In Milan, 500 Folgore paratroopers and drones for Saturday's marches

Five hundred paratroopers from the Folgore Brigade will arrive in Milan from Siena ahead of the march on Saturday, October 24, with support from local police drones. The announcement came from Deputy Prime Minister Matteo Salvini at the end of a provincial committee for order and public security convened following the unrest of the previous weekend (Dire).

According to the tally provided by Salvini himself, last weekend’s unrest led to 343 people being detained and nearly 50 arrests, with the majority of those involved coming from outside Milan (Adnkronos):

“Five hundred Folgore paratroopers arriving from Siena, with drone support as well” — Matteo Salvini, Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Infrastructure

At the end of the same committee meeting, Mayor Giuseppe Sala acknowledged a certain unease about the situation, noting that only 20% of those detained were found to be Milan residents:

“There is concern” — Giuseppe Sala, Mayor of Milan

The security plan for Saturday, as reported by Euronews Italia, calls for the deployment of all available local police forces, checks at train stations for those arriving from outside the city, and mobile units ready to intervene in the event of tensions. Interior Minister Matteo Piantedosi clarified that the Folgore paratroopers will be able to patrol the streets, detain people and take consequent action, with the same police powers already granted to law enforcement forces.

The decision to deploy a military unit alongside public order management in a city like Milan marks a step up in scale compared to the measures adopted in previous weekends, when control of the territory was entrusted exclusively to police and carabinieri. The fact that the majority of those detained last weekend came from outside the city, according to the figure reported by Sala, is now also shaping the logic of the checks: arrival stations are becoming a point of preventive verification, not only the squares where the marches will converge.

The summit that produced these decisions brought together, in addition to Salvini, Piantedosi and Sala, the local authorities responsible for security in the province. None of the sources consulted currently report an overall number of officers and personnel to be deployed on Saturday beyond the 500 paratroopers announced, nor an updated tally compared to the one communicated by Salvini in the immediate aftermath of the previous weekend’s events.