Politico: The end of Italy’s 5Star Movement

After months of internal turmoil, the party's chief Luigi Di Maio, who is also the foreign minister, announced his resignation as leader on Wednesday evening while retaining his government role ahead of two crucial regional elections on Sunday where the 5Stars are expected to suffer massive defeats. [...]

In last May's European election the 5Stars won 17 percent of the vote. They've also seen serious losses in multiple regional votes across the past 18 months, plummeting to below 10 percent in the Umbria election in October. In the upcoming elections the party isn't running as part of a coalition with the PD, like in Umbria, and according to the latest available polls in both Calabria and Emilia-Romagna they are expected to score in the single digits. [...]

Whatever Di Maio's responsibility, his resignation as party leader had been expected for some time. According to members of his staff, his relationship with Grillo had deteriorated, leaving him without a strong political patron ahead of what is expected to be a major defeat in the Emilia-Romagna regional election Sunday.

read the article

The Local: How EU elections could lead yet another Italian government to collapse Inbox x

But the fact that Marine Le Pen’s National Rally from France, Geert Wilders’ Party of Freedom from the Netherlands, the Belgian Vlaams Belang, the Danish People’s party and others have all agreed to join suggests that Salvini is now recognised as a successful leader well beyond Italy’s borders. [...]

In April, the League was expected to win 37 percent of the Italian vote, but support for the party has been shrinking in recent weeks. It has now dropped to around 30 percent, according to some polls. Nevertheless, after securing just 6.2 percent in the last European election, that would still be an extremely strong performance by the League. [...]

The forced departure from government of the League’s undersecretary for transport, Armando Siri, as he faces an investigation into alleged corruption, has taken a toll, too. M5S used to let Salvini dominate the agenda, but is now asserting itself as the dominant coalition partner, and very much lobbied the prime minister, Giuseppe Conte, to get rid of Siri. [...]

Then there is the question of whether fresh elections could even be held as quickly as Salvini would like. After all, the executive could simply end up being replaced by another, supported by a different governing majority, as, if this government collapses, parliamentary arithmetic means that no single party, or leader, would be in control of what happens next.

read the article

Politico: Why Italy’s 5Stars love France’s Yellow Jackets

The Italian government is licking its wounds after losing a high-profile showdown with Brussels over its next budget. And Di Maio’s 5Star Movement is slipping in the polls, increasingly eclipsed by its coalition partner, the far-right League led by Matteo Salvini.

“My impression is that it’s not an anti-French move but an internal objective to show the base that they are still an innovative anti-establishment party,” said Giovanni Orsina, a professor of political history at LUISS University in Rome. “They need to show activists that they are still an anti-systemic force of resistance.” [...]

The anti-establishment sentiment behind the French protests is similar to the early Vaffanculo (“Go f**k yourself”) protests that led to the creation of the 5Star Movement. [...]

5Star members generally don’t support the violence that has been seen in France, Lazzari said. “We are very pacifist as a movement but in any demo you get hooligans making trouble.”

read the article

Politico: The sack of Rome’s mayor

Since taking office in 2016, the mayor of Rome has been unable to clean up the city’s filthy streets and make its badly maintained transport system work. Last month a tube station escalator collapsed, injuring 24, including one man who lost a foot. Almost no one is pleased with her work. [...]

According to the 5Stars’ code of ethics, a conviction of any kind would result in her resignation. Yet while her boss, 5Star leader and Deputy Prime Minister Luigi Di Maio, and the movement’s founder, Beppe Grillo, don’t like Raggi, they also don’t want her to resign because they fear losing control of Rome to their coalition partner and chief political rival, the League. [...]

Before the 5Stars took over a major city for the first time, Rome was briefly governed by the center-left Democratic Party’s Ignazio Marino, and before that by the right-wing Gianni Alemanno. The latter is currently facing trial for corruption and Marino — who denounced the city’s systemic corruption to prosecutors, triggering the “Mafia Capitale” scandal — resigned over a restaurant expenses scandal.

read the article

Social Europe: Italy Points The Way For Western Right-Wing Nationalists But Avoids EU Exit

Italy has become a leading example of a perilous western trend encompassing authoritarian, racist, and demagogic movements and attitudes. Developments are showing us what the anti-immigrant interior minister and deputy prime minister Matteo Salvini ideologically hates most –the European Union, solidarity, anti-racism and anti-fascism. His aim is to dismantle any successful form of integration of migrants within the country (see here), while fighting internationally the EU’s normative framework in the hope of leading a Eurosceptic wave to victory in the 2019 European Parliament elections. [...]

Moscovici predictably compared Italy to an illiberal member state such as Hungary for their (apparently) similar xenophobic and anti-EU policies. All this is happening when the country’s focus should instead be on remembering the 80th anniversary of the promulgation of the infamous fascist anti-Semitic laws which discriminated against Italy’s Jewish community. Instead, racially-motivated abuses are on the rise. Italian President Sergio Mattarella expressed concern on Italy becoming a new “Far West”. This is a further lesson for US politics and society: the far right’s active involvement in democratic institutions does not always lead to its moderation or “normalization.” Even if the League has been in Silvio Berlusconi’s coalitions since the 1990s, this time it is virulently radicalizing the governmental agenda – making it more in line with fellow extremists in the US, Eastern Europe, and Russia. When they do not share the same ideas, Prime Minister Conte and the 5s seem mere puppets in Salvini’s hands. The other vice premier Luigi Di Maio, following a similar line, suggested migrants should be excluded from the proposed basic income.

Despite this abundant evidence, all deny any racism on the part of their government. Hardly surprising if we consider that this is a political elite set on changing the EU legislation with the Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán. The paradox is that Orbán is opposing the very refugee redistribution quotas which would help Italy to deal with this humanitarian emergency. The truth is that without “easy targets” such as migrants, Islam, and blacks, the transatlantic far right would have only a few other minor mobilization flags. Immigrants, minorities and/or “foreign” traditions and cultures such as Islam represent the perfect enemies: they are “different” and challenge the “purity” of a given community. As non-white, and at times non-Christian, they cannot belong to any narrowly ethnically or culturally-defined Western society. In this sense, “Mexican” and “Muslim” are an easily interchangeable foe.

read the article

The Guardian: How Matteo Salvini pulled Italy to the far right

Then in 2012, prosecutors discovered that the Northern League’s treasurer had misappropriated some €40m in public money, and that hundreds of thousands of euros had gone to the Bossi family. A party that had run on the slogan of “Roma, ladrona!” (“thieving Rome”) had been caught out in the basest kind of corruption. Money had gone to pay for renovations of the Bossi home, a luxury car and a phony university degree purchased in Albania for Bossi’s less-than-brilliant son, who was being groomed for a leadership position.[...]

The magazine found that Salvini’s following often spiked after he made an especially provocative statement – such as declaring, in 2016, that the pope’s welcome to immigrants would “encourage and fund an unprecedented invasion”. But another Wired study found that Salvini has become increasingly sophisticated in the last few years, stimulating positive feelings as well as the usual negative emotions of anger and fear. “The rhetorical strategy is clear: you lower the reader’s guard by playing on fear and anger, but also suggesting that, by putting faith in the Lega, things will get better,” the magazine concluded. “There is a positive element to his posts, even a bit of joy.”[...]

Salvini’s rise to power has heightened concerns in Italy about the escalation of racist and xenophobic violence in the country. Dozens of attacks on black people and Roma have been recorded in the last year, all over Italy, from Treviso in the north to Gioia Tauro in the south, including Florence and Rome. The attacks range from drive-by shootings with air guns, in which the attackers were reported to shout “Salvini!” to the assassination of a Malian trade unionist campaigning for fair pay for migrant workers. An Italian athlete of Nigerian descent, Daisy Osakue, the Italian under-23 champion discus thrower, was hit in the eye by an egg thrown from a car. Police have been pursuing attackers and making arrests, but the government has been more reticent. After a torrent of criticism for his anti-migrant policies – culminating with the headline “Get behind me, Salvini” on the cover of Italy’s largest Catholic magazine – Salvini responded with a favorite phrase of Mussolini: “many enemies, much honor.” He also insisted that the idea of widespread Italian racism was “an invention of the left”.[...]

While stopping boatloads of refugees from north Africa may satisfy an emotional need to restore a sense of order to immigration, it doesn’t change the basic demographic arithmetic, which shows that Italy actually needs a healthy level of immigration to survive. Last year, 664,000 Italians died, while only 464,000 Italian babies were born – 100,000 of those were of mixed couples, with one Italian parent and one foreign-born one, according to Istat, the national statistics bureau. If the country is going to maintain something close to its current population of 60 million and have enough working people to keep its pension system afloat, it will have to add to its population. Most of Italy’s immigrants are young, arrived legally, and are working and paying taxes.

read the article or listen to the podcast

The Atlantic: The EU Has Rejected Italy's Budget. That's Just What Rome Wanted.

That fundamental incoherence met its biggest test yet on Tuesday, when the European Union rejected Italy’s 2019 draft budget—an unprecedented move against a eurozone country—saying its deficit targets and wishful thinking about growth posed a serious threat to economic stability in Europe. Italy now has three weeks to submit a revised budget.[...]

The wrist slap from Europe—or was it a melodramatically slammed door?—is exactly what the Italian government may have wanted. The driving force in the government, Matteo Salvini—the bellicose interior minister, deputy prime minister, and head of the League party—came to power spoiling for a fight with Europe. His senior coalition partner (who comes across as junior), the Five Star Movement’s Luigi Di Maio, also got elected on promises of redefining Italy’s relationship to Europe. Together, they form a government that needs enemies in order to justify its existence. Europe, with its irritating, sovereignty-straining rules and austerity measures, is an enemy.[...]

The government’s game of chicken with Europe might backfire. “It might be a lose-lose proposition,” Fubini continued. “If they hold on, it can be very damaging to the economy,” he said of the rising borrowing rates. “But if they step back, there is an element of face loss. So I think it kind of has to get worse before they change tactics.”

read the article

Politico: Italy’s high-speed railway dilemma

“It is necessary to go ahead with the TAV, not go back,” said Interior Minister and Deputy Premier Matteo Salvini, leader of the League. Although the party has indicated in recent days that the project could be scaled back. “The most reasonable thing is to downsize,” said Giancarlo Giorgetti, undersecretary to the prime minister and a key League figure, on Sunday.

The issue became even more fraught for the 5Stars after the Genoa bridge collapse that killed 43 people. Part of the movement’s early appeal was its opposition to infrastructure projects, including a new highway in Genoa — and it is now paying the political price. Its earlier dismissal of warnings that the bridge was fragile as a “children’s tale” has now been scrubbed from the party website (screenshot here). [...]

The 5Stars are now hedging their earlier opposition. Toninelli has commissioned a cost-benefit analysis before he makes a decision. Deputy Prime Minister (and 5Stars leader) Luigi Di Maio promised to “rethink” the project and to renegotiate the terms with Paris. [...]

The 270-km rail line is supposed to be completed by 2030. It includes an €8.6 billion, 57-kilometer tunnel running under the Alps, and is part of the EU’s Mediterranean transport corridor. The goal is to shift some of the truck traffic running between France and Italy onto rail, which would help reduce EU reliance on oil imports and cut emissions from transport.

read the article

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?

Haaretz: Return of Mussolini: Will Italy's Powerful Anti-immigrant Populists Really March on Rome?

Under Italy's constitution, the president serves as an arbiter above the political fray, and he is in charge of choosing government ministers in consultation with the prime minister-designate. Past presidents have vetoed multiple names for top cabinet posts, and each time the leading coalition submitted a different, more acceptable, candidate and went on its merry way to form a government. [...]

The firebrand populist demanded that the president immediately dissolve parliament and call new elections, "otherwise, we'll see you all in Rome," a not-too-veiled reference to the 1922 March on Rome that brought Benito Mussolini to power. [...]

The deal was based on an improbable mix of ultra-liberalist policies – such as introducing a flat tax rate – and socially-minded moves such as reducing the retirement age and granting citizen stipends. How the coalition could have fulfilled such costly, crowd-pleasing promises without further inflating Italy's enormous public debt (now at 132 percent of GDP) remains a mystery.

But that is beside the point, because this unprecedented yellow-green alliance (named after the colors of the 5 Stars and League) was not really planning to govern. There are still vast differences and strong rivalries between the nationalist, xenophobic League and the social-media-addicted conspiracy theorists of the 5 Stars, and their pact, backed by a slim parliamentary majority, was unlikely to last long. 

read the article

The Local: How the League's Matteo Salvini played his cards right amid Italy's political chaos

In the months of political horsetrading that ensued to form a government, the nationalist Salvini has seen his hand strengthened and is experiencing a meteoric rise in the opinion polls. From 17 percent on election day, surveys now put the League at over 20 percent – it scored 22 percent in a recent IndexResearch poll – while other parties' ratings have largely stayed the same as in March or declined. [...]

After the Five Star-League alliance collapsed, fresh polls looked to be the most likely outcome of the political saga. But while Five Star leader Luigi Di Maio is scrambling to put the coalition back on track, Salvini says he welcomes a return to the polls, confident that his party would emerge stronger than ever. [...]

Analysts also suggest that his unflinching stance on the party's core issues at a time of great uncertainty appeals to voters. The League appears "as the political group with the greatest consistency... this consistency makes them more clearly identifiable," said Marc Lazar, political science professor at Rome's Luiss University.

read the article

The Atlantic: Spitting in Europe’s Face Won’t Help Italy

PARIS—It’s time to retire the famous line by the Italian writer Ennio Flaiano, that in Italian politics, the situation is “always grave but never serious.” Today, it’s fair to say the situation is both grave and serious. The implosion on Sunday of a populist governing coalition—after Italy’s president vetoed the coalition’s choice of a euroskeptical economist as finance minister—has achieved three results, none of them good for the stability of Italy or Europe. It’s set Italy on the path to new elections. It’s strengthened the hand of the right-wing, anti-immigrant League party. And it’s turned Italy into a de facto referendum on the euro—an unprecedented development in a core member of the European Union and single currency. [...]

It’s the latest example of a short-circuit that was tripped when the European debt crisis began a decade ago: Mattarella’s move may be good for short-term stability in the European Union, but it’s not great for democracy—which in turn emboldens the populists who increasingly see the bloc as anti-democratic. The appointment of Cottarelli is a gift for the League, whose leader, Matteo Salvini, campaigned all along on a platform of liberating Italy from servitude to Brussels and Berlin. Meanwhile, the leader of the Five-Star Movement, Luigi di Maio, who only days ago said it was up to the president to choose ministers, has now set Italian social media on fire with calls for Mattarella’s impeachment because he intervened in selecting ministers, and has also called for mass mobilizations across Italy “to manifest our right to determine our future.” [...]

But in rejecting Savona, Mattarella had good reasons. He said on Sunday that any conversations about Italy’s membership in the euro should be held in public—especially since euro membership wasn’t an issue for debate in the platform agreed on by the Five-Star Movement and the League for the government they put forth last week. The League’s Salvini has flip-flopped in recent years on whether he wants Italy to stay in the euro. In the past, he’s said he wants a referendum on euro membership; during the campaign, he moderated his tone on the euro but raised it on immigration. Meanwhile, Di Maio of the Five-Star Movement kept quiet on the euro during the campaign, but the movement’s founder, Beppe Grillo, said this month that he wanted a “consultative referendum” on the currency. “It might be a good idea to have two euros, for two more homogeneous economical regions. One for northern Europe and one for southern Europe,” he told Newsweek this month.

read the article

Politico: Italy’s president scotches populist governing alliance

After the two populist parties refused to compromise on their choice of 81-year-old economist Paolo Savona for the ministry, Italy’s prime minister-designate — a little-known lawyer called Giuseppe Conte — said on Sunday he had told the president he was rejecting the mandate to form a new government. [...]

“Membership of the euro is a fundamental choice for the future of our country and our young people,” said the president, adding that since euro membership had not been part of the election campaign, it could not be questioned by the appointment of a Cabinet minister without holding a proper public debate. [...]

But even if Mattarella gives Cottarelli a mandate to form a government, he will face an uphill battle. Even though the two main opposition parties, Silvio Berlusconi’s Forza Italia and the center-left Democratic Party, have already said they would support a government sponsored by Mattarella, that may not be enough for such a government to survive a confidence vote in parliament.

read the article

Quartz: Italy’s new “political government” will be a technical government, minus the expertise

Luigi Di Maio and Matteo Salvini, leaders of the two groups, have agreed on a government plan (a “government contract,” as they called it) which will try and deliver their many electoral promises. From anti-immigration policies, to tax cuts for the wealthy, overall it looks like the most right-wing program Italy’s had in decades. Civil law professor Giuseppe Conte—known to Italians for defending the creators of a sham stem cell treatment administered on a terminally ill child—has been named to be prime minister. [...]

But only a few weeks later, while still technically mayor, Renzi turned on Letta and was named prime minister of a coalition government. One can see why Italians may be disappointed, and why the opposition, and especially the Five Star Movement, would harshly attack Renzi. It was not only because his coalition government was with the center right and one of Silvio Berlusconi’s minions, but Renzi himself had not even been voted in parliament (something that is perfectly acceptable within Italy’s constitution).

These became leitmotifs of the Five Star opposition, and informed the 2018 platform: They would reject any coalition or technical governments, and only govern with a full majority, and voters would know that the prime minister was “elected” (though the prime minister remains named by the majority parties, not voted). [...]

To mark a change, the actual leaders assured Italians that this will be a “political government”—but looking at it closely, it doesn’t look too different from their despised technical governments, albeit with no expertise. Conte is a the perfect exemplification of this: A professor, he has the shell of a technocrat, without any substance—only a day after his name was circulated, allegations that he lied on his résumé about a New York University degree emerged.

read the article

Politico: Italy’s coalition agreement explained

The document does not say who will become prime minister. The top job is expected to go to the 5Stars, the largest of the two parties, but negotiations between the two leaders will continue over the weekend. Di Maio is still seen as the leading candidate for the job, even though Salvini has said that won’t happen. [...]

But the agreement takes clear aim at the European Union, calling for a reevaluation of the EU budget and a review of “European economic governance” — namely the EU rules imposing fiscal constraints on national governments. These, the parties say, are based more on the “predominance of the market” than on people’s economic and social needs. [...]

The “universal citizens’ income” promised by the 5Stars is included, but in a watered-down form. The measure as described in the document resembles a form of unemployment insurance that would last for a maximum of two years while its recipient looks for a job. A promised roll back of a hike in retirement ages called for by both parties has also made the cut. Meanwhile, a planned “flat tax” of 15 percent strongly pushed by the League has become a dual rate of 15 and 20 percent with tax deductions for families based on their incomes.

read the article

openDemocracy: What is the meaning of the Five Star Movement?

In 2012, Beppe Grillo asserted that it was thanks to his party that there was no movement in Italy comparable to Golden Dawn in Greece. The success of Matteo Salvini’s Lega in 2018 – which, among its campaign promises, proposes the mass deportation of illegal immigrants – paired with the rise in xenophobic violence across Italy have proved Grillo wrong. The news that a Senegalese man was murdered by an Italian national the day after the election – a story right out of Camus’ The Stranger – hasn’t had much airtime in a country where Grillo is often considered a leftist despite having defended the “sanctity of borders” in 2007.

Since then, Beppe Grillo has stepped away from the party and the Movement has undergone significant change. Its slate for the March 2018 elections was fronted by the more reassuring image of Luigi Di Maio, a 31-year-old activist from Naples, presenting a manifesto and a list of technocratic ministers mostly drawn from the centre-left. The Movement therefore finds itself to be the party of the anti-vaccine activists as well as that of the cult of experts: a seeming contradiction which perhaps isn’t one at all. As opposed to the narrative in the foreign press that paints this election as an ‘anti-liberal chaos’, in the words of the New York Times, we are proposing an alternative reading, which is no less troubling.   [...]

Grillo, believe it or not, was the very first to use V for Vendetta in a political context. The movie ends with a spectacular explosion of the Palace of Westminster in London and this particular image was a perfect metaphor for what Beppe Grillo wanted to achieve with the Italian Parliament. Shortly before the Movimento’s victory in 2012, he declared that he will “open the Parliament like a can of tuna”. Some commentators drew a parallel with a similar statement by Benito Mussolini in 1922. But what is most interesting is how the spectacular rhetoric of a Hollywood movie infiltrated political reality, feeding a strictly post-ideological vision of both power and counter-power. A pure political myth created by the American cultural industry. [...]

Underneath its veneer, the Movement seems to be getting ready to implement a technocratic agenda which will fit into the ordoliberal scheme which governs the European Union. Grillo’s first objective has always been to radically cut public expenses. As for his position towards the Euro, it has kept changing over the years and yet there is a temptation to take seriously his declaration in 2014 according to which the national scale is obsolete and that Italy should be “divided into macro-regions”, just as Gianfranco Miglio used to advocate.  

read the article

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.

read the article

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.)

read the article

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.

read the article

Politico: Italian election’s biggest winner is Europe

In January, Renzi organized a pro-Europe event in Milan, in which he called for “a United States of Europe” and challenged his rivals to say where they stood on the issue. Among his electoral allies is former European Commissioner Emma Bonino, head of the explicitly pro-European +Europa party.

Berlusconi is also singing  a different song these days. He loves Europe, he now says. The past is the past, relations with German Chancellor Angela Merkel have always been good, and he’s proud of having her support. “Our relation has always been positive, and Signora Merkel backs our electoral campaign with determination,” he said last month during a visit to the center-right European People’s Party headquarters in Brussels. [...]

As recently as last December, the party’s candidate for prime minister, 31-year-old Luigi Di Maio, had said he would vote to leave the eurozone were Italy to hold a referendum on its membership. Today, he has ditched the idea of holding a referendum. And in an interview with the French daily Le Monde last week, he even argued that the party he represents is “pro-European.” [...]

In fall 2017, just 36 percent of Italians said EU membership was a good thing. That’s 21 percentage points below the European average. Only Cyprus and the Czech Republic were less in favor.

At the same time, however, a majority in the country is in favor of common European policies. “Italy ranks among the highest in considering that more decisions should be taken at the EU level (61 percent “agree,” ranking seventh of the EU28),” reads the Delors report.

read the article