On October 2, Domenico Lucano, mayor of the remote hillside town of Riace – Calabria was arrested by Italian authorities, accused of aiding and facilitating illegal immigration. His arrest illustrates how far-right values and anti-immigrant rhetoric have permeated Italy’s political landscape.

Once hailed as one of the world’s most influential leaders by Fortune Magazine, Mr. Lucano, more commonly known as Mimmo, was taken into custody and placed under house arrest on charges of arranging “marriages of convenience” and abetting poor oversight and collection services of select companies in order to side-step increasingly strict immigration laws. Mr. Lucano spent two weeks under house arrest until central government authorities formally banished him from Riace. He was ordered to leave the town as the investigation into the allegations continued.

Mimmo is no stranger to international notoriety. In 1998, Mr. Lucano initiated a programme to rejuvenate his struggling local economy and to restore life into a once vibrant community. Mimmo’s unusual methods for doing so thrust him into the international spotlight and made him one of the most popular political figures on the peninsula and across Europe. Mimmo faced a daunting task: residents of Riace were disappearing, fleeing the predominantly agriculturally focused south to find work in Italy’s more modernized northern regions. Buildings were vacant, industries vanished, even the one local school was near closure— Riace itself was on the brink of extinction.  Mr. Lucano, in partnership with the Italian government, replenished the town’s population and stimulated economic activity by openly welcoming a controlled number of migrants into his town of barely 2, 000 people. He offered them places to live in the abandoned apartments, as well as skills training programmes to help the new Riacesiintegrate into the local economy. Today nearly 450 migrants live in Riace. Mr. Lucano and his little Calabrian village became a beacon of hope in the chaos of the refugee crisis, and a model of how towns and cities around Europe could approach the immense challenges presented by mass migration.

However, not all migrants have settled easily in Riace. While Mimmo’s program has been lauded for its open-door policy, employment services are under pressure to accommodate a variety of skill-sets and preferences as more people arrive each day. Without adequate employment programs, which require considerable and consistent funding, social protection systems can buckle under increased strain and potentially lead to discontent within migrant groups and increased tensions with locals. Even Mimmo’s programme has not been immune to instances of racial tension or frustration from migrants who struggle to find stable employment.

Twenty years after its implementation, it is not just the financial demands of Mr. Lucano’s programme that have caught the eye of federal immigration officials. Instead, Mimmo and the residents of Riace have fallen victim to Italy’s increasingly rigid stance on immigration, one informed by emotion and propelled by the country’s most polemic politician: Matteo Salvini.

Mr. Salvini is at the forefront of Italy’s 180 degree turn on the topic of immigration. Once head of Italy’s far-right Partita Lega, he now serves as Minister of the Interior under the coalition government with Luigi Di Maio’s anti-establishment populist party Movimento Cinque Stelle. Mr. Salvini is responsible for the highly controversial decisions to turn back NGO migrant ships and to pass a recent bill that makes it easier to deport migrants and more difficult for those fleeing other countries to seek refugee status in Italy.

Where Mr. Lucano sees opportunity in a liberal migration policy, Mr. Salvini sees the degradation of Italian society. Salvini’s rhetoric tirelessly criticizes open immigration policies as a gateway to increased violent crimes. A little more than a week after Mimmo’s arrest, Mr. Salvini used the death of a 16 year-old Roman woman, Desirée Mariottini, suspected to have been raped and murdered by three Senegalese and Nigerian migrants, to push his hardline stance on migration control. He hurled accusations at migrant communities throughout the Eternal City, declaring them responsible even before the investigation yielded any suspects.

The investigation into Ms. Mariottini’s death is still ongoing, but early details have emerged pointing to addiction and a broken home. These details paint an unsettling picture, not of the anti-migrant narrative, but of the failure of Italianinstitutions that are designed to prevent such tragedies.

The demise of Mr. Lucano’s world-renowned refugee initiative at a time when Mr. Salvini uses human tragedy to advance his political agenda illustrates the drastic societal, ethical, and legal changes that are sweeping across Italy and other European nations as a result of the rise of right-wing populism.

Riace and Mr. Lucano’s project seem to hang in the balance. The same can be said for Italy itself. Riace was once a symbol of Italy’s liberal stance on immigration, as well as Italy’s leadership role in alleviating the refugee crisis. Today, the situation may be ominously foreshadowing what Italian writer Roberto Saviano calls: “the nation’s definitive transition from democratic society to authoritarian state”.