Does this year's election show that Italy is racist?

As Italy prepares to go to the polls this Sunday, its top issue is undoubtedly immigration. The increasingly ugly campaign has seen comeback kid Silvio Berlusconi (aged 81) promise to deport 600,000 so-called “illegal immigrants.”

His centre-right Forza Italia has allied itself with Lega. Formerly Lega Nord, the party once wanted north Italy to be a separate country, and its candidates have warned that the “white race” is in danger.

Rounding off the coalition that could lead the next government are the far-right Brothers of Italy, whose leader blamed the recent shooting of six Africans by a neo-Nazi in the small town of Macerata on “uncontrolled immigration.”

Given how much Italy has borne Europe’s brunt of the refugee crisis, it’s perhaps no surprise that immigration has become such a hot topic. But does the apparent hard-right shift prove that Italy is xenophobic?

“I wouldn’t say that Italy is a racist country,” says Antonella Napolitano, communications manager for Civil Liberties in the Digital Age, an organisation responsible for resources like the website OpenMigration.

“Definitely in some respects, there is a latent racism. And I do think that we never properly addressed the aftermath of fascism,” she says. “But I think Italy is a welcoming country.”

Civil organisations, mayors like Leoluca Orlando in Palermo, who has said that Italy’s mayors must become “a megaphone” for refugees, and thousands of ordinary Italians who volunteered during the refugee crisis appear to be proof of this.

On paper, Italy's response to the refugee crisis has certainly been one of welcome compared to stereotypically more tolerant countries like the UK—which has taken a fraction of its fair share.

And yet in a few weeks of campaigning, the Italian right has managed to make immigration a burning issue again. Napolitano believes that this is a result of gross exaggeration and misinformation.

“The numbers of arrivals were of course significant, but nothing to justify words [that were used] like ‘invasion’,” she says.

At the peak of the refugee crisis in 2015, a million people arrived in Europe, a continent of over 700 million. Compared to Lebanon, whose population of four million absorbed 1.5 million arrivals, this starts to look like small fry. And while studies have shown that Italians think up to 30 percent of the population is foreign, the true figure is only around eight percent.

OpenMigration was born in part to combat the hyperbole, as a source of hard facts and accurate data concerning immigration in an era of fake news.

Yet while the scale of immigration is not as large as many think, Italy is clearly experiencing a historic demographic transition. This is the first time in Italian history that residency has been so sought after—until recently, it was a country of emigration.

“Like other countries, Italy is developing a multicultural focus,” Napolitano says.

Sabika Shah Povia believes that Italy is growing more comfortable with multiculturalism, even if the ugly election campaign would seem to suggest otherwise. Povia, 31, used to answer ‘Pakistan’ when asked where she was from, despite the fact that she was born in Italy.

But in her twenties she noticed a shift: “I mean as soon as I start talking, people go ‘Oh my God, you’re so Roman!’” she laughs. When she explains that she grew up in Italy, people increasingly ask her why she answers that she’s from Pakistan. “I realised that perhaps society was ready for me to start embracing my being Italian.”

Povia, who writes about migrant issues and campaigns for greater immigrant rights in Italy, thinks it is important for Italians to understand that Italy is “now a multicultural nation. And people like me with brown skin and a ‘weird’ Arab name can still be considered Italian.”

As elsewhere in Europe, Italy is moving inevitably towards a more diverse future. Immigration is seen by many as literally the lifeblood of Italy—the country has the lowest birth rate in Europe. Dying towns in Calabria and Tuscany have embraced newcomers for keeping their communities alive.

In this context, rants about the "white race" seem like the sharp end of an ongoing debate about what Italy wants to be in the years ahead.

“There is of course a need for a proper debate,” says Napolitano, but the campaign leading up to Sunday’s elections has not been that, she adds.

Rather than have a healthy debate about Italian identity, immigration has been used as a scapegoat to avoid talking about actual policies addressing the struggling economy and tough job market. “I wish there was more focus on what migrants bring to Italy,” she says.

For Napolitano and others, this election campaign has been one big missed opportunity.