Maybe not since the proto-Protestant radical Girolamo Savonarola was hanged and set on fire with two of his clerical accomplices in 1498 has Florence seen a weekend so filled with terrifying surprises and reversals of fortune. On Sunday morning, March 4, the city awoke to discover that Davide Astori, the 31-year-old captain of its beloved soccer team ACF Fiorentina, had died of cardiac arrest during the night.
The following afternoon, a 65-year-old man named Roberto Pirrone carried his gun onto a bridge planning to commit suicide, somehow changed his mind, and shot dead Idy Diene, one of the thousands of Senegalese street merchants who have migrated to Italy in recent years. Prosecutors ruled out racism as a motive, citing a suicide note the man had written his daughter and his lack of connection to any political groups. That did not stop a hundred young African men from marching through the center of town to the St. John Baptistery, across from the Duomo, smashing flowerpots and generally ripping the place up.
Sunday, March 4, was also election day. A son of Florence, the former mayor Matteo Renzi, was leading the Democratic Party (Pd), much renamed since the end of the Cold War but still recognizable as the Italian equivalent of our own Democrats. Renzi had once been seen as the Italian Bill Clinton, who would reshape the center-left party as a business-friendly group for a new generation of voters. Business-friendly he was, but the voters never came. They repudiated Renzi in a referendum in December 2016 that would have given him more power.
But it was nothing like the slap he received this month. Renzi’s party got less than 19 percent of the vote. It had not only lost, it had almost fallen out of the political system altogether. Apart from a scattering of seats in the very far north, it had turned from a national party into a Tuscan party.
This was only the beginning of what Luciano Fontana, editor of the Corriere della Sera, called a political “earthquake.” Renzi was bested by a three-party conservative coalition that included former prime minister Silvio Berlusconi, who had dominated Italian politics for two decades until he was felled by sex scandals, judicial proceedings, and backroom maneuvers by the country’s president. His coalition took 36 or 37 percent of the votes, twice as many as Renzi got. But by the end of election day it was no longer “his” coalition. Berlusconi, once tarred by bien-pensant Italians as an “extremist,” a “virtual fascist,” and even a “neoconservative,” is now seen as a relative moderate. He was expected to sweep up the lion’s share of the conservative vote and use the more agitated parties to round out his coalition.
But his ally, the jovial, bearded Matteo Salvini of the League (Lega), blew him away. The League was founded towards the end of the Cold War by northern Italians determined to secede, convinced as they were that lazy Sicilians and Calabrians were leading the country to rack and ruin. Over time, the Northern League (as it was then called) also became Italy’s premier anti-immigrant party. Whatever they did, though, they hovered in the single digits, sometimes rounding out a Berlusconi coalition. They got 4 percent in 2013. They got 17 percent this time. As immigration turned into a threat to the nation, the League came into their own as a national party, though their victories were virtually all north of Rome. Salvini promised to throw the book at criminals, to deport as many illegal aliens as he could find, and to legalize and tax prostitution. “Italians first” was his motto. Steve Bannon was on the scene for the victory.
The biggest single party was the half-serious Five Star Movement (M5S), founded a decade ago by an acerbic television comedian, Beppe Grillo, and organized around the motto Vaffanculo (“Up yours”). It was as if Stephen Colbert had run for president and won, except that the party’s new top candidate, the pint-sized glad-hander Luigi Di Maio, turned out to have a very appealing way of promising the moon. M5S’s voters called the Italian government a “caste,” and for a long time they had an even lower opinion of the European government.
Now the “caste” is leaving the field. After his disappointing performance, Berlusconi did not appear for two days. Renzi held a press conference to offer an Al Franken-style resignation: that is, he talked about it, but he didn’t do it. It was as if Renzi had been told that making such a speech is what a politician does when he is disgraced but didn’t believe in his inmost heart that Italians would be able to tolerate public life without him. “We won’t form a government with extremists,” Renzi said. Problem is, the “extremists” now include almost all of the 81 percent who didn’t vote for Renzi.
Whether any functional government is possible for Italy right now is an open question. There is, in theory, a working majority that is opposed to the European Union. If you pieced together the M5S and the Lega with the third party in the right-wing coalition, Brothers of Italy (FdI), you could command a 53 percent majority in the chamber. The European Union is really not going over well now. Emma Bonino, a politician beloved of the press, ran on a party called More Europe (+Europa). That was good for 2.5 percent of the vote.
Politicians, though, tend to hate their rivals more than their enemies, and in the election’s aftermath the Lega’s Salvini ruled out working with the M5S. In a way, the two victorious Euroskeptic parties have been too successful. They’re the core of a new system in which both parties are what the old guard calls “populist.” The daily Il Foglio described best the new division in Italian politics: It pits those who are heartsick over unemployment against those who are heartsick over immigration.
