Demagogues Win as Europe’s Populist Tide Sweeps Italy

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/05/opinion/italy-election-populist.html

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The Italian elections on Sunday were the latest powerful wave in a tidal turn of anti-immigrant, anti-European Union and antidemocratic fervor that has ravaged European politics. The vote was a stinging rejection of traditional parties, and of national leadership that has been frustrated by a flood of migrants from Africa and the Middle East and stymied by years of stagnation.

While the populist parties that were the two biggest vote-getters were different in many ways, both want to abandon the euro and support for migrants, and shared conspiracy theories about bankers, vaccines and the 9/11 attacks.

The lack of an outright winner or obvious coalition promises a long and wobbly slog before a government, most likely unstable, takes shape.

The big winner, with about 32 percent of the vote, was the Five Star Movement, a grass-roots mélange of libertarians, progressives, Euroskeptics and other disenchanted voters formed less than a decade ago by a comedian, and now led by a 31-year-old college dropout, Luigi Di Maio.

Next was the far-right League (formerly Northern League) led by Matteo Salvini, 44. An enthusiastic fan of Marine Le Pen’s National Front and Donald Trump, Mr. Salvini fanned sadly familiar flames of nationalism, ethnocentrism and xenophobia, promising, among other things, “cleansing” Italy of immigrants, threatening force.

The League ran with Silvio Berlusconi’s Forza Italia party. If there was a sliver of good news it was that the party of Mr. Berlusconi, forerunner of today’s populists who was forced out as prime minister in 2011 in a swirl of sex scandals and legal troubles, took only 14 percent of the vote.

The biggest blow was to the governing Democratic Party, led by Matteo Renzi until his resignation on Monday. It sagged to a mere 19 percent of the vote. The party, which has led Italy in a technocratic direction for the past five years, pulled Italy out of recession and had been trying to modernize its economy. But the nation’s problems proved too great for it to resist the rise of extremism and demagogy.

Whatever government emerges will have a tough time satisfying voters’ expectations while coping with Italy’s real economic problems, including the largest public debt in the European Union and high youth unemployment. As Greece learned earlier, it’s one thing to rage against European rules; it’s a far different thing to try to buck them.

Italy now poses a major challenge to the European project, already badly battered by the Brexit vote in Britain and the illiberal drift of Poland, Hungary and other East and Central European countries. That promise of instability and uncertainty is no doubt being celebrated in the Kremlin. (Both the Five Star Movement and the League have argued against union sanctions on Russia.) Italy is not likely to quit the union or drop the euro, but a government hostile to both is a headache to Brussels and the deeper integration championed by President Emmanuel Macron of France and Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany. They will now need to decide whether to press ahead or hold off a while.