The Italian general election of 4 March 2018 was highly paradoxical in that it changed little or nothing while at the same time changing everything. What happened represented a kind of continuity in the groove of the dis-continuity which had been marked by the previous general election in 2013. The result was that the tide of change already underway in Italian politics was reinforced by the election outcome. On the one hand, though vote switches and changes in the distribution of the vote were at record levels, this, unlike the past, was not because of the emergence of new political protagonists. The main contenders remained the ones that had established themselves at the election five years earlier: a coalition of the centre left; one of the centre right, and the Movimento Cinque Stelle (Five-star Movement, M5s). As widely predicted, the election produced an initial stalemate , with no party or coalition having an overall majority, and it was not until 1 June that the new government took office. On the other hand, the election brought to power a âcoalition â consisting of two outsider, populist, parties, the Lega (League ) and the M5s, which, having negotiated and signed a âcontract for government â, declined to consider their arrangement a âcoalition â. In several respects, the situation has echoes and profound implications extending well beyond Italyâs borders. It reflected the recent turmoil in party systems and the difficulties of government formation in other countries such as Spain and Germany (Bosco and Verney 2016). It reflected the cross-national upsurge of populism . It added to Brexit, the fragility of the Eurozone and the EU-wide migration issue in seeming to put the whole European integration project at risk.
Italy has always been a kind of stimulating âpolitical laboratoryâ of democratic change in Europe and worldwide. It is a society where changes in party politics and in other political phenomena have taken place earlier than elsewhere or at least to an unusual or more extreme degree. It is enough to recall, among others, just two episodes, each of which occurred at different moments in time.
First, a quarter of a century ago, there was the end of the so-called âFirst Republic â and the decision of a particular political entrepreneur to âtake to the fieldâ with a new party: Silvio Berlusconi and his creation, Forza Italia (FI). He profoundly changed the ways of doing politics, his style of political communication becoming a sort of model. The idea of audience democracy theorised by Bernard Manin (1992) some years before Berlusconi entered politics, seems to encounter, in Berlusconiâs approach to politics and in his personal party, something very similar to the ideal type the French political philosopher had already described looking at the evolution of liberal and representative democracy in western countries generally.
Second, jumping ahead to a more recent period of time, a very specific and successful case of âtechno-populism â, that is the M5s, has been in the public eye internationally. This party is actually a significant challenge for representative democracy, mixing contrasting but closely related elements such as an anti-establishment stance, a web-based party model and a notion of direct democracy implemented through its online platform called, by no means coincidentally, âRousseau â. The M5s, running what has been only its second election campaign at the national level, has achieved the result of becoming a governing party.
This book therefore offers to tell the story of this remarkable event and its outcome for anyone interested in understanding either Italian politics or the uncertain future faced by the European and international systems in which Italy is a significant player. In the interests of inclusivity, we begin by providing, for those who do not already have it, the basic background information required to make sense of the material in the following chapters, covering, first, the line-ups among which voters were required to choose and then the institutional framework within which the election took place. From there we present the most salient features of the election outcome, the election context and the election campaign.
The Party Line-Ups and the Institutional Context
The main election contenders, in detail, were: the centre-left Partito Democratico (Democratic Party, PD) running in coalition with five other very small formations (with very little visibility in the campaign, none of them winning as much as three percent of the vote or more than a handful of seats apiece)1; the centre right , bringing together Berlusconiâs FI, Matteo Salviniâs League , Georgia Meloniâs Fratelli dâItalia (Brothers of Italy, FdI) and Raffaele Fittoâs Noi con lâItalia (roughly, âWe back Italyâ); the M5s.
The PD had emerged in 2007 as an amalgamation of former Christian Democrats and ex-Communistsâthe Democrazia Cristiana (Christian Democrats, DC) and the Partito Comunista Italiano (Italian Communist Party, PCI) having been the two largest parties in Italy from the end of the war until the aftermath of the collapse of the Berlin Wall in 1989. This had been a watershed event as much for Italy as for the rest of the world in that it had led the PCI to turn its back on communism (however conceived) as an ideal, and to change its name to become a non-communist party of the left. The DC, on the other hand, which had been the mainstay of every governing coalition since the war, nowâunder the weight of a massive corruption scandal known as Tangentopoli (or âBribe Cityâ)2 from 1992 to 1994âeffectively disintegrated as among other things, with the PCIâs transformation, it could no longer count on the anti-communist vote: its political role as the most reliable bulwark against communism had essentially become redundant.
That representatives of these two former parties ended up together in the PD was due to the party-system transformation that accompanied the post-1989 political upheavals. Prior to that time, the DC, as a centre party, had managed to sustain its position as the largest party and mainstay of all governing coalitions by capitalising on votersâ fears of the left and right extremesâthe PCI on the left and the neo-fascist Movimento Sociale Italiano (Italian Social Movement, MSI) on the rightâand therefore the unwritten agreement (known as the conventio ad excludendem ) between the DC and the smaller mainstream parties never to contemplate any kind of governing alliance with the PCI or the MSI, which were therefore permanently excluded from office. With the PCIâs transformation and the disintegration of the DC and its former allies, the party system as a whole underwent a transformation which from 1994 led to the emergence of two party coalitions, one of the centre right, the other of the centre left , each competing for overall majorities of seats, with ex-Christian Democrats being divided in their allegiance to one or the other of these two coalitions. The PD was thus eventually...