Ferdinand II of the Two Sicilies pondered the idea of a bridge as long ago as 1840. More recently, Silvio Berlusconi emerged as its greatest champion. His building plans were twice thwarted by political rivals who deemed it an absurd vanity project — but his vision still inspires devotion in Italian politics today. The Strait of Messina Bridge has come to symbolise a powerful and modern Italy. In a country fretting that its days of breath-taking building are over, the bridge is seen as sign that contemporary leaders can match not just the grandeur of ancient Roman viaducts and Renaissance churches, but also Mussolini’s creation of entirely new suburbs (a project later adopted by Berlusconi).

The politics of the bridge are intriguing: Giorgia Meloni’s government has recently augmented fiscal autonomy for the regions, which will almost certainly benefit the north more than the south. The bridge promises the opposite: it’s a nationalist symbol uniting the country and showing the south that Rome cares. The EU likes the idea because it would complete its Scandinavian-Mediterranean corridor. The transport minister and leader of the Right-wing Lega party, Matteo Salvini, has also gone all-in. In five years, as Meloni’s star has risen, Salvini’s popularity has crashed. And so despite opposing the bridge until 2016, he has now bet the entirety of his dwindling political capital on its completion.

“This project is very elevated in the public imagination,” says Guido Signorino of the Invece del Ponte group. “It’s like the pyramids, and Salvini wants to enter the history books as the visionary who made it happen.” The man who has journeyed from communist to neo-fascist, from secessionist to nationalist, now appears to see himself as Italy’s Pharaoh.

Architects envision a bridge 3.6 kilometres long, bookended by two main towers higher than the Eiffel Tower. With three vehicle lanes in each direction plus train tracks down the middle, 6,000 vehicles could pass over per hour and 200 trains per day. This won’t, of course, come cheap. According to the Italian Treasury, €1.2 billion has been spent on feasibility studies since 1965. The estimated cost of building the bridge has increased exponentially: in 2006 it was calculated to cost €3.9 billion; by 2011 that figure had rocketed to €8.5 billion. Now it stands at €13.5 billion.

Will it be worth it? Salvini has claimed that the project will create 120,000 jobs, but this figure has come under scrutiny. The company responsible for the project suggests that the real figure is more likely to be between 4,300 and 7,000, while one association opposing the bridge thinks that only 2,230 jobs will be created.

The main objection isn’t the vast cost or the blurry figures, but the inevitability that portions of the budget will be syphoned off by the Sicilian and Calabrian mafias (Cosa Nostra and the ‘Ndrangheta respectively). The anti-Mafia campaigner, Don Luigi Ciotti, has warned that the bridge “won’t only link two coasts but also two mafias”. That criminal infiltration takes hundreds of forms: financial investment, courier services, supply of raw materials, security, earth-moving, waste-removal. Every aspect of a major project is vulnerable to the mafias: they can make it all go smoothly or cause complications for decades. They might only gather breadcrumbs, but it’s a near-certainty that they’ll end up with a little of the loaf.

“The bridge won’t link just two mafias, but 20 different gangs,” Daniele Ialacqua, of the No Ponte Capo Peloro organisation, told me. “I worry we’re going to find ourselves in a situation like Chicago in the Thirties: there are too many interests, too many contracts.” The opposite is perhaps more likely, that rival gangs will cooperate and pool strengths: “in order to carry out major [building] projects in Calabria,” crime expert Anna Sergi recently wrote in Il Post, “the ‘Ndrangheta clans have always teamed up to strengthen their entrepreneurial capabilities. They will do it again.” Police wiretaps have already picked up on mob bosses negotiating how to share out the future juicy contracts.

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But objections to the bridge go much further. The Strait of Messina has always been troubled: Homer’s mythical sea monsters, Scylla and Charybdis, lurked on either side, symbols of the jeopardy of sailing between them. Hence the idiom “between Scylla and Charybdis”, the original version of “between a rock and a hard place”. The passage was risky not just because of snares and high winds but because of devastating earthquakes. The Straits are in Italy’s Zone 1, the most dangerous area for seismic risk. In December 1908, a 7.1 magnitude earthquake killed around 80,000 people and caused tsunamis that devastated the nearby coastal areas.

Even those in favour of the bridge have expressed concerns about the wisdom of building on that faultline. On 3 May, the Order of Engineers of Messina wrote an open letter stating that, although the bridge should go ahead, there was “deep concern” about the superficiality of the project’s earthquake-protection measures. They insisted that the research behind this would “require months of commitment, not days or weeks!”

Part of the problem is that the design of the bridge is very old: a consortium called Eurolink won the tender in 2005 with a design by the late British bridge designer, William Brown, dating from 1993. Brown remains an admired architect — he was responsible for the Severn, Humber, and Forth Road bridges in the UK, and plenty of others around the world. But the central span of his Italian bridge is due to be more than one kilometre longer than any other bridge span in the world. “That’s a huge jump in scale,” says Signorino, “but there’s been no jump in technological know-how. Our current knowledge doesn’t allow us to state that this is wise.”

There have been enough infrastructure disasters in Italy over the years to justify Signorino’s concerns. In August 2018, the Morandi Bridge in Genoa collapsed, causing 43 deaths. In 2014, just nine days after it was inaugurated, the Scorciavacche viaduct in Sicily also caved in. The company responsible for building that viaduct, Bolognetta, is a member of the Muratori Cementisti cooperative that has a 13% share of the Eurolink consortium. The other construction giants involved in the project aren’t renowned for their probity either. In 2022, the Spanish construction firm Sacyr, which has a 18.7% share of the Eurolink project, was fined — along with other firms — more than €200 million by Spain’s anti-trust regulator for rigging public tenders between 1992 and 2017.

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The bridge risks creating other problems, too. It may well obstruct the tallest container ships on their way to the vital Port of Gioia Tauro, forcing them to make a 500-kilometre detour around Sicily. And then there’s the displacement of locals: in Torre Faro in Sicily and Villa San Giovanni in Calabria, around 400 homes will be demolished in total. Environmental organisations — from the World Wildlife Fund to Legambiente — have also opposed the destruction of uniquely biodiverse lagoons and migration routes. “Living in these protected areas,” one weary resident told me, “we’re not even allowed to change the colour of our houses, but now they want to move millions of cubic metres of earth and build two Eiffel Towers!”

There’s also a sense that the bridge is futile unless the rickety public transport on either side is improved. The effective rail speed in Sicily is an astonishingly low 26-28 km/h, so placing a multi-billion-euro bridge at one end of the island seems superfluous to most Sicilians: “You can’t reduce a bottle-neck when there’s no bottle,” says one Sicilian I spoke to.

It’s anyone’s guess whether this mythical bridge really will be built. Work had been due to start this month, but in April the Environment Ministry requested an additional 239 documents to clarify a variety of critical issues. It turned out that the 318-page environmental impact document submitted by the Stretto di Messina firm overseeing the bridge in April had drawn on out-of-date statistics and many of its tables were gobbledygook. Even if the bridge does get started, one gets the impression it might be a very slow build.

These days, it’s commonplace to see garlanded technocrats such as Mario Draghi leaving office in shame. The decay of liberal elites has been the central political narrative of the last decade across the West. Surely, then, the time is ripe for a populist upsurge?

And yet, while a handful of insurgent leaders and parties have reached top office promising to shake up the liberal establishment, the first wave of populist and anti-establishment governments of the 21^st century has so far shown itself utterly incapable of replacing liberal elites. Tragically or otherwise, the recent ousting of Boris Johnson is the perfect example. Thanks to Brexit, Johnson had the strongest mandate of any British leader in the last half a century. To the disappointment of many, however, the incompetence of his cabinet reproduced the same vices of the elites he aimed to supplant — elites to which, it must be said, he always himself belonged.

But for all its charming British idiosyncrasies, Johnson’s rise and ignominious fall is not a drama specific to the UK but a defining feature of the first populist wave. Under this label, we can classify a diverse range of anti-establishment forces and leaders which rose to power in the period from 2014 to 2022, whether Donald Trump, Syriza, or the coalition government between the Movimento 5 Stelle and La Lega. These movements all represented different ideas and varying degrees of claimed distance from liberal power brokers, but they all campaigned under the slogan of taking power from the elites and giving it back to the people, promises they all singularly failed to achieve.

The promise and virtue of anti-establishment forces lay in their capacity to build their strength by gathering support from aggrieved sectors of the working and middle classes who felt the system was failing them. They introduced topics to the public agenda that were excluded from political debate. The new communication techniques introduced by populists disrupted traditional political parties. This ensured populist coalitions were successful election-winning machines, but governing effectively was an entirely different story. Perhaps one of the most significant traits populist governments share is that absolutely none of them actually fulfilled their pledge of rebuilding their nations anew.

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The constraints of real-life governance will always water down any promise of revolutionary change. Nevertheless, the problem with that recent wave of anti-establishment governments is not that the reforms they implemented fell short, but that such reforms never even began. The first thing Trump did was to suspend the TPP and the TTIP agreements, but then his government failed to present a programme to re-industrialise America. Boris Johnson eventually got Brexit done, but his real merit was preventing Brexit from being actively undone by technocratic liberal activists. Leftist Syriza passionately campaigned against EU austerity measures but, in the end, surrendered before a humiliating memorandum imposed by the Troika. Overall, almost no remarkable policy change was delivered by any of the numerous anti-establishment governments that took office during the past 10 years.

This is because these new forces were always weaker than hysterical liberal pundits wanted us to believe. To begin with, populist platforms have often been unwieldy coalitions of the disenchanted, united around a charismatic leader and common contempt for liberal elites. Their leaders have often been excellent communicators — especially compared with the boring centrist grey men — but they rarely had deep ideas of their own. If populist governments did not deliver meaningful change, that is partly because they didn’t know what exactly they wanted to do once in power. Political opportunism may get you into office, but it can’t reform a country.

Without a clear set of ideas, populists had a hard time framing social events in ways that could break with traditional political allegiances. And once in power, sooner or later, they all withdrew to their original  ideological safe space. When BLM protests erupted around the country, Trump took a traditional Republican stand, invoking “law and order”, though until then, a central part of his discourse relied on a strong mistrust of the deep state and the security apparatus. On the Left, we have seen how Bernie Sanders, Jean-Luc Mélenchon and Podemos sided once and again with the liberal centre to “Stop Fascism”. For a brief moment, it seemed possible that Boris Johnson would unleash the sovereign power of the British state towards reindustrialisation and finally lead the Tories from under Thatcher’s shadow.

Despite their use of disruptive communication and reliance on mobilised grassroots, the platforms that enthroned populist leaders were ultimately all too similar to the traditional electoral machines they aimed to confront. In the case of Johnson or Trump, they used conventional parties with almost no internal reform. Regardless of the lack of clear vision at the top, populist platforms lacked a competent, reliable line of middle-ranking officials able to translate the orders of the command staff to the tailored demands of everyday politics. History teaches us that reliable bureaucracies are the backbone of good governance. Every visionary start-up leader needs a bunch of boring Excel drones, but the boring work of government was never quite to the populist, crowd-pleasing taste of Johnson, Trump, or Salvini.

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So, during their time in office, they often combined chaos and poor governance with the tendency to delegate their day-to-day responsibilities to individuals linked to the old political elites — their purported opponents. The introduction of technocratic figures with no interest in implementing the changes populists promised sucked out all transformative energy those governments might have possessed. They were like the barbarian Mongols or Manchus who conquered the Chinese empire: after some initial disruption of the system, they surrendered their hard-won power to the old mandarins. Of course, the difference is that the successful barbarian king could lop the heads of bureaucrats if they found them obstructing the advance of the new order; today, the old establishment successfully used the incompetence of populist governments to take them down. The crown changed heads, but sovereign power never changed hands.

Trapped by the system’s institutional inertia, anti-establishment governments focused on what they did best, attacking the establishment, but not on remedying its errors. Criticising the elites is both a necessary task and an enormously satisfying one. But voters who gave their confidence to anti-establishment leaders expected something more than just seeing liberal elites being owned on Twitter. They expected reformers that would govern well on their behalf, changing the functions of the state in their image. While liberals caricature populist supporters as ignorant bigots, what actually feeds anti-establishment sentiment has always been the search for a point of anchorage in a time of turmoil and the hope of good governance. And no matter how whiny and annoying they can be, elites can still, it turns out, perform far better than common citizens in the task of governance.

The endurance of liberal regimes always lay in their capacity to inoffensively integrate external pressures and to prevent any attempt to implement structural change. That’s because, as with any other successful social system, liberal regimes are sustained not only by their front-line political backers but also by an entrenched network of interests and social organisations operating outside the formal structures of governance. That network acts as a para-state, with power inside and outside the state neutralising any possible threat. That is where social elites play their essential role in sustaining even a failing system’s capacity for survival.

Any political movement aiming to deliver reforms and break with the constraints of decaying liberal systems will therefore require something more than just winning elections and producing viral memes. After gaining office, the executive action of the government will need to be supported by an external solid social coalition. This means that an alternative network of civil society organisations must have already been built, incorporating unions, intellectuals, businesses, communities, churches. This will equip the new elites with the tools to finally reform broken Western societies, while also safely accommodating elements of the old establishment without keeping them in the driver’s seat.

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But in the meantime, the discontent that populist movements represented isn’t going away. In this state of permanent crisis, we will keep witnessing continuous social eruptions with strong anti-elitist sentiments: just wait for this winter when European voters leave their freezing homes to warm up the streets. Some of the new anti-establishment forces will try to recycle the old, failed populist form. Turbocharged with fiery rhetoric but incompetent at dealing with the most trivial tasks of governance, they will likely meet the same end.

Others, however, will learn the lessons of the previous populist wave and go beyond the outdated formula. This has been the historical pattern of past anti-establishment movements, from Chartism to Socialism; from the völkisch movement to the German Conservative Revolution; from the Russian revolution of 1905 to 1917; from the dispersed groups of American populism and the victims of the Great Depression to the coalition that brought the New Deal. In all of these, we can see the historical tendency to evolve from disorganised eruptions to disciplined structures, maturing from a general intuition about what is not working in our society to nuanced theories and complex doctrines, from the enfant terrible to visionary leaders and effective organisers.

Any well-functioning society still needs elites, no matter how bad they are. Populist revolts have removed the veil of liberal decadence, and our political systems have reached a point of no return. But inchoate populist rage is not enough. Whoever aspires to bring real change to Western nations must first work to build an elite class fit for the hard task of governance. As Boris learned, any fool can win power: the hard task is to wield it.

The latter had made his intention to become president rather clear: Draghi’s approval ratings as Prime Minister are falling, and likely to worsen as the country’s post-pandemic social and economic crisis unfolds and opposition to draconian Covid measures grows; he was, in effect, hoping to pass on that buck. Moreover, from the highest chair in the Italian state, he would have been able to oversee and steer any government for the next seven years.

Yet his odds faded as politicians failed to agree on a replacement prime minister with sufficient support or clout to see the government through to the end of the parliamentary term in 2023, thus raising the prospect of early elections — something hardly any MP wanted, for obvious pecuniary reasons. At that point, after a few failed attempts by the parties of the Right to gain support for a joint candidate, all the major parties (with the exception of Giorgia Meloni’s Brothers of Italy) opted for plan B and overwhelmingly re-elected Mattarella.

He represents the best possible outcome for the Italian and Euro-Atlantic establishment, if not for Draghi himself: the Draghi government will remain in place until the next elections, with a staunch defender of the status quo in the role of president.

From the establishment’s perspective, it also represents a win-win scenario for 2023. If a Right-wing coalition fails to secure a majority, they will be forced to find an agreement with other parties on a new “government of national unity”, much like the current one — and Draghi would be the most obvious candidate to head it. At the same time, if they were to succeed in securing a majority, they would still need a president capable of “vouching” for a Right-wing government and safeguarding it against any backlashes from financial markets or the European institutions — and Draghi would, again, be the most obvious choice. In that case Mattarella could step down, citing old age (he’ll be 81 next year), and pass the ball the Draghi.

That said, another positive unintended consequence of the election — again, from the establishment’s perspective — is to have made the prospect of a Right-wing majority in 2023 even less probable. The Right-wing alliance — Meloni, Salvini and Berlusconi — is more fractured than ever, and some even wonder whether it still exists. Berlusconi is no doubt furious at the other parties for not supporting Forza Italia’s candidate, Maria Elisabetta Casellati, the President of the Senate, in the secret of the ballot box. Meanwhile, Meloni chastised Salvini’s decision to support Mattarella, tweeting “I can’t believe it”.

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Indeed, it was the Democratic Party (PD), the main sponsor of the Draghi-or-Mattarella ticket, which once again came out on top, confirming itself as the real power broker of Italian politics — the party “that never wins an election but is always in power”, as the joke goes. As for the Five Star Movement, which has gone from being an anti-establishment party to an establishment wannabe, it is heading for an internal showdown: Giuseppe Conte, former prime minister and leader of the party, failed to whip up support for the unlikely choice of Elisabetta Belloni, head of Italy’s secret service; meanwhile, Luigi Di Maio, the party’s true éminence grise, was working behind the scenes to reconfirm Mattarella.

Yet on a deeper level, Mattarella’s re-election represents a failure of the entire political system, a choice that confirms the fundamental powerlessness and futility of Italy’s political parties, and of parliament more generally, and their existential fear of anything that actually resembles true politics; that is, a situation where they are called to make actual high-stakes decisions. The pathological infantilism of Italy’s political class is the result of 20 years of external constraint — that is, of the country being essentially managed by outside forces, in particular the European Union.

Political parties are well aware of the fact that, even if they manage to secure a majority in parliament, they lack all the “normal” instruments of economic policy necessary to actually steer the economy in one direction or the other, since these have all been ceded to the EU. Over time, this has created an enfeebled political class, which wouldn’t have the guts to make high-stake decisions — à la Brexit, so to speak — even if if had the means to do so. All of which explains why, in times of crisis, Italy’s political parties tend to pass the buck to technocrats such as Draghi and to the technocratic apparatuses of the state — such as the presidency — by having the latter take responsibility for policies, usually decided at the supranational level, which the parties don’t want to take responsibility for (but for which they can’t conceive an alternative).

It’s a TINA mentality on steroids, which is shared by the “progressive” civil society from which most of the support for establishment figures such as Draghi and Mattarella comes from. We’re talking of a relatively well-off minority that is terrified of anything that seems to threaten what they perceive to be “normality” — be it the rabble-rousing economic populists of the post-crisis years, the Eurosceptics or, today, those critical of vaccine mandates. Paradoxically, progressives have become so terrified of change that they have effectively become the most conservative bloc of Italian society, and the greatest supporters of anything and anyone upholding the status quo.

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Mattarella, with his sleepy, reassuring gaze, is the living embodiment of this comforting “normality” — and indeed enjoys widespread popular support for this very reason. By the same token, his re-election perfectly epitomises the transformation of the president’s role in the past few decades, and even years, from guarantor of the constitution to guarantor of the EU’s treaties and rules.

In 2018, for instance, following an alliance between the Five Star Movement and the League, the two parties, as required by the Italian constitution, submitted their choice of government ministers to the president for approval. Yet their proposed economic minister, Paolo Savona, was vetoed by Mattarella due to his euro-critical stance, forcing the two parties to opt for the more status quo-friendly Giovanni Tria.

More recently, when Matteo Renzi pulled the plug on the Giuseppe Conte’s second government in January 2021, Mattarella refused to dissolve parliament and call for early elections, instead working behind-the-scenes to ensure Conte’s replacement by Draghi, much like Giorgio Napolitano had done with Monti a decade earlier.

And over the past year, Mattarella has gone out of his way to vocally defend practically every policy of the Draghi government, including the more legally and constitutionally shaky ones — such as the introduction of vaccine passes and a de facto vaccine mandate, as well as the maintenance of a semi-permanent state of emergency. If one thing is clear, it is that Mattarella’s re-election will further strengthen Draghi’s authoritarian and anti-democratic grip on the country — now redubbed “Draghistan” by his critics — as the prime minister knows perfectly well that Mattarella won’t raise any issues of constitutionality in regard to his policies.

The Draghi-Mattarella regime exemplifies in many ways a disturbing evolution in Italy’s long-standing reliance on technocrats: what Christopher J. Bickerton and Carlo Invernizzi Accetti have dubbed technopopulism, which combines populist rhetoric to represent “the people” with technocratic claims to possess the necessary competence, experience and authority for translating its will into policy.

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Draghi, for example, recently painted himself as “a grandpa at the service of the state, with no particular aspiration” — that is, a common citizen who simply has the best interest of the nation at heart, a rather surreal claim coming from a former central banker who is considered by many to be “the most powerful person in Europe” and who is pursuing a very clear neoliberal political-economic agenda. In a similar vein, Mattarella stated that he had “other plans” but that he was willing to put his wishes aside and place himself once again at service of the nation, in what has been painted by the media as proof of the President’s supreme sense of selflessness, devotion and self-sacrifice.

This technopopulist mixture of technocracy and demagoguery is deeply worrying, and is at the root of Italy’s slide into autocracy — characterised by the centralisation of all major decisions in the hands of Draghi himself, the embarrassing level of government cheerleading by the media, and the silencing of any dissenting voices. That Twenties’ whiff just gets stronger and stronger every day. And with Mattarella in power, it doesn’t look like it will disappear soon.

On the issue of Brussels, however, Salvini appears to have undergone a conversion. On several occasions over the past year, Salvini has stated that he no longer believes Italy should leave the euro. Indeed, the formerly “anti-European” League now wholeheartedly backs the ultra-Europeanist Italian government led by former president of the European Central Bank (ECB), Mario Draghi — the very embodiment of the European currency that Salvini once railed against.

Why the change of heart? In a recent interview with the Financial Times, Salvini claimed that his conversion is a natural reflection of the “changes” that have occurred over the past year and a half as a result of the pandemic. “It is clear that Europe is changing for the better by equipping itself with new tools and new rules, and we must accompany it”, he says. “Covid has forced European institutions to listen to us. We hope that Covid has taught everyone that austerity doesn’t work”.

But what “new tools and new rules” is Salvini is referring to exactly? The much-vaunted Europe-wide “recovery fund” known as Next Generation EU (NGEU), I presume. Yet despite all the fanfare, the fund amounts to barely 5% of the EU’s GDP. What’s more, the funds will be disbursed (largely in the form of loans) over the course of six years, at best resulting in a fiscal expansion of around 1% of GDP on average between 2021 and 2024, according to the ECB’s own estimates. And that’s compared to a GDP loss for the EU as a whole of around 15% just last year.Furthermore, in exchange for this pittance, member states will be subject to very strict troika-light conditions.

The notion that “Covid has taught [Europe] that austerity doesn’t work” is also highly questionable. Yes, since the pandemic started, the EU suspended the Stability and Growth Pact’s (SPG) notoriously tight fiscal rules. Despite this, however, the euro area’s discretionary fiscal stimulus in 2020 was a paltry 4% of GDP — half the United States’ discretionary fiscal stimulus over the same period.

Moreover, the suspension of the SPG was always intended to be temporary. Indeed, the European Commission has recently stated that the “general escape clause” — which, in effect, suspended the SPG, giving governments space to spend – will no longer apply in 2023. From then, governments will have to start tightening their belts once again, in a repeat of the disastrous approach following in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis.

If anything, the real question is by how much? Judging from the actions of the Draghi government, a lot. Not only does the Government’s fiscal policy remain “very restrictive”, as the economist Gustavo Piga recently noted, but the latest budget report “sets out for the next three years a path of massive deficit reduction, unlike anything ever seen before in the country’s history”. So much for lessons learned.

All things considered, there appears to be very little in the way of positive changes within the EU to justify Salvini’s conversion. Indeed, I would argue that the very opposite is true: Salvini’s switch to Team EU is not a reflection of the bloc’s improvement, but rather of its inability to reform.

Salvini, like most of his Right-wing and formally “Eurosceptic” bedfellows, knows all too well that any attempt to challenge the EU’s economic governance will result in swift and merciless retaliation by the European authorities. Indeed, he experienced it first-hand, when the Conte I government (2018-2019) — supported by the League and the Five Star Movement — found itself on a collision course with Brussels over a minuscule budget deficit increase, required to finance the Government’s two flagship proposals: a citizen’s income and a reform lowering the pension age.

So Salvini, who has a good chance of becoming the country’s next prime minister, knows that he needs to get in Brussels’s good graces if he wants to have a chance at government. Of course, he is aided in this by the fact that his Euroscepticism was arguably always more show than reality, and that his neoliberal economic outlook, just like that of his ally Giorgia Meloni, isn’t that different from that of the EU itself  — in his interview with the FT, Salvini boasted that “on the economic front we are absolutely liberal”, as testified by his fondness for quoting Friedrich Hayek, largely recognised as an intellectual forefather of the euro.

But that’s not the point; the point is the way in which the EU’s economic pensée unique, by ruling out all alternatives to managing society and the economy other than the neoliberal rulebook, inevitably ends up pushing political challenges to the status quo, and to the EU itself, onto a strictly cultural and identitarian terrain.

Hence Salvini’s reframing of his critique of the EU, no longer couched in terms of the bloc’s economic policies but of its encroachment upon the “diversity” of the European peoples. The same goes for other European Right-wing parties, as testified by the recent declaration undersigned by sixteen of them, including Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán’s Fidesz, Poland’s governing Law and Justice, France’s National Rally, led by Marine Le Pen, Austria’s Freedom Party, Spain’s Vox and, of course, Italy’s League and Brothers of Italy, Giorgia Meloni’s party. The document says nothing about the EU’s economic policies, but revolves entirely around its criticism of Brussels’s intention to “transform basic social institutions and moral principles”, and calls for the need for European nations to “be based on tradition, respect for the culture and history of European states, respect for Europe’s Judeo-Christian heritage and the common values that unite our nations”.

The question is not whether one considers these claims to be sensible, outrageous or anything in between. The point is the way in which the EU has succeeded in shifting any opposition to itself from the socioeconomic terrain to the identitarian terrain, thus fuelling the very culture wars that are tearing our societies apart. Indeed, the Left’s embrace of wokism is part of this same process. This is the terrifying new world the EU’s economic superstructure has in store for us: one where our “democratic” choice will be limited to choosing whether we want to want to live in relatively conservative or liberal societies, but where no one will dare to challenge the EU’s overarching socioeconomic regime.

Was it, as left-leaning commentators and supporters of the former PM argue, because Giuseppe Conte’s government’s timid social-interventionist measures incurred the wrath of the country’s business and financial elites? Or was it just a power play by Matteo Renzi gone terribly wrong?

I actually think it most likely that Conte was not considered by those elites to be strong enough to manage the “great reset” of Italy’s economy, an endeavour that can only be pulled off by a “technical” — or technocrat-led — government. But more interesting than the speculation about how he got here is what the prospect of a Draghi government tells us about the nature of Italian (post-)democracy, and the perverse effects that the euro has had on the country’s economic, social and political fabric.

Draghi’s descent into politics has been accompanied by feverish cries of jubilation by the mass media — on a level that would have probably embarrassed North Korean state media. And virtually all parties in Parliament— including Salvini’s Northern League, which seem to have jettisoned what little was left of its “eurosceptic” posturing — have expressed support. The tone of the discussion was captured well by the powerful governor of the Campania region, Vincenzo De Luca (PD), who compared Draghi to “Christ” himself.

Nearly everyone seems to agree: a Draghi government would be a blessing for the country, a final opportunity to redeem its sins and “make Italy great again”.

Such prophecies aren’t based on an analysis of what Draghi’s policies may actually be — and whether they would be in the interest of the country and its citizens, workers and businesses — but on vague references to the man’s “charisma”, “competence”, “intelligence” and “international clout”. This is a reflection of a sick political culture, whereby statecraft is reduced to a purely technical affair, in which notions such as power, class, ideology are erased from the equation. Instead, they are seen as inconvenient hindrances to the “efficient” management of government, which only requires the “expertise” of well-studied (and politically neutral almost by definition) “technicians” or technocrats.

This concept is well summed up by the notion of “technical government”, which most non-Italians readers are likely to be baffled by. Indeed, the concept doesn’t exist in nearly any other Western country. The basic idea is that in moments of deep crisis only “experts” supposedly untainted by political partisanship and unburdened by the complications of parliamentary politics can be trusted with making the “right” and “necessary” decisions.

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By Peter Franklin

It’s a concept that, alas, has a long-running history in Italy. It harks back to the fraught relationship the country’s economic elites have always had with mass social democracy, and how they sought to resolve this tension by resorting to self-imposed “external constraints” of various nature. Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, Italy’s ruling elites were faced with an increasingly militant and “ungovernable” working class and a state-centric, redistributive political economy (grounded in the country’s socialist-leaning Constitution) that was deeply incompatible with the emerging neoliberal paradigm.

They thus began to theorise that only by “tying the hands” of government via a political-economic straitjacket — an external constraint or vincolo esterno — could they hope to achieve a dual objective. Their aim was to essentially “break the back” of the working classes while spearheading those “reforms” for which there was very little popular consensus. And that vincolo esterno was, of course, the process of European integration, beginning with the system of semi-fixed exchange rates known as European Monetary System (EMS), in 1979, all the way up to Maastricht and then the euro (EMU).

One of the main advocates of the vincolo esterno was Guido Carli, Italy’s highly influential economic minister from 1989 to 1992, not to mention one of the mentors of Mario Draghi. In his memoirs Carli made no secret of the fact that “the European Union represented an alternative path for the solution of problems which we were not managing to handle through the normal channels of government and parliament”. Namely, the wholesale transformation, or neoliberalisation, of the country’s political economy. This can be said to embody what Edgar Grande calls the “paradox of weakness”, whereby national elites transfer some power to a supranational policymaker (thereby appearing weaker) in order to allow themselves to better withstand pressure from societal actors by testifying that “this is Europe’s will” (thereby becoming stronger).

The concept of “technical government” is largely a by-product of the vincolo esterno. On the one hand, the apparently inexorable logic of the external constraint — be it the maintenance of a fixed exchange rate or the need to appease “markets” or “the EU” in order to avoid retaliation — creates a semi-permanent “state of exception”. This means that at any moment the complex dynamics of parliamentary politics may need to give way to “non-political” (i.e., “technical”) governments tasked with “getting the job done”.

Such a move implies that the policies they carry out are not a political choice but something entirely rational and necessary, which Parliament should limit itself to rubber stamping without asking too many questions. On the other hand, the socio-economic effects of the external constraint — particularly disastrous in Italy’s case — create growing tensions between the demands of citizens and the requirements of the external constraint (plus the inter/supranational institutions overseeing it). National parties are unable to resolve these because they lack all the “normal” instruments of economic policy necessary to maintain societal consensus. Which then leads them to turn to technocrats to resolve the impasse, by having them implement the measures the parties don’t want to take responsibility for.

It’s no coincidence that the era of the technical governments begins in the early 1990s, following Italy’s signing of the Maastricht Treaty, which was negotiated by none other than — you guessed it — Mario Draghi, at the time director general of the Italian Treasury. The first technocrat-led government, led by former governor of Italy’s central bank, Carlo Azeglio Ciampi, was formed in 1993 and inaugurated the first round of mass privatisation of state assets. Just a few years later, it was the turn of Lamberto Dini, prime minister between 1995 and 1996.

Throughout this entire period, Draghi, in his capacity as director general of the Treasury, was one of the main proponents of the privatisation of Italy’s state-owned companies, and of the vincolo esterno in general. The fall of Berlusconi’s last cabinet, in 2011, saw the ushering in of another technocrat, Mario Monti, former European commissioner and an international advisor to Goldman, who proceeded to administer a devastating austerity “cure” recommended by Brussels. This was largely a consequence of the decision by the newly-appointed president of the ECB – yes, Mario Draghi again – to stop the purchases of Italian government bonds, which caused Italian interest rates to skyrocket.

In short, either in his capacity as director general of the Treasury or president of the ECB, Draghi oversaw mass privatisation, severe public spending cuts and tax hikes that all had a deleterious impact on Italy.

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By Bruno Maeces

The experience of the Monti government is a perfect case in point: the healthcare cuts administered by Monti, as well as other administrations, and demanded by the European Commission, left the Conte administration dramatically ill-prepared to fight the Covid-19 outbreak. The architecture of the euro continued to impede an efficient response, despite extensive central bank support and the temporary suspension of the EU’s budget rules. This led to mounting economic and social costs, and ended up placing a growing strain on the government — an impasse that we are now told can only be solved by yet another deus ex machina technocrat.

This is madness. There is little doubt that Italy’s crisis must be regarded as a crisis of the post-Maastricht order of Italian capitalism, and more in general of the logic of the external constraint based upon privatisation, fiscal austerity and wage compression. This hasn’t just entailed the permanent stagnation of Italy’s economy but has also had the effect of disarticulating the normal functioning of democracy. If that is the case, then it is folly to think that Mario Draghi — literally the bodily incarnation of the political-economic model that has ruined Italy — can represent a solution.

Draghi didn’t just directly oversee the dismantling of Italy’s public industry and application of severe austerity in the early 1990s during his position at the Italian Treasury. He also fine-tuned the external constraint itself by spearheading the transformation of the euro system. It changed from a dysfunctional but formally democratic monetary union into an inter/supranational governance structure where governments are punished through a complex array of institutional mechanisms.

A system in which the formal democratic process itself is systematically subverted through financial and monetary blackmail — first and foremost at the hands of the ECB — to the point that one may reasonably question whether euro area member states can still be considered democracies. Even according to the narrow “bourgeois” understanding of the concept, one would certainly be hard-pressed to still consider Italy as such. Especially now that Mario Draghi has been called in to finish the job he began 30 years ago.

“Does Trump’s defeat signal the start of populism’s decline?”, asks the New York Times. “A Biden win buries the populist decade,” states The Article. “Its best days may already be over”, suggests The Guardian. “After four years of President Trump, and four years of trying to get Brexit done”, writes Andy Beckett, “populism is entering a trickier political stage: middle age”.

Populism has had a terrible year. The highs of 2016 feel like a very long time ago. Contrary to the old saying that you need a crisis to put anti-establishment revolts on steroids, this crisis seems to be throwing cold water over them.

Compare the polls before the pandemic erupted, in January, and how they look today. In Italy, Matteo Salvini’s League is down from 30 to 25%. In France, Marine Le Pen’s movement had a disappointing set of local elections earlier this year, losing around 40% of her local officials. In Germany, the Alternative for Germany is down from 14 to 9%, and the mainstream centre-Right and centre-Left that are up. In Brazil, public disapproval of Jair Bolsonaro’s presidency more than doubled during the height of the crisis. And here in the United Kingdom, for those who see Boris Johnson as part of the same anti-establishment wave (I do not), he has lost a 20-point lead in the polls in less than a year.

Then come the latest findings from the YouGov-Cambridge Globalism Project, a survey of about 26,000 people across 25 countries, which suggests that ‘populist tendencies’ among people in Europe are in decline. And to this we might add the coming shift in political debates more generally.

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National Populism is here to stay

By Michael Lind

We might have a vaccine but we also have the largest pile of debt since the Second World War. Somebody still needs to pay for this crisis. And that means that debates over economics, things like taxation and redistribution, which underpin the traditional ‘Left versus Right’ spectrum, have by no means disappeared. The 2010s were dominated by debates over identity and culture but the 2020s may soon see a return to those classic debates over the economy, so the thinking goes. And that might help the Left.

Look ahead, as I suggested in June, and it is not hard to see a chain of potential events that could utterly transform the global debate. Joe Biden enters the White House in January, the Alternative for Germany slump at elections in Germany a few months later, Emmanuel Macron is comfortably re-elected in 2022, Bolsonaro is kicked out in 2022, Poland’s Law and Justice lose in 2023 and a Labour-SNP coalition take power here in the UK.

One of the big arguments about national populism is that it represents a values-based backlash among a loose alliance of blue-collar workers and middle-class conservatives against the excesses of liberalism. Were that chain of events to take place then, so the thinking goes, it would represent a counter-backlash by a loose alliance of liberal graduates, ethnic minorities, Millennials and Zoomers — a newly ascendant majority who reflect how demography is, ultimately, destiny.

It’s all so seductive, isn’t it? Only, I don’t really buy it. The rise, nature and appeal of populism have always been more complicated than our public debates would have us believe. There is even a serious debate to be had about whether you can even ‘get rid’ of populism, or whether that would even be desirable. Democracy ultimately depends on the people for its legitimacy and, going back to Michael Oakeshott, has long incubated a tradition that sees politics not simply as process and management, but as a forum through which the people can search for national redemption, salvation and renewal.

Populism is something that kicks in when our democracies become too remote and detached from the people. Not only is it impossible to strip this long tradition out, but even if we could then we would find ourselves confronted with the very opposite of democracy: hollow, distant, bureaucratic and soulless technocracies. Democracy has always rested on the uneasy balance between these two styles.

But looking past that, I think that in the current moment we can also see three more specific reasons why the populist challenge to what we might call the liberal mainstream is unlikely to disappear in the years ahead.

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By Matthew Goodwin

The first is one of the big lessons from the previous crisis, the Great Recession: political volatility lies downstream from crises. Had we tried to predict the political effects of the Great Recession during the eye of the storm, as Lehman Brothers fell, then it is very unlikely that we would have foreseen the full extent of the churn and change that was about to arrive: the rise of Trump, Brexit, Salvini, Le Pen and others, as well as the continued collapse of social democracy.

These revolts may not have been caused by the Great Recession, but they were certainly given a helping hand by that crisis. And the full impact wasn’t clear immediately. It was only years later, once its effects had bled into people’s daily lives, that the underlying divides began to find their expression in the world of politics.

It may well be the same this time around. Consider this study on the effect of past pandemics: SARS (2003), H1N1 (2009), MERS (2012), Ebola (2014) and Zika (2016). It finds that five years after the immediate impact, the ‘Gini coefficient’, the main measure of inequality, has increased significantly.

To that we might add the looming pile of evidence from around the world which shows, quite clearly, that it is low-income voters who have, once again, been hit disproportionately hard by both the health and economic fallout of coronavirus. We know, for example, that in the United States most of the job losses have hit lower-income groups; while here in the UK, the Office for National Statistics suggests it is working-class ‘elementary workers’ who have been most likely to suffer higher rates of unemployment and mortality during this crisis. This tells me that many of the underlying social divides that fed the higher rates of political volatility in 2010s are, if anything, only being reinforced by this crisis.

The second is that we now have growing evidence that demography might not be destiny. Trump might be on the way out but Trumpism is alive and well. Look at data on voting patterns in the United States and you can make a case for how, actually, his movement has broadened rather than narrowed.

As Michael Lind points out in UnHerd, one of the big political narratives about populism — that it is mainly a refuge for old white men —  has imploded as Hispanic, Latino, Cuban American and women drifted toward the outgoing incumbent. Put simply, there was no major repudiation of Trumpism. There was no blue wave.

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This is all consistent with what Roger Eatwell and I argued in National Populism. These movements have deep roots within our societies while their reach is potentially wider than many think. Significant numbers of ethnic minority voters (like the one in three black and ethnic minority Brexiteers), a good chunk of graduates, the self-employed and middle-class remain receptive to this politics.

In the same way, it is worth noting that significant numbers of people from LGBT communities in France support Marine Le Pen because of threats to their rights from Islamic extremists, while here in the UK Boris Johnson has shown that you can substantially realign a party electorate (a realignment that his new advisors would do well to study).

Liberal progressives have a habit of talking about politics as though it were a conveyor belt, with increasingly diverse populations gradually turning their way as one year follows the next. But look at the events of the past decade and ask yourself if you find this convincing. We’ve never had more graduates, liberals and middle-class professionals in our societies and yet the number of Left-wing parties that are in power has crashed while conservatives and populists have, on the whole, had some of their best years for decades.

The third and final reason is that I am still not convinced liberals have crafted a meaningful reply to the underlying grievances that led us here in the first place. Look at Biden’s campaign. He certainly did inch a little closer to Trump; his ‘Made in America’ tax incentive, penalty for offshoring and promise to review (rather than repeal) Trump’s tariffs on China all show how a protectionist spirit remains alive and well. Alongside his big promise to invest in manufacturing and infrastructure, this might explain why he did a little better among white men, even if these gains were not as impressive as we were told they would be.

But he said almost nothing about the cultural dimension. Early Biden executive orders will likely focus on cancelling funding for the wall, reversing the ‘Muslim travel ban’ and pushing softer immigration positions. These will go down well with his progressive base but they will also antagonise Republicans. So I see little reason to think that polarisation in America will reduce. One of the central challenges facing all of our leaders around the world is to somehow strike a compromise between these two camps. So far, few have found a way.

And what was Biden’s vision for a revitalised liberalism? It seems to me that his was a narrative that was more anti-Trump than pro-Biden, more anti-populist than pro-liberalism, if you like. In the same way, aside from managing coronavirus more effectively, what exactly is Keir Starmer’s vision for where he wants to take the country and the British people? We don’t really know because, so far, that vision does not seem to exist.

The year or two ahead may well be difficult ones for the populist Right which, as Beckett rightly notes, may find middle-age harder than adolescence. But we should not kid ourselves. Many of the underlying drivers are just as prominent as they were four years ago. Which means that the 2020s could end up being just as volatile as the 2010s.

But it will be in southern Europe, in countries such as Italy, where the worst effects of the health crisis will allow the worst effects of the economic crisis to really do some damage.

The numbers are terrifying.

This week, Goldman Sachs said that while it expects France’s GDP this year to decline by just over 7%, and Germany’s by 9%, Italy’s will slump by nearly 12%. The signs of the looming catastrophe are there. Italy’s manufacturers have just recorded their sharpest drop since records began.

More than four million businesses have shuttered. Tourism has ground to a halt. And, in a cruel twist of fate, it has been Italy’s most productive northern regions where the full force of the coronavirus pandemic has been felt.

Some analysts have argued that this contraction and crisis will be short-lived; that Italy will ‘bounce back’ later in the year. But this raises a difficult question: bounce back to what? The country has, essentially, lost two decades.

As the economist Ashoka Mody has pointed out, Italy has been in an economic coma ever since it joined the Euro more than 20 years ago. Economic growth has flat-lined and living standards have stagnated; Italians have now spent all of the 21st century in a slow or no growth trap.

The country was heading into another recession at the end of last year. And it had already gone through three in the past ten years, without ever having really recovered from the last crisis. Before Covid-19 hit, Italy’s economic output was still 5% below the peak that was recorded more than a decade ago.

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Populism in Italy is far from defeated

By Matthew Goodwin

This is one reason why, last year, the International Monetary Fund forecast that even by 2024 Italy’s output will still be lower than it had been in 2007. The country’s public debt to GDP ratio has ballooned; for each of the past six years Italy has owed more than 130% of its annual economic output, a figure that will now almost certainly surpass at least 150%.

Its financial system has remained weak, and there are still too many non-performing loans. The country, meanwhile, is grappling with one of the highest unemployment rates in the Eurozone which, at 10%, is basically what it was nearly a decade ago. Youth unemployment has been far higher — at nearly 30% —which is one reason why you hear so many Italian voices on the London tube.

In short, it is hard to make the case that the average Italian today is better off than when their country joined the single currency more than 20 years ago. Certainly, some of Italy’s problems predate its membership of the Euro: the poor education rates, ageing population, lack of industrial modernisation and heavy reliance on small family-run businesses have not helped.

But it is also true that Italy’s inability to breach Eurozone spending rules and invest seriously in its own economy has left it trapped in a doom loop. Which, in turn, has left Italians feeling frustrated, fed up and deeply pessimistic about their future. At the end of last year, 90% of the Dutch and 83% of the Germans described their economic situation as ‘good’. In Italy, it was 17%.

Italian enthusiasm for the European Union was also waning. Last year, as the Eurobarometer survey revealed, they were already among the least trusting of the European Union (only 38% trust it), were among the least likely to think positively about the EU (only 33%), were among the least likely to feel that their ‘voice counts’ in the EU (only 30%) and were among the least likely to feel satisfied with how democracy is working in the EU (only 45% did so).

Then, when Covid hit and Italians looked beyond their borders for help, European ‘solidarity’ was slow to appear — or did not appear at all.  Talk of unity, of learning from the mistakes of previous crises, quickly made way for nation-first approaches to closing borders and restricting the export of medical supplies.

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Populism in Italy is far from defeated

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Russia and China quickly filled the vacuum that had once again been left by the lack of leadership in Europe by sending supplies and workers.

When several states, including Italy, then asked their Eurozone partners to share debt, the more secure states in the north, notably Germany and the Netherlands, said no.  Anxious that a sharing of debt now might lead to the sharing of debt in the future, some in the north argued that financial assistance should come instead through the European Stability Mechanism (ESM).

But many in the south, shaped by the experiences of the past decade, and remembering the treatment of Greece, fear what strings will be attached to assistance. It is seen as a path to further austerity; last week, nearly half of all Italians rejected the idea of receiving help from the ESM because they see it as “a tool to impose Greek-style austerity”.

Meanwhile, the populist politician Matteo Salvini, who has been struggling in the polls, has taken full advantage of the situation. He’s now campaigning on the issue, stating simply: “No to the ESM”. Even if Salvini himself is not the beneficiary it is hard to see how Italy comes out of a renewed crisis with less rather than more populism. After all, it was the previous financial crisis that set the stage for the rise of both the ‘neither Right nor Left’ populist Five Star and Salvini’s League.

Their abandonment by the EU is clearly being felt by Italians as they sing to one another from their balconies. In recent weeks, nearly nine in ten said that the ‘EU is not helping us’, more than seven in ten felt that the EU ‘has not contributed in any way to addressing the crisis’ and nearly eight in ten resigned themselves to the view that the EU is unlikely to change

Other polls have recorded an increase in public support for leaving; today, more than one in three Italians say they would leave while less than half think this is a bad idea. Feeling abandoned, Italians have also become less trusting of the EU —with just one in four doing so — and more likely to say that their membership of the EU is a ‘disadvantage’, with 67% doing so.

All of this is raising big questions about the ability of the European Union to revive public enthusiasm in the broader project. As even the New York Times noted this week: the question to ask is not whether the EU will survive — because it will — but rather what is the point of any union if it cannot find unity when unity is needed most.

Passionate pro-Europeans routinely begin their columns and tweets with the famous quote by Jean Monnet: ‘Europe will be forged in crises and will be the sum of the solutions adopted for those crises’.  But many other things can be forged in crises — including Euroscepticism and a belief that, when it comes to the crunch, you really can only rely on your nation.

We tend to forget this now, but it was the EU’s fumbled response to two earlier crises — the Great Recession and refugee crisis — that convinced Britain’s Leave voters that being in this organisation was not in their longer-term economic interests.

Most Italians have not yet reached the same conclusion. But if you put Europe’s bungled response to Covid alongside Italy’s worsening economic picture then it is not hard to see how the different impact of the current crisis and the recovery to come might push them further in this direction.

When Italy eventually emerges from this crisis it will not only be a poorer country but will also be a more Eurosceptic one, too. And who knows where that will lead.

In America, questions about President Trump’s actions have become central to the debate, not least because of the proximity of an election and the extent to which a strong economy had been the President’s best argument for re-election. But it is in Europe that the consequences could be most profound, even if it still too early to tell which political factions will predominate.

Perhaps the extensions of state powers in every European country will make the populace more open to authoritarian impulses from the political fringes, or perhaps this experiment with them will make the public more resistant to the accumulation of power by the state.

Of all the points of political interest relating to this crisis, one relates particularly to the series I have been working on for UnHerd on the European Right and the borders which delineate it from the far-right. Last month I looked at Sweden and the way in which a party of the extremes — the Sweden Democrats — had in the course of two decades come towards the political centre. But it is in Italy, currently the worst afflicted country by the coronavirus, that a spotlight is currently needed.

Italian politics is not the same as politics in other western countries, and this is as true of the extreme as the centre. In Germany today there are movements that regard their country’s history in the 1930s and ’40s as a proud one, but they are kept to the very farthest margins of the politics and in many cases are illegal. Though there are exceptions, almost anybody in Germany who looks towards the country’s fascist era as a noble one is granted the opprobrium they deserve and kept far from the centre of polite society.

Other countries have a different settlement, most clearly, perhaps, Spain and Italy. Whereas after 1945 Hitler-ism was vanquished not only on the battlefield but in the field of ideas, the same cannot be said of Mussolini-ism. There are reasons for this, not least the claim that among the last century’s fascist dictators Mussolini was a lesser beast than Hitler (admittedly a low bar).

For this reason among others, post-war Italy consistently sustained a far-right movement (as it did a far-left movement) in a way that would have been utterly unimaginable, not to mention illegal, in post-war Germany. A view persisted on the Italian Right that their brand of Fascism would not have gone so badly if it had not been for Hitler dragging Mussolini in a bad direction.

Because of these historical differences, in Italy ‘fascism’ and ‘far-right’ are not such excommunicable offences as they are in the rest of western Europe. As recently as 2003 the then Italian Prime Minister, Silvio Berlusconi, made exculpating remarks about Italy’s wartime dictator and ten years later praised Mussolini as having been a good leader.

By this point, however, there was one element of Mussolini’s record which Berlusconi was wise enough to condemn without caveat, the passing of anti-Jewish laws. This was not an example of moral or political leadership on Berlusconi’s part, for by then even on the Italian far-right there had been some shift in attitude towards the past.

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In the 2000s a figure who looked set to go all the way to the top in Italy, Gianfranco Fini, made one of the most interesting migrations in modern politics. During the 1990s Fini had been a member of the Movimento Sociale Italiano, a party formed immediately after the war by supporters of Mussolini. In the 1990s Fini became famous — among other reasons — for his overt support for the wartime dictator, including his assertion that Mussolini had been the greatest man of the 20^th century.

But during the 2000s, as Fini rose through the political firmament (by then in the Alleanza Nazionale) he also changed, although as ever it is impossible to know what is opportunism and what is somebody’s political heart.

In an interview with the Israeli newspaper Haaretz in 2002, Fini (by then Deputy Prime Minister in one of Italy’s permanently coalition governments) said: “As an Italian I must accept responsibility, I must do so in the name of Italians… The Italians bear responsibility for what happened after the legislation of the race laws in 1938 — and they must apologise.”

The statement caused an uproar in Italy, not least among supporters of Mussolini. But for a leader of a party seen as linked to Mussolini-ite politics the statement was crucial. A year later, on a visit to Israel, Fini cemented this shift, and also comprehensively disowned his previously laudatory statement about Il Duce.

Whatever Italian views about other aspects of Mussolini’s rule, Fini made clear that Mussolini had been wrong in several absolutely central things: in being an autocrat, in his alliance with Hitler and in his anti-Semitism. Although Fini’s career ended up dissolving within the decade in a blizzard of very Italian discoveries about a flat in Monaco, the fact that such a prominent figure from the far-right had made this move was a demonstration of a wider change in the country’s politics.

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Nevertheless, Italian politics remains open to neo-fascism in a way which is unacceptable in almost every other western country, and few people have been accused of it more readily or more frequently than the most recent leader on the Italian right, Matteo Salvini.

Unlike Fini and others, Salvini did not originate on the far-right. Indeed. when he started off in Milanese politics in the 1990s he was involved in the communist faction of the Lega Nord. His success came about through his recognition that the party which campaigned for the separation of northern Italy from the south should become a national movement. More than anyone else it was Salvini who in recent decades pulled off the feat of making a separatist party into a national, and indeed nationalist, one.

However this success would not have been possible had Italy not been forced to deal with the consequences of migration surge from North Africa throughout the 2010s — and virtually alone.

While the European Union professes to hold to a policy by which all member- states take an equal share of the burden on migration, in reality Italy, like other frontline states, has been forced to cope alone. During the 2000s they did so —among other things — via a policy of dark and rarely acknowledged bribes to the Gaddafi regime in Libya. So long as Gaddafi held back the boats (and his regime certainly did not hold them all back) Italy could cope.

But in the wake of Gaddafi’s overthrow in 2011 all of that changed, and soon boatloads of migrants were arriving every day on Italian islands like Lampedusa. Other European countries refused to pay for their share of this burden, and although the Italian population (spurred on not least by the Pope) were extraordinarily tolerant and sympathetic to the arrivals, nevertheless once the migrants got stuck on the islands or in major cities Italian public opinion began to shift.

Yet it was a major test of Italian tolerance; on top of the sheer weight of numbers, most came from culturally and religiously very different societies, as well as the criminality that the smuggling gangs brought into Italy. Salvini  addressed the issue, and his arguments resonated with the Italian public: not only the unfairness of Italy being forced to cope with this alone, but his insistence that the new arrivals did not share the traditions or ways of life of the Italian people.

And while it is true that the Lega (especially while it was a separatist movement) had ugly and neo-fascist elements, in many respects the party was not especially right-wing — it did not, for instance, have any especially austere attitude towards social welfare.  Yet it had an anti-intellectualism and instinctive nativism which made it easy to dismiss for a time.

Nevertheless, after the extraordinary events of 2015, when huge numbers surged into Europe, it was inevitable the party’s star would rise. After the election in 2018 the Lega formed part of an unlikely coalition government, with the Left populist Five Star Movement, and Salvini became Minister of the Interior and Deputy Prime Minister.

Although he is currently out of power (having attempted, unsuccessfully, to disband the coalition government last year) he remains the most dynamic force in Italian politics. Earlier this year, as the coronavirus began to enter Europe Salvini — like Marine Le Pen in France — called for his country’s borders to be closed. The rest of the political class called him a racist for suggesting such an unthinkable idea, and a few weeks later (after the severity of the crisis finally hit them) the same people who had condemned Salvini instituted the very policy.

Still he is regularly described in the foreign press as a ‘far-right’ politician, despite always having demonstrated a very un-Duce like respect for the democratic process (he quietly left office last September after his coalition broke apart). Partly this reflects the historical baggage of the Italian Right but much of it is misrepresentation by the press.

When last year the Italian Senator and Holocaust survivor Liliana Segre called for a bill to be passed in the Senate setting up a commission to look into “intolerance, racism, anti-Semitism and hatred”, the Lega abstained from the vote, believing that it would be used to excoriate them on their immigration policy. Salvini himself currently faces prosecution in Italy for forbidding illegal landings while Interior Minister, so it is was not an irrational belief on the Lega’s part.

For abstaining in this vote Salvini and his party were accused of being anti-Semitic, yet he has been exceptionally outspoken on this issue. In January of this year I spoke alongside him on a panel in the Senate in Rome which called on the Italian government to adopt the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance definition of anti-Semitism. It is the definition that the British Labour party — among others — has stumbled upon and it is the definition which among other things makes plain that hatred of the Jewish state is itself a demonstration of anti-Semitism.

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If Salvini were a fascist or an anti-Semite it would seem an unusual thing for him to demand that the Italian government adopt a definition of anti-Semitism more stringent than they are currently willing to adopt. A definition which would — incidentally — almost certainly catch a number of ‘anti-racist’ but vociferously anti-Israel politicians on the Italian Left.

Fears of fascism in Italy are not unfounded, and the country does have parties and groupings whose attitudes towards the past and policies for the present should cause deep concern. Groups like Casa Pound, in this case named after the Mussolini-supporter and poet Ezra Pound, make no secret of their neo-fascism. To Salvini and the Lega’s Right there are parties which the rest of Europe would have a far bigger problem with.

Then there is Fratelli d’Italia, led by Giorgia Meloni, a former minister in Berlusconi’s last government. Meloni is a very Italian creation. Her public speeches and stances focus on her patriotism, her Catholicism and her support for the family – all popular things of course – but at heart her party is homesick for the fascist era.

When, a few years back, centre-left Jewish politician Emanuele Fiano (of the Partito Democratico) spoke in the Council of Deputies about an episode of anti-Semitism, Meloni and others objected to his speech by doing the saluto Romano (the fascist salute, with arm raised) in the chamber.

It was, and is, an action which it is almost impossible to imagine in any other European country, and a reminder that in Italy the past has not been fully or satisfactorily litigated, and that Italian politics remains as volatile as it ever was.

The furthest edge of the European Union has recently become the centre of the continental bloc’s attention; and what happened in Kastanies is reverberating in Brussels, Paris and Berlin, as Turkish autocrat Recep Tayyip Erdogan, humiliated by the loss of at least 33 Turkish soldiers in an airstrike in Syria’s Idlib, takes his rage out on Europe.

Since the multi-billion Euro refugee deal with Europe in 2016, Erdogan, like Gaddafi before him, has wielded the prospect of unleashing an unstoppable wave of migrants as a threat against the soft, rich and disunited European powers he incessantly rails against.

Until now, the threat has always worked, both for extracting Danegeld at will from fearful European leaders, especially the perennially pliant Angela Merkel, and for ensuring European acquiescence to his military adventures in Northern Syria. Among them, the January 2018 invasion of the Kurdish region of Afrin, and the October 2019 invasion of the country’s Kurdish-dominated northeast each saw hundreds of thousands of Syrian civilians flee their homes in the face of war crimes carried out by Turkey’s rebel proxy militias and a systematic Turkish campaign of ethnic cleansing and forced demographic change.

But this week, when Erdogan finally pulled the trigger, European leaders did something few expected, least of all the Turkish despot himself: they said no, and pulled together in what became the first display of European diplomatic unity and common purpose since Brexit unsettled the fragile union.

Erdogan had hoped that European leaders would support his faltering war against the Syrian government and its Russian backer in the county’s northwestern Idlib governorate. Here Assad’s forces, backed by brutal and indiscriminate airstrikes against civilians as well as the mixed rebel and al-Qaeda-linked jihadist forces backed by Turkey on the ground, are regaining territory lost in the first years of the almost decade-long war, causing one million civilians to flee their homes in the process.

Erdogan’s propaganda channels, like the state-run broadcaster TRT, linked the sudden arrival of tens of thousands of migrants at Greece’s border with the humanitarian crisis in Idlib, claiming that the huddled masses seeking to gain entrance to Europe were fleeing Russian and Syrian government bombing. Despite this claim being boosted by well-meaning Western commentators, it is entirely untrue. The dispossessed of Idlib remain trapped in Idlib, barred from entering Turkey by the second-largest wall on earth, manned by Turkish border guards ordered to use lethal force to prevent their entry.

Instead, the flow of migrants who appeared at Greece’s border demanding onward passage to the UK, Germany and Sweden were drawn from the migrant underclass of Istanbul and other Western Turkish cities, mostly Afghans from the country’s Hazara Shia minority working in the country’s booming sweatshops as well as Pakistanis, Moroccans and other recent migrants drawn in by visa-free travel to what has become the easiest point of access to the European Union.

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Lied to by the Turkish state, which informed them that Europe’s borders were now open, they were then bussed to the border in free coaches laid on by the Erdogan government for this sole purpose. When they realised that the border was closed, they attempted to gain entry by force, hurling rocks and tear gas grenades at the Greek soldiers and police guarding the border, or rushing weak sections of the border fence as Turkish police fired tear gas at Greek officials to distract them, and used armoured cars to pull down the border fence.

The images of an angry mass of mostly economic migrants attempting to enter Greece by force, urged on and openly supported by Turkish security forces, have awoken a strong feeling of patriotic and indeed nationalist sentiment in Greece, where the new conservative government has directly labelled the events at the border as a form of hybrid warfare, in which Erdogan utilises migrants as weapons and the Turkish and international media as a force multiplier to secure his aims.

Civilian hunters, fishermen and military reservists from border villages have formed semi-official patrol groups along the frontier, capturing and detaining migrants who have broken through and handing them to the Greek army and police for immediate return to Turkey. Convoys of military reinforcements trucked to the frontier have been met by applauding crowds as they trundle through the towns and villages of Greece’s border regions, where many Greeks see the sudden, forced migrant crisis as part of Erdogan’s longstanding campaign to weaken Greek sovereignty over areas of the nation only liberated from long centuries of Ottoman rule in 1913, and which Erdogan repeatedly threatens to take back under Turkish control.

It is unclear why Erdogan attempted to achieve his goals in this precise fashion, using unhappy humans as weapons in a manner directly contradicting claims that this crisis has its roots in Syria. Greek government statistics disseminated to journalists last week asserted that of the 252 migrants who had then been detained after illegally entering Greece over the land border, 69% were from Afghanistan, 19% from Pakistan and only 4% from Syria- fewer than the 5% from Turkey itself.

If Erdogan had wanted to round up a sufficient number of genuine Syrian refugees to hurl at the border, he could easily have done so. But by weaponising a random assortment of migrants of dubious or non-existent refugee status, the Turkish government not only weakened its case to be acting out of a humanitarian desire to assuage Syria’s human misery, but has also weakened the entire concept of asylum in the eyes of European observers and voters.

The Greek government’s response, halting all new asylum claims, whatever their merits, until the end of the border crisis and immediately returning all new arrivals to Turkey, has met with the warm approval of Europe’s political mainstream.  Greece has been termed Europe’s “shield” in a newly warlike turn of phrase, and €700m of support for new border infrastructure has been pledged, as well as hundreds of personnel to repel attempts to enter what is now an officially sanctioned Fortress Europe.

The massive disjunct between the Turkish government’s narrative of events at the border and that witnessed by journalists on the Greek side has also highlighted the sadly now firmly established weaponisation of media in 21^st century conflicts. In attempting to expand the Syrian war to the frontiers of Europe, Erdogan also expanded the online meta-conflict to the sphere of European politics, a trend which will not enhance ordinary consumers’ trust in the news they watch and read.

Accelerated by social media, the Syrian War has blurred the distinction between protagonist, activist, analyst and journalist like no previous conflict. As various factions and proxy militias battle on the ground, this meta-conflict between western commentators rages on social media, as each side, radicalised by the secret DM groups in which they communicate, attempts to sway the public narrative in their chosen direction.

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Consequently, those journalists and commentators keen to promote Western military intervention in Syria on behalf of either the civilians or armed rebel groups of Idlib have uncritically shared Turkish narratives of desperate Syrians pleading to enter the safety of Europe, despite their almost total lack of correspondence with reality.

As Stalin learned nearly a century ago, and other dictators have realised since, Western journalists will quite happily ignore the evidence of their own eyes if doing so allows them to flaunt their humanitarian and progressive values, a situation drastically exacerbated by Twitter.

Yet whatever the merits of Western military intervention in Syria, the dire situation of the country’s civilians will not be improved by allowing Turkish-resident Afghan and Pakistani economic migrants to enter Europe en masse whenever Erdogan deems it useful. Instead, by eroding the already-waning attachment of European voters to the very concept of asylum, Erdogan’s cynical border gambit will do great harm to those genuine victims of conflict, now and in future, who need it most.

What Erdogan did not realise is that the Europe of 2015 no longer exists, shunted into distant, unrecoverable history by the political hangover of that year’s refugee crisis. The wave of right-wing populism that has eviscerated Europe’s once dominant centre-left now threatens the continent’s centre-right, causing mainstream conservatives to shift dramatically rightwards for their own survival. In 2015, right-wing populists in Hungary and Poland were shunned outliers in the European system, written off as aberrations from an only semi-liberalised Mitteleuropa. Five years later, right-wing populists are the rising challengers even in the continent’s western heartlands.

In France, only a few percentage points separate Le Pen from Macron for dominance entering next year’s presidential election. In Italy, the likelihood is that Salvini will assume power within the next year or so, most likely in coalition with the far more radical Brothers of Italy party. In Spain, the outlandishly Francoist VOX party seeks to enter coalition government with mainstream conservatives nationally, as it already has in Madrid.

In Sweden and Finland, the heartlands of the Nordic social democracy so beloved by British and American liberals, right-wing populist parties seeing to halt migration and overturn the liberal consensus are the most popular political forces in each country.

In Germany itself, the entire political system has been paralysed by the rise of the right-wing AfD party in response to Merkel’s handling of the 2015 crisis, with Merkel taking six months to form a government after the 2017 election, and German politics now reducible to a series of experiments in unlikely and unstable coalitions just to keep the populists out of power.

The country has also been shaken by a series of extreme right-wing terror attacks against both ethnic minorities and pro-migration politicians alike, and a rolling drumbeat of alarming incidents of radicalisation within the German security forces, like the 2017 Day X plot in which troopers in the German equivalent of the SAS allegedly conspired to assassinate liberal politicians, including the country’s president, and launch a guerrilla campaign against the state.

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In Austria and Denmark, the onward march of right-wing populism has been halted, but only by centrist governments of right and left adopting the rhetoric and policies of the populist right, including a zero tolerance approach to illegal migration. It is little wonder that Orban himself has declared the European Union’s reponse to this crisis a moral victory: the policies he was shunned for in 2015 are now the stated policy of the European Union as a whole, with Europe’s mainstream conservatives falling over themselves to claim Greece’s hardline border policy as their own.

This is not, as an aside, the Europe that Britain’s FBPE contingent so idealised during our own long-running political crisis, but it is the continent’s political mainstream for the foreseeable future. Given that the majority of Afghan and Pakistani migrants will have aimed for the UK as their ultimate destination, drawn by long-existing communities of fellow kin and a facility with the national language, it is ironic that at the same time Turkish police were firing volleys of tear gas at their Greek counterparts to enable their entry, Dominic Raab was in Ankara declaring his full-throated support for Turkish foreign policy, despite the fact that its success at Europe’s borders would direly threaten his own government.

The European Union — with the exception of Merkel’s Germany, lumbering distractedly and painfully towards geopolitical irrelevance — has finally awoken to the threat posed to the continent by a Turkish autocrat lurching from one self-engineered crisis to another in his desire not to relinquish his hold on power.

Threatened at home by a secular Kemalist section of the electorate dissatisfied at the country’s bloody and so far unsuccessful war in Syria, by the presence of millions of refugees, by slow-motion economic collapse and by the country’s growing slide into authoritarian Islamism, Erdogan survives only by engineering crises which pit the Turkish nation against the world. Switching from the United States to Russia to Europe and back again as the existential foe of the moment, Erdogan’s Turkey is the greatest destabilising factor in our near abroad.

Claiming that Turkey’s borders as settled by the 1923 treaty are too small to contain the might and needs of the Turkish nation, Erdogan has effectively annexed large chunks of northern Syria, expanded its military presence in Iraq and Libya, claiming them to be within the Turkish “borders of the heart,” and threatens constantly to invade and annex Greece’s eastern islands.

It is only by chance that the 2016 coup attempt against him failed and that Turkey avoided a serious civil conflict, and Europe will need to be similarly fortunate to avoid being dragged into a conflict of the autocrat’s choosing in the near future. The chances of a peaceful transition of power away from Erdogan are exceedingly slim, and Europe, including Britain, will need to reassess its relations with its unhappy neighbour sooner rather than later, a process begun, it seems, at a sleepy Balkan border crossing the Turkish strongman last week turned, on a whim, into a battlefield.

What do they all want? At the more wonkish end of the debate, the argument is broadly that the political push throughout the twentieth century for ever greater social and economic freedom has brought many benefits, but that these have been unevenly distributed and are now reaching the point of diminishing returns.

The pursuit of ever greater freedom and individualism, this strand of thought argues, has delivered rising wealth while hollowing out working-class communities; liberated some women while forcing others to work a double shift and abandon the young and old in substandard care, and provided an infinitude of consumer choice but at the cost of mounting ecological damage. Under the sign of radical individualism, the new communitarians argue, we are all becoming more solitary and self-absorbed. Even charitable giving seems to be in unstoppable decline.

But what, in practice, are the new social conservatives seeking to conserve? Calls for a revival of cultural conservatism, many in the name of Christian values, seem often on closer examination oddly insubstantial. In 2017, UKIP’s leader-for-that-week Stephen Crowther said that the UK is a Christian country, “and we intend to stay that way”.

Yet for Crowther, being a Christian country does not seem to impose any obligation to actually be Christian, but he says, simply “reflects the Judeo-Christian classical and enlightenment origins on which our laws, our social systems and our cultural norms have been built over two millennia.”

Elsewhere in Europe, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbàn describes his brand of authoritarian, identity-oriented politics as “Christian democracy”. Only a minority of Hungarians go to church every week – only 12% attends church regularly, although around three in four identity as Catholic or Protestant — but the identifier “Christian” has nonetheless become central to Orbàn’s politics.

Much as Crowther did, the Orbàn-supporting Bishop of Szeged, László Kiss-Rigó, bridges this gap with a vague, cultural definition of what actually constitutes a Christian: “In Europe, even an atheist is a Christian”, he said. It turns out that being “Christian” is less about prayer or doctrine than values, for as he puts it: “We are very happy that there are a few politicians like Orbán and Trump who really represent those values which we Christians believe to be important.”

What exactly are these values, then? Attendees at anti-Islam Pegida rallies in Germany carry crosses and sing carols. Italian Right-winger Matteo Salvini punctuates anti-immigration rhetoric by brandishing a rosary, drawing criticism from the very Catholic faith whose symbols he invokes. Try to pin down any actual values this form of Christianity might require of its adherents, and matters are much less clear.

Even those whose stated desire is to defend the place of faith in public and political life seem keen that the faith itself stop short of imposing actual obligations. To take a more moderate example of the new cultural conservatism, the Social Democratic Party took a broadly post-liberal, culturally conservative stance in its 2018 relaunch. The New Declaration made an energetic defence of our right to hold even illiberal religious views openly in public life, stating that “Citizens holding a traditional, patriotic or religious outlook are often bullied and marginalised, stifling the open debate upon which a free and democratic society depends.”

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Then, about a year later, the SDP lost its only donor over a bitter intra-party dispute about whether or not it should be party policy to ban religious non-stun slaughter — a position markedly at odds with the party’s previous defence of religious pluralism. And when the Church of England recently reiterated its long-held position on sex and marriage, prominent SDP member Patrick O’Flynn took to the pages of the Daily Express to mock “the otherworldliness of these Men of God”. Instead of insisting on “out of touch” doctrine, O’Flynn suggested, in order to attract more young people to weekly worship the Church should adjust its doctrines on sex and marriage to reflect their values.

In this view of faith, theological positions do not reflect any kind of truth-claim but should be emergent properties of the aggregate ethical positions held by the members of that church. Less “Christian democracy” than “democratic Christianity”: whatever the congregants believe becomes the doctrine of the Church.

From a religious perspective this makes no sense. To the believer, doctrine is handed down from God Himself. The thought of God’s word being subject to plebiscite is absurd, if not outright blasphemous.

This debate reveals the missing piece in today’s would-be conservative revival. Where do our values come from? What is the proper source of political authority? Progressives gesture at natural rights or an imagined future utopia, but for anyone who remains unconvinced that we are all on a journey somewhere wonderful, some other authority is required.

Edmund Burke suggested the answer lay in a blend of deference to tradition and God’s grand design, tempered by carefully constrained democratic institutions; his Savoyard contemporary, Joseph de Maistre, argued that the only proper form of authority lay in God’s will, delivered via the Pope and an absolute monarch.

The history of modernity has unfolded in the tensions between these competing understandings of political authority. “The will of God”, the will of “the People” and the grand designs of utopias have variously been used to justify all manner of enterprises, with outcomes from the magnificent to the horrific. But our present political difficulties may be in part down to a growing popular discomfort with accepting the legitimacy of any of the above.

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Since the election of Donald Trump and the vote to leave the EU, there has been a low but persistent rumble from our moral betters that democracy should maybe have its wings clipped a little, to stop stupid proles making bad decisions. A degree of wing-clipping has in fact long since taken place: John Gray has discussed recently in these pages the way the language and legal mechanism of ‘rights’ is used to shift entire areas of public life from democratic debate to the dry realm of unelected lawyers and judges. But if authority does not reside in the will of the people, nor does it reside with God: it is difficult to imagine a mainstream British politician claiming moral authority on the basis of divine will without being roundly pilloried.

Progress and human rights, then? Every young person who passes through a modern university is taught in no uncertain terms that totalising metanarratives are suspect. At best, they are power moves. Whenever you find one you should ask cui bono? In the case of universal human rights, the answer is probably: lawyers.

This leaves would-be conservatives in a bind. If (with a few honourable exceptions still holding out for direct Vatican rule) political authority rests not in tradition (too restrictive on personal liberty) or democracy (probably rigged) or even God (don’t tell ME what to do!) or even in the lawyers, then what is left? Politics professor Matt McManus argues that the result is a postmodernism of the right as well as of the left: a series of nested calls for a return to authority, tradition and culture that all, on closer inspection, turn out to be largely delivery mechanisms for adversarial but hollow identity politics.

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Having come unmoored from its roots either in the past, the divine, or the popular will, McManus suggests that this postmodern conservatism has warped a Burkean belief in tradition into a kind of moral cosplay whose main purpose is less seeking the good life than making a noisy defence of whichever identities its sworn enemies attack. As the postmodern liberal-left demonises heterosexual white males, so postmodern conservatism sets out to defend them; and so on.

Seen in this light, the problem with Orbàn and other borrowers of Christian clothing is not that they do not believe their own words. Inasmuch as they can mean anything, they genuinely identify as Christians. It is more that when all sources of authority are suspect, the only legitimate recourse is to the self: to identity, and identification.

And the problem with identification is that it remains separate from whatever it identifies as. Just like the modern dating marketplace, where commitment is radically undermined by the ease of swiping right, modern cultural conservatism is radically undermined by the fear that without a reliable foundation of authority, and with more identity-choice options only a click away, we are never fully the thing we claim as our identity.

Without a sense of confidence in the roots of its political legitimacy, conservative values dissolve from concrete obligations to consumer accessories. This in turn is why Orbànist “Christian democracy” and many of its populist cousins find their most compelling realisation not in religious doctrine or observance, but in defining themselves against their outgroup. If “even an atheist is a Christian” then either no one is a Christian, or everyone is. The only way of defining what a Christian is, is in terms of what it is not: foreigners.

But if this is so, then in a postmodern environment, shorn of recourse to authority, cultural conservatism is a waste of energy. It cannot define what it wants. All is insubstantial; there is no exit from the Matrix, nothing left to conserve.

Does it follow from this that those who long for place, limits, love, family, faith and meaning should just sit in the rubble and watch it all burn? I do not think so. But when there is nothing solid to go back to, anyone attracted to what is left of the ideology that used to be called “conservative” needs to find a new name for their yearning. “Constructionists”, perhaps. There is a lot of building to do.

When all votes had been counted, the Right-wing alliance, which had hoped to use a shock victory to force fresh national elections, finished more than seven points behind the Left. It wasn’t even close.

For much of the past three years Salvini has seemed unstoppable. While the 46-year-old has at times miscalculated, like last summer when he tried and failed to bring down Italy’s shaky government, he has developed a potent message.

Strident opposition to immigration, refugees, Brussels and Rome, combined with a near-constant presence on social media, has transformed Lega from a northern separatist fringe party into a serious force that has swept southwards and into first place in the national polls.

But now Salvini has been stalled. Cue much talk about the decline of populism. “Peak Populism?” asked The Times in its leader, in the shadow of his defeat. It is not the first time this question has been asked, of course. In the aftermath of Marine Le Pen’s defeat to Emmanuel Macron in 2017, many observers drew the same conclusion; populism had finally been kicked into decline. But then it continued to consolidate across much of Europe, not only at the national level but also winning a record number of seats in the European Parliament last spring.

As in 2017, many see Salvini’s defeat in Emilia-Romagna as a crucial watershed; a line in the sand in the global debate about how to defeat populism. Bruised by their defeat in the Brexit wars, and anxious about a looming rematch with Donald Trump in November, liberal campaigners are rushing to draw lessons from the regional battle, or what Italy’s La Repubblica has branded Salvini’s “first defeat”.

Some are already arguing that the main takeaway is the need for mass mobilisation. Perhaps the most striking feature of the election is that, compared to the previous contest in 2014, turnout surged by 30 points.

Then comes the more specific counter-mobilisation in the form of the ‘Sardines’ movement, which sprung up in November to oppose Salvini and the Right-wing turn in Italian politics. The Sardines, named on account of the way in which they pack themselves into town squares, are already being hailed around the world as an antidote to populism. “An Italian flash mob just pushed back Europe’s populist tide“, reads a headline in The Atlantic.

But is this really the case? There is certainly no doubt that the vibrant, youth-led movement played a role but precisely how much of a role is up for debate. Compared to the last election the Left’s share of the vote only increased by 2-points. The Right’s jumped by nearly 14-points while Salvini and Lega walked away with a new record share of the vote, as did the ultra Right Brothers of Italy who saw their support jump more than four-fold.

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Perhaps just as important, if not more so, was the collapse of the populist “neither Left nor Right” Five Star, whose leader, Luigi Di Maio, sensing the shifting winds, resigned only a few days before the election. In Emilia-Romagna support for Five Star crashed by 10-points and, crucially, much of this vote appears to have flowed over to the Left. This may yet have profound implications for Italian politics.

If Five Star continue to decline then the centre-Left may be the beneficiary as Italy becomes more polarised between Left and Right. Either way, the defection of Five Star voters to the Left arguably reflected not so much the discovery of a new liberal formula for fighting populism but more simply a governing populist party failing to manage the transition from being an outsider to an insider governing party.

Then there is the region’s long-established political tradition. Similar to Labour’s Red Wall in England and Wales, or the socialist strongholds in industrial France, Emilia-Romagna has long been dominated by the Left. In fact, for more than half a century this strong tribal loyalty and local culture made it virtually impossible for other challengers to breakthrough. This too helped the Left. But as in England, France and elsewhere, there are signs that the Left’s dominance is weakening and that national populists, rather than retreating, might actually be consolidating.

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The writing has been on the wall for a while. Salvini and Lega took 19% in this region at national elections in 2018 and then nearly 34% at the European elections last year, along the way picking up a few victories in mayoral elections. And now they have a new record share of the vote at regional elections.

It all feels so familiar to those of us who have watched the Brexit wars. Lega’s gradual chipping away at the established parties remains me of UKIP’s gradual erosion of Labour majorities, which cleared the way for a wider assault on the Red Wall in 2019. I’m not saying that Italy is going to vote to leave the European Union but I am saying that sequencing in politics is important, and that it feels incredibly unlikely that Salvini and Lega have actually peaked.

On the contrary, Salvini and his movement appear to be consolidating. This is reflected not only in its record general election result in 2018, and then its strongest ever result at European elections in 2019, but also in a string of record results at regional elections in the past two years; the Aosta Valley, Abruzzo, Basilicata, Piedmont, Lombardy, Sardinia, South Tyrol, Trentino, Fruili-Venevia Giulia and the Left stronghold of Umbria. Emilia-Romagna now joins that list.

This is the story of how parties build support; bit by bit, district by district, some prominent victories mixed with some prominent defeats. While Salvini failed to breach the wall this time it is not hard to see how he and his allies might do so in the future, much like UKIP’s defeat in the Labour Party bastion of Heywood and Middleton paved the way for Boris Johnson and the Conservatives to eventually capture the seat in 2019. Salvini and his party have still led in every single poll since October 2018 and with an unstable government it seems likely that Italy will have elections sooner rather than later.

This is why I find it hard to avoid the conclusion that, contrary to the inevitable talk about the defeat of populism, Lega continues to emerge as a stable and permanent player in Italian politics. We should avoid sensationalist talk about peak populism and instead explore the deep-rooted currents that are pushing these movements forward; strong public distrust in politics and institutions; fears about the relative deprivation of one’s group compared to others in society; intense worries over both the pace and scale of immigration and social change; and the way in which our parties have been pushed into an era of ‘dealignment’, as the bonds between voters and established parties break down. None of these is going anywhere anytime soon.

In the shadow of yet another election in Europe, it feels as though while the Left has won a battle, it has still not figured out how to win the war. “Let’s start again,” tweeted Salvini as he boarded a train departing Emilia-Romagna. “He who hesitates is lost.”

https://twitter.com/matteosalvinimi/status/1221774082162790402

Final polls for Sunday’s elections in Emilia-Romagna, before Italy’s statutory blackout in the fortnight before a vote, had the candidate for regional president of the Left-wing Partito Democratico (PD) neck and neck with Lucia Borgonzon, representative of Matteo Salvini’s Right-wing Lega.

If defeated in Emilia-Romagna, it is difficult to see how the PD dare muster the nerve to continue as junior partner in the national coalition government with the ever weaker alt-Left 5Stelle (5 Star), which continues to tear itself apart. On Wednesday, in a further sign of disarray, Luigi di Maio resigned as 5Stelle leader but remains Minister for Foreign Affairs.

When it came to power after the last general election in 2018 the anti-corruption movement 5Stelle, founded by comedian Beppe Grillo — a Genoan version of Billy Connolly — was Italy’s most popular party, polling at 32.7% (compared to then coalition partner the Lega’s 17.35%). But it has haemorrhaged support ever since and is now on just 15% compared to the Lega’s 33%.

Its coalition partner, the PD, is in equally dire straits even if it does hang on to Emilia-Romagna. It has also seen its suppport plummet and last September it split when former premier Matteo Renzi – Italy’s attempt at Tony Blair — refused to accept the coalition with 5Stelle and resigned to form a new party Italia Viva, which is now polling about 4%.

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If the marriage of 5Stelle and PD, sworn enemies until they formed a government and currently fielding opposing candidates in Emilia-Romagna, does collapse it will almost certainly mean a snap general election, which a Salvini-led Right-wing coalition would win by a mile, according to the polls.

These place the Lega consistently on 33% — as much as its two nearest rivals the PD and 5Stelle put together. So, with its traditional allies, Silvio Berlusconi’s Forza Italia (6%) and the national conservative Fratelli d’Italia (10%), the Lega would have more than enough votes to get a working majority in Parliament.

Salvini would thus become Italy’s first elected prime minister since 2011 when Berlusconi resigned at the height of the Eurozone Crisis. None of the subsequent five was elected as premier — three were not even MPs or Senators.

Even Britain’s liberal-Left Guardian finds it impossible to praise Italy’s coalition government. The other day its Rome correspondent wrote that “the past four months have been marred by constant bickering and scant action on policy” and its budget “contains nothing that will tackle high unemployment or revive Italy’s long-stagnant economy”.

If the Lega wins Emilia-Romagna, then what might keep the coalition alive apart from a shared determination to keep Salvini out of government is the equally shared desire to keep getting paid bootloads of cash. Italian MPs are among the most rewarded on the planet, with a basic gross salary of €140,000 per year, which when expenses plus allowances are included rises to €230,000 per year.

Just as Boris Johnson’s Tories appeal to so many traditional Labour voters in red wall strongholds by pledging solutions to the problems those voters care about, so too does the Lega strike a chord with many former Italian communists in places like Emilia-Romagna.

All populists have this in common: they promise government programmes that combine, to a greater or lesser degree, Right-wing levels of patriotism and Left-wing levels of expenditure.

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And in Salvini the League has a charismatic leader who is popular with the working class because he shares their concerns and aspirations and who — like Johnson — has the gift of the gab and loves nothing better than to mix with ordinary people and have his selfie taken with them. And like Trump, Salvini is hyper active on social media with more than 3 .6 million followers on Facebook.

His latest ruse on the campaign trail was to press the intercom buzzer of a Tunisian immigrant family in a block of flats in Bologna whose son was said by local people to be a drug dealer. “Can I come up to your flat to speak to you about your son who local people round here say is a drug dealer?” Salvini said into the intercom. The scene was filmed and went viral. The son later told journalists he would sue those who sent Salvini to his family’s block of flats for defamation, but admitted he had been in prison for drug-related offences.

Before the collapse of the Berlin Wall Italy had the largest communist party outside the Soviet Bloc — the Partito Comunista Italiano  (PCI) — and Emilia-Romagna was its epicentre. This was the region where internationalism and then socialism first took hold at the end of the 19th century before evolving into communism after the First World War.

The PCI’s economic model ruled the roost in Emilia-Romagna for decades and consisted of publicly subsidised cooperatives which guaranteed jobs for the boys — party members — across huge swathes of the economy. The system worked because it was a closed shop.

Ironically, Emilia-Romagna is also where Benito Mussolini was born and then became the rising star of Italian revolutionary socialism as editor of daily newspaper Avanti! in Milan — before his expulsion from the party in 1914 after his refusal to oppose Italian entry into the war on the side of Britain and France.

He took that decision, as did the socialists in France and Germany but not Italy, because the war had made him realise that people — himself included — are more loyal to country than class and that therefore nations are superior to the internationale. In 1919, he founded fascism as a national, as distinct from international, version of socialism. The tectonic tensions that caused fascism are similar to those that cause populism — however different the consequences. Then as now patriotism, and what it means, played a crucial role.

At Brescello, the small town near the River Po used by Giovannino Guareschi as the model for his Don Camillo books, which pitted the communist mayor Peppone against the priest Don Camillo, Salvini posted a selfie on Facebook of himself next to the statue of Peppone with the caption:

“I bet today Peppone would vote Lega! You have no idea how many old communists have told me in the past few days: ‘The PD people prefer bankers to workers, this time I’m voting for you!'”

This was the region where at the end of the Second World War communist partisans massacred thousands of Italians without trial and covered it up for decades. Things have not changed that much; I live here, near Ravenna, and about 10 years ago received a bullet through the post with an anonymous death threat for my children because I had written an article stating that the Americans and British liberated Italy, not the partisans. The Communist partisans were, contrary to Left-wing propaganda, a military irrelevance, and they did not fight for democracy and La Patria but for communism and the Soviet Union.

The Left can still control the writing and teaching of history through its command of the education system and media, but not the workplace and community where it has become increasingly irrelevant. And that is why more and more working people here are turning to the Lega.

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Then there is the issue of money: average annual GDP per capita growth in Italy since the introduction of the euro has been zero. Italy’s government debt is 131% of GDP — and GDP is virtually stagnant. The economy has been in more or less permanent recession for years. Adult unemployment is officially about 10% but in reality is much more, as not many more than half of working age Italians do actually work. Youth unemployment, meanwhile, is more than 30%.

To make matters worse, 600,000 migrants, the vast majority of whom were not refugees according to the UN, have arrived in Italy since 2013 by sea from Libya — 335 miles away from Sicily. The Left, in power on its own most recently with Renzi followed by Paolo Gentiloni until 2018, did nothing to stop the migrant flow until its dying days, nor create jobs or protect italian workers from globalisation. It kowtowed to the EU’s diktat that austerity is the only solution to the eurozone crisis. Obviously, the eurocracy loves the Italian Left but the country’s hoi polloi increasingly do not.

Salvini promised a crackdown on mass illegal immigration and as deputy prime minister delivered. Indeed, his 2018 closure of Italy’s ports to charity ships ferrying migrants to Italy from the Libyan coast was practically the only concrete achievement of the last coalition government of 5Stelle and the League — apart from 5Stelle’s introduction for the first time of a non-contributory unemployment benefit system. Needless to say the new coalition has re-opened the ports.

But Salvini’s migrant crackdown was hugely popular with ordinary Italians. He also promised, and still does, an end to austerity with huge infrastructure investment, the breeching of the EU’s budget deficit limits, a flat tax for small businesses, a crackdown on crime, tough import laws to stop unfair trade, and the defence of Catholic values and the traditional nuclear family — hence his frequent brandishing of a rosary during speeches.

Whether or not this is a cynical ploy from the divorced Salvini, and whether or not the party are “racist” as its enemies claim, his message is one that resonates with millions of Italians battered for two decades by the EU, the euro and the forces of globalisation, and disillusioned with the Left’s abandonment of class warfare in favour of the identity war. A familiar story all over the West.

This is true even for British liberals who, reeling since the night of 23 June, 2016, have made the continent a sort of spiritual home as they’ve become alienated from their countrymen.

Right-thinking Britons see their country as an embarrassment sliding towards populism, a sad contrast to the moral superpower that is Germany and France under centrist leader Emmanuel Macron. Yet the Continent of the Anglo liberal imagination is as unreal as the supposed nostalgic Britain of yesteryear loved by Leavers.

Italy

Britain, many people fear, is moving away from the European dream and towards fascism. It’s such an established meme that even the most recent BBC Agatha Christie adaptation was a thinly-veiled analogy about 1930s fascism and Brexit.

Yet people keep on coming to this Nazi hellhole, with the fabled “Brexodus” of migrants leaving the country actually seeing an extra 212,000 people arriving last year, and with record numbers of foreign students, too.

The fascist Brexit Britain theory is held among a minority of Remainers because they’re measuring the country by a theoretical ideal rather than comparing it to other — real — countries. So while the hate crime “surge” following the referendum mostly involved very minor incidents, Italy saw a number of openly racist murders during the late 2010s.

Whether they’re connected or not, Italy has also had a populist Right-wing government in power for most of the past four years, and the Lega may well return — at around 33% in the polls, it is by some distance the most popular party. Italian politics has been, as long as anyone can remember, chaotic and unstable, which makes me wonder if Mary Beard’s Italian colleagues who make her feel “embarrassed” about Brexit have been paying attention to their own country.

France

A central theme of fascism is a love of violence against ideological opponents, and so a visitor from outer space with a vague understanding of our human political philosophy would probably conclude that there was only one fascist state in the EU — France, where the brutality of the police is on a scale that would be unfathomable in England.

Among the recent victims of the gleefully violent French police is a teenager who lost an eye in Strasbourg and an elderly woman in Marseilles who died from her injuries after being hit by a rubber bullet. Just this month prosecutors launched a probe after a video appeared to show a policeman firing point-blank at protestors with a riot control gun.

France is quite far down from Britain in the Freedom International rating, and treats minorities like Roma in a way that would do more than embarrass liberal Brits.

Right-wingers often complain that the horrific behaviour of the French police towards the gilets jaunes has received scant coverage in the BBC; certainly if Hungary or Poland treated their citizens like that, I’m pretty sure it would be on our news more. But then France has always been a politically violent country.

The last mass murder of protesters in England occurred in 1819, when 18 people were killed by authorities in Manchester; in France police in Paris killed up to three hundred unarmed protesters in 1961.

Had anything even vaguely comparable happened during the US Civil Rights era it would have been the subject of about 500 films and even my children in an English primary school would now be learning about it now. But then Anglo liberals are fascinated with the Anglo world; not so much by the continent.

France is different to England, in some ways far more traditional; for example, the same-sex marriage campaign there was opposed by enormous protests, while, like many continental countries, it has a 12-week limit for abortion, when even talk of a 20 weeks-limit would have the Anglo commentariat dressing up in those Handmaid’s Tale outfits.

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Germany

Germany also has strict laws on abortion and its rate is around a third that of England, while it only passed same-sex marriage in 2017, against the wishes of liberal idol Angela Merkel.

But no one cares, because a certain type of Anglo sees Germany as flame-carrier of all that is good and forward-thinking, locked in a battle with the forces of darkness towards the east — Hungary, Poland and especially Russia.

Yet Germany is, if not Russia’s ally, then a close trading partner; it has far, far better relations with the country than Britain does, largely built on energy supply, and Germany’s support for the Nord Stream gas pipeline makes it far easier for Moscow to exert pressure on the west. Europe’s biggest economy also gives far less in international aid than Britain, which donates more than any other country in the continent and is, proportionally, the sixth-most generous.

Scandinavia

Even more so, Scandinavia is seen as an ultra-progressive paradise to British progressives, especially those who — like me — enjoy Borgen. Yet neither Denmark nor Sweden are as social democratic as Anglos believe, with large private sector involvement in areas run by the state over here; in Denmark even the ambulances are privatised, while Sweden is fiscally more free market than the US, and has three times as many private health operations as Britain (proportionally).

Denmark also has immigration restrictions that would have British academics in full “Toby Young has said something” outrage mode — and these were put in place by its centre-Left party.

Are the Danes racist bigots? By any measurement they are among the most tolerant, liberal people on earth — they just don’t share the Anglo elite’s belief that immigration controls are necessarily immoral, a worldview that makes us quite unusual globally.

The Nordic countries generally also have fewer females in top jobs compared with the United States, and a smaller proportion of women studying STEM subjects than Islamic countries like Malaysia and Oman.

British progressives see patriotism, and particularly its violent, heroic element, to be positively primitive. Because they’re not keen on the idea of dying for their country they assume other liberal nations are like them — and yet the Swedes and Finn do not feel the same way and are positively gagging for a chance, way ahead of any other non-ex-Soviet European state.

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Racism

Although Britain has fallen to fascism, it curiously remains by most measurements one of the least racist countries, the least worried about inter-racial marriage, or living next door to people of a different race.

Britain is also unique among European countries in having a tiny education gap between the children of natives and immigrants, whereas in every continental country it is large.

Europeans are far less pro-immigration than Americans are, while Britons are among the most pro-immigration of Europeans, and public attitudes towards immigrants have softened further since the referendum.

Americans and Britons also have stronger sensitives about race than continental Europeans. Recently Italian football authorities decided to take a stand against racism in the game, so they hired artists to paint… monkeys. Many Italians are of course embarrassed by this, but something like that would never have seen the light of day in England.

On a similar note, every December lots of Anglo-liberals are shocked to learn that the Dutch have a festival once a year where people black up as Zwarte Piet, “Black Pete”.

Although it is true that the Netherlands is a more liberal — and generally better — version of England, it is different to ours. It also has a far stronger religious element, which might surprise people who rarely travel beyond Amsterdam. Britain’s progressive sibling even has its own Bible Belt, where women are discouraged from wearing short skirts and swearing is even prohibited in some communities.

Healthcare

Perhaps no subject brings out the parochial Brit more than healthcare, most of whom believe that there are two systems in the world: our NHS, and the American system where paramedics rifle through your wallet before giving you CPR. Most remain blissfully unaware that many of our neighbours do not have an NHS. Germany doesn’t. France doesn’t. Switzerland doesn’t.

Germany and France both have the “Bismarck system”, not the “Beveridge Model” used in Britain, and have much better healthcare outcomes.

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Citizenship

When the Home Secretary suggested that London-born jihadi Shamima Begum should be stripped of her nationality it was widely denounced as racist by UK media, American media, and even by Al Jazeera, the network owned by the not-at-all-racist Qatari state.

Is taking away the citizenship of a jihadi born in the country that odd? The Germans do it, and so do the Danes, and I wouldn’t call either of those countries fascist dystopias. Even the proposal to allow a jihadi bride with two children to return to Norway has brought down the country’s government, which includes the populist-right Progress Party.

But then the whole idea of jus soli — that being born in a state confers some natural right to live there — is far from universal. The French have long had it, and so have the Americans, yet it’s never been the norm in Germany or other countries. And why would it? Different countries have different traditions.

Free movement

Despite all the despair about Brexit taking away our freedom to live, love and travel the world, not many Brits choose to live in continental Europe.

Of those who do are large minority are retirees, especially in Spain, people who aren’t taking the opportunity to explore the world but just want less winter in their autumn years. There are just 6,000 Brits in Poland, for example, about 0.6% of the number of Poles in Britain, while even the numbers in France are small compared to the French diasporas in London, and the age difference between the two groups is significant.

This isn’t a criticism – I live about 10 miles from where I grew up – but the rhetoric of Europeanism and of free movement isn’t matched by the reality.

Likewise with students and their opportunity to explore the continent; lots of young Britons would like to study in the EU, but then several non-EU states take part in the Erasmus scheme too, and the country they most want to live in is, of course, the United States.

International affairs 

People who worry that Britain’s relations with our European partners also need to bear in mind that Italy and France are now so at loggerheads that they’re engaged in a sort of proxy war in Libya, each backing different shady militias in that benighted country.

In contrast Britain, France and Germany have grown increasingly close on military matters since 2016, a by-product of the United States’ inevitable drift away from Europe towards Asia, with various joint statements reflecting the stronger three-nation alliance.

There are two continental Europes: the fictional one of the British liberal imagination, and the reality; both are indeed lovely places, but they are rather different to each other; and despite globalisation, the internet and all that business, the continent still remains very much isolated.

Throughout all of this, we learned a great deal about the current state of politics: that national populism has consolidated as a political force, that Green movements are gradually becoming more significant, that social democracy remains stuck in a state of crisis, that Europe’s political systems are continuing to fragment and that Brexit is now definitely going to happen.

Underneath all of this, we also learned some other things; that for millions of voters around the world feelings of cultural insecurity continue to matter as much as feelings of economic insecurity; that centre-Right parties such as Britain’s Conservatives or Austria’s People’s Party are starting to adapt far more effectively than Left-wing parties to this new political era; and that the Left still does not appear to have much of an answer to its fragmenting electorate.

Against this backdrop, then, what might 2020 have in store for us? Here are a few predictions to see us through.

First, starting here in Britain I predict that Boris Johnson and the Conservative Party will enjoy a lengthy honeymoon period. With the largest Conservative majority since 1987, Prime Minister Johnson will inevitably pass his Withdrawal Agreement Bill. Aside from formalising Brexit this will allow him to claim with credibility to have honoured the result of the 2016 Referendum, as well as his 2019 promise to “Get Brexit Done”. It will also leave Johnson as the only Conservative leader to have truly triumphed over the Europe question, an issue that dogged all of his predecessors.

This year will also allow us to see how Johnson and his party plan to hold together an electorate that looks and feels fundamentally different from that which elected David Cameron in 2010 and 2015.

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Johnson’s following is older, more working-class, less well educated, heavily white and more socially conservative. This is why I predict some big, bold offers on immigration reform, crime, spending on infrastructure and other investment for the (non-London) regions. Expect lots of pictures and speeches outside the capital.

With a big majority, I also predict that this generation of Conservatives will want to go much further than their predecessors in pushing back against a “soft Left” bias that runs across much of Britain’s education sector and media. There is no point in winning a battle over Brexit if your party is simultaneously losing the longer-term war over culture.

Meanwhile, Remain will inevitably drift into Re-Join. Not only will this be a harder movement to sustain but it will also be one that will soon run out of steam. Babyboomers will struggle to turn pro-Remain sentiment into a viable political project, especially when the much younger Generation Z are far more concerned about the issue of climate change. There will be a hardcore of diehard Remainers continuing to rally around podcasts and Twitter Land but this will be a fringe movement, nothing more. More Brits will identify openly as “European” but this will not translate into any significant political change.

Labour, which just sunk to its lowest number of seats since 1935, will struggle to regroup this year. Corbynism has been removed as one possible reply to the wider crisis facing social democracy in Europe, as well as to questions that are being asked in the United States about where next for the Democrats. Economic populism, it turns out, is not as popular as many people think. It will also lose every time when presented with a centre-Right leader who is willing to lean Left on the economy while leaning Right on culture and identity. That too contains a message for the United States as it begins to gear up for November.

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Labour’s sudden rush into a leadership debate, the lack of any serious self-reflection on its defeat, the unimpressive opening statements of the leadership contenders and the deeper structural problems within its electorate all point to a long and slow walk through the wilderness rather than a quick recovery. Local elections in the spring of 2020 will likely add to this challenging year.

Look ahead at 2020, and when it comes to populism all eyes will be on the United States where I think, on balance, that Donald Trump will probably be re-elected.

There is certainly a lot running against the incumbent. His path to winning the electoral college remains narrow and his approval ratings are weak, especially when seen in historical perspective. In fact, his ratings are the lowest in any election year since Gerald Ford in 1976 (who went on to lose to Jimmy Carter).

But there is also a lot going for Trump, too. Among his core groups of voters — evangelicals, committed Republicans and the working class — his ratings are far stronger. And the Democrats have, at least in my view, so far shown little understanding about why Trump was elected in the first place or what they might say to win back key chunks of his electorate. Mobilising minorities and committed leftist activists will not be enough.

Then comes the narrative; Trump actually has a lot to say to voters. You might not like what he has to say but on the American economy, standing up to China, working to defend national borders and clamping down on terrorism and gang violence he does have a story to tell. What, in contrast, is the Democrat narrative? I’m not really sure. On top of this, we knew that Trump had a lot of negatives in 2015 and he still won.

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Europe’s national populists will continue their current success after their best year yet, when this disruptive political family went on to win its largest number of seats in the European Parliament. In Britain over 2019, Nigel Farage continued to pile pressure on the main parties via the Brexit Party, whose call for an Australian-based immigration points system and more work on tackling regional inequalities would later be adopted by Boris Johnson’s Conservatives.

Elsewhere, new parties broke through; Forum for Democracy at municipal elections in the Netherlands and, more significantly, Vox at national elections in Spain. While In Italy, Matteo Salvini and the Lega lost power but won a record number of seats in the European Parliament and continue to enjoy healthy leads in the polls. Flemish Interest in Belgium won a new record share of the vote while the Alternative for Germany advanced at state elections in Saxony, Brandenburg and Thuringia. In Poland, Law and Justice won their largest share of the vote on record.

Rather than weakening, national populism has consolidated and, as we head into a new decade, looks set to remain as a permanent force on the landscape, particularly as Europe’s political systems continue to fragment.

One final thing to watch out for in 2020 are the shifting political alliances. Boris Johnson is interesting because of the way in which he is seeking to usher in or revive a different brand of conservatism, which has seen his party forge an alliance-of-sorts with the left-behind working class — but this is not the only new alliance to keep eyes on.

At the recent election in Austria, the Greens enjoyed their strongest ever result but then proceeded to join a coalition government with the centre-Right People’s Party. And, interestingly, while they have introduced new environment taxes, the Greens have also signed up to some pretty hardline positions on immigration and integration; supporting measures to crack down on illegal migration, to curb “political Islam”, including the banning of headscarves for under-14-year-olds, and introducing preventative custody for individuals who are considered a risk to security but have committed no crime.

All of this is a reminder of the fact that, just because Green movements are doing a little bit better than in the past, that does not necessarily signal the return of a nice, fluffy brand of social liberalism. On the contrary, on the all-important questions about identity and culture much of Europe continues to drift further to the right, in response not only to national populism but also to the public mood. I see few reasons why that will change in 2020.

The country is in trouble. It rests on an unfair and inefficient politico-economic equilibrium, which hinders innovation, competition and creative destruction to protect vested interests. Average incomes have barely grown for a quarter of a century. And distrust for the political system is deep and widespread. Hence the success of demagogic politics, on both sides of the political spectrum.

The main beneficiaries were the Five Star Movement and the far-right League. At the March 2018 election they won 33% and 17% of the vote, respectively, and formed a government together, which challenged and momentarily rattled the EU.

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Although the two parties might seem similar, however, their coalition was always an ill-starred one. As I explained here before, while Five Star rose to challenge Italy’s political establishment, the League is a party of the status quo. Its rhetoric, which acts as a cover for that strategic priority, is directed against immigrants and Europe; Five Star’s is couched in the language of transparency, accountability, public integrity and the rule of law – all urgent priorities, but ones that challenge the vested interests that the League represents.

Indeed, before starting serious negotiations with the League, Five Star explored a possible alliance with the Democratic Party (PD) – the mainstream centre-Left party that dominated the 2013–18 cabinets, which did very little to change that equilibrium, and suffered a stiff electoral defeat in 2018. Although they were political adversaries, policy compatibility seemed greater between them than between Five Star and the League. Five Star and PD could have found common ground in vital areas – on social insurance reform, for example, on the fight against corruption and tax evasion, on public administration reform, and on a pro-growth public-expenditure review. I argued at the time that I saw a Five Star-PD coalition as the preferable solution in a hung parliament.

But the talks were called off when the PD’s former leader – Matteo Renzi, who had resigned but still controlled the parliamentary party – vetoed them, mandating the party to go into opposition. Five Star and the League had won the elections, he said, and should govern together (“we’ll sit back, watch the show, and eat popcorn”, he added). So the second largest party effectively withdrew from the game of coalition making, and Five Star and the League began their negotiations in earnest. What followed was quite a show.

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Mutual suspicion led Five Star and the League to write down a detailed coalition contract and choose a non-partisan PM (an unknown academic, Giuseppe Conte, without any political or executive experience). Lacking either a clear policy vision or a plausible diagnosis of the country’s problems, Five Star was thoroughly outmanoeuvred by the League. Under Matteo Salvini’s leadership, the party was skilful in directing discontent against scapegoats such as migrants, Brussels, and even burglars, and then used its rising popularity to open political battles with Five Star, one after the other, corner it, and pass the legislation it wanted – often cruel, in the field of migration and law and order, and sometimes absurd. Having stimulated the demand for such policies with his divisive, hate-filled rhetoric, Salvini could satisfy the interests of his core electorate – with targeted tax cuts, an amnesty for tax evasion and spending policies that favour vested interests – while paying no political costs.

On the contrary, over 12 months the balance of power within the coalition was reversed. In the latest opinion polls before the government fell the League stood at 36-39%; Five Star, which appeared to have renounced its foundational public-integrity message, stood at 16-17%.

It was to cash in this surge that Salvini abruptly denounced the alliance with Five Star, on 8 August, claiming that his coalition partner was blocking the League’s policies. He was aiming for a snap election, to win enough support to govern alone (or together with a small grouping of neo-fascists and the far-right Fratelli d’Italia, Brothers of Italy). In a tour of the country’s beaches, wearing swimming trunks, neck chain and sunglasses he demanded full powers to make Italy great again.

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The League seemed unstoppable, and disquiet swept the country. Not just in the op-ed pages but also in the streets, and the beaches: after Salvini’s ‘full-powers’ speech, loud and imaginative crowds of protesters began to disturb his seaside pronouncements.

But the dissolution of parliament is a prerogative of the head of state, and during the summer recess it took a while for the League to have parliament table its motion of no confidence. So the tempo of the crisis was slowed down, and the League’s opponents could reorganise.

On 13 August Renzi surprised everyone by proposing a Five Star-PD government, to avert the risk of the far right winning an outright majority.And when parliament was finally convened, on 20 August, Salvini suffered a rare public-relations defeat. When in the Senate Conte reproached the League’s leader for some of his more shameful measures – each of which Conte had formally endorsed, naturally, voicing hardly any reservation – Salvini stumbled. He seemed as effective in delivering slogans on a beach, mojito in hand, as he was ill-at-ease facing reasoned criticism in parliament, lacking even the wit to call out its hypocrisy.

Conte had been ridiculed for his embellished CV, and then disparaged for meekly bowing to Salvini’s ever growing demands, but that day became a statesman in the eyes of some observers.

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Thus the dynamic of the crisis changed. The League appeared to be losing support, talks on a Five Star-PD cabinet commenced, and Salvini began to backtrack, eventually inviting Five Star to form another government together. Five Star refused; its talks with the PD proceeded.

Despite commanding twice as many parliamentary seats as the PD, Five Star had little bargaining power. It was the party that feared snap elections the most, for it could lose more than half its votes, and it had just demonstrated remarkable executive incompetence and tactical ineptitude.

The PD, however, was and remains split between Renzi’s faction, more centrist and liberal, and a loose alliance of other factions, both centrist and left wing. These divisions strengthened Five Star’s hand, to the point that when it demanded the reappointment of Conte as PM – which Donald Trump unsurprisingly supported – the PD obliged, at Renzi’s insistence.

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The deal was struck on 28 August. The following morning the head of state reappointed Conte as PM. Five Star and the PD then drew up a programme. On 3 September the deal was overwhelmingly approved by Five Star’s registered members (fewer than 60,000 voted). And by 9 September Conte and his cabinet are expected to receive parliament’s vote of confidence. Things have come full circle, after 14 months of mostly damaging or pointless executive action.

The markets reacted positively: after a significant spike in the wake of Salvini’s no-confidence motion, the interest-rate spread between Italian and German treasury bonds fell consistently, and now stand at the lowest level since May 2018 (when the League and Five Star agreed their coalition).

Yet it is hard to be optimistic. Past performance suggests that Five Star lacks the ideas and the PD lacks the will to change Italy’s social order, which lies at the roots of the country’s malaise. All that can be said in favour of this cabinet is that it is likely to be better – less ill-intentioned, frankly, and possibly more competent – than its predecessor, and that it may gain useful time for opponents of the far right, and perhaps also for fresh, better political options to emerge.

Having frightened much of Italy and Europe, Salvini ultimately appeared weaker and less skilful than it was assumed. His past successes stemmed from the weakness of his competitors. But if this coalition disappoints, Salvini will rise again.

That’s not to say that the League’s xenophobia is insincere or negligible. In 2000, its activists herded a dozen pigs into the field where a Muslim community planned to build a mosque, for example, and three years later its founder – Umberto Bossi, then minister for institutional reform – advocated using artillery against boats carrying migrants to Italy’s coasts. After the third warning, he said, “I want to hear the roar of cannons”.

Salvini’s recent policies against NGO rescue operations seem mild in comparison. But these aren’t especially deeply felt: they are tactics employed to muster support from the majority of voters whose interests, meanwhile, are being damaged by the League’s real priorities. Indeed, its rhetoric has changed in tune with the anxieties and opportunities of the period.

Before immigration rose in the 1990s, its scapegoat (when it was exclusively a party of the North) was southerners, whom it denounced as lazy welfare recipients; before it was nationalist, the party was federalist and fleetingly secessionist; before it was fervently Catholic, it staged elaborate rituals to honour the river that crosses the peninsula’s northern plain, the Po.

The only constants are the scapegoating and its relentless effort to cast itself as at one with the man in the street.

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This serves a strategy whose main pillar is keeping the rule of law weak. Karla Hoff and Joseph Stiglitz defined this notion as “what stops the few from stealing from the many”; the League uses demagogy to distract the many while the few steal from them. And this is the real danger the party poses.

In Italy, average real incomes are roughly at the level they were in 1995 – in France, Germany and Spain they are about 25% higher – and political discontent is intense and widespread. The primary cause of this malaise is not the euro but stagnant productivity growth, which began to decline well before the establishment of the common currency.

Italy’s large public debt is itself a manifestation of that problem. Its roots lie in a politico-economic equilibrium that hinders innovation, competition and creative destruction, which are crucial drivers of productivity growth and prosperity. Low political accountability and a weak rule of law are the main traits; clientelism and illegality its clearest manifestations. Tax evasion is between two and three times higher than in France, Germany, or Spain, for example, and corruption is at levels typical of the Balkans.

Italy is an open democracy, served by an economy – which has Europe’s second largest manufacturing sector – that reliably produces healthy current account surpluses. But its social order is markedly less efficient and fair than its peers’: to protect the country’s elites, it constrains the opportunities of ordinary citizens and firms, raises inequality, and dampens the country’s potential.

In order to shore up this unbalanced system, Italy’s governments acquired the consensus of elements of society by granting them certain political and economic privileges. These particularistic policies accumulated over decades, may have made the social order more inclusive. But they reduced the efficiency of public expenditure and prevented the development of a genuinely universal welfare system, which economies based on competition and innovation require.

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This equilibrium and the political establishment that presided over it were shaken in 1992–4, mightily, by a currency crisis and vast corruption investigations. The equilibrium stabilised, thanks to greater budget discipline; but the political establishment collapsed and rapidly dissolved.

The League flourished then, as the fiercest opponent of that establishment – which it described, correctly, as corrupt, collusive, and unaccountable. It gained almost 9% of the vote in 1992, an extraordinary result in Italy’s ossified 1948–92 party system. Yet, in 1991, the party had opposed a referendum that sought precisely to increase political accountability, and a few weeks after its electoral success it approached one of Italy’s largest firms, which was illegally financing the establishment parties, and duly received its own undisclosed contribution.

Its 1992 manifesto – mixing hostility to Rome and the South with threats of tax revolt and secession – was a direct response to the rising tax burden. It argued that the North should keep its own money, and found support among those regions’ professionals, self-employed workers, small entrepreneurs, and their employees. This became the League’s core electorate, and that manifesto barely changed until the 2010s.

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In 1994, the League allied with Silvio Berlusconi, who inherited the priorities and electorate of the old establishment. It supported each of his cabinets – 1994, 2001–6, 2008–11 – and each of their worst policies, including repeated amnesties for tax evasion and a long line of laws whose main aim or effect was to increase impunity for corruption.

Italy’s politico-economic equilibrium was to become less stable because the fiscal space for lifting growth through public spending, to compensate stagnating productivity, and for securing consensus, had been severely reduced. Indeed, Berlusconi’s last government was felled by the European sovereign debt crisis (which threatened the survival of the Eurozone).

Mario Monti’s 2011–13 ‘technocratic’ cabinet, which implemented emergency austerity measures, relied on Berlusconi’s and the centre-Left’s support. The League, alone in opposition, benefited from the fact that those harsh policies, which had contributed to avoiding a catastrophe, soon became unpopular. Under a weak and confused leadership, however, crushed by grave corruption scandals, the League suffered a stiff electoral defeat in 2013.

Salvini inherited a party in ruins. But he could capitalise on its opposition to austerity, to recast the party as an anti-establishment one, and nimbly discarded separatism in favour of nationalism, to expand its support beyond the North. The 2013–18 centre-Left governments did little to either raise growth or make it more inclusive, and Five Star and the League won the 2018 elections by promising cultural and economic protection to those left behind by globalisation.

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By Barney Cullum

In office, however, the League pushed policies that went directly against their interests. It granted a special pension scheme to certain cohorts of workers; it obtained a tax cut for professionals and small entrepreneurs, and demands a yet more generous one; it won a tax-evasion amnesty, wants another one, and proposes to abolish all limits to the use of cash, which will further ease tax evasion; and it defended tooth and nail two junior ministers accused of corruption and embezzlement.

The League is now the main – though not the sole – guarantor of Italy’s equilibrium. It picked up from Berlusconi the standard of favouring vested interests and tolerance for illegality, and inherited much of his electorate. What changed, compared with the period of Berlusconi’s dominance, is that xenophobia is more readily turning from rhetoric into deeds.

This mix worked remarkably well at the European elections in May. It resembles what happened in Hungary, and in other regimes characterised by the combination of corruption and demagogic nationalism (which could be better described as multi-party kleptocracies than illiberal democracies, as Branko Milanović has argued).

In Italy’s better-governed democracy, however, that combination generates greater tensions, which are a permanent source of instability. It’s why the more predatory the League’s policies are, the louder its rhetoric must be. But the xenophobia is a distraction. That’s why those who wish to oppose the League will be ineffective if they simply decry the xenophobia without mentioning the perversion of the rule of law.

Andrea Lorenzo Capussela is the author of ‘The Political Economy of Italy’s Decline’ (Oxford University Press, 2018)

In the run up to last year’s election, the Five Star Movement (M5S), led by Luigi Di Maio – a suited and booted 32-year-old with no degree who had previously been unemployed – preached an end to institutional corrup­tion, an end to fiscal pardons, free internet for everyone, no more environmentally harmful infrastructure projects and, above all, a ‘citizens income’ for the poor. It was an appealing platform, securing 32% of the vote for the populist Left party.

The other party, the League, led by 46-year-old Matteo Salvini – also without a degree but boasting 15 years’ experience as a Milan city councillor and a wardrobe full of jeans and sweatshirts – demanded a lower retirement age, a new tax pardon, lower tax levels, more large infrastructure projects, and the forced repatriation of hundreds of thousands of immigrants. The populist Right party fared less well, winning just 17% of the vote, but an electoral alliance with the centre-Right Forza Italia meant that together they could win more seats.

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The result was a hung parliament. And the two anti-establishment parties, who had hitherto ridiculed, berated and demonised each other, came together to form a government.

In order to govern together, Di Maio and Salvini formed a contract in which they agreed that each party could carry out its expensive flagship policies, in particular the citizens’ income on one side and the lower retirement age and lower taxes on the other. Where the two men can’t agree, fudge and procrastination has come to their aid: a tax pardon can be called “fiscal peace”, the planned high speed train tunnel under the Alps, which M5S viscerally opposes and the League determinedly supports, can be interminably ‘re-discussed’.

Unable to decide which of the two men would be Prime Minister, Di Maio and Salvini brought in Giuseppe Conte, a professor of law with no political experience, but an enviable ability to cavil – again and again Conte finds some eloquent equivocation that allows both M5S and League supporters to feel that their party has stuck to their principles.

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By Peter Franklin

So the country lurches about in quite contradictory directions driven by competing and antagonistic ideas, but the government doesn’t fall. Arguably, this bizarre situation is very much the product of EU membership.

Since ratification of the Maastricht treaty in 1993 Italy has been governed by alternat­ing centre-Right and centre-Left governments, the former mainly represented by Berlusconi and the latter Prodi, then Renzi. Committed to following the Maastricht criteria and later the European Fiscal Compact in relation to annual deficit, overall debt, and various other key economic parameters, they had little room for manoeuvre. The result was that, despite a rhetoric of profound ideological division, Italians got used to seeing very little difference in economic policy whoever the party in government.

Prior to the introduction of the Euro in 2002, this situation was made palatable by a fairly steady 1.5% growth rate, comparable with Germany and the rest of the EU. After 2002, however, Italy began to lose ground, and between 2007 and 2017 it had an annual GDP decline of 0.6% compared to a German growth rate of 1.2%. In 10 years, a 20% difference in economic performance has opened up between Italy and its main trading partner, and relative salary levels have fallen drastically.

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Between 2008 and 2015 Italy lost 15% of its manufacturing base and the sector’s workforce shrunk by 18%. Meanwhile the construction industry shed 25% of capacity and lost 30% of its workforce. Unemployment stands at 10%, while youth unemployment is over 30%.

Most of all, there is no sign of progress and no positive future to look forward to. Every time a government seeks to follow an expansionist policy it is swiftly reminded by Brussels of the need to abide by the rigid Fiscal Compact. Sanctions are threatened and, worse still, Italian government bond rates are forced up in relation to German bonds increasing public borrowing costs, alienating foreign investors and generally worsening an already depressed situation.

This might be acceptable if Italians felt there was any democratic process that could alter EU policy. This is not the case. The idealism that drove the Maastricht process is long gone. European elections are seen as little more than an opinion poll for national parties, with no sense that the European Parliament could function as an instrument for improving economic prospects for Italy.

As the EU came to be seen more and more as an externally imposed necessity, rather than a community Italians are enthusiastically part of, it was inevitable that new parties would emerge taking an anti-European stance and criticising the leaders of the mainstream parties for abject compliance with Brussels.

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This was exactly the line taken by both M5S and the League in the run-up to the 2018 election: they would get tough with the EU, they would not observe the Fiscal Compact, and their budget would allow for an annual deficit of 2.4% rather than the stipulated 2.0%. Jean-Claude Juncker could like it or lump it.

People like fighting talk. When the pensionable age for most people is 67, you can win votes promising to reduce it. When people are struggling, a citizen’s income is enticing.

And once in government, Di Maio and Salvini insisted they would not back down in the face of EU opposition to their budget proposals. It was their moment of greatest unity and bravado. But at once bond rates began to rise, the economic experts broadcast their alarms, and very soon, under the cover of Conte’s able cavilling, the retreat began. Eventually a deficit of 2.04% (only provisionally accepted by the EU) was presented as a victory.

This amounts to the infantilisation of national politics. Like a bragging schoolboy in the playground a national politician can win consensus, but the showdown with his teachers soon reminds him of his insignificance. He is caned and sent home with a raw bottom. At which point what can he do but engage in more play­ground posturing to at least keep his dominant position among his chums?

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Thus Salvini and Di Maio have talked about turning the forthcoming European elections into a chance to fight back against EU arrogance and austerity. But even assuming the anti-EU vote makes gains, it’s hard to see that leading to real changes to the Fiscal Compact.

There are two logical ways out of this impasse and the irresponsibility and frustration it breeds. One is a move to a genuine political and fiscal union of Europe; the other is a return to increased national autonomy outside the Euro. Present animosities make the first solution unthinkable. There is no appetite for it. Yet the economic power of the markets to punish any move to leave the Euro makes the second solution suicidal; as Greece has shown.

What we can expect, then, is more and more empty rhetoric and clownish behaviour at a national level; more and more people voting in a spirit of defiance, while tacitly accepting that their vote means nothing. It is a system in which you vote for someone because of what they say they would like to do, not what they can actually do. In short, if you don’t rule your country you can’t expect a viable ruling class.

Then both sisters, tired of living with a succession of old men, marry new, young, ambitious husbands. In fact, one of the sisters, rarely able to make clear choices, takes two new husbands simultaneously.

These twin hubbies, Luigi and Matteo, are jealous of one another. They are also fascinated by, but wary of, the other sister’s husband, Emmanuel.

The various husbands, being young and ambitious, start to wash the dirty family laundry in public. The result: a stonker of a family quarrel, reminiscent of those seen in Italian movies from the 1950s. The neighbourhood is delighted but also alarmed. Where will this all end?

I speak of the great Franco-Italian quarrel of 2019.

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On one level, it’s an absurd, sisterly spat which has long been in the making. It’s also a political manoeuvre before the European Elections in May, which are shaping up as the most interesting European elections since European elections began 40 years ago.

But it is also something deeper and, from a European Union viewpoint, darker – a skirmish which portends a wider war for the soul of Europe. Should the Europe of the 21^st century be  based on the supranational EU project which started over 60 years ago? Or should it revert to the much looser cooperation between nations which broke down so calamitously twice in the 20^th century?

France withdrew its ambassador to Rome last week and, pointedly, reminded the world that this was the first time this had happened since Benito Mussolini declared war on France in 1940. It was also the first time since the creation of the EEC/EU in 1958 that one member state had withdrawn its ambassador to another.

There have been a series of jibes, insults and accusations hurled across the Alps in recent months. Most have come from the populist coalition government in Italy and its Number Two – really its de facto number one – Matteo Salvini, leader of the hard-Right Liga party. He accused the French, inter alia, of exploiting their ex-colonies in Africa and stealing their gold or dollar reserves to finance France’s debt. This is the kind of lie-by-exaggeration that Donald Trump might be proud of.

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Some of the insults have come from the centrist pro-European French President, Emmanuel Macron. He implicitly included Italy alongside Hungary and Poland when he warned of a “growing leprosy” of populist nationalism which threatened to destroy the EU.

He also said that the populist Italian government was “cynical” and “irresponsible” for closing its ports to African boat people. Then Mr Macron cynically refused to take a boatload of migrants himself.

In recent weeks, the junior leader of the junior Italian coalition partner, the country’s de facto number three, Luigi di Maio, joined the battle.  He championed the Gilets Jaunes or yellow jackets, who have been campaigning, often violently, since mid-November to depose Macron and tear up the French constitution.

Last week he crossed a diplomatic Rubicon. Without informing the French government, he turned up in the outer suburban town of Montargis, south of Paris, for a photo-opportunity with a group of people whom he described as “the leaders of the Gilets Jaunes”.

Mr Di Maio, head of the anti-politics Five Star movement, praised the yellow vests as the French equivalent of his own party: a rejection of perpetual elites in favour of a popular government on the internet, by and for the grass-roots.

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Mr Di Maio had not done his homework properly. The group of half a dozen people that he met in Montargis were insignificant figures in an officially leaderless movement. One of them, Christophe Chalençon, is an obscure, far-Right activist who called last year for a military coup against Macron (and was disowned by other yellow vests).

The real leader of the breakaway group of Gilets Jaunes that Mr Di Maio thought that he was meeting is an impressive young auxiliary nurse called Ingrid Levavasseur. She plans to run a list of candidates in the European Parliament elections in May.

Madame Levavasseur was not informed of the Italian leader’s visit to France. She said that the meeting was “horrible”, a “total usurpation”, an unjustified invasion of French internal affairs and the work of a “world of sharks”, including Mr Di Maio. Several “spokespeople” for other tribes of the splintering and re-splintering Gilets Jaunes said roughly the same thing.

As a result, Mr Di Maio, was made to look ridiculous in the Italian and French media. His invasion of Gaul was supposed, Caesar-like, to shore up his weakening position at home in the uneasy coalition with Mr Salvini’s Liga party. The European elections are widely predicted to lead to early Italian parliamentary elections in the summer. If anything, Mr Di Maoio’s botched intervention has made him seem more feeble.

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In which case, did Emmanuel Macron and the French government overreact by withdrawing their ambassador to Rome? Maybe.

Part of Macron’s calculation was also electoral. His centrist La République En Marche party is vying with Marine Le Pen’s far Right Rassemblement National for top spot in the French part of the European poll on 26 May. Coming first in European Parliament elections has little practical significance, but would be an extraordinary mid-term triumph for a young president who has been battered by low opinion polls and street protests for months.

Just before the emergence of the Gilets Jaunes, President Macron had declared himself to be the champion of the supra-national European Union model of open markets and open borders, the rule of common laws and democratic values. He positioned himself as the man who would defeat the “anti-European”, nationalist-populist trend – or “leprosy” – which had taken power or a share of power in Italy, Austria, Poland and Hungary.

“Defeat” by Mme Le Pen in the European elections would be a bitter blow for Macron. By taking such a dramatic stand against Di Maio’s calculated – or miscalculated – insult, the French president hoped to galvanise pro-European opinion in France to take the European elections seriously (the usual turnout is around 40%) and vote for his party in May.

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In any case, there were good reasons, or excuses, for France to take such dramatic action. Mr di Maio’s arrival unannounced on French soil to hob-nob with a violent dissident went beyond all the usual tolerated limits of interference by one EU government in the internal affairs of another. Such interference is banned by the EU treaties.

“But, but, but”, British Eurosceptics might well splutter, Macron interferes in British “internal affairs” all the time. On several occasions recently, he has spoken of the 2016 British referendum decision to leave the EU as “based on lies” and impossible to deliver because “you can’t deliver a lie or something that doesn’t exist”.

Isn’t that interference in a British internal affairs? No, not really. If Macron had turned up unannounced at a meeting of British Remainers in, say, Reading, and called for a second referendum, that would have been interference. His comments on Brexit – a subject of vital importance to France and the whole of the EU, not just the UK – were made at public meetings in France.

In any case, the whole of the French mainstream media, Right and Left, has supported Macron’s decision. Mme Le Pen has been left floundering. As a fierce French sovereigntist, should she praise Di Maio for sticking it to the pro- European Macron? Or attack Di Maio for invading France’s political space?

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It is difficult to see where the row goes in the short-term. The two countries are bound together by centuries of shared history and culture, and profound economic integration.

Italy is France’s third-biggest market for exports. France is the second most important export market for Italy. French banks hold €285 billion in Italian debt – about a sixth of Italy’s staggering €2 trillion total (130% of its GDP). It is not in the interest of either country to destabilise the other.

Some of the quarrels between the two nations go back a long way. Others have been invented or revived by Salvini and to a lesser extent, until now, by Di Maio.

The finger-pointing on illegal migration started before Macron was elected in 2017 or the Italian far Right-populist coalition took power last year. There are now 5,000,000 foreign-born residents of Italy, compared to 1,300,000 in 2002. Most of the increase comes from absorbing African and Middle Eastern migrants who have crossed the Mediterranean from Libya.

Most other EU countries, and especially France, have been reluctant to share this burden. Salvini called Macron a “hypocrite” last year when he lectured the Italian government on their human rights responsibilities and then refused to admit a ship-load of migrants that was floating in the Med. Salvini also tweeted videos of French police blocking migrants at the French-Italian border.

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There is more. Italy accuses France (starting long before the present incumbents) of picking off Italian business jewels but preventing Italian companies from buying French “champions”. The latest spat is over a Paris-willed, Franco-German challenge to the proposed takeover by Italy’s Fincantieri S.p.A of France’s Chantiers de l’Atlantique – the company which built the Queen Mary 2 and other state-of-the-art cruise liners.

Salvini has also explicitly spelled out long-standing Italian unhappiness with the budgetary rules which underpin the single European currency. He has blamed a “Franco-German axis” which ignores the interests of Southern EU states.

He was forced to back down in December and accept objections from Brussels to the Italian coalition’s attempt to increase unilaterally its agreed annual budget deficit. Cue Italian fury when France was allowed to exceed its limit this year to fund a €10 billion package of concessions in response to the demands of the Gilets Jaunes.  

Salvini also accuses France of sheltering 15 Left-wing Italian terrorists, convicted in absentia for attacks on politicians in the 1970s. And there have been quarrels over Libya, a former Italian colony, where Rome accuses Paris of advancing its national interests.

Mr Salvini’s accusation that France subsidises its own debt by exploiting its own former African countries is rejected by most independent economists. Salvini also claimed that French exploitation of African countries was “causing” the migrant flow across the Mediterranean. In truth, few of them come from francophone countries.

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There was even an unpleasant spat between the media of the two countries when France won the soccer World Cup last July. Italy had failed even to qualify for the finals in Russia. Some Italian journalists suggested that the multi-ethnic France team was not truly French.

Such quarrels are jealousies between EU countries, and have always existed. They did not begin with, or end with, the creation of the Common Market and then the European Union. The difference is that they have mostly been confined in the past to private rows between leaders and public rows in the press.

Salvini, and now Di Maio, and to an extent Macron, have brought these disputes into the open. In Salvini’s case, he has overstated them in emotive language, of the same kind he uses against domestic political foes in Italy. There are resemblances with Donald Trump’s attack-dog “diplomacy” against America’s allies.

Some commentators believe that this is a “good thing” for the European Union. For the first time, they say, it has created a political forum in Europe akin to that of a national stage. The political savaging of today will, they say, become the common European identity of tomorrow.

Alberto Allemano, 43, Italian-born professor of European integration at the internationally-respected French business school, HEC, says: “There is a Europeanisation of the political space. Is that a bad thing? I don’t think so. Usually, the European Parliament elections have been just a collection of national elections where voters expressed their approval or disapproval of national politicians.”

“For the first time, in 2019, two different visions of Europe will confront one another. The European elections will finally be about Europe.”

This is an interesting argument but may be overblown. Will the turn-out in the European elections really be higher? Will voters in France, or other countries, really base their votes more on European issues?

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By Peter Franklin

The darker interpretation of the 2019 Franco-Italian war of words is that the post-war consensus which created the EU is breaking down. These are, after all, two of the founding members of the Common Market, two of original Big Three within the original EEC Six of 1958.

To that you must add the nationalist, anti-democratic drift in Hungary and Poland. You must also add the growing nationalist and anti-Brussels feeling in other member states, including France. In a poll last week, 40% of French people said that they were like to leave the EU (Frexit). Some Gilets Jaunes are fiercely anti-Brussels. Others, such as Ingrid Levavasseur, are pro-European.

Paradoxically, the divisive forces within the EU have been weakened, or at least changed, by Brexit. The messy and contentious British withdrawal – the doubts about how, or even if, Brexit can happen – have discredited the full-frontal, anti-EU arguments in the 27.

But they have not gone away. Through Maldini, Di Maio, Viktor Orban, Marine Le Pen and others they are taking a new form. The Maldini/Le Pen argument is that the EU should be “reformed” from the inside, to make it a looser collection of trading states. For “reformed” from the inside, read dismantled from the inside.

The starting gun for that battle may have been accidentally fired last week in the small town of Montargis, south of Paris.

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