Europe’s Reaction to Italian Elections: ‘Devastating’ ‘Chaos’

LONDON â€" Deadlock Impasse Stalemate Take your pick.

The European press was united on Tuesday in its anguish over an indecisive election in Italy that commentators said threatened to make the country ungovernable.

Germany’s Der Spiegel said the only good news was that Silvio Berlusconi did not win.

“But the bad news is disturbing enough,” according to Der Speigel’s Hans-Jürgen Schlamp. “Center-left leader Pier Luigi Bersani was unable to win control of the Senate, meaning that a stable government in Italy looks unlikely.

“The results for Europe could be devastating.”

Italy’s European partners have more than a passing interest in the electoral gridlock. The political uncertainty puts new strains on the euro at a time when leaders had hoped the worst of the criss in the currency zone was over.

Italian bonds fell on Tuesday as a period of instability threatened the euro zone’s third largest economy.

“Italians choose a government of chaos!” declared Germany’s Bild Zeitung and asked: “Will they now destroy our euro”

“The Italian impasse revives the specter of the crisis,” according to Les Echos, the French business daily, describing the election outcome as a worst-case scenario for investors.

The Open Europe think tank said on its blog that the final result looked like Brussels’ and Berlin’s worst nightmare.

It predicted there would be a lot of pressure to change Italian electoral law in the event of a re-run of the election. “For that, of course, you need a majority in both houses…,” it added wistfully.

As my colleague Rachel Donadio reported from Rome, Italian voters delivered a rousing anti-austerity message and a strong rebuke to the existing political order in the national elections.

That included a massive turnout for the populist Five Star Movement of Beppe Grillo, a former stand-up comedian.

Most European commentators failed to see the joke. François Sergent at Libération, the left-leaning daily, wrote, however, that it was understandable that Italians should have rallied to this “sinister clown of the Republic” given their recent politicl history.

Conservative Home, a grassroots journal of the British Conservative Party, lamented that “the only grown-up candidate in the election” â€" Mario Monti, the technocrat prime minister â€" won just 10 percent of the vote.

Markets in Europe and beyond responded initially with predictable nervousness to the news from Italy.

But my colleague Roger Cohen offered a sober reminder that Italian elections have been even more serious affairs in the past. During the Cold War, they were watched with some foreboding from the U.S. embassy.

“Italy was the soft underbelly of the West where the Communist Party might enter government,” Roger writes. “It never did.”

“By comparison, the Italian election unfoldi! ng as I w! rite is a geostrategic minnow. Markets are worried, but then markets always are.”