The Italian Elections
The latest, and most grave, example of the current tide of right-wing populism can be found in Italy.
We should be paying attention to Italy. Via the NYT: Why Italy’s Insular Election Is More Important Than It Looks.
The entire piece is worth a read, as there are a lot of details, but the first several paragraphs will give one the basic idea:
The campaign before Italy’s national elections on Sunday has been self-obsessed and often petty and unedifying. But it has been instructive about one thing: The political forces that have torn at the global order and the European Union have settled into the mainstream.
Fascists rallied in large numbers in Italian piazzas. The country experienced its worst political violence in years. Formerly unthinkable suggestions, like the mass deportation of migrants, became virtually routine.
The reanimation of Italy’s political ghosts is a worrying harbinger for a European Union already weakened by Britain’s decision to leave the bloc, the electoral setbacks of Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany, the long shadow of Russia and the rise of an illiberal bloc of nations in the eastern part of the Continent.
In elections in the United States and elsewhere in Europe, the far right had shifted the debate within the political establishment. But in Italy, the birthplace of fascism, they are a full partner in it.
UPDATE (James Joyner): John Oliver’s take is worth a look as well:
The center parties have no answers and the left is non-existent. Gravitational pull toward the right goes unopposed.
A few days ago Bloomberg ran an article on Berlusconi, whom the NYT article describes as a “nominal moderate” despite his having promised to expel the nation’s 600,000 undocumented migrants. According to the Bloomberg article:
Something familiar about all this.
@Kylopod: One of the disturbing elements of the current election cycle is the Berlusconi, who is terrible in any number of ways, may be one of the better options.
@Steven L. Taylor: Maybe. I was hearing similar arguments about Trump during the 2015-16 GOP primary season.
@Kylopod: Trump was decidedly the worst of the GOP candidates. There are actual neo-fascists running in Italy, and Berlusconi isn’t one of them. That makes Berlusconi not the worst. I say that not to endorse, or even praise, Berlusconi, but to simply point out how bad the situation is.
@Steven L. Taylor:
I agree with you now, but at the time I wasn’t convinced of that, and I wasn’t alone. I’m trying to dig up a post in which I made the argument, but I can’t find it right now. I did find one post from Nov. 2015 in which I said I’d have crossed over and voted for Trump in an open GOP primary if given the chance. gVOR08’s reply largely captured my own thinking at the time:
In Feb. 2016, Jonathan Chait wrote an article elaborating on this position. The basic idea was that out of all the Republican candidates, Trump was the least likely to win the general election (I still believe that’s true–well, okay, maybe Ben Carson would have been a weaker general-election candidate), and if by some chance he did win and became president, he was so weak and non-ideological he was the likeliest of all the GOP candidates to deviate from the party’s destructive agenda.
Of course there were several problems with this argument, and the most obvious was that it was dangerous to put the country’s nuclear codes in reach of a personality as unstable as Trump. At the time, however, I and many others were still convinced Trump was some kind of performance artist putting on a shtick, like Andy Kaufman doing Tony Clifton. Given my limited knowledge of Italian politics, I’ll take your word for it that Berlusconi truly isn’t the worst of the bunch. But after what happened here in the states, I can’t help raising an eyebrow whenever I hear this type of argument made about another flamboyantly narcissistic nativist.
@Kylopod:
Yeah, I never bought that line. Not even close.
@Kylopod:
Again: he’s pretty horrible, although the main difference is that Berlusconi has already been PM, so we have a good idea of what we would be getting if his faction were to win (he can’t serve for another year due to a corruption ruling from last time).
I am just saying that in comparison to neo-fascists, he is is better. A damning statement, one would think.