Italy Answers the Milan Looting With 500 Troops and a Package That Reaches All the Way to Parents

Italy's government responded to a weekend of looting and clashes in Milan, Turin and Bologna by announcing it would put soldiers on the streets. Foreign Minister Antonio Tajani said 500 military personnel would be deployed to help secure the country's cities, and that they would be granted judicial police powers, the authority to act more like law enforcement than a static security presence, as part of what he described as robust preventive measures.

The unrest that prompted the response began as part of a wider wave of cost of living protests that spread out of France over the preceding weekend, reaching Italian cities alongside similar demonstrations in Belgium and Portugal. What started as economic grievance marches turned into vandalism and looting in Milan's case, the kind of scenes serious enough that Rome is now reaching for a response built around troops rather than ordinary policing alone.

Behind the military deployment sits a far broader legislative package the government is weighing. Preventive detention would be extended from 12 to 24 hours, with the same detention authority made available for minors where the legal conditions allow it. A new specific offense would target aggravated property damage committed by groups, carrying penalties of up to five years in prison and fines reaching 15,000 euros under a bill already before the Senate, and police would gain the ability to make deferred arrests based on photographic and video evidence gathered after the fact rather than only in the moment.

The package does not stop at policing tactics. It also reaches into public order law more broadly, allowing authorities to ban gatherings for individuals judged to pose a threat to public order and strengthening the formal warnings security authorities can issue to people involved in organized violence during protests. On the juvenile side, the plan calls for more staff and capacity in juvenile courts and detention facilities, paired with tighter administrative penalties aimed at the parents of minors involved in the violence, a detail that extends the government's response beyond the people who were actually in the streets.

What the combination adds up to is a government treating the Milan unrest as more than a single bad weekend to get past. Deploying 500 troops answers the immediate problem of securing city centers, but the detention, sentencing and juvenile justice changes being discussed alongside it are the kind of permanent legal tools a government reaches for when it expects this will not be the last time cost of living anger shows up as broken shop windows rather than a peaceful march.