Muslim candidates divide right in local election in Italy's Vigevano city

A local election in an industrial city in northern Italy is exposing differences over immigration between governing coalition parties and showing how the country’s rapidly changing social fabric is shaping politics. Surrounded by factories and rice paddies, Vigevano is a city of 62,000 people where 15 per cent of the population is foreign, including many people from Egypt and Romania. Many more are naturalised Italians and second-generation immigrants. Once a Communist Party bastion, the city is held by the League, a far-right junior partner in Italy’s ruling coalition whose leader Matteo Salvini has said citizenship should be revoked for second-generation immigrants who commit crimes. Then-deputy PM of Italy, Matteo Salvini, attends a news conference for the government’s first budget in Rome, Italy on Nov 22, 2022. — Reuters/File But the League’s mayoral candidate, Riccardo Ghia, a jeweller, made headlines last month when he put two Muslim candidates on his list of prospective councillors — with an eye to attracting votes from immigrant communities. One of the two, Italian-Egyptian Hagar Haggag, 20, said she had received a slew of insults and threats since her candidacy was announced. She attributed the virulent reaction mainly to the fact that she wears a headscarf. She told AFP she had “never felt racism” in the local section of the party, pointing out that the former League mayor had allowed a Muslim prayer hall to open in a disused hangar in 2022. Haggag said she was also running because she wanted to “put an end to the left-wing cliche that Muslim women are ignorant”. She is studying diplomacy and is considering a political career beyond Vigevano — maybe even in Egypt. The other candidate, Ibrahim Hussein, is a spokesman for the local prayer hall who presented his bid “in the name of Allah”. Hussein wrote on Facebook that he chose to be a candidate for the League because he sees himself as “a real example of integration”. On the last day of campaigning on Frid