Ireland rejects May’s Us-canada border solution

Populism and nationalism are marching across the continent, destroying social democracy as they go

THERESA MAY believes the Canadaus customs regime can provide the blueprint to solve the Irish border problem when Britain leaves the EU.

Canada and the US have no customs union but do have a trade deal that allows border crossings daily with a trusted trader scheme to avoid delays. However, Mrs May’s suggestion was immediately rejected by Leo Varadkar, the Irish prime minister. Critics pointed out that armed guards were stationed on the North American border, and that physical infrastructure, such as scanners to check lorries, was part of the arrangements.

The Government has already said no new infrastructure will be built between Northern Ireland and the Republic, as it would risk the delicate balance between north and south enshrined in the Good Friday Agreement.

David Davis, the Brexit Secretary, has visited Detroit to examine the Uscanada border system. But Mr Varadkar said he, too, had visited the border, and while he found it impressive, “make no mistake, it’s a hard border”. Meanwhile, MEPS warned that the success of Eurosceptic parties in Italy’s general election at the weekend would make EU leaders more determined to punish Britain for Brexit.

The Five Star movement, which has advocated Italy leaving the eurozone, won the biggest share of the vote. With the anti-immigrant Lega party, which wants EU reform, the two populist par- ties accounted for 50 per cent of the total vote. Brussels fears “Quitaly” – Italy quitting the euro – and David Campbell Bannerman, the Conservative MEP, said the election result could cause the EU to “put political imperative before economic costs” in deciding what sort of deal to offer the UK.

ITALY’S populist and Eurosceptic parties were locked in a battle to form a new government yesterday after both failed to win an outright majority in the country’s general election.

The tumultuous result upended Italy’s political landscape, with more than 50 per cent of Italians voting for populist parties. The competing camps of the anti-immigration League party, led by Matteo Salvini, and the upstart Five Star Movement, led by Luigi Di Maio, were left duelling for the right to form a government.

Italy’s complex election law left both parties short of the 40 per cent share needed to form a government, opening the prospect of a prolonged period of political deadlock.

The vote was widely seen as an angry reaction to Italy’s endemic unemployment and failure to control migration – both of which, polls show, are blamed on the failings of the European Union. It was also a stunning repudiation of Italy’s governing establishment, with the centre-left Democratic Party of Matteo Renzi and Silvio Berlusconi’s centre-right Forza Italia losing massive vote share to the anti-establishment parties.

Mr Renzi last night told reporters in Rome he would “obviously” resign as leader of the Democratic Party. The country faces deep uncertainty as the rival parties try to convince Sergio Mattarella, the president, that they each have a mandate to form the new administration.

“We’re like Christopher Columbus, sailing into the open sea without any idea where we’re going,” said Giovanni Orsina, a political analyst from Luiss University in Rome. “Anything could happen.”

Mr Di Maio, the 31-year-old university dropout and former football stadium steward who leads Five Star, said the party “feels the responsibility to form a government”. Smiling broadly and addressing the country in a televised news conference, he said: “This election was a triumph for the Five Star Movement. We are the winners. More than half of voters in some regions have voted for us.”

He said Five Star’s strong performance meant that it “represents the whole nation, from Val D’aosta (a northern region bordering France) to Sicily. The others can’t say that.” Five Star has historically said it would never

‘We’re like Christopher Columbus, sailing into the open sea without any idea of where we’re going’

enter into a coalition, although Mr Di Maio said he would be “open to discussion with all political actors”.

“Everyone is going to have to come and speak to us,” said Alessandro Di Battista, a senior Five Star leader. But Mr Salvini, who heads the Right-wing League, was insistent that he should be the country’s next prime minister.

The former journalist, who has pledged to deport hundreds of thousands of migrants, said he had “the right and the duty” to form a government after his party quadrupled its share of the vote compared with how it performed at the last election in 2013.

“Italians have chosen to take back control of the country from the insecurity and precariousness put in place by Renzi,” he said.

Mr Salvini dismissed speculation that he would forge an alliance with Five Star to form a government. He said he was implacably opposed to messy “minestrone soup” coalitions.

The resounding win for populists, in a country which until a few years ago was enthusiastically pro-eu, drew comparisons with Brexit and the election of Donald Trump.

The big losers from the election were Mr Renzi, whose party performed woefully, and Mr Berlusconi, who after 25 years in politics may finally be finished. His party took 14 per cent of the vote. “It seems to me that it will be hard for him to come back from this. For the Right, Berlusconi is the past, Salvini is the future,” said Prof Orsina.

“The centre-left and the Left suffered a crashing defeat,” said Wolfgango Piccoli of Teneo Intelligence, a risk consultancy. “The vote has radically transformed Italy’s political landscape and its repercussions will be long-lasting.”

The vote split Italy in two, with the League dominating the north and Five Star sweeping to victory in the south.in the case of prolonged deadlock, Mr Mattarella could choose to leave in place the current centre-left government of Paolo Gentiloni, the prime minister. This would allow time to set up a temporary government to reform the electoral law and organise new elections.

Acasual observer could be forgiven for thinking that the news from Germany and Italy could not be more different. In Germany, the Social Democratic Party’s decision to enter a new “grand coalition” with Angela Merkel has been greeted with relief in Brussels and on financial markets, with the threat of fresh elections in Europe’s most powerful nation averted. In Italy, by seeming contrast, populist, anti-immigrant and Eurosceptic parties surged to record votes in Sunday’s general election, bringing new fears of instability in a major and vulnerable EU state. It all sounds like the traditional mixture of German order and Italian chaos – almost reassuring in its familiarity.

Yet these events are closely related and are two of the most significant chapters so far in a sad and ever clearer story: the death of the moderate Left in Europe. As of this week, parties led by social democrats or moderate socialists neither head the government nor provide the main opposition to it in any of Britain, France, Germany or Italy – a situation not witnessed in peacetime in the past hundred years.

Germany’s beaten Social Democrats faced a choice between further losses in a fresh election or the eclipse that comes over all junior partners in coalitions – asked whether they wanted to be massacred now or later they understandably chose later, after a period of government. Our own Liberal Democrats are experts in that choice and its consequences.

Failing to heed the pleas of their own youth wing, their decision provides temporary stability at a huge price: the far-right will now provide the main opposition in Germany, an extraordinary event in itself, and the far-left will outflank its moderate rivals with new ideas. Neighbouring Austria, where repeated grand coalitions have led to the ultra-right Freedom Party entering government, demonstrates the risks all too well.

Only two and a half years ago, the Italian Democratic Party was a majority government under Matteo Renzi and on the brink of sustained reform of the eurozone’s soft underbelly. Today, his party is out of the picture, perhaps down to less than 20 per cent of the vote. It is a common fate. Support for Spanish socialists has fallen by half in the past decade. The Dutch Labour Party lost four-fifths of its seats in last year’s election. In France, the socialists fell from holding the presidency to just 7 per cent, their support going to the hard-left or a new president who governs from the centre-right.

Here in the UK, the collapse has taken a different form – happening inside the Labour Party while the hard Left takes its brand and voters – but is part of the same rapid disintegration of social democracy. Moderate Labour MPS are still privately full of bravado that they will take back their party, but to do so they would have to swim against a continent-wide tide of change as well as defeat a national party machinery now totally in the hands of Jeremy Corbyn’s extremists. They cannot just organise their way back, because the problem is so fundamental.

In his famous work The Strange Death of Liberal England, published in 1935, George Dangerfield set out to explain the apparent paradox in the British Liberals being triumphant in 1906 and presiding over a peak of prosperity and Empire, and yet being shattered as a party by the Twenties. The death of the moderate Left in Europe needs no such sense of mystery. Its leaders, whether Tony Blair, Gerhard Schröder, François Hollande or Mr Renzi, have accelerated a steady separation from their original core support.

Their support for immigration has become deeply unpopular across the continent. Millions of their voters also reject the promotion of a political union of Europe rather than an economic one. In the face of a global financial crisis, the leaders of the moderate Left had no reaction or policy that differed from the Right. To these mistakes can be added several even more deep-seated factors: the decline of unions in the economy, the demise of class-based loyalty and the rise of welfare states to expensive limits. Finally, the end of the Cold War has broken the link between the hard-left and clear threats to national security. Voters feel free to turn to new parties or more radical leaders.

The collapse of such parties – or moderate leaders within them, in the case of our Labour Party – is bad news and should be no cause for celebration among Conservatives. It removes an important option for many voters, and will lead either to centre-right parties stagnating in power or extreme parties of Left or Right coming to power with abrupt and unsuccessful changes to national policies.

In both scenarios, public discontent with the entire system of government is likely to rise. The absence of alternating government between moderate parties is therefore one of several warning lights starting to flash on the dashboard of democracy itself. We all need someone to resuscitate the moderate Left. How can that be done?

The reason a party like the British Conservatives has been so dominant over such a long period is that it has sometimes been quite brutal with itself about coming into line with the society it represents and also been open to new ideas. The brutal bit for the moderate Left is it needs to join the voters in rejecting uncontrolled immigration and the further loss of national sovereignty.

Once it does that, it can get a hearing and start on new ideas. Is it so difficult to come up with a social democratic vision of how to cope with the wave of change in technology, work and education so that inequality isn’t widened and European countries don’t fall behind the US and China? Perhaps it is, but shouldn’t someone among Yvette Cooper, Andy Burnham, Chukka Umunna – or just someone in this country or the rest of Europe – actually try?

If they don’t do it quickly, the centre-right parties and Emmanuel Macron lookalikes will get there first. If they don’t do it at all, populism and nationalism will keep marching on all over them. Then we will not just be reading two more chapters in the death of the moderate Left, as we are this week. We will be closing the book. And the only mystery will be why they carried on letting it happen.