Populist gains in Italy show the scale of Europe’s anger epidemic
There is no comfort for British pro-Europeans in the knowledge that the EU has worse problems than Brexit. In recent months, more sleep has been lost in Brussels over Italian politics than anything Theresa May’s government might do. That alarm was vindicated by Sunday’s election.
The biggest winners were the populist Five Star Movement and the far-right League (formerly known as the Northern League). Both are Eurosceptic by continental standards, but neither made that the centrepiece of their campaign. They mined general frustration at the failure of the incumbent government to turn economic growth into public prosperity, made pungent in many areas by deep resentment of mass immigration.
The ruling centre-left Democratic party (PD) was punished even more aggressively than was widely anticipated. Forza Italia, the party of Silvio Berlusconi, also did worse than forecast. The octogenarian former prime minister and impresario of sleaze had tried to bridge the gap between flagrant racism and pragmatism by offering a kind of populism-lite – anti-immigration but also pro-European; the reassuringly familiar face of casual patrician prejudice from a less volatile age. But he has been eclipsed by his junior coalition partner, the League’s Matteo Salvini, a dispenser of undiluted, racially charged vitriol. “There has been a tide of delinquents and I want to send them home, from first to last,” Salvini said of Italy’s migrant population at one election rally.
It is testimony to how low expectations in Brussels have fallen that before the vote, Berlusconi was seen as the least worst available option. The hope was that he might sand the Eurosceptic edges from Italian nationalism. Italy is the third-largest economy in the eurozone and a founder nation of the EU. Rome cannot be excluded from debates about vital structural reforms, but that conversation is politically tricky with a country that can’t form a stable government. It is also morally compromised if that country ends up governed to the beat of a quasi-fascist drum.
The biggest winners were the populist Five Star Movement and the far-right League (formerly known as the Northern League). Both are Eurosceptic by continental standards, but neither made that the centrepiece of their campaign. They mined general frustration at the failure of the incumbent government to turn economic growth into public prosperity, made pungent in many areas by deep resentment of mass immigration.
The ruling centre-left Democratic party (PD) was punished even more aggressively than was widely anticipated. Forza Italia, the party of Silvio Berlusconi, also did worse than forecast. The octogenarian former prime minister and impresario of sleaze had tried to bridge the gap between flagrant racism and pragmatism by offering a kind of populism-lite – anti-immigration but also pro-European; the reassuringly familiar face of casual patrician prejudice from a less volatile age. But he has been eclipsed by his junior coalition partner, the League’s Matteo Salvini, a dispenser of undiluted, racially charged vitriol. “There has been a tide of delinquents and I want to send them home, from first to last,” Salvini said of Italy’s migrant population at one election rally.
It is testimony to how low expectations in Brussels have fallen that before the vote, Berlusconi was seen as the least worst available option. The hope was that he might sand the Eurosceptic edges from Italian nationalism. Italy is the third-largest economy in the eurozone and a founder nation of the EU. Rome cannot be excluded from debates about vital structural reforms, but that conversation is politically tricky with a country that can’t form a stable government. It is also morally compromised if that country ends up governed to the beat of a quasi-fascist drum.
Source:
theguardian
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