ANigerian has been elected as senator in Italy, it was announced yesterday.
Toni Iwobi of Spirano in Lombardy who
belongs to the anti-immigration League is the first black to be so
elected in the history of Italy. Iwobi, announced “with great emotion”
on his Facebook page that he had been elected to the senate in Italy’s
general election.
“Friends, it is with great emotion that I inform you that I was elected senator of the Republic!” he said in a statement.
“After over 25 years of battles in the great family of the
league, it is about to start another great adventure! My thanks go to
Matteo Salvini, a great leader who led the league to become the first
centre-Centre force of the country!
“I have to thank then my National Secretary Paolo Grimoldi, my
now former provincial secretary and new Congressman Daniele Belotti, the
whole team of the department for work done over these years, the great
league militants and all facebook friends for their support.
“I can’t forget my family, without them I wouldn’t have come
here today because they never stopped supporting me and being close to
me!
“Thank you, thank you, thank you! I’m ready, friends!”Iwobi wrote.
“I’m ready, friends,” Iwobi said.
Iwobi,
62, was born in Nigeria and came to Italy on a student visa some 40
years ago, before going on to marry an Italian woman and start his own
IT company there.
Campaigning with the slogan “Stop
Invasion”, Iwobi said his concern isn’t just for Italians but for
migrants, who the League claims it prefers to help “in their own home”
rather than in Italy though its “Italians First” programme contains few proposals for international development aid.
Despite being one of very few black
members of the League, whose leader has made many inflammatory remarks
about non-Italians and Muslims, Iwobi insists that the party isn’t
racist.
“Racism means thinking yourself better than others, while in the
movement I find many firm positions, but also a lot of respect,” he
told the Corriere della Sera.
He was quick to defend fellow party
member Attilio Fontana, who caused outrage during the campaign by saying
that immigration to Italy threatened the survival of “our white race”.
“Where’s the problem,” Iwobi asked,
claiming that Fontana had simply been referring to Italian “culture”.
Fontana went on to win his campaign to become president of Lombardy,
Italy’s most populous region, by a margin of 20 percent.
Before running for senator he represented
the League as a municipal councillor in Spirano back in the 1990s, and
more recently headed Salvini’s national committee on immigration.
In that capacity, he helped write the
League’s anti-migration platform, in which it proposed among other
things to make it easier to deport migrants, to use economic incentives
to get countries to agree to repatriate their nationals from Italy, to
refuse to take in migrants rescued by NGOs from the Mediterranean, to
renegotiate EU agreements that oblige Italy to house migrants that
arrive here while their application to stay is processed, to threaten
withdrawal of the right to seek asylum or benefits if migrants commit a
crime or break the rules of the reception centre where they’re housed,
and to stiffen existing requirements for the children of immigrants
applying for citizenship to include a test on Italian “language, culture
and traditions”.