You Guys Suck Too
General Gidayu prepares for death
Italy yesterday completed its first major electoral test since the Prodi government came into office a little more than a year ago. Ten million of the county’s citizens voted in a round of “administrative” elections to renew city councils and select mayors. How did that turn out? In a nutshell, the Left got stomped.
We can of course articulate that a little better. The Right cleaned up in the North and the Left “held on” in the South. You should know that this is interesting confirmation of a “long wave” trend that has been underway for some time here. Traditionally – and by that we mean since the end of World War II – much of the North, dominated by big industrial cities, has had a distinctly reddish tone politically, while the South ranged from conservative to downright reactionary: Catholic, Monarchist and Neo-Fascist by turns.
Though this is now history, the political classes are still trying to get a grip on it and are always astonished when the “wrong” candidates keep winning. What has happened, in the very broadest terms, is that both North and South – the eternal divide in Italian politics – have figured out who is footing the bill. In extreme synthesis, it has become clear that the Northerners are largely maintaining the Southerners, at least in terms of who is paying for government and services. The first are naturally pissed off by this and the second expect those rich bastards up there to keep doing their part and not try to wriggle out of “national unity.”
There is another important element in the outcome of these elections. This has to do with exactly who within the two main electoral blocks actually did the most winning, something that is both unusually clear and an obvious source of trouble. In a way, this aspect is derivable from the phenomena we described just above. In the North, the biggest gains were ascribable to the Lega Nord – see (here) – a party with its roots in tax rebellion and an institutional dislike of the South. Where the Left gained instead, to the degree that it did, was on its extremist fringe – real Communists who want to cut “the rich” down to size…
If you follow that “Lega Nord” link, you will see that we – immodestly – have been astonishingly clever in calling this one. Most of Italy presumed the Lega was completely dead after its part in the defeat of the Berlusconi government and a crushing setback in a constitutional referendum intended to introduce elements of federalism into the Italian system. Coalition dynamics will have to absorb the League’s positive results in some way, inevitably a source of Center-Right unhappiness.
The relative success of the “immoderate” Left is instead very bad news for a project we have already sniped at – (here) – the attempt to create a catch-all “Democratic Party” so that leftist politicians can all march to the same drummer, in contrast to the “every man for himself” outlook that presently prevails. At least this time around though, “homogenization” does not appear a paying strategy for actually getting your people into office. In nearly every case, the winners on the Left were candidates and lesser parties that have chosen to opt out of Mr. Prodi’s grand design.
It is probably wrong to characterize what has happened primarily as a defeat for the Left, though it is that. To some immeasurable degree, the Italians took this occasion to vote “against” rather than “for.” Popular patience with politicians of any stripe is running out and the Right has no real reason to celebrate. It governed very badly when it was in power and now the Left is doing at least as poorly. No-one is happy about that – except maybe opposition leaders who suppose that the broad distaste for the people currently in office means they will after all have another chance to pillage and to screw-up themselves. That is roughly the popular view of political life here.
Because Italian politicians are on the whole not even lucky, the other front page story today has to do with the Japanese Minister of Agriculture, Toshikatsu Matsuoka, who, having lost his honor in a financial scandal, has committed hara-kiri. “I am well aware of my responsibilities as a Minister. It is my duty to make certain similar things cannot happen again,” he wrote in a suicide note. Though Mr. Matsuoka hung himself rather than make use of the more spectacular seppuku ritual disembowelment reserved to the samurai, much coffee bar chatter today will draw invidious comparisons between his idea of duty and that of Italy’s leaders.
In the very attractive illustration above, General Akashi Gidayu prepares to commit seppuku after having lost a battle for his master in 1582. His death poem is visible in the upper right corner.