Told ya! Anti-immigrant backlash pushes Italy sharply right

Bunga bunga! As Walt predicted in "Italian top court OKs Fascist salute as right-wing coalition heads for election victory" (WWW 24/2/18), Italian voters turned sharply to the right in yesterday's parliamentary election. Lifetime pct .991!

Latest results show the anti-establishment Five Star Movement as the biggest party. With strong support in the south of the country, they garnered 32.3% of the vote. But former Prime Minister Silvio Berluscone's coalition of centre-right and far-right parties is set to win most seats in the lower house of the Italian parliament.

Matteo Salvini, leader of the League (formerly the Northern League), declared that, with 17.6% of the vote, his party had the "right and duty" to govern at the head of a right-wing coalition. Mr Berlusconi's Forza Italia got 14%, and the far right Brothers of Italy received a smaller share.

Italy is now in for another coalition government, but this time it will be coalition of the centre right, not the centre left. But who will lead? The joker in the deck is the Five Star Movement, which did not join Mr Berlusconi's coalition in the election campaign. If they are going to be part of the coalition government, it would seem logical for their leader, Luigi Di Maio, to get a high position. But at only 31 years of age, the political neophyte is seen to lack the experience and gravitas for the role of prime minister.

Silvio Berlusconi cannot hold public office until next year because of a tax fraud conviction. Besides, he's 81 -- yesterday's man, no longer capable of bunga bunga! Walt predicts the next Prime Minister of Italy will be the League's Matteo Salvini, pictured above. (Lifetime pct .991.)

The Clinton News Network never says "the League". They always call the party "the xenophobic League". During the campaign, Mr Salvini spoke about the danger of Islam, and promised to deport hundreds of thousands of "refugees" and other migrants. And that's why Italians voted for his part and the other putative members of the new coalition. Italians are xenophobic. And they don't like foreigners very much, either. Who can blame them?!

Italian top court OKs Fascist salute as right-wing coalition heads for election victory

As Italy gets ready for its first general election in five years, the New York Times has its hair on fire over the growing popularity of "right-wing" political parties. You already know, don't you, what epithet they're hurling at groups like the Brothers of Italy. That's right. They're using the F-word -- Fascists! In "Anti-Fascist Protesters Rally in Italy as Mussolini’s Heirs Gain Ground" (24/2/48) one terrified scribe writes, "The re-emergence of extremist violence, harassment and xenophobia has gripped Italy and forced the country to reckon with the hard-right and fascist ideologies fueled by a lingering financial crisis and migration."

"Fueled by migration"... Imagine that! As if Italians would be different from the Austrians, Hungarians, Poles, Germans and other Europeans who reject the "suicide by diversity" of the Christian West espoused by such misguided "leaders" as Angela Merkel, who is, until next month at least, still the Chancellor Germany. Italians are just as fed up as the rest with having to welcome, feed, clothe and house the masses of mainly Muslim migrants being fished out of the Mediterranean every week.

Those are the same "refugees" who bite the hands that feed them, going on orgies of robbery, rape and general mayhem. It is only natural that there should be an awakening of the xenophobia which is part of human nature. And it is only natural that those feelings should find expression in what the Times calls "extremist violence, harassment and xenophobia".

As the elections approach, politically inspired violence has become an almost daily occurrence. Earlier this month, in the city of Macerata, a "fascist extremist" (the Times again) carrying a candle with an image of Mussolini opened fire on African migrants, wounding at least six people before he was arrested. Interior Minister Marco Minniti described the shootings as an "evident display of racial hatred."

Earlier this week, Italy's supreme Court of Cassation ruled that giving a Fascist salute is OK. Provided it's "commemorative" and non-violent, the straight-arm salute popularized by Mussolini is considered a free expression of thought, the court said, acquitting two Brothers of Italy (FdI) supporters who gave the salute in Milan in 2014. They had been charged under a law including such salutes as "complicity in Fascist demonstrations", which are prohibited by a postwar law banning the "apology of Fascism".

Forza Nuova, an Italian party which marches with that salute, has repeatedly clashed with the police and masked and violent antifa protesters. Members of CasaPound, a political party that proudly claims to admire Mussolini, recently invaded the emergency area of a hospital in Bolzano to protest against homeless "refugees" taking refuge there overnight.

As anti-immigrant backlash intensifies and the antifa-fomented violence worsens, the "progressives" are pointing the finger of blame at Matteo Salvini, the secretary of the League party, and Giorgia Meloni, the leader of the Brothers of Italy, the modern heirs of the party that rose from the ashes of Mussolini’s Fascists. For the coming elections, Mr Salvini and Ms Meloni have joined forces with former Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi. As of this writing, their coalition is leading in the polls. Stay tuned!