XPost: soc.culture.italian, alt.politics.immigration, alt.politics.obama
XPost: sac.politics
Good for them! Thank Barack Obama for creating the immigration
mess.
Amid relentless propaganda about Italy being in the grip of
fascism, Italians go to the polls on Sunday. It will be an
attempt to produce their first elected prime minister since
2008, when Silvio Berlusconi won. Since his resignation in 2011,
Italy has had four unelected leaders.
Italy’s migrant crisis has dominated these elections, especially
after the discovery of the chopped-up remains of an 18-year-old
Italian girl in two suitcases by the side of a road in the
picturesque hilltop city of Macerata in Le Marche. Three
Nigerian migrants are in custody for the murder. And in revenge,
a 28-year-old fascist lunatic drove around Macerata opening fire
on black people at random, wounding six (none fatally). He then
gave himself up to police.
What happened in Macerata transformed Italy’s migrant crisis,
already a big factor, into la questione numero uno of the
election campaign, despite massive efforts inside and outside
Italy to use it instead to talk only about fascists.
The Italian left and a largely supportive global media are doing
their best to brainwash Italians into thinking that a vote for
the right is a vote for fascism. But neither Italy’s right, nor
the Italians, are fascists. What they are is fed up with the
floods of illegal migrants coming into Italy, where they
represent what Berlusconi has described as a ‘social bomb about
to explode’.
Italians are angry at the failure of successive governments and
of the EU to stop NGOs and the navies of EU countries picking up
migrants just off the Libyan coast and ferrying them 280 miles
to Italy, where they claim asylum or disappear, and are
virtually never deported. This is despite the fact that, as the
UN admits, the overwhelming majority are not refugees but
economic migrants.
One way to understand the mood of Italians as they go to the
polls is to imagine Britain with 35 per cent youth unemployment
and an overall unemployment rate of roughly 15 per cent, mired
for a decade in more or less permanent economic recession,
throttled by the fourth highest public debt in the world as a
percentage of GDP (132 per cent)costing €70 billion a year to
service, unable — as a prisoner of the single currency — to do
anything meaningful to solve the problem, except austerity and
more job cuts.
Imagine if a fleet of NGO and EU vessels was ferrying into such
a bleak situation from as far away as Quimper on the French
Atlantic coast — let us say, as the distance is the same — more
than half a million migrants, who are nearly all men and
masquerading as refugees, to Southampton. Do we not think, in
those circumstances, immigration would be a major election issue
in Britain?
Before the Macerata murder, the coalition of the right was
already well ahead in the polls on around 37 per cent. The
coalition comprises Forza Italia (16 per cent), led by
Berlusconi, the populist Lega (14 per cent), led by Matteo
Salvini, plus the post-fascist Fratelli d’Italia (5 per cent)
and a small centrist party. The coalition’s support then went up
by 1-2 per cent, until Italy’s opinion poll blackout in the last
two weeks of election campaigns came into force.
The anti-party, anti-parliament Movimento Cinque Stelle (M5S),
which is run like a Scientology sect, was on 27 per cent and
remained on 27 per cent. The coalition of the left, which has
been in government since 2013 and failed to reboot the economy
or solve the migrant crisis, was polling 25 per cent. Its
leading party — the post–communist Partito Democratico — has
seen its support collapse from 40.8 per cent at the 2014 Euro
elections to 22 per cent.
To win a majority in parliament, a party or coalition must get
at least 40 per cent of the vote. Only the coalition of the
right looks to have any chance of doing so.
This, for a British newspaper like the Guardian, reeks of
fascism. The paper has been running hysterical headlines such as
‘Fascism is back in Italy’ and ‘Italy is being driven into the
arms of fascists’. The New York Times and the BBC have done
similar.
ITV news, as keen as anyone to be part of the dominant media
narrative, ran a story on Tuesday about ‘middle-class diners’
doing fascist salutes in a Milan restaurant. Well, I’ve got news
for ITV. Those who do the fascist salute have been doing it
since 1945 and are politically irrelevant. Inevitably, such
coverage can provide only the flimsiest of evidence to support
its claims. The truth is that fascist parties in Italy attract
minimal support. The most successful — CasaPound (named after
the American poet Ezra Pound) — is polling at around 2 per cent.
To win seats in parliament under Italy’s electoral law (a
labyrinthine mix of first-past-the-post and proportional
representation), a party needs to get at least 3 per cent of the
vote. Yes, Fratelli d’Italia is post–fascist and with 5 per cent
of the vote will win seats (in fact, it has them already), but
if it is fascist then Tony Blair’s a commie. Even Italy’s left-
wing Interior Minister, Marco Minniti, an ex-communist ergo
professional anti-fascist, admitted in the wake of the Macerata
shootings: ‘Fascism in Italy is dead for ever.’
There have been regular outbursts of violence during election
demonstrations in recent weeks. But virtually all of it has been
caused by ‘anti-fascist’ demonstrators trying to stop CasaPound
and the even more irrelevant Forza Nuova from holding meetings.
Yet the impression the liberal-left media has been disseminating
is the opposite: that it is the fascist right committing the
violence.
There is no fascist threat in Italy, except, ironically, from
the M5S, which wants to replace parliament with the internet.
It’s true that the fascist Macerata gunman stood as a Lega
candidate in last year’s local elections and got zero votes. But
that does not mean that the Lega itself is a party of fascists.
What the Lega proposes is to stop more migrants getting into
Italy from Libya, which is what the outgoing left-wing
government was belatedly forced to do anyway last summer with
considerable success. The Lega also promises to deport all those
among the 630,000 illegal immigrants estimated to be in Italy
who are not genuine refugees. That is more hardline but hardly
neo-Nazi.
If the coalition of the right achieves the 40 per cent threshold
and the Lega gets more votes than Forza Italia, then, under the
agreement that has been struck, Salvini will become prime
minister. But if Forza Italia gets more than the Lega,
Berlusconi will be the victor. Berlusconi, however, is banned
from public office after his 2013 conviction for tax fraud and
he has yet to name his prime minister.
So Italy could have its fifth unelected prime minister in a row.
A farce? Certainly. A fascist coup? No way!
https://www.spectator.co.uk/2018/03/italians-arent-fascists- theyre-angry-about-immigration/
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