Base expansion plans in conservative regions can trigger broad, diverse protest coalitions

Evidence

The army garrison in Vicenza, Italy, is another place where vehement antibase protests have surprised many. Opposition in Italy had long been restricted to small, scattered protests in places such as Naples and Pisa, and a movement against a missile base in Sicily in the 1980s. U.S. officials had long thought of Italy’s wealthy and strongly conservative northeast as a particularly supportive host. But the plans to build a new base at Vicenza’s Dal Molin airport unexpectedly provoked a widespread surge of protest. Equally surprising, the opposition movement was remarkably diverse: it joined self-identified housewives and businessmen, former 1960s radicals and young anarchists, university students and religious organizations, pacifists and disaffected members of the openly racist anti-immigrant Northern League. They formed a sometimes rocky but effective and unusually creative coalition. — David Vine, Base Nation_ How U.S. Military Bases…, 897

Categorization

• QUESTION: Why did the Dal Molin plans specifically trigger protest where decades of base presence had not?
• XREF: connects to: Anti-establishment protest can break out even within formally conservative parties — Vincent Bevins, If We Burn: The Mass Protest Decade and…, 592