Jacobin Magazine: The Salvini Plan

It’s not just immigrants that Salvini has in his crosshairs. His Lega, today in government with the Five Star Movement, has discussed closing down many of Italy’s mosques, and his ministry has announced plans for a census of Roma camp sites throughout the country. He has also set his sights on immigration lawyers, liberal journalists, and NGO volunteers, claiming that they peddle fake news and engage in humanitarian activity for profit. The attack on perceived “foreigners” also targets NGO missions as representative of foreign capital: “foreign ships with foreign money.” [...]

By 2013, the route proved so deadly that large numbers of Syrians refused to take it, preferring to wait in North Africa, the Middle East, and Turkey for other routes to open. Under Matteo Renzi’s center-left government, the Italian state’s own Mare Nostrum rescue operation was axed. As the state left people to drown, humanitarian maritime missions run by NGOs tried to save them. Even so, as deaths at sea mounted during 2014 and 2015, this did not deter hundreds of thousands from daring the route: indeed, more than 150,000 made the crossing each year between 2014 and 2016. [...]

In spring 2017, Italy’s center-left government, led by Paolo Gentiloni and then-interior minister Marco Minniti, fleshed out a deal with the Serraj government in Libya to effectively arm and fund Libyan militia to seize departing migrant boats. The plan was finally implemented at the end of the summer. By the time of the march 2018 elections, there had already been a 75 percent drop in the number of migrant landings, and a campaign of racist rhetoric and violence outran the efforts of the progressive left-wing and Catholic forces, which had previously sustained rescue operations. [...]

The Salvini Plan might also be designed to break the Five Star Movement’s own coalition of support and consolidate the Lega’s power, both through ongoing local votes and any snap general election that might be called. Recent local elections have indeed seen the center-right win mayoral seats across Italy, often with 60 percent of the vote. The Five Star Movement, which came in first across the South in March’s general election, no longer seems to be polling well after allying with the Lega, whose anti-migrant rhetoric used to be matched by hatred for Southerners (it only recently dropped the name “Northern League” from its propaganda at the national level). A fresh election, likely resulting in gains for the Lega, would allow Salvini’s party greater control of state finances and satisfy the conservative capitalist interests that stand behind it, without having to give in to some of the Five Star’s (limited) demands for welfare reform. [...]

Yet the power of the extreme-right hate speech does not only draw from its radicalism or the leverage of the capitalist powers financing it. Matteo Salvini is not only a result of the Left’s failure, but ironically, the success of past revolt. The fear he stirs up is based on very real acts of resistance against the border regime. Without the mass breakthrough of 2015, in which migrants scaled and dissolved Europe’s eastern and southern borders, the new European right would not have had the basic material from which to construct its hatred and lies.

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openDemocracy: German social democrats have alienated their base and fractured Europe

But buffeted by two oil price shocks, in 1973 and 1981-82, and unable to stem the rapid rise in unemployment, the SPD lost electoral favor. For 16 years, from 1982 to 1998, the SPD was consigned to the political wilderness while Chancellor Helmut Kohl of the rival Christian Democratic Union (CDU) reigned supreme. Kohl also lured SPD supporters by adopting some of the social justice agenda: more generous unemployment benefits and new a child-rearing allowance. [...]

Schröder’s major initiative was the so-called Hartz reforms, which reduced benefits for unemployed workers and so pushed them harder to look for new jobs. As a result, workers who could not retain their privileged positions in Germany’s best-performing firms accepted low-wage temporary and part-time “mini” jobs in the low-productivity services sector. Such workers fell into a trap of low earnings and increasing economic insecurity. Unsurprisingly, they steadily transferred their allegiance from the SPD to other parties, including what now is called the Left Party, which promised to work harder for workers’ protections and rights. [...]

But Schröder aggressively promoted a narrow German national interest in European affairs. He fought for national voting rights in the Council of Ministers. To protect the German automaker Volkswagen, he blocked a European Union proposal for the reform of corporate takeover legislation. Schröder’s parochial interest was motivated by his allegiance to Volkswagen, on whose supervisory board he had sat as governor of the state of Lower Saxony.  And while Schröder rightly opposed the European Central Bank’s excessively tight monetary policy and the European Commission’s mindless pursuit of fiscal austerity, he sought only a German exemption rather than a constructive change in rules. [...]

The SPD’s intellectual influence was particularly insidious in the area of “labor market reforms.” In October 2014, Renzi announced what was to be his singular achievement: the Jobs Act. Much like the Hartz reforms, the act weakened workers’ rights and, despite claims of protective provisions, reinforced the tendency toward jobs with insecure tenures. Italian governments before Renzi’s had implemented similar reforms, which indeed increased employment. But the evidence from the past reforms was that they dulled the incentives for employers and employees to increase productivity and, hence, contributed to the steady decline in Italian productivity growth. Renzi’s Jobs Act seems destined to prolong Italy’s near-zero productivity growth.

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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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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.

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Social Europe: Renzi’s Last Call

“Within proportional electoral systems,” household-name Law professor Gustavo Zagrebelsky told the anti-Renzi Il Fatto Quotidiano newspaper, “everyone is called into play to try and win, even against all odds. In the end, of course, you can go into opposition if you’ve failed to negotiate. But [opposition] is not the default choice.”  [...]

Parallels with Spain are in fact multiple. Five Star share with Podemos a powerful anti-establishment rhetoric: the old system is portrayed as a caste of self-interested politicians. These are set against the general interests of ordinary individuals – society at large. According to this narrative, both socialists and conservatives are responsible, in equal measure, for the political and economic crises in Italy and Spain: Podemos and Five Star want to surpass what they define as the “fictional differences” between left and right. The real chasm lies – here they are in unison with UKIP’s Nigel Farage, their Strasbourg allies, to the tune of hundreds of thousands of euros from the EU – between the “people” and the “establishment.” [...]

So, maybe there is a slim chance for PD to regroup, from the high-backed opposition benches or not. Those PD deputies around outgoing prime minister Paolo Gentiloni are in favour of negotiating, but they’re in the minority. Although Gentiloni was always a “Renziano” himself, belonging to a certain current does not involve, on this specific issue, following or rejecting Renzi’s view by default. It’ll be a personal choice. Regrouping, after this, may thus commence on an individual basis. The sheer force of dialogue could restart a centre-left party that, after 11 years, is going through a middle-age crisis (politicians are still fairly old in Italy, but organisations are very young indeed).

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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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Politico: Will Italian populism save Europe?

For the first time in Italy’s history, nearly every party mentioned the European Union in its electoral program. But while the parties presented a wide variety of options — ranging from the creation of a “United States of Europe” to holding a referendum on the country’s membership in the eurozone — the public debate remained superficial and misinformed. As a result, Europe never truly became part of the national conversation. [...]

Signs suggest that Italy may actually do neither, but rather set its own course of action within Europe — one that leads to an entirely new understanding of what EU citizens want, starting from a discussion on universal basic income and the best ways to reform the eurozone. [...]

Euroskepticism doesn’t mean the same thing in Italy as it does elsewhere. Over the last 20 years, prime ministers on from the right (Silvio Berlusconi) and the left (Matteo Renzi) have used Europe as a scapegoat for everything that is wrong in the country. [...]

In other words, the 5Stars have none of the baggage of the old-fashioned mainstream parties. Indeed, when it comes to their prowess at community organizing, the party has more in common with Macron’s La Republique En Marche party — which at the time of its creation drew inspiration from the 5Stars — than with Renzi’s Democratic Party.  

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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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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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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.

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The New York Review of Books: Italy: ‘Whoever Wins Won’t Govern’

Letta, however, had the added quality of being the nephew of Gianni Letta, a close adviser to Silvio Berlusconi and significant figure in the media magnate’s center-right Forza Italia party, which was supporting the government. When Berlusconi was found guilty of corruption in August 2013 and, after endless wrangling and stalling, finally expelled from the Senate, Letta’s government was seriously weakened. In February 2014, Letta was replaced by Matteo Renzi, then the mayor of Florence and the new leader of the Partito Democratico. [...]

That Renzi found the energy to persuade the Senate to vote for its own demotion is extraordinary. But he had promised a referendum on the reforms before they would become law. In the run-up to that vote, the press presented him as a man seeking to grab power for himself, his family, and his buddies, rather than sharing it among the endless factions that make up Italian politics. Few Italians believe in the possibility of anyone seeking power genuinely in the interest of the nation as a whole. In the December 2016 referendum, Italian voters rejected his reforms, Renzi resigned, and the country was once again consigned to be governed by a gray, accommodating figure, Paolo Gentiloni. After a debacle of this magnitude, it seems unlikely that anyone will try to reform the Italian constitution for decades to come.

As if this failure were not demoralizing enough, the forthcoming election will be held under a new electoral law laboriously put together during Gentiloni’s government after the previous system, which Berlusconi introduced in 2005, was pronounced unconstitutional. The complications and compromises of this law would beggar belief, if Italians were not inured to such things. Essentially, it mixes some constituencies whose representatives will be elected by straight majority vote (or first-past-the-post) with other, larger constituencies where a number of representatives will be chosen on a proportional basis. Though the districts and distribution for each chamber differ, both chambers will comprise roughly one third directly-elected delegates and two thirds by the proportional system allocated according to numbered lists of candidates submitted by every party. Constitutionally, the House of Deputies and the Senate will continue to have equal power and thus the ability to cancel out each other’s decision-making and legislative powers. [...]

Despite this, there is no serious debate about Italy’s relations with the EU, or about its foreign policy in general and the country’s position in the world. There is equally an absence of any radical proposals for getting the economy moving again. Extraordinarily, given his record in office and ineligibility to serve in the government, Berlusconi is offering himself as a safe pair of hands who could guide his party’s elected representatives from outside parliament, thus saving the country from the presumed incompetence of the Five Star Movement.

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Politico: Italy’s electoral law puts government at risk — this one and the next

Lawmakers from the anti-establishment 5Star Movement — which has criticized the proposed electoral system as a plot to suppress their numbers in parliament — reacted with fury, declaring the confidence vote an “attack on democracy” and an “emergency,” and promising to take to the streets. [...]

If an election were held under this mix, polls indicate it would result in either no viable coalition in parliament; or an alliance of populist, Euroskeptic and right-wing forces that would cause international markets to tremble. One Italian official described any election as a “blind gamble.” [...]

The problem is not that an electoral law is difficult to design in itself, but that parties appear unable to put aside their own interests to agree on one. The biggest change in the new electoral law is that it would allow parties to contest seats as coalitions: a change that the 5Star Movement sees as a direct attack on its electoral chances.  [...]

The Porcellum made voters pick only between parties, with no candidates named on the ballot, giving party grandees a power of patronage they have since been loath to give up.

It also granted a 55 percent majority to the most successful alliance in the lower house. But proposed curbs on the power of the Senate meant to accompany it were rejected in a referendum the following year.

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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’.

Haaretz: Le Pen Lost French Election, but Battle Against Populism Is Far From Over

None of this means European liberals can return to their pre-Brexit complacency, however. Not when 52 percent of the votes in the British referendum in June were in favor of leaving the EU. Nor can we discount Donald Trump’s victory in the United States, or the 46 percent of voters in Austria’s presidential election who cast their ballots for a right-wing extremist. The center is holding, for now. 2016, the year of populism, has been followed so far by relative sanity, but the threat has only receded, not disappeared.

Moderate leaders like Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte and Britain’s Prime Minister Theresa May have been forced to tack to the right to capture ground lost to the populists. Rutte announced crackdowns on immigrant communities during his campaign for the March 15 election. May is fighting a jingoistic campaign, demonizing the EU leaders with whom she will have to negotiate a complex Brexit deal after next month’s election. Meanwhile centrist parties, particularly center-left ones, are shrinking across the continent. In Britain, Labour been taken over by Marxists and is unlikely to be a viable opposition party for at least another decade. In France, both of the parties that shared power for the last five decades failed to make it in to the second round of voting and face uncertain prospects in next month’s parliamentary election. In Sunday’s state election in Germany’s Schleswig-Holstein, the Social Democratic Party lost control of the regional parliament while Alternative for Germany passed the electoral threshold for the first time. [...]

Macron and Renzi’s challenges are similar. They must adapt the European welfare state to the globalized economy of the 21st century. They have to try to rekindle hope in a largely apathetic society. Young people fear they will not achieve the standard of living of their parents, who are reluctant to give up on a long and comfortable retirement paid for by a shrinking younger generation. There is the challenge of creating new jobs in a state where traditional industries are bleeding. Finally, both Macron and Renzi must attempt to preserve the European project of economic and political integration, which guaranteed peace and prosperity, when it is under attack from all sides. There are no easy answers. That’s why Macron’s campaign was heavy on slogans and lean on policy. And why Renzi’s first attempt ended in failure. And why after eight years of being led by the young and charismatic Barack Obama, the United States elected Trump.

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Bloomberg: Italy's Renzi Quits as Party Leader, Triggers Re-Election Fight

With critics from leftist factions threatening to abandon the Democratic Party, Renzi, 42, told the national assembly of the party in a Rome hotel on Sunday that he had handed in his resignation, acknowledging he was set back by defeat in the Dec. 4 constitutional referendum. [...]

Renzi, who is expected to stand for re-election at a congress in April or May, denounced “blackmail by a minority” and infighting that he called “a gift” to the anti-establishment Five Star Movement. [...]

Renzi has faced challenges to his reformist strategy and leadership especially since losing the referendum, which prompted him to resign as premier and sponsor current Prime Minister Paolo Gentiloni, a Renzi loyalist and fellow PD member, as his successor.

Renzi, who has pushed for early national elections in June or September, made no such appeal on Sunday and instead urged his audience to support Gentiloni and his government. [...]

The survey credited Five Star with 30.9 percent of the vote, against 30.1 percent for the PD, 13 percent for Forza Italia of ex-premier Silvio Berlusconi and 12.8 percent for the anti-immigrant Northern League.

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Böll-Stiftung: The Italian constitutional referendum: a victory for democracy and civil society

First of all, with 68,48 percent the participation rate was astonishingly high, both with respect to previous constitutional referendums (34,05 percent in 2001 and 52,46 percent in 2006) and also compared to the recent European election in 2014 (58,69 percent). This is surely an important signal for the ‘health’ of our democracy, which had been eroded by an alternation of ‘technical governments’ and government reshufflings. It underlines the desire of people to be part of the political debate, especially when relevant  topics such as the constitution are on the table. [...]

On the one hand, there was Renzi and his coalition of centre-left and centre-right parties; on the other hand, a diverse group made up of antifascist partisans, trade unions, constitutionalists, radical left movements, Lega, Forza Italia and the 5 Star Movement. The convergence of extremely different political positions and the temporary closeness of various political groups on this topic was something completely new for the country. Obviously, behind this ‘muddle’, as the opposition was contemptuously named by Renzi, there were noble and less noble political motives An example for the latter is, typically, Berlusconi who became a ‘No’ supporter after having signed an agreement on structural reforms (Patto of Nazareno) with Renzi in 2014. [...]

If we look at the regional distribution of the votes, it is interesting to see that ‘Yes’ reached the majority only in Emilia Romagna, Toscana and Trentino Alto Adige, whereas ’No’ won in all the southern regions and also reached the 63,32 percent of votes in Lazio. Particularly interesting is the result in the southern regions (all governed by Renzi’s Democratic Party), where Renzi attempted to collect votes and gain support through several visits during the last weeks. Moreover, if we link the regional outcomes with the first provisional data on the age composition of the vote, we get further interesting insights. It shows that young people, the ones who should represent the ‘new’ according to the rhetoric of Renzi, have been the strongest opponents of the reform. [...]

These examples show that Renzi, the leader of the biggest left-wing party of the country, was (and formally still is) running a government which embraces a neoliberal ideology, even if pretending to act for the wellbeing of the nation.

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Politico: Europe’s blurred lines between populism, mainstream

In fact, the Austrian vote no more represents an endorsement of traditional establishment ideals than the Italian referendum signals their rejection.

If anything, the two votes illustrate how the increasingly blurred lines between populism and mainstream across much of Europe are shaking the political landscape.

The Italian decision, for example, has been seen as the mirror image of the Austrian result: the rejection of an establishment prime minister in favor of populists. [...]

Prime Minister Matteo Renzi’s proposed constitutional reform would have meant a radical departure from Italy’s post-war democratic norms. Seen in that light, the No vote suggests above all that Italians are resistant to radical change, even at the cost of political instability. [...]

Consider Alexander Van der Bellen, Austria’s president-elect. A former Green leader whose party never garnered more than 11 percent of the vote under his stewardship, Van der Bellen tried to soften his image during the campaign to attract more mainstream voters. He declared himself an independent and even donned Tracht, or traditional Alpine garb, a favorite tactic of establishment conservatives, but anathema to those on the Left. [...]

The FPÖ has governed at the national level as the junior coalition party twice over the past 30 years and has led regional and municipal governments. It currently has representatives in all nine of Austria’s provincial assemblies as well as in the European Parliament.

In contrast, Austria’s Greens have never been part of a federal government. The party rarely polls at over 12 percent, about one-third of the FPÖ’s support.

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Politico: Matteo Renzi, from demolition man to demolished

The outcome of Sunday’s vote, widely seen as a referendum on Renzi’s government, suggests that the prime minister and his party have lost voters to the anti-establishment 5Star Movement as well as minor parties on both the Right and Left.

Renzi’s opponents won 60 percent of the vote and 17 out of Italy’s 20 regions. High voter turnout of more than 68.5 percent made it an even more conclusive defeat for the former mayor of Florence.

Renzi may be paying the price for an original sin: hijacking the PD as an outsider. Several party elders, who openly campaigned against Renzi, are now demanding his resignation as head of the PD, accusing him of having fomented divisions. [...]

Renzi loyalists have argued that if he also resigns as chairman, the party will be left “with a bunch of barons fighting each other – and no king.” They also argue that, despite the defeat, nearly 13 million Italians voted in favor of Renzi’s reforms and that such support should not be underestimated — or wasted.

“One of the mistakes of the Remainers of the Brexit campaign is that they did not capitalize on the over 40 percent of votes they got,” said Lia Quartapelle, chair of the PD’s foreign affairs committee. “We intend to do differently.”

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Mic: Italian #FertilityDay campaign asks women to hurry up and get pregnant, sparks outrage

A gentle reminder from Italy to its female citizens: You're not getting any younger, so maybe get on that baby-making, okay?

That's among the messages the Italian government is currently using to up its flagging birth rate. Its recently-launched #FertilityDay campaign features 12 ads that have attracted much criticism, such as the below picture of a smug-looking woman holding an hourglass.

"Beauty has no age. Fertility does," it reads. [...]

With slogans like "fertility is a common good," Blasi explained, the government is casting the uterus as "public property." But there's enough baby shaming for everyone: Fertility Day's official Twitter account also tweeted out "The five golden rules to protect male fertility," accompanied by a picture of an old banana peel and an image of a flaccid cigarette with the subtle message, "Don't send sperm up in smoke."

Even Italy's prime minister has come out against the ad campaign. "If you want to create a society that invests in its future and has children, you have to make sure the underlying conditions are there," Matteo Renzi said in an interview, according to Reuters, adding that he couldn't think of anyone who's been motivated to make babies because an advertisement asked them to. And while Lorenzin has apologized and proposed changing the #FertilityDay message, the event itself will go ahead as scheduled. 

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Business Insider: A tiny bank in Italy could decide the future of Europe

The loans on the balance sheets of Italy’s local banks weren’t made to consumers spending beyond their means, or speculative house purchasers, but mostly to local businesses. Their customers were primarily the country’s large number of small- and medium-sized enterprises, often family-run, with business models not that different from the very dynamic enterprises of southern Germany, Austria, or Switzerland, which concentrate on making niche products — specialized textile machinery, for instance — for international markets.

This throwback banking model insulated Italian banks from the fast-developing financial shocks of 2007 and 2008. At the beginning of the global crisis, as other European governments spent large sums bailing out their banking systems, it looked as if Italy had the most solid banks in Europe. The European Central Bank’s calculation of the fiscal cost of bank bailouts for the 2008-2013 period shows a cost for Germany of 8.8 percent of GDP and for Spain of 4.9 percent, with much higher amounts for European countries that required a bailout from the International Monetary Fund (Ireland, 37.3 percent; Greece, 24.8 percent; and Portugal, 10.4 percent). Italy, by contrast, spent less than 0.2 percent of GDP.

But this encouraged a dangerous complacency in Italy, as a slow-moving economic crisis gradually rotted the country’s financial foundation. A long-standing failure to undertake structural reforms has condemned the country to exceptionally sluggish growth, even before the 2008 crisis. Italy’s clothing and textiles sector has been hit by the move of production to Asia or to lower-cost producers in southeastern Europe; even luxury manufacturers are beginning to outsource production. Eventually, the weaknesses of the Italian economy hit the country’s banks with a massive volume of nonperforming loans — the current estimate is 360 billion euros. (It didn’t help matters that the Italian government is often a hindrance; there are many stories of businesses that contract with the government only to find they are never paid.) [...]

In Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa’s great novel The Leopard, Tancredi Falconeri states: “If we want things to stay as they are, things will have to change.” If the government isn’t allowed to help banks directly, it has to commit itself to a new growth dynamic for the entire continent. It remains quite uncertain that it can — or will be allowed to — follow up on that promise.

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