Italy is in desperate need of a saviour, by Nicholas Farrell. This is what you don’t hear in the mainstream media. The ABC News for instance described the Italian referendum as just about constitutional reform.
Matteo Renzi lost his constitutional reform referendum – and his job – for a simple reason: too many Italians from across the political spectrum opposed the Florentine and what he represented. What he stood for is easy to see from the names of those who gave him their wholehearted support: Jean-Claude Juncker, Angela Merkel, Mario Draghi, François Hollande, the Financial Times, and, of course, outgoing American President Barack Obama, who made him guest of honour at his last White House state dinner in October and described him as ‘bold’, ‘progressive’ and ‘promising’. …
The anti-establishment movement in Italy is a strange beast:
Beppe Grillo — the comedian and demagogue, who has been convicted of manslaughter — and who preaches direct democracy and whose slogan is ‘Vaffa!’ (‘Fuck Off!’) to most things, including the euro, is the name now on everyone’s lips.
Like Benito Mussolini before him, this sci-fi fascist who also reminds me of a scientologist version of Billy Connolly, insists that his party – the Five Star Movement – is a movement and not a party, because parties are corrupt and impotent. And just like the Duce, Beppe used to be a left-wing firebrand who founded an alternative revolutionary movement which was also able to attract right-wing support. …
The Communist far left and the Fascist far right voted against Renzi. So did the ex-Communist old guard within his own party. So, too, did Italy’s third most popular party – media tycoon Silvio Berlusconi’s Forza Italia – and its fourth most popular (and rising) party – the Lega Nord – defined by the Guardian and the rest of the horrified Western liberal élite as ‘xenophobic’, not because, like the French Front National, it believes in the big state – for how could they possibly oppose that? – but because it wants to stop illegal immigration. So far this year, 171,000 migrants have been ferried into Italy across the Mediterranean from Libya by the navies of most of Europe – which beats by a whisker the previous record in 2014.
hat-tip Stephen Neil
