Italian Elections and Politics 2018: Yellow Tide

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The answer is that the PD is not a social democratic party.

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https://twitter.com/Yascha_Mounk/status/969956753134809089

[Filuwaúrdjan]

To be fair it also depends on how fast you count votes. UK elections literally take the entire night and part of the next day. Meanwhile here by midnight you basically already have 99% of the vote in.

Thing about the UK is that a) only final results for each constituency are released unlike in normal places where each polling district declares and b) postal votes are counted at the same time as day votes rather than the next day or even longer. The latter reason (not the first!) is also why counting is 'slower' in Germany.

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Yeah, I wouldn't trust the exit polls.

Have they ever been right?

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I told you all that Renzi was a mistake.

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Other left: why you so weak?

The old Refoundation vote is literally dead and the people who have led subsequent splinters have tended to be charmless apparatchiks well past their political sell by date and so have not done well at bringing votes from the PD with them (or getting them back from the Five Star Clown Car for that matter).

[Filuwaúrdjan]

Why doesn't Salvini shave? I remember when fascists used to have some form of style for their facial hair, not gross neckbeards.

Ugh, yeah. Salvini is really as ugly externally as he is internally.

Alec Guinness once wrote of his desire to give Radovan Karadžić a severe hair cut - a short back and sides, actually. Similarly, whenever I see a picture of Salvini I have this urge to force him to have a wash and trim that gross facial fuzz neatly.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

Am I correct that M5S is anti capitalist? Isn't degrowth essentially anti-capitalist? If so, I don't know why they would form a government with Salvini and his band of dumbasses.

It doesn't have any sort of coherent ideology or project on economic issues.

It's a howl of (quite legitimate, quite justified) protest linked to an increasingly deranged personality cult.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

In fact everyone should calm down for other reasons: even taking the absolute worst case scenario (from most Atlas posters pov), it's fair to say that the Italian state has its ways of... dealing... with situations like that.

It's also the case that, damn guys, it's extremely early. We're talking about exit poll figures modified for partial results from a handful of selected polling districts. The actual results are coming in, but very slowly and don't assume that early numbers are representative. From an at all left or liberal perspective this election was always going to be extremely bad, we've known that for more than a year.

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I know it's very early, but hahaha look at the MS5 numbers in Naples, Christ.

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Can someone who knows something about Italian politics explain what is going on?

Berlusconi dominated politics from the mid 90s until the financial crisis. After a period of technocrat rule, there was an election and the PD took power. PD rule has been a bit of a fiasco for various reasons, but Berlusconi has not recovered his former shine. Make sense now?

[Filuwaúrdjan]

The center-left coalition, which won the last election and presided over a chaotic period of mass migration and economic stagnation, lost a lot of votes.

I'm not going to defend the record of the PD-in-government, but it is really important to understand the mess the country was in when they gained power. Not only is it hackish to not mention this, but it makes things confusing - when, then, has there not been a great Right landslide? Because they still themselves carry the stink of the mess they made last time they were in power...

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My family is from Molise and Abruzzo. Glad to see the League is only getting 7% in the former.

The League getting 7% or so in Molise is hardly reason for reassurance.

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Things seem pretty bad for PD in FPTP seats.  In Tuscany where it is the strongest, out of the 7 Senate seats, it is only ahead in 2 of them.  And one of seats that it is ahead is Renzi's seat.

In Emilia-Romagna where PD is also very strong it seems to be Center-Right 6 PD 2 in terms of Senate FPTP leads.

PD is losing Emilia-Romagna and Umbria against the center-right with Lega at 20%.
That alone summarizes this election.

It's an embarrassingly bad performance that calls into question... well... everything, doesn't it?

[Filuwaúrdjan]

LeU never got off the ground, but it has had an impact on the election: it's going to cost the PD a bunch of district seats...

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LeU never got off the ground, but it has had an impact on the election: it's going to cost the PD a bunch of district seats...

I saw that.  I am confused on why this took place.  Even if LeU ran candidates in the FPTP seats surely their PR supporters should tactically vote for the Center-Left block since there is no way the LeU candidate could win.  It does not seem to have taken place.  Is there some sort of rule I am not aware of that forces the PR vote to be linked to the FPTP vote ?

The answer is the electoral system: you cannot vote for a different party for the district and list seats. Another spectacular own goal for Renzi there.

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Since the President is a leftist

He's in the PD, yes. But a leftist? looool...

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Anyway I'll start working on some maps later today.

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Like I said: Italy counts slower than Atlanta.

It's quite normal for the full count of American elections not to be entirely finished for weeks and there are invariably all kinds of nasty disputes about procedural irregularities. You're confusing the tendency of your media to make Calls very early with the completion of a count.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

Well, this is certainly one for the history books. The failure of the two "main" parties, the rise of anti-establishment parties, and the ensuing chaos will surely help define politics going forward, especially within in the EU.

Every single Italian election since the end of the First Republic has been very dramatic... and has in no way foreshadowed the one that followed.

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Um... why would the PD want to go back into government right now? They've just suffered an unimaginably terrible defeat, one that calls into question every single aspect of their strategy since Prodi came up with the Olive Tree idea over twenty years ago. And this from a position of such seemingly impregnable strength a couple of years ago. And every other political force - especially the ones that did well - ran vicious campaigns (often personally abusive) against them. I mean, come on now...

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Hey, look, a Renzi ally re-elected outside Tuscany!

(lol)

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...but it also has a M5S city government and I don't know how competent it is. Plus Grillo is from Genoa, that might count.

These things clearly matter. Genoa was an area of notable MS5 strength in 2013 as well.

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An issue there o/c being how left is the centre 'left' under Renzi anyway?

[Filuwaúrdjan]

But given the reputation of Italian exit polls, are cross-tabulations worth taking seriously at all?

Mostly no, but the general age pattern suggested is consistent with everything else we know. It's pretty clear that the PD is to a great extent a pensioners party, for instance.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

The Map is done. A few errors and rounding inconsistencies are always possible; a handful of polling districts are also outstanding (though shouldn't alter anything of significance).