Italy: Voters reject austerity and elites

Welcome to “Absurdistan,” said Marco Cattaneo in La Repubblica (Italy). Italian voters delivered a “nightmare scenario” of divided results in this week’s parliamentary elections. The center-left bloc, headed by Pier Luigi Bersani, won 29.5 percent of the vote for the lower house, just edging out Silvio Berlusconi’s center-right bloc, with 29.2 percent. Beppe Grillo, a comedian turned blogger who opposes both blocs, took 25.5 percent. Meanwhile, the incumbent, Mario Monti—the technocrat who took over in 2011 when Berlusconi was forced to step down amid foundering state finances and allegations of sex parties with prostitutes—was punished by voters for daring to impose financial prudence; he got just over 10 percent. Because of Italy’s “convoluted, ridiculous election laws,” Bersani took a clear majority of seats in the lower house but not in the upper. He will have to form an alliance with either Berlusconi or Grillo if he is to lead a majority government.

What an upset, said Stefano Folli in Il Sole 24 Ore. The markets expected that Bersani and Monti would have enough votes between them for a center-left coalition that would more or less continue Monti’s course. But “if the elections were a referendum on austerity, austerity lost.” Italians are feeling mutinous. More than one in five actually indulged in the “sadistic pleasure of kicking the party elites in the seat” by voting for Grillo, an anti-EU iconoclast with no real political experience. At least Grillo has a clear message, said Simon Jenkins in The Guardian (U.K.). He believes “that austerity, the euro, and corruption are jointly to blame for Italy’s continuing ills”—and he’s right. Maybe his success will crush the “dogma of austerity that now has Europe’s economy by the throat.”

Great—the Italians are “going to destroy our euro,” said Albert Link in Bild (Germany). Bersani’s choices for coalition partner are Berlusconi, who is “largely responsible for the country’s recession and debt crisis,” or Grillo, “the candidate of rage” who wants Italy to abandon the euro altogether. It’s not that bad, said the Financial Times (U.K.) in an editorial. Polls show that most Italians support the euro. Grillo’s stunning showing was not about the currency, but rather “a damning verdict against Italy’s political class.”

Subscribe to The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up

In any case, this country has become “ungovernable,” said Massimo Razzi in La Repubblica. Grillo won’t cut a coalition deal—he has called the main political parties “the walking dead” and said he’s sure his party will win an outright majority in elections within a year. Bersani and Berlusconi have such opposite platforms that they can’t possibly join together. That means early elections must be called—either for both houses or for the Senate alone. But before that we’ll need a new election law that allocates seats according to some kind of sane arithmetic, and to draft that law, Bersani, Berlusconi, Grillo, and Monti must all come to an agreement. “Is that remotely possible?” We have no choice but to hope that it is.