Fascism in Italy

making a comeback

https://www.theguardian.com/news/2018/feb/22/casapound-italy-mussolini-fascism-mainstream

 

Should you be stuck with the choice of herding cats or Italians then choose the cats. Italian Fascism was much a fantasy: https://www.thelocal.it/20131007/ferramonti-was-not-a-death-camp

 

Assuming the report of a 5 year old child is true, your conclusion is that Italian Fascism is a fantasy because they only put people in concentration camps and they didn't execute them?
That's your point?

 

They never came close to being the totalitarian state they proposed.

 

Totalitarianism-lite?

 

Light enough for Mussolini to have been fired.

 

I really hope that this doesn't result in the outbreak of World War III.

 

Sit down everyone and take a deep breath. Don't panic! CasaPound is only polling at 1.8% in the latest polls. There's a hard-left Venezuela-ish neo-Communist party called Power to the People that's polling at 1.7%

It's true that Italian politics is highly fragmented with dozens of political parties, and some of the smaller ones, including formerly influential ones, are polling down at the same level of one or two percent. (That seems to happen a lot in Italy where parties appear and disappear overnight and the elites from the shrunken but once-powerful parties combine and recombine into new parties with new names. Italian politics is constant churn.)

So CasaPound is entering the 'mainstream' in that respect, simply by running a candidate list and polling above one percent. But nothing to panic about. No need for dark WWIII talk.

Italy has a general election scheduled for March 5 and it promises to be very interesting. (I'm sure that's the occasion for the Guardian writing this piece.) With lots of parties, parties enter into alliances and form coalitions. There are two broad coalitions contending, a left(ish) one (that forms the current government) and a right(ish) one. Plus there's the Five Star Movement, something of a populist wildcard, that hasn't entered any coalition.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opinion_polling_for_the_Italian_general_election,_2018

The ruling left(ish) coalition is falling like a stone in the polls, currently polling at 26.3%. It's composed of the rather social-democratic Democratic Party (PD), itself formed from a variety of declining left leaning parties in 2007, including remnants of the once-powerful Italian Communist Party. The PD is currently doing reasonably well, polling at 21.3%, second among individual parties. But that represents a fall from what once was a commanding lead in the polls. The left-coalition's other big problem is that the declining PD doesn't have any strong coalition partners. The second strongest partner in the left-coalition is a pro-EU integration Party called More Europe, polling at 2.8%.

The right(ish) challengers are a combination of Silvio Berlusconi's Forza Italia party, polling at 15.9% and the once-separatist Euro-skeptic and anti-migrant Northern League at 14.8%. (Plus some small parties at about one percent each. CasaPound isn't among them.) The right(ish) coalition currently totals 37.5% in the polls, well ahead of their rivals.

The wildcard in the election is the new 5Star Movement (5SM) currently polling first among parties at 26.3%. (Equal to the entire ruling left-coalition.) It's hard to place this party on the stereotypical left-right spectrum since it's clearly Populist (in the sense of an Athenian-style popular democracy party). It opposes the idea of an elite consisting of rich and connected career politicians inserting themselves between the people and power, while claiming to rule in the people's name. 5SM advocates widespread use of referendums on controversial issues and MPs generally voting in Parliament as their voters desire. Sensing how the electorate is tilting in Italy and in Europe, the 5SM has recently taken a more anti-migrant and Euroskeptic line which gets them lumped with the "far right" in MSM fake news (such as the Guardian). But they can surprise and take a very leftish line on some issues.

So the election on March 5 will be something to watch, as will be the attempts by the various parties and coalitions to form a government afterwards. The 5SM looks to finish as the top party, and the right(ish) coalition as the top coalition. But who will the 5SM ally with to form a government?

 

"It's The Guardian, Jake."

 

Anything to the right of Jeremy Corbyn is "fascist" to the Guardian.

I still remember them in the early 1970's when they were kind of an alternative counter-culture newspaper in Manchester with a defiant Marxist line, cheering the North Vietnamese in the Vietnam War and every Marxist-led "national liberation struggle" they could find. Then they moved to London and somehow magically became identified as a "quality" mainstream British newspaper.

 

Orwell, 1944: http://orwell.ru/library/articles/As_I_Please/english/efasc

 

more

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/24/world/europe/italy-elections-violence.html?module=WatchingPortal&region=c-column-middle-span-region&pgType=Homepage&action=click&mediaId=thumb_square&state=standard&contentPlacement=2&version=internal&contentCollection=www.nytimes.com&contentId=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.nytimes.com%2F2018%2F02%2F24%2Fworld%2Feurope%2Fitaly-elections-violence.html&eventName=Watching-article-click

 

The Mystery of Fascism - http://www.la-articles.org.uk/fascism.htm

 

More on Silvio Berlusconi's improbable return to politics.

https://www.yahoo.com/news/shedding-past-scandals-berlusconi-barrels-ahead-comeback-175015329.html

As somebody said, Silvio Berlusconi invented the style. Trump is just a Berlusconi imitator.

 

Berlusconi spent years forging ties with Kadaffi. Italy paid to Libya some token reparation for the former Italian occupation as part of a broad commercial deal. And Kadaffi kept back the would-be tide of emigrants to Europe. A tide preceding the ill-named Arab Spring.

Berlusconi was then forced into participating in the overthrow of Kadaffi, the beginning of the tragic Arab Spring with its horrendous body count. Mediterranean commerce dissipated where it could have flourished.

 

The Tunisian upheaval was internal. Libya saw external forces overturning Kadaffi in favor of...well, who knows?

 

The Italians are voting.

Here's a recent exit poll, with a handy cheat-sheet describing who the various parties are:

https://twitter.com/EuropeElects/status/970419770062499842

It looks like the Right(ish) coalition is at 36% in the exit poll. The 'populist' 5 Star Movement is at 30.5%. (40% is needed to form a government.)

Here's a projection of number of seats each party will win in the Chamber of Deputies. (Parties have to get more than 3% of the vote to win parliament seats. (CasaPound, the neo-fascists who had the Guardian so excited, is apparently getting a fraction of 1%, so they won't be represented in parliament.)

https://twitter.com/EuropeElects/status/970434013423947781

Assuming that these exit poll numbers reflect what the final results will be, the big question is what the 5 Star Movement does. It's already said that it doesn't want to enter into any coalition, but does it really want to stay outside government after coming in first among parties?

 

No problem. Anyone can be called fascist.