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Italy's March 2018 election saw two populist parties, the Five Star Movement (M5S) and Lega (formerly the Northern League), win a combined majority of votes and parliamentary seats, and these unique parties have joined forces to form a government. M5S is an internet-driven movement with the utopian mission of implementing direct democracy, while Lega is a onetime regionalist party that has replaced its former goal of secession for northern Italy with appeals to nationalism and the defense of Italian sovereignty. Having decided to step off the deficit-cutting path that Italy's previous governments had agreed to follow, these two parties are now on a collision course with the European Union. The outcome of this conflict will determine the future direction of Italian politics. This article explains the nature of these two parties and the reasons behind their success.

El éxito político de Berlusconi no se puede explicar sin las televisiones. Ni el de Salvini, sin las redes sociales. Del \"si no sale en televisión es que no existe\" del primero, a los tweets incendiarios y al anything goes del segundo. ¿Misma estrategia, nuevos medios? El objetivo de este artículo es reflexionar sobre las técnicas comunicativas de los dos políticos italianos, poniendo el acento en las analogías y diferencias. Se profundizará en las técnicas comunicativas utilizadas por Berlusconi y Salvini y el uso que han hecho de los medios de comunicación para construir una imagen electoralmente atractiva y políticamente exitosa. Palabras clave: Italia; Berlusconi; Salvini; Comunicación Política; Redes sociales. The political success of Berlusconi cannot be explained without the televisions. Nor that of Salvini, without the social networks. From the \"if it does not appear on television, it does not exist\" of the first, to the incendiary tweets and to the anything goes of the second. Same strategy, new media? The aim of this article is to reflect on the communicative techniques of the two Italian politicians, putting the emphasis on analogies and differences. It will delve into the communicative techniques used by Berlusconi and Salvini and the use they have made of the media to build an electorally attractive and politically successful image. Keywords: Italy; Berlusconi; Salvini; Political Communication; Social Networks.

The Lega Nord (LN) has undergone a profound process of transformation since 2013, by replacing its historical regionalist populism with a new state-wide populist radical right outlook. However, very little is known about how such transformation impacted its organizational model, particularly the mass-party features that characterized it under its founding leader, Umberto Bossi. This article explores the organizational evolution of the party under Matteo Salvini by means of a qualitative in-depth analysis of 41 semi-structured interviews with representatives of the LN from four regions (Calabria, Emilia-Romagna, Lombardy, and Veneto) and primary documents. It underlines that the LN was turned into a disempowered and politically inactive “bad company,” charged with the task of paying the debts of the old party, while its structure, resources, and personnel were poured into a new state-wide organization called Lega per Salvini Premier (LSP). The LSP has not simply maintained the key features of the mass-party in the LN’s historical strongholds, but also pioneered a modern form of this organizational model grounded on the continuous interaction between digital and physical activism, i.e., “phygital activism,” which boosts the party’s ability to reach out to the electorate by delivering the image that the League is constantly on the ground. The LSP has sought to export this modern interpretation of the mass-party in the South; however, in that area its organizational development remains at an embryonic stage, and the party’s nationalization strategy has so far produced a “quasi-colonial” structure dominated by, and dependent on, the Northern elite.

Robert Lechler, President of the Academy of Medical Sciences, noted that “I am at pains to once again stress that leaving the EU without a deal is a grave threat to biomedical research and the patients and public who rely on our currently collaborative and world-class science.” [...]common policies for defence, security, borders, and immigration so that we are “stronger together in the world”. [...]greater investments in Europe.

Many researchers have postulated an elective affinity between populism and social network, but few studies have addressed the specific features of online populist communication. This paper discusses the use of Facebook by Matteo Salvini, the leader of Italy’s League party and the European politician with most followers on the social network. It specifically examines his use of livestreaming, with the aim of revealing the characteristic communicative tools of populism 2.0. The research takes a multimodal approach, triangulating three methods (digital, audiovisual analysis and clause-based semantic text analysis), and concludes that Salvini's discourse displays all the typical characteristics of populism: the innovation resides in its perfect adaptation to the affordances of the social network.

Italy's health ministry sent inspectors to two hospitals in the north of the country on 8 September after some experts speculated that the child may have been infected while being treated in hospital for complications related to her diabetes. Local press reports have suggested, however, that blood samples taken from the child after she was admitted to the hospital at Portogruaro on 13 August may have already been discarded, making it harder to establish whether she had already contracted malaria when she was admitted. Malaria used to be widespread in Italy, but eradication campaigns reduced the incidence of the disease and the World Health Organization declared Italy free of malaria in 1970.

The far right has become a major political actor in Italy. In this light, this paper focusses on three issues: first, it shows that far-right political alternatives have been around for some time, and highlights the reasons behind their electoral growth; second, the Lega Nord’s Le Pen-ist turn is analysed, along with the process by which Fratelli d'Italia was formed, following the neo-fascist tradition of the Movimento Sociale Italiano; and finally, the two parties’ ideological and policy proposals are examined, showing both the changes and continuities with their origins.

Italy’s health minister, Giulia Grillo, has fired all 30 independent members of the country’s Superior Health Board, a body set up to advise the government on all aspects of public health, explaining that she wished to send a “signal of discontinuity.” In 2015 the party proposed a law against vaccinations, citing “the link between vaccinations and specific illnesses such as leukaemia, poisoning, inflammation, immunodepression, inheritable genetic mutations, cancer, autism, and allergies.” In 2013 the Five Star Movement’s first major public campaign condemned the medical establishment for preventing parents from accessing a controversial stem cell therapy called Stamina, which was claimed to cure degenerative diseases.

The study aims at disclosing the narrative of immigration and the construction of the otherness in Italian Interior Minister, Matteo Salvini’s discourse, geared towards the legitimization of anti-immigration policies. For this purpose, the author analyzes a sample of the Italian Interior Minister’s discourses related to three cases of migrant landings, drawing on Proximization Theory, revealing how the concepts of closeness and remoteness are manipulated for the construction of threat and the legitimization of negative political response. The study concludes that Salvini’s discourse presents all the classic characteristics of populism. It depicts virtuous and hardworking people threatened by the “others”, them “illegals” who are not “legitimate refugees”, along with inventing a new antagonist “other”, the rescue NGOs that are framed as criminals, justifying their criminalization.

The country’s leading consumer rights group, Codacons, this week published what it said were all the relations between Walter Ricciardi, head of the National Institute of Health (Istituto Superiore di Sanita, ISS) and the drug industry.1 The group said that Ricciardi should be investigated for activities including the receipt of €4000 (£3600; $4500) for speaking to Pfizer staff in 2017, his involvement in a project sponsored by Pfizer and Janssen-Silage with the medicine faculty of Milan’s Catholic University of the Sacred Heart, a €400 sponsorship payment from GlaxoSmithKline in November 2017, and his role as “scientific director” in an Abbvie project that involved a payment of €58 250 to the Milan university. In 2015 The BMJ reported how one Italian vaccine expert who criticised plans to expand Italy’s national vaccination programme was threatened with legal action by government medical officers.2 Vittorio Demicheli, of the Cochrane Collaboration Vaccines Field, said then that plans to introduce vaccines against human papillomavirus for males, rotavirus for infants, and Herpes zoster and pneumococcal polysaccharide jabs for elderly people were too costly or ill advised, and he questioned the motives behind the new programme, which was written by a panel that included Ricciardi. The rate of measles, mumps, and rubella vaccine coverage in Italy fell from 90.5% in 2010 to 87.2% in 2016,4 although there is some evidence of a rise in uptake of 2.9% since then in some regions.5 Italy currently accounts for roughly a third of all measles cases reported by countries in the European Economic Area. 1 Day M. Italian expert questions need for expanded vaccination schedule.