Italian election lays bare gaping north-south economic divide

ROME: Long divided along economic lines, Italy is now also politically cleft after yesterday’s elections, with the anti-elite 5-Star Movement triumphing in the underdeveloped south and the right dominating in the wealthy north.

Whoever ends up governing the country after the inconclusive March 4 ballot will not be able to ignore the chasm, but will face deeply conflicting demands from the two halves of a fractured nation, and few funds to remedy the situation.

The split between the industrialised north and deprived south has never been so stark and is likely to have profound implications for Italy and Europe for years to come.

“The south is moving beyond the point of governance,” said Lucio Caracciolo, co-founder of the MacroGeo think-tank and a member of the Italian Foreign Ministry’s Strategic Committee.

“The disparity between the north and the south is so great I think it will eventually provoke some sort of geopolitical crisis in Italy. You are already beginning to see the facts on the ground.”

The Mezzogiorno, or “noon” as the south is called in Italian, has lagged behind the rest of the country for decades, but the recent financial crisis has exacerbated the problem.

Its economy shrank 7.2% between 2001-2016, in the latest data, while Italy’s output grew by 1% over the same period and that of the EU by 23.2%.

Unemployment in the south stands at almost 18% versus 6.6% in the north, with youth unemployment at 46.6% – more than double the level at the top of the country.

With 4.7 million Italians living in absolute poverty, the 5-Star has promised to introduce a monthly minimum income of up to €780 (R11 340) for the poor – a godsend in a country which offers no basic welfare for the jobless.

Although many analysts say heavily indebted Italy can ill-afford the plan, there is little doubt it convinced almost half of all Italy’s unemployed to vote for 5-Star, according to pollsters, with the party becoming the lodestone for the disaffected and disenfranchised.

This helped it become the largest single party nationwide and partly explains its unparalleled success in the south, which used to back mainstream centre-left or centre-right groups.

“People used to vote for established parties expecting to get something back, but instead we have witnessed the sack of the south,” said author Pino Aprile, who has written extensively about Italy’s southern woes and believes the north has received a disproportionately high amount of state funding for decades.

“Now people are putting their faith in this new party in the hope it will finally do something, but it might be too late,” he told said. “The situation down here is tragic.”

Five-Star won 76 out of 80 firstpast-the-post seats in the lower house of parliament in Italy’s eight southern regions, winning almost 50% of the vote in Sicily and Campania.

By contrast, it picked up just three of 90 first-past-the-post seats across six northern regions, including wealthy Lombardy and Veneto, where the far-right League shone at the head of a centre-right bloc.

The centre-right’s main economic proposal was a flat tax of 23% – attractive only in the north and of little interest in the south.