The General Election in Italy 2018

Is it all change in Italy or just more of the same?

In the last year I have posted results and comment on elections in the Netherlands, France, the UK and Germany. In all of those cases, there was a possibility, a threat if you like, that the established order would be challenged by 'right-wing' 'nationalist' 'populist' 'anti-EU' parties that in reality did not materialize. If the results of the Election in Italy this weekend appear different, that is because Party politics in Italy has taken a different path from its Northern neighbours, and it remains to be seen if the 'radicals' will make any significant difference to the practice of Italian, never mind EU politics.

For those of you living in a country with a stable party system -let's say Tories and Labour in the UK, Democratic and Republican in the USA- who think that the two party system is the problem, consider Italy as the model you don't want to replace the one you have.

There was a time when Italian politics was relatively simple, and the gift of an extraordinary man, Alcide de Gasperi, who all but flogged himself to death to create a liberal democracy out of the ashes of Fascism in the late 1940s. I am not a Conservative but de Gasperi for Italy performed a service similar to Adenauer's in Germany in making conservative politics respectable as well as being a prime mover in what is now the EU, he is thus in my estimation one of the most important European politicians of the post war era, along with Clement Attlee, the aforementioned Adenauer, Charles de Gaulle, and Éamon de Valera. At the time, both of the strong Communist Parties in Italy and France were led by Stalinists, Palmiro Togliatti in Italy, Maurice Thorez in France, and as such attracted significant US hostility as Italy both during and after the War was thought of as the 'soft underbelly' of the industrial north.

The long and the short of it is that de Gasperi in 1945 created the Democratic Christian Party that was the largest party in Parliament from 1946 to 1994, and that the only serious challenger to it was the Communist Party of Italy. If you consult the Wikipedia results for the Italian elections of 2018 neither of these two parties are found, but their successors are the new version of Forza Italia, and the Democratic Party of the Left (PD).

Thus, what makes the 2018 election different is the emergence of the Five Star Movement, and the growth of support for the League, formerly the Northern League. Of the two, the Five Star Movement now has the largest number of seats in Parliament, but has the internal problem that it has attracted votes from the left the centre and the right, and thus presents itself as an 'anti-establishment' party but does not have a unified approach to the varied policies its members want action on. As I pointed out in another thread, the Five Star Movement is critical of the Euro -but we don't know if or how it can withdraw from the Euro without a credible replacement; it is opposed to the vaccination against Measles for reasons so remote from science it appears science to them has no meaning. And it is an anti-immigrant party at a time when the perception that Italy is a soft touch for illegal immigrants and refugees is underlined by the maritime crisis in the Mediterranean. But elements of Italian politics have been anti-immigrant for decades.

Smallish point: the League did well in its Northern heartland, Five Star Movement swept through the South and Sardinia, the PD lost many seats but held on to its central constituencies in Emilia Romagna and Tuscany (ie the region between Milan and Bologna).

As is usually the case with the aftermath of a Italian election, the President will appoint a Prime Minister who in turn will create a government. The problem is that with 133 seats the Movement may have t form a coalition with or reach an arrangement with Forza Italia and/or the League, which many in the Movement would not like.

There are numerous complexities in Italian politics, I have not discussed how Italian party politics developed over the years with reference to the Gladio Network, the corruption scandals that culminated in the collapse of the party system in the early 1990s, or the question of the involvement in party politics of the Mafia and organized crime.

For the time being Italian politics appears to have changed its face, but we wait to see if the reality of political power will mark a radical departure in Italian and European politics.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Italia...election,_2018