Social Europe: Can the left really stop Salvini?

The turnout in Emilia-Romagna was up more than 20 percentage points from five years ago. This made a huge difference. The strong personal victory of Bonaccini—whose electoral list with his name on it added almost 6 per cent to the progressive tally—could at first sight be explained by the local tradition of good governance. This is represented by the modello Emiliano,characterised by a tempered capitalism embedded in a social-democratic governance with a strong left-wing subculture.[...]

Their full name, ‘Sardines against Salvini,’ tells a lot about their nature and genesis as well as their will to counter a far-right victory in a left-wing bastion. In some ways, they recall the mobilisation of grassroots progressive groups in the United States since the election of Donald Trump as president. This complex and variegated activism, a ‘middle America’ rebooting democracy—made up of Women’s Marches, Black Lives Matter, local canvassing, and a spontaneous citizens’ engagement in cities and suburbs of many states—has largely been missing on European soil. [...]

As the resistance of the last bastions against the European populist trend becomes increasingly fragile, it is time for progressive forces to find new forms of mobilisation—without mirroring demagogic nationalism and its policies—and to learn a few lessons transnationally and from Italy. The left needs to regain its capacity to create a shared political culture, to focus on integrative responses and to challenge rising populism with its traditional political weapons: rights, solidarity, equality, democracy.

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UnHerd: Populism in Italy is far from defeated

But now Salvini has been stalled. Cue much talk about the decline of populism. “Peak Populism?” asked The Times in its leader, in the shadow of his defeat. It is not the first time this question has been asked, of course. In the aftermath of Marine Le Pen’s defeat to Emmanuel Macron in 2017, many observers drew the same conclusion; populism had finally been kicked into decline. But then it continued to consolidate across much of Europe, not only at the national level but also winning a record number of seats in the European Parliament last spring. [...]

But is this really the case? There is certainly no doubt that the vibrant, youth-led movement played a role but precisely how much of a role is up for debate. Compared to the last election the Left’s share of the vote only increased by 2-points. The Right’s jumped by nearly 14-points while Salvini and Lega walked away with a new record share of the vote, as did the ultra Right Brothers of Italy who saw their support jump more than four-fold. [...]

If Five Star continue to decline then the centre-Left may be the beneficiary as Italy becomes more polarised between Left and Right. Either way, the defection of Five Star voters to the Left arguably reflected not so much the discovery of a new liberal formula for fighting populism but more simply a governing populist party failing to manage the transition from being an outsider to an insider governing party.

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Jacobin Magazine: The Resentful and the Damned

In towns where only five years ago Salvini’s party defined the locals as terroni, a racialized term of abuse against Southerners considered akin to “Albanians” or “Moroccans,” it is now combining a new reactionary common sense with an older conservative base. Having risen from zero to high single figures in Southern regions at the general election seven months ago, the Lega is now polling 22 percent in the bottom half of Italy that stretches from Abruzzo to Sicily. Yet this is no uniform picture: the Lega vote remains wealthier and older than the general population; in the South, it is winning more support off other right-wing parties than from the Five Star Movement, an eclectic force which enjoys particularly strong backing among white-collar workers and the unemployed.[...]

Such rhetoric is today echoed by the hard-right Interior Minister’s coalition partner; after Lucano’s arrest, and the announcement that funding for migrant reception would be cut off, Salvini’s undersecretary Carlo Sibilia (Five Star) wrote a blog entitled “Riace was no model: time’s up for the immigration business.” If a handful of Five Star figures not in government (such as parliamentary speaker Roberto Fico) do defend immigrants, this direct combination of anti-corruption and anti-immigration politics has always been a potent ingredient in the movement’s brew.[...]

Despite occasional accusations of vote-buying made during the election campaign, notably in Naples’s Scampia district, it would be a vast exaggeration to suggest that the Lega’s base in the far south is dependent on organized crime. It has, instead, succeeded in cohering behind itself more legitimate networks of power, as well as parts of the activist base of right-wing and far-right parties of older vintage. [...]

Anti-racist voices are beleaguered, as are all those that seek to unite workers on the basis of their economic interests rather than promote the war between the poor. The glue of the Lega’s support, across class divides, is weaponized resentment; those whose social status is in decline, or challenged, are mobilized behind a nakedly reactionary agenda in order to blame those who stand even lower. Rather like the Northern, and then Southern Italian immigrants who gradually became an accepted part of US society, the latest-comers in the Lega’s own ranks can be among the most aggressive in policing the boundaries of race, identity, and “who belongs.”

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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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The Local: Italy is 'steeped in hate', Amnesty warns amid toxic election campaign

Against this background, the campaign for Italy's election on March 4th has only aggravated the problem, Amnesty said. The group has been monitoring comments made on social media by political leaders and candidates nationwide and in the past two weeks alone has identified more than 200 that it flagged as hateful or discriminatory on grounds of race, religion, gender or sexual orientation. 

Virtually all were made by members of the centre-right alliance that the latest polls show leading, comprised of Forza Italia centrists, the populist League and far-right Brothers of Italy. [...]

Meanwhile the Brothers of Italy, while making fewer discriminatory statements about migrants, refugees and Roma people, made the highest number of negative comments about women and LGBTI people. While the party has a high-profile female leader, Giorgia Meloni, it promotes "traditional family values" that tend to exclude orientations other than heterosexual.  [...]

Amnesty's Rufini warned that Italy is more polarized than ever before, saying that part of the public believes itself to be "great, pure, Italian while the rest don't deserve to share the country [...] creating an impossible climate in this country and killing all chance of debate". 

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