Nicholas Farrell

The people of the Eurozone’s third largest economy  - Italy -  yesterday evening became the first in western Europe to get what is popularly known as a 'populist' government. The imperial eurocracy will not – cannot – allow such a mortal threat to the EU from the patriotic people to survive – not in Italy. The markets are getting decidedly agitated. Game on. Giuseppe Conte, a 53-year-old law professor at the University of Florence, who has never been involved in politics let alone been elected to the Italian Parliament, is Italian Prime Minister. More than two months after inconclusive elections on 4th March, the Italian President Sergio Mattarella was compelled through gritted teeth to ask Prof.

It looks indeed as if Italy — the beating pulse of European civilisation — will be the first country in western Europe to fall to what’s popularly known as populism. Those who regard populism as an affirmation of democracy are pleased; those who regard it as a negation of democracy are appalled. The markets remain silent. For the moment. The alt-left Five Star is on the verge of forming a coalition government with the hard-right Lega in the EU’s fourth largest economy, which has been stuck in more or less permanent stagnation since the global banking crisis of 2008.

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.

I’ve been hearing disturbing but well-informed voices about the result of the election in Italy, the Eurozone’s third biggest economy, which if correct will cause the global liberal elite to go ape and try to section Italy. The result which such voices are predicting will have a similarly disturbing effect on global libertarian conservatives. As for the markets, they will go bananas. Here’s what these voices are saying. The anti-party Movimento Cinque Stelle (M5S) which is run like a Scientology sect and would if it got the chance replace Parliament with direct democracy on the internet will get many more votes than suggested in the last opinion polls before Italy’s poll black-out two weeks before election day.

 Ravenna Amid relentless propaganda about Italy being in the grip of fascism, Italians go to the polls on Sunday. It will be an attempt to produce their first elected prime minister since 2008, when Silvio Berlusconi won. Since his resignation in 2011, Italy has had four unelected leaders. Italy’s migrant crisis has dominated these elections, especially after the discovery of the chopped-up remains of an 18-year-old Italian girl in two suitcases by the side of a road in the picturesque hilltop city of Macerata in Le Marche. Three Nigerian migrants are in custody for the murder. And in revenge, a 28-year-old fascist lunatic drove around Macerata opening fire on black people at random, wounding six (none fatally). He then gave himself up to police.

The man who could become Italy’s next prime minister is sat just opposite the entrance to the huge US and Nato airbase near Catania in Sicily at a hotel confiscated from the Mafia. It’s not Silvio Berlusconi, no matter how much the British press tells us that ‘Berlusconi is Back!’ Silvio Il Magnifico (as I call him) cannot be prime minister because he is banned from public office after his four-year jail sentence for tax fraud in 2012 (commuted to a year’s community service in an old people’s home). No, the man I’m talking to is Matteo Salvini, leader of Lega, the leading party on the right (15 per cent, give or take, in the polls), just ahead of Berlusconi’s Forza Italia (14 per cent), whose support has collapsed since the good old days.

That the Tunisian terrorist who slaughtered 12 people in Berlin on Monday was even in Europe, let alone able to move about Europe with ease, is a scandal. It shows that the policy of the European Union and its member nations on the migrant crisis is a complete and dangerous failure. The collective refusal of the European liberal elite to face up to this fact promises further disaster. Anis Amri, 24, had no legal let alone moral right to be in Europe, and yet he had been here since 2011 when he arrived in a migrant boat on the tiny Italian island of Lampedusa. Shortly afterwards, he was jailed for four years after he set fire to a migrant welcome centre in Sicily. On his release in 2015, he was ordered by Italian authorities to return home.

Theresa May was not the only elephant in the room at Thursday’s European Union summit in Brussels, and EU leaders studiously ignored the other one as well. Paolo Gentiloni, Italy’s new Prime Minister – its fourth unelected one in a row since 2011 - must somehow save Monte Paschi di Siena, the world’s oldest bank, from collapse. If he fails to do so – and much will depend on EU help - then it will set off a chain reaction that could easily engulf the Eurozone. You might have thought, then, that EU leaders would have had something to say about the matter. But no. Italy’s third largest bank, founded in 1472 in the city that is nowadays de facto capital of the Tuscan province of Chiantishire - teeters on the edge of the abyss.

Though he is a big fan of the European Union, Barack Obama brings bad karma to it. So perhaps he should not have chosen Greece and Germany, the two countries which illustrate so poignantly why the euro is doomed, for his last foreign tour. His farewell visit is, if not a kiss of death, surely a bad omen for the EU and most immediately for one of those present in Berlin to bid him goodbye: Italy’s prime minister, Matteo Renzi, who has called an all--important referendum on constitutional reform for 4 December. If he loses, as looks ever more likely, it could cause a run on Italy’s sclerotic banks that could engulf the eurozone.