hi boys, hi sisters,
i don't feel any more italian than i feel european. i think i have more in
common with somebody living in Liège or Barcelona than somebody living in
the Italian provinces (invariably nightmarish from Lombardy to Calabria).
so i don't claim i have a special grasp of the italian mind (wotever it is)
and altho i happen to be born here and speak the language, i don't
particularly feel connected to my own 'people' (yes i do eat pasta, no i
didnt cheer zidane gettin kicked out).
Still March 4 was a watershed in Italian modern history. The Second
Republic (in existence since Bribesville and the rise of Berlusconi and
Prodi in the 1990s) has crumbled along with its protagonists: Forza Italia
and Ulivo-PD. The ante-litteram macronian Renzi is the biggest loser, but
his left critics have evaporated, while Berlusconi was surpassed by evil
nazipopulist Salvini with his Lega ('Nord' was dropped in a successful bid
to make the party national - it can be now considered equivalent to Front
National in France and Austria's FDP). The clear winner is the 5-Star
Movement, which scored almost a third of the votes and in many areas of the
Mezzogiorno got absolute majority. Even if Salvini got 18% of votes, he
leads a coalition that has more seats than M5S in parliament. Thus there's
two contenders for power and no clear majority in sight: hence the current
stalemate. Many activists (myself included) are trying to push the PD to
give backing to a 5star government which would implement conditional
minimum income and a minimum wage law. However, italian family capitalism
and its media seem to favor the right-wing alternative (i.e. a rightist
government somehow supported by the PD to appease financial markets).
A caricature of the vote could be that Northern small entrepreneurs voted
for Lega's flat tax and Southern unemployed youth voted for 5Star's basic
income. There is truth in that, however if we dissaggregate the vote
according to provincial districts (the one in use for the proportional
share at the Chamber of Deputies, where all Italian citizens over 18 are
eligible to vote), we see that such a split is not so clear-cut. For
instance 5stars triumph in deindustrialized Liguria as well as in exporting
Emilia, and confirm their great score in Piedmont. It's noteworthy that the
PD's last remaining strongholds are in Tuscany (Renzi is florentine) and in
Milan, where the city center gives PCI-like percentages to the PD. The
informational middle-class and financial bourgeoisie of Italy's wealthiest
city bucked the general trend and voted for europe and innovation,
eschewing either right-wing or social populism.
The radical left was an unexpected protagonist of the campaign, due to
racism and antifascism being at the center of pubblic attention after a
leghista+fascista tried to commit a mass murder of blacks in Macerata (and
a Senegalese activist was shot and killed by a fascist in Florence right
after the elections). As the official left (3% at the ballot) waffled about
macerata, and the PD persuaded the three red institutions of the left in
Italy, the partisans' association ANPI, the formerly communist union CGIL,
and the leftist cultural association ARCI, to call off a national demo,
there was a rank-and-file insurrection and centri sociali and the antifa
network seized the day and convened all the Italian movement in Macerata.
>From then on, antifa protests spread to Bologna, Palermo, Turin, Milano and
reunited all of our people like we hadn't seen in a long time. Main
beneficiary at the ballot of this ferment was Potere al Popolo (Power to
the People), a marxist-leninist red-star formation born in Naples (theater
of an interesting left-populist municipalist experiment), which got a
paltry 1.1% but according to some has potential (if the autonomists are not
in and it sticks to an anti-european, jobs-for-all platform, it won't go
far). The main result of the antifa movement of '18 is that the neofascists
of Casa Pound got a pitiful score, in spite of media attention, and the
neonazists of Forza Nuova were taught a lesson they won't easily forget.
Going back to Europe, it's clear this vote goes against the Macron-Merkel
plan-in-the-making for liberal restoration, just like the Austrian vote
(and Dutch government's recent europhobic stance). Of the two formations,
it's certainly Salvini's Lega that is benefiting from opposition to
Maastricht and Brussels, while the 5Star movement is an odd beast that
could end up being a lot less anti-establishment that its critics fear.
They were very close to join United-States-of-Europe Verhofstadt's yellow
liberals in the European parliament and have quietly shelved the idea of
holding a referendum on the euro. In fact, the European establishment and
the international financial press seem more welcoming of cinquestelle than
the Italian establishment. Fact is that the privileges enjoyed by family
capitalism (agnellis, benettons, debenedettis etc) and top bureaucrats
(public managers are paid extravagant salaries in italy) would be taken
away by a 5star government, while a lega government would keep capitalist
hierarchies intact and make sure that entrepreneurs find the low-wage
workers they need, unencumbered by subsidies to the poor. It's true that Di
Maio (their Spitzenkandidat) is an intellectual dwarf and that Grillo can
be mercurial and bullying, but for all their downsides they are neither
misogynist nor homophobic, and their xenophobia is utilitarian rather than
ideological. Salvini is a guy that swore on the Gospels in Milan's piazza
duomo that he'll become prime minister and doesn't want Disney's Elsa to go
queer. He's pure reaction of the worst kind. It's Putin and Trump's
legitimate child. He's gotta be stopped.
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