Saturday, March 10, 2018

5-Star Italy?

 After Italy's elections the 5-Star Movement triumphing in the underdeveloped south and the right predominating in the wealthy north. Five-Star won 76 out of 80 first-past-the-post seats in the lower house of parliament in Italy’s eight southern regions, winning almost 50 percent of the vote in Sicily and Campania. By contrast, it picked up just three out of 90 first-past-the-post seats across six northern regions, including the wealthy Lombardy and Veneto, where the far-right League shone at the head of a centre-right bloc.The split between the industrialised north and the deprived south has never been so stark.

“The south is moving beyond the point of governance,” said Lucio Caracciolo, co-founder of the MacroGeo think-tank and a member of the Italian Foreign Ministry’s Strategic Committee. “The disparity between the north and the south is so great that I think it will eventually provoke some sort of geopolitical crisis in Italy. You are already beginning to see the facts on the ground,” he told Reuters.

The Mezzogiorno as the south is called in Italian, has lagged the rest of the country for decades, but the recent financial crisis has exacerbated the problem. Its economy shrank 7.2 percent between 2001-2016, according to latest data. Unemployment in the south stands at almost 18 percent versus 6.6 percent in the north, with youth unemployment at 46.6 percent — more than double the level at the north of the country. Italy’s eight southern regions all rank lower than 155th among 202 EU regions in a 2017 European Commission survey on the quality of public services, with five rating worse than 190th for corruption, highlighting a woeful state of governance. The lack of hope and opportunity has led to an exodus, with a net 716,000 people emigrating from the Mezzogiorno, mostly to the north with some going abroad, in the past 15 years, more than 70 percent of them aged 15-34.
“Between now and 2065 it is estimated we will go from a population of 20 million to 15 million. That means 25 percent of Italians will live in 40 percent of its surface area,”  says industry group that advocates for southern Italy, Svimez chairman Adriano Giannola, told Reuters. “We will just be a place for the old and for tourists,” he said. 

With 4.7 million Italians living in absolute poverty, the 5-Star has promised to introduce a monthly minimum income of up to 780 euros ($960) for the poor — a godsend in a country which offers no basic welfare for the jobless. It convinced almost half of all Italy’s unemployed to vote for 5-Star, according to pollsters, with the party becoming the lodestone for the disaffected and disenfranchised.

Author Pino Aprile, who has written extensively about Italy’s southern woes and believes the north has received a disproportionately high amount of state funding for decades. “Now people are putting their faith in this new party in the hope that it will finally do something, but it might be too late,” he told Reuters. “The situation down here is tragic.”

The centre-right’s main economic proposal was a flat tax of 23 percent — an attractive idea in the productive north but of little interest in the south, where the average annual wage in 2016 was barely 16,000 euros ($20,000), a salary which already falls into the 23-percent tax band.

Southerners would view a flat tax as a generous gift for their rich co-nationals, while the universal wage would be seen in the north as unjustifiable generousity for the south.

“The flat tax in the south is a non starter, while a universal wage is culturally unacceptable for northerners. They would bristle at the idea of giving people money without working,” said Andrea Goldstein, head of the Nomisma think-tank.

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