© REUTERS/Tony Gentile

Giuseppe Conte, a 53-year-old lawyer and professor, was an unknown on Italy’s political scene—until Monday, that is. He was thrust into the spotlight when Luigi Di Maio, leader of the anti-establishment Five Star Movement (M5S), and coalition partner Matteo Salvini, who heads up the far-right Lega (“League”), nominated Conte to steer their “government of change” as prime minister.

The decision to nominate a complete political novice as premier was unprecedented, but then these are unprecedented times for complex Italy: Almost three months of political wrangling, two former rivals not only buried their significant differences but also united in their determination to break from the status quo for good.

After Conte survived scrutiny over his credentials—he was accused of embellishing his university studies on his CV—president Sergio Mattarella handed him a mandate to form a cabinet and start putting the new government’s program in place. That program includes a list of pricey fiscal pledges, with both a flat tax and an universal basic income, as well as a raft of hardline policies against illegal immigrants. The policy document, titled “Contract for the Government of Change,” also calls for sanctions against Russia to be withdrawn, EU treaties to be renegotiated, unauthorized Roma camps and mosques to be shut down, and imams to be registered.

More than 90 percent of supporters from both the M5S and Lega backed the program, leaving Mattarella little choice but to ratify a government that many analysts believe will leave the eurozone’s third-biggest economy in peril and immigrants more vulnerable.

“The voters of these two parties are very happy because they are in power, so there won’t be any rebellion from them. The parties were out to grab power and they grabbed it,” said Mauro Calise, a politics professor at the University of Naples Federico II.

Conte’s path to the premier’s office could still be derailed, however, by President Mattarella’s strong reservations over the coalition’s pick for finance minister: Paolo Savona, an 81-year-old economist who wants to pull Italy out of the euro. 

Turbulence Ahead

Salvini and Di Maio both campaigned on a highly euroskeptic platform, and they have continued to challenge the EU since Italy’s March election. Yet in his first public address on Wednesday, Conte moved to allay fears in Brussels by saying that Italy would indeed stay in the EU.

Even so, in keeping with the two parties’ populist rhetoric, he also pledged to be the “defense lawyer” of the Italian people and protect their interests in Europe and abroad.

“[The speech] was a tool to demonstrate that the government would not be an adversary of European and international institutions, but you can find every element of populism in his discourse as well,” said Massimiliano Panarari, a politics professor at Rome’s Luiss University.

“What does Conte mean when he presents himself as a ‘lawyer of the people?’ It’s very artificial. He also has the problem of demonstrating to his political stakeholders—Di Maio and Salvini—that he will be close to their political desires and narrative.”

With Salvini and Di Maio pulling the strings, it is unlikely that Conte will have much influence. Mauro Calise, the politics professor from Naples, pointed out that Conte may be an expert in law, but those are not necessarily the skills he’ll need as prime minister.

“It’s not so much a matter of experience, which is important, but political autonomy. Conte has been put there from out of nowhere by these two leaders simply because neither one could agree on the other being prime minister—that’s the only reason he is there. It’s a mess,” added Calise.

Deep in the Red

The government will be under pressure to deliver the financial incentives promised to an austerity-weary electorate during the campaign. But with Italy’s public debt at more than 130 percent of GDP, there will inevitably be clashes with the EU.

The first key fiscal test will come in September, with the unveiling of an updated economic policy plan, followed by the drafting of the 2019 budget in October. Both will need approval from Brussels.

“Given the very limited margins available to the government on fiscal policy, the stringent EU deficit reduction requirements, and the fragile state of Italian public finances, even limited fiscal slippage could risk creating a conflict with the EU and undermining market confidence,” Federico Santi, an Italy analyst at Eurasia Group, wrote earlier this month.

In that respect, the government’s longevity will very much depend on how its navigates the financial challenges over the next six months.

“At the beginning they’ll try to make things smooth and not be too aggressive,” said Calise. “Europe will also be very cautious—they don’t want the Italian situation to explode. But once the honeymoon period is over and tough decisions need to be made, that’s when the difficulties will arise.”

If Conte succeeds in installing a government, then pundits forecast it faltering within a year. In that case, Di Maio and Salvini would inevitably eschew responsibility before readying themselves for new elections—and put the blame for any failures squarely on Conte. So even as concerns over the new Italian government run deep in Brussels, it might not be around all that long.

“This government is unlikely to prove stable in the medium-term,” Santi wrote in his note. “The two parties’ ideological differences, the challenges they will face given the limited fiscal space available, and the fact that the ‘mainstream’ parties’ retreat makes M5S and Lega natural rivals are all likely to create friction between them going forward. This creates a latent risk of early elections, possibly as early as Spring 2019. In any case, this government is unlikely to last a full five-year term.”

The post The Big Gamble appeared first on Berlin Policy Journal - Blog.

© REUTERS/Ciro De Luca

There was no clear winner in Italy’s general election—not that you would get that impression from the euphoria emanating from two populist parties, the Five Star Movement (M5S) and the League.

Luigi Di Maio, the 31-year-old leader of the anti-establishment M5S, hasn’t stopped grinning since March 4. On Tuesday, he told reporters that the elections were “a slap in the face for the old way of doing politics.” Meanwhile his rival Matteo Salvini, who heads the far-right League, stamped an image of himself onto bottles of wine with the words: “My Prime Minister is him.”

The pair certainly have reason to celebrate. M5S became the biggest single party in Italy’s general election, taking almost 33 percent of the vote; the League, with 18 percent, was the surprise winner within a coalition that included Silvio Berlusconi’s center-right Forza Italia and the smaller far-right Brothers of Italy. The coalition got more votes—37 percent—but neither side has the majority required to form a government.

After a gloomy campaign that hinged mainly on immigration and pies in the sky, Italians signaled that they wanted change, trouncing the “old guard”—Forza Italia and former Prime Minister Matteo Renzi’s center-left Democratic Party, which scored its worst result ever with just 19 percent.

No Winners, No Losers

In reality, there were no real winners or losers in Italy’s election. The vote produced a stalemate that could drag on for months, making it difficult even for pundits to envisage what form Italy’s next government will take.

All they can agree on is that caretaker prime minister Paolo Gentiloni of the Democratic Party will have to steer the ship with a steady hand in the meantime.

“I’m really lost,” said Roberto D’Alimonte, a politics professor at Rome’s Luiss University. “Everyone is confused, it’s a very chaotic situation. But the markets don’t seem to be worried. We’ll have to wait and see. We saw the same thing in Germany, Belgium, the Netherlands,” he said. “Time is essential.”

The first stages of haggling over a coalition government have produced little in the way of concrete results: Di Maio has called on rivals to bring him “proposals” that might help form a government, although he resolutely refuses to budge on M5S’s platform. The party’s most likely bedfellows are the League or the Democratic Party. The League’s Salvini has insisted his coalition should govern with him as prime minister, but he has not excluded an alliance with M5S.

Meanwhile, internal strife continues to cripple the Democratic Party since former prime minister Matteo Renzi announced he was resigning in the aftermath of the disastrous election performance. Interim leader Maurizio Martina wants the party to regroup in opposition. On Monday he called on M5S and the League to take responsibility. “The time for propaganda is over,” he said. “Your citizens asked for you to govern, now do it.”

Down But Not Out

That leaves Italy’s Berlusconi and his Forza Italia. The 81-year-old media magnate went into the elections believing he would be the kingmaker. He emerged weaker than expected, but not completely out of the game.

Still, with M5S pledging to get tough on conflict of interest rules and introduce a new law for media businesses, an alliance would be Berlusconi’s worst nightmare.  After all, one of his central aims is to protect his business interests.

“Berlusconi is not sleeping at night because if M5S gets into government, those are the first two things it will do,” said D’Alimonte.

As the parties continue to squabble, the next major milestone will be the election of speakers for the two houses of parliament—the Chamber of Deputies and the Senate—at the end of March.

The most likely scenario is an M5S parliamentarian being appointed speaker of the Chamber of Deputies and one from the League leading the Senate.

“The election of the house speakers is a potential litmus test,” said Francesco Galietti, the founder of Policy Sonar, a Rome-based consultancy. “But at the same time, it is a little bit misleading,” he added. “Obviously having M5S and the League together is a scary prospect for outsiders, so investors could jump to the conclusion that it foreshadows a government.”

Gro-Gro-Ko?

There has been some speculation that we could see a broad coalition made up of all the key players on the political landscape, led by M5S. But because Italy’s various parties have such starkly different platforms, D’Alimonte finds such a union difficult to imagine. Galietti said that while momentum is building for the so-called Gro-Gro-Ko, one of the main questions would be whether the cabinet is made up of technocrats or politicians.

“There will be enormous disappointment if Italian voters find out that having voted en-masse for anti-establishment parties they instead get a mainstream government,” said Galietti.

The post Italy’s Impasse appeared first on Berlin Policy Journal - Blog.

Artwork © Dominik Herrmann

Italy has found itself in the middle of a vicious election campaign leading up to the March 4 vote. It is more of an election war, really, fought with lies, propaganda, distortion, intolerance, violence, and a torrent of hatred.

A glance at the country’s social media is enough to get a sense that this is not simply a matter of differences of opinion, nor is it about persuading voters. Anyone with a different view is not simply a political opponent―they are an arch enemy, who must be destroyed along with their ideas. In Italy, political confrontation has always oscillated between drama and melodrama. But the punches being swung this time around are increasingly brutal.

The weekly newspaper L’Espresso produced a catalogue of such insults at the end of last year, gathered under the title “Die, You Bastard.” The collection showed that regular social media users are far from the only ones unscrupulously venting their rage. Politicians and media outlets seem to completely underestimate the potential for violence that comes from these tirades of hate.

For example, just before parliament voted on the controversial new electoral law last year, an MP from the Five Star Movement (M5S) wrote to Ettore Rosato, a Social Democrat who helped draft the bill, saying: “Rosato, let’s make a pact: if the constitutional court approves your law, we’ll burn you alive.” Meanwhile, Vittorio Feltri, editor-in-chief of the daily Libero―allied to the populist Northern League―posted on Facebook: “Dying of malaria is not normal. The infection is coming from far away, from black Africa. Stop the intake!”

For its part, a far-left movement dug out a photo of former Prime Minister and leader of the Christian Democrat, Aldo Moro, who was kidnapped by Red Brigades militants on March 16, 1978, and found dead a few weeks later in the trunk of a Renault 4. His kidnappers had taken the photo during his captivity and passed it to the Italian media. The public was shocked, and even today the photo is seen as a dramatic testament to a period of trauma.

Yet that didn’t stop the left-wing extremists from swapping Moro’s face for that of Matteo Salvini, leader of the Northern League―complete with a gag over his mouth. The doctored image was captioned: “I have a dream.” The next day, the Rome-based daily Il Tempo published a similar picture, this time with the image of lower house speaker Laura Boldrini.

In fact, Boldrini seems to have become the object of the most vile and extreme attacks―because she is a woman, because of her pro-refugee stance, and because she is on the left. One activist for the “Us with Salvini” list responded to an alleged rape by an immigrant by asking: “When will this happen to Boldrini and the women of the Social Democratic party?” This was outdone by an even more alarming post featuring an image of a beheaded Boldrini and the words: “This is the end she had to meet in order to appreciate her friends’ customs.”

Throwing Up the Media

The press, of course, have not been left out, and the former leader of the M5S movement, Beppe Grillo, has been particularly vicious. “I’d like to eat you all up and get so full that I can vomit you straight back out again,” he told the press on one occasion.

Grillo’s aggressive and powerful rhetoric is not the only reason that there seem to be no more taboos when it comes to verbal confrontation. But it is undeniably a factor. In 2005, Grillo wrote a blog post announcing the start of his “Parlamento Pulito” (“Clean Up Parliament”) campaign. It targeted 20 MPs who had retained their seats in parliament despite being convicted of crimes. Grillo bought a whole page in the International Herald Tribune to expose the issue. He attracted a lot of attention from abroad, but far less in Italy itself, starting with the media. So he changed his tactics, and organized the first national “V Day” for September 8, 2007. V stands for the expletive vaffanculo, meaning “fuck off.” This time around, Italians and the country’s media were listening.

Political disputes in Italy have always been something of a gladiator fight. But the current confrontation has flagrantly crossed the boundaries of civility so often that Amnesty International Italy has started the campaign “Count to Ten.” “There’s not an hour that goes by in which social media, or traditional media, aren’t reporting on the latest hate-filled statements, and anyone can be the target, whether migrant, woman, Roma, LGBT person, or a member of a religious minority,” the NGO wrote on its website. The campaign features a barometer measuring the hate level in the run up to the election.

It is hard to say whether this project is really achieving its goal of getting people to dial down their tone. But the threat is certainly real—these hate tirades are followed by actions, as the last few weeks have shown. A few days after an 18-year-old was murdered in the city of Macerata and a group of Nigerians came under suspicion, an Italian man embarked on a shooting spree targeting African immigrants. During a visit by Boldrini to a Milan suburb, the right-wing extremist group Casa Pound publicly burned a straw puppet effigy of the lawmaker. Brenda Barnini, mayor of the Tuscan town of Empoli, was sent an envelope containing two bullets, a swastika, and the message: “You prefer niggers to your own countrymen. We will finish you.”

Hugo von Hofmannsthal once wrote: “Words are not in the power of men; men are in the power of words.” At the moment, Italy seems to be in the power of some particularly nasty ones.

The post Words Don’t Come Easy: “Vaffanculo” appeared first on Berlin Policy Journal - Blog.