By Alessio Colonnelli –
Does Italy really need a new government? The answer lies in last Sunday’s regional elections (26 January), although these, it must be said, don’t usually attract that much foreign attention. Matteo Salvini’s Lega, on the opposition in Rome, was expected to increase its share of the vote in Emilia-Romagna – and dramatically so. A change did happen, though not as big as many of the polls had predicted: some even forecasted a win for the ex-secessionist party. And while Italian pollsters keep getting it very wrong, they still managed to catch an undeniable trend – the politics of the centre-left is struggling like mad. The crisis is so tangible that there’s no need to carry out phone surveys to confirm this.
Indeed, the parties of the progressive governing coalition – anti-establishment Five Star Movement (M5S) and leftist Democratic Party (PD) – lost in the other regional election of the day, in Calabria. Turnout here was exceptionally low: 44.33%. M5S came third in both regions, and is in deep crisis. A jubilant Silvio Berlusconi hailed his Forza Italia’s (FI) 12.34% of the vote in this southern region as an undeniable sign of his party’s resurgence (the FI candidate is Calabria’s new president). This is zombie politics. Italy is again confirmed as the largest laboratory for ideas. Anything goes: from the seriously rotten and indecent to the very fresh and untried.
Which brings us to the Sardine (saar-dee-neh, or ‘sardines’) phenomenon. The fish morphed fins into limbs, and trailed in the steps of Salvini during his lengthy (two months) electoral campaign in the northern region, home to Pavarotti, Ferrari and parmesan. This is a vast area across the Po Valley, where the country’s first socialist party was founded – in 1881 – and only a minority of people would ever have toyed with the idea of voting anything rightwards.
Nevertheless, contemporary Emilia-Romagna is also Gianfranco Fini’s home, who turned Italy’s sole neo-fascist party in Parliament – the Italian Social Movement (MSI) – into a mainstream entity by starting a process which paved the way to the creation of today’s centre-right. Fini also did all this by publicly apologising to the Israelis in Jerusalem in 2003 (“Fascism was part of the absolute evil,” he said about the big role played by Fascism in the Holocaust, while wearing a kippah). Under his leadership MSI changed its name into National Alliance, now called Brothers of Italy, also regarded as Salvini’s closest allies.
Therefore, winning in Emilia-Romagna was always going to be hard for the combative Lega, but not impossible: the party of hardliners on immigration and the Euro, which, having been founded in Milan, was reasonably hopeful of finally conquering one of Italy’s largest (4.5 million inhabitants) regions in the heart of the productive north. It hurt that it was never able to. Ferrara, however, a city of 135,000 at the centre of it, last elected a Lega man as a mayor – Alan Fabbri. The outcome was incredible at the time (June 2019). And so, the unbelievable could well happen again.
In a recent interview with El País, when asked about the reasons of his success, Fabbri replied: “I grew up in this region, where admitting to being in the Lega 20 years ago wasn’t easy. But the left of that time is no longer that of PD; its voters no longer recognize themselves in it. We have focused a lot of our discourse on security, because there are neighbourhoods in Ferrara where there are serious problems. Moreover, because of PD and [ex-prime minister Matteo] Renzi, we had a bankruptcy decree that effected Ferrara’s local savings banks and 32,000 people, including shareholders and subordinate bondholders, who lost all their money. The voters rewarded us for being there for them, listening to them and seeking interventions.”
You can spot Salvini’s recipe’s key ingredients in Fabbri’s remarks: law-and-order and money. It worked in one part of Emilia-Romagna six months ago; but only at first glance. Yet this is not true. The reality is more complex: Lega did lose to PD – governor Stefano Bonaccini has been re-elected – and by a wider margin than had been forecast; but also Lega has never had so much support in the reddest of all regions as now. Its candidate for the region’s presidency, Lucia Borgonzoni, won 43.6% of the vote (7.8% less than leftist Bonaccini). A remarkable result. Not enough, however, to allow Lega to shoulder its way to new general elections. Had Borgonzoni won, though, these key regional elections would’ve been interpreted as the M5S-PD coalition’s swansong, which is also made up of much smaller centre-left and radical left outfits.
Elly Schlein, originally from Italian-speaking Switzerland, received the most votes for a regional councillor – 22,098. Most of them came from the main urban areas: regional capital Bologna (15,975), Reggio Emilia (3,896) and Ferrara (2,227). This shows where PD tends to score higher, i.e. away from the countryside. Bologna is Italy’s seventh largest city, with a million people residing within the boundaries of its metropolitan area. The sardines first packed themselves into the city’s iconic Piazza Maggiore. Their collective voice gathers momentum by bouncing off city walls. The effect is energising.
And so the performance of a foreign-born politician follows the patterns of politics abroad, such as that of the United Kingdom, for example. Big cities vs. market towns and villages. The bigger story across Europe: the left on the brink of passing out still hangs on in there for dear life. It’s happened in Spain and Finland, very recently. In this respect, Labour’s failure under Jeremy Corbyn’s 1970s diktats, albeit within the confines of a uniquely gagging electoral system (also endorsed by Labour itself, it must be said, allergic as it is to alliances and coalitions), speaks volumes and brings to mind Schlein’s commenting words to la Repubblica newspaper the next day: “Politics is about contamination; not about closing yourself behind ideological doors.”
For the moment, there won’t be a new government in Italy, despite its senior partner M5S on the verge of imploding. But how much you can stretch such moment is anybody’s guess. My guess is there’s still room for stretching the old elastic band a bit more. It won’t snap just yet. It might even keep going all the way to 2023. Cod liver oil’s might be going out of fashion but these days, Sardine’s do just the trick.
(Written by Alessio Colonnelli on 28 January 2020, exclusively for this blog.)
Alessio Colonnelli 