Tag Archives: crocetta

After Irish vote, what next for same-sex marriage in Europe?

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There’s no doubt that the landmark vote in Ireland on May 22, the first such referendum where a popular majority enacted same-sex marriage, has been received as a huge step forward for marriage equality and LGBT rights in Europe.Ireland IconEuropean_Union

While the United States supreme court is set to rule later in June on marriage equality as a legal and constitutional matter within all 50 states, it may feel like a watershed moment in Europe as well, where French president François Hollande and the center-left Parti socialiste (PS, Socialist Party) and British prime minister David Cameron and the Conservative Party both swung behind legislative efforts to enact same-sex marriage, in 2013 and 2014, respectively.

Luxembourg’s prime minister Xavier Bettel officially married his own partner in May, but it was only six years ago that Iceland’s Jóhanna Sigurdardóttir became the world’s first openly LGBT head of government, followed shortly by Belgian prime minister Elio Di Rupo.

Yet the lopsided Irish referendum victory — it passed with 62.07% of the vote and the ‘Yes’ camp won all but one constituency (Roscommon-South Leitrim) — obscures the fact that additional marriage equality gains across the European Union will be slow to materialize. Leave aside the notion, now reinforced by Ireland, that the human rights of a minority can be legitimately subjected to referendum — a precedent that Europeans may come to regret. Amid the recent burst of marriage equality in Europe, the immediate future seems grim.

Nowhere is that more true than just next door in Northern Ireland, which is the only part of the United Kingdom that doesn’t permit same-sex marriage. With the Protestant, federalist electorate dominated by the socially conservative Democratic Unionist Party (DUP), one of western Europe’s most harshly anti-LGBT political parties, there’s little hope that Northern Ireland will follow in the footsteps of England, Scotland and Wales. At the end of April, Northern Irish health minister Jim Wells was forced to resign after suggesting same-sex couples were inferior parents. It’s home to the late Ian Paisley’s ‘Save Ulster from Sodomy’ campaign in the late 1970s, and it’s where sexual relations between two consenting same-sex partners were illegal until 1981, when the European Court of Human Rights ruled that Northern Irish law violated the European Convention on Human Rights.

But Northern Ireland is not alone in its reticence — marriage equality faces long hurdles in some of the European Union’s most important countries, including Germany, Italy and Poland.

The irony is that despite Europe’s leading role two decades ago on LGBT marriage rights, the United States could eclipse Europe with the supreme court’s ruling in Obergefell v. Hodges, as the European Union struggles for years to enact consistent marriage equality legislation. Continue reading After Irish vote, what next for same-sex marriage in Europe?

Exit Vendola, stage left, as Puglia’s regional president

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Nichi Vendola, the openly gay, openly socialist president of Puglia, the southeastern Italian region, was once the new face of the Italian left — and was regarded as a potential prime minister by fawning profiles in the global media in 2010 and 2011.pugliaItaly Flag Icon

That praise came with good reason.

Vendola (pictured above), in the waning days of former prime minister Silvio Berlusconi’s domination of Italian politics, was the anti-Berlusconi. In a conservative region like Puglia, where Catholicism is still a strong force, Puglia became an unlikely leader.

This week, however, Vendola announced that while he would always be a militante of the left, he will step aside as the leader of his democratic socialist party, Sinistra Ecologia Libertà (SEL, Left Ecology Freedom), when he leaves office in Puglia later this year. Italy will hold regional elections in seven regions, including Puglia, on May 31. In recent days, Vendola has spoken about marrying his longtime partner, speculating about fatherhood.

There’s one major reason, among many, that Vendola is headed for retirement instead of to Rome.

It’s the ascendance of Italian prime minister Matteo Renzi, the former Florence mayor who won the leadership of the center-right Partito Democratico (PD, Democratic Party) in November 2013 and who wrested the premiership in February 2014 from his technocratic PD colleague Enrico Letta. In one sense, Renzi’s rise has been great news for the Italian left. Renzi’s youthful image and reform-minded approach to government has positioned the Democratic Party as the most dominant centrist force since the fall of the old Christian Democratic Party in the early 1990s.

While that’s been wonderful for moderates, plenty of die-hard leftists are not thrilled with Renzi, especially among the labor unions that have traditionally controlled the political left. For Vendola, an avowed communist, Renzi’s dominance will almost certainly close the door to any further ambitions for Vendola. Despite his widespread popularity in Puglia, where he won two consecutive elections, Vendola failed to win much more than 3% of the vote nationally in the 2013 general election. Though SEL is still polling between 3% and 5% in national polls, it’s difficult to see much of a future for the party without Vendola, whose star quality and charisma propelled it as a wary electoral partner for the Democratic Party, even if Vendola has increasingly distanced himself from Renzi over the past two years. With Vendola’s retirement and with the 2008 collapse of the successor to Italy’s Communist Party, Partito della Rifondazione Comunista (PRC, Communist Refoundation Party), it will be difficult to find any bona-fide communists in the homeland of Gramsci. Continue reading Exit Vendola, stage left, as Puglia’s regional president

What will Italy’s election mean for LGBT rights?

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Last weekend, Nichi Vendola, the openly gay regional president of Puglia, pluckily posted to Twitter a photo of himself campaigning alongside Pier Luigi Bersani, the leader of the center-left Partito Democratico (PD, Democratic Party), captioned ‘coppia di fatto‘ (‘de facto couple’).

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Vendola, the leader of the more stridently leftist Sinistra Ecologia Libertà (SEL, Left Ecology Freedom), is part of the broad centrosinistra (center-left) coalition that hopes to elect Bersani as Italy’s next prime minister this weekend, and the pun subtly reinforced the role that gay rights has played in Italy’s election campaign.

The subtlety speaks a lot to how the issue of gay rights and same-sex marriage has hummed along the surface of a campaign that’s been almost entirely fought over economic policy — he state of Italy’s finances, economic reforms, budget austerity and the encroaching control of Brussels and Berlin on Italian governance.  Nonetheless, the gay rights issue is probably the most important social issue as the election approaches.

Given that Rome, Italy’s capital, is also home to the Vatican, gay rights is also one of the most polarizing issues of Italian public life.

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Vendola (pictured above) is perhaps the most vigorous advocate of gay rights and same-sex marriage in Italy, but the progress elsewhere in Europe has also underscored Italy’s lack of progress on gay rights.

With parliaments in two of Europe’s four most-populous countries — the United Kingdom and France — passing legislation that allows for same-sex marriage in the past month, there’s some pressure on Italy to follow suit.  Italy also lacks any anti-discrimination laws or hate crime laws designed to prevent crimes with a particularly anti-gay bias.  Although southern Europe isn’t traditionally as socially liberal as northern Europe, both Spain and Portugal have promulgated full same-same marriage rights — Spain did so eight years ago.

Continue reading What will Italy’s election mean for LGBT rights?

Crocetta to become Sicily’s first openly-gay, first leftist president

I wasn’t entirely sure he could pull it off, but the unlikely Rosario Crocetta will become Sicily’s first openly-gay regional president and likely the first leftist to have won a clear mandate in one of Italy’s most culturally and politically conservative regions.sicily flag

According to preliminary results, the center-left coalition backing Crocetta has won 30.48% and 39 seats in Sicily’s 90-member regional parliament, giving it a plurality of seats, but something short of an absolute majority.

Crocetta’s victory in Sicily makes the former Gela mayor Italy’s second openly gay regional president — he joins leftist Nichi Vendola, the president of Puglia (also in southern Italy).  This is a bit of a shocker given Sicily’s incredibly conservative bent, and the region has been consistently governed by center-right politicians and centrists alike, but never by a former Communist Party member.

Through the early 2000s, Crocetta was a member of the Partito della Rifondazione Comunista (Communist Refoundation Party).  Although many PRC members joined moderate social democrats and centrists to form what’s now Italy’s largest center-left political party, the Partito Democratico (PD, Democratic Party), in 2007, Crocetta certainly comes from the more radical leftist tradition.  Interestingly enough, so does Vendola, who was elected as Puglia’s regional president in 2005 from the PRC and subsequently reelected.  Vendola, who has future national political hopes, and who seems likely to play a  role in Italy’s upcoming national elections in early 2013, has formed his own leftist party — Sinistra Ecologia Libertà (SEL, Left Ecology Freedom).

Not only is Crocetta’s victory a watershed moment for Italy’s left, it’s a victory for Sicily’s courageous anti-mafia forces.  In a region where politics and organized crime are often two sides of the same coin, Crocetta was an anti-mafia crusader as the former mayor of Gela, Sicily’s sixth-largest city, working to convince local businesses not to pay protection money to the Sicilian mafia.  In fact, he was such a stridently anti-mafia mayor that he’s been the subject of several assassination plots and has been living outside of Gela since 2009.

Meanwhile, the center-right coalition led by European Parliament member Nello Musumeci has won just 25.73% and 21 seats.

The surprisingly strong third-place winner was the new anti-austerity protest party, the Movimento 5 Stelle (M5S, Five Star Movement), led nationally by the comedian and blogger Beppe Grillo — who swam across the Strait of Messina from the Italian peninsula to Sicily to kick off the party’s regional campaign.  Giancarlo Cancelleri, the presidential candidate backed by the Five Star Movement, won 18.18% and the party won 15 seats.

A center-right ‘Sicilianist’ coalition, essentially the coalition to which outgoing president Rafaelle Lombardo belongs, under the candidacy of Gianfranco Micciché won just 15.50% and 15 seats.  Lombardo resigned in July in the wake of charges of corruption and complicity with the Sicilian mafia, forcing early elections.

Although the Sicilian autonomist and center-right parties have governed together before, they won’t together command a majority of seats in Sicily’s regional parliament, meaning that the center-left will govern with a minority, likely with the outside support of Five Star Movement legislators, or even from the Sicilianist autonomists.  Continue reading Crocetta to become Sicily’s first openly-gay, first leftist president

Today’s Sicilian elections showcase potential party strength before 2013 Italian election

Today, one of Italy’s most iconic regions — Sicily — goes to the polls to elect the 90 members of its regional legislature and, indirectly, a new regional president.

For all the beauty of its landscape, the majesty of its architecture and the divinity of its food and wine, Sicily, the home of the well known Cosa Nostra, the Sicilian organized crime group that has become synonymous with the word mafia, is not the world’s model showcase for good governance.

Sunday’s elections come six month early after the resignation on July 31 of regional president Raffaele Lombardo, who was elected overwhelmingly in 2008, but stepped down under a cloud of corruption — depressingly familiar charges of complicity with the Sicilian mafia.  The election also comes as a bit of a dress rehearsal for Italy’s expected upcoming general election (along with early elections expected soon in Lombardy as well) — just a couple days after former prime minister Silvio Berlusconi’s conviction in a Milan court for tax fraud.

Rosario Crocetta (pictured above, top), the leading leftist candidate for president and the mafia-fighting former mayor of Gela (Sicily’s sixth-largest city) would be Sicily’s first openly-gay regional president and has campaign marks the best chance of the center-left in a generation to govern Sicily.  But polling nearly as well as the broad center-right and the center-left is the new anti-austerity protest party, the Movimento 5 Stelle (M5S, Five Star Movement) of blogger and comedian Beppe Grillo — he made a splash by swimming across the Strait of Messina from the Italian peninsula to Sicily at the beginning of the campaign (pictured above, bottom).

In one way or another, each of the five main parties competing in today’s election in Sicily will be able to pull lessons from the result in advance of national elections that, although just six months away, remain incredibly fluid.

Italy’s technocratic prime minister Mario Monti, who was appointed in November 2011 to push through budget, tax and labor reforms in the midst of an Italian sovereign debt crisis, remains popular, but has said he won’t run in his own right for election (although could remain available to head a future technocratic government).

Berlusconi had pledged as recently as last Wednesday that he would not run for prime minister as the leader of his own center-right Popolo della Libertà (PdL, People of Freedom), though the unpredictable former prime minister has already said he plans on staying in politics to some degree.  Yesterday, in a Nixonesque, hourlong rant, the enraged, newly-convicted Berlusconi hinted he might even try to bring down Monti’s government to bring forward a snap election even sooner, lashing out at Monti, German chancellor Angela Merkel, former French president Nicolas Sarkozy, and a ‘judge-ocracy’ that he says is ruling Italy.  With plenty of money and control over Italy’s private media, he’ll be able to influence politics as long as he wants.  Currently, the PdL secretary is Angelino Alfano, a 41-year-old former justice minister who is from Sicily and rising star who’s thought to be the leading contender to lead the PdL into the next general election.

Meanwhile, the center-left Partito Democratico (PD, Democratic Party) expects to choose its candidate for prime minister in November.

With 5 million people, Sicily features just around 8.5% of Italy’s total population.  Despite a national GDP per capita of around $31,000, Sicily’s is something like $19,000, vying for Italy’s poorest region with a handful of other southern provinces — it’s nearly half the GDP per capita of the richest province, Lombardy (around $39,000).

In the prior regional elections in 2008, Lombardo led a center-right coalition that included the PdL, the Unione di Centro (UdC, Union of the Center), remains of what used to be the once-formidable Christian Democratic party and his own regionalist Movimento per le Autonomie (MpA, Movement for Autonomies) and together won 65.4% of the vote and 61 of the 90 seats in Sicily’s regional parliament.  A PD-led leftist coalition, headed by Anna Finocchiaro, won just 29 seats at 30.4% of the vote.  The vast majority of the seats (80) will be chosen by proportional representation, with a 5% threshold for winning seats; an additional 10 members are elected with a block-voting system.

In today’s regional elections, though, there are five coalitions/parties, each fielding its own candidate for regional president — polls are hard to come by, but it’s a bit of a free-for-all.

Near the top of the polls is the PdL coalition, headed by Sebastiano ‘Nello’ Musumeci.  Musumeci, a member of the European Parliament, is himself a member of a small autonomist right-wing party in Sicily, Alleanza Siciliana (Sicilian Alliance), having his roots in the now-defunct National Alliance, a stridently right-wing party which had neofascist roots.  Although he’s not actually a member of the PdL, a broad win for Musumeci would bolster the PdL nonetheless and, in particular, boost Alfano’s chances of leading the PdL into the next elections — despite record-low polling for the PdL nationally, Alfano would be attempting to become Italy’s first Sicilian prime minister since Mario Scelba led the Italian government from 1954 to 1955.

Also at the top of the tolls is Crocetta’s PD-led coalition (also supported by the UdC).  Crocetta’s election would be historic in at least two ways.   Continue reading Today’s Sicilian elections showcase potential party strength before 2013 Italian election