A month or so ago, we picked up on the Sardines movement in Italy - so-called because they packed Italian piazzas “like sardines”, in order to show street-level opposition to the xenophobic populism of Matteo Salvini, the leading politician of the League.

The flash point was a contest between the League and the leftist Democratic Party, in the region of Emilia-Romagna - where the left have had a stronghold for decades, and where victory to the League would represent a serious shift in the nation’s politics (perhaps similar to the crumbling of the Red Wall in the North of England to the Tories in the December General Election).

Well, the election just happened, and Salvini’s League was indeed beaten by the Democratic Party - who fully acknowledged the Sardines’ impact (see below). Our interest is in the techniques and rhetoric of the Sardines, who seem to represent another democratic and civic innovation, from a country notorious for them.

We sample from two reports. The first is from Rachel Donadio in The Atlantic:

The Sardines showed an ability to mobilize citizens in support of a more civil form of politics, one based on issues and supportive of the institutions of government, not social-media antics.

The electorate, it turned out once again, is not the same as the Twitter feed. “We’re the famous antibodies who show up to present a different reality,” Mattia Santori, one of four co-founders of the Sardines, said at a news conference here this month.

Salvini may be a pro on social media, Santori said, but the Sardines are strong in the piazzas. Santori told me that the Emilia-Romagna election was a contest between “a physical presence and a digital presence.” It was “a war between physical reality and digital reality.”

…Democratic Party officials claimed victory while thanking the Sardines for awakening a sense of civic engagement after years in which the left had effectively ceded grassroots engagement to the League. “We had forgotten to show up in the piazzas, to spend time among the people,” one was quoted.

…Italy has always been a harbinger of political developments in Europe, and Europe has often exported those developments internationally. The country produced Benito Mussolini as well as Silvio Berlusconi, who created a viewership that became an electorate. It gave rise to the anti-establishment Five Star Movement, which started as an online community a little more than a decade ago and is now in government, although it is slowly imploding.

More recently, Italy produced the online nativism of Salvini, whose relentless campaigning and natural-born hunger to please have made him one of the best politicians in the world today. Salvini’s ubiquity on platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and now TikTok, where in a recent video he drank a raw egg, represents an experiment into a new form of right-wing populism, one that combines goofiness with toughness.

Today, Italy is at the forefront of post-party politics—and even post-politics politics. And that’s where the Sardines fit in. As the Emilia-Romagna contest shows, the Sardines represent the clearest example yet seen in Europe of pushback against a nativist wave that seemed unstoppable—swimming against a populist current.

Their model might be replicated elsewhere. But as what? The co-founders of the Sardines say they have no desire to become a political party, instead remaining a form of free-floating (and generally left-leaning) political energy.” We don’t want to be a party. We want to bring people close to political parties,” Santori said before the vote.

In mid-March, they plan to hold a meeting in Scampia, a rough suburb of Naples known as a stronghold of the Camorra, or Neapolitan Mafia, to chart their future. “Some people say it’s acts of madness that change the course of history, but we think it’s actually ordinary gestures that change the world we live in,” they wrote on Twitter after the vote. “We weren’t born for the stage. We took to it because it was the right thing to do.”

Since November, the Sardines’ Santori has become a kind of anti-Salvini—a popular figure on Italian television and social media, with his wide smile, five-day beard, rosy cheeks, sneakers and jeans, and mop of loose brown curls in a semipermanent state of bedhead. Calm and upbeat, he speaks in defense of institutions and politicians, and the hard work of governing.

“We always think we’re sentenced to years and decades of populism and we can do nothing,” Santori told me ahead of the elections. That’s not true, he said. “We have thousands more people than they do,” he continued. “We’re showing there is an alternative to this.”

Above all, Santori said, the Sardines want to push the conversation away from social-media posturing and back to issues. He pointed out that ahead of the elections, Salvini shifted from focusing on fear of out-of-control illegal immigration to focusing on one-off attention-grabbing incidents to highlight his man-of-the-people persona.

“There’s nothing political about hugging a cow or signing an autograph on a Parmigiano. There’s nothing about the future. There’s nothing about the environment,” Santori said. “There’s nothing about politics.”

Like the 2016 U.S. election, the Emilia-Romagna race was about change. Voters of all stripes here told me that they were generally satisfied with how things were going in their region, but still wanted improvements locally and nationally.

In the piazza at the Sardines concert, people told me of their desire for “a better kind of politics, a politics with less shouting,” as Gabriele Federici, a retiree, put it.

Giusi Paladino, a high-school philosophy teacher from Verona who was wearing a sequined fish on her head, told me that the Sardines had inspired her to action. “They gave us the courage to come outside, to say, ‘Okay, we’ll get off the couch and do something,’” she said.

“Even the fact of our being here together and coming together is something important. We count; we’re all for something and all against something precise.” That something is Salvini.

More here.

And this from Jamie Mackay in the Guardian:

What’s most interesting about these elections, then, is the extent of the Sardines’ sudden influence. By manipulating the main parties’ fears of Salvini this makeshift movement has not only blocked the right: it has effectively made the ruling coalition dependent on their endorsement.

For now, the organisers are playing down the possibility of forming their own party. This seems wise. While being outsiders has its drawbacks, it has enabled them to avoid self-defeating echo chambers and foster a remarkable pluralism that has been key to their success.

The Sardines are not here to save the old left. Instead their task is more foundational: to rebuild a culture of political participation, and demonstrate to Italy’s sceptical population that grassroots politics and activism can yield results – especially so soon after the M5S’s own failed experiment in “direct democracy”.

That they’ve succeeded in this to some degree, in a country where pessimism has become so deeply ingrained is already a minor miracle. If this belief in collective action can be maintained, the League’s road to power may not be as smooth as the pollsters would have it.

More here.

So the Sardines (and their joyful occupation of the squares) just helped defeat toxic populists in Italy’s Emilia-Romagna. What next?