It’s unlikely that you stayed up late to catch the results of Italy’s election Sunday, and so far as I know it hasn’t been deemed newsworthy enough to prompt a presidential tweet. But Italy has a population roughly the size of Britain and France and is the fourth largest economy in the European Union — one that has still not recovered from the 2008 economic crisis. It’s big enough to matter, even to inattentive Americans.
And the results were something of a surprise, and rather different from the polls. The leading single party was the Movimento Cinque Stelle (Five Star Movement, abbreviated as M5S), but with only 33 percent of the vote for the Chamber of Deputies. (The small differences with the results for the Senate, for which the minimum voting age is 25, can be set aside.)
Doing better was the Centrodestra (center-right) coalition, with 37 percent in all. The surprise here was that the coalition’s Forza Italia (Let’s Go Italy) component, headed by former Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, got only 14 percent of the vote, while the Lega (League), formerly a regional party known as the Northern League, got 17 percent.
Trailing badly was the Centrosinistra (center-left) coalition, with 23 percent.
Some observations:
(1) This was not so much a victory for anti-European Union forces as it was a defeat for governance. The M5S is skeptical of the EU, whose German-forged financial policies have hurt Italy, but it also is skeptical about taking part in a government. Its leader has said it wants to govern alone but not in a coalition, which will be impossible with only 33 percent of the votes.
Coalitions were common in post-World War II Italy until the 1990s, when the largest party was the Christian Democrats and the second largest, the Communists, were deemed ineligible to participate in government. Nevertheless, there was a kind of consultation that went on.
By 1990 both parties were in trouble, partly because of scandal, but also because most voters no longer believed in their original faiths, Catholicism or Communism. Berlusconi, a media magnate who owns three of Italy’s six TV networks, formed Forza Italia as a kind of secular free market party; the Communists rebranded ultimately as the Democratic party and emerged as a center-left alternative. Now the M5S has emerged as a third alternative, preventing both the center-right and the center-left from amassing majority parliamentary support, as one or the other had in so many elections over the last 25 years.
(2) In Italian politics from 1948 (the first postwar election) to 1990, the parties had regional bases where their predecessors had been the chief force against Nazi German troops during the awful years 1943 to 1945 when the Nazis occupied the country after Mussolini’s ouster. Christian Democrats tended to win in the economically backward south, the first area liberated by the Allies, and in the northeast Veneto, next to Communist-ruled Yugoslavia. Communists won in the Red Belt, including Tuscany and Emilia-Romagna north of Rome, where Communist partisans had led local guerrillas against the Wehrmacht. The north, especially around Milano, Italy’s largest and richest metropolitan area, was mixed.
These patterns are now obsolete. The M5S carried almost all of Italy south of Rome, while the Centrodestra carried almost all the regions to the north.
(3) As in France, Austria, the Netherlands, and Germany, the traditional center-left party largely collapsed, with just over 20 percent of the vote, even though the Democrats’ Matteo Renzi had been prime minister until he lost a referendum in late 2016. The center-left coalition carried only parts of the previously solid Red Belt — most of Tuscany, about half of Emilia-Romagna, plus the German-speaking northern part of Trento-Alto-Adige (homeland of Rick Santorum’s forebears). The Democrats’ predecessor, the Communist party, had won 31 percent in the critical election of 1948 (in which the infant U.S. Central Intelligence Agency campaigned against it) and between 30 and 34 percent in the elections of 1976, 1979 and 1983. The combined Centrosinistra didn’t come even close to this on Sunday.
(4) One might have thought that negative or very sluggish economic growth might spur increases for a center-left party; as in so much of Europe, it seems to have had the opposite effect.
Rather, Italian voters seem eager not for redistribution, but for stopping the flow of Muslim and African immigrants across the Mediterranean and into Italian cities and villages. The pro-EU Centrosinistra is suffering, according to this theory, for its support of the EU nations, and especially Germany, which encouraged rather than stanched this flow; the more critical Centrodestra and the M5S seem to have benefited.
It’s another example of how German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s incomprehensible decision in 2015 to admit more than 1 million “refugees” and “asylum seekers” to Germany — which of course encouraged people to cross the Mediterranean into Italy — has produced results she must deeply regret, not only in her country but across the continent.
