Takeaways from Italy’s chaotic election
Southern Europe anger, economic stagnation, migrants were key issues
BRUSSELS— More than half the Italians who cast ballots Sunday voted for populist parties, largely abandoning the traditional mainstream parties, especially on the centre-left, a European trend.
Here are some other takeaways from a “throw the bums out” Italian election.
Migration matters
The issue continues to disrupt and inflame European politics, including in Germany, Greece, the Netherlands and now Italy. With Greece, Italy has borne the brunt of historically large movements of refugees and migrants into Europe from places such as Afghanistan, Libya and Syria.
There is a strong feeling that the mainstream parties have no answer and that Italy got little help from the European Union in Brussels or from other member states. Once Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany had cut off the migrant flow through Central Europe by doing deals with Turkey, neither Berlin nor Brussels seemed to care anymore — a European policy on migration is still unresolved.
“There was a sense in Italy of total abandonment over migration, which didn’t become a crisis until Germany suffered, and then stopped being one,” said Mark Leonard, director of the European Council on Foreign Relations.
The irony of Italy’s reaction is that it comes late; in many ways the crisis is receding from its peak, as Italy and the rest of Europe have cut migrant smuggling routes and made them- selves less welcoming. But, not having had an election in five years, this was the first time Italians had been offered a chance to voice frustration. The economy matters, too Italy is finally growing, albeit anemically, after a decade of no growth, but the economy remains far smaller than it was before the financial crisis of 2008. Its current growth of 1.5 per cent of gross domestic product is poor compared with the rest of the eurozone, and even that growth is not benefiting the young and the middle class, Tilford said.
“There is a powerful complacency in Europe, and people forget what Italy has been through economically and how weak the recovery is,” he said.
Nor did Brussels help much, said Mujtaba Rahman of the Eurasia Group, a fact that undermined Matteo Renzi’s effort as prime minister to overhaul the Italian economy and its institutions, further harming the centre-left.
“There was a big debate he had with Brussels to get more fiscal space, to get more growth and use that space to make Italy more modern,” Rahman said.
“That was an agenda Merkel and Brussels should have gotten behind and didn’t. And then layer on top of that the migration crisis.” Mainstream parties failed There is a long-standing crisis of elites in Italy, considered generally corrupt and inefficient, according to Leonard.
“Few wanted to vote for mainstream parties that were the authors of the stagnation of the last decade,” he said.
Further, they were led by leaders considered old or failed, such as former prime minister Silvio Berlusconi and Renzi, while the more right-populist parties of Five Star and the League were led by younger, more vivid and aggressive personalities.
Five Star became the largest party, and the far-right League, behind Matteo Salvini, outperformed Berlusconi. Southern Europe still angry And it is angry at the European Union, in particular France and Germany, for a perceived lack of solidarity on the euro and on immigration and refugees. There was a warning when Alexis Tsipras won in Greece during the height of the euro debt crisis, with his promises to change the European Union.
And while he got slapped down by Brussels and became somewhat tamed in the national interest, anti-European feelings are alive in the southern countries of the bloc, as well as in the authoritarian-lite governments of Central and Eastern Europe.
The Italians voted largely for parties that are euroskeptic, and while no one expects Italy to leave the European Union or the eurozone, any government that emerges is likely to be much more hostile about eurozone reform, about an easy ride for Britain as it tries to untangle itself from the European Union or about trying to discipline Hungary or Poland, Rahman said.