Italy’s political torture continues

It’s nice to get an election prediction right. Well, more or less right anyway.

The Movimento Cinque Stelle (M5S) – the drain-the-swamp-screw-everything protest movement founded by a comedian and run like a Scientology sect – has got many more votes in Sunday’s Italian general elections than opinion polls had suggested. According to exit polls conducted by Italy’s state broadcaster RAI, the M5S has got 31.5 per cent of the vote cast, which makes it, by a long way, the party with the most votes. Before Italy’s required opinion poll black-out two weeks before general election day the M5S remained consistently on 27 per cent. In my last post I predicted this – saying that it would get 33 per cent.

M5S would then be in a position – I said – to dump for good its pledge never to form coalitions with any political party on the grounds that political parties along with parliaments are precisely what is wrong with the political system. Well, we shall have to wait and see whether it tries to form a coalition – as I’ve been hearing it will do – with a small hard left party formed by breakaway members of Matteo Renzi’s Partito Democratico (PD) and other PD parliamentarians who will now abandon a discredited and badly defeated PD.

According to the exit polls, the PD which has been in power since the last general election in 2013 has only got 21 per cent of the vote (in the 2014 Euro elections it got 41 per cent). My other prediction was that the right-wing populist party the Lega, led by Matteo Salvini, would get more votes than its partner in the Coalition of the Right Silvio Berlusconi’s centre-right Forza Italia – again contradicting the opinion polls which...