Fratelli d'Italia is now the biggest party in Italy

submitted by EthnocratArcheofuturist from self.debatealtright

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[–]Schlomo_GaschambergRabbi Schlomo Auschwitzstein Gaschamberg 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (3 children)

From what I know, I'd be closest to the Tricolour Flame and New Force in that country. But they look like they can't really get anywhere.

I don't like Salvini or Berlusconi, nor their Lega and Forza Italia parties. I see FdI as being closer to the genuine 'extreme-Right' than the populist Lega and Forza Italia parties, so I guess FdI is all I can hope for. I don't like Meloni, though, who I think is not much different to France's Le Pen. You make her sound even worse with the pro-NATO nonsense, which is even more wrongheaded if it isn't even what most of the FdI voter base want. Is it really important for Italian candidates to look as though they have good relations with the American government?

I agree that M5S is trash. It is actually Left-wing populist, and not much better than the biggest group of bad guys, the PD. The only difference seems to be in that the PD seems a more cosmopolitan, pluralist, technocratic party that has probably lost all sense of 'Italianness'. A party of 'Anywheres'.

Whereas the M5S at least still might have an 'Italianness', even if it is that of southern Italy, of pizza and Mafias, and not that of the north.

Do you think it's possible that PD or any other essentially Left-wing group could make a comeback? That seems to be the trend across practically all of the Americas (Peru, Chile, Honduras and Colombia all come to mind, with Brazil sure to follow) as well as Australia very recently. Turkey also looks to have a Left-wing, pro-EU victory coming soon. The only outlier I can think of is Ecuador, but that is more because of the absolute bungling of the country by the previous Left-wing government.

In most of these places it seems to be Covid, and the responses to it, that most hurt incumbents, and so I imagine that Italy's response has deeply harmed the Draghi government. But Draghi is in an odd position because he has cobbled together parties from both sides. And so I imagine that Covid is currently harming M5S, Lega, PD, Forza Italia and Renzi's party. While FdI, being in opposition, is benefiting from Covid?

I'm going to take a wild guess here: with Lega and FI essentially abandoning the Right to join Draghi, M5S, PD and Renzi, it is their voter bases that are drifting to FdI as a response to this kind of betrayal? Or is it more that the Lega/FI voters supported aligning with Draghi in the hope of diminishing the even greater influence the Left would have had over his government if they did not join in to counterbalance it?

[–]Rakean93Identitarian socialist 2 insightful - 1 fun2 insightful - 0 fun3 insightful - 1 fun -  (2 children)

You are right about the vote drifting from Lega and FI toward FdI, as well as the fact that being the contarian party (the only one in the opposition) is extremly beneficial to FdI. About the PD, it never vanished, it is still the second italian party. But the PD is the party of the liberal left, the party of the big industrials crowd and the upper middle class, and his voter base doesn't intersect at all with that of FdI, which is the most conservative right. PD could cannibalize some of the voter base of FI because honestly they are basically the same party. But they can't really grow much more than now, the liberal left is not a supermajor part of the italian political tradition.

What could happen instead is the return of the socialist left, which is actually a very important part of the country. FI was basically a splinter party from the right wing of the old christian democrats (DC), while the PD is the result of the merging between the left wing of the DC with the communist party, which used to be 30%. I think that eventually, with nothing left on the right, people will look to the left of the PD, and there is honestly some intersections with the voter base of FdI, expecially the more pro-social part, as well as the more left leaning voter base of PD. M5S was actually a tool used to gather the socialist left, and in fact resulted as the biggest party in the last elections, but now it took a pro-institution stance which alienated his original base, bleeding more 2/3 of the votes.

edit: those other parties you mentioned are more like clubs and are not serious about gaining the power. I know them pretty well, most of them have cool guys, but they are not interested in doing actual politics, just in proclaming that they are the most pure on the right. They should turn into think tank and cultural movements, they would be way more useful.

[–]Schlomo_GaschambergRabbi Schlomo Auschwitzstein Gaschamberg 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (1 child)

Yes, I agree that Forza Nuova and Tricolour Flame, having gotten nowhere as political parties, would be much better off as interest groups. Mostly because interest groups are one of the very few types of institutions in the West whose memberships are actually growing, whereas political party memberships have been declining for decades on end in almost every European country. It seems like people are more interested in the 'metapolitical' than the political. They are turned off by the nuts and bolts of actually running in elections and so forth: elections are costly (especially for challengers, not so much for incumbents), stressful experiences.

PD having limited ability to grow because of the unpopularity of the 'postmaterialist', pluralist type of Leftism ubiquitous in the Anglosphere sounds good. To me they look like the biggest problem in Italy, owing to their size, and I hope that younger Italians are not attracted to them in the way that younger Anglosphere voters are very attracted to similar kinds of movements (particularly ones that put a Green environmentalist and/or Animal Rights twist on top of the standard social democratic, pluralist, 'postmaterialist' politics), like the German Die Grunen.

I noticed that the M5S people who were elected years ago, like Virginia Raggi in Rome, seem to have lost their seats largely if not entirely back to the PD. M5S—a party I've noticed is hated by Western media like The Guardian for its populism—looks like a brief 'flash in the pan', capitalizing on an anti-establishment sentiment.

My guess for their decline is either that the anti-establishment sentiment that put them into power has died off; that because the M5S was more about getting establishment figures out of power rather than having a positive vision in power, they did not really have an idea of what to do once they won power; and that because M5S were political upstarts, they were inept in realizing any vision (direct democracy, I think also a UBI, etc.) that they might have had.

There is a sort of horseshoe going on where some more socialist and populist voters might be more likely to support FdI over PD if forced to make that choice? Which parties do they normally vote for? All the other Left parties like 'Italian Left' (SI) and 'Article One' look very similar to the PD to me.

[–]Rakean93Identitarian socialist 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

There is a sort of horseshoe going on where some more socialist and populist voters might be more likely to support FdI over PD if forced to make that choice? Which parties do they normally vote for? All the other Left parties like 'Italian Left' (SI) and 'Article One' look very similar to the PD to me.

They were voting were voting Lega before FdI, and before that M5S. The M5S was very close to the old Italian communist party when it comes to what they were aiming for.