Italy now has the most right-wing government in Europe...

@deadgerbil why have the people voted in such a stupid way ?

@deadgerbil I heard someone say she was appointed. That can't be strictly true, though, I would think.

@deadgerbil Same thing as Trump 2016; low turnout (many people like "AlL SiDeS aRe JuSt As BaD1!!111! 😭😭 I WON'T VOTE THIS TIME, THAT'LL SHOW 'EM!", FdI supporters instead were of course hellbent into voting and in queue at 6am lmao, and now 25% of the voting population chose the winning party). Now, I'm sure Meloni is not even sleeping at night because these people didn't feel represented enough to be bothered to spend 10 minutes of their Sunday time to walk to the polling station and draw a cross on a ballot paper, just like I'm sure Republicans over there can't even sleep well at night because of these [i]far-center[/i] abstentionist lmao. We also had a super-coalition with essentially FdI being the only significant opposition party, and in Italy opposition parties gain traction only to deflate as soon as they govern (as you can see comparing League and Five Stars numbers with the numbers they got in 2018; FdI will go through the same process, most likely, especially considering the energy crisis and probable recession they'll soon have to face).

[quote]Her allies have both had close ties with Russia. Mr Berlusconi, 85, claimed last week that Vladimir Putin was pushed into invading Ukraine while Mr Salvini has called into question Western sanctions on Moscow.[/quote]
Berlusconi (also historically) always come up with controversial lines like that. He's the "there's no such thing as good advertisement or bad advertisement, only advertisement" kind of guy; he's been into power for over 20+ years often reaching the end of the term in a system where everyone else barely survives maybe one year, rest assured these aren't "blunders" but most likely calculated moves. and imo, he was trying (looking at the result and comparing it to the pre-election polls, perhaps successfully) to steal votes from Salvini's base. In practice, his party has never shown ambiguities when it comes to sanctioning Russia, as far as I know. Salvini is the guy who went around with Putin shirts, said that sanctions are hitting us worse than Russia, investigated for illicit funding from Russia - and he flopped hard, his party is seeking to replace him with a new figure and they're not even too quiet about it anymore. Meloni as far as I know is clean in that regards (she's in her current form - because she's been in politics for quite a bit - a [i]child [/i]of Bannon, not of Putin - assuming the two things are different ofc) - it's not foreign politics what concerns me too much about FdI (see e.g. [u]https://reddit.com/r/europe/comments/xpjgej/meloni_said_some_good_things_about_europe_and/[/u]), it's literally all the rest 😅

@deadgerbil Italy and Italians in general are much less enthusiastic about siding with Ukraine than most western European countries are. Italy has, of course, a strong post-war communist tradition.

@MartinII There's no communism here. Italy's overton window isn't really different than America's, after 20+ years of Berlusconi the word "leftist" (let alone "communist") is almost perceived as an insult.

Many won't care about helping Ukraine essentially for two reasons:

1) secondhand Russian propaganda, disseminated by some parties that coincidentally happened to receive money from Moscow and we're pretty big in term of % until the past election cycle

2) general egoism and feeling distant from the conflict ("why do I have to side with Ukraine and by doing so ending up paying more for energy / lose my job / shutdown my business?"). Ignoring completely that, no matter the Italian alignment, the price of gas here wouldn't improve in any way – wait until these people figure out that gas pipes necessarily have to pass through other countries..