I am writing these lines in Italy, witnessing very important elections not only for Italy, but also for Western democracy as such. After the elections on September 25, Italy turns to the right in the most categorical way, giving an absolute majority in both houses to a coalition consisting of three parties, two of which belong to the category of national populist parties: Lega and Fratelli d’Italia. This is the first post-pandemic election since the one in 2018 that produced a government formed by two parties: a right-wing populist party and another left-wing one. At the time, Italy was conducting a unique political experiment: until 2018, there were populist parties in government in Europe, but each time the populist party joined a traditional party that otherwise could not form a majority. Italy is also experimenting in 2022: the new coalition is the most right-wing on the political spectrum since the Second World War, and also the first at the European level.

Italy’s election marks the emergence of a new political leader to take over as Prime Minister, Giorgia Maloney, but also the fall of the left led by the Democratic Party. Enrico Letta failed to overcome the psychological threshold of 20%, he failed to form an electoral alliance with the 5-Star Movement, and the PD fell below the historic low reached in 2018. The PD was unable to prevent the split of the former prime minister. Matteo Renzi and Enrico Letta, who is considered a technocrat former prime minister, did not attract the votes of the left electorate. This electorate voted for the Frattellii d’Italia, as has been the case so far with many populist parties that have absorbed the traditional electorate of the left, as well as the 5 Star Movement in southern Italy. M5S made a smart move by putting former Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte at the helm of the party, who championed social reforms that benefited the people of Sicily and other less developed regions of Italy. The M5S campaign was very forthright in accusing FDI that once in power all these social benefits would be lost. For this reason, the Italian press started calling the M5S “Lega Sud”, referring to the fact that the Lega traditionally appealed to those who came from the North (it was originally called the Lega Nord), and the M5S tends to become a regional party, as the Northern League was before Matteo Salvini came to power.

This election marks another first: it is the first time that Forza Italia has entered a coalition of parties in which it is not the first violin. The party was still in sharp decline, and an alliance with the Lega and the FDI was virtually the only option for political survival. Silvio Berlusconi, at the age of 85, was the master of this coalition.

The elections in Italy demonstrate the unusual volatility of the entire political spectrum: if in 2019 Giorgia Maloney’s party had about 4%, now it will have about 25%; Lega had about 30% in 2018, now it will be less than 10%. We might be tempted to think that the electoral base of the League has shifted towards FDI, but in reality the situation is much more complicated if we take into account the geographical dispersion of votes. The Italian left has not been able to offer an alternative to the right-wing coalition that Berlusconi negotiated, but this coalition is not very stable either. Georgia Maloney will need to put forward competent ministers, especially in vital areas such as finance, otherwise the three-party pool of talent appears to be very limited. Italy has rejected the technocratic government of Mario Draghi, but in fact has no alternative to the ministers of that government.

Draghi’s government actually engaged in intensive negotiations with all Italian parties except FDI, which gave this party the opportunity to present itself as the only alternative to the government. Any discontent with the Draghi government was carefully exploited by Georgia Maloney, which brought her additional votes. The episode entitled “Draghi’s government” offers an answer to a long-standing question that arises in all Western democracies: the fight against populist parties is more effective by not giving them power, but by creating the conditions for their growth, by profiling them as a single opposition force, or by integrating them. in the government coalition to show that they do not really offer solutions? Italy chose the first option. Sweden, after all the post-election negotiations, seems likely to choose the second option.

Elections in Italy are important not only for Italy, but also for the whole of Europe. The acute sense of dissatisfaction of the electorate, which deepened after the emergence of the pandemic and after the start of the war in Ukraine, is present in all Western democracies. These are crises that follow one another or, if we take into account climate change, overlap. Sovereignists from Lega or FDI, populists from M5S, extremists from ItalExit gave different answers to these crises in Italy. All these parties used different narratives to interpret a specifically populist account of people against government. Mario Draghi was a common enemy even for the parties that were part of the ruling coalition. Draghi was considered a symbol of “international finance”, “globalization”, in general, everything that was considered in contradiction with supposedly typical national virtues. This is the same mood that Lega and M5S used in 2018, to which they added the exponent, the “class enemy” in the person of Draghi. He resisted the last moment, believing that he had a mission to fulfill: the image of Draghi negotiating in Rome on the last day of the election campaign, the final details related to the unlocking of the PNRR funds with the responsible persons in Brussels. , and a few hundred meters from the office of the President of the Council of Ministers Meloni, Berlusconi and Salvini, the last pre-election rally organized will long remain a warning of what Italy would look like without the Draghi government.

What will be discussed in Italy in the coming months will not only be a matter of domestic politics. Italy based its democracy on the mechanisms of representative democracy enshrined in the Constitution adopted after the Second World War. A Maloney government will try to impose mechanisms of direct democracy to satisfy its own electorate, more than the M5S did when it was in power. The tension between representative and direct democracy would mark the next period in Italy and implicitly influence the entire debate on the subject in Europe. According to the political scientist Maurizio Molinari, Italy found itself between Rousseau and Montesquieu, rejecting the historical stage at which the ideas of the two could coincide and then be translated into political action.

The artificial tension between representative and direct democracy is not a purely Italian or even a European problem. Vladimir Putin’s Russia has long undermined Western democracies from within, using friendly parties such as Salvini’s League. The director of the Russian Institute of European Studies in Moscow, Oleksiy Gromyko (nephew of the oldest foreign minister of the USSR), said in an interview with the Italian media on the day of the election that the Kremlin does not care. about who will come to power in Italy, saying that Moscow’s strategic goal is to have governments friendly to Russia. Read the full article and comment on Contributors.ro