As Christoph von Marschall points out in the Berlin daily Der Tagesspiegel, the rise of the right is a function of the failure of the center-left. One might add the mainstream political parties more generally. Only 63 percent of the Italian population bothered to vote. Marschall notes that “the electoral successes of populists can promote democracy. They can prompt a course correction, whether it’s Sweden, France — or now Italy.”
Too optimistic? The other course is to thunder, as the EU grandees are doing, about the perils to democracy. Some are even vowing that Meloni simply cannot be at the head of an Italian government.
They should think again. The populists are not the source of the problems Europe confronts but a symptom. Britain is collapsing economically. Germany faces a recession and high inflation. So does France.
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