Italian Elections and Politics 2018: Yellow Tide

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Most European countries have proportional electoral systems, and they've all accepted the principle at European level. There are ways to help coalitions over the majority line, like Germany's 5% threshold or Ireland's transferable vote in small constituencies.

However, there's practically no European electoral system that delivers a one-party majority on 29% of the vote (some recent opinion polls suggested the PD could win with 29%). Even the British system wouldn't do that. The majority bonus gives the same right to rule to parties winning 29% and 45%, under the correct circumstances.

Italy is certainly in a more serious situation than other European countries, but a government elected by 29% of the people would have real legitimacy questions in enforcing its reforms , particularly when that 29% seems to regard the other 71% as more or less craven or obstructionist.

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Salvini comes out in support of a flat tax. A nice reminder for the morons who think the European far-right is "economically leftist".

You shouldn't call people morons because they disagree with you; it's an offensive term. One human data point does not disprove a general claim about parties as diverse as FN, PVV, DF, Finns, etc.

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It is rather strange. The fundamentals are bad. There is still a recession and unemployment is rising. On the other hand, Italy has repudiated austerity; its debt/GDP is above 130% and rising. Italy has made no meaningful impact in European debates and much of this year's national debate has been on the fallow subject of electoral reform.

How, in spite of all these? First, the PD replaced Letta with Renzi as PM before the European Parliament elections. They were the biggest election so far, and it was effectively during a political honeymoon. Renzi's budget policy so far has been tax cuts. Cut taxes and you get praised by both anti-austerity believers and the Wall Street Journal. The economy may be doing badly, but at least the government is on your side. What's not to like? This game eventually ended Berlusconi's career, but global yields have dropped since then.

Second, Renzi has adopting many elements of Berlusconi's strategy: not just tax cuts but also the criticism of Europe and mixing a rhetoric of radicalism and liberalism with an absence of actual threats to vested interests. Renzi refrains from the PD's usual outright personal anathema against Berlusconi, who in turn publicly supports Renzi on many topics. This has undermined Forza Italia.

Third, Renzi embodies generational change within both the PD and Italian politics generally. This might appeal to young supporters of M5S and voters who didn't want to be governed by former communists who chose Forza Italia instead. But don't underestimate the value of tax cuts in creating these positive feelings.

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He simply realised the popular low-tax aspects of Berlusconi's manifesto, sidelined the unpopular parts of his own party, and added his own shiny new young face to it, while the Keynesian stimulus seems completely ineffective and lets Renzi wait for some future successor to pay the bill.

The so-called joke parties collectively outpoll the PD, which could matter in a future Senate election if there is an anti-European majority among M5S, FI and LN. Renzi's majority is built on not just PD but also one party which didn't run last time and two parties which have withered since then.

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The story of Lega Nord in Emilia-Romagna is that they held onto their 2010 vote when Forza Italia, and to a lesser extent PD, suffered massively from abstentions. Nationally, the Lega's current polling performance is not unprecedented at mid-term.

Also consider that the other centre-right and right-wing parties are now polling less than 20% combined; and that, furthermore, Lega Nord is the closest approximation to Generic Anti-Foreigner Party, albeit in a country where lots of other parties are now, also, leery of the EU.

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Unlike (say) the Greek or British electoral systems, the Italicum will grant the top party an automatic majority.

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Unlike (say) the Greek or British electoral systems, the Italicum will grant the top party an automatic majority.

Forgive me for reiterating my point in a more explicit way, but a party with as little as (say) 25% public support can win an overall majority in the Italicum by simply appealling to parties that don't get an opportunity to contest the run-off. Even the second-most popular party can do this if they win the run-off! In other words, this is not a proportional system at all, and there is little use comparing it to the British system because it is worse (more extremely majoritarian) than the British system. Blair got a majority on 35% of the multi-party vote; Bersani, last time, could have got one on 25%.

Consider the following scenario next time:
PD 35%
M5S 25%
Lega 15%
Forza 15%
etc

Best-case scenario, PD earns an artificial majority with a FPTP-type vote. Worst-case, M5S gets a majority with less than one-quarter of voters behind it.

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But one way or another, the winning party will have earned a majority of the vote.* Yes, it might be in the runoff, but it still gives it far more legitimacy than Thatcher or Blair ever had.

*Or rather 40%, actually. But still, that's fairly decent.

What if instead of a two-party runoff, you have a one-party runoff? That way, the most-popular party will always get a majority of the vote. Not allowing parties to contest a decisive election is a bad font of legitimacy.

When the British people looked at all their options, Thatcher won over 40 per cent three times, and got three majorities; Bersani would have won an equally-effective majority with just 25 per cent in an equally-free choice in 2013.

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I wouldn't over-exaggerate the PSI-Berlusconi coalescence. Even at top institutional level, most of their leaders quit politics or allied with the PDS or eventually joined The Olive Tree / The Union directly or via fringe centrist groups. Others allied sooner or later with Forza Italia, particularly those around Craxi most aggrieved about the PDS. As so often, the strange minority is more distinctive and interesting than the obvious majority, but we can easily forget the latter by focussing on the former.

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It most certainly was - it didn't die with Craxi, and ignoring all-bar-Craxi is exactly the problem.

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Friendly like Renzi!

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Since we're discussing demographics of the post WW2 alignments, can someone give me a brief description of who voted for the following minor parties?

1) Italian Social Movement
2) Republican Party
3) Radical Party
4) Liberal Party

With a grain of salt:
Southerners who missed the 20s
People who would have been very socially radical in the 20s, plus everyone in Ravenna
People who were very socially radical in the 70s
People who missed the six decades before the 20s

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Renzi had no parliamentary seat. In the previous comparable case, Monti was given a seat in the Senate, but he didn't legally require a seat to become President of the Council. Ministers can participate in, or be obliged to participate in, parliamentary debates without a seat in parliament.

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There are several European countries with regular multi-party coalitions, but in Italy participants seem to change sides more often than in, say, Sweden. Italy has a low-trust political system at elite level - would you trust Renzi or Berlusconi to respect you once you join their party? However, the Italian electoral law rewards finishing in first position around the country, which implies that big blocs beat small ones. This means

	Low trust	High trust
Rules reward position	Pre-election negotiated coalitions	Big parties
Rules are proportional	Post-election negotiated coalitions	Recurring coalitions

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Does Italy do proportional representation, constituency seats, a combination, or something else entirely? It seems like it would be proportional or similar based on the number of small parties with a shot at representation.

Take a standard FPTP system like UK House of Commons. (Remember FPTP is just a list system of magnitude one.)
Add a national list component based on the constituency vote, but that doesn't balance out the constituency results, it's counted separately. That's the Chamber of Deputies.
Replace national with regional lists. That's the Senate.
Registered living outside Italy? Just the local outside-Italy list.

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Apparently Free Flights to Italy is not a nice guy.

That sounds very plausible, but keep in mind that Tuscany and Modena-Reggio were not part of the Papal State but are emblematic parts of the Red Belt and that on the other hand large parts of Latium and the Southern Marche were part of the Papal State but are not extremely red.

Yeah, it's not a Papal States thing, I think, but land tenure and lay Catholic organisation among workers. I think what the Papal States explanation gets wrong is that it dates lay Catholic political activity in Italy way too early, when it only began in earnest in the 20th century.

But to give the initial question a really simplistic explanation:

I'm not expecting a huge write up, bit are there any good resources about how the different regions of Italy behave politically?

1. The north-east is centre-right. It was ruled by Austria, and local community organisation was strong before socialism, so lay Catholic organisations became powerful. The economy was dominated by lay Catholics to an extent unusual in Italy.
2. The north-west is contestable like similarly advanced industrial regions in the "blue banana" of Europe. Particularly around Lombardy/Milan, Berlusconi and Forza Italia have done better than the old DC party, due to both a "favourite son" local effect and his less fusty, more American modern conservative appeal.
2a. Both northern regions are resentful of being taxed by a distant Roman authority in "Southern Italy" and the well-off respond distinctly better to anti-state appeals than is usual in Europe.
2b. The linguistic minority regions even more so.
3. The red belt around the Via Aemilia and Florence. With an agricultural sharecropping system unusually prone to socialist and anti-clerical appeals, in most of this region, left-wing parties won the democratic elections since 1919 and led the resistance to wartime occupation. "Political culture" is sometimes vague to the onlooker, but here it means that in both rural or urban areas, people were socialised in proletarian institutions like peasants' unions, agricultural labourers' unions and eventually the PSI/PCI social life. Note that the left-wing parties have polled much better among elevated social classes in the red belt than elsewhere.
4. Rome and a nearby belt across Italy are like a blend of the red belt and the south. The MSI gained a distinct opening here after the war due to memories of greatness, the anti-democratic tendencies of the gerontocratic civil service appointed under Mussolini, plus a desire among ordinary voters to fight the corruption of the democratic parties. Rome remains prone to such populist forces, but has tended more toward the left as, like all Western countries, the metropolitan educated public sector has grown.
5. The south is quite poor, as you may know. It took quite a time for the left to overcome the power of DC to distribute patronage investments, a very strong reaction from property owners against changes to land tenure, the tendency for the most discontent citizens to move within Italy or emigrate, general scepticism that one's vote would matter in a state apparatus dominated by Padanians and Romans, and above all the widespread religious observance that continues to this day.

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I think Berlusconi is obsessed about the rest of Europe rejecting his government. That's why he lined up Tajani. I find it impossible to believe he would stick to a Forza-Lega pact if Forza-PD were viable. However, I don't know enough about the loyalties of the likely centro-destra first-past-the-post winners to say.

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2016 did indeed had quite low turnout in the Mezzogiorno, and in general these numbers suggest no significant regional change in turnout since 2013. With the big caveat that the numbers in Emilia-Romagna look very low. (Unless people there don't vote by 12pm because they don't go to Mass... )

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Not quite a Hamon bad performance, but close to Schulz bad.

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Noting the irony that SPD in Germany MUST NOT go into government as a minority partner, while PD MUST!

LeU is not really an far-left party. Apart from being a less useful vote than PD, there really wasn't much difference in the agenda. While it's impossible to know how a far-left party may have prospered, it would probably be (a) better than LeU and (b) not that great anyway, unless it was willing to take actions to remove foreigners from the country, which was clearly the #1 issue.

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Which is why as fun as it is to pile on Renzi, these are longterm problems: the entire strategy of the past twenty years was flawed, as I think everyone has known for some time, deep down. The issue I mentioned above has been a point of considerable concern to some observers for a long time. This is just a particularly brutal confirmation. But how to get out of this mess?

Here is a hint to the difficulty in getting out of the mess, which perhaps sounds harsh, but I am no more pro-the Italian right than you are. Number of people who formed a centre-left government in post-war Italy using centre-left parties as a vehicle: One.

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I have a bizarre feeling this will end with M5S-Forza, at least for a while.

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Why would you believe a Lega Nord (for that is their name) anonymous spokesman? They have every incentive to overtalk their own chances in an attempt to win the mandate to form a government. 35 to 40 lawmakers looks like as spurious a number as polls that report in decimal places, and remember that this needs to be across both houses.

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Hey look, a map of Lazio support by division!

Well, striking that southern support for MSI/DN/AN is gone.

Why has MSI/AN/FdL historically done so well in Lazio?

It started with the relatively mild experience of war, occupation and liberation in Rome itself. Then postwar nostalgia among civil servants and upper-class people connected to central government, then anti-corruption anger at the democratic parties.

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I don't want to coem across all PAN EUROPEAN TRENDS, but it is interesting to note that almost all cities - even ones considered quite borgeois and right-wing like Stockholm, Oslo, Milan, Rekjavik, Madrid - seem to be drifting left?

Is this missing the wood for the trees? Aren't they drifting far right, like the continent as a whole? Does M5S count as left-wing? (I also ask myself does LeU?)