Italy vs France vs Brexit

TALKING POLITICS

Catherine Carr

News, News & Politics

4.7 • 2.5K Ratings

🗓️ 21 March 2019

⏱️ 43 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

We take the wider European view this week, catching up with the latest developments in Italy and France. A year on from the Italian elections, who is up and who is down in the coalition between the League and Five Star? What is China up to in Italy? Has Macron really got his mojo back? Plus we ask the big question: between chaos at Westminster, riots in Paris and rabble-rousing in Rome, whose democracy is in the biggest trouble? With Lucia Rubinelli and Chris Bickerton.

Talking Points:

What’s going on in Italian politics?

In regional elections, the Five Star’s votes collapsed.
The PD, the centre-left party, now has a new leader, but at the time of the regional elections it was in transition and still beat Five Star.
The League has doubled its share of votes to 33-34%.
The new leader of the PD got elected on a platform that would bring the party further to the left. But the Renzi faction is still quite powerful.

What about France?

There is something taking place in France that the national conversations don’t seem to have addressed.
France has been through a lot of turmoil during the Macron presidency. Yet the polling is remarkably unchanged. It’s a very divided electorate, but it’s divided in basically the same ways as it was a few years ago.
The gilets jaunes protest is targeted at Macron and the emblems of the state.

Stepping back: In Italy, the anti-establishment parties are in power; in France, the centrist government is now facing radical street protests; and in Britain, you have Brexit. Which of these is the dominant crisis for this period in European politics?

Brexit is a peculiarly institutional crisis. It’s not that it isn’t important, but in France, there is a more self-evidently class-war element.
The Italian case is substantially different than both: it’s not an institutional crisis, at least for now. And unlike France, there isn’t opposition to what the government is doing—in fact, there’s a lot of support.
In Italy, the main divide isn’t education or age, but region: it’s North vs. South.

Mentioned in this Episode:

Further Learning:

And as ever, recommended reading curated by our friends at the LRB can be found here: lrb.co.uk/talking

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello my name is David Ronsman and this is Talking Politics. Today we're going to be talking about political strife in Italy, in France, and in the UK.
0:17.0	Who's in the most trouble and who is best placed to get out of it?
0:23.0	Talking politics is brought to you in partnership with the London Review of Books.
0:29.0	As politics speeds up, slow down with the subscription to the LRB where Brexit and Trump are only part of a picture that includes, well, everything else.
0:40.0	Read relevant pieces and subscribe at a special rate at lrb.co.uk forward slash talking.
0:53.0	I'm joined by Chris Bicqueton who is among other things an expert on both Italian and French politics.
1:00.0	And it's a pleasure to have back Lucia Rubinelli an expert on European political thought but also on the politics of her native Italy.
1:08.0	So Lucia we're about a year on from the elections that eventually resulted in the League 5 Star government.
1:16.0	And it's been this kind of amazing experiment in a new kind of politics because they are together in this government.
1:23.0	The 5 Star when it started with a more popular party in polling and voting terms.
1:28.0	The League are, I mean, they're not conventional, right? But they are a recognizable type of anti-immigrant for one to a better word, populist party.
1:38.0	Not exactly right wing but because some of the issues cut across left and right.
1:42.0	But we know the type, I think, in European politics. And then 5 Star doesn't really have a type much harder to pin down.
1:50.0	And what we have seen, I think you can tell me from wrong here, over the year is the League's stock has gone up.
1:57.0	And 5 Star are really in trouble. And in recent elections they've been close to being wiped out.
2:03.0	And the balance has really shifted.
2:06.0	I mean, we talked about this a bit before but it's, if anything, it's accelerated.
2:10.0	Yeah, so since the last time we spoke, three things happened.
2:14.0	The first one is, well, the first two are two regional elections. One in Abruzzo, which is a very small region in Central Italy and one in Serdini, the island.
2:22.0	In both regions, the 5 Star did relatively well at the national elections but they did very, very, very badly in regional elections.
2:31.0	Exactly, collapse. So they were the third party after the center-right coalition because that's also interesting.
2:37.0	The League run with Berlusconi. So after them and after the PD, which was proclaimed to be that, right?
	...

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