SIGFIDO RANUCCI is the face of Italy’s most notable investigative television programme. Screened on the national network RAI, his weekly Report tackles corruption political and financial; exposes the dark underworld where criminal conspiracies intersect with organs of the state, politicians and big capital.

For him and his team threats are routine. When an explosive device went off outside his house in Campo Ascolano 20 miles south of Rome, damaging a neighbouring house and cars belonging to him and his daughter, it was an echo of Italy’s years when violence functioned as an instrument of opposing political blocs.

It is a warning. From whom remains an open question. Possibly criminal but not quite to the standard set when the judicial exposure of the links between gangsters, the right, big capital, the shadowy intelligence world and ultra-left and right-wing provocateurs saw top investigating magistrates and police and Carabinieri officials assassinated by massive bombs.

Anti-mafia prosecutors have opened an investigation. The Interior Minister Matteo Piantedosi has boosted Ranucci’s long-time police protection squad and Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni went on record to describe the attack as a “serious act of intimidation” and piously declare “freedom and independence of information are essential values of our democracies, which we will continue to defend.”

The story is replete with ironies. Report is often the object of critical attention by Italy’s right-wing parties of government. Lega’s Giancarlo Giorgetti — the finance minister in Meloni’s coalition — and Industry Minister Adolfo Urso from her Fratelli di Italia formation and her own head of cabinet Gaetano Caputi have all taken the programme to court.

Journalism can be risky in Italy. The joint industry/journalists’ union NGO Ossigenio per l’Informazione (Oxygen for Information) keeps an eye on press freedom and threats to journalists. It says that last year there were 516 threats against journos and 20 live under permanent police guard with another 200 under some form of protection.

Report — well respected by audiences and profoundly disliked by the political class — is a rare element in the output of national broadcaster RAI. In Italy’s postwar period RAI expressed the political realities with an informal arrangement in which different channels gave broad support to the conflicted tendencies in politics.

RAI Duo was seen as more orientated to the left, its content was at a significantly higher cultural level and its political coverage in a media landscape in which Berlusconi’s Mediaset empire became a byword for poor taste and right-wing political bias was generally progressive.
With its directors appointed by the state the political output of RAI is always controversial. Two years ago RAI’s CEO Roberto Sergio responded to the growing Palestine solidarity movement by instructing the broadcaster to broadcast a statement signifying his personal and RAI’s corporate support for the Israeli regime.

This naturally reignited the criticism that RAI’s management were too intimate with Italy’s politicians and, among its staff, a growing movement of resistance.

One reflection of this has been the participation of media workers in the two big strikes this year, in September and again this month.

Italy’s main union confederation CGIL, traditionally communist-led and today more tied up with the Partitito Democratico (PD), joined with the more militant Unione Sindicale di Base (USB) and much of Italy’s heterogeneous grassroots left in a two-million-strong strike in defence of the Global Sumud Flotilla bound for Gaza with port workers, particularly in Genoa and Venice, at the forefront.

The Palestine question has come to stand for a growing sense among workers influenced by the left of the political crisis in which a Fratelli di Italia government of self-described “post-fascists,” the late Berlusconi’s Forza Italia and far-right formations like Lega has both reconciled with the EU’s austerity economic regime and Donald Trump’s erratic politics.

Under the rubric Democracy at Work the CGIL has called a national demonstration in Rome this coming Saturday with the slogans: increase wages and pensions, say No to rearmament, invest in healthcare and education, say No to precarious employment and for real tax reform.

On TV earlier this week CGIL leader Maurizio Landini criticised Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni. She did not “lift a finger” to bring peace in Gaza. She was “playing the role of Trump’s courtesan,” he said.

An ideologically adroit operator, Meloni,took advantage on social media of Landini’s poor choice of words to present a screenshot dictionary definition, “Woman of easy virtue, heterosexual; euphemism, prostitute” and turned it against Landini saying that for decades the left had “lectured us on respect for women” only to then criticise a woman by “calling her a prostitute.”

Landini’s defence, that there were no sexist insults and that he meant Meloni was Trump’s “lackey,” fell flat and no less crass, Trump, at the Gaza summit, repeatedly called Meloni “beautiful.”

“We have a woman, a young woman, who’s a — I’m not allowed to say it, because usually it’s the end of your political career if you say she’s a beautiful young woman,” he said.

Trump added: “Now, you use the word beautiful in the United States, about a woman, that’s the end of your political career, but I’ll take my chances.”

Trump then turned his back on the microphone and said, “Where is she … there she is,” when he located Meloni. “You don’t mind being called beautiful, right? You are,” while the US president’s media operation published a lavish set of images of Meloni with Trump at the White House.

These cringeworthy incidents reveal that Meloni’s administration has been running a parallel operation to the EU establishment and vying to be Trump’s closest ally.

Her obvious intention is to secure preferential treatment in Trump’s tariff war with his nominal allies, which he conducts no less fiercely than with his presumed enemies.

At the same time she has aligned her government’s economic policies more closely to the EU’s neoliberal consensus echoing former Italian prime minister and European central Bank director Mari Draghi’s call for a more assertive European capitalism.

She echoes the new emphasis on increased military spending both as a form of military Keynesianism and a more aggressive posture towards Russia.

The 2025 budget anticipated a 7.2 per cent rise in military spending from the previous year at a total of €31.2 billion (£27.1bn). Like other EU states Italy has massaged its military spending plans to allow for infrastructure spending to meet the 2 per cent of GDP target that the EU/Nato partnership anticipates.

Given Italy’s weak military posture, and — by the new EU metric — low defence spending the Meloni administration will find meeting these commitments will come at the political cost of increased resistance.

Despite the increasing tempo of industrial action and political protest Italy remains deeply divided politically with an ineffective “official” opposition, the PD, and the Five Star Movement increasing reliant on co-ordinated electoral work and the left still fragmented.

Three years in office Meloni is slightly more popular than when she was elected and despite being reliant on EU recovery funding faces the general EU malaise of weak economic growth, substantial migration, particularly of youth, and a weakened industrial sector.

Meloni is set to join the small band of politicians who have survived more than a thousand days and may break new ground in securing continuity in office in the new elections.