This is the Kator Daily podcast for Wednesday, March 7th, 2018.

I'm Caleb Brown.

New elections in Italy have boosted anti-liberal populists,

but this election probably wasn't going to have a happy

ending for Friends of Liberty.

According to Alberto McGarty, adjunct scholar at the Cato Institute, he discusses the political

geography of Italy now and what populism means for Europe at large.

What should Italian free marketeers, people who cherish liberty and view the liberty as the highest political

value, was there any outcome in this Italian election that they would have liked any possible outcome?

Well, Caleb, there was no possible great outcome for the free market or for people that cherish

liberty, the open society and so on and so forth.

And this was one of the problems with this election.

Anti-establishment parties have won. They have won big time. This parties on the right

tended to campaign basically against immigration. That was the thing. On the left they campaigned for bigger government, for

subsidies to everybody in the form of a basic income, very generous one. But this anti-establishment parties were not opposed by somebody

who embraced rhetoric pro-globalization,

free market, pro-Europe, they were opposed by people

who were basically promising the same thing a bit water down and that was clearly the case with

Mr Rensi he embraced the leader of the left-wing Democratic Party I mean the moderate in the left. They embraced a version of the

anti-establishment rhetoric just, you know, with softer tones with nice vocabulary with a little bit of a flavor of the great

man of the world and this was not a winning strategy.

So in a way, this is a very bad outcome for anybody believing in liberty,

...