FROM WASHINGTON:

In a few hours, the polls will open in Italy.

Nothing is certain at this point, but a few things seem likely.  Turnout will likely be low.  The number of nullified ballots is likely to be much higher than the standards of democracy ought to allow, thanks to the complicated rules of the Rosatellum electoral law.  The South will likely vote monolithically for the Five Star Movement (M5S); the Democratic Party (PD) under Matteo Renzi will likely suffer an unprecedented humiliation; and no one will be happy.  There are no good options.

There are old options and there are new options.  Italy tasted Renzi’s leadership once, and spat it out.  PD has no new ideas at all, and seems to be aping Britain: Renzi the Italian Blair; the breakaway of old stalwarts Grassi and Bersani a perverse homage to Corbyn and Momentum.

Meanwhile the elements the old right-wing triumvirate — Berlusconi the liberal-conservative, Bossi the northern secessionist, Fini the neofascist — are back.  The heavy-eyed, knuckle-dragging Salvini has replaced Bossi.  Giorgia Meloni has replaced Fini.  Berlusconi has somehow replaced Berlusconi.

And there are new options.  M5S will have an unprecedented role in parliament.  Nobody quite knows what that will mean.  Their program looks attractive enough from afar: a green government, guaranteed income for all citizens (an idea whose time has maybe come), greater attention toward the crumbling economies of the South.  But M5S has never yet bridged the gap between its soaring rhetoric and its plodding governance.  Virginia Raggi, M5S mayor of Rome, looked promising: young, female, energetic.  Her mayorship has been a trainwreck.  Likewise the mayor of Turin.

And whether or not M5S is technically fit to run a country, they may not be morally fit.

Renzi addressed the PD faithful last night on the last push of a tired and jaded campaign.  “They want us to be ashamed,” he said, “but there is only one thing that embarrasses us, and that’s you all and your language, my Five Star friends… M5S’s violent way of doing things isn’t bad for PD.  It’s bad for Italy.”

And correctly, courageously, he continued: “Italy does not belong to fascist murderers.”  He was referring to the attack on Nigerians in the town of Macerata by a right wing militant and Lega Nord candidate, an act of violence whose brutality and banality captured the mood in Italy with sad precision.

 

Renzi seems confident of one thing: that he will remain the kingmaker of Montecitorio, the parliamentary palace, however many seats the rebel Five Stars take.  Throwing down the gauntlet in his final speech, Renzi told Di Maio that PD would rather join the opposition than rule with M5S; he could only make that statement if he were certain that no one else would, either, and that sooner or later PD will end up in government, in a grand and unwieldy coalition with Berlusconi.  But take note: Renzi’s confidence is never to be trusted.  M5S may well form a coalition with the racist, Eurosceptic right.

This is the worst possible scenario: a M5S-Lega-Fratelli d’Italia (FI)  government.  It would be the first fascist government in Italy since the fall of the Social Republic.  It would be the finishing flourish of a nightmare thirty years in the making.  The rebirth of Italy, the energy and the force of spirit, the generations of genius and daring that made the world a place fit to live in, will be postponed another fifty years or more; and Europe will have to stagger on with a dead limb, with dead flesh in its Italian boot, contracting backward toward the Rhine, toward the old bickering of France and Germany, toward the grim, practical, industrial vision of European unity that preceded the Treaty of Rome.

M5S is a party that thrives on moods and hysterias, on resentment and the comfort of a crowd.  It’s leadership is quick to accuse the media of being fake news — an apt little nod to certain spiritual brethren across the Atlantic — while peddling the grossest and most preposterous fake news on social media, including crudely doctored photos and bizarre insinuations.  M5S is a party of frustration, certainly; of desperation, especially in the South.  But it is also the party of ignorance, of small minds and withered hearts.

M5S is also a party with no moral grounding.  It is proudly anti-ideological, and has changed drastically over the years.  Its tone has changed: its views toward Vladimir Putin have notably changed form wry hostility to gushing support; it feels older than it did four or five years ago, grayer and stupider, and the votes it commands give the impression of an old man’s belly, massive but unhealthy.  Its mutability is worrisome, because it recalls a small protest party 99 years ago that was vaguely progressive and revolutionary and run by charismatic speakers with great PR.

The Windrose is certainly not the first to make the comparison:

 

A M5S-Lega-FI government would be a government for the murderer of Macerata.  It would be a government for the Hungarian journalist on 2015 who kicked and tripped refugees as they ran by.  (Not for nothing was Meloni recently guest of Viktor Orban.)  It will be a government for Steve Bannon, a Lega enthusiast and a longtime admirer of Italian fascism, and for Marine Le Pen, and for a Polish government that signs Holocaust denial into law.

It will not be a government for Italian youth, who are pouring out of the country in the greatest migration in a century.  It will be a government that inflames tensions between North and South, rather than easing them, a government that will let Veneto and Lombardy hold money that could be spent repairing roads in Basilicata, funding researchers at Università degli Studi in Naples, or microfinancing farms in Sicily.  It will look to cut off capital flow from the rest of the EU, in a fatal gesture of “sovereignty.”  And for all its law and order talk, a right wing government will continue to enable the Mafia, first by widening the job and power vacuum in the rural South, and second by its macho posturing, which goes a long way toward legitimizing the rule by gun.

But none of that is guaranteed to happen.

The best case scenario is a grand coalition of the center-left and center-right.  Berlusconi’s ghost would haunt Rome once again, but it already has for some time now, and it shouldn’t surprise us.  At least in his stead Berlusconi would send Antonio Tajani to Rome.  Tajani is the President of the European Parliament, a staunch Europeanist — and a with a monarchist upbringing, which may or may not be a good thing.  Italian monarchism always had two faces.  Part of the movement, the part typified by Achille Lauro, was rebellious and populist, hostile to the cosmopolitan “elites” (!) and on good terms with the Movimento sociale italiano, the grandfather of all neofascists.  The other part (the likes of Giovannino Guareschi) prized stability, dignity and tradition above all else.  It took its Christian morality and its European legacy quite seriously. If Tajani comes to power and channels this legacy, he may prove to the moral glue that Italy desperately needs.  And with Renzi, he could start the hard work of forming a serious government.

At this late hour, there is still time to pray.