Politico: American nationalists’ European vacation

“It’s a definite paradox,” said Ben Nimmo, director of investigations at Graphika, a social media analytics firm that tracks these campaigns. “The U.S. far right, a nationalist and racist movement, is now trying to go global itself.” [...]

Despite a groundswell in the volume of American-made misinformation in Europe, activists’ efforts largely failed to sway public opinion, according to online campaign analysts, hate-speech experts and policymakers who have tracked the growth of American digital activists operating in the EU over the last four years. [...]

Soon, the hashtags #GetBrexitDone and #TakeBackControl started trending in the U.S., despite most Americans being largely apathetic toward Brexit. The idea of a polarized Britain — and a leader like Johnson who rose to the occasion to champion the will of the people — served to boost Trump’s “stick it to the elites” narrative. [...]

While the groups failed to get much attention in France, their anti-Macron hashtag was soon trending back home in the U.S. — despite most American Twitter users not interested in European politics. That allowed these activists to portray the soon-to-be French president as someone from a corrupt political elite and to link the scandal to Trump’s pledges to “drain the swamp.” [...]

Ahead of the European Parliament election in May, 2019, for instance, European activists grew tired, and even angry, over American groups’ interest. The efforts coincided with the failed attempt by Steve Bannon, the former White House chief strategist, to unify the region’s nationalist political parties under one umbrella. [...]

Increasingly, political operators — on the right and the left — are moving away from paid-for social media ads and toward so-called organic content, or regular social media posts published in private Facebook groups to reach their target audiences.

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DW Documentary: Italy's populists reach for power - Five Stars for Rome (May 27, 2018)

The Five Star Movement celebrated an historic victory in the Italian parliamentary elections. Luigi di Maio has been under consideration for prime minister. But what does the movement stand for?

The Five Star movement defines itself as grassroots and post-ideological. Its program of environmentalism, criticism of Italian refugee policy and the promise of financial aid for the socially disadvantaged appeals to both right and left-wing voters. A camera team accompanied the populist "anti-system party" on the campaign trail. Its core voters are in southern Italy, where unemployment is high and average incomes are low. Salvatore Micillo, who won 58 per cent of the votes cast in his constituency north of Naples, says, "Populism means addressing the people, and that's not bad: it's more about providing answers. The promise of a basic income of € 780 is intended to signal our intention of looking after our citizens. It doesn’t mean letting them stay at home, it means that the state will take you under its wing, protect you, give you work and trys to train you.” The candidates themselves project an image of modesty. "The ultimate goal of politics is not to do extraordinary things, but to prevent crap from happening," proclaims Party founder Beppe Grillo. But is the "MoVimento 5 Stelle" really ready for the responsibilities of government?

Social Europe: Lib-Pop Politics: Why Italy’s New Government Is More Neoliberal Than Populist

A new Italian government is in the making, with an unprecedented alliance between the Five Stars Movement (33% of votes in the March 2018 elections; 36% of seats in the House of Deputies) and the Lega (17% of votes; 20% of seats). The view that ‘populist barbarians have conquered Rome’ is a gross misunderstanding. Lega has already governed for nine years in Berlusconi governments supporting all neoliberal policies that have favoured finance, business and the European integration they now criticise. The Five Stars are ready to compromise on everything with anyone – Washington, Brussels, business, finance, the military – for their turn in power, knowing that their large support is at best temporary. The result is that – rhetoric aside – pro-rich neoliberal policies dominate the new government agenda, tinted with a shade of populism, with modest pro-poor and harsh anti-immigrant action. Lib-pop politicsis how we may call Italy’s new political experiment. [...]

The political momentum for Salvini grew with the elections in two regions held in April 2018. Lega won in the north-eastern region of Friuli-Venezia Giulia with the centre-right coalition getting 63% of votes, Lega alone obtaining 35% and providing the President of the Region, while the Five Stars slipped to 7%. In the small Southern Molise region, the centre-right coalition won with a Forza Italia candidate on 49% of votes (Lega had 8%), while the Five Stars list obtained 32%. Current polls reflect this trend of a growing Lega and a stable Five Stars consensus; when Five Stars support weakens – as happened in the peripheries of Rome and Turin, run by weak Five Stars mayors – Salvini is set to grab a large part of their disappointed voters. Thus, the political outlook suggests Salvini as a likely winner of a real majority for the centre-right when new elections take place, giving him the upper hand in talks for the new government – the alternative being an early vote in autumn or in May 2019 that could be held together with the European elections. Finally, Lega’s hegemonic power is marked also by its ability to combine power and protest; it was long in power in all Berlusconi’s governments but is not perceived as responsible for the current crisis. At the same time, Lega capitalises on widespread protests with its rhetorical challenge to European rules, harsh treatment of migrants and anti-tax, anti-bureaucracy agenda. [...]

The most important specific policy that will be introduced by the new government is the Italian version of the ‘flat tax’; firms and individuals will pay either 15 or 20% of income taxes, as opposed to the current 43% for the top income bracket. It is clearly stated that no wealth tax will be introduced (Italy has often been criticized by the EU for having cancelled real estate taxes on home-owners). Tax controls on Italy’s large number of small firms and self-employed will be scaled down, basically legalising tax evasion for a large number of right-wing, medium and high-income voters. For financial firms and banks no control or limit on their activities will be introduced. This will make Italy a neoliberal business paradise, competing with Ireland in the race to the bottom of business taxes in Europe, offering some room for the survival of Italy’s small businesses dramatically hit by a decade of crisis. In this way, the transfer of income to the richest 20% of Italians will be huge, with the very rich benefitting the most. Berlusconi would have never been able with his past majorities to introduce such a pro-rich agenda.

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Social Europe: There Are More Things In Heaven And Earth, Horatio, Than Populism

The concept of populism is a theoretical kaleidoscope which has been used indiscriminately for Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders, Jeremy Corbyn and Marine Le Pen, Alexis Tsipras and Viktor Orbán, even for Barack Obama, or for Margaret Thatcher in the past. It really offers a reassuring view of the world: in today’s confused times, where all that is solid melts into air (political traditions, identities, narratives), people are being led astray by demagogues thunderously ventilating their fears of the unknown. But populism is merely a political style that invests political programs and strategies. It is not an ideology or a worldview in itself. Let us not take the appearance for the essence, the symptom for the cause. [...]

It is precisely with the outsiders and losers that social democracy lost contact after its social-liberal adaptation to late capitalism – and now finds itself bitterly defeated in Italy, trapped in a standstill coalition with the preachers of Ordoliberalismus in Germany, suffering from the “Pasokification” effect all across Europe. A victim of its own triumph, it became too much of a mainstream and consensual political force. With its last moment of hegemony (Blair’s “Third Way” and Schroeder’s “Neue Mitte”), social democracy effected a full adaptation to post-Fordist capitalism but at the same time lost its chance to change the path of European integration. Instead it made its opponent’s agenda its own: never before had social democrats believed so implicitly in market self-regulation. When the crisis broke social democracy was unable to formulate a Euro-Keynesian solution, to escape from austerity or remedy the inequalities of trickle-down economics. But material security is the touchstone for progressive reformism, next to identity politics. For social democracy it is after all not so difficult to win the support of “globalised” liberal white-collar voters. What has been lost is the support of the world of labour, the young precarious workers, the people stuck in rusting ports and former industrial cities. [...]

The Left should therefore defend its fundamentals instead of deploring the supposedly irrational populist surge. And this is first and foremost the primacy of politics over economy, a core tenet of social-democratic tradition as Sheri Berman has eloquently indicated: political intervention and not a passive acceptance of the “global market forces”, a new social-democratic compromise between capital and labour without great sacrifices on the part of economic stability but in return for more protection for the outsiders. An updated combination of prosperity and equity is the key to reassert the progressive values against the “cultural backlash”. After all, material security is a prerequisite for both individual emancipation and an open and self-confident national identity, only this time beyond nation-state (which was the case in the Glorious Thirty) as reformism is possible only at a supranational, European and rather federalist level.

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Quartz: The election of Italy’s first black senator won’t make a dent on rising racism there

wobi is not only the first Senator of African origin to have been elected in Italy. He’s also the first person from sub-Saharan Africa to have been elected to represent a far-right party, la Lega (The League) led by Matteo Salvini.

But his election is unlikely to lead to less racism and xenophobia in the country nor will it bring any respite for migrants in the country. This is for two reasons: racism and xenophobia have become more entrenched in Italy, and neither Iwobi’s party, nor the senator himself, are sympathetic towards migrants. [...]

Migrants in Italy are increasingly seen as a threat to society. The centre-right coalition, which attracted the highest percentage of votes in the recent elections, focused its campaign on the slogan “Italians first”. The leader of the coalition Silvio Berlusconi even declared that “migrants are a social bomb.” [...]

In March 2011, Human Rights Watch published a report entitled “Everyday Intolerance: Racist and Xenophobic Violence in Italy”. The report pointed to “worrying signs exist that increasing diversity has led to increasing intolerance, with some resorting to or choosing violence to express racist or xenophobic sentiments.”

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Social Europe: Nothing’s Left

Things simply got worse with the financial crisis and its aftermath. The latent dissatisfaction with the establishment exploded in a full-blown revolt already in 2013, when the centre-left and centre-right combined attracted less than half the total votes. The PD’s disappointing result led to the demise of the post-communist-turned-moderate leadership in favour of Matteo Renzi, a reckless maverick that, freely borrowing from Five Star rhetoric, had attacked the old political caste governing the party. It was a change for the worse: Renzi’s political project anticipated – albeit less successfully – Macron’s rise: extreme centrism to re-unify the establishment in opposition to the populist threat. His ultra-liberal reforms – in particular of the labour market – pushed the social-democratic component out of the Party. [...]

Their new electoral base is the mirror of their political culture. They speak of financial markets and “responsible” economic policy – and never of exploitation, wages and inequality. They have taken the working class vote for granted, and tried to conquer the vote of the moderates by embracing a pro-market ideology. Yet, that very own ideology has dramatically modified the social and economic landscape: rampant inequality and poverty are eroding the middle class – making the race to the centre a suicidal option. Furthermore, as shown by Branko Milanovic, both the working class and that very same Western middle class are the real losers of globalisation, and have often become resentful and much less moderate than they used to be. Recent electoral and political trends show that elections are now also fought on the extremes, by winning the votes of the people left behind by the neo-liberal globalisation that the pro-establishment Left so blindly supported. Trump won the presidency by stealing the rust-belt states, while in England both Labour and the Tories moved away from centrism, adopting more populist platforms – from Brexit to nationalisations. In Italy, the anti-establishment parties gained more than 50% of the votes.

Unlike other countries such as the US, UK, France, Spain, Portugal, the protest vote in Italy does not have any significant leftist representation. Free and Equal – the new Party created by former PD leaders – failed miserably, managing to collect barely 3% of the votes. More worryingly, they are just a better copy of the PD, faring relatively well among higher degree holders and almost absent in the poorest urban areas. This is no surprise: after having embraced all kinds of liberal policy, formed administrations with Berlusconi and supported technocratic government, they quite simply do not have the credibility to talk to the working class. Even the leader of Free and Equal, former Senate speaker Pietro Grasso, has the profile of a moderate leader: a former anti-mafia magistrate, with impeccable credentials as a civil servant and no direct political experience. Free and Equal correctly identified the disillusionment with Renzi amongst the progressive electorate, but failed to understand that Italians just want a clean break with the past and not an ameliorated and more presentable version of the establishment.

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Social Europe: Italy: First European Country In The Hand Of Populists?

A mix of contextual and of more political factors lies behind these results. According to the Bertelsmann Stiftung’s 2017 Sustainable Governance Indicators (SGI) on Italy the economic recovery started to take off under the Democratic Party-based governments of Matteo Renzi and Paolo Gentiloni, but people’s perceptions didn’t change much and are still dominated by the effects of the deep recession of the past years – fear of unemployment, experiences of business failures, and the tightening of living conditions. Naturally, the main governing parties suffer under such conditions, whereas opposition parties that are perceived as being far distant from the government enjoy voters’ goodwill. Thus, first and foremost the Five Star Movement and the League grew rather than Forza Italia which had headed the government three times between 1994 and 2008.

A second reason for the success of these two parties is the growing resentment in large strata of the population against the policies of the EU. Many people feel damaged by economic austerity on the one hand and resent the scant solidarity shown to Italy’s problems with immigration on the other. The Five Star Movement and the League have both shown very critical attitudes towards the EU – to the point of even suggesting a referendum on the Euro. [...]

If an alliance of the twin winners is rejected, both leaders have to court the centre of the parliament in order to build a majority. They have already given some signals in this direction. This means they will have to moderate some of their most radical positions. In particular, both will have to bargain with political forces that are more pro-European. We may expect therefore a government that would raise questions in Brussels but not refuse cooperation. It would be wise for EU authorities and other European leaders to encourage this process by paying more attention to the problems that Italy has been facing recently, not least because some were exacerbated by sub-par EU policies. 

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Social Europe: Fear, Loathing And Poverty: Italy After The 2018 Elections

The 37-38% (respectively in the House and the Senate) won by the Centre-Right comes from the success of the League, gone from 4% in the 2013 general elections, to 6% in the European elections of 2014, to 18% today, while Forza Italia falls from 22% in 2013 to 17% in 2014 and to the current 14%. The 32-33% (respectively in the Senate and the House, with a younger electorate) for Five Stars should be compared with the 26% of the general elections of 2013 and with the 21% of the European elections of 2014. Matteo Renzi is the clear loser of the election, with his Democratic Party getting 19% of the vote – it had 25% five years ago and peaked at 41% in the 2014 European elections – and his coalition reaching a total of 23%, including the 2.6% of the ‘More Europe’ party of  Emma Bonino. On the Left ‘Liberi e Uguali’ obtained just above 3% of votes, failing to build a significant left-wing opposition. Voters’ participation was similar to five years ago, around 75%, while in the European elections it had fallen to 57%.  

Those gains of the Centre-Right and Five Stars are parallel successes, fueled by common ingredients: protest vote, populist rhetoric, criticism of Europe, anti-immigrant feelings. In the Center-Right coalition such drivers coexist with very distant other interests – those of the rich and powerful around Berlusconi; the balance of internal power relations in the coalition will be difficult to sort out, in terms of political hegemony even before the formation of a government. In the Five Stars those ingredients coexist with the attempt to achieve a transformation from protest movement to government party, with an evolution – in terms of identity and political agenda – that is yet to be charted.  

These same drivers, however, have taken different directions in the North and South. The League’s roots in Northern regions have been expressed in demands for lower taxes, for protecting falling incomes, local and national identities. The South – which has been ‘left behind’ by political and economic developments, abandoned by a new emigration, marked by social degradation and criminal powers – has expressed a protest that demands new political power. The main limit of Salvini’s attempt to build an Italian ‘National Front’ has been his inability to overcome these regional division.

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Social Europe: EU Takes Beating In Italian Elections: When Will They Ever Learn*?

The centrist parties in the European Parliament treated the growth of the far right as a fringe phenomenon requiring no amendment to their “ever closer union” agenda.  The British vote to leave brought no more than a momentary shock.  Shrugging off Brexit as a uniquely British phenomenon and no threat to the continent, the centre-right (European Peoples’ Party) and centre-left (Progressive Alliance of Socialists and Democrats) pursued their top-down strategy of deepening through compromise. [...]

That the European Commission president could make such a statement reveals the bureaucratic myopia of the EU leadership, in Brussels, Berlin and elsewhere.  Juncker and other EU leaders face the high probability of needing to work with an Italian government of the right led by the Lega and one which is homophobic, misogynist, opposed to the euro, and dedicated to expelling illegal immigrants.  I would prefer such a government to be weak and non-operational. [...]

It is not appropriate for Brussels to seek to influence the political process in member countries.  Indeed, German pressure via Brussels on Silvio Berlusconi to resign in 2011 is one reason for anti-EU sentiment on the Italian right.  Nor will the long-term consequences of the Commission’s part in undermining the Syriza government during 2015 prove beneficial to Greek democracy or foster respect for the EU.  

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Bloomberg: Italy's Five Star Movement Should Think Long Term

After decades of economic stagnation, growing inequality and concerns about immigration (the latter grossly amplified by social media) Italians turned their back on mainstream political forces. The Five-Star Movement, the largest vote-winner, appeals mainly to the disaffected middle-class while the League, the other populist winner, draws support from the working class and small business community. While the League is by far the most influential political force in the north, Five Star won virtually every constituency in the south. Together they have more than 50 percent of the proportional vote. [...]

Five Star has had its share of scandals, but in its major battles, Five Star has been on the right side of history. It fights corruption, advocates for more transparency in government and typically communicates in plain language through its website. In other words, Five Star has shown its readiness to address the concerns that any progressive political force should tackle, but that former Prime Minister Matteo Renzi's Democratic Party (PD), the leading Italian progressive party, failed to do. As such, Five Star must coalesce with other political forces, including possibly PD itself now that Renzi has conceded defeat and stepped down. [...]

Five Star's normalization would require it to change: It would have to leave aside the bigotry and bizarre anti-science agenda that has dogged some of its candidates and platform, and render its governance structure more transparent and accountable. That won't be easy: The experience of the past few years has shown Five Star to be opaque, top-down and authoritarian in the way it is run; a reality its supporters either ignore or excuse. That would have to change and it's not clear Five Star has the will or ability to make this happen.  [...]

It would also need to clarify its ambiguous position on Europe. Over the last 20 years, Italian politicians – both from the right and the left– have used Europe as a scapegoat for Italy's home-grown problems. Much of this EU-bashing fueled the rise of an anti-EU sentiment in the country, giving Five Star the momentum that propelled it onto the national and European stage; the party's deputies currently sit in the European Parliament in a group with the British anti-Europe UKIP party that campaigned for Brexit.

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The Huffington Post: Do Not Misunderstand The Significance Of The Five Star Movement's Electoral Victory

Although the success of Di Maio’s formation had been largely predicted, the real shift in these elections came from the rise of the right-wing and Eurosceptic party ‘Lega Nord’. If the latest numbers are confirmed, its leader Matteo Salvini will have taken the party from a meagre 4% in the 2013 elections to an astonishing 17.4%. There can hardly be any misunderstanding regarding the significance of this outcome – a sizeable percentage of Italians have put their weight behind the ferociously divisive and openly racist rhetoric of a leader who, over the years, capitalised on popular discontent and perfected the art of appealing to the voters’ resentments while stoking their fears about migration, terrorism and the economy.

Having presumably captured (some of) the vote which was expected to otherwise go to political formations further to the right, such as Forza Nuova or Casa Pound, the Lega Nord is now strong enough to significantly alter the political calculations regarding what the next government will be. They have become the first party of the centre-right coalition, to which they ostensibly belong. However, should they decide to form a coalition with the Five Star Movement, that would mean access to an absolute majority in Parliament – a rather unsettling scenario in many ways. [...]

It is hard to say what will happen next. Given the uncertainty and ideological flexibility of some of the winning parties, all options are on the table – including a centre-right government, a coalition government by the Five Star Movement and Lega Nord, and a coalition government by the Five Star Movement and the centre-left (probably the least likely scenario). That is, unless Brussels decides to respond in its own way to Emma Bonino’s unlucky electoral slogan, and steps in once again to bring ‘stability’ and a bit ‘more Europe’ to bear on Italian politics; or, as others would say, to save Italy from itself.

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Political Critique: The Italian elections were a victory for Trumpism

On paper, and taken at face-value, much of the M5S programme sounds appealing. Testament to this is the sheer variety of their public supporters including alt-right commentators, radical left intellectuals like Dario Fo and Bifo Berardi (the latter retracted his support), and even Bill Emmott, ex editor of the Economist, who despite some reservations was surprisingly enthusiastic about M5S when I interviewed him in the run up to the vote. Few indeed could argue with the idea that that Italy’s notoriously corrupt republic needs a new force to clean up the system, to “drain the swamp” in Trump’s words. What M5S have done so cleverly is to occupy this space with an additional commitment to tackling all the other things that the incumbent parties have failed on: environmental commitments, democratic participation, technological innovation to name just three. As for the economy, meanwhile, while un-costed, M5S has campaigned in favour of a basic income as a measure to protect an increasingly precarious working class that has been abandoned by the system. Looking at the strong support in the country’s impoverished southern regions like Sicily, Campania and Puglia, as well as with the chronically unemployed young, this gamble seems to have paid off.

The appeal is easy to understand, at least in theory. So why has the movement been so criticized? And why, following their most recent success, are so many in a state of panic? First, of course, are the realities behind these pretty words. It is hard to take M5S’s remarks on direct and internal democracy seriously when candidates have historically been forced to tow the party line to such an extent that members have been expelled for ‘crimes’ such as talking to the ‘fake news’ on mainstream TV. Then there is the question of ownership. For a movement that prides itself on transparency, the non-profit organization that manages the M5S digital platform, Rousseau, is remarkably cagey about where the presumably vast advertising revenue ends up. More tangibly still the movement has seemed on the back foot thanks to the unambiguous ineptitude of several local representatives. In the past year alone Virginia Raggi, the Five Star mayor of Rome, has presided over several corruption scandals and a dramatic worsening of public services, from transport to the now infamous garbage crisis. None of this however has affected their anti-political appeal at the national level.  

One of the most important aspects to note about M5S, however, leaving aside all superficially attractive aspects of their programme, is the movement’s gradual but definite shift towards the right. In reality glimpses of this were visible from the very beginning, in what were passed off as occasional rhetorical gaffs as when one candidate likened gay sex to bestiality, or, more recently when the movement’s leader Luigi Di Maio made the bizzare claim that Italy is importing 40% of Romania’s criminals. More recently this kind of talk has translated into actual policy. Under Raggi there have been several evictions of shelters hosting refugees in Rome, as well as widespread talk of deportations at a national level, not to mention consistent fear mongering about rising crime due to immigrants (in fact, as ISTAT data shows, crime in Italy is actually decreasing and there is no easy correlation with areas of dense immigration.)

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The Atlantic: Two Ways to Read Italy's Election Results

The people have spoken. But what are they saying? There are two main ways to read the results, and both have major consequences for Europe. One—and this is entirely new—is that one of the three pillar countries of the European Union now effectively has a euroskeptical majority in parliament; both Five Star and the League have called for rewriting treaties with Europe to give Italy more sovereignty. (Although it’s a big question whether they would team up to form a government; the election results have produced a hung parliament.) The second is that voters are punishing Italy’s governing elites—Renzi’s Democratic Party, but also Silvio Berlusconi’s Forza Italia party—for overseeing the country’s decline.

The results of the vote fundamentally alter Italy’s relationship to the European Union. Five Star and the League haven’t called for an Ital-exit per se, but a loosening of ties that they say have held Italy back. How they’ll accomplish this is anyone’s guess. In a victory speech on Monday, Matteo Salvini, the head of the League—which he transformed from a Northern sovereigntist party into a national one by campaigning on a platform of “Italians first”—said he wanted a “different” kind of Europe, one that gives more power to national interests over pan-European commitments. He praised Hungary’s Viktor Orban, who is famous for his authoritarian bent and for advocating what he has called “illiberal” democracy, and who has pushed back taking in refugees from the Middle East. He also thanked France’s Marine Le Pen for her support and friendship. But he shares some of Le Pen’s contradictions—like her, he is a euroskeptic who has served in the European Parliament; like her, he has said the European Union is a suffocating oppressor, while wanting lots of European Union agricultural subsidies for the farmers that form a key constituency. [...]

In this, the results resemble less Brexit and Trump than the rise of the left-wing Syriza party in Greece, which came to power when the centrist parties were seen as corrupt and complicit in bankrupting the country. Nor did Renzi do himself any favors. In Italy, Di Maio is mocked for making grammar mistakes, especially with the subjunctive mood, used for hypotheticals. Renzi seems to have the opposite problem. He uses the subjunctive too much. In his speech Monday, when he said he’d eventually step down, he barely conceded any errors and instead talked about how Italy should have held elections last year, riding the currents that helped defeat Geert Wilders in the Netherlands and elect Emmanuel Macron in France.

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Salon: In Italy, fake news helps populists and far-right triumph

Five Star — which one commentator described as a party with a “rightist façade over a leftist basement and anarchic roof” — is poised to be the biggest party with more than 30 percent of the vote. The League, an anti-immigrant party in former Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi’s coalition, soared to its best result ever with over 18 percent of the vote. [...]

These trends, combined with Italians’ low levels of trust in media organizations, have made Italy fertile ground for spreading misinformation and propaganda online.

In the last five years, online alternative media platforms and their audience have grown exponentially in Italy. At the end of 2017, BuzzFeed exposed several popular Italian websites and Facebook pages that posed as news organizations but trafficked in misinformation with a focus on anti-immigration content. These outlets had several million social media followers. That is substantially more than Italian newspapers and political leaders who typically attract modest numbers of followers. For example, Italian Prime Minister Paolo Gentiloni has only 410,000 Twitter followers. Compare that to U.S. President Donald Trump with more than 48 million.  [...]

Last month, the Italian daily La Stampa identified several prolific Twitter accounts suspected as being used for Russian propaganda operations in Italy. In a report published last fall, the Atlantic Council, an American think tank, documented extensive links between Russian figures and both the Five Star Movement and the League.

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The Guardian: Will Putin benefit from Italian populist parties' Kremlin leanings?

Both the Five Star Movement (M5S) and the League – previously known as the Northern League – have raised the possibility of abandoning Nato, called for ending sanctions on Russia they say have hurt the Italian economy, and have been supportive of Russia’s campaign in Syria.  [...]

Matteo Salvini, the head of the League, has made several trips to Moscow, including one visit weeks before the 2016 constitutional referendum he staunchly opposed. The “no” vote ultimately won the contest, marking a major defeat for the then-prime minister, Matteo Renzi, the head of the Democratic party and close ally of former president Barack Obama. [...]

In 2016, Manlio Di Stefano, one of the party’s foreign policy experts, gave a speech before a conference of Putin’s United Russia party in which he not only called for an end to EU sanctions, but said it was evident that the “Ukraine crisis” was a result of meddling by the EU and US in Russian affairs.

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Jacobin Magazine: Notes on Italy’s Election

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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Politico: Silvio Berlusconi’s grand failure

“Since it was a race, the winner is [League leader Matteo] Salvini. He succeeded in bringing his party from 4 to 18 [percent], he did a great political job and turned a regional party into a national one,” said Denis Verdini, an Italian lawmaker and long-time ally of Berlusconi. He added that the League managed to win regions historically loyal to Forza Italia.  

“Unlike Berlusconi, he [Salvini] capitalized on anti-immigration and anti-EU feelings that ran strong across the country. He proved that ‘Italians first’ is not just a slogan,” Verdini said. [...]

“Berlusconi has woken up to a rather cold shower. At age 81, his unique selling point was his stated ability to rein in the League and fend off the 5Stars. He did not deliver on either count,” said Francesco Galietti, founder of political risk firm Policy Sonar. [...]

“Berlusconi’s age and his poor social media skills also played a role in his defeat. Both Salvini and the 5Star Movement used online platforms to campaign and attack opponents, and both succeeded,” D’Agostino said.

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Jacobin Magazine: Italy Is the Future

Nonetheless, the aggressive tones of Italian public life conceal the real reason why Italy is a case study for the new politics. M5S proclaims its will to “clear out” the established political “caste” and the hard-right Lega hopes to impose its leadership over more conservative forces. But the most notable aspect of contemporary Italian politics is the lack of belief that anything will in fact change.[...]

The Italian political system certainly looks chaotic. None of its parties are thirty years old, and even those created in the early 1990s have constantly changed their identities. Today’s rising force, the Lega (formally known as the Lega Nord or Northern League) was once a hodgepodge of Thatcherites, libertarians, and former Communists bent on Northern autonomy (or even independence) from the South. Today it is a national movement encroaching on the terrain of the far right. [...]

In many countries the old class-based parties of the twentieth century still soldier on. Even as they weaken they can retain some residual social roots and serve as sites of collective identification: “my granddad was a miner” has long been the cry of the reluctant social democrat. Conversely, the Italian parties that emerged in the post-Cold War era more immediately reflect today’s lack of belief in collective projects or state action. Created at a moment when the “end of history” was so widely proclaimed, they have been unable to cohere new identities. [...]

The result is the rise of parties that are defined precisely by their sense of being “outsiders,” in different countries reflecting a hostility to perceived cultural decline brought by immigration (as in Northern and Central-Eastern Europe) and an opposition to austerity (as is broadly true of Southern Europe). Combining both “South” and “Northern” regions, Italian populism concentrates the worst traits of both, reflecting social despair rather than offering a way out of it. [...]

In practice, the M5S has not only backed away from any significant reforming agenda, but has even cast doubt over the viability of “anti-corruption” politics itself. This is illustrated by a recent scandal over its MPs’ salaries. M5S parliamentarians are supposed to remit half their salaries to a finance ministry microcredit fund, and then post online scans of their transfers. However, over the last fortnight ten of them were caught cancelling the transfers as soon as they published the images online. They along with three candidates with Masonic links were expelled from M5S.

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Jacobin Magazine: It Never Went Away

Throughout Italy’s election campaign its main parties have imitated anti-migrant and racist rhetoric from the far right, an alarming trend in a country where fascist groups are increasingly finding a foothold again. The Left’s weakened social roots and a pliant media have combined not only to boost hard-right forces like the Lega and Fratelli d’Italia, but also militant fascist groups such as CasaPound and Forza Nuova. [...]

These two cases were part of a longer pattern. In Florence in 2011, CasaPound supporter Gianluca Casseri killed two Senegalese men, Samb Modou and Diop Mor, and injured a three others,Mbenghe Cheike, Moustapha Dieng, and Sougou Mor, and then killed himself before he could be captured by the police. While the mainstream media and political parties have treated these events as isolated incidents caused by lone wolves, they are in reality chapters in the story of resurgent fascist and xenophobic ideas in Italy. [...]

Despite the smokescreen which still hangs over the events of these years, it has been established that fascist groups were involved in at least one coup attempt (the so-called Golpe Borghese, named after the former fascist Navy official behind the initiative) and a number of massacres across the 1960s and 1970s. The bomb that killed seventeen people and injured eighty-eight in Milan’s Piazza Fontana in 1969 marked the beginning of a decade that culminated in the August 1980 with the bombing at Bologna railway station, which left eighty-two people dead. Although we still don’t know the names of the instigators, trials have established that fascists carried out both atrocities, as well as a number of other killings and shootings throughout that decade. [...]

The demand “put Italians first” has not only been a rhetorical device. As the housing situation became explosive during the crisis, with evictions skyrocketing as tenants were unable to pay their rent, fascist groups promoted squatting for Italians only, or attempted (often successfully) to impede migrant families’ rightful access to public housing. Playing on the burgeoning feelings of fear and insecurity, fed by a media campaign over migrant criminality, fascists instigated neighborhood patrols, often under the cover of murky citizens’ associations. Taking advantage of an increasing poverty rate, they have collected food in front of or even inside supermarkets, but for indigenous Italians only.

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The Local: Immigration in Itay: Myths and reality ahead of election

Italy's national statistics institute Istat says that there are five million foreign nationals legally residing in Italy. That is 8.3 percent of the country's population of 60.5 million.

The biggest proportion, 23 percent, are from Romania followed by Albanians (9 percent), Moroccans (8 percent), Chinese (5.5 percent) and Ukrainians (4.5 percent) and many of them are employed in retail, farming or domestic work.

More than 690,000 migrants, most from Sub-Saharan Africa, have arrived by boat from Libya since 2013. Migration study foundation ISMU estimates that around 500,000 are living in the country illegally -- equivalent to 0.9 percent of the population. [...]

However Italy's interior ministry says the crime rate has dropped by 8.3 percent in the last 10 years, despite the fact that the number of foreigners in the country has increased from three to five million over the same period.

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