The Right-Wing Steamroller: First Trump in the US, then Bolsonaro in Brazil, now Salvini in Italy..... No, wait! Salvini was Defeated!!

A Reflection on the Defeat of the Italian League in the Recent Regional Elections.

The right-wing League has been defeated in the regional elections of yesterday in the "Emilia-Romagna" in Italy. It was a key region, traditionally held by the left. The leader of the League, Matteo Salvini, had made an all-out effort to win there in the wake of the weakening of the traditional political parties, but he failed. It was not just a local event, it shows the weakness of a whole propaganda system and it opens up the question of how social media affect democracy. It is just the beginning of a long story that we'll see unraveling in the future. (BTW, note in the image the Catholic rosary held by Mr. Salvini, part of a hodgepodge of modern and ancient ideas he used for his electoral propaganda).

Matteo Salvini, the leader of the Italian League, had focused his electoral efforts on Emilia-Romagna, the Center-North region that was a traditional stronghold of the Italian left. In the wake of the crisis of the left-wing parties in Italy, it seemed possible, even easy, for the League to win there. That would have been a big blow for the central government and would probably have forced new national elections. Then, the League would have won hands-down.

It was as good as any battle plan. But the best plans of mice and men (and of Mr. Salvini) tend to gang agley. Mr. Salvini turned out to be an amateur in the role of the local Napoleon: he overstretched his forces and he was defeated. Now he is facing an uncertain retreat that he won't probably survive, politically.

Of course, the vagaries of local politics in Italy are only of modest interest for the rest of the world (and even for Italy). Yet, I think we all can learn something from the recent Italian elections. What we have seen was an unexpected failure of the recently developed propaganda techniques that brought right-wing parties to victory almost everywhere in the world.

In terms of electoral propaganda, Matteo Salvini had done everything "by the book" to prepare for the elections. His propaganda machine goes under the name of "La Bestia" (The Beast) and it has been operating for a few years in the way pioneered earlier on by Silvio Berlusconi and that brought Donald Trump to the presidency in the US.

The idea is to target the lowest cultural level of the population. Use scare tactics, find enemies of all sorts, demonize them, then promise safety in the hands of a right-wing government. As "ministro degli interni" (ministry of the interior) at the national level, Mr. Salvini had waged a feverish hate campaign against immigrants, communists, leftists, intellectuals, etc. Then, La Bestia used technologies of targeted propaganda on social media, the same pioneered earlier on by Cambridge Analytics. Again, all done in a very aggressive manner, targeting the most sensible fraction of social media users.

It didn't work. The resistance of the left was remarkable: it was the same surprise that Napoleon must have experienced when he found that he couldn't beat the Russians at Borodino. The left in Italy is commonly seen as a spent force but, evidently, it is not, not completely, at least. But, possibly, Mr. Salvini has undone himself by exaggerating with his electoral tactics. Too much screaming, too much hate, too many threats. Mr. Salvini surely has a certain capability of endearing himself with the least cultured fraction of the population but as a leader, well, you could say he looks more like a bus driver. He never had a job, never worked for a living, failed to obtain a university degree. People perceived that the leader of the League really had no plan other than taking power and then, probably, screaming even louder.

One specific mistake that Mr. Salvini may have done was to play down the climate-environmental problem. He did his best to avoid the subject and when he was forced to face it, he tended to slip away using jokes or sneers. He also failed to comment on the general tendency of his supporters to take an aggressive anti-science position, to say nothing about the barrage of insults they directed at Greta Thunberg. Also here, Salvini gave the impression of having no ideas and no plans. He didn't realize that it is no more possible for a politician to ignore climate change.

So, we saw the first defeat of a set of propaganda techniques that seemed to be invincible with Trump, Bolsonaro, and the others. At the same time, we saw the complete defeat and the disappearance of the "5-star" movement (M4S). The M5S was the result of another attempt to use the Internet in the political process. It was based on the use of a platform called "Russeau" that tried to create a shared decisional process -- in some respects. it was the opposite approach of "The Beast."  Like a giant Rube Goldberg machine, the M5S decisional system worked well until it ceased to work.

Surely, the Beast, the Russeau, and other electoral methods will evolve and change on the basis of the experience gained in this and other elections. But, if the Internet is generating a remarkable revolution on the methods used to win elections, it doesn't seem to help much in what is to be done afterward. This problem is what doomed the M5S and would probably doom the League, in case they were to take power in Italy. With all our powerful communication technologies and models, all politics is still based on 4-5 word slogans: "Make America (or Italy) Great Again." A fine idea, but how exactly?

Trump Takes Italy by Storm: the Rise of Matteo Salvini and of the Italian Right

Matteo Salvini, the leader of the Italian League and Minister of the Interior since June 2018. During the past few weeks, he has gained political prominence in Italy by adopting Trump's style and policies. Here, you see him together with the slogan "Italians First."

During the past few weeks, we have seen a true political revolution in Italy. Matteo Salvini, leader of the Italian League, has successfully exploited his new position of Minister of the Interior to gain personal prominence. The M5s movement had won the elections, this year, but it has been emarginated to a secondary role, while Salvini acts and looks like if he were the real Prime Minister. If new elections were held now in Italy, Salvini and the League would win hands down. 

All politics is, after all, about blame shifting. So, political success means simply finding someone to blame. Matteo Salvini was successful by adopting the same style and content that made the political fortune of Donald Trump. Both Trump and Salvini found a good target to blame with immigrants and foreigners in general. Both used harsh language, insults, callousness, and plain racism. Both found that the more shrill and violent their utterances were, the more they were approved by the public. It took a remarkably small effort to convince a large majority of Italians that all their troubles are caused by immigrants and, in particular, by the Roma people (less than the 0.2% of the Italian population). Salvini also capitalized on demonizing the Euro and the European Union, although he can't afford (so far) to exaggerate with insults and threats in that field. In any case, right now, it seems that 72% of Italians approve Salvini's actions. 
 
For everything that happens there is a reason and there has to be a reason for the outburst of hate and of racism in Italy. It has to do, probably, with the return of nation-states as protagonists in the world power game and with the ongoing disgregation of the American Empire. 

After the end of WW2, the European Union took the role of an agent of the American Empire to keep the European states under control. But the EU itself had to be kept under control, least it could become another empire that could have challenged the American supremacy. So, the EU wasn't allowed to develop an army, nor all the paraphernalia that would have turned it into a recognizable state, from an official language to a decent flag. It was an exercise in political acrobatics and it is remarkable that it worked reasonably well for more than half a century. 

But, today, the EU is weakened by the economic crisis and probably fatally wounded by the loss of Britain. All Empires tend to collapse in times of economic hardships, an even more likely outcome for a entity, the EU, which was a failed empire from the beginning. So, the old states are rising again - a trend that we see also outside Europe. Even in the US, Donald Trump is busy at turning the American Empire back into a nation-state. That changes many things, not necessarily for good.

Normally, empires are not racist and they don't engage in ethnical cleansing. They cannot afford that, since they are composed of heterogeneous entities which may need to be kept together by force. That makes Empires expensive: one of their characteristic is the large and costly military apparatus they are forced to maintain. Excessive military expenses is the most common cause of the collapse of empires. It happened to the Ancient Romans, just as it happened to the Soviet Union. And it is happening right now to the American Empire. It just can't survive for long without the influx of cheap energy and resources that created it.

Nation-states, instead, are relatively homogeneous entities in linguistic and ethnical terms, less likely to fragment in smaller pieces. What they need in terms of military force may be just a militia able to put down or exterminate ethnical or ideological minorities. That makes them less expensive and more resilient than empires. They can survive the economic hardships that shattered the most powerful empires in the world's history.

Nation-states often generate great enthusiasm among their citizens, but they are far from being benign entities. Their ethnical and linguistical homogeneity may be more a dream than reality and their survival may need to be propped up a poisonous mix of aggressive nationalism, hate, and racism directed against foreigners. It was one of the methods used in Italy by Mussolini's government in the 1920s and 30s, so it is not surprising that Mr. Salvini's government (formally known as Conte's government) is using the same methods today. As we know, hate and racism may not remain confined to insults.

And here we stand. The message that the current economic hardship is the result of resource depletion and of the negative effects of ecosystem disruption didn't pass, and maybe it never will. At this point, accusing Salvini or Trump of "populism" or of "racism" is not going to stop the trend. It is clear that their methods work wonderfully well. The skunk is out of the bag and we don't have to wait for long before other leaders will follow their example. A new round of ethnical cleansing in Western Europe, if not the start of a new European war, may be a plausible scenario for a non-remote future. 

But nothing is unavoidable. With enormous changes going on worldwide, with the ecosystem collapsing, with natural resources dwindling, with the human population still expanding, we may be rather facing a Seneca Collapse that will make short work of the European nation-states, just as the current crisis is destroying the American Empire. The future is never like the past and the only thing we are sure about it is that we cannot be sure of anything.