Italian politics Archivi

Anti-Establishment: sometimes it means NO to reform. The Italian Referendum case

2ND UPDATE – DEC 05 – RENZI RESIGNS. FINAL RESULT: NO 59.11%, YES 40.89% To be honest, since the result was already in the bank, after the initial projections I serenely went to bed. Here we are, the morning after a result that is slightly better than I predicted (57-58% in my FB wild guess). Kudos to Renzi for resigning immediately: this is not typical of Italian politicians, who tended to find excuses to stay in charge even after a defeat. He kept his promise instead. Our future remains very uncertain, Italian politics is a mess, to put it mildly. We’ve got a PD (Democratic Party) that is still…

The Old Establishment Crank beat the Fresh Populist: does it matter?

A guy beat another guy in a Primary: big deal! Here’s a quick recap to understand some aspects of Italian politics; we can use what follows as a starting point, departing from there to get into more general stuff. In Italy the Partito Democratico (the most important party, founded in 2007) tried to mimic the US Democratic Party even in the choice of the name. It’s actually the inheritor, through a complicated series of transformations, of the defunct PCI (Italian Communist Party). Many things changed through the last 2 decades, but a strong sense of partisan commitment and a political apparatus that takes no prisoners are still a mainstay, a…