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.