Hugo Dixon

By Hugo Dixon

(Hugo Dixon is Editor-at-Large, Reuters News. The opinions expressed are his own.)

The UK Independence Party will not come close to winning Britain’s next general election. The populist anti-Europe, anti-immigration party may not even win a single seat, despite last week’s surge in English local elections where it won nearly a quarter of the vote – running a close third to Labour and the Conservatives. That’s how the maths of Britain’s first-past-the-post voting system works.

Nevertheless, the rise of UKIP could have profound consequences for British politics and business – in particular, for the UK’s relationship with the European Union. This is because UKIP is mainly taking votes away from David Cameron’s Conservatives. A calculation by Sky News suggested that, if the local election results were translated into a general election, Labour would win an overall majority. Even though UKIP might win no seats itself, its popularity would damage Cameron’s prospects for reelection in 2015.

A key question will be how the Conservatives respond to this challenge. The party’s right-wing is already advocating a shift to the right to prevent more defections to UKIP. David Davis, who lost out to Cameron in the battle to lead to Conservatives in 2005, advocated an early referendum on whether Britain should quit the EU. Cameron has promised such a plebiscite but only after the next election – and implicitly only if he wins that election.

Other Conservatives will be arguing that it will be folly to tack to the right and leave the centre completely open to Labour. Holding a referendum on Europe before the election is not even practical politics, as the Conservatives are in coalition with the pro-European LibDems who oppose such a vote.

Italy could do with some market pressure. Rome’s bond yields are now lower than they were before February’s inconclusive election. But as the politicians scheme, the economy burns. With markets calm, there is insufficient urgency to crack on with long-needed economic and political reform.

The fall in 10-year bond yields, which were 4.3 percent on Friday compared to 4.4 percent just before the election, is attributable to two factors. First, nobody wants to bet against the European Central Bank which has promised to do whatever it takes to preserve the euro. Second, the Japanese central bank’s pledge to buy gigantic quantities of bonds at home has buoyed asset prices elsewhere, including in Italy.

The backdrop to the current political crisis is starkly different to that in November 2011, when a sharp increase in bond yields created a panic which led to Silvio Berlusconi being forced out of office. Now none of the three main political blocs – Berlusconi’s centre-right group, the centre-left Democrats and Beppe Grillo’s 5-Star Movement – can govern on its own. But seven weeks have been wasted without a coalition being formed.

Can the Italians be serious? That is likely to be the reaction of financial markets and the country’s euro zone partners as they ponder a disastrous election result, which could reignite the euro crisis. More than half of those who voted chose one of two comedians: Beppe Grillo, who really is a stand-up comic; and Silvio Berlusconi, who drove Italy to the edge of the abyss when he was last prime minister in 2011. Both are anti-euro populists.

This comedy could easily end in tragedy. The inconclusive result has echoes of last year’s first Greek election – except that Italy is bigger and more strategic. The country faces political paralysis, while its economy is shrinking and its debt is rising. The European Commission forecast last week that GDP would fall a further 1 percent this year after last’s year 2.2 percent drop. Debt, meanwhile, would reach 128 percent of GDP by the end of this year.

The euro crisis went into remission after the European Central Bank’s president Mario Draghi promised last summer to do “whatever it takes” to preserve the single currency. But, if Italy proves ungovernable during this critical time, even the ECB’s safety net may not work.

The last Italian prime minister whose surname began with a “B” – Silvio Berlusconi – was a disaster. The country’s next leader’s name is also likely to start with a “B”.

Investors want Mario Monti, the technocrat who took over from Berlusconi last year, to stay as prime minister after the election, which will probably be in March. But they are more likely to get Pier Luigi Bersani, leader of the left-wing Democratic Party (PD). While there are risks, such an outcome may not be as bad as it looks – not least because Bersani has promised to continue with Monti’s policies and was one of the few reformers when Romano Prodi was prime minister in the last decade.

Trade union-backed Bersani will be the standard-bearer for the left in the coming elections after winning a decisive primary at the weekend against Matteo Renzi, the modernising mayor of Florence. His first comments were promising: he said the PD would have to tell Italians the “truth, not fairy-tales” about the country’s grave economic situation.

At a dinner in Madrid earlier this month, the main complaint about Mariano Rajoy was that the new prime minister was treating the electorate like children. Many of the guests, supporters of Rajoy’s Popular Party (PP), understood that Spain had to cut its fiscal deficit and restore its competitiveness. But they didn’t like the fact that the prime minister hadn’t been frank about his plans.

In advance of last November’s general election, Rajoy said he wouldn’t raise taxes, make it cheaper to fire people or cut the welfare state. But he has now done the first two. After this week’s election in Andalusia, Spain’s largest region, he is expected to do the last.

Rajoy’s camp doesn’t see any problem in failing to be upfront. It would have been foolish to talk too much about austerity in the general election campaign as that might have frightened the voters. For the same reason, it would be foolish to tell them about reforming the welfare state in advance of the Andalusia election.

Francois Hollande’s sins are more those of omission than commission. The headlines might suggest otherwise. The socialist challenger to Nicolas Sarkozy as France’s next president has promised to cut the pension age to 60, tax the rich at 75 percent, renegotiate Europe’s fiscal treaty and launch a war on bankers. But these pledges aren’t as bad as they look. The real problem is that Hollande, who has a strong lead in the opinion polls, isn’t addressing the need to reform the country’s welfare state.

Hollande is a moderate. Like Sarkozy, for example, he is promising to cut the budget deficit to 3 percent next year, from 5.8 percent as estimated by the European Commission in 2011. But he still had to throw the left some red meat in the election campaign, which runs until May. That’s not just to prevent votes drifting to Jean-Luc Mélenchon, the far-left candidate. It’s also to avoid being outflanked by Sarkozy’s own populist attacks on corporate fat cats and bankers.

Still, the precise pledges probably aren’t what they seem, as I discovered on a trip to Paris last month.