Sun Sentinel Palm Beach Edition
Italians to vote but no end in sight for tensions
Majority needed for governing could prove elusive
ROME — Italy’s election campaign reads much like a police blotter, chronicling a country whose politics lately have been increasingly nasty, divisive and even violent.
A young man knifed while affixing posters for a far-left party. A politician for a pro-fascism party beaten up on the street. A candidate for premier spat upon and shoved while stumping for her far-right party. Protests and counterprotests, in the streets from north to south.
The national vote Sunday to determine who’ll govern Italy appears unlikely to bring much relief.
Prospects loom for months of more political tensions after the vote, with backroom party maneuvering possibly producing a crisis-prone, short-lived government with limited chances of making headway on Italy’s economic and social issues.
Some fear an even more dismal outcome.
Sunday’s vote “will bring Italy in line with the worst tendencies in contemporary European politics,” said Cornell University sociology professor Mabel Berezin, who studies populism and fascism in Europe.
Noting a rise in xenophobia and nationalism in Central and Eastern Europe, Berezin said the main contenders in Italy’s election include parties that have supported anti-European, anti-immigration and populist positions.
Over the last few years, the arrival of hundreds of thousands of migrants, many fleeing poverty in Africa, after rescue at sea from smugglers’ boats, coupled with Italy’s own slow economic recovery, makes for an extremely volatile situation, Berezin said.
The extreme far-right Forza Nuova, whose leader unabashedly describes himself as fascist, is among the smaller parties running candidates.
If opinion polls prove accurate, voters won’t reward any one party or coalition with enough votes to yield the parliamentary majority needed to sustain a viable government.
Italian law forbids publishing opinion poll results in the last 15 days before an election. Earlier polls pointed to a hung legislature, split into three political blocs, each purportedly distrustful of allying with opponents in a government coalition.
“However the elections go, the situation will be opaque and fragile, but the market is used to seeing an unstable Italy,” limiting the danger to Italy’s sovereign bonds, said political scientist Roberto D’Alimonte, a Rome-based LUISS university professor.
Leading in opinion polls has been the populist 5-Star Movement. But because the 5-Stars deny they’re a political party, their candidate for premier, Luigi Di Maio, 31, rejects entering into a postelection coalition government with established parties.
If anyone stands a chance of winning an absolute majority, analysts concur, it’s the coalition anchored by former Premier Silvio Berlusconi’s center-right Forza Italia Party and the right-wing, virulently antimigrant League.
Based in Italy’s more affluent north, the League is led by Matteo Salvini, who hopes his party will outdraw Forza and position him for the premiership.
A smaller campaign partner is Brothers of Italy, a party with neo-fascist roots. Despite its name, it boasts the only female candidate for premier, Giorgia Meloni.
Because of a tax fraud conviction, Berlusconi himself can’t hold public office. But as a three-time premier, his face is a familiar one.
The 81-year-old billionaire recently went lobbying in Brussels to convince European Union leaders he is a dependable pro-Europe ally. He reluctantly resigned as premier in 2011 after financial markets lost faith he could keep Italy’s sovereign debt crisis from endangering the eurozone.
Berlusconi has also been unofficially promoting European Parliament President Antonio Tajani as the “right” person to be premier. Tajani previously served as Berlusconi’s spokesman in the 1990s.