WHAT IS RIGHT AND WRONG WITH 'POPULISTS' ITALIAN-STYLE: A COMMENT

"Italy’s new government was sworn in on Friday, ending the country’s longest postwar political crisis but pushing the eurozone’s third-largest economy into an era of potentially greater conflict with the EU. Sergio Mattarella, Italy’s president, presided over a ceremony at the Quirinal Palace in Rome on Friday that allows Giuseppe Conte, the new prime minister, to take office along with the rest of the 18-member cabinet. Mr Conte was the compromise candidate chosen by the anti-establishment Five Star Movement and the far-right League after the two parties agreed to strike a deal to govern together after the March general election. Mr Conte is replacing Paolo Gentiloni, the outgoing prime minister, who presided over the final stretch of a five-year period in which centre-left administrations ran the country. On Thursday night Mr Mattarella gave his green light to Mr Conte’s government by approving the ministers picked by Five Star and the League. Matteo Salvini, the League leader, will be interior minister, and Luigi Di Maio, the Five Star leader, will be labour and economic development minister. “We are ready to launch the government of change and improve the quality of life of all Italians,” Mr Di Maio said. Giovanni Tria, a professor of political economy, will be finance minister, while Enzo Moavero, a former EU official, will be foreign minister".

James Politi, "Five Star and League take power in Italy". The Financial Times. 1 June 2018, in www.ft.com.

"Europe is set to enter a new period of political uncertainty after two populist parties in Italy, the Five Star Movement and the League, agreed to form a new government together. After a week of uncertainty that has sppoked markets, Italy, the eurozone’s third and the world’s eighth-largest economy, finds itself run by two populist parties that have in the past expressed deep scepticism of Italy’s membership of the eurozone, as well as opposing EU policies on migration. Italy is a country where the two major EU crises of previous years cross paths. Italy has suffered both from long-standing economic malaise, made more acute in the years of the eurozone crisis, and a mounting migration crisis in the Mediterranean. In both cases, Five Star and the League have fostered the perception of many Italians that the EU not only failed to help but outright harmed Italy by imposing upon it punishing economic reforms and leaving it without help to manage the influx of refugees on its shores. Ideally, this would concentrate the attention of EU elites on the effort to overhaul Europe’s economic governance and management of its external frontier, with an eye to developing more sustainable and equitable policies. Italy is indeed the final frontier of the decade-long governance crisis of the EU: a founding EU member, its fourth-largest country and traditionally a pro-European society, Italy faces very real policy challenges that are seen by its electorate as closely intertwined with its membership of the EU and the eurozone. And yet the populist coalition in Rome has seemed to elicit a different kind of reaction. Political commentators across Europe were quick to frame the Five Star–League partnership as one more episode in the long march of populism in Western democracies. After the defeat of Marine Le Pen in French presidential elections last year gave way to talk that the populist wave might have ebbed, Italy’s potential new government vindicated those who argue populism, illiberalism and even authoritarianism continue to be Europe’s main problem today. Yet the obsessive focus in much of the political, policy and journalistic debate on populism’s challenge to liberal democracy misses an even more important aspect to the story: that in most cases the rise of populism feeds off very real policy failures and very legitimate popular reactions to them. This is particularly true in a context of continental integration that seems to be increasingly unbalanced between a relatively prosperous and sheltered core of northern and western European states and an increasingly powerless periphery bearing the costs of adaptation to economic hardship and the migration crisis".

Angelos Chryssogelos, "The EU Must Realize That Populism Is a Symptom of Real Policy Failure". The Royal Institute of International Affairs. 31 May 2018, in /www.chathamhouse.org

The bien-pensant reaction to the triumph of the Five-Star and the Northern League and their now acquiring the keys of office in Italia are all too typical. Focus on the dangers to Democracy and liberal governance by Italia's new rulers and ignore the very real problems in Italia's economy which have not so magically conjured up the admittedly idiotic policy promises of the new Italian government. Which is not to gainsay the fact that Italia has suffered from one of the worst growth records since the formation of the Eurozone almost twenty-years ago. A hard fact that all the liberal-bourgeois-post-enlightenment-cosmopolitan nostrums will not gainsay or wish away. They are hard and solid and true facts. The real scandal is that many countries were allowed into the Eurozone (Greece, Portugal, Italia, Cyprus and to a degree Spain), who should not be in the Eurozone. It is probably the case, that at this point in time, it would be more of a disaster for all concerned to allow any of these countries, especially Italia to leave the Eurozone. What however the Eurozone needs is something along the lines of a fiscal motor, which will alleviate the fiscal Brunningism that the Southern European countries have been undergoing since 2009. President Macron of France has put forth some reforms that would move things in the right direction. Only time will tell if Germany will sign-on to these reforms. Currently, the signs are not good. Something that Populists in both Italia and elsewhere should jump for joy for.