Italy Votes / Episode #1
To the Polls, to the Barricades....can Fascism be looming over the Quirinal?
Continuing my pledge that Andelman Unleashed will chronicle every presidential or national leadership election around the world this year, we are turning now to the landmark election in Italy. Between now and the vote on September 25, we will examine each week the evolution of the players, the issues, and especially the stakes for Italy, Europe, America and the world. Stay tuned.
Wonder what the new face of Fascism might look like in Europe? It's blonde, with a winning smile, a quick laugh and a far-right agenda that hardly includes any immigrants arriving on its shores, a hard line on law and order, and a recognition that a collapsing economy is failing workers deeply. No, it's not France's Marine Le Pen, whose far-right party did manage to score its largest parliamentary victory in history in France's National Assembly elections in June. The potential, even more likely, leader of a major European nation will be Giorgia Meloni—head of the Brothers of Italy, poised, if the early polls continue to show the kind of strength they have recently, to become the new prime minister of Italy on September 25.
Ironic, really. Because it's precisely one century ago this month that Italy's last avowedly fascist leader, Benito Mussolini, assembled his black shirt army and began his infamous March on Rome, gathering followers along the way, conquering strategic points as they converged on the capital where the head of state, King Victor Emmanuel III, simply rolled over and delivered his kingdom to the fascists in a bloodless coup.
At that moment, Hitler was just beginning to organize his own National Socialist party in Germany—taking his cue, as it happens, from the Italian's march and his subsequent surge to power. This time, no march will likely be necessary, certainly no beer halls, no putsch either. Simply a candidate who seems to be appealing to a rapidly escalating tranche of the Italian electorate. That individual is Giorgia Meloni. And who, incidentally, has characterized Mussolini as a personality who “needs to be framed in specific historical context.”
Meloni and her Brothers of Italy have exploded from 4.4% of the vote in 2018 to 24% today according to the latest polls. And much of this growth must be laid at her feet.
Of course, there is at least one other serious candidate nipping at her heels. So close—just 1 percentage point behind—is Partito Democratico (PD), the party of a previous prime minister of Italy, Enrico Letta. Still harboring the illusion that there can be a huge, moderate center in a nation that's deeply divided—right from left—PD inherited a long tradition of leftwing parties ranging from labor and social Christians to what remains of fragments of the old Italian Communist Party, once the most powerful in Europe. The Democrats' strength springs from this diversity, not to mention the three prime ministers it managed to elect between 2013 and 2018—Matteo Renzi (2014-2016), Paolo Gentiloni (2016-2018), and Enrico Letto (2013-2014), now back for a second bite at the mela (apple). Sadly, there are those who view Letto with a degree of contempt, the magazine Tempi, which calls itself a "monthly and online newspaper of news, judgment, free circulation of ideas," has branded him "Inspector Clouseau, called to commission the Democratic Party."
The tenure of each of these PD-led governments should provide un piccolo assaggio (a little taste) of the disarray of Italian politics in recent years that has only been compounded by a host of external factors from the outbreak of covid (its first arrival in Europe was in Italy) to a deepening economic crisis that has led to surging unemployment. But we will get to the principal issues in the campaign in our next installment.
Meanwhile, the personalities are especially compelling. Beyond Meloni's Brothers and the Letto's Democrats are at least nine other parties dividing the remaining 53% of the electorate. This vast menagerie includes a host of names from Italy's immediate past and distant past.
At the top of this list is Silvio Berlusconi and his FdI, or Forza d'Italia, itself another right-wing party, if only slightly more centrist than the Brothers and Meloni. Still led, as Forza has been since its launch nearly three decades ago, by Silvia Berlusconi, at 85 years old he is hardly prepared to give an inch especially not to a woman 40 years, really two generations, younger and at least 20 degrees to starboard. Though he has agreed to participate in a loose coalition of the far right led by the top-polling Meloni and her Brothers, Berlusconi said recently, in characteristically hyperbolic remarks on RAI radio, his comeback would "make everyone happy." Not to mention that “I’ve received pressure [to do so] from many, even outside Forza Italia.” Since he's now polling at barely 8%, half his number four years ago, it's hard to see just how many happy people there might be in his camp. Still, Italians, very much like the French, have a hard time ditching their long-time political stars no matter how much their luster might be fading. After all, Berlusconi was three times prime minister of Italy with perhaps the most flamboyant lifestyle of any leader in Europe, and who paid for his excesses with a conviction for tax fraud and six-year banishment from politics.
The final member of this far-right gaggle is Matteo Salvini and his ultra-populist Lega (League). It is really the creation of one man and his ambitions—Salvini—who took a deeply corrupt and fracture institution based in Italy's industrial north and transformed it into an entirely new entity with the full name of Lega per Salvini Premier (League for Salvini Prime Minister). Salvini clearly has long harbored vast European ambitions having allied himself closely with Le Pen in France and Geert Wilders’ Dutch Party for Freedom. Four years ago, Salvini was a frightening force in Italian politics. In the 2018 general elections, the League racked up 17.4%, allied itself with a broad center-right coalition led by the Five Star Movement (M5S) with 32.7% of the vote, catapulting its leader Giuseppe Conte into the post of prime minister, and Salvini was named Minister of the Interior. He was eventually forced out and has now returned to opposition. But this time around, the numbers are compelling. Together, Meloni, Berlusconi and Salvini account for 48% of the vote—nearly enough to form a government of potentially frightening prospects. They could, provided these three personalities can somehow agree amongst themselves to support a single capo di tutti capi for more than a political nanosecond. And if they can scrounge a few more votes somewhere along the political spectrum. After all there is always M5S (Five Star Movement)—the anti-establishment, environmentalist and populist party founded by comedian Beppo Grillo and now led by the former prime minister, Conte. Not surprisingly there's another former prime minister also in the mix. Matteo Renzi broke off from the Democratic Party in 2019 and formed Italia Viva which has some 5% of the projected vote.
All of these competing egos and strong doses of hubris suggest how we got to this predicament in the first place. After all, Italy did have a prime minister for the past 18 months who was every inch the consummate technocrat this economically and socially troubled nation needed to dig itself out of its woes and set it on very much the right path. Mario Draghi, successor to Conte when his government collapsed, trained as an economist with service as an academic, banker and civil servant, arrived in power in February 2021 fresh from a masterful eight year stretch as the president of the European Central Bank.
Having somehow managed to mediate between 27 disparate, often quite fractious member states and their central bankers, one would think that leadership of the Italian political landscape would be a walk in the park. And indeed, after his first year in office, Politico Europe ranked Draghi as the most powerful person in Europe, The Economist naming Italy "Country of the Year." In July 2022, riding high, Draghi boarded a special train with President Macron and Germany's new chancellor Olaf Scholz to visit Ukraine's embattled President Volodymyr Zelensky to demonstrate the solidarity of Europe with his cause. If there was any greater indication that Draghi and Italy had arrived among the leadership nations of Europe rather than the nearly failed state it had been a decade earlier, this was it.
But within days, one member of his coalition, M5S, withdrew its support for an economic stimulus plan Draghi had created in response to the energy crisis and pulled out of the coalition government Draghi had so carefully assembled. On the same day, despite having survived a confidence vote in Parliament, Draghi resigned. When Italy's president Sergio Mattarella refused to accept his resignation, a week later two more parties—Lega and FI—pulled out of the coalition and hardly surprisingly, Draghi resigned again. Now voters will be confronted with a Hobson's choice as they go to the polls on September 25. Just what kind of a choice? Well, if they really valued reliability, they'd have found a way to hold onto Mario Draghi—who actually knew how to run a country.
What we've tried to do here is to give you, dear reader, a broad sense of Italy's bizarre electoral landscape and especially the featured players. Next week, developments permitting, we'll dive more deeply into the issues that divide them and examine the wreckage that could be in store if the nation's electorate does indeed choose to drive the train straight off the cliff.
Italy Votes / Episode #1
Look forward to the next installment, which I assume will spell out the extent and nature of Italy's immigration growth. I'm also curious how many of these immigrants are eligible to vote.