The Minister’s Tears and the Strike of the Invisible. The Political Debate on the "Regulatization" of Undocumented Migrant Farm Labourers During the Covid 19 Health Crisis in Italy

Over the 2010s, the representations of Italian agriculture were crossed by a tension between the “gastronationalist” claims of the “Made in Italy food” excellence and the denounces of the dramatic conditions of migrant farmworkers. In 2020, the first phase of the Covid19 crisis highlighted both the risk of workforce shortage in this sector, due to the restrictions of workers’ mobility, and the exposure of migrant labourers to the epidemics. In response to these risks, in mid-May the Government launched a regularization program for undocumented migrants. This chapter proposes a discourse analysis of the political debate on this measure, focusing on its main actors: the Minister of Agriculture Teresa Bellanova; the leader of the populist radical-right Lega party, Matteo Salvini; Aboubakar Soumahoro, grassroot union organizer. This analysis unpacks the different articulations of populism in their positions and shows that they all embrace a “populism as method”: only by representing himself/herself as a “member of the people”, one can legitimately discuss about agriculture in the Italian political debate.