Italian Elections and Politics 2022 - Our Time to Schlein

[𝕭𝖆𝖕𝖙𝖎𝖘𝖙𝖆 𝕸𝖎𝖓𝖔𝖑𝖆]

Also, didn't Italy never really have a "normal" correlation between vote and income? The Red Regions have always been richer than the South.

This is a complicated topic which could probably be discussed for ages... but I believe the short version is that our Left found its first base in industrial workers (obviously less common in less industrialized regions - i.e. the South*) and mezzadria tenants (a form of sharecropping which was disproportionately common in the lower Po Valley and the Tuscany-Umbria-Marche central area) and you can see where that leads. That said half a century ago I'm sure you would have found the left-wing parties doing better with blue-collar workers than with white-collar workers let alone managers.

*although this may also expain Veneto since Veneto was kind of an agricultural backwater relative to the rest of the North until about the 1960s.

[Antonio the Sixth]

Beautiful (if depressing) map.

I notice that my earlier assessment that the right lucked out with marginals in the House was exaggerated. Of the 11 seats that were decided by less than 2 points, it looks like the right won 5, and the left and M5S won 3 each, which is as fair a distribution as one can imagine. The right did win a disproportionate amount of seats by 2 to 5 points - I count 8 on this map, compared to 2 for the left and 1 Sicilian Indy - but by that point the sheer fact that they won the most seats has to weigh in.

[Person Man]

What can she realistically accomplish? I mean, its not like her Government is going pass a fetal heartbeat law, Right to Work, Open Carry, the flat tax, bring back executions, their version of AZ SB 1070, the sunsetting of pensions and public health, Private Prisons, and Don't Say Gay, right? But I imagine there could be things going on in Italy that are just as bad if not worse, even if they don't touch most of these areas.

I think you get my point. What are the likely or reasonably possible consequences?

[Filuwaúrdjan]

I notice that my earlier assessment that the right lucked out with marginals in the House was exaggerated. Of the 11 seats that were decided by less than 2 points, it looks like the right won 5, and the left and M5S won 3 each, which is as fair a distribution as one can imagine. The right did win a disproportionate amount of seats by 2 to 5 points - I count 8 on this map, compared to 2 for the left and 1 Sicilian Indy - but by that point the sheer fact that they won the most seats has to weigh in.

I think it's an impression you can get by looking at the Tuscan results (the product of a very oddly drawn map that functions as a vicious anti-PD+ gerrymander in a bad year) but it doesn't hold elsewhere, yes.

[crals]

Salvini has a point. Why doesn't Meloni want him in the government?

[If my soul was made of stone]

They're dying in Modena, ER.

[𝕭𝖆𝖕𝖙𝖎𝖘𝖙𝖆 𝕸𝖎𝖓𝖔𝖑𝖆]

I notice that my earlier assessment that the right lucked out with marginals in the House was exaggerated. Of the 11 seats that were decided by less than 2 points, it looks like the right won 5, and the left and M5S won 3 each, which is as fair a distribution as one can imagine. The right did win a disproportionate amount of seats by 2 to 5 points - I count 8 on this map, compared to 2 for the left and 1 Sicilian Indy - but by that point the sheer fact that they won the most seats has to weigh in.

I think it's an impression you can get by looking at the Tuscan results (the product of a very oddly drawn map that functions as a vicious anti-PD+ gerrymander in a bad year) but it doesn't hold elsewhere, yes.

They should have trolled both livornesi and pisani by putting the two cities in the same constituency (which would then be safe for PD+ even in terrible years) imo.

[Antonio the Sixth]

Salvini has a point. Why doesn't Meloni want him in the government?

He is a massive political liability. His stay at the interior ministry is remembered with horror by the ministry's civil service and he still has ongoing lawsuits about his actions there. He is for all intents and purposes bought and paid for by Russia (I still can't f**king believe Lega got away with publicly, overtly signing a "friendship agreement" with United Russia) at a time when Meloni is trying to reassure about Italy's commitment to NATO. He is also, generally speaking, a loudmouthed buffoon whose constant antics are a source of embarrassment for himself and his allies. Lega's pathetic results clearly show that Italians are tired of his nonsense, and while he will need to get something to remain on board, Meloni has a strong interest in sidelining him as much as possible.

[Sebastiansg7]

Well, besides the historical reasons for the particular strength of the Italian Left in Tuscany and Emilia-Romagna, I am not surprised at all by the fact that the traditional left is actually stronger in two of the wealthiest regions of the country than in for example, Calabria, or Sicily.

The traditional left-wing parties like Partito Democratico, The Labour Party in the UK, or the German Social Democratic Party have slowly become the parties of the highly educated, and they have been losing their traditional working class support at the same time. The working class has either become unintrested in politics, or has turned to the populist/nationalist right.

[Sebastiansg7]

Does anyone have a link where I am able to see the electoral results by commune? I haven't been able to find it.

[Antonio the Sixth]

Does anyone have a link where I am able to see the electoral results by commune? I haven't been able to find it.

You can find them on the Interior Ministry's website (https://elezioni.interno.gov.it/camera/scrutini/20220925/scrutiniCI) but you'll have to do some browsing, first going through the countless byzantine layers of nested constituencies, and finally once you get to FPP seats you can select an individual comune to look at.

[If my soul was made of stone]

The traditional left-wing parties like Partito Democratico

[Sebastiansg7]

The traditional left-wing parties like Partito Democratico

Well, perhaps they are not traditional left per se because they are not an ancient party, but they are mainstream left: social-democratic, middle-of-the road in many issues, in tune with cultural issues that are of the interest of the highly educated more than they are of the interest of the working class, etc

[If my soul was made of stone]

The traditional left-wing parties like Partito Democratico

Well, perhaps they are not traditional left per se because they are not an ancient party, but they are mainstream left: social-democratic, middle-of-the road in many issues, in tune with cultural issues that are of the interest of the highly educated more than they are of the interest of the working class, etc

thatsthejoke.png

[𝕭𝖆𝖕𝖙𝖎𝖘𝖙𝖆 𝕸𝖎𝖓𝖔𝖑𝖆]

The traditional left-wing parties like Partito Democratico

The traditional left-wing party is Forza Italia because it is the heir to the Italian Socialist Party of course. jao

[If my soul was made of stone]

The traditional left-wing parties like Partito Democratico

The traditional left-wing party is Forza Italia because it is the heir to the Italian Socialist Party of course. jao

And Forza Italia is boldly resisting bourgeois postmaterialism* and #trendz as evidenced by its continued strength in Calabria and Sicily!

*caring about women

[rob in cal]

  Any thoughts on what the results for the FPP seats would have been with a runoff provision where the top two advance?

[Antonio the Sixth]

  Any thoughts on what the results for the FPP seats would have been with a runoff provision where the top two advance?

Going back to these maps:

So I guess just to make myself cry, I made this:



Map shows the seats where different alliance patterns could have prevailed over the right (of course that's somewhat theoretical, as not all of those votes would have stuck together in such a scenario):

Won by the Left: 12 (H), 7 (S)
Won by M5S: 10 (H), 5 (S)
Won by others: 4 (H), 3 (S)
Left+Calenda OR Left+M5S beats the Right: 13 (H), 4 (S)
Left+M5S beats the Right: 37 (H), 24 (S)
Left+M5S+Calenda+SVP beats the Right: 18 (H), 9 (S)
Right wins regardless: 53 (H), 22 (S)

So even a simple alliance with Calenda's clique, something that was actually on the verge of happening, would have taken the right a full 13 seats in the House and 4 in the Senate (confirming my intuition that the Right won a lot more marginals in the House than in the Senate). That alone would reduce their majorities to 224 and 111 respectively, which would put it in line with previous right-wing majorities. If the Left had somehow managed an alliance with M5S, meanwhile, they could actually have forced another hung parliament, with only 187 and 87 seats left for the Right. And an (obviously fantastical) "all against the Right" coalition would theoretically have clinched a pretty decisive majority.

Of course only the first scenario is even remotely realistic, but I guess we'll have to see what that means for Italy's future. Most pressingly, what this shows is that there is a real, strong potential for left-populist majorities in Southern Italy which could form the basis for an alternative to the current wave of right-wing populism. Whether M5S and PD can work together to make this potential a reality remains to be seen.

The pink seats would almost certainly flip to the left. There's such an abundance of potential transfer votes there that even if the transfers are very poor they should be enough to put the left over the top. The orange seats are the big question marks. My guess is that PD transfers to M5S would probably be better than the other way around (that's been the patterns in runoff elections with M5S before), so you might expect quite a few of the Southern ones to flip. The light blue ones would probably stay to the right barring the occasional upset.

[rob in cal]

   Would most A-IV voters have gone to the left in a runoff scenario?

[Person Man]

What can she realistically accomplish? I mean, its not like her Government is going pass a fetal heartbeat law, Right to Work, Open Carry, the flat tax, bring back executions, their version of AZ SB 1070, the sunsetting of pensions and public health, Private Prisons, and Don't Say Gay, right? But I imagine there could be things going on in Italy that are just as bad if not worse, even if they don't touch most of these areas.

I think you get my point. What are the likely or reasonably possible consequences?

Again. Humor me as the ignorant but curious person here but what will this likely mean? What’s on the table? Do we have enough information to determine what they are going do?

[Kahane's Grave Is A Gender-Neutral Bathroom]

When does Meloni take over? I remember it took like three months to decide on Conte after 2018 but with such as big win it might be different?

[Alcibiades]

Also, didn't Italy never really have a "normal" correlation between vote and income? The Red Regions have always been richer than the South.

To add to what Battista said: the Red Regions originally emerged as left-wing strongholds in the early 20th century because they had a very particular agricultural system which engendered violent class conflict between rural labourers and landowners. The flip side of this was that in the immediate post-WWI years, Tuscany and Emilia-Romagna were also the strongholds of Fascist popular support, where it found a natural base among the middle classes terrified by this working class radicalism.

My understanding, though, is that after WWII the nature of left-wing support in the Red Regions underwent quite a dramatic change from the above situation, and the PCI (which had of course supplanted the PSI as the dominant force on the left) became something of a cross-class phenomenon there, a deeply-engrained cultural institution. I’m not fully sure of the reasons for this, but I think it had something to do with these regions being the centre of anti-Fascist Resistance activity during the war. It probably also helped that the PCI was quite distinctive amongst left-wing parties in being founded as much on a core of intellectuals as the mass support of the organised working classes. That said, I think you would still have had much more relatively normal class-based electoral patterns during the First Republic in, for instance, the industrialised North.

Finally, I don’t think it makes sense to think of the South as being the kind of region which would be a natural base for the left in most other countries simply because it is poor. As Battista said, it is the least industrialised part of the country, and it also, for want of a better word, has always lacked ‘political consciousness’, which is certainly a consequence of its poverty, as well as historical and cultural circumstances. Its politics have tended to be based on clientelism and the like rather than the kind of ideological ‘mass politics’ in which socialist, social democratic, and communist parties traditionally tended to thrive.

[Antonio the Sixth]

Again. Humor me as the ignorant but curious person here but what will this likely mean? What’s on the table? Do we have enough information to determine what they are going do?

We don't, no. We can safely assume she'll do some pretty heinous stuff, but speculating on what exactly is a fool's errand. Meloni is very right-wing, but she's also shown a lot of pragmatism and seems to be going out of her way to reassure the EU, so in terms of social policy she will probably choose her battlefields carefully.

Also, most of the stuff you cited are very America-specific issues that aren't even discussed in Italy at all. The Italian right bears some similarity with the US right, but not nearly that much.

When does Meloni take over? I remember it took like three months to decide on Conte after 2018 but with such as big win it might be different?

It shouldn't take nearly as long, unless the rift with Salvini gets a lot worse than it looks right now. The right-wing parties have already agreed to govern together long before the elections, so all that's left to do now is hash out the details of who gets what. By contrast, M5S and Lega were starting from scratch in 2018 and needed time to feel each other out on pretty much everything.

One symbolic but important thing to consider is that we're coming up on the 100-year anniversary of the March on Rome, on October 28. Meloni will probably want to be all set up at least a week before that, so as to avoid any unfortunate parallels.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

From Tuscany and points south these patterns are rather familiar, with the exception of the disappearance of a few old strongholds in parts of the South (c.f. Naples city, Messina and parts of Calabria). But in the North... although the area of greatest strength (the South West of Veneto) always saw relatively good results for the old AN in the 1990s, this is very much a new electoral world and a quite remarkable one. Many rural districts where the old AN polled its worst percentages in all of Italy saw extremely strong FdI results this time around. There are breakthroughs and then there's, well, that.



Similar to last time, but there are some interesting differences and they are consistently in the direction of a less weird map by historical standards.



Vastly reduced in scale, yet the same dominant geographical theme still appears. But look a little closer: in much of the country this is clearly a much more 'left-wing' geography than seen before.

[Leading Political Consultant Ma Anand Sheela]

Snip

From Tuscany and points south these patterns are rather familiar, with the exception of the disappearance of a few old strongholds in parts of the South (c.f. Naples city, Messina and parts of Calabria). But in the North... although the area of greatest strength (the South West of Veneto) always saw relatively good results for the old AN in the 1990s, this is very much a new electoral world and a quite remarkable one. Many rural districts where the old AN polled its worst percentages in all of Italy saw extremely strong FdI results this time around. There are breakthroughs and then there's, well, that.

Snip

Similar to last time, but there are some interesting differences and they are consistently in the direction of a less weird map by historical standards.

Snip

Vastly reduced in scale, yet the same dominant geographical theme still appears. But look a little closer: in much of the country this is clearly a much more 'left-wing' geography than seen before.

Well, that's the funny thing, isn't it - if anything this election has seen a mild reversal of MUH TRENDZ (tho, of course, buried under a right-wing landslide), but observers seem to be falling over themselves to proclaim the exact opposite...