Italy’s populist coalition government has plunged itself into a crisis, even as it has enjoyed its status as one of the most popular governments in recent history. How can this paradox be explained? With apologies to Bill Clinton, “It’s not the economy, stupid!” This crisis is apparently all about politics – and the Roman Catholic Church has popularized the fractured coalition government’s interventionist economic policies.

For the second quarter of 2019, Italy’s economy once again had a zero-percent growth rate. The government praised the lowest unemployment rate since 2012 and perhaps the highest labor force participation rate since 1977, when Italy first began to record this statistic. But those data are grossly inflated:The unemployment rate is still at 9.7 percent, the third-highest in European Union. This year’s unemployment level is lower than last year’s mainly because fewer people are considered officially “unemployed”; however, many of them are very young (from 15 to 24 years old) and/or jobless who are not searching for a job any more.

The actual employment rate is increasing only for older workers (those older than 50). The largest number of new jobs are in government-run initiatives. Just last week, the government announced the recruitment of 53,000...

As Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin meet in Helsinki, the world seems concerned about the rise of Vladimir Putin. However, Putinism is on the rise in Italy – in fact, it is now in the political majority. More distressingly, Putinism enjoys growing support among faithful Roman Catholic adherents.

Both governmental parties, the League and the Five Star Movement, are directly or indirectly linked to the Kremlin. The League formally signed an agreement with United Russia, the party of President Vladimir Putin and Prime Minister Dmitri Medvedev, on November 28, 2016. (The full text, in Italian, may be found here.) The Five Star Movement has a long voting record on Russian issues reflecting the Kremlin’s views opposing EU sanctions and NATO. And prominent members of the Five Star Movement met with Putin’s party in 2016. Russian “eurasiatist” philosopher Aleksandr Dugin has a very close relationship with several Italian politicians, the League in particular. After the new government was installed, Dugin personally praised Matteo Salvini as the initiator of a “great populist revolution.”

The new Italian government is a very strange creature. It’s easy to define it as a “populist” government, but that is surely an oversimplification. It is formed by two very different political forces: the Lega (League) and the Five Star Movement, which were not allied during the 2018 general elections. As all pundits rightly forecasted, no coalition nor party won the majority. But no one forecasted two anomalies: the League trounced the party founded by former prime minister Silvio Berlusconi, Forza Italia (literally “Forward Italy”), becoming the largest political force on the center-Right for the first time since 1994. The second was the huge success of the Five Star Movement – a movement formed just six years ago – which became the kingmaker after winning more than 30 percent of the vote.

These unpredictable results provoked the quick collapse of the center-Right coalition and the formation of a new, unprecedented majority: the Five Star Movement and the League. But the coalition is not as natural as it has been portrayed outside Italy.

Who makes up the new coalition?

The League was founded in 1982 by former Communist sympathiser Umberto Bossi as the Lega Lombarda, a tiny autonomist party in...

November 7, 2017: Exactly 100 years after the Bolshevik Revolution, thousands of Communists marched in Moscow’s city centre under the infamous red banner, carrying portraits of Lenin and Stalin, celebrating “the most important event for humanity.” Among them are dozens of Italian militants, delegations of three little Communist parties: the new Communist Party led by Marco Rizzo, the Communist Refoundation Party led by Maurizio Acerbo, and as many as 80 delegates of the renewed Italian Communist Party led by Mauro Alboresi. Four days later, Rizzo led a public celebration in Rome, which started at the Coliseum. Many events in Italy, from North to South, marked this Revolutionary Jubilee. In Lecce conferences, exhibitions and shows organized by the ARCI (the post-Communist youth cultural organization) included important guests like former premier Massimo D’Alema. On the opposite side of Italy, in Varese, the local Communist cultural centre hosted “Varese Celebrates the October Revolution,” with poetry, art exhibitions and music.

Today, nearly a century after the founding of the Italian Communist Party (ICP) by Antonio Gramsci in 1921, few Italian Communists want to use that name. Their parties have little or no representation in local and national institutions. Nonetheless, Communism in Italy is the...