February 28, 2024 - 2:16pm
Giorgia Meloni has just suffered her most serious political setback since becoming prime minister of Italy. In this week’s regional elections in Sardinia, the centre-left opposition not only gained the regional presidency but also took control of the regional council. The centre-Right hasn’t lost a region since 2015 — and some commentators are interpreting the result as a possible turning of the tide against Meloni and her allies. As a briefing from Eurointelligence puts it, “she may not be as strong as widely believed”.
At this stage, it’s possible that too much is being read into a particularly confused and chaotic local contest. In Italy, regional and national elections are fought by alliances of different parties, some of which have little in common. That certainly proved to be the case in Sardinia, where the centre-Right campaign began with a bitter fight over who their joint candidate for regional president should be. The incumbent president Christian Solinas of the Sardinian Action Party was eventually supplanted by Paolo Truzzu of Meloni’s Brothers of Italy.
This clearly had an impact on the result. Though the centre-Right alliance beat the centre-Left alliance in the vote for seats on the regional council, the vote for regional president went the other way — Truzzu losing by a razor-thin margin to Alessandra Todde. It would appear that disgruntled supporters of Solinas expressed their anger by voting across political lines for the centre-Left candidate.
Can Meloni dismiss this defeat as the result of purely local factors? After all, Sardinia is hardly typical of Italy — many Sardinians would insist that it isn’t Italy at all. And the Prime Minister’s party is still comfortably ahead in nationwide polls.
But Meloni should be wary all the same. While her allies in Sardinia were bickering among themselves, the opposition parties put up a remarkable show of unity. Todde belongs to the Five Star Movement, but formed a very effective alliance with the Democratic Party. That’s something of a breakthrough because — though the two parties can be broadly described as centre-Left — they’re at opposite ends of the populist (Five Star) versus euro-establishment (Democrats) spectrum.
A united opposition that can attract Left-leaning professionals and angry outsiders could cause Meloni major problems — especially if she forgets about the wave of Eurosceptic populism that swept her to power in the first place. She was never the Mussolini reboot that some people feared she’d be. In fact, as prime minister she’s ruled as a conventional and rather compliant euro-conservative. There’s been no significant confrontation with the EU establishment and she’s continued to accept mass immigration into an already over-burdened Italy.
Though Meloni is famous for her rhetoric — especially her line, “I am Giorgia, I am a woman, I am a mother, I am Italian, I am Christian… no one will take that away from me” — she wasn’t elected just to give off vibes, but to make a meaningful difference. Sardinia is a warning that if she doesn’t bring change to Italy, then change will come to her.
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SubscribeSame as all the other populist damp squibs. They have no plan, no people and no competence. They just misappropriate and redirect people’s legitimate concerns, promising easy solutions (three word slogan!), to catapult themselves into power and just assume they’ll work it out from there once in.
People have no principles and no ideas. They are just a mess of incoherent misgivings and latch onto whichever telegenic figure appears most in their news feeds. So long as this persists our politics will be rubbish.
The condescension oozes throughout this comment. What’s the alternative then? Vote for the same old, rotting political parties that have continually demonstrated incompetence? Vote for the parties that have delivered open borders, net zero, crippling Covid policies, CRT/DEI?
People vote for the options presented to them. It’s not their fault if the options are blah. That’s why Britain will have record low voting turnout in the next election.
You need to make more effort than just voting for a liar every 4 years.
Very lazy non response. I’m shocked someone upvoted it.
It may be a lazy response but it is also true. We who complain, rightly, about our politicians DO need to do more to try to change our country’s disastrous descent into Hell.
Inserting “You” in your previous comment was typical of your lazy, ad hominem and cowardly anonymised offerings.
So the 95% of people who don’t actively participate in politics should just shut up and take it? They have somehow forfeited their right to complain. The busy mom with three kids should get out there and organize.
Both parties lead you into the abyss. Speed is the only difference.
I did not upvote for him, but maybe that’s what he meant.
Given the choice between a bad plan that is borderline suicidal for the middle class over the long term and no plan at all, I know which one I’m picking. I don’t love choosing between some appointed figurehead of a loathsome aristocratic class that oozes contempt for many if not most of the people they’re supposed to serve and a probably incompetent clown who offers very little beyond the vague sense that he sort of respects and cares about his supporters, but if a gun is held to my head, I am again picking the latter. Picking a random direction and walking blindly into a dark cavern hoping to stumble onto some unknown exit is a better idea than walking directly up to the hungry tiger blocking the only lighted exit. It would be nice if we had better options in all these cases. Could you maybe suggest some?
Unless they can stop immigration, they will always lose popularity and eventually power. It is by far the most important issue to right-leaning people and yet right-leaning politicians are seemingly incapable or uninterested in reducing the numbers.
The problem is that everyone is in the same… boat. It doesn’t matter who is in power.
You are right. All countries are in the same boat.
1.First the government needs to want to stop mass immigration.
2.Then they need to change the laws and remove the outdated international agreements that constrain them from doing so.
3.Then they need to work out the operational issues (how to deter would be immigrants? what to do with those that arrive illegally?)
4.Then they need to work out how to deal with the labour and consumption gaps that reduced immigration will entail.
Australia is a good example of a country that got on top of its illegal immigration situation and has a good visa regime. It is hard for Italy because it is a member of the EU so must accept Freedom of Movement and is bound by ECHR regulations. Britain has edged its way in the right direction by leaving the EU but its government is suffering from a lack of will to do anything. The USA is an example of a country where the government seems to have a deliberate policy of open borders.
Australia did do this but as most people arrive by plane, it’s easier for them to check effectively who’s going in and out.
However, I thought the new government had started to ramp up migration again because of the aging population. So economic factors always make the decision in the end.
The new government are of course extremely woke lefties as seen by The Voice referendum. It doesn’t surprise me that they want more immigrants. Instead of thinking through ways of maintaining economic growth with fewer immigrants they just issue more visas.
Also most asylum seekers to Britain arrive by plane – they get into the country and then disappear The dinghies are just the most dramatic way of gaining illegal entry.
Every country needs a certain amount of immigration. The real problem is when govts just allow everyone in, without being vetted. This does not happen, although I understand the current govt wants to open up its borders.
The thing is in Australia no one gets in without being vetted. There is no open border. If an illegal alien does manage to enter, they are detained until there is immigration hearing.
Amen, Jim. Would that other governments had a similar amount of good sense.
I think the statistic for immigration into Australia last year was over 500,000. In a country of 26 million people, 8 million have arrived just this century. Vetted or not, this is a disastrous number of immigrants. The point of it is to keep wages low and the construction/property industry in business. Real wages in Australia are where they were in 2010. Productivity is low (no need to innovate when labour is cheap). Rents are sky high. The major political parties don’t dare deviate from this stupid high-immigration policy.
The USA is an example of a country where the current regime seems to have a deliberate policy of open borders, but there are consequences. Political polarization has paralyzed the federal government and prevents any serious action because in the USA, it’s much much easier to prevent a law from being passed/changed than it is to actually pass/change a law. The executive branch can fail to enforce existing law as they have for most of the past several decades, but that too has consequences, and we’re seeing them.
As we speak, Texas’s governor is currently directly administering a section of the border through the Texas national guard. For those that don’t know, the national guard is considered a part of the US military but during peacetime, the guards themselves answer directly to the governor of their states. There’s not a lot of precedent for whether an executive can countermand a governor’s directive during peacetime and a lot of good reasons not to find out. Enforcing a de facto open borders policy that most Americans don’t care for is not a good reason to test the loyalties of trained soldiers, particularly when said soldiers have already made something of a declaration of loyalty through their willingness to follow the governor’s orders rather than the President’s. This is not a trivial confrontation and it is helping establish a precedent. When the federal government is divided and constrained by a lack of popular support, the states have broad latitude to solve their own problems, and America has a long history of these types of confrontations. Unlike Europe, there are no international treaties signed by anybody to constrain policy, just the notoriously vague and short on details Constitution. When there’s any level of vagueness to exploit, the states will generally do whatever they can get away with, and in today’s polarized America with a weak and unpopular national government, the states can and do get away with quite a lot. Texas and the federal government are still fighting the matter in court and probably still will be years from now when the issue is long forgotten but in the meantime, the Texas guard is still there and the border is secured. The preferred points of crossing have no shifted westward into Arizona, so it’s mission accomplished for Texas. Every state will have noted that Texas thumbed their nose at the federal government and suffered no consequences while accomplishing exactly what they set out to do.
During the Trump administration, we had the opposite happening, with so called ‘sanctuary cities’ declaring their unwillingness to follow federal immigration law as it was being enforced. They too suffered little consequence, though mainly because nobody seriously cared to stop them, including Trump or the Republicans, who were pretty willing to let deep blue cities inflict continuing economic, political, and social suffering upon themselves for the sake of their silly ideologies. They were never going to vote Republican either way.
There is almost zero prospect in the short to medium term of this dynamic changing, so I expect to see a lot more states pursuing their own de facto immigration policies through labor regulations, residency requirements, voter ID laws, etc. The federal government can try to stop them, but in a country so divided as the US is where neither party can achieve a strong majority and there are serious divisions within the parties themselves, there will be a lot of situations where the political price of doing so is higher than the price of just looking the other way. When the states that have sensible rules to encourage positive immigration to fill actual economic needs experience more political harmony, lower crime, and better economic conditions than those that fail to do so, the laggards will be forced to get with the program or see their political and economic fortunes vis a vis other states suffer in term. Historically speaking, this is how the US works. It’s slow, inefficient, ugly, and conflict driven, but it works, eventually. With fifty little laboratories of democracy, sooner or later the cream rises to the top.
Very thoughtful comment. Thanks.
Something rises to the top, but it ain’t cream.
Thanks Steve, very interesting. Out of interest, are the Texas national guard full time professional soldiers or are they a sort of citizen militia with other jobs but report for duty when called upon?
They are part time citizen soldiers, yes. It’s an American thing and I honestly can’t think of any analogous force in any foreign country. The US has a second flavor of part-time soldiers, the reserves, whose sole function is exactly what it sounds like, to serve as extra manpower in wartime. The national guard has broader responsibilities that include police functions like disaster response, riot suppression, security, etc., in addition to being called up during wartime. As one might expect, the national guard is used quite a lot while the reserves are very rarely called up. I would hazard a guess that guardsmen tend to be the more committed and experienced group. The national guard and reserves were heavily utilized in both Iraq and Afghanistan to the point where I would hesitate to give the standing army much if any advantage in terms of combat experience or effectiveness at this point.
The army was reorganized in this way post WWII as a way of continuing the American tradition of independent local militias and bringing them under federal oversight. I’m sure the intention was not to give the states their own trained military forces that could be used in a theoretical domestic conflict, but domestic conflict wasn’t even on the radar at that point. The practical impact in the current political climate is that every state has a semi-professional military force in easy reach should someone in Washington ever be so stupid as to try to use brute military force to impose federal policy on an unwilling populace.
The national guards of the states combined with the reserves are actually slightly larger than the USA’s standing army. Regardless of the rhetoric coming out of the Biden administration publicly and the dismissal of the topic by the mainstream media, the threat of domestic conflict is not something to be casually dismissed. A seceding US state on day one would likely already have a better equipped, better trained, better disciplined, and better organized military force than the US faced in Afghanistan or Iraq. I suspect the generals and Pentagon planners tasked with analyzing and advising the politicians on such things are already well aware of these facts and are painting a pretty grim picture of what a second Civil War would look like. I suspect the picture is grim enough that the federal government won’t even consider a military response to a state defying the feds on a particular issue. They’ll go to court time and again as if words and judgements will change anything. They’ll stomp their feet and cry foul to their media lapdogs in a play to pick off the last few Americans that still actually listen to such things. They’ll even threaten to withhold federal funding for state programs, a threat which will never be fully carried out for other reasons. They’ll do anything they can do to make their displeasure known and to coerce states into complying but Washington won’t respond militarily to anything short of open rebellion and/or a declaration of secession.
Here in Australia we have the Citizens Military Force, known as the CMF. Known affectionately here as the Cut Lunch Commandos.
It is not an earth slide but only a thin margin. So can it be interpreted as a turning tide?