Right wing’s victories in Italy mirror Trump’s populist wave
There were slim hopes in Europe that Italy’s national elections this month might follow the 2017 French elections and act as a brake in the march of populist and illiberal revolts moving across Europe — the same movements that surprised Britain in its Brexit referendum and the United States in our election of Donald Trump as president. But it was not to be. Instead, more than 50 percent of the Italian electorate voted for populist and far-right nationalist parties. The showings for the standard-bearing parties of both the incumbent center-left and the center-right suffered painful losses, pulling their percentages of the vote into the teens.
The sources of populist support in Italy will sound familiar to American ears, if in a somewhat different, Italian, key. No figures of resentment in the Trump base are more pervasive than the “globalists.” These are the “elites” whose economic interests and presumed sense of cultural identity lies beyond the national borders. To them the Trumpists retort, “America First.”
For the Italians, the globalists are the European Union technocrats in Brussels, and their power over the country’s economy and politics is real. As Luigi Zingales, a professor of finance at the University of Chicago, observes, the power of Brussels to limit the policy choices of Italian governments is enough to make the “election superfluous, engendering a sense of loss [of ] sovereignty that fuels nationalism and populism.”
The big populist winners in the election are both fervently anti-EU. The biggest winner, which now commands a third of Italy’s popular vote, is the Five Star Movement. This is a purely Internet political party that determines its candidates and policy choices through “direct democracy” voting online.
Five Star was founded by a comedian, Beppe Grillo, whose attacks on all parties of the Italian establishment and the EU have typically been overthe-top vulgar tirades. To date, while the movement’s criticisms have been
legion, it has been able to remain ambiguous on what it stands for. Its candidate for the country’s prime minister post, 31-year-old Luigi di Maio, calls the movement “neither left nor right,” and that it stands for “all things to all people.”
The second big winner is La Lega, the League. The League’s national vote soared from 4 percent to more than 17.5 percent in the election, eclipsing by several points the vote total of Silvio Berlusconi’s Forza Italia party to become the strongest party on the Italian right and dash Berlusconi’s plan for a political comeback.
In addition to running on the radical platform of removing Italy from the euro currency, the League’s stock in trade is its fierce anti-immigrant views. The primacy of the League’s demonization of immigrants in its political appeal is reminiscent of the place attacks on Latinos and Muslims had in Donald Trump’s presidential campaign. In its exceptional virulence, the League resembles the radicalism and racism the American “alt-right” brings to its support of Trumpian anti-immigrant politics. In February, a would-be League candidate terrorized African immigrants in a day of drive-by shootings in the Italian city of Macerata.
The League’s leader, Matteo Salvini, traveled to the United States in April 2016 to support Trump’s presidential campaign. After meeting with Salvini for 20 minutes, Trump commented that he hoped Salvini would be Italy’s next prime minister. It’s interesting to note that it is only in recent months that Salvini changed the League’s name. Formerly it was the Northern League, and its signature politics was separatism, attacking southern Italians as racially and socially inferior to northern Italians.
As in the United States, much of the support for the populist right in Italy comes from people who feel left behind economically. The country has stagnated economically over the past two decades. Italian youth unemployment is more than 30 percent. In 2016 alone, an astounding 2 percent of Italians between 18 and 34 emigrated abroad. The country has been unable to resolve the ongoing crisis of its national debt. It fears a fate resembling the pauperization of Greece these past four years.
The architect of Trump’s populist electoral victory, Steve Bannon, traveled to Italy to be present for the elections. Bannon’s political goal is to turn the racially fraught populist nationalism he cultivated at Breitbart.com into the successor movement to the Tea Party that dominated Republican politics in the Obama years. What’s more, he believes that his movement is of a piece with where history is headed in the Western world. Bannon was clear on what he saw in the Italian election. “The Italian people have gone farther, in a shorter period of time, than the British did for Brexit and the Americans did for Trump,” he declared.
If immigrants and minorities are not going to be scapegoated for economic and social dysfunctions — if, that is, there is to be a brake on the march of populism in the West — these days that brake will have to come from somewhere other than Italy.