Nèdeem Elmahjoub's blog

" A pact between M5s and the PD carries all manner of dangers for Italy. Should a deal between them prove impossible, the country faces early elections and a likely huge mandate for Salvini. This would finalise the Lega’s capture of the conservative middle classes, while reducing Berlusconi’s old party, Forza Italia, to a mere rump entity after its quarter-century domination of the right. Victory would also propel the Lega’s march into the once hostile southern regions." Oh, those "middle classes", the engine of progress!    Why Italy is heading for crisis once more

Opportunist Populism: On Italy's Five Star Movement

" Trump and Berlusconi are both men who came to power from business rather than politics, and both have presented their inexperience with the political establishment as a mark of purity. They have both insisted on their entrepreneurial success as the most evident proof of their qualification to rule the country. Like Plato’s tyrant, they both exhibit an ethos based on a dream of continuous and unlimited jouissance and an aggressive and hubristic eros (though Berlusconi prefers to think of himself as an irresistible seducer rather than a rapist). They both indulge in gross misogynistic and racist jokes and have reshaped public language by legitimizing insult and political incorrectness as acceptable forms of political communication and by embodying an exhilarating return of the repressed. They both revel in kitschy aesthetics and don the orange hue of artificial tanning. And they both allied with the far right in order to advance a political project of authoritarian neoliberal