Italian political leaders are not generally held in high esteem outside (or indeed inside) their home country. Their handling of the country’s first big race-relations crisis has shown why. Among the adjectives that spring to mind are opportunistic, histrionic, irresponsible and, perhaps at best, insensitive.

The trouble began on October 30th, when Giovanna Reggiani, a 47-year-old Italian naval officer’s wife, was returning home along a deserted lane in northern Rome. She was brutally attacked. Early reports suggested that she had been tortured, raped, robbed and ferociously beaten—though, in fact, she was neither tortured nor raped. But it may be that her assailant set about her savagely after she tried to defend herself from sexual assault.

This was a horrifying crime, from which Ms Reggiani died two days later. The man accused of her killing is Nicolae Mailat, a Romanian Roma (gypsy) who lived in one of a string of shacks in a nearby wood. He denies murdering Ms Reggiani, but admits snatching her bag. Fellow shack-dwellers say that he is mentally disturbed.

None of this carried any weight in the outcry that followed. Mr Mailat is one of hundreds of thousands of Romanians, many of them gypsies, who have flocked to Italy in recent years and now make up its biggest ethnic minority. They have unquestionably brought problems, particularly to Rome, where a disproportionate number live in dreadful conditions under bridges, in copses or in disused buildings. They have made some parts of the city feel distinctly unsafe.

But the reason so many have come is that Italian politicians have encouraged them. The former centre-right government of Silvio Berlusconi waived visa restrictions on Romania five years before it joined the European Union in January. The current centre-left government of Romano Prodi chose not to restrict the entry of workers from Romania after it had become a full member. Romanians were initially popular. They speak a Romance language. Most integrate easily.

Despite Italy’s open-arms policy, no steps were taken to provide even temporary shelter for the new arrivals. Part of the blame must fall on Rome’s centre-left mayor, Walter Veltroni. Yet it was he who was chiefly responsible for pushing the government into a panic after Ms Reggiani’s murder.

Mr Veltroni is more than just mayor of Italy’s biggest city. Last month, he was elected head of the new Democratic Party, which combines the two biggest parties on the centre-left. As such, he instantly became heir-apparent to Mr Prodi, and the centre-left’s candidate for the next general election. He thereby makes himself a continuous source of discomfort to Mr Prodi, as he seeks to keep himself in the news. He also offers an appealing alternative to an unpopular and fragile government which smaller coalition parties are repeatedly threatening to bring down.

After Mr Veltroni declared that “neither the police nor the local authorities can cope with the emergency”, the cabinet produced a decree that gave prefects, local representatives of the interior ministry, the power to expel citizens of other EU countries if they had the backing of a judge. A 2004 EU directive legitimised such expulsions in cases where there was a threat to public health or security.

In Brussels, the justice commissioner, Franco Frattini, and his officials seem to have accepted the Italian move (see article). But it is at best debatable whether the expulsions reflect faithfully a directive that, according to the EU’s own summary, was intended for a “ serious and present threat which affects the fundamental interests of the state”.

The most shocking aspect of the decree is that it is aimed so openly at Romanians. The preamble claims that “the proportion of crime committed by foreigners has increased, and those who commit most crime are the Romanians.” This is true only in absolute terms, because Romanians are the most numerous immigrants. As an analysis in La Stampa has shown, the proportion of Romanians reported to, or arrested by, the police in 2006 was lower than in most other foreign groups.

Within 24 hours of the cabinet meeting, 20 people were expelled. A band of thugs beat up and stabbed three Romanians in a Rome suburb. The first of several immigrant encampments were flattened with bulldozers. Since then, the Roma have been the target of vitriolic abuse. Gianfranco Fini, the supposedly reformed leader of the former neo-fascists, accused them of prostituting their womenfolk, approving the kidnapping of children and believing that theft was morally justified.

Continued at: The Economist