Editorials of The Times

The Italian elections Sunday were the latest powerful wave in a tidal turn of anti-immigrant, anti-European Union and anti-democratic fervor that has ravaged European politics. The vote was a stinging rejection of traditional parties, and of national leadership that has been frustrated by a flood of migrants from Africa and the Middle East and stymied by years of stagnation.

While the populist parties that were the two biggest vote-getters were different in many ways, both want to abandon the euro and support for migrants, and share conspiracy theories about bankers, vaccines and the 9/11 attacks.

The lack of an outright winner or obvious coalition promises a long and wobbly slog before a government, most likely unstable, takes shape.

The big winner, with about 32 percent of the vote, was the Five Star Movement, a grass-roots mélange of libertarians, progressives, Euroskeptics and other disenchanted voters formed less than a decade ago by a comedian, and now led by a 31-year-old college dropout, Luigi Di Maio.

Next was the far-right League (formerly Northern League) led by Matteo Salvini, 44. An enthusiastic fan of Marine Le Pen’s National Front and Donald Trump, Salvini fanned sadly familiar flames of nationalism, ethnocentrism and xenophobia, promising, among other things, “cleansing” Italy of immigrants, threatening force.

The League ran with Silvio Berlusconi’s Forza Italia party. If there was a sliver of good news it was that the party of Berlusconi, forerunner of today’s populists who was forced out as prime minister in 2011 in a swirl of sex scandals and legal troubles, took only 14 percent of the vote.

The biggest blow was to the governing Democratic Party, led by Matteo Renzi until his resignation Monday. It sagged to a mere 19 percent of the vote. The party, which has led Italy in a technocratic direction for the past five years, pulled Italy out of recession and had been trying to modernize its economy. But the nation’s problems proved too great for it to resist the rise of extremism and demagogy.

Whatever government emerges will have a tough time satisfying voters’ expectations while coping with Italy’s real economic problems, including the largest public debt in the European Union and high youth unemployment. As Greece learned earlier, it’s one thing to rage against European rules; it’s a far different thing to try to buck them.

Italy now poses a major challenge to the European project, already badly battered by the Brexit vote in Britain and the illiberal drift of Poland, Hungary and other East and Central European countries. That promise of instability and uncertainty is no doubt being celebrated in the Kremlin. (Both the Five Star Movement and the League have argued against union sanctions on Russia.) Italy is not likely to quit the union or drop the euro, but a government hostile to both is a headache to Brussels and the deeper integration championed by President Emmanuel Macron of France and Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany. They will now need to decide whether to press ahead or hold off a while.

Some actions by political leaders are capricious. Some can be shortsighted. And some are sheer lunkheaded. President Donald Trump hit the trifecta last week when he encouraged the House speaker, Rep. Paul Ryan, R-Wis., to scrap startup money for an additional rail tunnel between New York and New Jersey, a project essential to the economic health not only of those two states but of the entire country.

Worse yet, the president’s action bore no relation to objective analysis of the region’s infrastructure needs. Accounts in The Times and The Washington Post said he did it to spite the Senate Democratic leader, Chuck Schumer of New York, whose sin is failure to fall in lock step with Trump on a variety of issues.

This is foolishness. Republicans and Democrats alike broadly agree on the essentiality of the Gateway tunnel, described by many officials as the most urgently needed infrastructure project anywhere in the United States. It will not come cheap, with $11 billion required for the first phase and an estimated $19 billion more needed to finish the job. “People get frightened by the cost,” said John Banks, president of the Real Estate Board of New York. “But the alternative is worse."

Existing tunnels under the Hudson River are more than a century old and stressed by damage from Hurricane Sandy in 2012. Losing one of those tubes would greatly reduce train capacity, to devastating effect. With the metro region said to account for about 10 percent of the national economy, it doesn’t take a seer to appreciate that such a blow would be, to borrow from Trump when he’s in high dudgeon, a disaster.

It was bad enough that in 2010 then Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey, a Republican, killed a predecessor to the Gateway, a project known as Access to the Region’s Core. That decision hit the same trifecta. The Obama administration, graced with the good sense to make a top priority of a new tunnel across the Hudson, agreed informally to have Washington split the initial costs with New Jersey and New York. When officials from both states met with Trump in September, they were led to believe he was fully on board with a similar funding plan.

That commitment grew shaky in December, when an administration official expressed grave doubts. Now Trump seems intent on plunging a dagger through the project’s heart by pressing Ryan to eliminate $900 million for Gateway in a House spending bill expected to be voted on this month.

It is but one instance among many of the president showing zero concern for the region and the city that created his wealth and his reputation. More than most states, New York and New Jersey are adversely affected by his 2017 tax legislation, by his anti-immigrant rhetoric and by his lack of interest in lifting a finger to help rescue his hometown’s ailing mass transit system.

Assuming Trump doesn’t change his mind — he can be as constant as a reed in a stiff wind — the best hope may be that Ryan shows backbone, for a change, and supports money for Gateway as benefiting the nation. It may be worth noting that Trump urged the speaker to eliminate the funding when they were together at the Capitol for a memorial ceremony for the Rev. Billy Graham. It would have been a fitting time for both men to recall words from Luke 6:48, about the importance of building well and laying a foundation on rock so that “when a flood came, the torrent struck that house but could not shake it."