NYT's Roger Cohen Calls for Central Banker Draghi to Run Italy

UPDATE: The animal wails emanating from The New York Times opinion page are hard to ignore. The cries and woe-is-me moans are all about Italy's general election results. David Brooks' "The Chaos After Trump" is a good example. His column concludes: "Vladimir Putin’s admirers are surging. The center is still hollowing out. Nothing is inevitable in life, but liberal democracy clearly ain’t going to automatically fix itself."

In all of this, as in The Times' unsigned editorial "Demagogues Win as Europe’s Populist Tide Sweeps Italy," there is this tone of exasperated victimization. The poor, poor elite who have been guzzling at the trough for decades are finally being abandoned by the voters. And make no mistake, the elitism is oozing out. Note the editorial's reference to M5S leader Di Maio's lack of a college degree:

The big winner, with about 32 percent of the vote, was the Five Star Movement, a grass-roots mélange of libertarians, progressives, Euroskeptics and other disenchanted voters formed less than a decade ago by a comedian, and now led by a 31-year-old college dropout, Luigi Di Maio. [Oh, my goodness!]

Or the very similar complaint by Brooks that Di Maio's never worked full-time

The big winner is the populist Five Star Movement, which was started by a comedian and is now led by a 31-year-old who had never held a full-time job. [Di Maio has been a member of the Italian Chamber of Deputies since 2013.]

It's all unhinged, panicked. Brooks at least calls out that the center is imploding. David Broder writing for Jacobin, "Notes on Italy’s Election," doesn't see M5S as a precursor to fascism, nor does he see it as in the same league as the UK's Momentum. Broder labels M5S as basically an uninspired technocratic, reformist movement. To which I would say,You could dismiss the entire progressive era of American political history on the same terms.

M5S parliamentarians have long abstained on controversial issues, from migration to gay rights, in order to maintain the movement’s “catch-all,” oppositional image. Entering government demands greater political definition. M5S promises to speak to “all political forces” — probably including the Lega — about the way ahead, but clearly risks being unbalanced should it ally with some more cohesive force. Yet while the party system is fluid, even a pact with the Lega will not automatically see voters turn back to the Left. If M5S could represent the forces of discontent, it could do this because what is still called the “center-left” has been hollowed out over decades.

The M5S is not an Italian Front National. It is not even a strongly Eurosceptic force, having abandoned this cause in the name of presenting a more “professional” and less “extreme” face. Nor does it offer some new democratic vision. Far from empowering citizens to mobilize for social change, its guru proposed a well-worn set of ideas based on removing “ideology” from the realm of state administration, in this drawing on the technocratic ideals of typewriter kingpin Adriano Olivetti. It repeats a hackneyed cry of making Italy a “normal country,” free of corruption and inefficiency, even though it has already abandoned its own anti-corruption charter.

Be that as it may, the M5S captured a wider discontent, and looks best placed to try and form a government. Its prime ministerial candidate Luigi Di Maio’s range of choices, plus the evident difficulties forming an opposite, grand coalition, mean that this could go on for several weeks. This will invariably feed a narrative of mounting “EU chaos” or “destabilization” coming from Rome. But least of all should we rely on the baleful tweets of Le Pen or Farage to tell us what is happening. Even if it does reach office, M5S is not about to bring down the EU (it already abandoned calls for a euro referendum) and nor is Fascism Returning in Its Historic Heartlands.

The rise of Lega and the M5S is grim news for anyone who believes in progressive politics, or who retains some memory of the Italian left’s past glories. In France, when Macron and Le Pen reached the second round, we could at least see that France Insoumise had laid down a marker. In the UK Labour has advanced, and even in the US the Sanders campaign provided a platform for left renewal. March 4 offered no such room for hope. But nor is panic about some alleged “rising fascism” going to offer it. As one old Marxist once put it: the old is dying, and something superficially different but not all that new has been born. May other things be born, and soon.

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To get a whiff of dirty diapers read Roger Cohen's infantile "Italy’s Five-Star Electoral Performance." At the end he wails for ECB's Mario Draghi to save the day. It is unbelievable --

Other possibilities, none of which look stable, include a center-right coalition that would need outside support to have enough seats to govern and would presumably see the odious Salvini as prime minister; a far-fetched coalition of the Five Star Movement and the Left; or a German-style grand coalition that, as in Germany, would see the defeated mainstream parties trying to govern and would thereby fuel rage against democracies that refuse to heed what voters say.

Putin is certainly happy. Trump is likely happy. The giants of European unity and freedom — Alcide De Gasperi of Italy, Konrad Adenauer of Germany, Robert Schuman of France — are turning in their graves. The almost three decades since the fall of the Berlin Wall have been a long strange trip to the politics of the mob.

The wise Mario Draghi completes his term as governor of the European Central Bank in October. He’s the best answer to Italy’s problems I can see. Rome has seen empires come and go; it can see out the seven months until then.

What so strange about the reporting in the organs of the corporate press is that there is hardly ever an explanation of why, as Jason Horowitz put it in "Italy’s Surging Populists Run Into a Political Muddle. But for How Long?," "[A]nti-Democratic forces [are] sweeping up furious voters across Europe." It is as if arbitrarily a xenophobic steroidal rage has descended upon the continent. At least that's the sense one gets from reading The New York Times.

The answers are obvious: 1) a plutocratic economic order where the benefits of increased productivity have been vacuumed up by the rich, leaving the working class with longer hours of work and higher housing costs, and 2) perpetual warfare abroad, which is a principal cause of Europe's immigration crisis, and terrorist attacks at home. Who in her right mind would endorse such political outcomes year in and year out for decades? You would have to be insane (like Roger Cohen).

The encouraging news found in Horowitz's article is the Five Star Movement wants to govern and wants to govern based on issues-based ad hoc coalitions. Let's hope Europe's Russophobia is blown down and that a large national economy enacts a guaranteed basic income:

It now falls to Italy’s president, Sergio Mattarella, the keeper of its institutions and now the nation’s most powerful person, to find someone who can put together a stable government that can survive a confidence vote in the new parliament, which meets on March 23.

It doesn’t look easy. Any solution that does not include the Five Star Movement or the League, the hard-right, formerly northern-based secessionist party, will raise questions of democratic legitimacy.

“Mattarella can’t keep the populists out,” Massimo Franco, a political columnist with il Corriere della Sera, said in an interview.

“If he keeps the Five Star out, they’ll say that they have twice the votes of the League,” he continued. “If he keeps the League out, they will say that their coalition has more than the Five Star. We have two relative winners, that’s one of the problems.”

Luigi Di Maio, the Five Star Movement’s candidate for prime minister, made it clear on Monday that his party wanted to run things.