Maurizio Molinari: In Italy, mainstream parties have failed again to challenge populist nationalism

These elections reinforced Italy’s reputation as the big testing ground for nationalism and populism in Europe. The outright winner was Matteo Salvini’s League: less a political party than a vast coalition of different sections of the electorate, from businesspeople who want to cut taxes, to voters hostile to migrants, to fierce opponents of gay marriage. This coalition is held together by the identity politics of white Catholic ethnic nationalism. One sign of that was the crucifix Salvini clutched as his victory was declared. The 2018 elections, produced a League-Five Star governing coalition combining the anti-establishment politics of Beppe Grillo’s followers and the League’s hostility to migrants. After this election we know that nationalism is this coalition’s driving force. And now Salvini is set to pursue his party’s alliance with Marine Le Pen and Nigel Farage in the European parliament to change Europe from the inside.

The poll also demonstrated the sheer volatility of voters. The huge rise in votes for the League and the unexpected overtaking of the Five Star movement by the centre-left Democratic party all confirmed that in Italy, political affiliations are highly fluid.

But despite the fluctuations, the populist-nationalist proportion of the vote remained stable. The League and Five Star still command the support of over 50% of voters. In fact, if you throw in the far-right Brothers of Italy party, the nationalist vote has grown. The discontent that produced an anti-establishment surge has not gone away, and the traditional mainstream parties are still struggling to deal with it.

• Maurizio Molinari is director of La Stampa and author of Why It Happened Here – The origins of the Italian populism that has shaken Europe

Christophe Guilluy: The gilets jaunes, like the Brexiters, are here to stay: this will be a long culture war

First it was the left, now it’s the turn of the right to fade from the French political landscape. We have a new faultline: one that separates “progressives” from “populists”. This realignment is no accident, but the result of the political world catching up with real changes in society. The traditional left-right divide is giving way to one that reflects a fundamental class conflict that will define the west in the 21st century: the working classes whose livelihoods have been hollowed out by globalisation pitted against those socioeconomic groups who have benefited from it.

This shift we are witnessing in Europe is the consequence of workers at both ends of the economic spectrum cutting loose from their traditional political affiliations.

Both the far right Rassemblement National (RN, formerly the Front National), and Macron’s Republique En Marche (LREM) can now claim distinct electoral bases that are neither right nor left but a coherent reflection of sociological and geographic changes. As in the French presidential elections, the working classes, the people who inhabit “peripheral” France, the small towns, deindustrialised regions and rural areas, voted for “populists”, while globalisation’s “winners” and people living in the big French metropolitan areas backed “progressives”. If the far right managed to bring together groups that were previously politically opposed (workers, employees, self-employed, small farmers), Macron also achieved an unlikely alliance of hipsters and the traditional bourgeoisie.

This new faultline in French politics is a translation of the social and cultural polarisation that’s happening across Europe. In this context, there is no longer a place for traditional parties of right and left.

The cementing of these two electoral forces – populist and progressive – confirms that we are moving away from fragmentation and to what the Polish sociologist Zygmunt Bauman called “liquid modernity”. Instead, the stage is set for a new but enduring class conflict. We’re seeing the start of a long culture war, like it or not: the “gilets jaunes”, like the Brexiters, will be with us for at least the next 100 years.

• Christophe Guilluy is the author of Twilight of the Elites: Prosperity, Periphery and the Future of France

Alan Posener: As Germany goes Green, the nativist temptation may have peaked

Germany went Green. The Greens supplanted the Social Democrats (SPD) as the second biggest party after Angela Merkel’s Christian Democrats (CDU/CSU). Among under-30s, the Greens received more votes than the CDU-CSU and the SPD combined. Twenty years ago, the Greens were the party of the radical “68ers”. They’ve reinvented themselves as the party of the children and grandchildren of 1968. Their stylishly dishevelled leader Robert Habeck embodies what this generation would like Germany to be: a kind of environmentally conscious golden retriever.

The nationalist Alternative für Deutschland (AfD), widely tipped to lead a far-right surge, topped the polls in the eastern states of Brandenburg and Saxony. But take a closer look: the Greens won in Brandenburg’s capital Potsdam, as they did in Berlin and in Saxony’s largest city Leipzig, not to mention Hamburg, Frankfurt, Düsseldorf, Munich and Berlin. As elsewhere in Europe and the west, the main divide in Germany is between on the one hand, young, urban, educated and upwardly mobile “globalists” and on the other hand, older folk in sparsely populated and declining areas, who feel threatened by this brave new world.

This chasm has swallowed the SPD, squeezed between the Corbynite Left party and a CDU that Angela Merkel has taken leftwards to attract urban voters. And indeed, the CDU is the only party that can claim to bridge the gap between densely and less populated areas. A map showing the results in the 16 federal states shows the CDU and its Bavarian sister the CSU winning all but five (two for the AfD, three for the Greens) in spite of taking a drubbing.

Polling nationwide at just under 11%, the AfD may have peaked. Markus Söder, head of the CSU, which traditionally steers to the right of the CDU, said his party must become “cooler” in order to compete with the Greens. Good luck with that. But it shows which way Germany is heading. The nativist temptation is looking less tempting now.

• Alan Posener is a commentator for Die Welt and Welt am Sonntag