The Italian elections have resulted in the predicted swing against the centre-left pro-EU Democratic Party, the successor of Italy’s once mighty Communist Party – the party of Togliatti and Gramsci – and today the Party of outgoing Prime Minister Paolo Gentiloni and former Prime Minister Matteo Renzi.
From a position in 2008, when the Democratic Party won 37% of the vote in the parliamentary elections of that year, it fell to 25% of the vote in the elections of 2013, and has no fallen further to just 19% of the vote in the elections which have been held now.
The result is that the Democratic Party has now fallen to third place behind the combined Beppe Grillo’s insurrectionary Five Star Movement (which won 32% of the vote) and the right wing alliance nominally led by Matteo Salvini but whose best know figure is Silvio Berlusconi, the individual who has dominated Italian politics since the Tangentopoli scandal of the early 1990s.
As it happen, the result of the election was almost as big a blow for Berlusconi as it was for the Democratic Party. Expectations that he would emerge as the ‘kingmaker’ in forming a new Italian government have been dashed, with his Forza Italia Party winning only 14%, less than its alliance partner, the considerably more right wing Northern League, which won 17.7% of the vote, and which is now clearly established as a powerful force in Lombardy and the Veneto.
What the Italian election in fact shows is the gathering pace across Europe of the swing against establishment parties which are strongly identified with the EU.
Though Berlusconi has had his own major falling outs with the EU establishment at various points during his political career, he is nonetheless very much a member of the Italian establishment and is someone who has long played a major role in European and EU politics.
As a result Italian voters refused to turn to him, just as they turned their backs on the even more strongly pro-EU Democratic Party, choosing instead to vote in large numbers for the Five Star Movement and the Northern League, both of which have been strongly critical of the EU, and both of which have at times considered the possibility of Italy quitting the Eurozone, though neither of them as it happens advocates it now.
The Italian election in fact serves as a further case study of the malign effect of the draining of the life blooded of politics in Europe as the EU has become increasingly centralised and technocratic.
It is clear that despite the well publicised differences between Donald Trump and Angela Merkel, Donald Trump’s election has made no difference to the operation of the system.
As a result we have seen since the Brexit vote the far better than expected result of the Jeremy Corbyn led Labour Party in Britain’s 2017 general election, the rise of the AfD in Germany, growing mutinies against the EU leadership in Poland and Hungary, the recent victory of Milos Zeman in the Czech Presidential election, the strong vote for the right in the recent Austrian parliament elections, and now with the victories of the anti-EU parties in Italy.
Even in France and the Netherlands – the two countries where the anti-EU insurgency has made less of an impact than some expected – Marine Le Pen, Jean-Luc Mélenchon and Geert Wilders have won millions of votes.
Thus the parties and leaders who are increasingly winning votes are dismissed as “populists” – a label which is both meaningless and deeply anti-democratic – their voters are dismissed as ‘ultra-right’ and racist, and their electoral successes are explained by sinister Russian meddling which is supposed to occur but of which no evidence is ever found.