Losing Ground
Italy's xenophobic Five Star Movement has capitalized on the Left's weakness to emerge as the lone voice of anti-establishment voters.
Italy’s June 5 municipal vote represented the latest electoral challenge to Prime Minister Matteo Renzi and his social-liberal Democratic Party (PD). The results were marked by voters’ anger at establishment corruption, with the Five Star Movement (M5S) and the hard right rising at the expense of the PD as well as the conservative forces once led by Silvio Berlusconi’s Forza Italia (FI).
The vote also revealed the Italian left’s current weakness and presage trouble for Renzi’s proposed constitutional reforms, which face a national referendum this fall.
Conspiracy Theories
In the run-up to the Roman mayoral election, M5S senator Paola Taverna claimed that the PD and FI put up weak candidates to ensure that M5S would win. Their scheme, she says, was to make her party “economically dependent” on the national and regional governments run by the centrist PD, then cut off funding and “make us look bad.”
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