Since January, the most important person in the campaign for the Italian elections coming on March 4 has been a missing person. Sad selfies of Pamela Mastropietro, a troubled 18-year-old from Rome, have appeared on the front pages of Italy’s newspapers since her body was found, chopped up, rinsed with bleach, and packed into two wheeled suitcases, outside the city of Macerata, northeast of Rome. Four recent Nigerian migrants to Italy were arrested for the deed. They are among the millions of newcomers who have found their way north across the Mediterranean and, in just a few years, altered the fabric of Italian life.
A few days after the discovery of Mastropietro’s body, 28-year-old Luca Traini, whom press photos show with runes tattooed on his skull, wrapped himself (literally) in the Italian flag and began shooting Africans in the center of Macerata, wounding six. Over the years, Western politicians have perfected a playbook of calming clichés for moments like these. The Italian candidates did not follow it. Their condemnation of Traini was neither swift nor categorical. Former prime minister Silvio Berlusconi, the 81-year-old media billionaire who has dominated Italian politics since the end of the Cold War, has made a mighty comeback in this election, even though judges have blocked him from running for the top post again. Berlusconi said that the illegal immigrants now in the country were a “social bomb” waiting to go off. Matteo Salvini, leader of the Lega Nord, descended from a northern separatist party, said that “anyone who shoots someone is a delinquent,” but he blamed “out-of-control” immigration, which he likened to an invasion. Both men and their parties shot up in the polls. On the eve of elections, three conservative parties appeared likely to take 283 of the 630 seats in parliament. The more liberal Democratic party was at 158 and falling rapidly. The anti-establishment Five Star Movement, with 152 seats, looked set to be the single largest party.
A lot of Italians believe they are going to the polls to answer the question: Do you want there to be an Italy or not? In the early days of February, Istat, the national statistical office, published some population data that shocked even demographic pessimists. In 2017, Italy had 2 percent fewer births and 5 percent more deaths than the year before. Since the end of the 20th century Italy has been producing children at rates close to the lowest ever seen in human history: 1.34 children per woman. It is now entering the “low-fertility trap” that demographers have warned about. The population fell by 100,000 from the past year—a decline that is bound to accelerate.
Migration is swelling because people across the Mediterranean can sense this. Once those immigrants have arrived in sufficient numbers, the alarming population statistics will stabilize, but this will only disguise, not alter, the underlying demographic trend. Giorgia Meloni, whose conservative Brothers for Italy party is looking to form a coalition with Berlusconi and the Lega, says she is running “in order that Italians not disappear.”
Italians have seen for a while that there is something broken in their system. The Five Star Movement (M5S), a mostly online group founded by the comedian Beppe Grillo, came within a hair’s breadth of winning the last national elections in 2013. The M5S accuses la casta—Italy’s tight-knit group of business and political elites—of corruption, and has sometimes ruled out having anything to do with the major parties at all. It may have a point. Italy is handcuffed by nearly $3 trillion in debt, which a plummeting population does not improve the prospects for financing. And yet the parties persist in making the most profligate electoral promises. Berlusconi’s Forza Italia promises a flat tax (which also would be a steep cut), while offering a guaranteed basic income of $15,000 a year. This last is an idea that he stole from the M5S, which would at least try to finance it by pushing up estate taxes.
M5S’s skepticism about politics as usual crosses ideologies. Many of its voters are appalled at the way progressives in the political establishment have permitted unbridled immigration. But they do not trust conservatives like Berlusconi or even Salvini to bridle it. Whether the M5S would join any coalition has been the subject of much discussion. But when an intransigent protest party takes a quarter of the seats in a parliamentary election, a shutdown of the system is a real threat.
This year, la casta has been fighting back, arguing that M5S is a party as untrustworthy as the rest of them. Former prime minister Matteo Renzi, the Democratic party’s lead candidate, has dismissed them as “freeloaders, crooks, and freemasons.” A Berlusconi-linked television show accused M5S members of parliament of irregularities in filing expenses and of failing, in a few cases, to honor a promise to donate part of their salaries to support Italian small business. The affair has become known as Rimborsopoli, “-opoli” being an Italian particle like our “gate” that gets attached to the end of every political scandal.
Like the French Socialists and German Social Democrats who have seen their votes crater in recent elections, the Italian Democratic party is struggling to find a raison d’être. Renzi and his colleagues suffer, as the Corriere della Sera newspaper puts it, from “the fact that they only express an opinion on important issues after their opponents have done so.” Their problems go even deeper than that. In the early years of globalization, parties that in the industrial age had represented workingmen were able to pump up votes by abandoning their old constituents for new ones. This was a bonanza for a few electoral cycles, until the party’s traditional voters realized they had been not just jilted but tricked. That happened to Italian social democrats as surely as it did to American Democrats. Renzi spent two years pushing a referendum to reform the Senate and strengthen his own central government, even hiring Barack Obama’s adviser Jim Messina to run it. When he lost by almost 20 points, he had to resign.
The Socialist party’s internal travails have rendered less logical an Italian system that was illogical to begin with. Renzi’s replacement, Paolo Gentiloni, is a political wallflower, a placeholder, an unassuming and unambitious-seeming politician. For that reason, he has gradually become the most popular politician in the country, the only prime minister in a quarter-century whose approval ratings—which now stand at the astronomical, for Italy, level of 47 percent—have risen during his term. And although Renzi, as the leader of the Democrats, is their official candidate for prime minister, he would never have the votes to take that office back. Should the elections produce no clear winner, Gentiloni could be the first choice to head an interim or technocratic government.
European pundits, journalists, and commentators are almost unanimously in favor of the European Union. They have spent much of this election season, particularly since the death of Pamela Mastropietro, fretting that the Italian elections could topple another anti-European domino. First the intransigence against migration policy laid down by Poland and Hungary, then Brexit, now Italy, and next . . . ?
But serious strife awaits even if Italy’s government does not turn on the E.U. As in Germany, the public has mobilized against an unpopular coalition government, with especial contempt for the touchy-feely social democrats who have been steering it. It is too early to rule out a result similar to the dangerous one that Germany’s elections produced—a return to power of the government the public repudiated with an even larger role for the very forces the public liked least. It’s okay when voting produces results that are unacceptable to elites—democracy is supposed to work that way. What is more dangerous is when voting produces results unacceptable to voters.
Christopher Caldwell is a national correspondent at THE WEEKLY STANDARD.
