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League victory in EU vote strains Italian government

“The fuse that will lead to the government's collapse has been lit”, said Italian political experts on Monday following the League's EU election triumph.

Published: 27 May 2019 12:52 CEST
League victory in EU vote strains Italian government
Italian Deputy Prime Minister and Interior Minister Matteo Salvini arrives to cast his ballot at a polling station in Milan on May 26, 2019, as he votes in European parliamentary elections. Photo: AFP

The success of the eurosceptic, anti-migrant League party at the European elections has raised questions in Italy over the current populist coalition government's future.

The League won more than 34 percent of the Italian vote, compared to just six percent in the 2014 EU elections and 17 percent in the Italian general election last year.

The results confirm the reversal of fortunes of the League and its coalition partner, the anti-establishment Five Star Movement (M5S), which took 32.5 percent at the general election but took home just 17 percent on Sunday.

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“We can expect a week of frenetic negotiations to see how everyone will reposition themselves,” said Giovanni Orsina, politics professor at Rome's LUISS University.

The League victory and M5S collapse in popularity “is explosive in terms of the consequences for government stability,” political analyst Stefano Folli wrote in the Repubblica daily.

“We're not talking tomorrow, or the day after, but the fuse which will lead to the government's collapse has been lit,” he said.

READ ALSO: How EU elections could lead yet another Italian government to collapse

The League snapped up votes from both the M5S and the opposition, with a hardline stance on migration and a savvy multimedia team bombarding Italians with selfies of leader Matteo Salvini.

The party did particularly well in centres seen as migration “hot spots”, including a town held up as a model of integration.

“A miracle”

Salvini's victory had been widely expected, despite the M5S taking advantage of embarrassing corruption scandals involving the far-right party.

The interior minister sparked an outcry at a rally in the run-up to the vote by holding aloft a rosary seen by many as a gratuitous prop, and calling for the Virgin Mary to carry him to victory.

“Salvini was convinced he could do it. The (corruption) investigations made the League lose five to six points, but then he pulled out his rosary. And perhaps he really did get a miracle,” Marco Valbruzzi from the Istituto Cattaneo research institute said.

Inside a polling station in Milan before the 2019 EU elections. Photo: Miguel Medina/AFP

M5S head Luigi Di Maio suggested the League had got one over on it because of political attacks which initially went unchallenged.

Salvini – who celebrated by tweeting a photo of himself grinning and holding a sign saying “top party in Italy” – is now likely to try to force the M5S's hand on every plan it has contested since the coalition formed in June 2018.

“I ask for an acceleration on the government programme,” the 46-year-old said, brandishing Roman Catholic rosary beads.

The main questions at stake are a high-speed rail line between the cities of Turin and Lyon in France, and a flat tax proposal.

“Too silent”

“Perhaps we were too silent, too pure at the beginning, and if that was our mistake I take responsibility,” he said Monday.

The results place Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte in an increasingly difficult position. The leader agreed upon by Salvini and Di Maio is purportedly independent but was a M5S pick.

Analysts say Salvini may be tempted to break up the coalition and join forces with others on the right.
“I'd say the possibility of autumn elections is over 50 percent, unless there's a very strong alignment of the M5S with the Salvini leadership, which would create enormous tensions within the Movement,” Orsina said.

Italy's small far-right Brothers of Italy (FdI) party took home 6.4 percent of the vote, while billionaire Silvio Berlusconi's centre-right Forza Italia party, a historic ally of the League, pocketed 8.8 percent.

“Salvini may pull the plug if he feels confident enough in getting an outright majority by siding with Brothers of Italy and part of Forza Italia (without Berlusconi),” said Lorenzo Codogno, former chief economist at the Italian Treasury Department.

The centre-left Democratic Party (PD), which won just 18 percent at the general election, took 22.7 percent of the vote, clawing back some votes from M5S.

The Green party, which recorded significant gains in many other European countries, took just 2.29 percent.

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CLIMATE CRISIS

Why Italy is fighting EU plans to limit vehicle emissions

Italy's government is leading a revolt against an EU plan for a green car transition, vowing to protect the automotive industry in a country still strongly attached to the combustion engine - despite the impact of climate change.

Published: 25 May 2023 10:07 CEST
Why Italy is fighting EU plans to limit vehicle emissions

Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni’s hard-right coalition, which came into office last October, tried and failed to block EU plans to ban the sale of new cars running on fossil fuels by 2035, which her predecessor Mario Draghi had supported.

But this week the government took the fight to planned ‘Euro 7’ standards on pollutants, joining with seven other EU member states – including France and Poland – to demand Brussels scrap limits due to come into force in July 2025.

READ ALSO: Why electric cars aren’t more popular in Italy

“Italy is showing the way, our positions are more and more widely shared,” claimed Enterprise Minister Adolfo Urso, a fervent proponent of national industry in the face of what he has called an “ideological vision” of climate change.

The EU plan “is clearly wrong and not even useful from an environmental point of view”, added Transport Minister Matteo Salvini, leader of the far-right League party, which shares power with Meloni’s post-fascist Brothers of Italy.

Salvini led the failed charge against the ban on internal combustion engines, branding it “madness” that would “destroy thousands of jobs for Italian workers” while he claimed it would benefit China, a leader in producing electric vehicles.

Electric car being charged

Photo by Gabriel BOUYS / AFP

Federico Spadini from Greenpeace Italy lamented that “environmental and climate questions are always relegated to second place”, blaming a “strong industrial lobby in Italy” in the automobile and energy sectors.

“None of the governments in recent years have been up to the environmental challenge,” he told AFP.

“Unfortunately, Italy is not known in Europe as climate champion. And it’s clear that with Meloni’s government, the situation has deteriorated,” he said.

Low demand

Jobs are a big factor. In 2022, Italy had nearly 270,000 direct or indirect employees in the automotive sector, which accounted for 5.2 percent of GDP.

The European Association of Automotive Suppliers (CLEPA) has warned that switching to all electric cars could lead to more than 60,000 job losses in Italy by 2035 for automobile suppliers alone.

READ ALSO: Italians and their cars are inseparable – will this ever change?

“Since Fiat was absorbed by Stellantis in 2021, Italy no longer has a large automobile industry, but it remains big in terms of components, which are all orientated towards traditional engines,” noted Lorenzo Codogno, a former chief economist at the Italian Treasury.

For consumers too, the electric revolution has yet to arrive.

Italy has one of the highest car ownership rates in Europe: ranking fourth behind Liechtenstein, Iceland and Luxembourg with 670 passenger cars per 1,000 inhabitants, according to the latest Eurostat figures from 2020.

But sales of electric cars fell by 26.9 percent in 2022, to just 3.7 percent of the market, against 12.1 percent for the EU average.

Electric cars charge at a hub in central Milan on March 23, 2023. (Photo by GABRIEL BOUYS / AFP)

Subsidies to boost zero emissions vehicles fell flat, while Minister Urso has admitted that on infrastructure, “we are extremely behind”.

Italy has just 36,000 electric charging stations, compared to 90,000 for the Netherlands, a country the fraction of the size of Italy, he revealed.

READ ALSO: These are the most (and least) eco-friendly towns in Italy

“There is no enthusiasm for electric cars in Italy,” Felipe Munoz, an analyst with the automotive data company Jato Dynamics, told AFP.

“The offer is meagre, with just one model manufactured by national carmaker Fiat.”

In addition, “purchasing power is not very high, people cannot afford electric vehicles, which are expensive. So the demand is low, unlike in Nordic countries.”

Gerrit Marx, head of the Italian truck manufacturer Iveco, agrees.

“We risk turning into a big Cuba, with very old cars still driving around for years, because a part of the population will not be able to afford an electric model,” he said.

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