By William K. Black
May 29, 2018 Bloomington, MN
Italy’s establishment has just revealed its truest beliefs and priorities. The context was the two parties that received the most votes in the last election forming a coalition government. The two parties seeking to form a coalition government won a majority of the seats in both houses of Italy’s parliament in the most recent election. The New York Times reported many of the key facts, but missed the key analytics.
Italy’s populists seethed and the European Union sighed with temporary relief on Sunday night after an anti-establishment alliance poised to govern the bloc’s fourth-largest economy imploded at the last minute amid concerns that it was planning to sneak out the back door of the eurozone.
Less than a week after Italy’s populist parties, the anti-establishment Five Star Movement and the anti-immigrant League, ironed out their policy differences and jubilantly received a mandate to form a government that they said would usher in a new era in Italian and European history, its designated prime minister announced on Sunday evening that he had failed to form a government.
Both paragraphs are lies. Bizarrely, the rest of the article demonstrates both lies. I do not support key aspects of either party’s platforms, so I am not writing as a disgruntled supporter. I start with the NYT’s second lie, for exposing it also exposes the first lie. Giuseppe Conte, the “designated prime minister,” did not “announce … that he had failed to form a government.” He announced an undisputed fact – a political rival, President Sergio Mattarella, refused to allow the two parties to form a coalition government because he objected to their selection of Paolo Savona as their economics minister.
