ROME/VIENNA — Italians and Austrians went to the polls in closely watched votes that will gauge the strength of Europe’s populist and extreme right political parties.
Whatever the outcome of the votes being anxiously watched in capitals across Europe and carefully scrutinized on trading floors around the world, it will lead to change.
If the center-left Renzi’s proposals to streamline a 68-year-old parliamentary system are voted down, he has vowed to resign.
That would usher in a period of political uncertainty and potential economic turmoil for the country and its European Union allies.
The plebiscite on Renzi’s flagship overhaul — which would shrink the powers of the Italian senate and regional governments to ease political gridlock and remove red tape — has consumed the country’s politics for most of 2016 and divided a population which is struggling to recover from a bruising triple-dip recession.
In Austria, the far-right Freedom party’s Norbert Hofer is running for the presidency against Alexander Van der Bellen, a Green politician who campaigned as an independent. Opinion pollsters believe the contest is too close to call.
A victory for Hofer would cap a wave of political upsets in western industrial countries this year following the UK vote to quit the EU and Donald Trump’s election as US president. It would buoy the hopes of France’s Marine Le Pen, the National Front leader who is expected to poll strongly in next year’s French presidential elections.
After the Brexit vote in the UK and Donald Trump’s upset win in the US election, the Italian vote is also being watched with concern across Europe — given that the opposition to Renzi’s proposals is being led by Eurosceptic political parties, including the Five Star Movement and the Northern League.
The importance of Sunday’s referendum has been compared to other pivotal votes in Italian history, from the 1946 vote on whether to end the monarchy and establish a republic, to a 1974 vote allowing divorce, to a 1987 poll on nuclear energy.
The most apocalyptic scenarios involve a crisis of investor confidence causing the failure of a rescue scheme for Italy’s most indebted banks, triggering a broader crisis across the eurozone. Italians appear to realize how much is at stake.
Voters, who have been known to head to the beach rather than the ballot box when less important referendums have fallen on a sunny day, have spent weeks passionately embracing the pros and cons of the proposed reforms.
A bumper turnout looks like the only prediction anyone can make with any certainty, as polls have been banned since Nov. 18.
Meanwhile, Austria’s presidency is largely ceremonial, EU leaders fear a win for Hofer, 45, would trigger a domino effect in the wake of key elections next year in France, Germany and The Netherlands.
Populist groups across Europe, on the right and the left, have benefitted from a growing sense of unease about globalization, multiculturalism, rising inequality, and austerity cuts.
