Italy craps its pants

As one EU headache subsides in Germany, another starts in Italy

In delivering a horrendously hung parliament, Italy’s voters had also turned their back on their mainstream ruling parties, with a majority backing populist, anti-establishment, hard-right and broadly EU-critical candidates.

The poor showing by Silvio Berlusconi’s centre-right Forza Italia and Matteo Renzi’s Democratic party may be no surprise given Italy’s two decades of stagnation (its economy remains 6% smaller than in 2008, with unemployment stuck at 11%) and the migration crisis: more than 600,000 irregular migrants have arrived since 2014.

But the fact that the insurgent Five Star Movement finished as the country’s biggest party by far, and the anti-immigration La Lega as the strongest force on the right, raises questions not just about Italy’s capacity to pursue domestic reforms, but also its inclination to play any part in planned closer EU and eurozone integration.

Italy’s angry, fed-up voters rejected the path of economic modernisation and broad eurozone compliance followed by successive Italian governments since the financial and economic crisis, opting instead for parties whose generous campaign promises – a flat tax rate, a universal income, early retirement – would set them on a collision course with Europe’s budget constraints.

Demagogues Win as Europe’s Populist Tide Sweeps Italy

The Italian elections on Sunday were the latest powerful wave in a tidal turn of anti-immigrant, anti-European Union and antidemocratic fervor that has ravaged European politics. 

The vote was a stinging rejection of traditional parties, and of national leadership that has been frustrated by a flood of migrants from Africa and the Middle East and stymied by years of stagnation.

While the populist parties that were the two biggest vote-getters were different in many ways, both want to abandon the euro and support for migrants, and shared conspiracy theories about bankers, vaccines and the 9/11 attacks.

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The big winner, with about 32 percent of the vote, was the Five Star Movement, a grass-roots mélange of libertarians, progressives, Euroskeptics and other disenchanted voters formed less than a decade ago by a comedian, and now led by a 31-year-old college dropout, Luigi Di Maio.

Next was the far-right League (formerly Northern League) led by Matteo Salvini, 44. 

An enthusiastic fan of Marine Le Pen’s National Front and Donald Trump, Mr. Salvini fanned sadly familiar flames of nationalism, ethnocentrism and xenophobia, promising, among other things, “cleansing” Italy of immigrants, threatening force.

The League ran with Silvio Berlusconi’s Forza Italia party. 

If there was a sliver of good news it was that the party of Mr. Berlusconi, forerunner of today’s populists who was forced out as prime minister in 2011 in a swirl of sex scandals and legal troubles, took only 14 percent of the vote.

The winners are pro-Russian, anti-NATO, strongly nativist promising mass deportations of migrants, and make the usual ridiculous, blowhard promises of wild economic successes.

Italy’s Frightening Election Result

“While we were sleeping, Putin won the Italian election,” the Twitter user Southpaw wrote this morning.

Far-right and anti-Europe parties did very well in that election. 

It’s still unclear who the new prime minister will be. 

But Italy’s new government will likely join the list of governments — including those in Hungary, Poland and, yes, the United States — hostile to immigrants and even to democratic values.

“After Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany and President Emmanuel Macron of France beat back populist and far-right insurgencies in the past year, Europe had seemed to be enjoying a reprieve from the forces threatening its unity and values,” The Times’s Jason Horowitz writes. 

“That turned out to be short lived.”