It’s hard to map out, let alone quantify, the political impulses in Italy today, but a new study complicates the narrative that the right-wing government was brought to power on a wave of anti-immigration sentiment. Instead, the study finds Italian voters are generally sympathetic to asylum seekers but have wound up with a government that’s not. Conducted by More in Common, a nonprofit initiative aimed at combating authoritarianism and xenophobia, and the polling firm Ipsos MORI, and based on a sample of 2,000 people, the study found that more than 70 percent of Italians believe in granting asylum to some immigrants. In one telling result, when asked if Italy should start sending the people-smugglers’ boats back across the Mediterranean, even at the cost of some people’s lives, only 15 percent of those polled said they agreed with the idea. That figure rose to 46 percent for League voters, but was at 17 percent for Five Star Movement voters, underscoring an incoherence in the coalition that won’t easily be resolved. (In a dramatic example in June, Salvini barred Italian ports from receiving a ship operated by an NGO carrying more than 600 immigrants who had been rescued at sea; after more than a week of political brouhaha, it docked in Spain instead.)
Above all, the study found the main divisions in Italy to be between those who favor a more open society and those who want a more closed one—currents that are also at play in the United States under Trump and the Britain of Brexit. The study paints a picture of Italy as a fragmented society where the moral impulse to welcome the stranger runs up against economic instability, a sense that the European Union has failed to help Italy contend with nearly half a million immigrants who have arrived in recent years, and a sense among many Italians that they no longer feel at home in their own country. Those emotions are reflected in a coalition that, for all its differences, came to power on a wave of anti-establishment sentiment and economic anxiety. The study found that 80 percent of Italians believe globalization has harmed Italy, but are divided about questions of identity and immigration, torn between what can loosely be defined as humanitarianism and nationalism.
The More in Common study also found a majority of respondents believe that to fix Italy’s problems, the country needs “a strong leader willing to break the rules.” (Another study released on Monday by the Italian sociologist Ilvo Diamanti, in the center-left daily La Repubblica, also found a majority of Italians wanted a strong leader, and it identified a divide between party leaders and their electorates.) Italy is, after all, a country with a history of strongmen, from Mussolini to Berlusconi and now Salvini, who is playing the role for the social-media era. “This is Salvini’s government,” Paolo Flores d’Arcais, the editor of MicroMega, a left-wing journal of ideas, told me in Rome this month. “The Five Star Movement are completely subordinate for a simple reason—because if Italy voted tomorrow, Salvini would win by a landslide. He’s acting like prime minister and even like the president of the republic.”
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