The Minister's tears and the strike of the invisible

Abstract

Over the 2010s, the representations of Italian agriculture were crossed by a tension between the “gastronationalist” claims of Italian food’s excellence and the denouncements of the dramatic conditions of migrant farmworkers. In 2020, the Covid-19 crisis highlighted both the risk of workforce shortage in this sector, due to restrictions on workers’ mobility, and migrant labourers’ vulnerabilities. In response to these risks, in mid-May the government launched a regularisation programme for undocumented migrants. This chapter proposes a discourse analysis of the political debate on this measure, focusing on its main actors: the then Minister of Agriculture, Teresa Bellanova;the leader of the populist radical-right Lega party, Matteo Salvini;and Aboubakar Soumahoro, grassroots union organiser. This analysis unpacks the different articulations of populism in their positions and shows that they all embrace “populism as method”: only by representing him/herself as a “member of the people” can one legitimately discuss agriculture in the Italian political debate. © 2022 selection and editorial matter, Pavel Pospeĕch, Eirik Magnus Fuglestad, Elisabete Figueiredo;individual chapters, the contributors.