Deutsche Welle: Italy's popular populists

Political analyst Francesco Galietti, sitting in his elegant Rome office boasting designer furniture, offers a more sober analysis of the situation. He attaches great importance to the role of the financial markets. Galietti used to work as a consultant for Italy's Ministry of Economy and Finance. He says "the markets are waiting for a signal indicating a robust fiscal policy and against leaving the eurozone. Snap elections and the uncertainty they entail would be a very bad signal." He thinks an anti-establishment coalition could calm markets provided it does not decide to drastically increase spending. Investors, argues Galietti, expect the new government to have a proactive strategy for reducing Italy's national debt. 

Unlike some in the European Union, Galietti is not worried Italy will bring the eurozone to its knees. "I don't think [the populists] will create a disaster. Some have this fear that Salvini wants to provoke a crash. But I don't believe that." However, he says, the confrontation is getting out of control. He says it's now "the Palazzo versus the people," by which he means President Mattarella, whose official residence is the Palazzo del Quirinale, and who, at least on paper, should be impartial and not embroiled in a fight with Italy's populists.

Galietti says that if you want to provoke a political confrontation, then you need an enemy, but because Berlusconi has been sidelined politically and the Social Democrats have brought about their own demise, the populists are now turning to Mattarella. "He took the situation nuclear because he has brought a potential referendum on the euro into the realm of possibility," says Galietti. He drew comparisons between the current political climate in Italy and Brexit. But in the case of Italy, the outcome could be even worse, "because Italy is in the eurozone," he says.

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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. 

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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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openDemocracy: Harakiri, Italian Style

In my view, Mattarella’s decision is bad for Italy, Germany, and Europe. The only political force which is likely to profit is the Northern League – an extreme right-wing party which campaigns chiefly against migrants, and sides with Vladimir Putin and Marine Le Pen. Liberal democracy will be the greatest victim in Italy and beyond. Centrist parties will be reduced to a political footnote in the next Italian elections. Politics in the coming months will be ever more contentious, if not violent. Europe will be even more paralysed, faced with instability in one of its most important member-states. Germany will have to live with the implications. [...]

The first victim of Mattarella’s decision will be Italian democracy. The president cited concerns about international markets as the prime reason for his veto. This implies that the markets, and not voters, are in a position to determine the future of the Italian Republic. Put differently, elections can be considered valid only if they lead to outcomes welcomed by the markets. [...]

The second victim of Mattarella’s decision will be the European Union. The president told Italians that the proposed government, and especially the proposed minister of finance, could or even “inevitably” would take his country out of the Eurozone. The winners of this year’s Italian elections are clearly no fans of the Fiscal Compact because they believe that excessive austerity hampers Italy’s growth.

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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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The Local: Profile: Italian president Sergio Mattarella, the country's 'political referee'

Mattarella is a well-respected figure in Italian politics, though he was relatively little known by the public and press before he was sworn in in 2015. The 75-year-old was born in the Sicilian capital of Palermo (he's the first Italian president from the region), and studied law in Rome.

After qualifying, he taught law in his hometown, with a focus on constitutional law and Sicily's regional government. His elder brother Piersanti was elected regional president of Sicily, and it was his brutal murder in 1980 at the hands of a local mafia group that persuaded the younger Mattarella to enter the political arena. [...]

In 2008, Mattarella chose not to run in parliamentary elections, and in 2011 was elected a Constitutional Judge. Four years later, he was elected president, and vowed to prioritize tackling corruption and organized crime while in office, as well as getting the country back on track after a crippling recession. [...]

Mattarella is a centre-left-leaning politcian who started his career as a member of the now-defunct Christian Democrats, which his father Bernardo helped create. Later he was one of the founders of the Democratic Party (PD) and that party, led at the time by Matteo Renzi, endorsed him in the 2015 presidential vote, which he won with a comfortable majority.  

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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.

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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.

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Politico: How Italy could blow up Europe as we know it

Donald Tusk, who runs the European Council, attempted the Bratislava Declaration and Roadmap in September 2016. Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker won plaudits for his 2017 Future of Europe white paper, but tanked when six months later he put forward a specific plan that wasn’t mentioned in the initial paper. Emmanuel Macron attempted to start the EU’s traditional Franco-German motor for reform, and kept pushing in his speech accepting the Charlemagne Prize this week; but the French president has found himself blocked by a German election stalemate and then a government in Berlin allergic to ideas like a eurozone finance minister.

With the U.K. leaving, Spain mired in its own Catalan constitutional crisis, and Poland neck-deep in rule-of-law complaints from Brussels, that leaves only Italy to help get things moving again. The 5Stars pitch themselves as EU reform-minded: If they stay true to that promise, it would come as pleasant surprise for Tusk, Juncker & co. The odds are higher, though, that Italy will struggle to build a consensus, let alone a European one, and thus close the door on EU reforms before 2020. [...]

Yet an Italian euro-exit is hardly off the table either. Beppe Grillo, the 5Stars’ founder, last week revived the idea of forcing a referendum on Italy’s membership in the single currency. It is, after all, in the party’s DNA — and we all know what usually happens when the EU goes on the ballot (see France and Netherlands in 2005, Ireland in 2008, Britain in 2016, pick your year in Denmark). [...]

The success of these two parties brings home the changed mood among Italians. That’s especially true for the young. In a 2017 poll, just over half of people under 45 said they would vote to leave the EU if Italy holds a referendum on EU membership (while 68 percent of respondents over 45 supported staying in the bloc).

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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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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.  

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Politico: Italy’s ‘iron’ president takes charge

A patrician figure sometimes described as cold and reserved, 75-year-old Mattarella is the first president in the history of the republic to hail from Sicily. Elected in early 2015, he is so far untested by the kind of challenge that earned his predecessor Giorgio Napolitano the nickname “King George.” Until now, Mattarella has been seen as a man promoted to the job on Renzi’s wishes in the hope that he would stick to the ceremonial aspects of the role. [...]

In Italy’s stormy politics, where prime ministers last an average of just one year in office, presidents often have to steer the ship through choppy waters. This weekend, following consultations with party leaders, Mattarella will have to decide whether to appoint a temporary replacement for Renzi, or give the 41-year-old incumbent a new mandate until fresh elections can be called, probably in 2017.

Since the mani pulite corruption scandals two decades ago that wiped out the traditional parties, the president of the republic has become “a referee of situations that political forces didn’t manage to control anymore,” said Stefano Stefanini, who was an adviser to Napolitano. [...]

One characteristic of the current crisis in Italy is that, unlikely on previous such occasions when serving presidents have turned to the Bank of Italy in the search for a safe pair of hands to run technocratic governments — such as Lamberto Dini and Carlo Azeglio Ciampi, who later became head of state — this time the speculation includes Pietro Grasso, the former head of the national anti-Mafia bureau who now presides over the Senate.

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