Populists poised: Italian politics

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Hello and welcome to the Intelligence on Economist Radio. I'm your host Shashank Joshi, filling in for Jason Palmer. Every weekday we provide a fresh perspective on the events shaping your world. On the campaign trail, Mexico's president promised to clip the army's wings. But since coming into office, amlo, as he's known, has made the military more powerful than at any time since the end of the country's military led government in the 1940s. And the pandemic may have killed 10 million people around the world. Yet at least in Britain, doctors are still struggling to find enough bodies to train medical students. We explain why not just anybody will do. But first, Italy's government pushed back its coronavirus curfew this week by an hour to 11pm In a country where Covid came early and spread widely, there's reason for optimism. Cases are down and the economic recovery is under the steady hand of Prime Minister Mario Draghi. The former European Central bank president took power in February. Since then, support for one of Draghi's opponents has worn away. Matteo Salvini, a former deputy prime minister, leads Italy's hard right. Northern League. Backing for his party is down to 22% of voters from a peak of 37. His usual anti immigration talking points don't seem to have much place in a pandemic. But a willing coalition of right wing populist partners could give a struggling Salvini a credible path back to the premiership. And that could threaten the implementation of the European Union's pandemic recovery plan.

Matteo Salvini is in a really tricky position. His party has been losing support now for quite a long time, ever since he tried and failed to take over the top job by ousting a previous government.

John Hooper is the Economist's Italy and Vatican correspondent.

He now has though a window of opportunity because of the rise in immigration, which has always been his big issue and the issue that really fueled the rise of the Northern League under his leadership to the point where it was able to enter government.

John Mario Draghi, Italy's Prime Minister, was chosen to lead the country to a post pandemic recovery. How does this look from his perspective? How's he been doing?

Well, it's probably too early to say, but so far so good. I think he has accelerated the vaccination campaign and crucially revised the spending plan that Italy has submitted to Brussels for how it intends to disperse the money that's going to be coming Italy's way. 200 billion euros as part of the EU's post pandemic recovery plan. So for the moment, things are looking good for his government, but there is squabbling. It's a broad coalition and it stretches from the radical left right across to the hard right personified by Mr. Salvini.

And what sort of threat does Mr. Salvini and indeed other right wing populists pose to Mr. Draghi in his agenda?

Well, Mr. Salvini has been harrying Mr. Draghi to endear himself to the populists in his own ranks. He's been demanding reopening of businesses, restaurants, bars, etc. Shops go much faster. So he's a bit of a thorn in the side of Mr. Draghi. But at the same time, the threat that he poses is more of a long term one to the recovery plan because he would have quite different ideas about how the money should be spent. And the big doubt over the Draghi government is how long it's going to last. The next election is due in 2023, but Mr. Draghi himself might well wish to go before then in order to contest the election early next year for the presidency of Italy. And in a case in which there is an election called, well, the right, generally, the hard right, that includes not only Mr. Salvini's party, but also that of Giorgio Meloni, the so called brothers of Italy. These two parties combined have 40% of the support in polls and could well be forming the next and have very different ideas to Mr. Draghi about how Italy should recover.

John, how does immigration fit into all of this? Mr. Salvini seems to be banking on immigration becoming the big issue for at least some Italian voters. Is that going to work?

I think that it is going to become more of an issue as the summer wears on, as the conditions for crossing the Mediterranean become easier and we must expect the number of landings goes up. But there's a big doubt about whether Italians care as much about this issue as they did before. The big ticket issues at the moment are the pandemic and the recovery, the economic recovery. To that extent, the whole issue of immigration has been pushed a bit into the background.

You mentioned the Brothers of Italy. Tell us a little bit more about the other parties on the right wing and the challenge to Mr. Salvini from that side of the spectrum.

This is the one that really counts. The Brothers of Italy has been making steady progress over recent months and its rise has matched almost exactly the fourth fall in the expressed support in polls for Mr. Salvini's party. Giorgio Meloni's party are the heirs to a tradition that goes back through the neo fascist movement, right back to the dictatorship of Benito Mussolini. They have some very right wing ideas and among them is how to deal with immigration. Ms. Meloni's idea would be a naval blockade in the Mediterranean mountain by Italy. The more that Giorgio Meloni drains support from Matteo Salvini, the more inclined he will be to try anything to restore his support. And that could become, in the longer term, a threat to the stability of Mr. Draghi's government.

And if you were advising other European leaders on how to blunt any populist resurgence, what sort of advice would you give them?

They would need above all to try to cut away at the roots of the whole immigration issue, see if more cannot be done to invest in the areas from which the migrants set off to make people more disposed to stay. But I think on the other hand, European leaders have got to be more frank with their electorates. They've got to tell them that in many cases, and Italy is an outstanding case, immigration is required. Italy has a rock bottom birth rate, it needs labor, and at the moment, the only way it's going to get that is by immigration.

John, thank you very much for joining us.

My pleasure.

Mexico had a succession of generals as leaders until the 1940s. Since then, the military has been under civilian control and has stayed out of politics south of the border.

It's election time in Mexico, with Miguel Aleman the odds on favorite in one of the most colorful presidential campaigns in the republic's history. Music, dancing and cartloads of confetti heralding the rise to power of Mexico's next president.

That tradition didn't seem under threat when Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, known as Amlo, became president in 2018. During his campaign, he promised to take soldiers off the streets and criticise the army for its human rights abusers. But since coming to office, he has only given the army more power, and now it holds more sway than at any time since the generals were in charge.

I mean, the army has always been involved in national development projects. And since the time the presidency of Felipe Calderon, they've also been very involved in public security, particular in fighting organized crime.

Sarah Burke is the economist, bureau chief for Mexico, Central America and the Caribbean, and she's based in Mexico City.

But under amlo, he's both expanded those roles but also given them new ones. So for example, it's now responsible for Billy building pretty much all his infrastructure projects. So there's a train called the Maya train which is going to run through the Yucatan Peninsula. There's a new international airport in Mexico City. And these things would usually, you'd think, be built by private contractors, but no, they're being built by the army, bank branches, I mean, you name it, there's all sorts of things. I mean, he's also given them more powers to fight organized crime. He's used them in terms of controlling migration. They guard fuel pipelines, they administer ports. I mean, that's the army and the navy, and they've even run hospitals and helped distribute Covid vaccines.

Why that change of heart then, Sarah? Why does he have such faith in the military?

Now that's a very good question and one which lots of people have different answers to. So most people say it's because he has a desire for quick results. You know, the army is at his command as commander in chief, as the president is. So, you know, he can say go and do this and they can go and do it immediately without having to have tendering or all the rest of it. The other thing is, you know, it's a sign of Mexico's failure to build institutions that are strong. So he has a lot of civilian bodies that are very weak and Amlo also distrusts them. And then the private sector, he's also spoken out against, you know, really railed against them as rich and greedy. He divides everything between, you know, the poor people who are good and the rich people who are bad. I mean, the other thing too is that Mexicans rate the armed forces more highly than any other state institution. I mean, they see them with some good reason as comparatively professional and comparatively free of corruption. I mean, that's not to say they are entirely free of those things or professional. It's all relative.

And so in that regard, it's not politically bad for him to align himself with a comparatively well loved national institution, is it?

I mean, politically, no. If this works, he can promise speedy action. The army has very high approval ratings like him. You know, at 63%, he has one of the highest approval ratings for A president anywhere. And, you know, there are elections, Mexico's biggest ever elections, coming up in June. And so he's keen for things to be done before then so that he gains in popularity. So, yeah, politically it is probably a savvy move.

But, Sarah, as defence editor, I see lots of armies around the world being pulled into politics and all the baleful consequences that can follow. Are there perils here for Mexico in similarly short circuiting all of those other civilian institutions of state?

I mean, clearly, I mean, this is the problem. You know, it might be good short term for popularity, but there's obviously a danger of giving power to the army, which, incidentally, it might not want. There's sort of mixed messages coming out. It's obviously a very secretive body about how happy members of the army are with all these jobs and responsibilities. But in any case, you know, there obviously is a big potential political consequence for Mexico. I mean, we have to remember that Mexico is a very young or relatively young democracy and Latin America has been plagued by military coups and interference in politics by the army. And Mexico so far has been a rare exception to that. You know, so I've spoken to a bunch of people and one of them is former Foreign Minister Jorge Castaneda, and he thinks there is a sort of danger in that once you involve the army in things, they start to get opinions and opinions lead to potential pressure or interference. I mean, the other problem is the greater militarization also has dangers in terms of human rights abuses. There are lots of examples of soldiers being involved in the killing of people or of the disappearance of people. You know, and with this unprecedented level of involvement in national affairs and extra cash for building things and doing all the rest of it, there's obviously a risk of corruption too. So, you know, there are big risks.

For Mexico, but those are risks that Amlo is happy to overlook because he's getting essentially what he needs.

Exactly. What you can say about this president is what he does for Mexico is not necessarily the best thing. He is very savvy as a politician, but there's no reason to think this is going to work out particularly well. It might not be a disaster, but there are obviously dangers. You know, military involvement in policing has not brought about a reduction in violence. Instead, what you've seen since the 2006, when they first became very involved, is that criminal groups have splintered, so you have many more groups. And it's a much more complicated sort of landscape now in Mexico. There's no reason either to think that the infrastructure done by the armed forces will be particularly brilliant. There has been been delays in the delivering of bank branches. I spoke to someone else who said, yeah, sure, they can build an airport, but it'd be an airport where you think this is not great. You walk in and it's a bit shabby. It's not necessarily going to do great things for Mexico. And obviously the dangers are extremely large.

So where do you see all of this heading, Sarah? Is this just going to lead to ever more militarisation of Mexico until its institutions crumble?

I think at the moment it's hard to tell. It's wait and see. You know, AMLO has until 2024. So it also depends what happens in the next part of his presidency and also whoever takes over next. But one thing you can say is once you give powers to a body, the army or otherwise, it's pretty difficult to take them away. And so it's hard to see that this is anything but, at least, even if it doesn't go any further, that the increased militarization of Mexico.

Sarah, thanks very much for joining us.

Thank you.

It's a ghoulish idea, but doctors need dead people, especially those in training who don't want to worry about the consequences of a slipped knife. But in a grisly twist, even though the pandemic has increased excess deaths across the world, in Britain it's also contributed to a shortage of cadavers.

Even before the pandemic struck, cadavers were definitely a precious resource.

Catherine Nixsey writes about Britain for the Economist.

We need in Britain every year about 1,300 cadavers, and we pretty much meet that need. But there's not much spare flesh in the system, as it were.

How has the pandemic impacted things?

Cadavers have been in enormously short supply because of all the uncertainty surrounding Covid. So diseases are one reason why your body can be rejected for medical science. And nobody knew really anything about this new coronavirus. They didn't know if it was going to be infectious after you died. If it was infectious, for how long, it would be infectious. So there was enormous uncertainty and quite reasonably erring on the side of caution, they paused. Donations.

You mentioned they were already a precious resource. Why was that?

People don't like generally to think about their own death, and when they do think about their own death, they tend to prefer not to think about what happens to their flesh afterwards. This was very much the case in the past. Christians believed that in the end times that they would be resurrected and to be resurrected you needed a body. So there was layers upon layers of things that made body donation difficult. In the early years of surgical schools in Britain, in Edinburgh in the 1820s, there were two very enterprising men who found out a way to solve this shortage of cadavers. And they did it by essentially murdering people. And it worked really well for about 16 murders. And then they got found out.

OK, that sounds grisly. Are there requirements now about bodies being used for medical science?

They have quite strict rules about what can and can't be used in an anatomy department. So certain diseases instantly mean that your body can't be used. If you have something like early onset dementia. And then there are certain physical characteristics that mean that you can't be used. If you are too tall, you can't be used because, as I understand it, you come off the ends of the tables. You also can't be too fat because anatomy tables have weight limits. And you also can't be too thin, because if you're too thin, then there isn't enough to dissect and it's not as useful for the students.

Beyond those physical constraints, what about the law or the rules? Can I choose to donate my body? Can someone else? How does that work?

Yes, so you can choose to donate your body. You can't unfortunately, choose in this country anymore to donate the body of an aunt you find annoying, who's just died and whose funeral costs you don't want to fork out for. You used to be able to do that. That's called second person consent. There's good reason for having second person consent, because if somebody dies and they'd said to their family all along, I want to give my to medical science, then the family, when they die, can say, this is what they wish for. But of course, there is always the fear that there's slightly unscrupulous relatives, or maybe just very impecunious relatives might take advantage of this.

So if patriotic British bodies are in short supply, do we have other sources of these?

Well, yes, luckily for us, we have America. So in America, second person consent is still allowed. And so the law varies a bit depending on which state. But in some states, you have not only second person consent, but you can also take unclaimed dead. So you can take the dead from prisons. And you also get a situation in America where people who are unable to afford the funeral for their own loved ones then choose to donate their body to medical science instead. So America has a thriving body broking industry.

Are there other ways to train the next generation of medical students in the absence of human bodies on the table, there are.

So in some countries they use live animals as well and they use pigs and goats and in some countries they even use dogs. If you use a live animal instead, then it will bleed like a human will bleed. And bleeding and stopping bleeding and controlling bleeding is obviously fairly important in surgery and not something you get either from a 3D model or from a cadaver. Although I can't imagine that getting anywhere in Britain because if dogs bleed, then so too do the hearts of pet loving Brits. And anyway, it wouldn't be that much help because pet ownership has increased so much in the pandemic that dogs, like cadavers, are now also in short supply in Britain.

Catherine, thank you.

Thank you very much for having me on.

That's all for this episode of the Intelligence. If you liked us, leave us a rating and a review and you can subscribe to the economist@examiner.com intelligenceoffer the link is in the show notes. See you back here tomorrow.