‘The party’s over!’: Italy set to ban illegal raves

Italy’s Brothers of Italy party, lead by the country’s new PM Giorgia Meloni, has announced plans to outlaw unlicensed raves just hours after police shut one down.

Revellers could face up to six years in jail for attending gatherings of more than 50 people that pose a risk to public health, safety or order, while organisers could be wiretapped under the new law.

Cracking down on rave culture was a flagship policy of Ms Meloni’s campaign. In her first speech to parliament as leader last week, she said Italy was “not a country for young people” and described a “growing emergency of deviance, made up of drugs, alcohol and crime”.

It comes after Italian police dismantled a rave party in an abandoned warehouse on the outskirts of Modena.

On Sunday, deputy prime minister Matteo Salvini ordered the eviction of more than 3,000 people from the Witchtrek 2K22 Halloween event after residents issued noise complaints describing round-the-clock techno music.

“The party’s over!” Salvini declared.

The party, which had been scheduled to wind down on Tuesday, ended peacefully on Monday at lunchtime when revellers agreed with police gathered at the site to turn off the music and head for home.

It comes after several thousand black-clad fascist sympathisers chanted and sang in praise of Benito Mussolini as they marched to the Italian dictator’s crypt to celebrated the centenary of his March on Rome.

The crowd in Predappio, Mussolini’s birth and final resting place in the northern Emilia-Romagna region, also was apparently emboldened by the fact that a party with neo-fascist roots is heading an Italian government for the first time since World War II.

“They paraded calmly and happily,” Sandra Zampa, a Democratic party senator, said. “Have prime minister Giorgia Meloni and interior minister Matteo Piantedosi nothing to say about this? Is there no repentance for the violation of legislation that prohibits the reconstitution of the fascist party and apology for the regime?”