It was an odd feeling that followed the results of the Italian elections this year from my own perspective as a semi-invested foreigner living here. There was an atmosphere that lingered around the city as if something had just happened that everyone would rather forget. There was an elephant in the piazza if you like.

The traditional party of the Emilia Romagna region, the Partito Democratico, had been  humiliated with its worst result ever. The centre-left coalition, of which the PD was the major constituent, had lost its slight majority and just barely achieved over 20% of the vote. The Movimento 5 Stelle had won – and yet with less than a third of the vote and no coalition partners, it hadn’t. The right-wing coalition had won in terms of vote share with Salvini’s anti-immigration party La Lega becoming the biggest party in a coalition normally under Berlusconi’s control. And yet, they hadn’t won either.

In the eyes of most of my friends and others, Salvini was a dangerous and negative force in Italian politics, who represented the Italian wing of the growing nativist nationalism that was spreading across Europe. But because of the electoral outcome where no government has yet been formed, this was no Trump moment, no one seemed stupefied or taken aback by the electoral victory of an “Italians First” ideology. Many were angry, some bewildered by little curiosities like the fact that so many people in the south had voted for a candidate who once said that northern Italians had “nothing in common” with them, leader of a party who used to refer to southerners as “parasites” and “layabouts” in public rallies.

Matteo Renzi and the PD’s imminent demise didn’t come as a huge shock to anyone except for foreign media it seems. And foreign media coverage, or at least English language media coverage, I found quite lazy and ignorant. The Guardian’s analysis exemplified that, calling La Lega a ‘new populist party’ despite being arguably the oldest party in the Italian parliament, indicating parliamentary euroscepticism was a new phenomenon in Italian politics, and calling the small social democratic political coalition Free and Equal an alliance of the “radical left”. Others were happy to commit the same reporting errors made during the Brexit campaign by blaming the PD’s downfall entirely on immigration, ignoring a plethora of other important factors, and neglecting to mention most of the PD’s lost votes went to the Movimento 5 Stelle and not any of the hard-right parties. That said, almost every major party has called for tighter immigration controls and increased deportations. To many on the ground the disillusion of the PD’s former supporters seemed to come more from the PD’s continued transformation into a Matteo Renzi Party, its betrayal of left-wing values, and its exemplification of Italian politics-as-usual. Indeed for those further to the left the only positive to come out of this year’s elections was the resignation of Renzi himself (just this week there was a ‘PD Funeral Party’ held in the political science faculty here), although we will see how long his absence lasts.

For me the most surprising result was the increasing irrelevance of ‘Il Cavaliere’ Silvio Berlusconi. His name was plastered across all the election posters for the right-wing coalition despite a ban on holding public office, and yet after the results showed Salvini’s Lega outperforming Silvio’s Forza Italia, for the first time in memory I was reading analyses of the elections without barely a mention of the man who had dominated politics since the birth of the “Second Republic” in the 1990s, not to mention foreign headlines on Italian politics.

Here in Bologna, the run-up to election was a period of relative calm. In this huge university town, at the centre of what remains of Italy’s ‘Red Zone’ with numerous left wing organisations, political groups and agitators, it came as a surprise to see Salvini visiting the city unopposed. Just two years ago Salvini did the same and parts of the city erupted, with clashes just down the road from me on Stalingrad Bridge. This time there were over 200 riot police in the town but not a single protest. Perhaps this is because La Lega is no longer the boogeyman of right-wing politics, indeed being the biggest force in right-wing politics they are now the mainstream. Something much more malicious has taken its place as the left’s most hated enemy – unapologetic neofascist movements such as Casapound and Forza Nuova, which did attract some trouble when they attempted to hold a rally in the city centre.

With no realistic left wing  capable of tackling La Lega’s rise in a country which saw the most powerful Communist Party this side of the Iron Curtain, and Movimento 5 Stelle putting forward the only alternative, a party which seems to be against a lot of policies but in favour of very few,  it’s hardly surprising that the strongest sentiment I have sensed before and after the elections is one of apathy or even despair. Friends and colleagues weren’t too enthusiastic about travelling home to vote in their constituencies for lack of good candidates, when asked who to vote for I would get a shrug more often than an answer, people including myself were confused about how to vote due to new voting rules which guarantee a mixed proportional and majoritarian system for two chambers which share the exact same powers, and those who were enthusiastic about a specific political party were largely voting for candidates who didn’t have a chance of reaching the threshold required to make it into parliament like the pro-European liberal ‘More Europe’ group or the far-left Power to the People.

From here who knows where it will end, but with the likes of Salvini or the Movimento 5 Stelle in the driving seat, it doesn’t look good, especially if you’ve just arrived from an inflatable raft in the Mediterranean. Unlike me, I can just grab a Ryanair flight home to a country where politics makes sense… ha.