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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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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Social Europe: Lib-Pop Politics: Why Italy’s New Government Is More Neoliberal Than Populist

A new Italian government is in the making, with an unprecedented alliance between the Five Stars Movement (33% of votes in the March 2018 elections; 36% of seats in the House of Deputies) and the Lega (17% of votes; 20% of seats). The view that ‘populist barbarians have conquered Rome’ is a gross misunderstanding. Lega has already governed for nine years in Berlusconi governments supporting all neoliberal policies that have favoured finance, business and the European integration they now criticise. The Five Stars are ready to compromise on everything with anyone – Washington, Brussels, business, finance, the military – for their turn in power, knowing that their large support is at best temporary. The result is that – rhetoric aside – pro-rich neoliberal policies dominate the new government agenda, tinted with a shade of populism, with modest pro-poor and harsh anti-immigrant action. Lib-pop politicsis how we may call Italy’s new political experiment. [...]

The political momentum for Salvini grew with the elections in two regions held in April 2018. Lega won in the north-eastern region of Friuli-Venezia Giulia with the centre-right coalition getting 63% of votes, Lega alone obtaining 35% and providing the President of the Region, while the Five Stars slipped to 7%. In the small Southern Molise region, the centre-right coalition won with a Forza Italia candidate on 49% of votes (Lega had 8%), while the Five Stars list obtained 32%. Current polls reflect this trend of a growing Lega and a stable Five Stars consensus; when Five Stars support weakens – as happened in the peripheries of Rome and Turin, run by weak Five Stars mayors – Salvini is set to grab a large part of their disappointed voters. Thus, the political outlook suggests Salvini as a likely winner of a real majority for the centre-right when new elections take place, giving him the upper hand in talks for the new government – the alternative being an early vote in autumn or in May 2019 that could be held together with the European elections. Finally, Lega’s hegemonic power is marked also by its ability to combine power and protest; it was long in power in all Berlusconi’s governments but is not perceived as responsible for the current crisis. At the same time, Lega capitalises on widespread protests with its rhetorical challenge to European rules, harsh treatment of migrants and anti-tax, anti-bureaucracy agenda. [...]

The most important specific policy that will be introduced by the new government is the Italian version of the ‘flat tax’; firms and individuals will pay either 15 or 20% of income taxes, as opposed to the current 43% for the top income bracket. It is clearly stated that no wealth tax will be introduced (Italy has often been criticized by the EU for having cancelled real estate taxes on home-owners). Tax controls on Italy’s large number of small firms and self-employed will be scaled down, basically legalising tax evasion for a large number of right-wing, medium and high-income voters. For financial firms and banks no control or limit on their activities will be introduced. This will make Italy a neoliberal business paradise, competing with Ireland in the race to the bottom of business taxes in Europe, offering some room for the survival of Italy’s small businesses dramatically hit by a decade of crisis. In this way, the transfer of income to the richest 20% of Italians will be huge, with the very rich benefitting the most. Berlusconi would have never been able with his past majorities to introduce such a pro-rich agenda.

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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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Jacobin Magazine: Fidesz’s Two-Thirds

The plan had been brewing for some time. Various political and civil organizations, united under the umbrella of “Country for All Movement,” ran a series of surveys to determine the strongest anti-Fidesz candidate in the most competitive districts; the weaker candidates were then supposed to step aside. This call for tactical voting sparked much discussion both inside and outside the country, with liberal editorialists like Cas Mudde even suggesting that in order to overcome the Orbán regime, the liberal opposition should join forces with the Jobbik party, an extreme-right formation that has tried, like Marine Le Pen in France, to clean up its image and present itself as more moderate. [...]

Aside from anti-corruption rhetoric, opposition parties offered nothing new to voters. The election program of the ostensibly socialist party — as well as that of its liberal spin-off, Democratic Coalition — contained little progressive content. Discredited due to past betrayals, lacking a strategy to expand beyond partisan die hards, these parties failed to offer voters a credible left-wing alternative. Their opposition was stylistic, rather than substantive. [...]

Orbán is a liberal at his core, topped off with some colorful nationalism and racism. The same could be said of Italy’s Berlusconi or France’s Sarkozy or, more recently, Austria’s Sebastian Kurz. Has Western Europe already forgotten Italy’s anti-immigrant Bossi Fini law, or France’s ban on face-covering (which Kurz is now considering implementing)? Do we really have to remind aghast liberals that Switzerland voted for a constitutional amendment, proposed by the far-right Swiss People’s Party, to ban the building of minarets?  

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Social Europe: There Are More Things In Heaven And Earth, Horatio, Than Populism

The concept of populism is a theoretical kaleidoscope which has been used indiscriminately for Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders, Jeremy Corbyn and Marine Le Pen, Alexis Tsipras and Viktor Orbán, even for Barack Obama, or for Margaret Thatcher in the past. It really offers a reassuring view of the world: in today’s confused times, where all that is solid melts into air (political traditions, identities, narratives), people are being led astray by demagogues thunderously ventilating their fears of the unknown. But populism is merely a political style that invests political programs and strategies. It is not an ideology or a worldview in itself. Let us not take the appearance for the essence, the symptom for the cause. [...]

It is precisely with the outsiders and losers that social democracy lost contact after its social-liberal adaptation to late capitalism – and now finds itself bitterly defeated in Italy, trapped in a standstill coalition with the preachers of Ordoliberalismus in Germany, suffering from the “Pasokification” effect all across Europe. A victim of its own triumph, it became too much of a mainstream and consensual political force. With its last moment of hegemony (Blair’s “Third Way” and Schroeder’s “Neue Mitte”), social democracy effected a full adaptation to post-Fordist capitalism but at the same time lost its chance to change the path of European integration. Instead it made its opponent’s agenda its own: never before had social democrats believed so implicitly in market self-regulation. When the crisis broke social democracy was unable to formulate a Euro-Keynesian solution, to escape from austerity or remedy the inequalities of trickle-down economics. But material security is the touchstone for progressive reformism, next to identity politics. For social democracy it is after all not so difficult to win the support of “globalised” liberal white-collar voters. What has been lost is the support of the world of labour, the young precarious workers, the people stuck in rusting ports and former industrial cities. [...]

The Left should therefore defend its fundamentals instead of deploring the supposedly irrational populist surge. And this is first and foremost the primacy of politics over economy, a core tenet of social-democratic tradition as Sheri Berman has eloquently indicated: political intervention and not a passive acceptance of the “global market forces”, a new social-democratic compromise between capital and labour without great sacrifices on the part of economic stability but in return for more protection for the outsiders. An updated combination of prosperity and equity is the key to reassert the progressive values against the “cultural backlash”. After all, material security is a prerequisite for both individual emancipation and an open and self-confident national identity, only this time beyond nation-state (which was the case in the Glorious Thirty) as reformism is possible only at a supranational, European and rather federalist level.

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Quartz: The election of Italy’s first black senator won’t make a dent on rising racism there

wobi is not only the first Senator of African origin to have been elected in Italy. He’s also the first person from sub-Saharan Africa to have been elected to represent a far-right party, la Lega (The League) led by Matteo Salvini.

But his election is unlikely to lead to less racism and xenophobia in the country nor will it bring any respite for migrants in the country. This is for two reasons: racism and xenophobia have become more entrenched in Italy, and neither Iwobi’s party, nor the senator himself, are sympathetic towards migrants. [...]

Migrants in Italy are increasingly seen as a threat to society. The centre-right coalition, which attracted the highest percentage of votes in the recent elections, focused its campaign on the slogan “Italians first”. The leader of the coalition Silvio Berlusconi even declared that “migrants are a social bomb.” [...]

In March 2011, Human Rights Watch published a report entitled “Everyday Intolerance: Racist and Xenophobic Violence in Italy”. The report pointed to “worrying signs exist that increasing diversity has led to increasing intolerance, with some resorting to or choosing violence to express racist or xenophobic sentiments.”

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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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Jacobin Magazine: What Orbán Knows and His Enemies Don’t

But Hungary’s case seems even more extreme, showing signs of slipping toward an autocratic system like Turkey’s. Its conservative-nationalistic turn has been around longer, preceding rather than following Western trends, and it may have begun a dangerous cycle: the Western media and public opinion initially ignored or ridiculed Orbán’s nationalistic, xenophobic, and autocratic measures, but now they greet similar moves elsewhere as legitimate thanks to being “mainstreamed” by Hungary’s ruling class. [...]

Importantly, however, decommodification isn’t always progressive. Polanyi argued that the rise of Italian fascism represented society’s attempt to protect itself from the excesses of the market, writing, “the victory of fascism was made practically unavoidable by the liberals’ obstruction of any reform involving planning, regulation, or control.” It is this regressive decommodification that we see in Hungary today. [...]

To boost competitiveness and reduce the country’s crushing debt, the nation hurried to privatize state-owned companies, which also seemed like a way to “adopt” capitalism and attract foreign investment. In time, Hungary not only became liberalized — it became more liberalized than most “old capitalist” countries. [...]

Much like Polanyi described, Orbán has won the support of disgruntled and alienated citizens. Meanwhile the opposition has nothing to offer than more liberalism. Opposition parties (apart from Jobbik, of course) promise to make Hungary “more European,” but, for most Fidesz voters, the past decade’s efforts to advance toward Europe have been disastrous — slashing the welfare state, endangering their jobs, and making their lives more uncertain. For these Hungarians, voting for Fidesz makes perfect sense. [...]

Much like the Italian left under Berlusconi, the Hungarian opposition is obsessed with Orbán but not really interested in why he’s so popular. They love to hate his flamboyant rhetoric, his obvious lies, and the absurdities of the government-managed mass media. Many people recognize all this as a dangerous swing toward authoritarian rhetoric, but no one seems to wonder why it was so successful.

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Social Europe: EU Takes Beating In Italian Elections: When Will They Ever Learn*?

The centrist parties in the European Parliament treated the growth of the far right as a fringe phenomenon requiring no amendment to their “ever closer union” agenda.  The British vote to leave brought no more than a momentary shock.  Shrugging off Brexit as a uniquely British phenomenon and no threat to the continent, the centre-right (European Peoples’ Party) and centre-left (Progressive Alliance of Socialists and Democrats) pursued their top-down strategy of deepening through compromise. [...]

That the European Commission president could make such a statement reveals the bureaucratic myopia of the EU leadership, in Brussels, Berlin and elsewhere.  Juncker and other EU leaders face the high probability of needing to work with an Italian government of the right led by the Lega and one which is homophobic, misogynist, opposed to the euro, and dedicated to expelling illegal immigrants.  I would prefer such a government to be weak and non-operational. [...]

It is not appropriate for Brussels to seek to influence the political process in member countries.  Indeed, German pressure via Brussels on Silvio Berlusconi to resign in 2011 is one reason for anti-EU sentiment on the Italian right.  Nor will the long-term consequences of the Commission’s part in undermining the Syriza government during 2015 prove beneficial to Greek democracy or foster respect for the EU.  

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Politico: How billionaires learned to love populism

Once Trump took office, he went full billionaire, and it seemed at first that his entire populist pose was revealed as a sham. He appointed the wealthiest Cabinet in modern history; his agencies are studded with high-level corporate executives. Speaking to a crowd of cheering supporters in Iowa in June 2017, Trump said, “I love all people, rich or poor. But in these particular positions, I just don’t want a poor person.” [...]

There are a number of familiar explanations for how Trump gets away with all of this. One is that it’s all a con. Trump is an incredible salesman, the thinking goes, and he’s duping the white working class on behalf of a new set of overlords who put on their MAGA hats and sell false hope and snake-oil policies. Another explanation is that it’s all racism. Some of his white supporters from lower-income households are fine with the wealthy making off like bandits, as long as they can comfortably look down on immigrants and others of racial minority groups. [...]

America today is fully in the grip of political tribalism, and people who think that Trump’s billionaire populism is just a con are missing something fundamental. As Yale professor Dan Kahan has found, Americans’ political positions today, both liberal and conservative, are driven much less by individual self-interest than by “loyalty to important affinity groups.” What voters often care most about is having their team — their political tribe — win. And for millions of lower-income Americans, Trump has done a remarkable job presenting himself as being on their team, creating a tribal bond between a celebrity billionaire and blue-collar voters, while excluding the “elites” in the middle. [...]

When people long to rise, but can’t, what then? For many on the left, the response is to denounce inequality and to expose the American dream as a sham. The wealth of the super-rich is “obscene,” says Bernie Sanders, along with many other liberals; what’s needed is sweeping redistribution, regulation and institutional reform. For some voters, this is inspiring — Bernie, too, cuts through the niceties of elite tastemaking — but for a lot of Americans, it’s an alien way of thinking about the nation they grew up in. Americans have an overwhelmingly positive view of free enterprise and a far more negative view of the federal government and socialism. Americans also famously overestimate the degree of upward mobility in this country — the poor more so than the wealthy. [...]

In recent years, however, a number of other billionaire populist leaders have risen in developed countries. The most prominent is Silvio Berlusconi, the jet-setting media mogul who served as Italy’s prime minister for nine years. Berlusconi was infamous for his “bunga bunga” parties with prostitutes, and like Trump, he made crude jokes, publicly mocked women and was accused by his enemies of shady business dealings. He also sparked a global outcry in 2001 when he declared that Western civilization was superior to Islamic culture. (At 81, Berlusconi has now reinvented himself as a moderate.) More recently, Andrej Babiš, a billionaire and his country’s second-richest man, was elected president of the Czech Republic, campaigning on an anti-immigrant, anti-EU platform. 

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Politico: Silvio Berlusconi’s grand failure

“Since it was a race, the winner is [League leader Matteo] Salvini. He succeeded in bringing his party from 4 to 18 [percent], he did a great political job and turned a regional party into a national one,” said Denis Verdini, an Italian lawmaker and long-time ally of Berlusconi. He added that the League managed to win regions historically loyal to Forza Italia.  

“Unlike Berlusconi, he [Salvini] capitalized on anti-immigration and anti-EU feelings that ran strong across the country. He proved that ‘Italians first’ is not just a slogan,” Verdini said. [...]

“Berlusconi has woken up to a rather cold shower. At age 81, his unique selling point was his stated ability to rein in the League and fend off the 5Stars. He did not deliver on either count,” said Francesco Galietti, founder of political risk firm Policy Sonar. [...]

“Berlusconi’s age and his poor social media skills also played a role in his defeat. Both Salvini and the 5Star Movement used online platforms to campaign and attack opponents, and both succeeded,” D’Agostino said.

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Jacobin Magazine: Italy Is the Future

Nonetheless, the aggressive tones of Italian public life conceal the real reason why Italy is a case study for the new politics. M5S proclaims its will to “clear out” the established political “caste” and the hard-right Lega hopes to impose its leadership over more conservative forces. But the most notable aspect of contemporary Italian politics is the lack of belief that anything will in fact change.[...]

The Italian political system certainly looks chaotic. None of its parties are thirty years old, and even those created in the early 1990s have constantly changed their identities. Today’s rising force, the Lega (formally known as the Lega Nord or Northern League) was once a hodgepodge of Thatcherites, libertarians, and former Communists bent on Northern autonomy (or even independence) from the South. Today it is a national movement encroaching on the terrain of the far right. [...]

In many countries the old class-based parties of the twentieth century still soldier on. Even as they weaken they can retain some residual social roots and serve as sites of collective identification: “my granddad was a miner” has long been the cry of the reluctant social democrat. Conversely, the Italian parties that emerged in the post-Cold War era more immediately reflect today’s lack of belief in collective projects or state action. Created at a moment when the “end of history” was so widely proclaimed, they have been unable to cohere new identities. [...]

The result is the rise of parties that are defined precisely by their sense of being “outsiders,” in different countries reflecting a hostility to perceived cultural decline brought by immigration (as in Northern and Central-Eastern Europe) and an opposition to austerity (as is broadly true of Southern Europe). Combining both “South” and “Northern” regions, Italian populism concentrates the worst traits of both, reflecting social despair rather than offering a way out of it. [...]

In practice, the M5S has not only backed away from any significant reforming agenda, but has even cast doubt over the viability of “anti-corruption” politics itself. This is illustrated by a recent scandal over its MPs’ salaries. M5S parliamentarians are supposed to remit half their salaries to a finance ministry microcredit fund, and then post online scans of their transfers. However, over the last fortnight ten of them were caught cancelling the transfers as soon as they published the images online. They along with three candidates with Masonic links were expelled from M5S.

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The Local: Immigration in Itay: Myths and reality ahead of election

Italy's national statistics institute Istat says that there are five million foreign nationals legally residing in Italy. That is 8.3 percent of the country's population of 60.5 million.

The biggest proportion, 23 percent, are from Romania followed by Albanians (9 percent), Moroccans (8 percent), Chinese (5.5 percent) and Ukrainians (4.5 percent) and many of them are employed in retail, farming or domestic work.

More than 690,000 migrants, most from Sub-Saharan Africa, have arrived by boat from Libya since 2013. Migration study foundation ISMU estimates that around 500,000 are living in the country illegally -- equivalent to 0.9 percent of the population. [...]

However Italy's interior ministry says the crime rate has dropped by 8.3 percent in the last 10 years, despite the fact that the number of foreigners in the country has increased from three to five million over the same period.

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Politico: How Italy does Putin’s work

“Italy is a weird exception [among Western states] because the relationship between Italian politicians and Putin is very open,” said Anna Pellegatta, a digital forensic research assistant at the Atlantic Council, a think-tank monitoring the rise of digital falsities worldwide. “The line between misinformation and officials promoting Russian messages is very blurred.” [...]

But it’s not just Berlusconi’s media empire that has been willing to portray Russia in a more favorable light. Last year, Rai, the country’s national broadcaster, ran uninterrupted a four-hour interview between Putin and Oliver Stone, the U.S. filmmaker, which gave a broadly positive spin to the Russian leader’s aggressive foreign policy. [...]

Ahead of Sunday’s vote, Facebook rolled out a series of programs to counter these false narratives, including a clampdown on people making money from advertising connected to fake news. The social network also teamed up with Pagella Politica, a local fact-checking site, to debunk online myths. [...]

Italy’s politicians are divided over how to fight digital misinformation, with some actively embracing and sharing outright lies among their followers. Candidates from the Northern League and 5Star Movement are skeptical that false information is even a problem.

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

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

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

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

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Politico: 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 Guardian: The fascist movement that has brought Mussolini back to the mainstream

By the early 2000s, it was no longer taboo for mainstream politicians to speak warmly of Mussolini: admirers of Il Duce had become government ministers, and many fringe, fascist parties were growing in strength – Forza Nuova, Fronte Sociale Nazionale, and various skinhead groups. But where the other fascists seemed like throwbacks to the 1930s, CasaPound focused on contemporary causes and staged creative campaigns: in 2006 they hung 400 mannequins all over Rome, with signs protesting about the city’s housing crisis. In 2012, CasaPound militants occupied the European Union’s office in Rome and dumped sacks of coal outside to protest on behalf of Italian miners. Many of their policies looked surprising: they were against immigration, of course, but on the supposedly “progressive” grounds that the exploitation of immigrant labourers represented a return to slavery.  [...]

They also began pushing for policies the left had given up hope of ever hearing again, such as the renationalisation of Italy’s banking, communications, health, transport and energy sectors. They cited the most progressive aspects of Mussolini’s politics, focusing on his “social doctrines” regarding housing, unions, sanitation and a minimum wage. CasaPound accepted that the racial laws of 1938 (which introduced antisemitism and deportation) were “errors”; the movement claimed to be “opposed to any form of discrimination based on racial or religious criteria, or on sexual inclination”.

CasaPound’s concentration on housing also appealed to voters of the old left. Its logo was a turtle (an animal that always has a roof over its head) and Ezra Pound’s name was used in part because he had railed, in his poem Canto XLV, against rent (considered usury) and rapacious landlords. One of the first things CasaPound did in its occupied building was to hang sheets from the windows protesting against rent hikes and evictions – in 2009, there were an average of 25 evictions in Rome every day. They campaigned for a “social mortgage”, in which rental payments would effectively become mortgage payments, turning the tenant into a homeowner. Within months, they had given shelter to dozens of homeless families, as well as to many camerati down on their luck. [...]

These ideas are not likely to appeal to many Italian voters – but CasaPound’s job is already done. It has been essential to the normalisation of fascism. At the end of 2017, Il Tempo newspaper announced Benito Mussolini as its “person of the year”. It wasn’t being facetious: Il Duce barged into the news agenda every week last year. A few weeks ago, even a leftwing politician in Florence said that “nobody in this country has done more than Mussolini”. Today, 73 years after his death, he is more admired than traditional Italian heroes such as Giuseppes Garibaldi and Mazzini.  

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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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