Italian Elections and Politics 2018: Yellow Tide

[parochial boy]

  France has had PR for National Assembly elections off and on (last time in the 1986 elections), going back to runoff by districts as it is now, but the fabulous beautiful Macron supports bringing PR back.  Not holding my breath on that one though.

Funny how people always support electoral reform, right up until they win a stonking majority under FPTP.

Arguably though, France doesn't have pure FPTP due to the two round nature of the vote.

Italy, of course though, has always been held up by supporters of FPTP as "proof" that PR will just lead to unstable coalitions - which conveniently ignores all the countries where coalition governments work just fine.

[parochial boy]

At first blush, I think a problem with this system is how the Alliances will determine their FPTP candidates.

Will the largest party in the coalition take all the FPTP candidacies?

Will they be split proportionally between the parties in an alliance? If so what proportion?

There is also the issue of which party will get the safe seats, marginal seats, no-chance seats for an alliance.

Presumably this is all down to negotiation between the parties inside an alliance, however this is a source of instability in itself.

I imagine it might work somehow similarly to the way it currently does in France - at which point the risk would be that smaller parties end up as indistinguishable annexes of the larger ones.

[parochial boy]

I also have to add that the issues of regional autonomies are a lot wider and the debate in Italy is not only focused on South Tyrol but also other regions.

Speaking of which; are Veneto and Lombardy still trying to push for their own autonomy? Or were the referendums last October as pointless as they seemed?

[parochial boy]

Lol at the particular Lega strength in Northern Lombardy. Many of those voters presumably work in Ticino; which is delightfully fitting, in a way.

[parochial boy]

OK, something I have been wondering about - can anyone explain what the... purpose of the minor parties in the Centre-Left coalition are? like, who are pro-europa and why are they standing?

[parochial boy]

Vague thought about the FPTP vote - glancing at the 2013 results, M5S's support seems to be fairly evenly spread across the country. In which case, they might stand to lose out fairly badly in the FPTP constituencies if polling continues to show a (rough) 3 way split?

[parochial boy]

I'm not expecting a huge write up, bit are there any good resources about how the different regions of Italy behave politically?

I second this question. I can see that Piedmonte/North West would have a left wing tradition by way of it being industrial, that the North East is right wing as a result of being rich and that the South is right-wing/strongish for M5S because it is poor.

But what explains the left wing tradition in Tuscany/Emilia-Romagna/Marche/Umbria; and why does Basilicata stand out from its surroundings?

[parochial boy]

Yes, tradition/legacy plays a huge role in Italian political orientation and voting patterns. I find the strong divides that cannot be that easily explained to be even more fascinating than the ones that are easier to explain.

Where would you say had a divide that can't be easily explained? Most of the obvious divides I can think of have some sort of anthropological underpinning.

[parochial boy]

Yes, tradition/legacy plays a huge role in Italian political orientation and voting patterns. I find the strong divides that cannot be that easily explained to be even more fascinating than the ones that are easier to explain.

Where would you say had a divide that can't be easily explained? Most of the obvious divides I can think of have some sort of anthropological underpinning.

There are a lot of detailed voting patterns in the South that, frankly, you can only explain by throwing your hands in the air and muttering something about clientelism and not being sure that that really explains matters...

Which itself says something about the nature of Southern Italy, no? Even if not particularly about it partisan behaviour

[parochial boy]

Were there any polls with crosstabs that show differences between different demographic groups?

I found an article on POLITICO that has crosstabs by professional background and others: https://www.politico.eu/article/italy-angry-election-2018-anti-establishment/

Also, this study about how the Italian electorate see Europe and themselves is quite interesting and has some crosstabs: https://www.bertelsmann-stiftung.de/fileadmin/files/BSt/Publikationen/GrauePublikationen/EZ_eupinions_brief_Italy_27.02.2018.pdf

Neat, why do all the beach resorts love M5S?

[parochial boy]

It's going to be awful no matter what. Not much point in getting too excited

[parochial boy]

What's the methodology for the exit poll? Anyone?

[parochial boy]

Thinking about it, i would almost expect Turin rather than Genoa to be the M5S hotspot in the North, considering it's historical association with Southern immigrants (Juventus etc...). Is that sort of thing likely to have played any role at all?

[parochial boy]

Not sure if this has already been asked, but any reason for the particular M5S along the Adriatic coast? I don't think this is anywhere near as poor as thé mezzo giorno. I would mostly associate it with tourist resorts like Rimini?

[parochial boy]

I don't want to coem across all PAN EUROPEAN TRENDS, but it is interesting to note that almost all cities - even ones considered quite borgeois and right-wing like Stockholm, Oslo, Milan, Rekjavik, Madrid - seem to be drifting left?

I mean, the same economic factors that have been driving those sorts of trends (economic concentration around certain big metros, Housing costs, a higly educated but downwardly mobile youth population) exists pretty much all across Europe so it isn't such a controversial thing to say.

What's interesting to me is on the one hand, how certain types of cities (Naples, Le Havre) havent trended left. On the other hand, it was interesting to see how Paris reacted to Macron and London to Corbyn respectively, which sort of shows how "big cities are becoming more left wing" disguises a lot of much more complex factors

[parochial boy]

The sooner the Right-wing populist parties take power, the sooner they fail and lose their seats. Let's get on with it.

Lol. The Danish People's Party, which has basically been in power for a grand total of 15 years since 2001, says hi -- and so does the Lega itself. Some right-wing populist parties do collapse after a stint in government, but they often get back up after a while (Lega, FPÖ) or are otherwise replaced by a new movement, often further to the right. There is simply a big electoral "market" for these kinds of parties in almost all Western European countries, and demand is only increasing.

Correct me if I am wrong, but this is the first experience of a RWPP led coalition* in Western Europe (which is probably enough of a difference to ex-Communist Europe to be worth remarking on).

Also, it's Italy, of course it'll be a disaster...

*Let's ignore what exactly M5S are supposed to be for the time being

[parochial boy]

The sooner the Right-wing populist parties take power, the sooner they fail and lose their seats. Let's get on with it.

Lol. The Danish People's Party, which has basically been in power for a grand total of 15 years since 2001, says hi -- and so does the Lega itself. Some right-wing populist parties do collapse after a stint in government, but they often get back up after a while (Lega, FPÖ) or are otherwise replaced by a new movement, often further to the right. There is simply a big electoral "market" for these kinds of parties in almost all Western European countries, and demand is only increasing.

Correct me if I am wrong, but this is the first experience of a RWPP led coalition* in Western Europe (which is probably enough of a difference to ex-Communist Europe to be worth remarking on).

Also, it's Italy, of course it'll be a disaster...

*Let's ignore what exactly M5S are supposed to be for the time being

I don't really view M5S as an RRWP because I don't think they fit all of the three characteristics as laid out by Cas Mudde: M5S are populist, but I don't think they are sufficiently authoritiarian or nativist to be considered one. And a coalition completely consisting of populist, anti-austerity, anti-"Brussels" parties with an RRWP as a junior partner isn't anything new; Syriza-ANEL is one too.

To be sure, I think chances of (support for) M5S collapsing in the process are reasonably high. But the mechanism set out by PittsburghSteel, according to which Western European RRWPs always collapse when they are in power, is a common misunderstanding and I wanted to rebuke it. I agree that the Italian coalition is a big experiment with a big chance of failing and losing popularity.

Without wanting to get into a debate on semantics, "authoritarian" seems like a funny term, especially when applied to parties like FvD or KrF that might normally be classified as RWPP? Mind expanding on what he means by authoritarian?

With M5S, they are basically all things to everyone, but being in the EFDD group does tend to colour my perception

[parochial boy]

Lol yes,FrP, that's what you get for being functionally illiterate. What I meant was, I understood authoritarian as meaning personality cultish like an Orban, Erdogan or even a Mélenchon; which a lot pf RWPPs actually aren't

[parochial boy]

I mean, the PD went from polling in the 40s to polling in the teens, so their collapse has alread come and gone. As to why the likef of LeU haven't benefitting from that, well, their leadsership was never really going to drive a left-left revival. But

M5S look more and more like unprepared sitting ducks, being used to allow the far-right to take over internal institutions before a fully far-right government can be imposed on Italy.

This seems pretty likely, sadly enough

[parochial boy]

Did anyone ever post this? Where 2013 voters went in 2018 - the number of Monti-M5S voters seems... suprising to say the least, but even with the crosstabs disclaimer it's a bit hard to ignore..