The first cut on this record has been cross-format focused for Airplay success.

The men beat on their drums. I'm going to be. I'm going to I'm going to

the

I'm going to

I'm

the Hello and welcome to politics theory other.

My name is Alex Doherty and this week I'll be speaking with David Broder about the political situation in Italy.

You can listen to the podcast on SoundCloud, iTunes and ACAST, and you can also

follow us on Facebook and Twitter. We're at poll theory other. In March, Europe experienced another

electoral upset, this time in Italy, where the populist five-star movement emerged as the largest

single party, and the ruling Democrats slumped to just 18.7% of the vote.

To discuss the ongoing coalition negotiations, the rise of the populist right and the prospects

for the Italian left, this week I'm joined by David Broder.

David is a historian of French and Italian communism and is currently writing a book on the

crisis of Italian democracy in the post-Cold

war era for Verso books.

To a lot of outsiders, Italian politics can seem quite bewildering.

There's so many parties, so many electoral coalitions, there's the fact that most of those

parties haven't existed in their current form for more than 20 years.

Could you explain what the balance of power before the election was and what the election

result has meant for the major parties?

Well, the previous government was led by the Democrat Party, which is the party of the

...