Italy has elected its first ever black senator Toni Iwobi, a Nigerian immigrant who is a member of the anti-immigration League party. He says his election for the League shows far right party has no problem with ‘legal migration’.
Campaigning under the party slogan “stop the invasion”, Toni Iwobi, a 62-year-old businessman originally from Nigeria, won his seat in Spirano, a small town in the Lombardy province of Bergamo, as the party took almost 18% of the vote nationwide. “It’s an incredible honour for me to be Italy’s first black senator,” he told.
Italian international footballer Mario Balotelli has condemned the country’s first black senator, who was elected in Sunday’s general ballot for the far-right, anti-immigrant League party.
Balotelli, who was born in Palermo to Ghanaian parents and has played 33 times for Italy, has long been a target for racist abuse.
“Maybe I’m blind or maybe they haven’t told him that he’s black yet. Disgrace!” Balotelli wrote on Tuesday, in a post that is no longer visible.
Iwobi has long argued along with League leader Matteo Salvini that increased racism in Italy should be blamed on illegal immigration.
Balotelli posted a photo showing Iwobi and Salvini both wearing t-shirts emblazoned with the campaign slogan “Stop invasion”.
Iwobi has played an instrumental role in driving the League’s success, having helped to create some of the party’s key policies since being appointed by its leader, Matteo Salvini, as head of its immigration and security committee in 2015.
Like Salvini, who has called for a “mass cleaning” to rid Italy of people in the country illegally, Iwobi takes aim at the 600,000 people who have landed on its southern shores within the last four years. The highest number of asylum requests in Italy come from Nigerians.
“Anybody running away from a country because of conflict and war has to be hosted,” said Iwobi.
“But anybody leaving their country for the wrong reason and travelling to others in the wrong way has to be stopped. Immigration shouldn’t cost thousands of lives at sea and neither should it cost a cent to the host country,” he said.
“I want to stress that the League isn’t against immigration as such nobody in this world can stop people moving, it’s in the human DNA. But we are against illegal immigration,” Iwobi added.
>Juthy Saha
Italy Elects First Black Senator in History
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