During the Italian election campaign, the Five Star Movement, a party founded by a comedian and defined mostly by being anti-establishment, and the far-right, anti-European Union, anti-immigrant League (formerly Northern League) were bitter enemies.
“The real danger to Europe is the League,” declared the former.
“The Five-Star Movement would be the downfall of Italy,” proclaimed the latter.
But together they won a majority of the votes on March 4, fueled by the now-familiar anger over large-scale migration, economic stagnation and perceived diktats from Brussels. After arduous negotiations, they agreed to unite around a 58-page “contract” that promises huge spending and lower taxes; renegotiation of European Union membership; expulsion of a half-million undocumented migrants; and an end to sanctions on Russia, which they amazingly describe as “a potential partner for the E.U. and NATO.” The contract devotes only four sentences to Italy’s mountainous, 2.3-trillion-euro ($2.7 trillion) debt — 132 percent of gross domestic product — which they say they will eliminate through a “revival of internal demand.”
For prime minister, the parties agreed on a largely unknown law professor named Giuseppe Conte, whose résumé’s list of research at famous universities drew a blank at some of them, including New York University, which could find no record of him. His main qualification is apparently his willingness to do the bidding of the party leaders.
All this has sent a chill through markets and capital cities on a continent already battered by Brexit, Euroskeptic governments in Eastern Europe and the rise of populist parties elsewhere, and an “America First” Trump administration in Washington with faint respect for European allies. Conversely, the prospect of an overtly populist government in a founding member of the European Union was music to the ears of right-wing nationalists, including Stephen Bannon, who declared it “monumental”; France’s Marine Le Pen, who saw it as the harbinger of the collapse of the bloc; and Nigel Farage, a leader of the Brexit drive in Britain.
How much damage the coalition can actually do is not clear. Italy’s politics are inherently unpredictable and unstable. They are likely to stay that way because of ideological differences between the League, led by Matteo Salvini, a sweatshirt-wearing member of Parliament who has turned what was the regional Northern League into a national far-right party, and the Five Star Movement, a web-based party whose leader, Luigi Di Maio, 31, is a college dropout from a small town near Naples who became vice president of the lower house of Parliament at 26. Their slender majority in Parliament won’t help them, either.
Silvio Berlusconi, the scandal-plagued former prime minister, has already said his party, Forza Italia, which campaigned with the League but was excluded from the government coalition, will vote against the government. The coalition’s agenda, moreover, does not call for pulling out of the European Union or giving up the euro.
Yet the new Italian government cannot be dismissed as just another in Italy’s long history of political crises. The shift of a core member of the European Union, one whose allegiance to the “European project” had not been in doubt, toward the new Central European members hostile to Brussels is a serious blow to the deeper European integration championed by President Emmanuel Macron of France and Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany.
“Italians must understand that the future of Italy is in Europe and nowhere else, but there are rules to respect,” said the French finance minister, Bruno Le Maire. “If the new government takes the risk of not meeting its commitments on the debt, the deficit, but also the cleanup of the banks, it is the entire financial stability of the eurozone which would be threatened.”
Imposing stern rules on Greece, and scolding Poland and Hungary for their illiberal policies, were actions taken by established Western nations secure in their roles in Europe. But if Italy, the fourth-largest economy in the European Union, starts defying union rules and demanding a renegotiation of the terms of its membership, it will be far more difficult to hold other members in check.
Still, it is too early for Mr. Bannon and his allies to celebrate, or for the champions of the union to panic. The allure of populists can fade rapidly if they fail to come up with concrete solutions to the resentments that brought them to power. The task for Mr. Macron and Ms. Merkel and their allies is to stay the course on the bloc’s values, coherence and rules, but also to recognize and address the anger that has fed the rebellion.