Much of our country’s lifestyle inspiration, and not just football, comes from our neighbour to the North. But immersed in the minutiae of our own electoral campaign, most people have had no time to follow and absorb the Italian election and its deeply shocking results. However, we disregard them at our risk.

First of all, to start from the banal: the results show that the polls are not to be trusted. No poll has foreseen the real result and so no one was prepared for the result.

Secondly, it is a matter of great concern to the entire continent of Europe that Italy, a founder member of the Union, the third largest economy in the eurozone, has delivered a result in which a majority of voters have turned eurosceptic.

The international media have reacted to the results by trying to come up with combinations that could possibly deliver a stable majority but each time they admit to defeat. That is why many observers are already talking of a new election – but this is also complicated by the fact that President Napolitano now in his final months as President, cannot dissolve Parliament.

This was a protest vote, nothing less.

Those who voted for Beppe Grillo, the comedian turned politician, are protesting against any and all politicians.

Those who voted for Berlusconi have voted heavily against the policies of austerity, against what he called the German diktat over Europe and believed in his rash promise to wipe away the property tax imposed by Mario Monti and to pay for it through the promise to get the money from Switzerland and Italian investments there.

The real loser was Mario Monti – and with hindsight one really cannot see why this could not happen. Italy and the Italians are not an affluent people. On the contrary, there real issues of deep poverty. To impose austerity on such a people (but one can conceivably make the same argument about the Greeks, the Spanish, etc) just by slashing expenditure and by raising taxes meant imposing an extraordinary burden on an already burdened people. Mario Monti was a technocrat prime minister, with no popular legitimacy backing him. Now the meagre approval he has obtained shows him that his ‘medicine’ is supported by just a few of the people. He has not brought about a shared belief the country can emerge from the darkness it now finds itself in.

All the afore-mentioned forces have come together to thwart the Left from the electoral prize it expected to get. But then it was this Left which has continually obstructed all efforts by Mario Monti to restructure the country’s economy by modernizing the laws governing employment.

In a way, therefore, all the Italian political forces at play have driven each other and the country into deadlock which only future events can solve, if they can. The rest of Europe can only watch and gaze, and hope the euro is strong enough to withstand this new turmoil that once again has uncovered fault lines we thought had been removed. Now we realize, of course, that the agreements patched together by the European leaders at one of the innumerable summits that have been held are not sufficient or durable enough.

As for us, mesmerized as we are by the goings-on of our own electoral campaign, we might think we are spared the Italian mess as most probably there will not be any deadlock result after 9 March. But we may even do worse than that: We may get a clear result that puts us in even more jeopardy and danger than all the Italians with their result.

The economic crisis we are in is a very serious one and one cannot say we have found the solution to it or that better days are just round the corner. On the contrary, and this holds even for us whose economic fundamentals are somewhat better than Italy’s, the way ahead is a long and hard slog and we cannot let go, we cannot decrease our state of alert, and we must keep trying to get the fundamentals, as described by the Maastricht Treaty, right.

The problem is, just like in Italy, our electorate falls for gimmicks, for quick fixes, or maybe even for nihilist approaches that solve nothing but only make things worse, much worse.