Great Italian political divide

ANTI-ELITE PARTY SWEEPS SOUTH, RIGHT DOMINATES RICH NORTH

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 predominating in the wealthy north.

Whoever ends up governing the country after the inconclusive March 4 ballot will not be able to ignore the gaping 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 the deprived south 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 that I think it will eventually provoke some sort of geopolitical criest sis in Italy,” he told Reuters.

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

Its economy shrank 7.2% between 2001-2016, according to latest data, while Italy’s output grew some 1% over the same period and that of the European Union 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 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 the lodestone for the disaffected and disenfranchised.

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

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 out of 90 first-past-the-post seats across six northern regions, including the wealthy Lombardy and Veneto, where the far-right League shone at the head of a centre-right bloc. –