Italian Local Elections, 2013

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From May 25th to June 9th there will be 791 elections held across Italy for various local government seats. Among these 791 elections is the election for the mayor of Rome, the capital of Italy. These elections will likely provide important insight into the future of Italy.

The last local elections were held in 2012 and resulted in a victory for the left-wing Democratic Party. A general election was held in February 2013, which resulted in a narrow victory for the Democratic Party. However, no party received at least 50% of the vote, and as thus the Democratic Party had to form a coalition government with other parties.

These elections could show a public dissatisfaction with the coalition government headed by Enrico Letta. It could also show whether or not the dozens of political parties created in the last year will survive into the future or eventually merge with larger parties and die out. These elections could also point towards increased regionalism and separatism in Italy.

For those of you who are unaware, Italy is generally considered to be an artificial state. Italy was originally composed of dozens of independent nations. Many of these independent nations had their own cultures, languages and political structures. When Italy became a single unified state in the mid-19th century, many of these cultures and languages were suppressed along with their national identity. In recent years many Italians have begun to feel more attached to their historic nations, cultures and languages, rather than the central Italian state. Though these individuals appear to be in the minority at the moment, they have been growing in numbers and have made many political gains as of late.

What do you suspect will come of the elections? Will the Democratic Party retain it's control over most local governments? Will The People of Freedom make massive gains against the Democrats? Will the dozens of new political parties be able to maintain their fledgling bases of support? Will separatism and regionalism continue to grow? Who would you vote for if you were Italian?

 

Italy an artificial state? Well that's a first one. The Italian language became more or less the common language in every Italian state during the Renaissance and during that time Nicollo Machiavelli wrote "The Prince" in which he lamented the inability of Italian states to unite against the territorial expansions of France and the Habsburgs in Austria and Spain.

The cultural and economic disparities between the north and the south are real though and define quite a lot of the domestic politics of Italy. Local politics of Italy (or generally in anywhere else than Finland) is otherwise of little to no interest to me.

 

I thought someone had made a topic as a joke towards all your topics AD. I was wrong.

This seems to be in line with your other posts where the underlying theme constantly is staunch right wing, generally xenophobic, nationalistic policy. Poor rich northern Italy shouldn't have to pay for lazy, "African" southern Italy.

 

To be fair AD doesn't mention the north/south divide of Italy in his post so it's a bit premature to jump to conclusions. Frankly, I'd be surprised if he even knew about it.

Otherwise this topic is perfectly in line with the general ignorance and prejudice AD suffers towards Europe in general.

 

What else could you be talking about when you mention Italy as an artificial state and how it used to be many independent states?

An even clearer example of that is the UK where one "nation" brutally subjugated two (three) others and rule them to this day.

The point is that there is a red thread in all of AD's topics and it is coming from ignorant, right-wing American echo-chambers and the main message is: Evil centralized governments are taking away people's freedom, people come from X to leech and so forth and so on. I would welcome a discussion with a real right-winger, there is much to discuss but most don't discuss the real world, heck most don't even seem to live in the real world. They discuss the world as they want it to be to fit their arguments and that is kinda pointless.

 

There is that angle Tal and I have considered it. I guess it is just frustration that when we finally get new threads they, well, you can see my previous posts.

 

I'd just ban him. He's weird and doesn't contribute anything.

 

I must profess that I have even less knowledge about Italian politics than I do about how to defeat Kangaxx using a monk.

 

I don't mean to play internet police, but AD was banned from the only other community I'm remotely involved in (mmo-champion.com) last week because he sort of went into a downward spiral, ending with his last thread: "Would depopulating the Earth be such a bad thing?". I want to say this is more of a "don't take AD very seriously" post, but was reluctant to make it in the first place because: 1. I don't want to alienate him 2. AD takes himself and his ideology very seriously. 3. Our frontal lobes haven't completed development until the age of 25, I know he'll chill out with time, and see that the world isn't all left and right, black and white, freedom and tyranny.

While I'm talking about ideology, one of our most senior journalists over here, Jonathan Holmes (who hosts a show called media watch, that picks up errors, bias and oversights in all forms of media and puts it out there for the public to see every Monday night, which can make for entertaining or terrifying viewing depending on if you're the receiving end... which also gave rise to Media Watch's unofficial slogan, "everybody loves it, until they're on it") recently took two minutes to talk about ideology and I took the liberty of grabbing and uploading it. Hope this works...

 

He worries me a bit. He's genuinely the kind of person you can imagine going on some US style murder spree. The worst ones are those who think their actions are justified.

 

Why do we need to come up with new threads when these ones are so much fun?

It's like going to the fair. You sit at home and pay your bills and go to work and then you head out to play hook-a-duck and eat candy floss and rancid hot dogs!


Oooooh, you should so make 'Rancid Hot Dog of the Week' a new award!

 

Doesn't contribute anything? He's the reason for 90% of the discussion in the alleys lately.