Italy

Editorial

Articles: Israel and the politics of the last atrocity Italy: 96 and 76 Why poverty grows Download PDF

Italy: 1.2 million more absolute poor last year

In 2007 2.4 million Italians were living in a state of “absolute poverty”, a condition officially defined as "lacking the means to acquire the goods and services considered essential to a standard of living minimally necessary to subsist". Between 2007 and 2012 the figure doubled, underlining the collapse of the Italian economy, as the global financial crisis bit deeper. The latest report from Italy's national statistics office records further freefall last year. Meanwhile the country's new Prime Minister, Matteo Renzi blathers on about the imminent miracle round the corner when his still-to...

Grillo allies with UKIP

Italy’s Five Star movement, which announced its arrival on the political scene as the harbinger of a new, modern “non-ideological” Italy, cleansed of the filth and corruption of the “old”, has just joined forces with the right-wing populist UKIP in the European Parliament. After weeks of “democratic” debate, and a online referendum, it was announced last week that Five Start leader Beppe Grillo and UKIP’s Nigel Farage had managed to fish from the sewers of Europe’s political right the minimum of 48 representatives necessary to constitute a parliamentary group of Euro deputies. Among the new...

How Renzi triumphed

The Euro-election result in Italy was different from anywhere else in Europe. The governing party, the Democratic Party (product of a merger of most of what was left of the old Communist Party with sections of the old Christian Democrats), increased its support and got 41% of the vote. Beppe Grillo’s Five Star Movement got much less than it expected: 21%. The old right-wing ruling party, Silvio Berlusconi’s Forza Italia, was down to 17%. The hard-right Lega Nord was down to 6%, and the left-wing “Other Europe” slate got 4%. The victory of Matteo Renzi, leader of the Democratic Party and prime...

CGIL fails to reorient

The details of the latest scandal surrounding the contracts worth billions for the 2015 "Expo Exhibition" in Milan — revealing a network of many of the same individuals and forces at the heart of the "Bribesville" scandal that brought the first post-war Republic to ignominious collapse in 1994 — have underlined once again the squalid depths of corruption defining the Italy's economic and political system and state in its entirety. The news could only have rubbed salt in the wounds of the tens of millions left defenceless before the unending scorched-earth austerity. The political parties and...

Mussolini and Italian fascism

Unlike Hitler Mussolini had made compromises with the monarchy and the Church (in 1929 he gave the Vatican the status of an independent state and allowed the two million-strong Catholic Action to continue to function). Mussolini also had to manoeuvre between, balance, and play-off several competing cliques inside his own movement. Regional fascist organisations were organised through powerful local bosses often linked to organised crime. These structures and problems placed additional limits on his dictatorship which was authoritarian, but never totalitarian. Mussolini was a vicious thug –...

Mussolini and Italian fascism

“I am constantly amazed by man’s inhumanity to man.” Primo Levi “It is necessary, with bold spirit and in good conscience, to save civilisation. We must halt the dissolution which corrodes and corrupts to roots of human society. The bare and barren tree can be made green again. Are we not ready?” Antonio Gramsci A rapid and intensive development of modern, industrial capitalism took place north eastern Italy, especially in the area in and between Genoa, Milan and Turin, in the last two decades of the nineteenth century and the first two of the twentieth. The first electric power station in...

Italy: Renzi in power

The final paragraph of the manifesto of Matteo Renzi, read by him to a packed jubilant crowd of supporters in his native city of Florence, summed up the accuracy of the label pinned on the new Prime Minister as Italy's Tony Blair. "The left today is called upon to recognise and embrace the continuous flux of the new social dynamics, against those who vainly wish to appeal to and rely upon no longer existing social blocs. "In Italy, more than anywhere else, the political capacity to identify such dynamics that involve those at the bottom and the marginalised, and to create for them and everyone...

Tsipras to Europe? Italian left to...where?

On Friday 7 February, Syriza leader Alexis Tsipras spoke in Rome. In the little Teatro Valle, Rome’s oldest theatre, under occupation for the last two and a half years, he addressed a packed crowd in response to the invitation from a section of the Italian left to nominate him as presidential candidate in the forthcoming European elections. He has already accepted similar nominations from other sections of the left in Europe. On the basis of an article written in support by Toni Negri, an Italian intellectual once imprisoned for “political crimes”, right-wing Greek prime minister Antonis...

Racist Northern League open the floodgates of hate

On Tuesday 21 January the Italian Senate voted to abolish the law on illegal immigration introduced by the last Berlusconi government. The application of that law had only refined, even more cruelly, a system of racist measures put in place by the left-centre government of Romani Prodi nearly 20 years ago. In that period thousands of men, women, and children have perished in the seas around Sicily. Those who survived the shipwrecks of their overcrowded and frail crafts and the violent attempts to turn them back by Italy's marine forces were locked up, charged, and prepared for expulsion. All...

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