Italy Hit by Global Insurrection

Italy is the latest country to be hit with the fury of the global insurrection, whose recent targets include Muslim countries from Arab North Africa and Iran, largely agnostic European nations including France, Germany, Spain. and Holland, and of course that most revolutionary country, the Christian United States. The occasion for the Italian insurrection was a series of local elections all over the country, and the results were devastating for the incumbents.

As elsewhere, the insurrection was focused on the current leader — in this case, Silvio Berlusconi — took most expert observers by surprise, and was intriguingly leaderless (the winning mayoral candidates in Milan and Naples were virtual unknowns, and while both attracted support from the center-left Democratic Party, they owed it nothing and will likely govern with teams of young mavericks), leaving traditional opposition figures wondering what to do next. As in Egypt, we can expect the usual suspects — here, the center-left, and most importantly the heirs of the old Communist Party — to reorganize, penetrate the new insurrectionaries, and trot out their old dreams of an even bigger state with even more central control, but for the moment, it’s wide open. Meanwhile, Berlusconi has been battered in the most unexpected way — most of us “experts” thought he was unbeatable at the polls, as the public opinion surveys had documented until the eve of the vote — and his party, which is more a cult of personality than a modern political organization, is now looking for a successor for the first time in eighteen years.

In our words, the Italian Tea Party has had a great success.

To be sure, winning some local administrative elections does not a political revolution make, and Italy has some terrible problems. I am now in Naples, where the new mayor is putting together a city government largely made up of intellectuals, journalists, and lawyers, very few of whom have any experience managing anything (the new guy himself is a former prosecutor). We know how unhappily that sort of administration can turn out. For the moment he’s launching happy, politically correct promises: traffic-free zones in the middle of town, no more plastic cups, differentiated garbage collection, an invitation to Obama for Christmas vacation…none of which even begins to come to grips with the city’s massive corruption, lack of security even in good neighborhoods, and one of the world’s busiest and most lethal criminal organizations, the camorra.

Moreover, as elsewhere, the tumult came from a minority of voters, typically young ones. Here nearly seventy per cent of young voters said “hell no”  to the pro-Berlusconi candidate. On the other hand, nearly half of registered voters went to the beach or slept in, representing a landslide “hell no” to the entire political class.

If the new guys prove unable to cope — and I wouldn’t be at all surprised if they fail, since most of the time most of us fail, and these challenges would be daunting for Cardinal Wolsey at his best — the alienation of Italians will intensify, with results that are very hard to iimagine.

But that can be said about the global insurrection most everywhere. We are in the middle of a paradigm shift from a bipolar Cold War template to something we do not yet know, and there is still no major leader anywhere who shows signs of being able to master the tumult and guide us to the new paradigm.

He certainly isn’t anywhere in Washington…