Milan riots leave 104 police officers injured amid looting in city centre

Milan: 104 police officers injured and looting in the city centre

What happens when two thousand people dressed in black march down via Torino towards the Duomo, looting a Carrefour and smashing shop windows? That is what peine in Milan on a night of riots that has shattered the narrative of an orderly Europe. The official tally used by the Italian government: 104 police officers injured and 25 people treated in hospitals, ten of them officers. Fewer than ten arrests. According to the accounts circulating, the situation was declared "under control" when there was nothing left to control.

What has generated reams of commentary is not the figures but the videos: a man armed with a baton taking down several looters in an Under Armour store, the shattered windows of the Juventus Store, smoke and firecrackers metres from the cathedral. Urban guerrilla warfare has reached Italy's symbolic heart, and with it the debate over who is behind it and who benefits.

Who is behind the Milan riots

The description circulating on social media speaks of second- and third-generation young people, many of them "tanned", as part of the online crowd sums up with a smirk. The most repeated reading is that this is an imported phenomenon, in the style of the French riots, and that the international media are covering it up. Some go further and argue that many of the participants are in fact Italians and Latinos, which undermines the ethnic version of events. The only verifiable fact: most wore hoods and, according to one participant quoted, the revolt was "against the State and politics".

Giorgia Meloni's government is left in an awkward position. The most repeated criticism is not that it cannot deport anyone, but that it will not deport anyone, because the right, the argument goes, is the most pro-immigration ideology there is: it defends capital and liberalism, the engines of the phenomenon. Meloni, they say, is "the traitor" who calls the violent rioters "bambinos".

The political business of insecurity

Here the analysis turns conspiratorial, and it is worth saying so: some see a plan by elites to import violence, generate antiestéticar and sell dystopian technocracy as the solution. Social control, CBDCs, mass surveillance, fifteen-minute cities. There is no evidence of any such coordination, but the hypothesis circulates widely because it fits the distrust of the official narrative.

More down to earth is the thesis that a pattern is repeating itself: first Barcelona, then France, now Milan. In every case, the authorities react only when commerce is hit. Money talks. The looting of shops on Passeig de Gràcia was what triggered the protocols in Catalonia, not the burning bins. The question hanging in the air is whether this is a spontaneous phenomenon or something activated from somewhere.

The economic cost of the looting

Beyond the fire, the issue has an economic angle that matters on this forum. The shops in central Milan —Carrefour, Under Armour, Juventus Store— are franchises and chains that absorb losses through insurance, but small local businesses do not. Every night of riots means closures, less tourism and higher police spending. In parallel, there is the debate over the migration balance: it is argued that for every 26.5 migrants per thousand inhabitants who arrive, the real net figure is less than half, because many continue on to Germany or France. Those who stay, it is said, swell the ranks of minimum-wage workers and the informal economy.

What can be done: batons, deportations or nothing

The remedies range from the extreme to resignation. Some call for the police to shoot to kill, as in the 1992 Los Angeles riots, when Korean shopkeepers defended their stores at gunpoint. Others point out that the police are not using tear gas or water cannon because someone above the Italian government —and above Macron— has said no. And the most sceptical warn that this is not Milan: in Spain, with the current government, there will be no looting — or so they say.

The scene of the man with the baton defending a shop with his bare hands has become the image of the night. One man, a baton and several looters on the floor. The question is not whether it will happen again. It is how long it will take to happen in the next European capital.