Italy’s populists gain major ground in election, but the fight is far from over

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In France and Germany, the populists put up a strong fight but their touted revolutions ultimately failed. Not so in Italy, where more than 50 per cent of the vote in Sunday's election went to populist parties, such as the Five Star Movement, that have been trying to crack the walls of the mainstream parties for years.

Italy has become the first European Union democracy with an anti-establishment majority in parliament.

The question is whether the soaring Italian populists, having sent established parties such as the ruling Democratic Party packing, can transform those votes into a durable government. The alternative is political deadlock that might upend the populist parties' claim that only they can fix Italy.

The two Italian parties that made the biggest gains at the ballot box were both rage-against-the-establishment populist forces.

The first was the Five Star Movement (M5S), launched by comedian Beppe Grillo in 2009 as an internet-based protest group with euroskeptic leanings. With most of the polls counted by late Monday, M5S won just over 32 per cent of the vote, up from 25 per cent in 2013. That was not enough to give it a majority, but sufficient to make it the single biggest force in both the upper and lower houses of parliament. M5S's candidate for prime minister, Luigi di Maio, a 31-year-old Neapolitan, advocates political transparency, a basic income for the poor and a vigorous anti-corruption drive.

The second was the League (formerly Northern League), a far-right, anti-immigrant and anti-euro party that went from 4 per cent of the vote in the 2013 election to almost 18 per cent. Based on its spectacular rise, League leader Matteo Salvini has nominated himself for the premiership and there is an outside chance he will get it, since the League is part of the conservative coalition, whose four members include former prime minister Silvio Berlusconi's Forza Italia (Go Italy), that took 37 per cent of the vote. Mr. Salvini wants to expel all illegal immigrants and take back the old lira currency, and advocates greater regional autonomy, especially for the wealthy north.

While some commentators have said the populist surge in Italy was inspired by the populist rise in northern Europe, where France's National Front and the Alternative for Germany came on strong (though not strong enough to form governments), Italy's populist surge seems almost entirely homegrown.

Francesco Galietti, chief executive of Policy Sonar, a Rome political risk consultancy, says the Italian populist movement has been around for a long time and picked up momentum in 2011, the crisis year when Mr. Berlusconi, a populist himself in the 1990s, was in effect ousted as prime minister (Mr. Berlusconi's Forza Italia party fared poorly in the election). "Populism was a way of expressing disgust with the mainstream parties," he said, and it has been building ever since.

Italy indeed seemed ripe ground for populism. The economy, alone among the large European countries, is still smaller than it was before the 2008 financial crisis. Growth has returned after almost a decade of recession and stagnation, but it's too weak to put a big dent in the jobless rate. Almost one-third of young Italians (15 to 24) are unemployed. Italians in general, especially young Italians, are fed up with a political establishment they believe has failed them. The migrant crisis accelerated the rise of the far-right populist parties, such as the League and the smaller Brothers of Italy, who advocate mass deportation of the 600,000 migrants who have arrived by boat from North Africa since 2014.

But the self-declared victors – M5S and the League – shouldn't count their winnings yet. The coalition talks to form a government will be long, acrimonious and perhaps an outright failure, triggering new elections. Germany serves as a warning. Chancellor Angela Merkel thought her coalition was all set to roll last fall, only to see it derail. Her replacement coalition finally came together on Sunday, six months after the election.

As the biggest party, it seems almost certain that M5S will play a role in any coalition. Mr. di Maio said on Monday that he would talk to all parties. Doing so might be a waste of time. An alliance with the League looks good from a numbers point of view, but the two parties have no love for one another. The League is vociferously anti-immigrant; M5S is only somewhat so. Many League members think southern Italy is a wasteland, whereas M5S is strong in the south.

The idea of putting M5S and the PD together has been floated, but it seems unlikely that Italy's leading anti-establishment party would get into bed with the establishment party it just crushed. On Monday, the PD's leader, former prime minister Matteo Renzi, stepped down and said the centre-left party would serve in opposition. A hybrid grand coalition, one that would see the four biggest populist and establishment parties – M5S, the League, PD and Forza Italia – come together under a technocrat prime minister, has also been floated. Piling friends and enemies into the same sandbox, however, seems a recipe for endless infighting.

What is certain is that whatever coalition emerges, Italy's fundamental fiscal and economic problems – from a crushing national debt load to grinding poverty in the south – are unlikely to get resolved any time soon. The economic policies of the M5S and the League have been criticized by economists as unaffordable and unworkable. If Europe's first populist government fails to halt Italy's relentless economic decline, the populists' reign at the top of the political heap could prove short-lived. They might soon find that sniping from the political sidelines was a lot easier than governing.