ITALY: ANOTHER HOLE TO THE EUROPEAN UNION
nota publicada en: https://prensaobrera.com/politicas/41544-
In the eve of the elections that took place in Italy, the expectation that the results will not run aground the European Union even more in another of the crises that come sinking it inexorably, rested on the possibility that from the polls would emerge a coalition government between the governmental Democratic Party (PD) and the Silvio Berlusconi’s opposition, Forza Italia. The PD was born from the association of the Communist Party and a liberal fraction of the Christian Democracy, in the ’90s. It was a phantasmagorical version of strategic design (Historical Commitment), with which Stalinism intended to reach the government through an understanding with the Vatican. More prosaically, it was an attempt to grant amnesty to clerical politicians of a heavy burden of corruption, after three uninterrupted decades of government, and to co-opt the workers’ bureaucracy to the bourgeois state. The troop that was left out of this rinse was acquired by the media magnate Silvio Berlusconi.
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The management of Italy, in the last thirty years, was in charge, alternatively, of one and another. The government that was just swept away on Sunday had become a specter of that rotation, because it was born out of an alliance between the PD and a fraction that broke with Forza Italia; it suffered several ulterior palace coups; it consecrated a ‘renovator’ prime minister, Mateo Renzi, without passing through elections, and finally fell when the ‘renovator’ tried to perpetuate himself through a referendum. The anointed ones to save Italy from a crisis that took them out of the European Union remained, however, in the third and fourth place, in a competition between four majoritarian forces - with 14 and 18 percent of the votes. The collapse of the PD was described as “catastrophic” by the European press. The first place was for the ‘euroskeptic’ 5 Stelle (35%) and the second for reactionary nationalism - the Lega (16%). As a result of this, Italy has joined the squad of countries that question, in one way or another, the continuity of the European Union, from the Brexit to the nationalist governments of Eastern Europe, and the nationalist right of France, Germany and Austria.
The spectacular ascent of 5 Stelle, an ‘anti-system party’ lacking of principles, expresses the enormous vote of repudiation of the Italian electorate towards the traditional forces, which no force of the left and the working class leads was able to capture. Potere al Popolo, a coalition led by Rifondazione Comunista (RC), was relegated to marginality. RC had emerged in response to the dissolution of the Communist Party. The failure is understandable: Rifondazione Comunista joined the PD government and executed its anti-worker policy. Potere al Popolo justifies the anti-labor, militarist and pro-Nato policy of the Greek government of Syriza, with which it integrates a bloc in the Euro-parliament. For Potere al Popolo, the righting of Syriza constitutes an obligatory “sacrifice” of its direction in order to maintain the left in the government. The illustrious tradition of Italy has suffered the havoc of its ‘anti-capitalist’ left. The leadership of the New Anticapitalist Party of France gave him his total and useless full support.
Bankruptcy scenario
Italy “é il malato de Europa” (“is the ill of Europe”), with zero growth in the last decade -which contrasts with almost 30% of Germany or 14% average of the European Union- which gives, anyway, less than 2% per year. Unemployment is 12% average - in youth it reaches 34%.
It has the highest public debt in Europe - two and a half trillion euros, which pays a higher interest rate than its competitors. It feeds the banks with annual payments of 350 billion euros, though a third of the creditors are foreigners. To save part of its banks from bankruptcy it has been forced to violate the new bankruptcy law of the European Union. The appeal to this emergency resource has put it in conflict with the intention of the European Commission to develop a “banking union” and, therefore, with one foot outside the European Central Bank. The ‘euroskeptics’ and nationalists who stood in front in the elections give account for this crisis with the proposal to call a referendum to exit the euro and, potentially, the European Union.
Xenophobia
As it happened in Great Britain, one of the most important electoral levers of the xenophobic parties, was to blame immigration for the social ruin of Italy. The pose, out of place in relation with the nature and cause of the crisis, forwards the prognostic that they will fail miserably if they reach the government. To attack immigration, the Italian democracy, long before the fascist, has imposed the right of air patrolling Syria and of interference in its internal and security politics, that is to re-establish a colonial and militarist policy. But it has been, precisely, the reconversion of Libya into colony of imperialist States, bombing and invasion through and destruction of its government and murder of its leaders, what has unleashed the so-called ‘migratory crisis’. Italy’s political crisis, as the Balkans, Eastern Europe and the Euro-Mediterranean area ones as well, spurs and graven the catastrophic political crisis of the whole Middle East –and in first place of Turkey, first scale of the flight of the peoples affected by the wars which imperialism manipulates.
In the middle of the crisis which the Brexit is going through and the commercial reprisals announced by Trump, observers fear that the electoral result unleash a capital flight and the consequent bank crisis. During the last few days it has seen a liquidity crisis in Europe (short term financing), which has provoked an important raise in the reference interest rate, the Libor, which has made more expensive the refinancing of companies with elevated debts. The economy and politics in Europe are tied with wires.
Political Turn
We assist to a political turn to the right in the middle of an enormous social crisis and of an exhaustion of the economical relations of Italy with the world market. The margin of exploitation of the anti-immigration chauvinism as detour channel of the masses’ pressure is ultra-limited. A right exit claims a political regime change, and that change of regime is conditioned to the capacity of offering a program on the whole. These requirements are not rejoined in Italy, dependant above all from Germany. Europe, as a whole, has entered a period of great crisis, which is where there are going to put to proof the forces in presence, and especially its powerful working class. In France and Germany are next to come and even announces strategic struggles (Macron wants to privatize the French railway system). What was left clear is that the “anti-capitalist populism” and the “wide” or “plural” parties are not clarification, organization neither struggle instruments.