The Italian Implosion
ROME—In Italy’s national elections on Sunday, Marco Minniti, Italy’s interior minister, a long-time spy chief and a member of the center-left Democratic Party, was soundly defeated in his parliamentary race by a candidate without a party. The winner was a man who had been kicked out of the anti-establishment Five-Star Movement because he admitted he’d broken a party rule and not tithed part of his salary back to the movement. The majority of the other ministers in the current government, a grand coalition of center-left and center-right led by the Democratic Party, also lost in direct contests, although they’ll enter parliament through a proportional system.
The dust is settling on one of the most dramatic political shifts in the first party in Italy, with 33 percent of the vote. Most of the North went to the League, formerly the Northern League, which fears of out-of-control immigration and economic distress. That party is now the senior partner in a center-right bloc with Silvio Berlusconi’s Forza Italia party, which I wrote about . (The results produced a hung parliament, with no party getting enough votes to form a government on its own, and it will take weeks if not months for a government to emerge.)
