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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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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The Guardian: Italy is facing regime change. The future will be repressive

That talks have now collapsed hardly dissipates the danger. On the contrary, the very fact that these populisms have struck hard at the constitutional powers of the Italian president, Sergio Mattarella, shows how determined they are to upend the country’s institutional setup. With new elections, probably in the autumn, the populists are likely to emerge even stronger. But for now Italy is set to be led by a transition government – with no majority.

Both populisms raked up support with Europhobic slogans and concepts of a revolt of “the people” against the “elites” – all in the name of an imaginary “direct democracy”. One is the Five Star movement, founded by the comedian Beppe Grillo alongside a prophet of web-based democracy, Roberto Casaleggio. The other is Matteo Salvini’s League – no longer a secessionist party of the north but a far-right party that expresses sympathy for the regimes in Russia and North Korea. [...]

This Italian “double populism” will not renounce its programme, which aims to control the government through a sort of politburo known as the “conciliation committee”, placed wholly under the control of Five Star and the League. It aims to neutralise parliament by making it impossible for lawmakers to switch parties – whereas the freedom of MPs to do so is written into the constitution. Unpopular laws would be submitted to a sort of screening by referendum; the same would apply to international treaties, and therefore to all the steps that Italy has taken to be part of the EU and the eurozone – even though backtracking on treaties is forbidden by article 75 of the constitution. [...]

The contortions of both parties paved the way for populism. The Democratic party proved unable to move on from Renzi’s leadership, despite a long series of defeats – not least a crushing one in the 2016 referendum on wide-ranging constitutional reform. Forza Italia and the moderate centre-right are tied to the ailing but still hegemonic figure of Berlusconi. On top of that, both mainstream parties did nothing during the campaign but imitate the themes, proposals and styles of the populists, instead of pushing back against them.

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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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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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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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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: 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 Atlantic: Why Is Silvio Berlusconi Back (Again)?

How is it possible that Berlusconi is still on the political stage? Especially when Italy is facing dramatic economic problems—some of which stem from his years in government—and after all the embarrassing “Bunga Bunga” years? I’ll try to keep this simple. He’s still around because Italy doesn’t have a normal center-right; because its center-left, although polling higher than Forza Italia, has imploded into a fratricidal mess and been unable to capitalize on five years of decent government; and because he’s a known quantity in an election dominated by anti-establishment arrivistes like the Five-Star Movement and right-wing anti-immigrant politicians. During the campaign, Berlusconi has referred to himself as “usato sicuro,” or “used but in good condition,” the same term you see in ads for used cars. There’s a sucker born every minute. Although maybe not in Italy, which has one of the lowest birth rates in the West. [...]

Berlusconi as politician was born in 1994 from a political void—the collapse in a massive bribery scandal of the Christian Democrats and Socialists who had at that point governed throughout the post-war era—and today he fills another void. “If Berlusconi suddenly decided to retire from politics, the real true center-right, with the exception of Salvini, would not find a political expression. There would be a vacuum,” Sofia Ventura, a professor of political science at the University of Bologna, told me. Berlusconi is still on the scene because of the large number of centrists in Italy who could vote right or left, and who in this election don’t feel at home in the Democratic Party but are not as far right as League voters. Where else can they turn? [...]

There’s also the possibility that if he gets the numbers for Forza Italia, they could drop their right-wing partners, the League, and form a grand coalition with the center-left Democratic Party, which is running on an opposing ticket with other left-wing parties. Berlusconi criticizes the Democratic Party leader Matteo Renzi on the campaign trail—the left ruined the country and let in too many immigrants; Renzi governs by clicks and tweets are constant refrains—but he seems to have more fellow-feeling with Renzi than with Salvini, the leader of his party’s ostensible coalition partner, the League. A gossip magazine owned by a Berlusconi family company once ran a photo of the 44-year-old Salvini’s girlfriend kissing another man. In Italy’s political culture, the term for a sotto voce agreement, in which two rival politicians have a tacit agreement to drop their partners and team up after elections, is an “inciucio” (pronounced In-CHEW-CHO), which comes from Neapolitan dialect and implies a secret affair. “Berlusconi and Renzi are like two lovers looking to hide in the dark,” Ezio Mauro, a columnist for and former editor of La Repubblica, Italy’s leading center-left daily, which was an opposition paper when Berlusconi was in power, told me.

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Politico: Why Matteo Renzi’s star is fading

The most likely outcomes of the parliamentary election on March 4 are a hung parliament or protracted negotiations as political leaders struggle to gather enough support to govern. [...]

The drop in support is particularly acute in the south — where polls predict the Democratic Party and its allies will lose every seat they currently hold — and nowhere more so than in Abruzzo, where the country’s economic woes continue to bite. [...]

According to Marco Sonsini, a partner at Rome-based lobbying firm Telos, the battle in the region will be between Berlusconi’s center-right coalition and the 5Stars. “In Abruzzo, the PD will pay the price of Renzi’s unpopularity, the draconian cuts to services and spending at a regional level and a slower than average recovery,” he says. [...]

The regional government says it faces significant challenges because of some €780 million in debt it inherited and the fallout of the 2009 and 2016 earthquakes. Nevertheless, Abruzzo was granted €2.5 billion in financing from the EU and Rome to fund infrastructure projects.

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The Guardian: 'There is no long-term vision': young Italians lose faith in politics

Analysts say the growing apathy with politics is not confined to the young: overall, about 30% of voters plan to abstain or are undecided.

“This is partly due to a loss of faith in politicians,” said Antonio Noto, the head of the polling firm IPR. “A decade ago, the level of faith in political parties was around 10%, now it’s 7%. People think that voting is useless.” [...]

The abstention rate in national elections has risen since the early 1990s, partly because of penalties against non-voters being abolished in 1992. The turnout in the 2013 general elections was 75.19%, the lowest since 1946.  [...]

The outcome of the upcoming elections is likely to be determined by the 10 million voters who, so far, remain undecided. In the 2013 elections, support for M5S rose 5% in the last few days of the campaign.

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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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Politico: Italian election’s going to be messy, say pollsters

Friday marks the last day in which opinion polls can be published ahead of the March 4 ballot, according to Italian law. All the polls have similar findings — one of the most unpredictable elections in decades likely ending with a hung parliament. That in turn could lead to a larghe intese — a grand coalition — even though all the main parties have ruled out such an arrangement during a heated campaign. [...]

The center-right coalition led by Silvio Berlusconi has better chances of securing a working majority, pollsters say. The group — Berlusconi’s Forza Italia, plus the Northern League of Matteo Salvini and the right-wing Brothers of Italy — is predicted to get between 35 and 38 percent of the vote, which could be enough for a razor-thin majority.

Under new electoral rules, 63 percent of seats are assigned using a proportional voting system, with the remaining 37 percent of the parliament to be elected locally under a first-past-the-post system. It’s in the latter where the election could be decided, especially seats in the south of the country. [...]

The other main factor that makes the election result highly unpredictable — and any forecast shaky — is the high number of undecided voters, which, according to the latest polls, stands at between 30 and 45 percent of the electorate.

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Reuters: Italy's League leaves northern bastions, bangs anti-migrant drum

In a radical makeover, the League has dropped the word "Northern" from its name and is presenting itself as a national force, aggressively surfing a tide of anti-immigrant sentiment to vie for supremacy within its own center-right bloc. [...]

Founded in 1991 by Umberto Bossi, the League once campaigned vociferously for northern secession and used to denounce Italy's capital as "thieving Rome". Maps on its website jokingly referred to everything south of Rome as Africa. [...]

He has since rowed back on the euro pledge and has turned his focus onto immigration, tapping public angst over the arrival of more than 600,000 mainly African migrants in four years, mostly by boat from Libya. [...]

"A large part of the old guard which always supported the ideals of the north are now struggling to see themselves reflected in this new party," said Giovanni Fava, who was beaten by Salvini in the party's 2013 leadership battle.

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The Guardian: Italy is being driven into the arms of fascists

Matteo Salvini, the leader of the far-right Northern League, has accused the Democratic party of flooding Italy with immigrants to replace Italian workers, thereby transforming the nation into a giant refugee camp. He declares that immigrants bring drugs, theft and violence. Last weekend the impact of this hate speech was made clear, with a drive-by terror attack in Macerata, central Italy. A gunman named as Luca Traini, 28, a candidate for the Northern League in last year’s local elections, went on a two-hour shooting rampage in his car, apparently targeting people of colour. Six were wounded before Traini was arrested, giving a fascist salute as police led him away. At his home, officers found a copy of Hitler’s Mein Kampf and a flag with the Celtic cross, a symbol often used by far-right parties.

Yet the most frightening thing about the Macerata episode is how mainstream Traini’s views are. The Northern League has formed a coalition with another far-right anti-immigrant party, Brothers of Italy, as well as with the disgraced former prime minister, Silvio Berlusconi. This bloc is expected to win the March election. Berlusconi and his allies have for years been encouraging hatred against foreigners, demonising them and creating a situation in which violence against them seems inevitable. [...]

The political agenda of the Berlusconi-backed coalition is virulently anti-immigrant, defending what it calls a “pure race”. One of its candidates, Attilio Fontana, has said that all immigrants threaten the survival of “the white race”. He even bragged in Italy’s main newspaper, the Corriere della Sera, newspaper that his proudly racist views boosted his popularity.

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Quartz: Italy’s neo-fascism is what happens when you normalize extremism

Then things changed. Today, political parties with fascist sympathies are growing fixtures (paywall) in Italian politics, and a number of publicly fascist actions have troubled Italian society: During a soccer match last month (Oct. 22), a group of football fans gave out stickers of Anne Frank dressed in their arch-rival’s jersey. Earlier in the year, an Italians-only beach decorated with fascist symbols and paraphernalia had opened near Venice. Near Rome, a town mayor erected a statue to a fascist general.

Fascism’s rebirth and insidious spread in Italy is the result of a political process that has progressively whitewashed extremism, assisted by the confluence of recent historical factors: By the early 1990s, new generations had grown disconnected from the country’s history of resistance against fascism, as partisans and victims of racial laws aged and died. The fall of the USSR and the dissolution of the Italian communist party also meant a drop in funding to some of the country’s main anti-fascist educational organizations.

More importantly, something happened in the right at the same time. Ruth Ben-Ghiat, a professor of Italian history at New York University, calls it the rise of “fuppies,” or fascist yuppies. “Fuppies” were typically members of, or politically aligned with, Alleanza Nazionale (AN), a rightwing party that publicly rejected antisemitism and other fascist principles, such as violence.

“Fuppies” used articulate, tolerant language and showed respect for democratic institutions. Founded in 1994, AN was led by Gianfranco Fini, who entered politics with the belief that deposed fascist dictator Benito Mussolini was “the greatest statesman of the 1900s,” the Fuppies positioned themselves as modern, successful conservatives. The party’s newspaper, Il Secolo d’Italia, describes AN as aiming to (Italian) move “from the ghetto to the governing right, become ‘presentable,’ scrap nostalgias, acquire moderates who are no longer scared of neofascism.”

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Social Europe: Four Lessons For Europe From Italy’s Experience With Populism

Over the past two decades, Italy has been one of the strongest and most enduring markets for populist parties in Western Europe. While in other European countries the rise or the emergence of populism is a recent development or has occurred only occasionally, it is a persistent feature of Italian politics. In the sixteen years since 2001, Italy has had populist governments for roughly half of this period (eight and a half years) if one counts the three governments led by Silvio Berlusconi that were in power from 2001 until 2005, 2005 to 2006, and 2008 to 2011. Furthermore, in the last Italian general election in 2013, populist parties (People of Freedom/Forza Italia, Lega Nord, and the Five Star Movement) gained over 50% of the vote. [...]

First, there have been implications for the checks and balances that exist within the Italian political system. Populist parties have repeatedly attacked the work of judges, notably in the case of Silvio Berlusconi. They have also had a sizeable impact on the role of the media in Italian politics. This is true both of Berlusconi’s Forza Italia and the Five Star Movement, who have both posed a threat to the freedom and autonomy of media organisations.

Second, there has been a general oversimplification of political discourse in Italy. The debate about the cost of politics is a good example. Initially introduced by the Northern League and Forza Italia in the 1990s, complaints over the cost of politics have also become one of the most successful topics for Beppe Grillo to mobilise support around. Yet despite the presence of this debate for two decades in Italian politics, the political attention it has received has failed to produce significant savings (as shown, for instance, by several expensive and incomplete attempts to abolish provincial councils). There is cross-party consensus among the main political parties on the need to reduce the number of MPs. This implies a certain reduction of political representation, while the reduction in terms of the cost of politics is rather uncertain.

Third, Italy has experienced the spread of populist themes and frames even among non-populist parties. In the last few years, the success of populist campaigning among citizens has pushed even mainstream parties to react using populist rhetoric, styles and sometimes also populist content of their own. An example would be a much-shared Facebook post produced by Matteo Renzi on migration, which stated that ‘we need to free ourselves from a sense of guilt. We do not have the moral duty to welcome into Italy people who are worse off than ourselves’.

Politico: Italy’s Northern League goes soft (on the euro)

Speaking to POLITICO last week, he didn’t attack the single currency or even the EU, instead saying “we want to give Europe one last chance, but in return we want to see real change, especially when it comes to Schengen and the Dublin treaty” — the two EU treaties that regulate cross-border movement in the bloc.

Libero, an Italian daily that follows the Northern League’s line, described Salvini’s comments (first reported in Brussels Playbook) as “a small shift in foreign policy,” with the party moving “from euro-nihilism to Euroskepticism.” It said that shift has become more marked since Marine Le Pen’s defeat in the French presidential election. [...]

In all three Berlusconi coalition governments, he has found a place for the Northern League and that will be the case again if talks to create a center-right bloc succeed. When the Northern League was in power in the past, it didn’t have a clear anti-euro line, which has emerged since Salvini took over the leadership. [...]

Salvini doesn’t just want to prop up the old warhorse Berlusconi. This admirer of Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin wants to be prime minister — and he could achieve that ambition if his party gets more votes than Berlusconi’s. (The tycoon, who turns 81 next month, won’t be prime minister anyway, as a conviction for tax fraud means he cannot be elected to parliament). [...]

He has succeeded in turning the Northern League from an anti-migrant party that wanted to split from the poorer Italian south into a stronger force that campaigns against the euro (and still doesn’t like migrants), and has no qualms about forging ties with the likes of the neo-fascist Casa Pound activist group.

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Politico: Berlusconi battles to lead the Italian right

The four-time Italian prime minister, who turns 81 in September, may be marred by sex scandals and barred from holding public office after a tax fraud conviction. But that hasn’t stopped him from emerging as a potent political force ahead of a parliamentary election early next year. [...]

Rejuvenated by a surprise success in June’s local elections, Forza Italia is neck-and-neck with the far-right Northern League led by Matteo Salvini. According to a recent survey by the Italian polling firm IPSOS, both parties are polling at just over 15 percent. [...]

“Berlusconi is playing his new game smartly, in a subtle way,” he added. “He knows he’s not the center of Italian politics anymore, but he still can be one of the few kingmakers.” [...]

But he has recently softened his once strident Europhobia in public appearances, focusing instead on an electoral program that includes a flat tax at 15 percent and a pledge to reform the European Union by rewriting all its main treaties, including the Maastricht Treaty that created the euro and introduced fiscal limitations on national governments.

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