What just happened in Italy?
Much the same as what’s happened in France, Great Britain, Sweden, Poland, Hungary, and the U.S.
What happened in yesterday’s election in Italy?
At the purely factual level, a coalition of right-wing and center-right parties won big in an election trigged by the collapse of a government led by the center-left Mario Draghi.
Giorgia Meloni’s Fratelli D’Italia (Brothers of Italy) was the biggest vote winner. The Fratelli were founded in 2012 as a successor to the post-fascist MSI (Italian Social Movement), which was itself founded in 1946 by Giorgio Almirante, who served as a minister under Mussolini. The other major members of the coalition are Matteo Salvini’s Lega and Silvio Berlusconi’s Forza Italia. A fourth party called Noi Moderati (really a coalition of small, centrist parties) is also expected to join a right-leaning government. At the time of this writing, with about half of the votes counted, it looks like the right will take something in the range of 60 percent of the seats in both the lower and upper houses of the legislature while winning a slightly smaller share of the vote than polls had predicted. (With Salvini’s Lega, especially, under-performing.)
The Incoming Coalition
The reality is somewhat less ominous than one might conclude from hearing we’re living through “the return of fascism in Italy.” The incoming government is certainly Italy’s most right-wing since World War II. But it’s also the case that the members of the victorious coalition have much more in common with other right-leaning politicians and parties around the contemporary world than they do with the politics of the 1930s.
Berlusconi, a media-mogul-turned-populist-politician with a blustery personality, understandably reminds Americans of Donald Trump. But Berlusconi didn’t do major damage in his nine years as prime minister between 1994 and 2011. Neither is his party especially scary. It’s evolved into a pro-business (or “liberal,” in European terms) party that’s also quite friendly to the Catholic Church, which retains a strong influence in the country.
Lega and its leader (Matteo Salvini) are more right-populist in orientation, especially on illegal immigration/migration, which they strongly oppose. It also originated as a regionalist party from Italy’s prosperous north, and though its outlook has shifted over the years, Lega remains committed to federalism and regionalism. On foreign policy, both Forza Italia and Lega have leaned toward Atlanticism, with Lega also expressing a past desire for close ties with Russia (while also supporting NATO).
That brings us to Fratelli D’Italia, which won a paltry 4.4 percent of the national vote just four years ago. It has since surged to prominence despite its genuinely radical roots. But it has also sought to moderate its stances and image. The party was once hostile to the European Union and sought to build bridges with Moscow, but both stances have been reversed (or at least softened) since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. On the other hand, the Fratelli remain strongly opposed to immigration, gay marriage, and “globalism,” and they collaborate with anti-abortion and anti-LGBT groups.
Put it all together—populist hostility to immigration, pro-business economic policy, support for federalism, and social conservatism on religion and cultural issues—and we have an incoming coalition that overlaps in important ways with the post-Trump configuration of the Republican Party (without the embrace of election-fraud conspiracies), as well as with the current governments of Hungary and Poland, the recently elected anti-immigrant government of Sweden, and Marine Le Pen’s far-right National Rally in France.
The Shape of the Italian Electorate
But there are other ways in which the Italian situation echoes trends elsewhere. Across the Western democracies, the technocratic center-left has gone into decline over the past decade, with the broad-based support it enjoyed from the mid-1990s on down through the late 2000s contracting and parties of the right gaining ground in its place.
In a recent, illuminating post for his consistently excellent newsletter, historian Adam Tooze brought together the results of several in-depth (pre-election) polls of the Italian electorate. They tell a story of a country increasingly divided by lines of class and culture, with the right benefitting and the center-left finding itself on the losing end of the trend.
The polls look at three measures of economic and social stratification—education, occupation, and income—and how they interact with support for the various Italian parties.
On education, the center-left Partito Democratico (PD) (which won about 20 percent of the vote on Sunday) does vastly better than the right-leaning parties with those holding college degrees, while Lega does best with the least educated and the Fratelli enjoy support from all levels of education.
When it comes to occupations, the PD does best with professionals, white-collar workers, and teachers, while doing worst with working-class voters and the unemployed. Lega, by contrast, does quite well with the working-class, and, once again, the Fratelli’s base of support is spread across most occupations.
As for income, support for the PD increases at higher incomes, while Lega does best with low-income voters and the Fratelli do well across multiple salary levels.
Finally, when it comes religion, the data Tooze cites show that the most secular voters consistently favor the center-left, Lega and Forza Italia do well with practicing Catholics, and the Fratelli (in Tooze’s words) do “best with those who declare themselves to be religious but are not practicing, which is also the largest segment of Italian society—52 percent.”
A Familiar Story
We’re left with a picture of a country in which the center-left is supported mainly by the educated, secular, and professional classes, while the right appeals to a cross-section of the rest of the country—the working class as well as the middle and upper-middle classes, along with the religiously pious and the large numbers of Italians who treat religion as a symbol or identity-marker without actually believing in or practicing it.
If that sounds familiar, that’s because similar things have been happening in many places over the past decade. The precise political results of these shifts have varied from country to country as they’ve interacted with different electoral systems, but the underlying trends in public opinion can be seen to a greater or lesser extent in France, Great Britain, the U.S., and other countries. In each case, the center-left has gone into decline with the center-right and anti-liberal populist right rising to take its place.
Until the center-left figures out a way to win back the working- and middle-class, as well as the nominally religious, it will continue to lose precious political ground to the populist and nationalist right.
In the US, it seems that the Democrats enact economic policies that are beneficial to middle and lower class Americans. It appears that these get overshadowed by the Republican's harping on divisive cultural issues. The left doesn't help itself by engaging in extreme wokeness. The Rs exploit this by portraying the left as too extreme. The Ds should concentrate on the positive economic record and drop the wokeness.
IMO, I’m pretty sure the Dems are thinking their highly educated and remunerated voters will carry them to the finish line, even though they seem to be slowly leaking minority voters.
What I want to know is why are so many people down on immigration all across the world? What is the left doing to address the root of those issues? My guess is it is all about economic instability and crime, i.e. safety and shelter, the bottom line of Maslow’s hierarchy. Then again, maybe the Dems want to focus on culturally left issues because there’s really nothing they can do about the other. I wonder.