How Milan’s voters opted for the losers
IN RECENT years, as Italy has struggled economically, Milan has been happily out of step. It enjoyed a revival that reached a peak three years ago when it hosted Expo 2015. The universal exhibition left Milan with a clutch of renewed urban areas and rekindled its spirit of optimism. The city centre, ever stylish, nowadays feels flamboyantly affluent.
Since the general election on March 4th, however, Milan finds itself at odds with the rest of Italy in a rather less positive way. “We voted for the losers,” says Francesco Daveri, who heads the MBA programme at the city’s Bocconi University. The Milanese cast 36% of their votes for a centre-left alliance that managed to win only 23% of the vote nationally. The anti-establishment Five Star Movement (M5S), took less than a fifth of the vote in Milan (against almost a third in Italy as a whole) and, despite its regional origins, the nativist Northern League fared worse in cosmopolitan Milan than it did nationally.
Since the M5S, the...