Italy's Contemporary Politics

James L. Newell

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000228441
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: European Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

In early 2020 Italy was a country whose political parties stood as significant obstacles in the way of resolution of its social and economic problems. The purpose of this book is to help the reader to understand how Italian politics had reached this point. It does this by tracing the most significant processes of political, economic and social change to have marked Italian history in recent years back to their roots in the Italian political system as it emerged at the end of the Second World War. Starting with the restoration of democracy, the volume discusses the post-war party system and how it came under increasing pressure from the mid-1970s. From there it discusses the political upheavals of the early 1990s and the transformations they led to, the rise and fall of Silvio Berlusconi, and the watershed election of 2018. In short, the book provides a narrative. Narratives tell us who we are, where we have come from, where we are now and where we are going. Without them, we cannot make sense of the world. At the end of this narrative, if it has done its job properly, Italian politics and current affairs should 'make sense' if before they seemed confusing.

1 Introduction

Italian politics in early 2020

In early 2020 Italy was ruled by a coalition, which, unusually for an Italian government, appeared to be rather strong. Voting intention polls suggested that support for the governing parties had been stable for several weeks, while other surveys suggested that Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte’s personal approvals ratings had increased markedly.¹ The opposition parties were under pressure to ensure that their criticisms were constructive. This was hardly surprising. The pandemic of coronavirus disease (COVID-19) was killing approximately 600 people per day; the health service in parts of the country was struggling to cope; schools, offices and factories were closed; and citizens were confined to their homes. The tendency for incumbent governments to enjoy unusually high levels of popular support at times of national emergency is well known.

In early 2020, therefore, the Italian Government’s hold on office seemed much more secure than it had done at the beginning of the year. Then, governing together had meant that the parties of the ruling coalition were involved in a prisoner’s dilemma. That is, the action each had to take to advance its own interests could not but damage their joint interest in remaining stably in office.

First, there was the MoVimento 5 Stelle (M5S—Five Star Movement), an anti-establishment protest party, founded in 2009, which initially came to prominence in local elections in 2012. Since it sought the support of voters from across the political spectrum, it had always refused to locate itself in left-right terms and so lacked a clear ideological profile. Consequently, it was struggling to retain support. In government since its triumph at the general election of 2018, it gave the appearance of being absorbed by the very political system it had promised protesters it would overhaul. Regional elections had suggested that its right-wing voters were deserting it for the populist chauvinism of the opposition Lega (League), while its left-wing voters were refusing to turn out. Under pressure, therefore, to take political initiatives that would stem the outflow of support, its leader, the Minister of Foreign Affairs Luigi Di Maio, could not help taking stances that often provoked tensions with his governing partners.

Second, there was Italia Viva, a party formed the previous September to further the political ambitions of its founder, the former Prime Minister, Matteo Renzi. Offering up as the basis for his party’s appeal a modernization narrative built around the ideas of equal opportunities; embracing the challenges of globalization; cosmopolitanism, and further European integration, he had a sufficient number of parliamentary seats to deprive the Government of a majority. However, he had not been able to garner support for his party in the country above single figures. To avoid political marginalization he had sought, like the M5S, political visibility at every turn, supporting the Government, yes, but being critical and goading his partners at every opportunity.

Finally, there was the Partito Democratico (PD—Democratic Party), a centre-left party under Lazio regional president, Nicola Zingaretti, formed in 2007 through an amalgamation of ex-communists and former Christian democrats. As such, it too suffered from the lack of a clear ideological profile around which it might construct a solid base of support. However, it could do little to try to develop one, as it had to spend most of its time in government firefighting by mediating between a modernizing Renzi and an anti-establishment Di Maio, both of whom were in search of visibility.

In opposition were the three parties, which, in 2018, had tried but narrowly failed to win an overall majority as an electoral coalition of the centre-right. The largest was the League, which had emerged at the beginning of the 1990s as a regional autonomy party called the Lega Nord (Northern League). Since Matteo Salvini had become its leader in December 2013 at the age of 40, it had sought to reinvent itself as a right-wing nationalist party, dropping the word ‘northern’ from its name in 2018 in order to extend its appeal to the country as a whole. The second largest party, under the 43-year-old Georgia Meloni, was Fratelli d’Italia (Brothers of Italy), whose ideological and organizational roots could be traced back to the neo-fascist Movimento Sociale Italiano (Italian Social Movement) formed in 1946. Finally, there was Silvio Berlusconi’s Forza Italia (Forward Italy, or Come on Italy!), formed in 1994 as a means of defending the entrepreneur’s economic interests by bringing together, in that year’s elections, a coalition of parties capable of defeating the left. Once Italy’s largest party, it had gone into decline since its founder had lost the premiership in 2011 and by late 2019 it was polling in single figures.

In short, Italian party politics in early 2020 seemed rather straightforward (Table 1.1). On the one hand, a governing coalition, securely in office, commanded 348 of the 630 seats in the Camera dei Deputati (Chamber of Deputies) and 164 of the 321 seats in the Senato della Repubblica (Senate of the Republic). Opposing it was a cohesive coalition of the centre-right led by Salvini’s League.

Appearances were deceptive, however. For one thing, the party system was far from being stable. Aggregate electoral volatility had been on an upward trend since the beginning of the 1980s and in 2013 and 2018 it had been higher than at any other election since the Second World War with the sole exception of 1994 (Emanuele and Chiaramonte, 2020, fig. 2). From that year, elections had been bipolar competitions between party coalitions, of the centre-left and centre-right, each competing for overall majorities of seats. This had ended in 2013 with the explosive growth of a significant third force, the above-mentioned M5S, thus considerably complicating the process of government formation.

Underlying the instability was the chronic weakness of the political parties, that is, their lack of stable and extensive extra-parliamentary organizations and their lack of public authority. Because of this, and because they were having to appeal to an increasingly volatile electorate, they had come to operate with increasingly short-term horizons and were consequently unable to develop agreed-upon long-term strategies for the future of the country. A good example of this was the debate that had surrounded the so-called plastic tax as part of the previous autumn’s budget discussions. A reasonable observer might have expected the debate to focus on the role of the tax in a strategy for tackling the climate change that has since been implicated in the spread of COVID-19.² Instead, it focused almost exclusively on the immediate-term costs of the tax for consumers, on the potential political costs for the parties, and therefore on what additional measures could be taken to offset them.

Table 1.1 Governing and opposition parties in the Chamber of Deputies and Senate, number of seats, early 2020

	Chamber of Deputies	Senate
Governing parties
Five Star Movement	203	98
Democratic Party	88	35
Liberi e Uguali	11	5
Italia Viva	30	17
Others	12	15
Opposition parties
League	125	60
Fratelli d’Italia	35	18
Forza Italia	97	61
Others	19	9
Total seats	630	321

Source: author’s compilation based on data provided by the Chamber of Deputies (www.camera.it/leg18/46) and the Senate (www.senato.it/leg/18/BGT/Schede/Gruppi/Grp.html).

The country’s political weaknesses, then, constituted significant obstacles in the way of the development of strategies for overcoming its economic and social problems, of which two stood out. The first was the lack of growth. Since 1990 growth rates have been much below what they were 45 years after the end of the war and below those of the other large European countries and the USA. This is a problem because the period from 1970 saw a number of important economic and social changes, described later in the book, which initiated a long-term upward trend in the level of public debt. By 2014 it had reached 135% of gross domestic product (GDP), and it has remained at around this level ever since. Consequently, Italian governments find themselves in a catch-22 situation. High levels of debt and the large proportions of tax revenue that must be spent on interest payments considerably limit the scope for using public expenditure to stimulate growth. A lack of growth makes it difficult to pay down the public debt.

Inward investment, as an alternative source of growth, is difficult to attract owing to inefficiencies in the legal and administrative systems. Vested interests often stand in the way of reform. For example, in 2006 the Minister for Economic Development, Pierluigi Bersani, sought to remove restrictions on competition in a number of markets including that for taxi services. However, in the latter case a ferocious drivers’ strike that had the tacit support of the then leader of the opposition, Berlusconi, forced the minister partially to retreat. There are huge political obstacles in the way of attempts to reduce the debt through tax rises and spending cuts. They include unemployment (at 9.7% in September 2019), absolute poverty (affecting over 5m. people in that year) and a level of GDP per capita which in 2018 was still below the level it had reached just before the global financial crash in 2008. The annual budget round provides an opportunity for opposition parties, during parliamentary discussions, to exploit divisions between spending ministers, thus exerting additional spending pressure.

Second, the country has an ageing population. This has put pressure on the pensions system. On 7 March 2018 the European Commission published its annual country report on Italy, noting that the old-age dependency ratio stood at 34.3% and was forecast to exceed 60% by 2045 as the country’s fertility rate was set to remain low. Meanwhile, thanks to the ‘brain drain’, net immigration had been declining and in the poorer southern regions it was negative (European Commission, 2018). Many argue, therefore, that immigration is essential to helping Italy to overcome its economic problems, especially to ensure the sustainability of the pensions system, since immigrants are on average younger than Italians and have a higher fertility rate.

Once again, politics gets in the way. Since 2008 austerity and refugee crises have made it possible for the League to make political capital by drawing on popular resentments to convince large numbers of citizens that migration represents a security threat. Measures to stem migrant flows have done little to stop the spread of intolerance and xenophobia. In February 2017 PD Minister of the Interior, Marco Minniti, signed an agreement with Libya providing for the financing and training of the Libyan coastguard. Sea arrivals and asylum applications, which in 2017 had numbered 119,369 and 130,119, respectively, fell to 23,370 and 53,596, r...