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.)