Is Italy's Populist Movement on the Ropes?

By Henry Srebrnik, [Fredericton, NB] Daily Gleaner
 

Have Italy’s populist and right-wing political movements begun to falter? 

Matteo Salvini’s League failed to overturn decades of leftist rule in the northern region of Emilia-Romagna in an election on Jan. 26. 

This followed Salvini’s decision last August to leave the coalition government he had formed with the Five-Star Movement after the 2018 national election, expecting to trigger another election that polls predicted Salvini would win. 

Instead, Five-Star opportunistically joined up with the center-left Democratic Party (PD) in a new coalition, shunting him into opposition.

In Emilia-Romagna, the League’s candidate, Lucia Borgonzoni, took 43.6 per cent of the vote against 51.4 per cent for the incumbent PD Governor Stefano Bonaccini.

Salvini’s rightist bloc did secure a resounding victory in a separate regional election in the underdeveloped southern toe of Italy, Calabria.

Five-Star is in far bigger trouble as a result of joining forces with the “establishment” in a national government. It has seen its support slide in recent months, leading to a wave of defections amongst its lawmakers, including some to the League.

This has led to the resignation of its leader Luigi Di Maio. Its caretaker leader Vito Crimi admitted that the movement was in disarray. In the Emilia-Romagna and Calabria elections, it had a disastrous day.

But Italy has not seen the last of Salvini. This previously obscure municipal councillor from Milan became the most powerful figure in the country in the past decade, with an anti-immigrant message that resonated with millions of Italians as refugees from Africa and the Middle East crossed the Mediterranean.

Since 2014, more than half a million people have landed in Italy, a country that is home to 60 million people and is 80 per cent coastline.

The party’s previous iteration, as the Northern League, was founded in 1991. Its goal was to split the north, an industrious and prosperous society, away from what it described as the backward and dependent south.

In 2013 Salvini became the party’s leader and reshaped it. To achieve national prominence, Salvini needed a new electoral strategy. The Northern League was a separatist movement targeting Rome as a nest of bureaucratic corruption, and the south as a land of idlers and parasites.

By the early 2010s, it was clear this approach had led to an impasse. There had been no separation from the south and none looked remotely likely.

So Salvini changed course: The League changed its name and abandoned the opposition between the two halves of Italy. It started courting, and winning over, voters in the Italian south, land of economic stagnation and high unemployment --the same southern regions from which his party once wanted to secede.

Salvini began to tap the country’s growing frustration with the European Union in a country where every budget had to be approved by the European Commission; he started to attack the EU bureaucrats in Brussels.

Salvini has long been obsessed with immigration as a negative force in Italy. So instead of southerners, he targeted immigrants, thus positioning the party to speak for all Italians, the whole nation, against “oppressors and intruders.”

Salvini’s formula has been to combine tough talk on immigration and emotional defenses of national identity.

The general election of 2018 was a milestone. Its main base remained the north, but the League was now also present in the south, though it gained fewer votes overall than its populist rival, the Five-Star Movement.

The two joined forces in a government whose main point of agreement was hostility to the EU and its single currency, the Euro, which they held responsible for the imposition of austerity on Italy. Salvini became a deputy prime minister and minister of the interior.

But eventually Salvini went too far in trying to impose his will on his Five-Star partners; the latter had, after all, won more votes.

So the Five-Star Movement, putting aside their disagreements with the Democratic Party, formed an alliance with them based solely on sidelining Salvini, who has mocked it as a government “made in Brussels.”

Meanwhile, Italy’s Senate on Feb. 12 voted to allow prosecutors to try him on charges of illegally detaining migrants at sea last summer. They “will be defeated by history,” asserted a defiant Salvini.