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Italian Election The right tries to woo Italians with message of xenophobia

As Italy goes to the polls on March 4 it has one of the highest debt ratio in the EU, distressing unemployment figures, a troubled banking sector and a deteriorating infrastructure. But instead of seeking solutions, most parties are talking about African and Middle East immigrants, writes CONN M HALLINAN

Italian elections are always complex affairs, but the forthcoming March 4 vote is one of the most bewildering in several decades — the right is resurgent, the left embattled and the issue drawing the greatest fire and fury has little to do with the economic malaise that has gripped the country since the great economic crash of 2008.

Predicting election outcomes in Europe is a fool’s game these days because the electorate is so volatile, a state one can hardly blame it for, given the beating it has taken from the almost decade-long policies of the European Union (EU).

The organisation’s rigid economic strictures for dealing with the debts incurred from the 2008 crisis — social service cutbacks, tax rises, massive layoffs, and privatisation — have sharply increased economic inequality throughout the continent.

They have created a “lost generation” of young people, poorly educated, unemployed, and locked into low paying part-time jobs, if they manage to find one.

There has been a surge of right-wing parties throughout the EU, but the analysis that voters are turning right is too simplistic.

Voters in Germany did put the nazi Alternative for Germany in the Bundestag, but mostly because they were fed up with the “stay-the-course” mainstream parties that offered them little more than austerity and more austerity.

Dutch voters demolished their social democratic Labour Party, not because it was left but because it was timidly centrist. Much the same was true for the French Socialist Party.

When centre-left and left parties challenge austerity, voters reward them, as they did in Britain and Portugal. It is not so much that the compass is swinging right, but rather that it is spinning.

The Italian elections are a case in point. Italy has one of the highest debt ratios in the EU, distressing unemployment figures — 11.4 per cent nationally and up to 36 per cent among the young — a troubled banking sector and a deteriorating infrastructure.

Garbage, quite literally, is overwhelming Rome, but instead of seeking solutions, most parties are talking about African and Middle East immigrants in a focus that is revealing an ugly side of the peninsula.

Hate crimes have risen 10-fold since 2012, and 20 per cent of Italians admit to being anti-semitic. The anti-fascist organisation Infoantifa Ecn has recorded more than 140 neo-fascist attacks since 2014.

Italy currently plays host to some 620,000 immigrants and, since France, Austria and Switzerland tightened their borders, Italy is stuck with them.

The EU has been little help. While Brussels was willing to shell out over £4.3 billion to Turkey to deal with the flood of immigrants generated by the wars in Syria and Yemen, Italy has been left to deal with the problem by itself.

Immigrants not only have virtually nothing to do with the crisis in banking, the slow growth of the economy or the persistently high numbers of unemployed, they are a solution to a looming “apocalypse” — Italy’s extremely low birth rate, the lowest in the world after Japan.

Italian women give birth to 1.39 children on average, but the replacement ratio for the developed world is 2.1.

“If we carry on as we are and fail to reverse the trend, there will be fewer than 350,000 births in 10 years time, 30 per cent less than in 2010 — an apocalypse,” says Italian Health Minister Beatrice Lorenzin.

“In five years we have lost more than 66,000 births [per year],” Lorenzin told La Republica, or a city the size of Siena. “If we link this to the increasingly old and chronically ill people, we have a picture of a moribund country.”

Whoever comes out on top will
still have to tackle the underlying
crisis, on which immigration
has no bearing

A major obstacle to increased birth rate is that Italy has the second lowest percentage of women in the workforce in the EU, at just 37 per cent. The EU average is between 67 per cent and 70 per cent.

An 80-euro-a-month baby bonus has flopped because many schools let out at noon and childcare is expensive.

The problem is EU-wide, where the average replacement ratio is only 1.58. The Berlin Institute for Population and Development estimates that Germany would need at least 500,000 immigrants a year for the next 35 years to keep pensions and social services at their current levels.

But Lorenzin’s warning is a cry in the wilderness. Immigrants are a “social bomb that is ready to explode,” says former Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, whose rightwing Forza Italia party is in coalition with the xenophobic Northern League and the fascist Brothers of Italy. The coalition is currently running in first place, with about 36 per cent of the vote.

“All these migrants live off trickery and crime,” he told Canale 5, a station he owns.

Not to be outdone by Berlusconi, Giogia Meloni of the Brothers calls for a “naval blockade” and “trenches.” Meloni launched her campaign for prime minister in Benito Mussolini’s city of Latina and the late dictator’s granddaughter is a party candidate.

Matteo Salvini, the Northern League candidate for prime minister, kicks it up a notch, saying immigrants bring “chaos, anger, drug dealing, thefts, rape and violence” and pose a threat to “the white race.”

Nationwide, crime rates are falling in Italy.

The Five Star Movement, polling at 28 per cent, is less bombastic, but it has taken to immigrant bashing as well. Its candidate for prime minister, Luigi Di Mario, also calls immigrants a “social bomb,” and the party was conspicuously silent when a neo-fascist recently gunned down six African migrants in the town of Macerata.

The Democratic Party was initially open-armed to immigrants, but it has since pulled up the welcome mat and started returning refugees to Libya.

Italy is very much a country of regions, a prosperous north, a generally well-to-do centre and an impoverished south.

Five Star is doing well in the south, but so is Berlusconi’s coalition. Five Star’s call for a minimum wage is popular in Calabria, Puglia, Basilicata and Sicily — the so-called Mezzogiorno — but Berlusconi won last spring’s elections in Sicily, just edging out Five Star.

The Northern League, which is polling at around 15 per cent, has dropped “Northern” in an effort to appeal to voters in central and south Italy, but the latter are not likely to cast ballots for Salvini.

Until recently Salvini routinely referred to southerners as “terroni,” a derogatory term. Southern Italians have long memories.

It is the left and centre-left that is in trouble. Former prime minister Matteo Renzi’s wing of the PD moved to the centre and is now paying the price for that manoeuvre. While critical of EU austerity policies, the PD nevertheless implemented them, bailed out banks and did little about joblessness.

PD Minister of Labour Giuliano Poletti encouraged unemployed young Italians to emigrate “rather than get under our feet,” not a comment likely to endear the party to the young.

The PD is not xenophobic like Five Star and Berlusconi’s coalition, but neither is it willing to directly challenge the myths around immigration. The PD is allied with Free and Equal, representing the left of the PD, but the party is brand new and it is not clear how well it will poll.

There is, as well, a centre to centre-left coalition of eight parties built around Popular Civic and its candidate Health Minister Lorenzin, but Popular Civic is also a new party and how it will do March 4 is uncertain.

There is also a new electoral law that combines proportional representation with first-past-the-post results and it is not clear how that will translate into seats in the 630-seat Chamber of Deputies and 315-seat Senate. A party needs 3 per cent to be represented in the parliament.

It is doubtful that anyone will “win” outright. Five Star may get the most votes, but it will have to ally itself with another party to form a government. In the past it has rejected doing so but recently moderated its opposition to joining with another party, possibly the Northern League.

Berlusconi’s coalition might take the largest number of votes, but enough to win a majority?

If the South goes Forza Italia rather than Five Star, maybe. There is a caveat here. Right-wing parties tend to do better at the ballot box than they poll.
 

Forza Italia has positioned itself as the defender of the EU against the “populists” of Five Star, but most of the anti-EU parties — Five Star included — have trimmed back their threats to withdraw from the EU or abandon the euro currency.

In the end it might be a hung government and “fractious” would be an understatement. Whoever comes out on top will still have to tackle the underlying crisis, on which immigration has no bearing.

The central problem is the economic policies of the EU, whose austerity-driven solutions are losing the organisation support. Only 36 per cent of Italians have a favourable opinion of the EU and that viewpoint is not restricted to Italy.

Faith in the EU has fallen from 38 per cent to 32 per cent in France.
As for the immigrants, not only are they not the problem, they are a long-term solution to Italy’s  and the EU’s looming demographic crisis

 Conn M Hallinan blogs at dispatchesfromtheedgeblog.wordpress.com, where this article first appeared.

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