No, Beppe Grillo isn't a cheap Italian restaurant chain

No, Beppe Grillo isn't a cheap Italian restaurant chain

by digby

There's a lot being written about the Italian election results yesterday, but the most interesting has to be the profiles of comic Beppe Grillo, whose party surprised everyone by taking 25% of the vote:

Once effectively banished from TV after sending up politicians, he has created a brand of politics all of his own, one that has propelled Five Star to third place in both houses of parliament.

Dissatisfaction with the traditional political class, both right and left, drives a party which has made the internet its medium of choice, and has sought out relative unknowns for its candidates.

At 64, the bushy-haired comic leading this new third force can still work a crowd in a piazza and inspires a wide following on social media, tickling the Italian funny bone with his jokes. He called former Prime Minister Mario Monti, for example, "Rigor Montis" for his deadly serious manner.

However, his ability to engage ultimately in the business of government in one of the eurozone's biggest economies is less clear.

Yeah, no kidding. But the election as a whole is a fascinating story and one that holds rather substantial ramifications for Europe according to Paul Krugman:

[T]he Italian election signals that the eurocrats, who never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity, are getting very close to the edge...

The fundamental fact is that a policy of austerity for all — incredibly harsh austerity in debtor nations, but some austerity in the European core too, and not a hint of expansionary policy anywhere — is a complete failure. None of the nations under Brussels/Berlin-imposed austerity has shown even a hint of economic recovery; unemployment is at society-destroying levels.

This failure came close to destroying the euro twice, in late 2011 and again last summer, as debtor nations threatened to enter a doom loop of plunging bond prices and failing banks. Each time Mario Draghi and the ECB stepped in to contain the damage, first by lending to the banks buying sovereign debt (LTRO) then by announcing a willingness to buy sovereign debt directly (OMT) ; but rather than taking the near-death experience as a warning, Europe’s austerians took the ECB-engineered calming of markets as a sign that austerity was working.

Well, the suffering voters of Europe just told them differently.

Krugman supposes that they were all so wrong because the VSPs assumed that the little people would just follow their cheerleading regardless of the conditions in their own lives.(I thought they'd been there and done that during the 1790s, but old habits die hard.) Krugman writes:

Wolfgang Münchau has a great lede in his column today, that gets at the essence:

There was a symbolic moment in the Italian elections when I knew that the game was up for Mario Monti, the defeated prime minister. It was when in the middle of the campaign – in the midst of an anti-establishment insurgence – he took off to Davos to be with his friends from international finance and politics. I know his visit to elite gathering in the Swiss mountains was not an issue in the campaign, but it signalled to me an almost comic lack of political realism.
What Europe’s VSPs fail to get is that the public perception of their right to lead depends on achieving at least some actual results. What they have actually delivered, however, is years of incredible pain accompanied by repeated promises that recovery is just around the corner — and then they wonder that many voters no longer trust their judgment, and turn to someone, anyone, who offers an alternative.

Let's just say that Europe has a bad track record in that regard. As the Shrill One archly observes, "there may be worse figures than Beppe Grillo lurking in Europe’s future."

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