Italy is holding its general elections on 24 and 25 February 2013 after several years of economic hardship and high debt. The main coalitions running are as follows:
-A centre-right coalition including Silvio Berluscuoni’s Forza Italia and the autonomist Lega Nord
-A centre-left coalition called Italy: Common Good which includes the social democratic Democratic Party.
-A centrist coalition supporting the current prime minister Mario Monti, calling itself With Monti For Italy including the Civic Choice and the Union of the Centre
-The populist Five Star Movement
-The leftist Civil Revolution
Nope. She just doesn’t speak English very well. But that was some time ago. Maybe she picked up more than an STD during her short marriage to Jeff Koons.
Going by Wiki, seems the best choice, if it can gather centrists (by Euro standards) and Communists under one tent. That’s a Popular Front, that is! Would we could have some such thing here! No, the Dems don’t cut it.
A Democrat is well-suited to diddle
In the sense that he’s straight-up-the-middle
But, 'tween left and right hand
He can ne’er . . . make a stand
At the end, can just sit there and twiddle! :o
The results are in, and things aren’t looking good in my opinion for Italy and Italians. Unbelievably the discredited and demagoging coalition led by Berluscuoni managed to get within a percentage point of the moderate centre-left Democrats (quite similar to our American Democratic Party actually) and their electoral allies while the Five Star Movement is the single-largest party and in third place in terms of a coalition easily beating out Monti’s centrist alliance.
This isn’t a problem so much in regards to the lower house since the largest coalition is guaranteed a majority but in the Senate it appears that centrists will certainly lack a majority.
Good for the Italians. Those centrists are a bunch of heartless, elitist empty-suits, who accomplish nothing for the regular man and get by solely on the strength of their connections and their fealty to the conventional wisdom, which is that the proles have to suffer to appease the market and summon forth the confidence fairies. God forbid they make the market unhappy.
Fascinating pieces of articles on The Guardian site. They’ve been essentially liveblogging the day’s crises as they unfold.
The problem for ordinary Italians is that no matter how stupid and corrupt the elites are, not having a working government makes everything worse and the hysterical reaction of the markets makes the worse stuff worser. Wishing unhappiness on the markets is a classic case of cutting off your nose to spite your face.
But pleasing the market doesn’t provide the average Italian (or European, for that matter) any real benefit, nor has it done anything to tackle their country’s debt problem, which was supposed to be the entire point of all this. Their debt problems have gotten worse because austerity stagnates the economy.
The strategy doesn’t work, so why elect the parties that insist on an ineffective strategy?
