This historic shift of power within the Right — the now-nationwide Lega secured four times more votes than in 2013, while Berlusconi’s party is weaker than ever — marks a further collapse of what is loosely called the “center.” Not only did Forza Italia fall behind, but Matteo Renzi’s Democrats, who hit 40 percent at the 2014 European elections, here collapsed below 20 percent. The decline of the parties who have ruled Italy since the early 1990s is notably expressed in the impossibility of forming a grand coalition, even if other liberal and center-left forces are included. Parties which achieved 70 percent of the vote in 2008 were this Sunday below 34 percent. [...]
Social atomization and disgust with politics did not create easy conditions for either. Rejection of the ruling parties has taken the form of a vote for “outsiders,” but the overall panorama is a sharp shift to the right, not least given the absolutely central role of migration and race in this campaign. Whatever the M5S’s internal dissensions, its leader has adopted an ever harsher rhetoric on this terrain. Even before he was contemplating a deal with the Lega, he denounced NGO “migrant taxis” and called for a target of “zero boats” with migrants from Africa. M5S ultimately responds to a pessimistic vision of Italian society, in which solidarity does not exist, collective ambition is impossible, and public spending is only something to be cut. [...]
The M5S is not an Italian Front National. It is not even a strongly Eurosceptic force, having abandoned this cause in the name of presenting a more “professional” and less “extreme” face. Nor does it offer some new democratic vision. Far from empowering citizens to mobilize for social change, its guru proposed a well-worn set of ideas based on removing “ideology” from the realm of state administration, in this drawing on the technocratic ideals of typewriter kingpin Adriano Olivetti. It repeats a hackneyed cry of making Italy a “normal country,” free of corruption and inefficiency, even though it has already abandoned its own anti-corruption charter.
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