Catalan Socialist Party leader Salvador Illa listens to his Basque counterpart, Eneko Andueza, making a speech, January 16 (Socialistas Vascos)
Catalonia’s Socialists missed an opportunity after the last election to split up the region’s left- and right-wing independence parties. The moderate Republican Left, which supports a Socialist government nationally, had tired of the hardliners in Together for Catalonia (Junts), but local Socialist Party leader Salvador Illa wouldn’t accept anything short of the presidency for himself.
“Why should I invest a person that I defeated at the polls?” he remarked of the Republican party leader, Pere Aragonès.
Illa won 50,000 more votes than the Republicans, but both parties got 33 out of 135 seats. Aragonès claimed the presidency too, but he had two paths to a majority, not one. Illa’s intransigence drove the Republicans into the arms of Junts.
But the coalition proved short-lived and Illa has recently set his ego aside. (more…)
Migrants are rescued by Red Cross in the Mediterranean Sea, August 18, 2016 (Italian Red Cross/Yara Nardi)
The Italian Senate has voted to raise penalties for human traffickers and narrow the eligibility criteria for asylum.
The reforms are part of Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni’s policy to bring down immigration. They have yet to be approved by the lower house, but her government has a majority there as well.
Meloni’s next step will be convincing other European leaders of migration reform. There is not much more Italy can do on its own to stop arrivals by sea, which quadrupled in the first three months of this year. (more…)
Skyline of Barcelona, Spain (Unsplash/Anastasiia Tarasova)
Spanish prime minister Pedro Sánchez has agreed to cap rent increases through 2025 and subsidize the construction of more low-rent housing in a deal with Basque and Catalan left-wing parties in Congress.
Sánchez hopes to get the reforms through Congress before the municipal elections in May, but his government does not yet have a majority and his Socialist Workers’ Party is down in the polls.
I’ll explain what the reforms are, why the government believes they are needed and whether they are likely to pass. (more…)
Italian prime minister Giorgia Meloni arrives to a meeting of European leaders in Brussels, December 15, 2022 (European Council)
Europe’s refusal to allow the sale of cultivated meat is bad enough, but Italy is taking it one step further. Its right-wing government on Tuesday decided to ban the production and sale of all “synthetic foods”.
No wonder food innovators are fleeing to America, Israel and Singapore. (more…)
Prime Minister Mark Rutte of the Netherlands is received by Giorgia Meloni of Italy in Rome, March 8 (Palazzo Chigi)
Giorgia Meloni may get her wish.
When the Italian conservative party leader, since elected prime minister, proposed to fund asylum centers in North Africa, she was called a xenophobe by the left in her own country and abroad.
Now it is part of a tentative EU agreement to manage asylum applications, which are approximating the records of 2015 and 2016.
European migration ministers have agreed that transit countries like Tunisia could be paid to shelter asylum seekers. The same countries would need to take back illegal migrants who crossed the Mediterranean Sea by boat.
Such boats regularly capsize, killing an estimated 1,200 migrants last year.
Ministers also discussed trade sanctions for countries that do little to stop irregular migration. (more…)
Elly Schlein, a member of the European Parliament for Italy, answers questions from reporters in Strasbourg, December 12, 2018 (European Parliament/Fred Marvaux)
When Italy’s Democratic Party lost the election in September, I told Newsweek they had made a mistake running on abortion, LGBT and immigration rights:
That helped the right more than it helped the left. Social justice resonates with university-educated Italians in big cities like Bologna and Florence. It doesn’t convince the garbage collector in Naples or the unemployed single mother in Palermo that the left has their interests at heart.
Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez speaks at a congress of the Spanish Socialist Workers’ Party in Huesca, October 1, 2019 (PSOE/Eva Ercolanese)
The constitutional crisis triggered by Spain’s highest court a week before New Year’s has ended with a whimper.
The Constitutional Court suspended a debate in parliament for the first time since the end of the dictatorship. Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez spoke of “an unprecedented situation in our democracy.”
At stake were reforms of the Constitutional Court itself. Sánchez’ left-wing coalition had proposed to lower the threshold needed to appoint justices from three-fifths to a simple majority in order to override a veto by the conservative People’s Party.
A majority in Congress, the Spanish lower house, approved the reforms. The People’s Party then asked the court to stop a debate in the Senate, arguing the changes were improperly introduced: as an amendment to penal reforms rather than a separate law. The six justices appointed by the People’s Party, including two whose terms had expired and who refused to recuse themselves, agreed this technicality warranted an historic breach of the separation of powers. The five appointed by Sánchez’ Socialist Workers’ Party sided with the government.
It was a new low in the politicization of the Spanish judiciary. After Sánchez became prime minister in 2018, a minority of conservative lawmakers blocked every judicial appointment they could. Their hope was to overturn the social democrat’s liberalizations, including the legalization of euthanasia and recognition of transgenders, and prevent the Constitutional Court from changing hands before the election in December.
Conservatives finally relented, and agreed to confirm three progressive judges, in order to avoid a permanent lowering of the required majority. That means Sánchez’ other reforms are probably safe. (more…)
Constitutional Court in Madrid, Spain at night (Europa Press)
Conservatives have plunged Spain into what Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez describes as “an unprecedented situation in our democracy” and Catalonia’s El Nacional calls “the biggest institutional challenge between powers in Spain since the attempted coup d’état of 1981.”
“You have silenced parliament,” Sánchez told opposition leader Alberto Núñez Feijóo on Wednesday, who convinced a majority of the Constitutional Court’s justices to block a Senate debate about reforms that would allow Sánchez to replace four of them.
The six justices in the majority were all appointed by Feijóo’s People’s Party. The five progressive justices sided with Sánchez, a social democrat.
According to Germany’s Die Zeit, it is the first time since the return of democracy to Spain that the Constitutional Court has intervened in the legislative process.
Opposition has blocked Sánchez’ nominees
Since Sánchez became prime minister in 2018, the right-wing opposition has vetoed all his judicial nominations, which require supermajorities in both chambers of parliament.
In an attempt to break the deadlock, Sánchez proposed to reduce the required majority for Constitutional Court appointments down from three-fifths.
The proposal passed the lower house with the support of left-wing and Basque and Catalan separatist parties.
The same coalition abolished the crimes for which Catalonia’s leading separatists were prosecuted when the People’s Party was last in power. Sánchez had already pardoned those found guilty of sedition and misuse of public funds by organizing an independence referendum in defiance of the Constitutional Court.
Feijóo on Wednesday accused Sánchez of “perfecting his obedience to the Catalan independence movement.”
Conservatives are alarmed
Catalan nationalism has become the primary motivator of the Spanish right. Whereas Sánchez hopes concessions to the Catalans will convince a majority to remain in Spain, conservatives smell treason and believe the only way to prevent Catalan secession is to crack down.
Conservatives are also alarmed by Sánchez’ expansion of abortion rights, legalization of euthanasia and recognition of transgenders. Some cling to the hope that the Constitutional Court might overturn those reforms.
Judges refuse to recuse
The right may be able to outsmart Sánchez for another year, when elections are due. Polls predict a People’s Party victory. To many Spanish voters, concessions to Catalans are worse than a judicial power grab.
That would require four justices — three conservatives, one progressive — to remain in office for another year. Their mandates expired in June.
The government had asked those justices whose mandates were affected by the reforms to recuse themselves from hearing Feijóo’s challenge but they refused, in effect extending their terms to vote against their replacement.
Bartender in Siena, Italy, August 5, 2020 (Unsplash/Gabriella Clare Marino)
Italy’s new right-wing government has backed away from a plan to let shops refuse card payments under €60.
The country’s previous government, led by former European Central Bank chief Mario Draghi, required companies to accept all card payments in an attempt to fight tax evasion. Businesses that refused were fined €30 per transaction plus 4 percent of the amount.
The policy was one of the EU’s conditions for releasing COVID-19 recovery funds, of which Italy is the largest recipient. (more…)
Spanish prime minister Pedro Sánchez chairs a meeting of Socialist Workers’ Party lawmakers in Madrid, June 1 (PSOE/Eva Ercolanese)
Spain’s ruling left-wing parties have abolished the crimes for which Catalonia’s independence leaders were imprisoned — and the right has gone berserk. Conservative deputies called the penal reforms an “assault on democracy”. The far right called Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez a “traitor”. (They do so frequently.)
When the reforms came to a vote in Congress, members of the conservative People’s Party (PP) sat on their hands. The center-right Citizens and far-right Vox (Voice) walked out in protest. So much for their commitment to democracy.
Indeed, it was the PP’s disinterest in Catalan democracy that culminated in the imprisonment of half the Catalan government and the suspension of Catalan home rule. Sánchez is doing little more than clean up the mess they made. (more…)
Outgoing Italian prime minister Mario Draghi poses for photos with his successor, Giorgia Meloni, in Rome, October 23 (Palazzo Chigi)
Giorgia Meloni has set out her program in an inaugural address to the Italian parliament.
The far-right party leader, who won the election a month ago to become Italy’s first woman prime minister, was sworn in by President Sergio Mattarella on Sunday. She leads a coalition of three right-wing parties.
She gave the top posts in her cabinet to centrists:
Finance: Giancarlo Giorgetti, a member of Matteo Salvini’s far-right League. Was minister of economic development under Mario Draghi.
Foreign Affairs: Antonio Tajani, the former president of the European Parliament and a member of former prime minister Silvio Berlusconi’s center-right Forza Italia.
Interior: Matteo Piantedosi, a former civil servant without party affiliation. Salvini had hoped to return to Interior, but was given Infrastructure. (Queue jokes about the far right making the trains run on time.)
Justice: Carlo Nordio, a 75 year-old former prosecutor who investigated corruption in Italy’s once-dominant Christian Democracy party in the 1990s. Belongs to Meloni’s own Brothers of Italy.
Meloni’s speech was also reassuring. In place of the fiery culture-war rhetoric of her campaign came sensible proposals for family policy and immigration, empty gestures on climate policy and the environment, and firm commitments to the Atlantic alliance, EU and Ukraine. (more…)
Catalan president Pere Aragonès speaks at a distribution center in Oliana, Spain, July 22 (Generalitat de Catalunya)
Members of Catalonia’s ruling center-right party have voted to quit the government. Both ruling parties — Together for Catalonia on the right and the Republicans on the left — want independence from Spain. They disagree about how to achieve it.
56 percent of Together’s 6,500 members voted to end the coalition. 79 percent took part in the vote, which was called after regional president, and Republican party leader, Pere Aragonès fired his Together deputy, Vice President Jordi Puigneró.
Neither man revealed the details of their dispute, but the Republicans and Together have been at odds for months. The former want to give talks with the Spanish government, which is also center-left, a chance. Together has lost what little faith they had in Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez. (more…)
Brothers of Italy party leader Giorgia Meloni makes a speech in Cagliari, September 2 (Fratelli d’Italia)
Giorgia Meloni’s call for a “naval blockade” of illegal immigration across the Mediterranean Sea has got plenty of attention, but the likely future prime minister of Italy has another, more humane idea: create European asylum application centers in North Africa, so migrants — many don’t qualify for asylum — don’t attempt a futile and perilous sea journey.
Italy receives an unusually high (for Europe) share of asylum seekers from safe African countries: Ivory Coast, Mali, Morocco, Nigeria, Senegal, Tunisia. Unless they fear persecution in their home country for their political beliefs, religion or sexuality, those asylum seekers are usually sent back.
That doesn’t mean they leave. Immigration authorities don’t have the manpower to escort every rejected asylum seeker back home. Some countries refuse to take their people back. A share — we don’t know how many — remain in Italy illegally. Others try for asylum in another European country.
Since illegal aliens cannot legally work, many end up either exploited or as criminals, and often homeless. (more…)
Italian Democratic Party leader Enrico Letta meets with other European socialists in Brussels, June 23 (PES)
The votes have been counted in 61,400 polling stations and they confirm what the exit poll told us on Sunday night: Italy has lurched to the right.
But not by much.
The four right-parties have 44 percent of the votes. That’s up from 37 percent in 2018, but closer to their historical average.
The right has become more right-wing. The Brothers of Italy, whose support went up from 4 to 26 percent, didn’t win many new voters; they cannibalized Matteo Salvini’s (formerly Northern) League, which has been reduced to a party of Po Valley homeowners and businessmen who despise the Italy south of the Arno River. Giorgia Meloni would lead Italy’s first right-wing government since Silvio Berlusconi stepped down in 2011, and the most right-wing government since the end of World War II.
The south, including Sardinia and Sicily, has about a third of the Italian population but not even one-fifth of its industrial base. It stuck with the Five Star Movement, the party of the left-behind Italy.
Ideologically and geographically, the social democrats are fighting a war on two fronts from their strongholds in Emilia-Romagna (the region around Bologna) and Tuscany (Florence). They did reasonably well in neighboring Liguria, Marche and Umbria, but there was a time when the left could count on working-class support from the south of the peninsula.
The defection of former party leader Matteo Renzi, and his union with the once-marginal liberals, which got 8 percent, also weakened the Democrats from within. (more…)
Right-wing parties won the election in Italy on Sunday.
Giorgia Meloni, the leader of the largest right-wing party, Brothers of Italy, would become the country’s first woman prime minister.
She would lead the first right-wing government since Silvio Berlusconi stepped down in 2011, and the most right-wing government since the end of World War II.
The elections were called when Prime Minister Mario Draghi lost the confidence of parliament in July. He did not run for reelection.
All 400 seats in the Chamber of Deputies and 200 elected seats in the Senate were contested.
Turnout, at 64 percent, was the lowest since Benito Mussolini rigged the election of 1924. (more…)
