Italian Elections and Politics 2022 - Our Time to Schlein

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I wonder who is actually voting for FI at this point - bored housewives who watch Berlusconi stations all day?

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Why don’t people like the Roma? I’ve always been confused by that.

You can’t imagine why Certain People would dislike brown, vaguely Eastern itinerants?

It's deeper than that: Roma are normally even lower on the totem pole than similarly disliked or poorly integrated groups like Maghrebis, Somalis, Kashmiris and Afghans. In northern Sheffield, for instance, there a quite a lot of Slovakian Roma people who have a highly tense relationship with locals of all races, who associate them with all kinds of petty crime. Crucially though, a lot of the tension has deflated since a few years ago, when people like David Blunkett were starting to proclaim that riots would be breaking out any minute.

https://www.yorkshirepost.co.uk/news/analysis/how-they-reduced-sheffield-s-boiling-pot-of-racial-tension-to-a-simmer-1-7860134

Anyway this is disturbing, although unfortunately not surprising.

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Not sure about Pisa and Siena in particular, but isn't Tuscany a left stronghold?

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Prediction: Renzi will randomly become Prime Minister again in like two decades.

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It's pretty funny that the much vaunted basic income from the 5 Stars is basically Hartz IV or universal credit; it's a means tested debit card that can only be used in certain stores for certain purposes and lasts for three years max, and you have to accept any job offered to you.

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Otherwise, if these results hold, Italy could truly turn into the next Hungary.

I don't think I agree with this. Remember that Fidesz regularly gets about half of the vote in Hungary, with another 10-20% going to Almost-Literal Arrow Cross.

small side-note: Jobbik were badly obliterated this election.

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I doubt whether this is a smart move in the long run (M5S may be needed in the future), but for now I will be eager to see Lega and FdI win a majority. Hopefully they can lead the way and inspire a similar movement throughout all of the continent.

More likely they will sufficiently toxify racist politics in Europe to an extent that no other country will want to touch the far right. In that way Italy, after being saved by Europe over and over again, will become Europe's sacrificial lamb. It would be poetic and beautiful if not so awful.

What exactly do you imagine a Lega-FI government would do that would make the far-right particularly unpopular? Far-right parties are already disliked by the establishment, I don't think forming a government all their own in Italy will particularly help their image, but I don't think it would really make it any worse either.

You can see what happens when far-right parties rule by themselves in Hungary. Liberal newspaper editors and NGOs talk badly about them, but Hungary has not collapsed, living standards have not declined, the government is popular. If Fidesz has done fine in government, why do you imagine Lega would be so much worse?

Do you think Italy's economy will crumble without constant injection of new African economic migrants? Putting aside the question of whether such migrants are good for the economy or not (they aren't), as people have already pointed out multiple times, they are a recent development, Italy did just fine without them for decades.

I know this is your shtick, but there are actually other issues that affect people's voting habits aside from immigration. The Italian economic situation is quite possibly the least optimistic in the whole of Europe, almost all parties are defined by corruption and many other italian leaders have been felled by the hubris that comes from sky high approvals. In such an environment there is no reason to believe any government can maintain high approval ratings for entire terms (indeed, has any government lasted a full term in the Second Republic?)

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That is what the cadre of the League etc believe and a substantial portion of the Italian population, but it clearly isn't what the majority of the Italian electorate thinks or else there would literally never be anything aside from League majorities.  You've been blinded by your own myopic obsessions, I'm afraid.

To put it another way, there is a substantial amount of voters in many many northern European countries who are completely inflamed by climate change, think it's by far the most (or only) important issue, but these people are not median voters.

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So what's the deal with the fascists in Lazio and those Roman suburbs? I know rge reputation of the football clubs ultras,, but still.

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The big problem is the Italian economy is possibly the most dismal in the EU, so a continued failure to promote growth and employment could leave the incumbent government in a pretty bad place.

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Thr Five Stars want a reduction in parlimentarians? If only there was a recent effort to abolish the Senate that they could have supported 😒

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can't wait for Conte to be a sort of perpetual PM that operates as a mouthpiece for whatever coalition has been cobbled together.

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I wonder if Conte will try and start his own personal party like Monti did?

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So, what happened in the Aosta Valley? Why did the AV local party get hit so hard?

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fwiw the cube root "rule" would give the Italian population an ideal legislature size of about 392 members.

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My memory is fuzzy: before last election a small crew of old school (i.e. crooked) politicians like Bersani, D'Alema (and maybe Letta?) split away from PD, i recall. Where did they end up going?

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My memory is fuzzy: before last election a small crew of old school (i.e. crooked) politicians like Bersani, D'Alema (and maybe Letta?) split away from PD, i recall. Where did they end up going?

Imagine calling Bersani crooked when the context of his split is Renzi.

Touche; i probably meant more "fossil generation".

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Why does Sicily have a relatively low drop, do we think?

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Also, didn't Italy never really have a "normal" correlation between vote and income? The Red Regions have always been richer than the South.

To add to what Battista said: the Red Regions originally emerged as left-wing strongholds in the early 20th century because they had a very particular agricultural system which engendered violent class conflict between rural labourers and landowners. The flip side of this was that in the immediate post-WWI years, Tuscany and Emilia-Romagna were also the strongholds of Fascist popular support, where it found a natural base among the middle classes terrified by this working class radicalism.

My understanding, though, is that after WWII the nature of left-wing support in the Red Regions underwent quite a dramatic change from the above situation, and the PCI (which had of course supplanted the PSI as the dominant force on the left) became something of a cross-class phenomenon there, a deeply-engrained cultural institution. I’m not fully sure of the reasons for this, but I think it had something to do with these regions being the centre of anti-Fascist Resistance activity during the war. It probably also helped that the PCI was quite distinctive amongst left-wing parties in being founded as much on a core of intellectuals as the mass support of the organised working classes. That said, I think you would still have had much more relatively normal class-based electoral patterns during the First Republic in, for instance, the industrialised North.

Finally, I don’t think it makes sense to think of the South as being the kind of region which would be a natural base for the left in most other countries simply because it is poor. As Battista said, it is the least industrialised part of the country, and it also, for want of a better word, has always lacked ‘political consciousness’, which is certainly a consequence of its poverty, as well as historical and cultural circumstances. Its politics have tended to be based on clientelism and the like rather than the kind of ideological ‘mass politics’ in which socialist, social democratic, and communist parties traditionally tended to thrive.

I suppose the counterpoint is spain, where Andalusia and Extremadura were historical strongholds of the PSOE owing exactly to the sort of economic quasi feudal set up in the south?