Italy’s insular election: More important than it looks
TROME he campaign before Italy’s national elections Sunday has been self-obsessed and often petty and unedifying. But it has been instructive about one thing: The political forces that have torn at the global order and the European Union have settled in the mainstream.
Fascists rallied in large numbers in Italian piazzas. The country experienced its worst political violence in years. Formerly unthinkable suggestions, like the mass deportation of migrants, became virtually routine.
The reanimation of Italy’s political ghosts is a worrying harbinger for a European Union weakened by Britain’s decision to leave the bloc, the electoral setbacks of Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany, the long shadow of Russia and the rise of an illiberal bloc of nations in the eastern part of the Continent.
In elections in the United States and elsewhere in Europe, the far right had shifted the debate within the political establishment. But in Italy, the birthplace of fascism, they are a full partner in it.
The populism, the electronic misinformation, the crumbling of the left and the rise of the antiimmigrant, post-fascist hard right that has floated in the European ether for years all crystallized in the Italian campaign.
Italy’s election “epitomizes everything, it is pure populism,” said Stephen Bannon, an architect of President Donald Trump’s populist message who served as Trump’s chief strategist until he was forced out in August.
Bannon is in Italy as part of a European tour to help build a broader populist movement throughout Europe, the subject of a speech he will deliver Tuesday in Switzerland.
Populist and far-right parties stand to make some of their deepest inroads anywhere. Chief among the populist forces, the insurgent Five Star Movement, polling around 30 percent, is likely to come out on top in a fractured field.
Italy’s center-left prime minister, Paolo Gentiloni, has sought to sound the alarm, telling the newspaper Corriere della Sera on Friday that the election was the most important in a quarter-century, a “contest against populism” with the system of free markets and an open society at stake.
Gentiloni and others have bemoaned the anemic resistance of the country’s political, business and intellectual leaders. The elites seem cowed. The capacity for outrage seems exhausted. This is the nuovo normal, and many analysts fear that Italy will become a bellwether for an anti-European season.
“Brussels and the European capitals are worried because this election could bring the least pro-Europe government Italy has ever had,” said Stefano Stefanini, a former Italian ambassador to NATO who is a Brussels-based consultant for Project Associates.
The political center has so shifted that Silvio Berlusconi, a former three-time prime minister who leads the favored center-right coalition, campaigned on the promise to throw out the country’s 600,000 unauthorized immigrants. And Berlusconi is considered a nominal moderate.
His prospective partners spent the last days of the campaign blaming newly arrived migrants for Italy’s long-established structural woes and fawning over Viktor Orban, the autocratic prime minister of Hungary, on a visit there.
Both parties have risen on the xenophobia that became the campaign’s animating theme, an indication that the migrant issue is going nowhere, despite European efforts that have cut off smuggling routes and made the continent less welcoming.
In fact, the center-left government made big progress in recent months in shrinking the numbers of migrants.
The party with the deepest suspicion of Russia, the Democratic Party of Matteo Renzi, has hemorrhaged support, extending a trend across Western Europe.
In 2014, the party won 40 percent of the vote for the European Parliament. In the current election, the left is in such shambles, and Renzi has proved so polarizing, that his party has decided it was better off not to name a nominee for prime minister.
The election itself is expected to result in an inconclusive muddle, as it is unlikely that any party or coalition will reach the 40 percent threshold necessary to form a government, which could take weeks of haggling.