Surely it could only happen in Italy, where the world has become used to regular bouts of political chaos.

Results published Tuesday indicate that Sunday’s national elections have delivered a hung parliament, with comedian Beppe Grillo’s upstart Five Star Movement receiving enough support to limit the chance of mainstream parties forming a coalition government.

Pier Luigi Bersani’s center-left Democratic party (pd) has claimed narrow victory in the polls for both chambers of the Italian parliament. However, the result left it well short of a needed majority in the Senate.

Silvio Berlusconi, the Democratic party leader, came within a whisker of beating Bersani’s slim victory.

Technocrat Mario Monti produced a disappointing result, gaining only 19 seats. These results are viewed as a disaster for outgoing Prime Minister Monti, whose centrist coalition was relegated to a distant fourth place.

The big surprise in the election outcome was thus the gains by Beppe Grillo’s populist Five Star Movement.

In the event that Italian political parties fail to agree on a governing coalition, new elections will be necessary. This will simply cause more uncertainty and create a leadership vacuum in the country at a crucial time in the ongoing euro crisis.

The chaos created by Italy’s election result will only exacerbate the country’s current deep recession, with unemployment above 11 percent, mostly affecting the young. Greece is the only other EU country to carry a bigger debt burden than Italy.

Stratfor opines that “Like Greece, Italy is approaching a situation where popular discontent is threatening the country’s governability. The situation in Italy is not as severe as in Greece, but the Hellenic nation reminds one just how quickly the social and political situation of eurozone members can degrade. … [A]ny hopes that Italy would return to some kind of political normalcy vanished with these elections. Rather than solving Italy’s problems, they have only made them more acute” (February 26).

Political conditions in Europe are ripening for the rise of populist leaders heading political parties beyond the mainstream. The increasing economic and social disruption caused by Germany’s stoic insistence on its economic model as the only savior for the continent is creating a climate that could easily lead to the EU fragmenting into the 10 political groups, each under a populist leader in tune with “the German way,” prophesied in your Bible (Revelation 17:12-14).

View our editor in chief’s Web exclusive titled “Germany: The New Superpower” for more on this, and study our booklet Germany and the Holy Roman Empire for in-depth background knowledge on its reality.

The results of continental chaos in Europe are already rippling across the English Channel and the Atlantic to negatively affect Britain and America.

In just a matter of days, we have witnessed the pope resign and the nation that is home to the Vatican State thrown into political turmoil.

Where is this all leading? The outcome is clearly prophesied in our book The United States and Britain in Prophecy.