Even with all his failures to reinstate Russia through USA power, his ally Steve Bannon is hard at work in Europe to dismantle the WWII allies. But, alas, Italy was an axis power.
Well, now everyone knows the dirty little secret of the Trump White House and why the climate crisis is far from their shady agenda. Who else would ever finance such nonsense?
6 June 2018
By Gian Volpicelli
So Italy has a government. (click here) On Wednesday June 6, Giuseppe Conte, an obscure academic handpicked by a coalition between the far-right League party and the anti-establishment Five Star Movement to be prime minister, secured the Parliament’s backing. He already made clear that banging his fist in Brussels to relax the eurozone’s rigorous budget rules is high on his list of priorities. He also seems keen on getting cosy with Russia.
The European Union is not happy, Italian bonds are doing badly on the markets, and Trumpist impresario Steve Bannon – recently in Rome gallivanting on rooftops and having over the creme de la creme of the Nationalist International (click here), including leaders from the League and Five Star – is hailing Italy as the epicentre of the populist revolution he has been peddling all over Europe. Among all the drama and the coattail-riding, one thing about Italy’s new government has almost gone unnoticed. This is not a populist government; it is a techno-populist one.
The Conte cabinet is a chimeric organism. Within it, populist and extremist politicians cohabit with the very best of Italy’s technocratic elite. While both the League’s Matteo Salvini and Five Star’s Luigi Di Maio have been assigned ministerial posts to pursue their political hobby horses, the key levers of power are in technocratic hands: the Minister of Foreign Affairs is a former EU official; the Treasury is run by a university dean; Conte himself— a civil law professor whose face and voice had never been heard and seen by any Italian up until a couple of weeks ago— is a technocrat through and through is a technocrat through and through.
The whole thing seems odd: we instinctively tend to think of populism and technocracy as warring parties. Technocrats deal in numbers, graphs and allegedly science-backed solutions; populist parties deal in emotions, despise unelected bureaucrats, and champion the real people’s very real will. These guys should be at each other’s throat. Yet they are ruling together. How come?
Lorenzo Castellani, a political historian at Rome’s LUISS University, recently explored the subject in an essay that did the rounds both in Italy and France, titled The Age of Techno-Populism. His theory is that, far from being foes, technocracy and populism are increasingly becoming allies in a war against a common enemy: representative democracy and traditional politicians....
