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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Slate: How Bad Could a Euro Crisis in Italy Get?

Neither of those two things is likely to happen because the Italian populace, as divided as it is, remains strongly in favor of the euro. They might hate elite politicians, and they might hate Brussels-imposed austerity, and they might vote for extremist parties like the Five Star Movement and the League—but they’re not about to vote to leave the euro, and the populists know that. [...]

Italy is too big to fail, but it’s also too big to rescue. While Greece could, ultimately, get bailed out by the European Union and the IMF, Italy can’t be. There just isn’t enough money. Without the low interest rates that accompany euro membership, Italy would be forced to default, and everybody who holds Italian debt, including virtually every major European bank, would be forced to take the kind of losses that lead straight to insolvency. Italy would become a disaster zone, but the rest of the world would suffer a major crisis and recession as well.

Ultimately, that’s why Italy’s president, Sergio Mattarella, refused to allow a euroskeptic to become finance minister. Governments come and governments go—that’s normal in Italy—but it’s Mattarella’s job as president to keep his country from self-destructing. He accepted the parties that won the election; he even suggested a different League representative as finance minister, one who didn’t want to bail on the euro. But the League didn’t bite, and the result is the current spate of nervousness and uncertainty, none of which is going to be resolved at least until the Five Star Movement and the League make it clear whether they’re going to fight the next election on an anti-euro platform. In the parlance of financial markets, we’re in “risk off” mode for the time being, with investors retreating to the safest havens they can find.

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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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Politico: Italy can’t get no respect

“The French think of Italy either when they have problems with Germany, or when Italy has an election that could spell trouble,” said Marc Lazar, professor of history and political sociology at Paris’ Sciences-Po university and president of the school of government at LUISS in Rome. [...]

As the crisis rolled into 2012, Monti briefly gained traction and Italy enjoyed a rare moment of EU influence, as the prime minister bounced Angela Merkel into embracing plans for a European banking union, easier access to the eurozone’s bailout fund and the possibility for the rescue fund to aid troubled banks directly. [...]

With a population size close to that of Britain and France, Italy has long punched below its weight in the EU, chiefly because of a chronically unstable political system with frequently changing governments and a weak public administration. The vicious circle of neglect fuels instability and Euroskepticism, which in turn makes it easier to ignore Italy. [...]

Italians have never held so mamy senior positions in European institutions, with four of the 33 seats around the EU summit table: Italian Prime Minister Paolo Gentiloni plus Draghi, European Parliament President Antonio Tajani and EU foreign policy chief Federica Mogherini. [...]

And Macron has moved to repair ties with Rome. He settled the shipyard dispute with a mutually accepted deal and promised a bilateral treaty to build Franco-Italian cooperation along the lines of the 1963 Elysée treaty that governs the Franco-German partnership.

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Politico: Marriage Italian (right-wing) style

As Italy heads toward a March general election, the two major right-wing parties —Silvio Berlusconi‘s Forza Italia and Matteo Salvini’s Northern League — hope to join forces in a coalition to maximize their chances of winning individual constituencies, which have taken on more importance since the introduction of a new electoral law, and taking power from Prime Minister Paolo Gentiloni’s Democratic Party (PD).

The deal is almost done, but there is one small detail stalling the negotiations: The charismatic 44-year-old leader of the Northern League fears that the rejuvenated 81-year-old Berlusconi is already eying up the PD. To avoid this scenario, Salvini wants the three-time premier to put his commitment to the coalition deal in writing — which Berlusconi has so far refused to do.

With the Italian political landscape highly fragmented, and dire predictions of ungovernability abounding, the current front-runners in the opinion polls are the anti-establishment 5Star Movement (currently polling at 29 percent) and just one point behind them — the PD, which is still run by Gentiloni’s hyperactive predecessor as premier, Matteo Renzi. However, neither party appears to have a realistic chance of reaching the 40 percent level of support needed to establish a governing majority and the 5Stars have diagnosed themselves as allergic to coalitions of any sort. [...]

Under Salvini’s leadership, the League has gained popularity by moving further to the right and is considering dropping “Northern” from its name to reflect its geographical spread. The party now occupies a roughly similar space to Marine Le Pen’s National Front in France.

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Politico: French and Italians sense golden opportunity in glyphosate ban

When the two countries announced Monday that they would ban the controversial weedkiller by 2020, the decisions seemed like knee-jerk reactions to being on the losing side of a vote in Brussels to extend the license of the world’s most common herbicide for another five years.

But French President Emmanuel Macron’s promise to outlaw glyphosate in France as soon as “alternatives are found” wasn’t fueled by blind faith. After all, he and Italian Prime Minister Paolo Gentiloni can’t risk infuriating powerful agricultural constituencies that see weedkillers as vital for growing everything from barley to carrots.

In fact, both France and Italy have a Plan B: a more natural product that threatens to oust Monsanto’s ubiquitous glyphosate-based herbicide Roundup from its dominant position in European agriculture. [...]

On Monday, France, Belgium and Italy joined six other countries to vote against a new license for glyphosate. They lost the vote when Berlin cast the swing ballot in favor of the weedkiller, extending the license by five years. The German chemical giant Bayer is poised to acquire Monsanto for $66 billion.

The decision by national experts in a food safety committee marked the culmination of a bitter political debate over whether glyphosate is a carcinogen. In 2015, the World Health Organization’s International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) said it “probably” causes cancer. Both the European Food Safety Authority and the European Chemicals Agency subsequently declared glyphosate as safe for use, however.

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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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