In March, Italian voters decided they had more to fear from corruption than from incompetence. Despite the warnings of experts, they voted overwhelmingly for two parties that want Italy to reclaim its sovereignty from the overweening European Union. One of those parties, the League, is on the nationalist “right”; it has played only a small role on the national scene since it arose at the end of the Cold War. The other, the Five-Star Movement (M5S) is on the madcap “left”; it has never been in government at all.
There is nothing odd about Italians’ behavior. Americans similarly thumbed their noses at elite analysts when they elected Donald Trump, and Britons rejected the E.U. in a referendum the same year. What is unusual is how slow the E.U. was to recognize the threat. The details of the policies that the League and M5S plan to enact leaked last week, and it is striking how much these juggernauts of right and left have been able to agree on: a renegotiation of the E.U. treaties, the write-off of part of Italy’s $2.7 trillion debt, a loosening of E.U.-monitored deficit requirements, an end to the diplomatic ostracism of Russia, a hard line against the hundreds of thousands of African illegal immigrants who have been pouring out of boats onto beaches across Italy, and the preparation of a currency instrument called the “mini-BOT,” which could replace the euro in a pinch.
Suddenly there were lectures from pro-E.U. newspapers (Italy was causing “angst,” according to the Süddeutsche Zeitung and “trembling,” according to Le Monde) and warnings from pro-E.U. politicians (“If the new government takes the risk of breaking its commitments on debt, the deficit, [and] bank reform, then the financial stability of the eurozone would be in danger,” said France’s economics minister Bruno Le Maire).
The tone, with its combination of alarm and condescension, gives an idea of why European bosses had been taking Italy’s populist landslide in stride: Countries tied into the European Union are not really democracies, as most people understand the word. There are lots of avenues, formal and informal, for appealing and overturning popular verdicts. In 2011, European leaders were able to drive premier Silvio Berlusconi from power by withholding credit from the Italian economy and to force the cancellation of a Greek referendum on membership in the euro. Germans voted last year to punish their chancellor Angela Merkel for her decision to open the country’s borders and repudiated her junior coalition partner, the Social Democrats. The result, after five months of negotiations, was a new Merkel government in which the Social Democrats had an even bigger role.
Italy’s populists have learned these lessons and ruses. Five Star leader Luigi Di Maio distrusts what he calls the political “caste” on principle. The League’s Matteo Salvini, a former leftist, has proved an able politician. In the days after he and Di Maio agreed to cooperate, he launched via Facebook video a preemptive strike against any future campaign to sow doubts. Bearded, bumptious, no stranger to the pasta buffet, he knew by heart the whole litany of establishment warnings and answered it point by point before it showed up in the newspapers and broadcasts. Pinching all his fingers together and shaking the back of his hand at the camera like a real Italian, Salvini spoke for 18 minutes:
Salvini and Di Maio, each of them unwilling to see the other as prime minister, have agreed between them to give the post to Giuseppe Conte, a lawyer close to M5S with expertise in bureaucratic streamlining and no political experience whatsoever. The coming months will see a battle between the two party heads to determine who will lead the anti-establishment movement. This will depend on whether Salvini, as minister of the interior, is able to expel immigrants faster than Di Maio, as minister of economic development, is able to create jobs.
The odds are against their successful cooperation. And those eager to see the government fail still have a lot of cards in their hands. Italian president Sergio Mattarella, who has a constitutional responsibility to oversee the formation of governments, spent much of May lecturing the two parties. He praised one of his predecessors of the 1950s for throwing a government with a popular mandate out on its ear. Now that the public has voted overwhelmingly for two explicitly anti-European parties, Mattarella is scrutinizing the government’s makeup to assure its pro-European sentiment. Conte may be the weak link. He said after his provisional appointment that he was “aware of the necessity to confirm the European and international position of Italy.”
But the international position of Italy is so diminished that it is beyond the capacity of E.U. well-wishers to shore it up. Salvini’s criticism is basically correct: Italy’s economy has shrunk since the turn of the century. Its debt is rising, so are interest rates, and its population is falling. Italy lost 100,000 people last year, and it will lose 16 percent of its population by mid-century at current rates. If the population doesn’t shrink, it will only be because Italy’s southern shores have been overwhelmed by immigrants from Africa. In the face of this incursion, European Commission president Jean-Claude Juncker has said: “We remain attentive to safeguard the rights of the Africans who are in Italy.” That’s all Brussels is going to do—not share the burden of rescuing, maintaining, and finding homes for them. Italy can do that itself.
There are politicians like Juncker all over the West. They seem sincerely to believe the average voter is only one good lecture away from changing his mind about everything. But they are wrong. Italy has hit the wall. Populists are taking power there not because the public has heard too little talk, but because it has heard too much.
