens of thousands of Germans on to the streets in protest.

However, among many AfD voters, the notion has become an unabashed talking point. “Not everyone should have to go but at least the criminals, like in Mannheim – this can’t go on,” said Konstantin, 17, referring to the killing of a police officer in the western city just days before the election, allegedly by an Afghan asylum seeker with a jihadist motive.

Brushing aside party scandals and attempts to whitewash the Nazi past, Konstantin and his friend Leonard, 18, also voted AfD. “When I go out I get insulted and even spat on by, let’s just say, non-Germans – those aren’t German values,” Leonard said. “If refugees come here and work and behave and leave me alone that’s fine, but if not, they should go home.”

Lea, a 22-year-old office clerk, declined to reveal how she voted but said the AfD and the new economically leftwing but socially conservative Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance (BSW), which garnered 14% in Brandenburg, were the “only ones” addressing local security.

“I don’t have anything against foreigners but the problem with crime has got out of hand. You see people drawing knives every weekend,” she said.

Violent crime in Brandenburg an der Havel has surged in recent years, with a 9% rise in assaults between 2021 and 2023. Of the city’s 74,000 people, about 6,000 were born abroad.

Noura Abu Agwa, a 24-year-old refugee from Damascus, said she and her mother also felt increasingly unsafe in town, but blamed the strong presence of the far right.

“When I arrived I was wearing the hijab but I got harassed so I took it off,” she said. “I feel bad for my mom because she’s still wearing it, and once she was walking in the street and a man stopped her to shout at her. She was so confused because she only speaks Arabic.”

Anna Leisten, the head of the AfD’s state youth wing, said its outreach had targeted the lasting impact of the anti-pandemic measures. “Forced testing, home schooling, bans on going out – an entire generation had their youth taken away.”

Leisten, who said she had experienced “exclusion, propaganda and intimidation” as a teenager in Brandenburg, praised the party’s mastery of platforms such as YouTube and TikTok to reach the young, “while Olaf Scholz posts boring videos about his briefcase”.

All the young Germans approached by the Guardian in Brandenburg talked about their anxiety about the war in Ukraine, with many criticising the governing parties for weapons shipments and expressing angst that they or their peers could one day be called on to fight. Germany suspended conscription 13 years ago, but is debating strategies to boost recruitment.

“Ukraine never interested us before – this is a thing between Ukraine and Russia,” Friedrich said of Moscow’s full-scale invasion of its neighbour. “Why should we help Nato expand its territory using our arms?”

Others said the government’s support for Ukraine had driven them to splinter parties, which taken together clinched 28% of the under-25 electorate, by far the largest share. Such fears and economic concerns have supplanted the climate crisis at the front of young voters’ minds, a recent study found.

“I voted for Volt, mainly because I’m concerned about the future of Europe and really care about the cause of peace,” said a legal system trainee, Mathias Sarömba, 22, referring to the small pro-European party that called for rejecting extremists with slogans such as “Don’t Be an Asshole”.

He said he had managed to persuade his mother in “tearful discussions” not to vote AfD, explaining how its stance on “queer rights” made him feel personally threatened. “It was only then that she got it.”

Henriette Vogel, a 21-year-old laboratory assistant, also called the AfD’s surge “scary”, citing its “misogynist” positions on reproductive rights and workplace equality.

She cast her ballot for the tiny Animal Protection party. “First of all because I wanted to oppose the AfD but also because I’m not happy with the major parties. But I didn’t want to abstain, because every vote counts.”

Kilian Hampel, a co-author of the study Youth in Germany, which in April predicted a jump in support for the far right, said that with three eastern states voting in September and a general election expected next year, the trend toward fragmentation was likely to magnify.

“If faith in the bigger parties continues to decline, the smaller parties will probably be the big winners,” he said.

Leisten, who said she had experienced “exclusion, propaganda and intimidation” as a teenager in Brandenburg, praised the party’s mastery of platforms such as YouTube and TikTok to reach the young, “while Olaf Scholz posts boring videos about his briefcase”.

What kind of idiots think it is a good idea to let 16 year olds vote in anything that actually matters?

16 year olds are not known for their long term planning or logical reasoning. Actually they are known for the opposite of that.

16 year olds are not known for their long term planning or logical reasoning. Actually they are known for the opposite of that.

I"d like to see some evidence that 16 year olds are statistically significantly different than 18 year olds or even 80 year olds in terms of short-sightedness or critical thinking.

Mixolyde wrote:

I"d like to see some evidence that 16 year olds are statistically significantly different than 18 year olds or even 80 year olds in terms of short-sightedness or critical thinking.

Frontal cortex isn't completely formed until 25years of age.

LeapingGnome wrote:

The 16 year olds who will be dealing with the effects of the votes in the next few deades?

Mixolyde wrote:

I"d like to see some evidence that 16 year olds are statistically significantly different than 18 year olds or even 80 year olds in terms of short-sightedness or critical thinking.

Frontal cortex isn't completely formed until 25years of age.

JC wrote:

Mixolyde wrote:

I"d like to see some evidence that 16 year olds are statistically significantly different than 18 year olds or even 80 year olds in terms of short-sightedness or critical thinking.

Frontal cortex isn't completely formed until 25years of age.

That original study that came from didn’t say that the frontal cortex was formed at 25 years. The original study ended at 25 and some subjects frontal cortex were still changing. The conclusion was some people’s frontal cortex wasn’t fully formed at 25, not all people’s frontal cortex is fully formed by 25.

The brain continues developing all through your life in spurts and bursts. It slows down as you get older but you can’t look at a MRI and say you are looking at a 18 year old or 30 year old brain.

Slate article on the 25 year old mature brain myth.