Populism in Charge in Italy
By Nicola Benvenuti
a prelude to a shift to the right of the European political axis …”
With the intervention of Italian Interior Minister Salvini to prevent the docking in Italian ports of the ship Acquarius loaded with African refugees, the Movimento 5 Stelle (M5S)-Lega government assumes a precise physiognomy. Salvini acts like the Prime Minister dictating the line to the entire government that can do nothing else but follow him (even if the transport minister denies that the ports have ever been closed to Acquarius or other mercy ships).
we must not hide …”
It is obvious for those who have the time and desire to study the affair that Salvini has acted in an irresponsible and improper manner from all points of view, but the shock message he wanted to send, of a change of course on the question of admitting immigrants, seems to have impacted the voters who have shown signs of appreciating his action. And this is also thanks to Spain which has offered to admit the refugees (which lets Salvini say something like “you have seen, if you are hard-nosed, the other countries which so far have denied any admittance, such as Spain, will yield “) French Presdient Macron has called Italian behavior, “repulsive” and has aroused the ire of all political forces in Italy because Macron makes this hard judgement from the pulpit of a country that has closed the borders with Italy to non-EU citizens in the town of Ventimiglia, creating inhumane situations. This is the France whose gendarmes in the Alps hunt down non-EU citizens – and the Italian volunteers who help them go to France. Volunteers whose actions are saving immigrants from certain death, given the freezing climatic conditions and their unpreparedness for such weather.
But we must not hide from the fact that Salvini’s position was welcomed by many voters, and not just on the Right. If the poll by Demos is accurate, 58% of Italians supported Salvini’s action. It should also be remembered that in the recent local elections in which almost 6 million voted, the Lega proved to be rapidly on the rise while the M5S appeared to be in difficulty. According to a recent poll, the Lega would get today 29.2% of the vote (it had 17% in the elections) while the M5S would fall to 29% (it had 32%). This should not be surprising to anyone. The League has been in government, has been administering cities and regions for years, and has solid links with local and national territories and powers. Moreover, having removed the mantle of right-wing leadership from Berlusconi, it is drying up his party, Forza Italia. The M5S is a protest movement, born of the activism of Comedian Beppe Grillo and the “Likes” obtained on social media. Its election victory was probably built by manipulating voters through profiling done by the Casaleggio company. In short, their electoral base is very volatile.
It is also clear that the government was formed with an absolutely contradictory program that assumes huge public spending. The main request of the League, in addition to the request for the expulsion of non-EU citizens, is a flat tax of 15% for companies, first, then for all citizens; while the M5S wants support for the unemployed in some form of citizen income. This proposal has garnered a very high percentages of votes in the southern regions. But the Minister of Finance, Giovanni Tria, almost literally reconfirmed the economic evaluations of the previous center-left government on the impossibility of loosening the public purse for increased public spending. Both Salvini and Di Maio, the parliamentary leader of M5S, have resized their respective positions on the program, but the contradiction remains, and it is very likely that sooner or later the government will suffer. Many observers expect the fall of the government after the next European elections, in May 2019, but if the racist proposals (as of yesterday the proposal to register the Roma – gypsies !!!) of Salvini find support in the population, the League will be moved to cash in on the consensus that could be gained through new elections, and therefore it is hard to imagine this government lasting beyond the autumn.
What is worrisome is the absence of effective opposition. The Partito Democratico (PD) will have to get out of its isolation imposed by Renzi, when he blocked any negotiation with the M5S for a government alliance. Even a completely symbolic discussion would have given the PD an opportunity to speak to the electorate about M5S. That policy of abstention instead has legitimized the embrace of Di Maio with Salvini. It gave up the possiblity of trying to insert a wedge between the two populisms (Right and Left), and to give the PD (whose traditional voters moved in part to the M5S) the image of a party that has passed the right measures laws and policies (A basic social income, containment of immigration, and credit in Europe) Such negotiations would have enabled the PD to position itself as a party that knows also how to engage in self-criticism.
Salvini uses his position as Minister of the Interior to campaign; the M5S, instead, both because of the poor quality of the management team and because of the onerous nature of its economic peoposals, has less visibility and effectiveness in the government. This is why the leaders of the M5S are increasingly restless in the face of the forceful actions of Salvini and fear like the plague any recourse to the polls that would electorally sanction their subordinate relationship in the balance of power with the Lega. The danger therefore is that the M5S becomes more and more under the sway of the Lega, already all powerful in the Center-Right coalition, giving life to a right-wing and authoritarian movement, completely unprecedented in scope in Italy since Liberation and, moreover, endowed with solid sympathies in the rest of Europe.
The formation of a populist government driven by La Lega is in fact strengthening a movement against Merkel and hostile to the Franco-German axis that has guided the European Community in recent years and which is charged with governing immigrant flows by increasing the political and financial engagement in North Africa and distributing that engagement among European countries. This movement, although still lacking a definite alternative platform, sees the Italian Lega-M5S government, populist Austria’s Sebastian Kurz and the Bavarian CSU of the German interior minister Seehofer, committed to a policy of closing borders – already requested by the countries of the so-called Visegrad group (Poland, Czech Republic, Slovakia and Hungary) – and as a prelude to a shift to the right of the European political axis.
