The South European Right in the 21st Century

Italy, France and Spain

Jocelyn A.J. Evans

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317984108
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Since the European-wide domination of social democratic governments during the mid- to late-1990s, Right-wing parties have returned to power in the three largest Mediterranean democracies – Italy, France and Spain. This alternation has been symptomatic of growing majoritarianism in Southern Europe, a trend which has gone against much of the rest of the continent, and of a decline in clientelist effectiveness also traditionally seen as the Southern 'norm'.

This volume assesses the subsequent periods of incumbency of these three governments, considering the salient features of each in their reaction to winning government and implementing policy, given their divergent historical roots and paths to power. In particular, it focuses on the evolving role of perceived extremist elements on the Right, and adaptation to a European arena which imposes a level of continuity on incumbents of whatever hue, attempts to defend national interests notwithstanding. Lastly, it considers the extent to which the swing to the Right has already reached its peak, given the evidence of recent national and regional elections in France and Spain.

Introduction

Jocelyn A. J. Evans

In 2003, it appeared that the conservative right in the largest Mediterranean democracies—France, Italy and Spain—had consolidated their hold on power. The Gaullists’ 2002 legislative election obliteration of the Socialist incumbents after Jacques Chirac’s landslide victory in the presidential election of the same year apparently placed the French left in a position from which it would not be able to recover for years, if not decades. In Italy, similar disarray on the left a year earlier had allowed Silvio Berlusconi, a politician hounded by civil and criminal actions for illegal financial activities, and his personalized party Forza Italia to trounce the Democratic Left. In Spain, the occupation of government by the Partído Popular (PP) and Jose-Maria Aznar since 1996 had strengthened the Spanish economy sufficiently to allow Spain into the EU’s Single Currency, and reduced unemployment to around 11 percent.

Yet, not for the first time in electoral politics, appearances were deceptive. By the end of 2004, the political landscape in these two countries looked very different. European and regional elections in France saw the Socialists enjoy victories over the governing Union pour un Mouvement Populaire (UMP), and in the latter the right lose control of every regional council in France but one, the left taking control of 19 of the remaining 21. While at the national level, the Italian left still looked a weak competitor against Berlusconi’s cohesive coalition, regional successes, and in particular the symbolic return of the Bologna town hall to the left’s portfolio, provided evidence of dissatisfaction with the right and a renewal in the Olive Tree Alliance. Indeed, the success of the right in the 2001 elections had been mainly due to its more strategic use of electoral alliance, rather than a major defection of votes from left to right.¹

The Spanish legislative elections saw the departure of the PP (and Aznar’s retirement) and the return of the Partido Socialista Obrero Español (PSOE) under José Luis Zapotera. Widespread disenchantment with the PP government’s support of the US in Iraq and a misjudged knee-jerk anti-ETA (Euzkadi ta Askatasuna) reaction to the Madrid bombings swung the public opinion away from the PP and back to the Socialists. However, the electoral effects of the bomb may have been exaggerated by some, given the media-reinforced image of high turnout by dissatisfied young voters.

The economic reality of the Spanish economy may have been moderate growth on paper and a reduction in unemployment, but the Spanish electorate has one of the highest levels of debt and lowest real incomes in the EU, and unemployment reduction has been based on short-term contract work rather than long-term job expansion.

For Southern European democracies, whose status in the comparative literature has frequently been one of exception and a subset of European democracies, these turnarounds appear to correspond closely to what we might refer to as a ‘politics as usual’ norm—electoral shifts based upon ineffective coalition bargaining (rather than hegemonic parties or atrophied centrist coalitions); incumbency penalization for economic downturns / insufficient upturns (rather than clientelist micro-bargaining); and exogenous influences upon domestic issues and policymaking (rather than vestigial, pre-democratic autarky oriented towards institutional consolidation).

This should not surprise us. The Spanish case has passed a quarter-century of post-Franco democracy, and both the French and Italian systems have enjoyed entirely democratic, if frequently unstable, post-war political systems. And yet the terms in which the authors in this issue and elsewhere speak, at least in the Spanish and Italian cases, betray an ongoing process of democratic consolidation, particularly in terms of the growing majoritarianism and adversarial politics that have developed in all three countries, the completion of governmental alternation as a necessary condition of mature democracy, and the establishment of multiple arenas of opposition. From this perspective, the French case presents a contrast. Of the two post-war democracies, it is the more advanced, Italy being engaged in re-establishing a dynamic political system subsequent to the period of Christian Democracy (DC) hegemony. In this respect, France provides a useful comparison. Moreover, from the perspective of this issue, it is the dynamics on the right of the political spectrum which demonstrate most clearly what consolidation has taken place.

A first element concerns the very etymology of the word ‘right’ in these countries. In every democratic system, the right has provided the ideological benchmark against which other political streams define themselves. As the representatives of the middle classes and more importantly, the self-regarded ‘natural’ ruling class, the right provides a status quo against which other parties, almost by definition mostly of the left, have engaged in a process of rectification. That is, the left addresses what it perceives to be injustices in the natural order, or the order imposed as ‘natural’ by the right. For the left, the identification of a progressive programme is relatively simple, working on the basis of eradicating such inequalities—although successfully addressing inequalities such as poverty, unemployment, gender and racial discrimination, inter alia, is evidently far from simple.

For right-wing parties, identification of a programme is a greater challenge, however. If the left aims for its utopia via an artificial state, so the right is generally convinced of the need for a more ‘natural’state. How the right chooses to define this state, and how it aims to achieve it, is the challenge. Where the right is in power in periods of social and economic stability, its politicians have normally identified the status quo as sufficient. Appeals to a status quo ante are the call from opposition. In Italy and Spain, the right has historically been synonymous with fascism and authoritarianism, connotations that it has by no means completely lost. Consequently, in the Spanish and Italian cases, such a harking back to the past risks promoting the fascist periods—or in Italy, the political atrophy and corruption of the years of DC hegemony.

Conversely, in Italy one political party—the Movimento Sociale Italiano (MSI)—actively underlined its heritage from Mussolini’s fascists, being as excluded from the governing centre as the Partito Comunista Italiano (PCI) on the extreme left, and won small but consistent niche support, particular in the south of Italy, until the 1990s. As Ramiro, Pasquino and Ignazi each show in their contributions to this issue, the evolution away from non-democratic cores to the definition of ‘right’ in Spain and Italy has been a gradual and often painful one, and one upon which elite and mass perceptions have not always coincided.

The PP has been engaged in a game of political catch-up with the PSOE, establishing a reputation as a credible governing party, and one with democratic pretensions. The Alianza Popular–Partido Popular (AP-PP) had to effect such a transition rapidly to establish itself not as one of many democratic right-wing parties but as the only right-wing party. After the collapse of the Union of the Democratic Centre subsequent to the retirement of Adolfo Suárez, the only potentially viable challenger to the PSOE was the AP, a party staffed by conservatives and former officials from the Franco regime. Nineteen years finally saw it take power in 1996, after a progressive centre shift distancing it from its fascist past and establishing it among the traditional conservative electorate of right-wing parties—Catholics and the middle classes.

Thus, it—or, perhaps more accurately, José Maria Aznar—engaged actively in a centripetal evolution that ideologically places it close to the PSOE on many traditional political issues. As Ramiro shows, the party has moved since 1977 from a right-wing to a slightly left-wing position, and then back to almost an exactly mixed, centrist position. In its economic policy, a re-emphasis on welfare policies and a lessening of emphasis on cutting tax—a solidarism associated more with traditional conservatism rather than authoritarian centrism—has placed it next to the median voter. In Downsian terms, the logic is perfect.

In Italy, by contrast, the mainstream right, as opposed to the extreme right, has not engaged in centre convergence, although, as Edwards shows, it can hardly be said to have engaged in a centrifugal radicalization of its programme. Berlusconi’s government was expected to implement a swathe of neoliberal, Thatcherite reforms of the pensions and welfare system, privatizations and a shake-up of other moribund sectors of the Italian economy. Yet, a combination of reticence over relinquishing control over state monopolies, to complement his existing private-interest monopolies in media and to a lesserextent in investment services, has led to a lack of competitive openness among newly privatized companies—less so than under the left-wing government of the late 1990s. Italy’s private sector remains most successful in its Third Italy manifestation, epitomized by the small independent firms of Veneto, Friuli and the centre region. Indeed, it is among these actors that Berlusconi has tried to court support, blocked in his reforms of employment legislation by Sergio Cofferati, Mayor of Bologna, and head of the Confederazione Generale Italiana del Lavoro (CGIL) union. In other policy areas, such as social policy and immigration, the swing away from the socially inclusive DC is more noticeable, with oppressive conservative-authoritarian (populist?) appeals.

Christian Democracy’s hegemonic occupation of the centre undoubtedly established the democratic core of the centre-right in Italy in the post-war period, but the right stricto sensu, represented by the MSI/Alleanza Nazionale (AN), has only recently begun to adapt its position to existing institutions, rather than promote the ideals of Mussolini’s Republic. The 1993 institutional reforms provided Gianfranco Fini with the opportunity to reject this heritage and reposition the new AN as a conservative party—in his eyes at least. Yet, as Ignazi demonstrates, there is still nostalgia among party cadres and some, if only a minority, of the electorate. Parties engaged in a move from pre- or anti-democratic right positions have to adopt a dual strategy: to convince their supporters that such an evolution does not abandon valid or valuable principles of party ideology, and at the same time convince other parties’ supporters that the shift is indeed a credible one.²

As we might expect, France represents a contrast in this respect. Given the far more limited nature of any fascist heritage, and the relative stability of the institutional framework for 45 years, the moderate right parties have had no concerns about establishing themselves in a centrist position. Indeed, the early years of the Fifth Republic saw a consolidation of the right bloc in the bipolar system through a convergence of former centrist groupings of the Fourth Republic and the more right-wing—and originally anti-system—Gaullists. Furthermore, the exceptionalism of France is reinforced among these three country-cases by the steadfast extremism of the Front National (FN). Evans and Ivaldi show that the party has remained resolutely anti-system, exploiting its protest potential by representing the self-perceived ‘forgotten’ of the French electorate, and has equally been resolutely kept on the margins by a moderate right that, at the national level at least, has refused to proffer any hope of coalition or even cooperation.

That this strategy on the part of both moderates and extremists is electorally and politically viable even if it is socially divisive is attested to by the abject failure of the splinter formation Mouvement National Républicain (MNR), formed in 1999 by Bruno Mégret, who wished to engage in some form of rapprochement with the Gaullists. This failure has been partially due to the lack of charismatic appeal of the kind provided by Jean-Marie Le Pen for the FN, and to underdeveloped party infrastructure and resources for the new movement. But equally the lack of will on the part of the governing right to court its radical neighbours, except in the notorious case of four regional council presidents in 1998, subsequently expelled from the Union pour la Démocratie Française (UDF), does not correspond with any electoral penalty. Cordell points out very clearly in this issue that the 2002 legislative elections show that landslide majorities are possible through cohesion of the mainstream right.

Yet, while at election time the French right may have finally found a level of cohesion, similar to the Italian case the French right has faced policy confusion in government since 2002. If all French parties can agree on one thing, it is that the traditional model of French capitalism and state structuration is increasingly anachronistic and unviable. Each successive government has attempted to reform it and, due to the piecemeal nature of the reforms and the subsequent greater or lesser failure, incumbents have been ousted partially as a result.

The Raffarin government appears no different, and Kuhn suggests this is in major part due to the dominance of a president with no clear ideological vision to allow sweeping reforms. While privatization is supported in principle, potential canards boîteux—the famous lame duck industries of the 1980s and 1990s for which France proved so reluctant to remove support—have continued to benefit from state and misallocated EU subsidies. Companies of symbolic worth and, perhaps more importantly, worth to France’s small number of right-wing majority shareholders are given crutch after crutch to support them through economic mismanagement and inefficiency. In unemployment benefit and income tax reforms, however, the government is avowedly right-wing, cutting both and benefiting only its own supporters in the process. Symptomatic of this heterogeneity in the government’s ideological position were two of the ministers appointed to the Raffarin government after the election victory: a neoliberal economic minister, Francis Mer, and a centrist social security minister, François Fillon.

It is clear that the reason for differing dynamics in the above cases is due to a complex interaction between voter demand and institutional constraints. In France, the majoritarian logic means that a separated third bloc cannot hope to attain power—centripetal convergence is the only hope of this. Equally, however, the FN retains its specificity by ignoring the dynamic demands of the system, and reaps the electoral rewards accordingly from voters for whom the notion of ‘centripetal convergence’ is entirely lacking. The Italian contrast, now also in a majoritarian system where AN has engaged in precisely such a strategy, and even the Northern League—now the radical right-wing populist party in Italy, according to Ignazi—has compromised sufficiently to be allowed to remain in a government that does not need its voting power in the legislature, must be put into the context of a system only recently characterized by a complete cycle of democratic alternation. In other words, under a new institutional framework, parties will shift significantly in their search for an equilibrium position within the party system encouraged by electoral dynamics.

In all cases, the major challenges to the right come from below and above—from the regions, and from Europe. In Spain, this has probably had the most noticeable effect. In moving away from its authoritarian roots, the PP was particularly quick to use the PSOE as a template for its own European policy. Llamazares explains that, under the premiership of González, the PSOE enjoyed a ‘statesmanship’ premium over Aznar. On assumption of power in the 1996, the European agenda promoted by Aznar was, however, one very much of intergovernmentalism and of close ties with the US. This Atlanticist approach would come back to haunt the PP in the 2004 elections, with the vociferously anti-US PSOE in line with other anti-war EU member-states such as France and Germany, and undoubtedly reaping some electoral benefit from this.

At the subnational level, the role of the Autonomous Communities has proved that the PP’s convergence upon the left-right centre has not been matched in a more progressive or consensual approach to the legitimization of other legitimate executive actors. The conclusion of Grau Creus’s article is clear: its refusal to accept the Autonomous Communities’ decision-making legitimacy at the national level is characteristic of its conservative nation-state-oriented institutional policy. Equally, its unilateralism at the national level has allowed the PSOE to exploit the regions—where regionalist parties such as the Catalan Convergència i Unió (CiU) and Basque Partido Nacionalista Vasco (PNV) challenge the nation-oriented PP for conservative support—as a forum of opposition. As with all European systems, which increasingly contain devolved levels of governance, horizontal exclusion from power can now be offset by vertical inclusion.

The Italian case presents a similar scenario. The European Union has proved a thorn in Berlusconi’s side, not least from its overt criticism of his media and other private-sector interests. As with many if not all of the Italian Prime Minister’s policy stances, this ‘intrusion’ in his personal matters has informed his government’s stance and resulted in the least pro-European of all post-war Italian governments. The usual ‘elite socialization’ dynamics of European Union politics have softened the executive line when antipathetic to Europe, as has the presence of a minority of pro-European Christian Democrats and increasingly pro-European AN leaders, including Gianfranco Fini in the Foreign Ministry.

The Northern League’s position on Europe has changed so substantially—from pro-federalist support to outright hostility—that Bossi’s rantings within the government count for little. Its Euroscepticism is also meant as a marker of its difference from other parties of the right, rather than an element of policy influence per se. However, Quaglia notes the growing presence of a rhetoric promoting ‘Italy’s national interest’ absent until now from government discourse. Certainly Europe has proved a useful scapegoat for many domestic woes, for instance the Single Currency and Italy’s high level of inflation, or the threats of the widening of EU membership and the immigration threat.

At the regional level too, alternatives to the governmental unilateralism of the Casa delle Libertà exist, particularly big-city mayors. The role of Cofferati in forcing the government to back down on its neoliberal employment laws shows the impact at the national level a local politician (and union leader) can have. The right’s view of devolved power has been ambivalent since Berlusconi’s withdrawal of support for the Bicamerale’s proposals on proactive devolution in 1998. The left-wing government enacted these proposals as policy anyway in 2001, but the right has eyed these powers suspiciously. The subnational powers are extensive, provinces enjoying jurisdiction in a wide array of strategic areas, and each region’s giunta regionale acting autonomously both in regional legislation and in external relations with the EU.

France’s EU relations are p...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• 1. Introduction
• The Mainstream Right
• The Right in Power
• The Right and Europe
• The Extreme Right
• Notes on Contributors
• Index