Italian Elections and Politics 2022 - Our Time to Schlein

[Filuwaúrdjan]

Government's honeymoon period - Lega's especially. Not much can be read into that - remember where the PD were during the first phase of the Renzi government and where they ended up...

...of course the absolute state of all parties not in the government can be raised at this juncture, but, hey, it isn't as if MS5 (for instance) was in good nick going into the last election really, what with the failing municipal administrations etc.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

Government's honeymoon period - Lega's especially. Not much can be read into that - remember where the PD were during the first phase of the Renzi government and where they ended up...

The difference here is that Salvini, being technically a "junior" partner (despite having written 70% of the government's program) can always turn and blame M5S for everything he fails to do, while getting credit for everything he succeeds in. It's a win-win situation.

Possibly, yes. But there's no way the government overall ends up unscathed by being in power, even if one of the parties in it is that lucky: it's actually quite likely that if that's the case it will be by cannibalising its own partner. No government of the Second Republic has been re-elected* and there's no reason (other than a certain understandable pessimism) to expect that to change...

<sub>(flash forward: government is defeated by an entirely new party of moronic populism as yet unknown. PD somehow manage to lose further support).

*Quite a fact when you think about it...</sub>

[Filuwaúrdjan]

Transient groups on the margins of society are despised and maltreated the world over. It isn't very nice, but it also isn't unique to Europe and its various Gypsy populations. I gather that in North America they have these things called 'Reservations'.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

Christ's sake. Disband and start over.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

Very much so.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

The right indeed won Siena and Pisa.

The former verging on 'Con gain Rhondda' territory, frankly.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

As an outsider, why is Salvini so wildly popular, he seems like the type who where I live in Canada would be loathed. 

The present Premier of Ontario is Doug Ford.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

As for the immigration issue: well, its actually quite unique toxicity in Italy can be put down to the fact that Italy for a very long time was a country in which emigration was a social phenomenon, but immigration basically wasn't.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

Can we maybe try to avoid turning every thread on this board into the same thread? It is getting a little bit tedious.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

To try to bring a little light back into the thread, the maps from last time around:



Unless the polls change quite drastically we can presumably expect the Right landslide in the North and Centre to be repeated and for it to extend deep into the South.



God knows what this will look like this time. But take a look at this map: you will never see, in an advanced Western nation in the 21st century, a clearer example of an incoherent howl of pain and protest take electoral form.



A fiasco of a map, disastrous results everywhere outside the inner cities (which in Italy are rather rich; the social geography of urban Italy is very different to the Western European norm) and absolutely catastrophic - electoral asteroid impact territory, frankly - results in the South. The PD should see at the least a limited rebound and the patterns will be interesting.



The green will deepen and spread and spread and spread. And this map is already a radical departure from what had been the norm.



Replace 'green' with 'blue' and 'spread' with 'shrink'.



Current polling shows these absolute charmers often doubling their support from last year. But the general pattern will remain, I suspect, that of Lazio supporters and other fascists with expense accounts.



Probably this will look much the same.



Now RIP but their votes have to go somewhere. Some to the new list with the remains of the increasingly hilariously named Communist Refoundation Party, but will others head back to the PD? We shall see...

[Filuwaúrdjan]

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.

The Roman middle classes did bloody well out of Fascism even if no one else did and this turned over time, as things do, into a political heritage and tradition.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

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.

I can’t speak for the Roman suburbs, but southern Lazio has a lot of descendants of fascist true believers from Friuli and Veneto who moved there to settle a planned city (today’s Latina) that Mussolini built in the early 30s.

This is correct. Something similar explains the tradition of fascist support in Bolzano, which in 2018 was expressed through a rather... erm... more hardcore vehicle than FdI...

[Filuwaúrdjan]

Is it, though? I thought that it was more the US and UK that differed from the Continental European norm in concentrating the poor in their urban centers. French urban centers are almost always well-off with the working-class (whether immigrant or native) concentrated in the suburbs (usually the Eastern ones, with the Western also being pretty bourgeois. And I think urban centers are also largely well-off in places like Spain, Germany and the Scandinavians, but I might be wrong.

German and Scandinavian cities are like British ones but better planned. National stereotypes all round there, I know, I know, but it is true.

Anyway I wasn't thinking so much of patterns of poverty so much as patterns of money, and this is what is unusual about Italian urban life. Consider Paris. The west end of the city proper is extremely rich and most of the rest of the city proper has been thoroughly gentrified since the middle twentieth century, but these areas are far from being the only places where money lives: you have the villa developments at Neuilly and so on, and then further out the various thoroughly suburban (but still flat out rich) municipalities as one keeps out wandering westwards. In most Italian cities, though, money lives in the centre and the geography often looks as if there's a gravitational pull at work - with a few little quirks here and there. Italy hardly lacks for middle class suburbs, of course, but they tend to have a firmly lower middle class quality, even if prosperous - which explains a great deal about political developments in the country in recent decades.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

Compare and contrast:

[Filuwaúrdjan]

So who are these people who voted Lega for the first time in 2018? Well...



(also relevant for the discussion of rump fascist party electoral geography)

[Filuwaúrdjan]

Hilarious stuff. Actually this might even work out for the best - presuming a new electoral system - so long as the PD and Renzi take the opportunity to fish in somewhat different pools. Of course it's the PD and it's Renzi so... er...

[Filuwaúrdjan]

Renzi defects and starts his own party, taking about 20 deputies and 10 Senators with him. He will continue support Conte in the short term he says. Long term the parliamentary Math becomes a bit more tight for Conte. Polls have Renzis Party at some 5%.

What is supposed to be the ideology of this new party?

I'm going to hazard a guess that they're pretty much all genepool DCs who claim to favour political Reform in the same vague sense that their parents favoured Stability.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

This New Party is just because his massive Ego and lust for Power cant take PD anymore, thats all.

A big issue is that people in his faction were largely snubbed for jobs in the new government and were... erm... less than pleased about this.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

No. The results in Emilia-Romagna and Tuscany are in line with the previous two decades if you adjust for the national climate. They are still pretty red - although I reckon they are so in a different way from the past because of urban-rural polarization - they are not going to become swing regions.

Also the point is that the Left was able to win in Tuscany whilst running an actual block of wood as its candidate. Do that almost anywhere else, and the result would be (and often has been) decidedly less pretty. But what is true - and this is not a phenomenon unique to Italy! - is that party allegiances are weaker than they have ever been, and this means greater and greater electoral volatility. Occasionally this will mean results that, in combination, will look perverse. But they will not represent a new order.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

That's 1/200,000 residents. Which is absolutely fine. I'd target one rep per 200,000-500,000 people as ideal in most countries. Places like the UK, with more than one MP/100,000 people are just absurd.

Italy and Great Britain do not have federal systems of government. Both countries also draw their ministries from the legislature.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

In practice the old Italian electoral system - the one used before 1994 - did allow for local representation, because it used open lists. Candidates would tend to focus their efforts on particular parts of the constituency that they ran in (these were huge) and if they were elected would concentrate constituency services in them as well. This extended to nationally prominent politicians: indeed, it was rather difficult to progress far in the DC without having a secure geographical base. So, Giulio Andreotti, who regularly topped the DC poll in the Rome-Viterbo-Latina-Frosinone constituency, always focused his efforts on the towns of the Valle Latina to the east of the city, rather than on the capital itself.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

Ah, I see that someone else is trying the now famous Blazing Saddles Negotiation Tactic.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

In the book the point is put across in a rather sharper manner than the film. But one reason why that line is so clever is that it does have multiple meanings: as the delusion of a clever man trying to convince himself that he isn't presiding over the slow destruction of his universe, but also as a barbed comment on the politics of the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

I mean if the official heir to both the DCs and the PCI can be literally the same party (as is the case!) then anything is possible. And so it goes.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

It's so deeply embedded in the cultures of most societies that you have to despair, you really do. But these remarks are even worse than 'usual' - they ought to be instantly career-ending.