Upheaval in Italy and Spain
editorial Two of Europe’s southern countries, Italy and Spain, got new governments last week, each a curious mix of disparate parties and neither particularly stable. That’s pretty much where the similarities end.
In Italy, two anti-immigrant and anti-Europe parties normally at each other’s throat — the left-leaning, anti-establishment Five Star Movement and the right-wing League — finally got the president’s blessing to form a government three months after a national election in which, riding the anti-liberal tide, they got the most seats. The president had rejected their first slate over the choice of a finance minister fiercely hostile to the euro. Nonetheless, confrontations with the European Union appeared inevitable, survival of the government far from certain.
The scenario in Spain was quite different. There, a Socialist leader whose party controls fewer than a quarter of the seats in the lower house of parliament cobbled together enough allies to oust the conservative government of Mariano Rajoy. He was the first leader in Spain’s modern democracy to lose a vote of no-confidence. The feat was all the more remark- able because Pedro Sánchez, sworn in as prime minister on Saturday, lost a bitter leadership battle in his party in October 2016 and staged a surprising comeback a year ago. He does not even have a seat in the parliament.
Mr. Sánchez owed his success less to any common program in what is being called his “Frankenstein Coalition” than to public frustration with a corruption scandal related to a secret campaign fund Mr. Rajoy’s Popular Party ran from 1999 to 2005. Mr. Rajoy, prime minister since 2011, claimed ignorance of the goings-on, but popular indignation boiled over last month when 29 people, including a former party treasurer, were convicted of corruption.
What next was far from clear, but unlike the reaction to Italy’s government, the European Union and financial markets displayed little anxiety over Spain. Mr. Rajoy was credited with steering Spain through a period of EUbacked austerity, and though Spain’s unemployment rate is among Europe’s highest, the country has had three straight years of growth above three percent. Mr. Sánchez, a former basketball player nicknamed Mr. Handsome, is a solid Europeanist who has pledged to retain the outgoing government’s budget and to honor obligations to the European Union.
The biggest immediate challenge for Mr. Sánchez is the secessionist movement in the autonomous province of Catalonia. His swearing-in on Saturday coincided with the installation of a new government in Catalonia under Quim Torra, who promptly declared he would continue to press for independence from Spain. Last year, a unilateral declaration of independence by the Catalan government ignited a constitutional crisis in which Catalan leaders were arrested or fled and the Spanish government took direct control of the province. The Socialists supported the government at the time, but Catalan parties are part of Mr. Sánchez’s coalition, so he may be open to calls for talks.
It is anybody’s guess whether Mr. Sánchez survives until the next scheduled election in two years, but in any case he is not likely to do anything to destabilize the economy or challenge Spain’s place in the European Union, if only because he doesn’t have the parliamentary votes for it.
Italy’s government is a different matter. The populist coalition there has promised tax cuts and welfare spending that could exacerbate an already onerous national debt, and though the partners are no longer threatening to abandon the euro, blaming the EU is central to their message. Actually running a government, however, has a way of moderating populist bluster.
As in any time of political turmoil, there’s plenty of reason for the rest of Europe to be wary and watchful. But petty tutelage is the last thing Brussels should do. This is a tale of two democracies working out their own problems.