Populists win the italian elections

But you forgot it's main quality: it's NOT those other guys, all of whom sold out something like 80% of the population to economic integration/Europe when it was made VERY clear they didn't want this.

Syriza is essentially the same thing, before they sold out.

This guy explains the Southern European experience better than I ever could : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9UOlJsmvwxs (while Italy hasn't been quite as bad as Greece, the problems are almost exactly the same. In fact, all of southern Europe has had pretty much the same experience).

(also they're "classic" leftists. A lot of their points are shared with leftists from 50 or so years ago. For instance, they're against global markets. Actually against it. That, of course, also means anti-immigration. I find it much more surprising that other supposedly leftist parties aren't. How can you keep a labour market scarce while allowing for large migration flows ? And keeping labour scarce ought to be the central, almost the only, fight a leftist party wants to win: that's the thing that will allow wages to take up a bigger slice of the pie. There is a fundamental contradiction in being pro-poor and being pro-immigration, it is an unwinnable fight)

And you might say, no you could win the fight for higher wages as a pro-globalization pro-immigration leftist party. And very, very technically you're right. If such parties win every single large population country around the globe (and therefore outsourcing can't go anywhere), then you can do it. As long as there is a country with lots of labour that won't force those wages higher (ie. China, India, Vietnam, ...) most people will lose, a lot, to immigration.

What I can say:

1. they are not anti-european, they simply hate the current Bankurope 2. They have not ties to Putin (who the fuck is spreading this bullshit ??) 3. They aren't anti-migrant, they want to control the immigration flows. Do you have the faintest idea what it means for a small country like Italy to be forced to import 600.000 migrants in 5 years? Heck, you can build a formidable army with such numbers 4. yes, they are left-wing (hugely statalists) and this is why I have not voted for them 5. yes, the infrastructure is handled by Casaleggio Associates. But AWS is controlled by Amazon. So what is the point?

The real point here, is that the radical chic leftist media are purporting them as the devil, while it is their masters who have worked hard for the past 6 years to literally destroy Italy.

We have hundreds of thousands of young people who leave Italy (high profile people, people with PhDs). We have foreign companies who take State's subsidies and then close up shop and go to Poland, Slovak, Romania, etc ... Our middle class has been literally destroyed. The number of poors have skyrocketed in the last 5 years. The unemployment is at a whopping 40+% among young people. Corruption is out of chart, with politicians actively working with ecomafias to illegally dump toxic wastes everywhere on our territory.

These are the real motives why the people have voted against the status quo. And they have gone to vote in unusually high numbers ( 73%, never seen before! ).

However, most people seem to take "populist" to mean "someone who distorts policy questions and advances their own agenda by pandering to people's emotions". I would call such a person a "demagogue" instead.