Italian Politics: Exploring the Dynamics of Political Change 0415325986, 9780415325981

Table of contents :
Cover
Endorsements Page
Half Title
Title Page
Copyright Page
Table of Contents
List of Figures
List of Tables
List of Abbreviations
Acknowledgements
Introduction
1 A Tale of Two Republics
2 Government and the State
3 The Italian Party System and the Electorate
4 Organised Interests and Social Movements
5 Political Corruption, Organised Crime and the Administration of Justice
6 Italy and the Wider World
7 Conclusion: The Italy of Berlusconi and His Successors
Index

Citation preview

‘James L. Newell has been observing Italian politics both from outside and inside the country for many years. This twofold standpoint has led the author to develop an original reading of the First and, more extensively, Second Republic, which is a well-known ‘political laboratory’ also significant for other contemporary democracies. The book covers the main national political ages, various institutions and actors, and specific phenomena and events that give the reader a better understanding of the complexity of current Italian politics.’ Luigi Ceccarini, University of Urbino Carlo Bo, Italy; President of the Italian Society of Electoral Studies (SISE) ‘In this short, erudite work James L. Newell, as one of our foremost Italian specialists, brings his highly perceptive analysis and insights to create a vivid explanation of Italian politics today through the historic lens of the watershed period of the early 1990s, leaving us with an intriguing sense of what might still be to come.’ Martin J. Bull, Professor of Politics, University of Salford, UK

Italian Politics

This book presents a comprehensive and incisive exploration of the intricacies of the Italian political system. Written in a lucid and informative style, the work features: • an examination of Italian political history from 1943 to the present day • an analysis of the governmental system, the constitutional framework, the core institutions, the electoral system and the key parties • an analysis of the role of contemporary pressure groups and social movements including environmental, labour and institutional organisations • discussions of important topical issues, such as corruption and organised crime • an exploration of Italian foreign policy towards the EU, the US and the wider world • a wide range of examples, tables and figures. Italian Politics: Exploring the Dynamics of Political Change is an indispensable resource for students and scholars delving into Italian politics, Italian studies, European politics/studies, political systems and comparative politics. James L. Newell is former Professor of Politics at the University of Salford, UK, and Adjunct Professor at the University of Urbino, Italy. He is the founding co-editor of the journal, Contemporary Italian Politics and co-founder of the UK Political Studies Association’s Italian Politics Specialist Group.

Italian Politics

Exploring the Dynamics of Political Change

James L. Newell

Designed cover image: Getty Images First published 2024 by Routledge 4 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2024 James L. Newell The right of James L. Newell to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Newell, James, author. Title: Italian politics : exploring the dynamics of political change / James L. Newell. Description: Abingdon, Oxon ; New York, NY : Routledge, 2024. | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Summary: “This book presents a comprehensive and incisive exploration of the intricacies of the Italian political system. Written in a lucid and informative style, the work features: an examination of Italian political history from 1943 to the present day; an analysis of the governmental system, the constitutional framework, the core institutions, the electoral system and the key parties; analysis of the role of contemporary pressure groups and social movements including environmental, labour and institutional organizations; discussion of important topical issues such as corruption and organized crime; an exploration of Italian foreign policy towards the EU, the US and the wider world; illustrated with a wide range of examples, tables and figures. Italian Politics: Exploring the Dynamics of Political Change is an indispensable resource for students and scholars delving into Italian politics, Italian studies, European politics/studies, political systems, and comparative politics”— Provided by publisher. Identifiers: LCCN 2023032092 (print) | LCCN 2023032093 (ebook) | ISBN 9780415325981 (hardback) | ISBN 9780415325998 (paperback) | ISBN 9780203422120 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Italy—Politics and government—History—20th century. | Italy—Politics and government—History—21st century. | Political corruption—Italy—History— 20th century. | Political corruption—Italy—History—21st century. | Organized crime—Italy— History—20th century. | Organized crime—Italy—History—21st century. | Italy—Foreign relations—History—20th century. | Italy—Foreign relations—History—21st century. Classification: LCC JN5448 .N48 2024 (print) | LCC JN5448 (ebook) | DDC 364.1/3230945—dc23/eng/20230731 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023032092 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023032093 ISBN: 978-0-415-32598-1 (hbk) ISBN: 978-0-415-32599-8 (pbk) ISBN: 978-0-203-42212-0 (ebk) DOI: 10.4324/9780203422120 Typeset in Times New Roman by codeMantra

Contents

List of figures List of tables List of abbreviations Acknowledgements

ix xi xiii xv

Introduction

1

1 A tale of two republics

4

2 Government and the state

29

3 The Italian party system and the electorate

55

4 Organised interests and social movements

85

5 Political corruption, organised crime and the administration of justice

103

6 Italy and the wider world

128

7 Conclusion: The Italy of Berlusconi and his successors

147

Index163

Figures

1.1 3.1 4.1 4.2 5.1

Index of total volatility, Chamber of Deputies, 1948–20185 Turnout at Italian general elections, 1948–2022 76 Italy GDP growth (annual %), 1961–2021 92 Weekly church attendance (% respondents) in Italy, 1968–2008 99 Persons reported for membership of Mafia-type associations per 100,000 inhabitants, 1996–98 114

Tables

1.1 1.2 2.1 3.1 3.2 3.3

Governments of the ‘First Republic’ Results of the 2018 Italian general election, Chamber of Deputies Presidents of the Italian Republic Failed parties of the ‘Second Republic’ Governments of the ‘Second Republic’ Left–right self-placement and party voted for in 2018: ‘Winners’ and ‘losers’ of globalisation 7.1 Results of the 2022 Italian general election, Chamber of Deputies

8 23 35 64 69 79 156

Abbreviations

Eu AD AN AP ARCI Art. 1 CCD CD CDU CGIL CI CISL CLN CpE CPI CSM DC Demo. S DS ECB EEC EMU EPAV EU FdI FI GDP GIP GS GUP IdV IMF

‘More Europe’ (Più Europa) Democratic Alliance (Alleanza Democratica) National Alliance (Alleanza Nazionale) Popular Alternative (Alternativa Popolare) Italian Recreational and Cultural Association (Assocazione Ricreativa e ­Culturale Italiana) Article One – Democratic and Progressive Movement (Articolo Uno – ­Movimento Democratico e Progressista) Christian Democratic Centre (Centro Cristiano Democratico) Democratic Centre (Centro Democratico) United Christian Democrats (Cristiani Democratici Uniti) General Confederation of Italian Labour (Confederazione Generale Italiana del Lavoro) Civici e Innovatori Italian Confederation of Workers’ Unions (Confederazione Italiana Sindacati Lavoratori) Committee for National Liberation (Comitato per la Liberazione Nazionale) Centristi per l’Europa Corruption Perceptions Index High Council of the Judiciary (Consiglio Superiore della Magistratura) Christian Democrats (Democrazia Cristiana) Democrazia Solidale Left Democrats (Democratici di Sinistra) European Central Bank European Economic Community Economic and Monetary Union Edelweiss Popolare Autonomista Valdostano European Union Brothers of Italy (Fratelli d’Italia) Forza Italia Gross Domestic Product judge for the preliminary investigations (giudice delle indagini preliminari) Large South (Grande Sud) judge for the preliminary hearing (giudice dell’udienza preliminare) Italy of Values (Italia dei Valori) International Monetary Fund

xiv Abbreviations IV LeU LN M5S MAIE MSI NATO NCD NcI NRRP PATT PCI PD PdCI PdL PDS PLI PM PPI PpI PR PRC PRI PSDI PSI PSLI PSU RI RnP SC SD SDI SGP SMSP SVP TAV TI UD UDC UdC UDEUR UIL UPV UV VdA-APF

Italia Viva Free and Equal (Liberi e Uguali) Northern League (Lega Nord) Five-Star Movement (Movimento Cinque Stelle) Associative Movement of Italians Abroad (Movimento Associativo Italiani all’Estero) Italian Social Movement (Movimento Sociale Italiano) North Atlantic Treaty Organisation New Centre Right (Nuovo Centro Destra) ‘We who are with Italy’ (Noi con l’Italia) National Recovery and Resilience Plan Trentino Tyrolean Autonomist Party (Partito Autonomista Trentino Tirolese) Italian Communist Party (Partito Comunista Italiano) Democratic Party (Partito Democratico) Party of Italian Communists (Partito dei Comunisti Italiani) People of Freedom (Popolo della Libertà) Democratic Party of the Left (Partito Democratico della Sinistra) Italian Liberal Party (Partito Liberale Italiano) public prosecutor (pubblico ministero) Italian People’s Party (Partito Popolare Italiano) Popolari per l’Italia proportional representation Party of Communist Refoundation (Partito della Rifondazione Comunista) Italian Republican Party (Partito Repubblicano Italiano) Italian Social Democratic Party (Partito Socialista Democratico Italiano) Italian Socialist Party (Partito Socialista Italiano) Italian Socialist Workers’ Party (Partito Socialista Lavoratori Italiani) Unified Socialist Party (Partito Socialista Unificato) Italian Renewal (Rinnovamento Italiano) The Rose in the Fist (La Rosa nel Pugno) Civic Choice (Scelta Civica) Democratic Left (Sinistra Democratica) Italian Democratic Socialists (Socialisti Democratici Italiani) Stability and Growth Pact single-member simple plurality South Tyrolean People’s Party (Südtiroler Volkspartei) high-speed train (Treno ad Alta Velocità) Transparency International Democratic Union (Unione Democratica) Union of the Centre (Unione di Centro) Unione of Christian and Centre Democrats (Unione dei Democratici Cristiani e Democratici di Centro) Union of Democrats for Europe (Unione dei Democratici per l’Europa) Italian Workers’ Union (Unione Italiana dei Lavoratori) Progressive Valdostan Union (Union Valdôtaine Progressiste) Valdostan Union (Union Valdôtaine) Vallée d’Aoste Autonomie Progrès Fédéralisme

Acknowledgements

Special thanks are due to Paolo Natale and Simon Parker for providing the framework for the book and the inspiration for the writing of much of the material. I would also like to thank Meghan Flood and Andrew Taylor for their sterling work in seeing the book through to completion. Elizabeth Hart did an outstanding job editing the text. Finally, I owe a debt of gratitude to the many Italian colleagues and colleagues of other nationalities who have provided stimulating conversations at various conferences over the years and who have thereby also contributed to the writing of the book. The responsibility for any errors in the text is mine alone.

Introduction

I wrote most of this book at my home in Manchester, UK, a city that has changed out of all ­recognition since I moved there in 1991. From having been a decaying city suffering from the decline of the Fordist manufacturing and the heavy industry on which it was once based, it is now on its way (Brexit permitting) to being a post-industrial city whose centre has become home to an ever increasing number of high-rise tower blocks, leading it more and more to resemble Manhattan with every day that passes. This set of circumstances can stand as a metaphor for the book’s main theme, which is that in the early 1990s, just when I moved to Manchester, Italy underwent a series of closely related political upheavals, such that, since then, almost ­nothing in Italian politics has remained the same. Some readers will, I have no doubt, regard that statement with scepticism and be ­reminded of Tomasi di Lampedusa’s famous aphorism about everything changing so that ­everything remains the same. In this respect, in the early 1990s, two foreign observers of I­talian politics came to very different conclusions about what was going on at the time. On the one hand, Mark Gilbert (1995) wrote a book entitled, The Italian Revolution: The End of Politics, Italian Style?, which implicitly considered the crisis of the time as one betokening a profound rupture. On the other hand, Paul Ginsborg (1996), in a piece published a year later, argued that it was ‘important to insist that events in Italy to date [had] not been a revolution, in any meaningful sense of the word’. It is of course true that there were at the time considerable efforts made ‘to absorb and exorcise the innovations and consequent traumas’ (1996: 35) of these years and that the period since then has revealed that there are any number of elements of continuity with past political practices. Nevertheless, some 25 to 30 years on, it seems to me that Gilbert’s interpretation of the events’ significance is the more accurate of the two, for, in almost all of the fields I cover in this book – the institutions of government and the state, the political parties and voting behaviour, organised interests and social movements, political corruption, organised crime and the administration of justice and Italy in the wider world – there have been profound changes triggered by or directly related to the events of the early 1990s, such that the events themselves can rightly be regarded as representing a genuine watershed in Italian politics. Of course, ‘watershed’, ‘earthquake’ and other geographical and geophysical terms have been so frequently used in analyses of Italian politics that there is a real risk that their use now obscures as much as it illuminates. Yet the sense that the early 1990s represent a watershed ­moment like no other in Italian politics since the war is suggested by commentators’ frequent use of the terms ‘First’ and ‘Second’ Republic to refer to the periods before and since then. Of course, the terms are not to be taken literally. There has been no regime transition, and the ­essentials of the Constitution, notwithstanding reforms, remain those that were laid down by the Constituent Assembly elected in 1946. However, the fact that they continue to be routinely used

DOI: 10.4324/9780203422120-1

2 Introduction suggests that my sense that the 1990s marked a fundamental change of direction in all three of the basic elements of political life – politics, policy and polity – is one that is widely shared. So one purpose of this book could perhaps be described as that of setting out, in these three respects, what Italian politics looked like in the ‘first’ republican period, what happened in the early 1990s and how this created the conditions for what Italian politics looks like now. Among other things, the early 1990s represented the beginning of a period of acceleration in the processes of globalisation and European integration. Consequently, much of what was the very distinctive character of the Italian politics of the early post-war years has now been lost, and its main features increasingly reflect those of the politics of other advanced liberal democracies – just as, to return to my metaphor, the centre of Manchester increasingly resembles Manhattan. The other purpose of the book is to explain the complexities of Italian politics to those less familiar with it. To that end, the book begins with a historical account, tracing the main lines of development in Italian politics as they have unfolded since the war, so that the reader can appreciate how the current ‘state of play’ has been shaped by the past. Given the book’s other purpose, to argue for the 1990s as a historical direction-changing moment, I refer back frequently to the first chapter in the chapters that follow. In Chapter 2, I explore the institutions of government and the state, as these provide the framework, the rules and the procedures within which and according to which political activity takes place, and an understanding of whose functioning is therefore essential if a country’s politics itself is to be understood. Chapter 3 considers the country’s political parties, without which democracy, understood as rule by the people, would be impossible, along with voting and elections, the principle institutions through which representatives are held accountable to those they represent. As we shall see, since the early 1990s, Italy, like other democracies, has shifted from being a polity in which party politics was a more or less well-structured and therefore predictable affair to being a sort of battleground between populist forces in which political behaviour is much more fluid, open and unpredictable than it was before the 1990s. Of course, parties and elections are by no means the only vehicle through which citizens are able to influence the political process and not even – perhaps – the most important, so Chapter 4 considers the other important vehicles available to them: pressure groups and social movements. Chapter 5 then moves on to consider the substance of political competition and interaction, the third of the three dimensions of politics – policy – by discussing three closely related issues that have had a high-profile and almost permanent place on the agenda of public debate in Italy since the war: corruption, organised crime and the administration of justice. I seek to explain their high salience, once again, by tracing their roots back to the past – in this case to the circumstances surrounding the emergence of the polity in the mid-nineteenth century – and, once again, the 1990s are significant, with the political debut of Silvio Berlusconi in 1994 having played a significant role in the especially high salience of the justice issue since then. The inclusion of Chapter 6 – looking at Italian foreign policy and Italy’s place in the wider world – has been driven by the recognition that the days when ‘foreign policy’, broadly understood, only concerned the country’s foreign ministry have long gone and that we now live in a world in which international organisations and their policies penetrate domestic policy-making structures at every level, creating considerable constraints on state action: a theme I return to on multiple occasions throughout the book. Finally, Chapter 7 attempts to draw the threads of the preceding discussion together by considering the quality of Italian democracy in the round, by highlighting the distinctive characteristics of political behaviour in Italy in the early twenty-first century as compared with the past and by looking forward to the prospects for Italian democracy in light of the outcome of the general election of September 2022. This has resulted in the victory and in the assumption of government office of the most right-wing coalition since the war, a coalition led by the country’s

Introduction  3 first female Prime Minister, Giorgia Meloni, whose party’s deepest organisational and ideological antecedents stretch back to Mussolini and the neo-Fascist Italian Social Movement founded in 1946. Prediction is hazardous, and so most writers in the field of politics avoid it, but to do so is cowardly in my view. My prediction is that the Meloni Government will not see the reemergence of Fascism but that there will be a degree of what has come to be called ‘democratic backsliding’: a decline in the democratic characteristics of the political system. I hope (in this latter respect at least) that I am proved wrong. References Gilbert, Mark (1995), The Italian Revolution: The End of Politics, Italian Style?, London: Routledge. Ginsborg, Paul (1996), ‘Explaining Italy’s Crisis’, pp. 19–39 in Stephen Gundle and Simon Parker (eds), The New Italian Republic: From the Fall of the Berlin Wall to Berlusconi, London and New York: Routledge.

1

A tale of two republics

Introduction In the spring of 2022, Italy was governed by a ‘national unity coalition’ headed by the former president of the European Central Bank (ECB), Mario Draghi. He had taken office on 13 February 2021 in circumstances that were eloquent about the nature of the country’s parties and party system and about the workings of the country’s democratic institutions in the early twenty-first century. In the first place, the political parties were, compared to those that had structured citizens’ voting choices until the early 1990s, fragile entities, in the sense that they enjoyed little public authority. True, mistrust of public institutions and politicians had always been relatively widespread in Italy, but, during the initial post-war decades, the main political parties had had mass memberships and extensive extra-parliamentary organisations. Under these circumstances, voters had been relatively stable in their voting habits, seeing in the parties the representatives of the groups to which they themselves belonged. The parties of early twenty-first-century Italy had, in comparison, few members and little by way of a presence in civil society.1 Voters were much more volatile in their voting behaviour (Figure 1.1).2 Under these circumstances, the parties had come to operate with increasingly short time horizons, finding it difficult to develop agreed-upon long-term strategies for the country. If this undermined their public authority, then their lack of public authority made it difficult for them to develop authoritative strategies, in a vicious circle. So the advent of the Draghi Government had, in the first place, been due to the actions of political parties whose profiles were reflections of their fragility. For instance, Matteo Renzi’s Italia Viva (IV), the main protagonist of the events leading to the formation of the Draghi Government, was a personal party (a party formed to further the political ambitions of its founder) that had only come into existence in September 2019. Moreover, it had done so not as the expression of societal demands but simply as the result of parliamentary arithmetic, for it was the product of Renzi’s decision to stage a breakaway from the centre-left Partito Democratico (Democratic Party, PD) – then in government under law professor, Giuseppe Conte, with the populist Movimento Cinque Stelle (Five-Star Movement, M5S) – taking with him a sufficiently large number of parliamentarians to make him decisive for the Government’s maintenance of its parliamentary majority. Consequently, it was Renzi’s decision to withdraw his support for the Government that was the most significant of the factors responsible for the arrival in office of Draghi. In the second place, the formation of the Draghi Government reflected the fragmented bipolarity of Italy’s party system. From the early 1990s, elections had been competitions between two main electoral coalitions – one of the centre left, the other of the centre right – each competing for overall majorities in the Chamber of Deputies and the Senate. At the election of 2013, DOI: 10.4324/9780203422120-2

A tale of two republics  5 45.0

39.3

40.0

36.7

Total Volatility

35.0 30.0 25.0 20.0

16.3

15.0

15.7

14.1 10.2

8.5

10.0

5.3

3.7

5.0 0.0

26.7

20.4

’48

’53

’58

’63

’68

5.6

’72

8.1

9.2

12.3

4.9

’76

’79

8.2 ’83

’87

’92

’94 ’96

’01

’06

11.3

’08

’13 ’18

Figure 1.1  Index of total volatility, Chamber of Deputies, 1948–2018 (Chiaramonte and Paparo, 2019: 266

the explosive emergence of the M5S, capitalising on popular hostility to the established parties and drawing support from across the left–right spectrum, had suggested that left–right, bipolar party competition might be undermined by a new establishment–anti-establishment dimension of conflict. But, since September 2019, this had come to seem less likely, as from then the M5S had been in government with the PD and the small Liberi e Uguali (Free and Equal, LeU) to the PD’s left, while the three parties in opposition to the Government had all been located on the centre right. Of these, the media magnate, Silvio Berlusconi’s, Forza Italia (FI), was another personal party, from 1994 the mainstay of the centre right but now a minor formation thanks to the declining political profile of its aging leader. Fratelli d’Italia (Brothers of Italy, FdI) was a far-right party whose ideological and organisational antecedents extended back to the Movimento Sociale Italiano (Italian Social Movement, MSI), the neo-Fascist party formed in 1946 by former officials in Benito Mussolini’s Repubblica di Salò. Finally, the Lega (League) was originally a secessionist party, one that had emerged in the late 1980s as the Lega Nord (Northern League, LN), reflecting the country’s distinctive north–south regional disparities, but which its leader from 2013, Matteo Salvini, had re-branded as a right-wing nationalist party to enable it to escape from its northern ghetto. By themselves, the three parties of the centre right were unable to command a parliamentary majority but nor, thanks to Renzi, were the former governing parties. Under these circumstances, the formation of a parliamentary majority capable of sustaining in office a new government came to depend crucially on the actions of the President of the Republic. In the third place, then, the formation of the Draghi Government was revealing of the institutional dialogue informing the process of government formation in Italy. In accordance with the 1948 Constitution, prime ministers are appointed by the President who, as head of state, is always mindful of the capacity of the person so appointed to form a government capable of commanding a parliamentary majority. Sometimes – as, for example, in the aftermath of an election won by a party coalition enjoying a clear seat majority – the answer to the question of whom to appoint is obvious and the President needs merely to appoint the coalition leader. In circumstances like those of February 2021, the President has considerably more discretion. Had he, in view of the Conte Government’s difficulties, indicated a willingness to dissolve Parliament, it

6  A tale of two republics is a plausible conjecture that, in reaction, Conte would have succeeded in finding a sufficient number of responsabili3 from the ranks of the opposition willing to help him remain in office. However, President Sergio Matarella stated that, owing to the COVID-19 emergency, he would not dissolve Parliament and instead called on the parties to ‘pass a vote of confidence in a highprofile government’. This was one that was not to be identified ‘with any political formula’ and that would deal, ‘in the shortest time possible’, with the challenges of the pandemic and the National Recovery and Resilience Plan (NRRP) called for within the framework of the EU’s postCOVID recovery package, Next Generation EU. In short, in using his power of appointment to confer the office of Prime Minister on Draghi, President Matarella was able to draw on the banker’s considerable prestige to generate a parliamentary majority to sustain him, and, indeed, once appointed, Draghi was able to draw in behind him the support of political parties keen to join a government that would have responsibility for managing the funds likely to flow in from the EU following presentation, by the 30 April deadline, of Italy’s NRRP. Only FdI and a handful of parliamentarians on the left remained in opposition. If this made Draghi a very powerful prime minister as Italian prime ministers go, then the counterpart to this was that the ‘national unity’ coalition he led might weaken him considerably as soon as the COVID emergency had passed and the parties began jockeying for position, as the next general election, which had to be held no later than the spring of 2023, drew near. Against this background, the purpose of this opening chapter is to place Italy’s politics in their historical context by tracing their main lines of development from the end of the Second World War down to the present. If Italian politics is often difficult for the outsider to understand, then this is partly because past events have conspired to make it so. Consequently, looking back at the past is part of what is required in order to make the current Italian political landscape intelligible. With this in mind, the remainder of the chapter is divided into the following four sections, each of which is divided from the previous one by a significant historical watershed. The first section covers the political system of the so-called ‘First Republic’ up to 1994. ‘First Republic’ is a term that was originally coined by journalists to refer to the period before the early 1990s party-system transformation which, as we shall see, was partly a consequence of the domestic reverberations of the collapse of the Berlin Wall in 1989. The party-system transformation, although not giving rise to a change of regime as such, changed the ‘logic’ underlying processes of government formation and seemed initially as though it might give rise to significant constitutional change. Consequently, although sometimes denigrated as misleading terms (as the constitutional essentials remain the ones laid down in 1948), ‘First’ and ‘Second’ Republic have tended to remain in use as shorthand expressions to refer to the periods before and after the early 1990s. The second section, thus, covers the politics of the ‘Second Republic’ up to the 2013 election marking the emergence of the M5S and the effective end of what can be referred to as ‘the Berlusconi era’ (Gibelli, 2010: 7): an era in which the entrepreneur and his role in politics constituted the main line of division across which the parties competed, such that Berlusconi could be regarded as the main ‘agenda setter’ in Italian politics.4 After 2013, although he remained a significant player, his role came increasingly to be confined to reacting to agendas set by other, more significant, players. The third section considers the period from 2013 to the present. The final section concludes. The politics of the ‘First Republic’ One of the most telling concepts used in relation to the period immediately after the fall of Mussolini in July 1943 is that of ‘the continuity of the state’, a term coined by the historian Claudio Pavone (1995) and referring to the fact that, notwithstanding the upheavals that followed the

A tale of two republics  7 dictator’s arrest and imprisonment, the transition from the Fascist regime to the republican was in fact managed by state institutions that were at no point overthrown, ceased to function or lost control of the process of transition itself (Pareo, 2020). Consequently, while it is true that the demise of the monarchy (with the outcome of the referendum of 2 June 1946) and the promulgation of the republican Constitution (at the end of 1947) represented significant institutional ruptures, the weight of the Allied presence, the improvised nature of the Comitato per la Liberazione Nazionale (Committee for National Liberation, CLN) and the political compromises that gave rise to the elections for the Constituent Assembly (most importantly the inclusion of the CLN parties in the Government from April 1944) were decisive. They meant that the Resistance movement was never able to lay claim to being the legitimate authority in the liberated regions of the north and thus to engineer any kind of ‘revolutionary’ rupture. And it meant, too, that pockets of authoritarianism in the state machine outlived the fall of Fascism and were allowed to survive thanks to the development of the Cold War (leading the Socialists and Communists to be depicted as ‘enemies within’) with the result that, in a number of instances, constitutional provisions for long remained dead letters. For example, it was not until the late 1960s that the enabling legislation providing for the setting up of regional administrations was passed, largely because the Partito Comunista Italiano (Italian Communist Party, PCI), while treated as a ‘pariah’ party at national level, was often able to find allies with whom to govern in local councils, with the result that the governing Democrazia Cristiana (Christian Democrats, DC) were fearful that the legislation would create an additional power base for the very party they opposed as part of their raison d’être. The DC and the PCI were, then, the two largest of the CLN parties to emerge with the fall of Fascism. They were able to consolidate their positions thanks to the popular authority they enjoyed as anti-Fascist parties dominating the Resistance movement and therefore to their ability to become mass organisations. This in turn ensured that they would be the main agents in the reconstruction of interest groups after the fall of Fascism, and this, together with their development of flanking organisations and their control of local authorities – especially in the northeastern and central regions, respectively, where they were able to develop territorially based political subcultures – meant that they became the main channels through which group demands were communicated to political decision-makers. As a result, instead of acting as mediators, the political parties tended to act as ‘transmission belts’ for unaggregated group demands – which in turn perpetuated clientelistic tendencies in the management of power relations, tendencies with deep cultural roots stretching back to the circumstances surrounding the establishment of the state in 1861.5 These tendencies were given further impetus in the republican period by the characteristics of the party system. With the development of the Cold War, the PCI was subject to the conventio ad excludendum, a term used to refer to the informal agreement between the DC and the remaining smaller parties in its orbit – the Partito Socialista Democratico Italiano (Italian Social Democratic Party, PSDI), the Partito Liberale Italiano (Italian Liberal Party, PLI), the Partito Repubblicano Italiano (Italian Republican Party, PRI) and, from 1963, the Partito Socialista Italiano (Italian Socialist Party, PSI) – to exclude the PCI from government office permanently thanks to perceptions that it was an anti-system party. The MSI was likewise excluded. This meant that ‘Westminster-style’ alternation in office became impossible and that, at every election from the one held in 1948 through to the one held in 1992, the DC always emerged as the largest party able, as it was, to capitalise on voters’ fears of the Communist and neo-Fascist extremes. The DC was therefore the mainstay of all feasible governing coalitions whose composition was always the product of ex-post negotiations between the political parties once election results and therefore the parties’ relative strengths were known.

8  A tale of two republics Table 1.1  Governments of the ‘First Republic’ Government

Dates

Composition

Duration (days)

1st legislature, 8 May 1948 – 4 April 1953 (general election: 18 April 1948) De Gasperi V De Gasperi VI De Gasperi VII

23 May 1948 – 12 Jan. 1950 27 Jan. 1950 – 16 July 1951 26 July 1951 – 29 June 1953

DC, PLI, PSLI, PRI DC, PSLI, PRI DC, PRI

599 535 704

2nd legislature, 25 June 1953 – 14 March 1958 (general election: 7 June 1953) De Gasperi VIII Pella Fanfani I Scelba Segni I Zoli

16 July 1953 – 28 July 1953 17 August 1953 – 5 Jan. 1954 18 Jan. 1954 – 30 Jan. 1954 10 Feb. 1954 – 22 June 1955 6 July 1955 – 6 May 1957 19 May 1957 – 19 June 1958

DC DC DC DC, PSDI, PLI DC, PSDI, PLI DC

12 141 12 497 670 396

3rd legislature, 12 June 1958 – 18 February 1963 (general election: 25 May 1958) Fanfani II Segni II Tambroni Fanfani III Fanfani IV

1 July 1958 – 26 Jan. 1959 15 Feb. 1959 – 24 Feb. 1960 25 March 1960 – 19 July 1960 26 July 1960 – 2 Feb. 1962 21 Feb. 1962 – 16 May 1963

DC, PSDI DC DC DC DC, PSDI, PRI

209 374 116 556 449

4th legislature, 16 May 1963 – 11 March 1968 (general election: 28 April 1963) Leone I Moro I Moro II Moro III

21 June 1963 – 5 Nov. 1963 4 Dec. 1963 – 26 June 1964 22 July 1964 – 21 Jan. 1966 23 Feb. 1966 – 5 June 1968

DC DC, PSI, PSDI, PRI DC, PSI, PSDI, PRI DC, PSI, PSDI, PRI

137 205 548 833

5th legislature, 5 June 1968 – 28 February 1972 (general election: 19 May 1968) Leone II Rumor I Rumor II Rumor III Colombo Andreotti I

24 June 1968 – 19 Nov. 1968 12 Dec. 1968 – 5 July 1969 5 Aug. 1969 – 7 Feb. 1970 27 Mar. 1970 – 6 July 1970 6 Aug. 1970 – 15 Jan. 1972 17 Feb. 1972 – 26 Feb. 1972

DC DC, PSU, PRI DC DC, PSI, PSDI, PRI DC, PSI, PSDI, PRI DC

148 205 186 101 527 9

6th legislature, 25 May 1972 – 1 May 1976 (general election: 7–8 May 1972) Andreotti II Rumor IV Rumor V Moro IV Moro V

26 June 1972 – 12 June 1973 7 July 1973 – 2 Mar. 1974 14 Mar. 1974 – 3 Oct. 1974 23 Nov. 1974 – 7 Jan. 1976 12 Feb. 1976 – 30 Apr. 1976

DC, PSDI, PLI DC, PSI, PSDI, PRI DC, PSI, PSDI DC DC

351 230 203 410 78

7th legislature, 5 July 1976 – 2 April 1979 (general election: 20–21 June 1976) Andreotti III Andreotti IV Andreotti V

29 July 1976 16 Jan. 1978 11 Mar. 1978 – 31 Jan. 1979 20 Mar. 1979 – 31 Mar. 1979

DC DC DC, PRI, PSDI

536 326 11

8th legislature, 20 June 1979 – 4 May 1983 (general election: 3 June 1979) Cossiga I Cossiga II Forlani

4 Aug. 1979 – 19 Mar. 1980 4 Apr. 1980 – 27 Sep. 1980 18 Oct. 1980 – 26 May 1981

DC, PLI, PSDI DC, PSI, PRI DC, PSI, PSDI, PRI

228 176 220

A tale of two republics  9 Government

Dates

Composition

Duration (days)

Spadolini I Spadolini II Fanfani V

28 June 1981 – 7 Aug. 1982 23 Aug. 1982 – 13 Nov. 1982 1 Dec. 1982 – 29 Apr. 1983

DC, PSI, PSDI, PRI, PLI DC, PSI, PSDI, PRI, PLI DC, PSI, PSDI, PLI

405 82 149

9th legislature, 12 July 1983 – 28 April 1987 (general election: 26 June 1983) Craxi I Craxi II Fanfani VI

4 Aug. 1983 – 27 June 1986 1 Aug. 1986 – 3 March 1987 17 Apr. 1987 – 28 Apr. 1987

DC, PSI, PSDI, PRI, PLI DC, PSI, PSDI, PRI, PLI DC, independents

1,058 214 11

10th legislature, 2 July 1987 – 2 February 1992 (general election: 14 June 1987) Goria De Mita Andreotti VI Andreotti VII

28 July 1987 – 11 Mar. 1988 13 Apr.l 1988 – 19 May 1989 22 July 1989 – 29 Mar. 1991 12 Apr. 1991 – 24 Apr. 1992

DC, PSI, PSDI, PRI, PLI DC, PSI, PSDI, PRI, PLI DC, PSI, PSDI, PRI, PLI DC, PSI, PSDI, PLI

227 401 615 378

11th legislature, 23 April 1992 – 16 January 1994 (general election: 4 April 1992) Amato I Ciampi

28 June 1992 – 22 Apr. 1993 28 Apr. 1993 – 16 Apr. 1994

DC, PSI, PSDI, PLI DC, PSI, PSDI, PLI

298 353

Source: Newell, 2010: 29–30, Table 1.2.

The very significant consequence of this was that, if the governing parties competed with left and right extremes across deep-seated ideological divides, then as parties forced to permanently ‘cohabit’, none was sufficiently powerful vis-à-vis the others to take decisive policy initiatives. As a result, they were reduced to competing amongst themselves for the control of government offices to be used for the clientelistic distribution of favours to their followers. This in turn meant that they acted as ‘veto players’ (Tsebelis, 2003), blocking change whenever external events created pressure for some policy initiative that potentially threatened the interests of those belonging to their own particular segment of the electoral market. Governments as a consequence were very unstable (there were forty-six changes of government between 1948 and 1994), coalition agreements often unravelling and being renegotiated several times during the course of a single legislature (Table 1.1). Meanwhile, government instability was a significant obstacle in the way of long-term policy development and implementation with the result that public policy problems across the board, from education to welfare, from the administration of justice to civil liberties, often went unaddressed for decades at a time. Thus it was that growing public discontent combined with the effects of the so-called ‘economic miracle’ to initiate a process of weakening of voters’ attachments to the traditional parties, a process which, from the 1970s, began to make itself felt in terms of declining turnouts (which fell at every election after 1976 from 93.4 to 82.7 per cent in 1996), growing fragmentation (the number of parties represented in the Chamber of Deputies rising from nine to fourteen between 1968 and 1987, the share of the vote obtained by the DC, the PSI and the PCI declining from over three quarters in 1976 to under a half in 1992) and increasing electoral volatility. As measured by Pedersen’s index (1979), aggregate volatility ‘rose from an average of 5.8 between the election pairs of 1953–58 and 1972–76 to an average of 9.1 between 1976–79 and 1987–92’ (Newell, 2000: 20; 2021: 20). The term ‘economic miracle’ is widely used to refer to the period of unprecedentedly high growth rates realised in the 1950s and 1960s, as Italy, in common with other European countries, repaired the damage wrought by the war and, in the process, made a transition from being a largely agricultural and undeveloped society to being one of the largest industrial economies

10  A tale of two republics in the world.6 Assisted by the development aid made available between 1948 and 1952 by the US Marshall Plan, the ‘miracle’ affected Italian politics in at least three significant ways. First, by bringing broadly shared prosperity, it stimulated the rise – through increasing levels of education, growing geographical mobility and exposure to a wider range of cultural stimuli – of a more critical electorate with the consequences I have just mentioned. Second, it stimulated a massive wave of internal migration from the rural south to the industrial north, where the effects of the miracle were largely concentrated. Third, it led to a massive construction boom as the new arrivals in the northern cities required housing, schools, hospitals and other facilities – in the process allowing Silvio Berlusconi to make his first fortune and lay the foundations of his later, even more meteoric, rise as a media magnate. Meanwhile, the growing willingness of ordinary citizens to question established values and practices, combined with the fact that Italian politics was ideologically polarised around the perceived Communist threat, provided the basis for what became known as gli anni di piombo or the ‘years of lead’: a period of time running from the late 1960s to the end of the 1970s that was marked by a rising spiral of violence, involving frequent, sometimes daily, street clashes between groups of the extreme left and the extreme right, and the development of what was known as the ‘strategy of tension’: a series of illegal operations on the part of sectors of the governing class, not excluding bombings and kidnappings, sometimes carried out with the collusion of the United States and the far right, designed to create a climate of fear and disorder that would lead to calls for an authoritarian restoration of order. One of the most significant long-term effects of the ‘years of lead’ was to hasten the decline of the PCI, whose share of the vote had reached a post-war high of 34.4 per cent in 1976. The disorders were highly problematic for the party, since, on the one hand, it was obliged to maintain its distance from the groups of the far left in order to retain its credibility among moderate voters; and, on the other hand, its pursuit of respectability left vacant the ground to its left, promptly filled by groups advocating violence – and in the case of the Red Brigades, kidnapping and terrorism – as means of fomenting revolution. Moreover, the pursuit of respectability held no guarantees when it came to convincing moderates, for it involved, among other things, a willingness to engage constructively with the DC and other governing parties in the legislature (by, for example, agreeing to be co-opted in the passage of legislation in exchange for policy concessions) with the risk that it would find it more difficult to perform the main function of an opposition party – holding governments to account – and so court popular dissatisfaction for that reason. With the arrival of the new decade, when police action successfully put an end to the violence, the so-called ‘retreat to the private sphere’, the decline of Fordist manufacturing and the growth of celebrity culture all placed the PCI’s ideology and position as a mass party of workers under pressure as never before. Its denunciation of ‘the moral question’, arising from illegitimate public–private links and associated instances of corruption, helped to nourish the spread of anti-political sentiments. It found itself and its Resistance symbols under virulent attack from a Socialist Party keen to avoid being cannibalised by the Christian Democrats to its right and the Communists to its left. With the collapse of the Berlin Wall and its aftermath, the Communists’ commitment to ideas of political and social transformation, already fading, was finally extinguished, its ability to sustain any real counter-culture – around the values of social solidarity in opposition to the prevailing values of individual aspiration and material acquisition – long gone. (Newell, 2019: 133) However, the collapse of the Berlin Wall, if it had profound consequences for the PCI, by that token, had consequences no less significant for the traditional governing parties and indeed

A tale of two republics  11 led ultimately to their complete demise. Its most immediate consequence was to prompt the Communists to embrace the idea of a change of name, so that from 1991 they were known as the Partito Democratico della Sinistra (Democratic Party of the Left, PDS), while suffering a breakaway, to their left on the part of the minority unwilling to divorce themselves from the party’s traditions. Yet, the effect of this was to undermine the power of anti-Communism as a source of support for the DC and its allies and therefore to enhance the prospects of new, challenger, parties, first and foremost the LN, which was able to draw on a combination of the country’s regional disparities and associated social tensions and popular dissatisfaction with the performances of the established parties to mobilise support for a project of northern autonomy in opposition to what it called Roma ladrona (thieving Rome). A third development linked to the PCI’s transformation was the great Tangentopoli (Bribe City) corruption scandal triggered on 17 February 1992, when Mario Chiesa, the Socialist head of a Milanese old people’s home, the Pio Albergo Trivulzio, was caught in the act of accepting bribes for the award of a cleaning contract. Tangentopoli was linked to the transformation of the PCI, because the party’s change of name made clear to public prosecutors that, for the first time since the war, it was possible to pursue a determined anti-corruption drive against the governing parties without the risk that this would play into the hands of their Communist opponents, heightening political instability. Tangentopoli became the largest corruption scandal ever to rock the political establishment in post-war Italy, because, by the time of the initial revelations, the corrupt funding of political parties, which in the initial post-war years seems to have been relatively restricted, had spread to the point that it had become systemic. Consequently, the arrest of Chiesa and his decision to confess what he knew about these funding arrangements set in motion a domino effect whereby his revelations led to the arrest of others and their revelations to the arrest of still further individuals and so on. Consequently, by the end of 1993, no fewer than 251 members of Parliament were under judicial investigation (including four former prime ministers, five ex-party leaders and seven members of the cabinet) and the governing parties were rapidly brought to a state of collapse through three interrelated effects. The sudden cutting off of corrupt sources of funding combined with the parties’ massive accumulated debts left them bankrupt. Membership collapsed. They faced a haemorrhage of support at the polls. The sense of public outrage Tangentopoli generated gave considerable encouragement to campaigners who were seeking to draw on the Constitution’s article 75 provision for the holding of public referenda on proposals to strike down laws when supported by at least half a million citizens willing to sign the relevant referendum requests. Thus it was that a cross-party body of campaigners, intellectuals and others with a high profile in public life managed to secure the holding of a referendum on a proposal to strike down part of the electoral law for the Senate, the de facto consequence of which would be that, from then on, three quarters of the Senate seats would be distributed according to the single-member simple plurality (SMSP) system and one quarter proportionally. Campaigners’ assumptions were that a change of the electoral law of this kind, would ultimately lead to a moralisation of public life as it would place parties in each of the single-member constituencies under pressure to coalesce with other ideologically similar parties behind common candidates in order to reduce the chances of parties further away on the ideological spectrum taking the seats at their joint expense. It was therefore thought likely to encourage the emergence of bipolar competition between two coalitions, one of the centre left, the other of the centre right, each competing for overall majorities of seats, which would want to give evidence of their probity and governing efficiency as the price of remaining competitive with their opponents. Since the Italian legislature reflects the principles of symmetric bicameralism (that is, its two components, the Chamber of Deputies and the Senate, have co-equal legislative powers and governments must retain the confidence of both), it was anticipated that a referendum outcome altering the electoral law for the Senate, would place legislators under

12  A tale of two republics pressure to make a similar change to the electoral law for the Chamber. On a 77.1 per cent turnout, campaigners secured their referendum victory with 82.7 per cent of the vote, largely because, although the specific issue at stake was a technical one, the vote was framed by the media as a plebiscite on a by-now discredited governing class as the result of which this became its actual political significance. Against this background, the party system was undergoing a process of rapid evolution. On the one hand, the PCI’s transformation removed the last of the pillars (Catholicism, clientelism, anti-Communism) on which support for the DC and the traditional governing parties had long rested, thus hastening their demise. On the other hand, the disintegration of the DC, whose raison d’être had included acting as a bulwark against the extremes, led to the collapse of the barriers that had once kept the MSI in isolation and stood in the way of its finding allies in the construction of a coalition to oppose the left. Thus it was that, in the run-up to the general election of 1994 – called just two years after the previous general election thanks to popular pressure to renew a legislature so many of whose existing members were discredited – the parties formed two broad electoral coalitions. On the left stood the Alleanza dei Progressisti (Progressive Alliance) led by the PDS and including the Partito della Rifondazione Comunista (Party of Communist Refoundation, PRC), to its left, the Greens and what remained of the PSI and left-leaning former Christian Democrats in La Rete (the Network) and Alleanza Democratica (Democratic Alliance, AD). The centre right came together under the leadership of Silvio Berlusconi and his new personal party, Forza Italia and included the LN and right-leaning former Christian Democrats in the Centro Cristiano Democratico (Christian Democratic Centre, CCD). The coalition also included the MSI which in the meantime had decided to make the most of its success in overcoming its isolation, by changing its name to Alleanza Nazionale (National Alliance, AN) with a view to distancing itself from its Fascist heritage, with all of the electoral handicaps that involved. There was also a third, smaller coalition, called the Patto per l’Italia (Pact for Italy) which had a centrist profile and which consequently disappeared shortly after 1994, squeezed as it was by the larger competitors to its left and its right. Berlusconi and Forza Italia, so significant for the politics of the ‘Second Republic’, are worth dwelling upon. Berlusconi, as we have seen, had made his initial fortune in construction. In the 1980s, he had moved into television broadcasting – taking advantage both of Constitutional Court rulings and legislative changes that had put an end to the state’s monopoly in the area and of the pent-up demand for TV advertising this monopoly had created over the years. He had developed a close relationship with PSI leader, Bettino Craxi, who had been able to see, earlier than others, that the future of political campaigning lay in the direction of a personalised style of ‘permanent campaign’ (Blumenthal, 1980) heavily dependent on the broadcast media. Craxi, therefore, saw Berlusconi as a useful ally, for whom he was willing to secure the legislation necessary to enable Berlusconi to achieve what would later become a virtual monopoly over private TV broadcasting in Italy. The demise of the traditional governing parties and the political demise of Craxi left Berlusconi orphaned of his former political protectors and at risk of losing his broadcasting monopoly in the event of a victory of the left. Thus it was that, with the launch of Forza Italia and its leadership of the centre right, he sought, in effect, to take the place of his now discredited former protectors and was successful in so doing thanks to the new style of campaigning he adopted. This was a highly personalised style, heavily focussed on Berlusconi himself, involving the adoption of linguistic styles already used to great effect by the LN that deliberately broke with the conventional but opaque styles of conventional parties and politicians and that therefore successfully conveyed what was an unashamedly populist message. This was that Berlusconi, a self-made man with whom ordinary Italians could identify, would do for them what he had done for himself, defending their interests against the attacks of professional

A tale of two republics  13 politicians, the left and an oppressive state machine. Performing the seemingly extraordinary feat of winning the 1994 election and making his party the largest, having launched it just a few weeks previously on 11 May, Berlusconi became Prime Minister and so inaugurated the politics of the ‘Second Republic’. The politics of the ‘Second Republic’ There were three main reasons why, for the next twenty years, Silvio Berlusconi was able to dominate Italian politics, occupying the position of Prime Minister, on and off, for more than nine years to the end of 2011. The first was that, as the leader of a personal party, it was he who brought both money and votes to his political creation, not the other way around. Second, he and therefore his party was a ‘coalition maker’, meaning that it was of a size such as to be able to dictate the terms on which negotiations for coalition formation took place on the centre right and, therefore, that it was the leader of the coalition, the essential element of its cohesion. This meant that Berlusconi was able to dominate his coalition as well as his party, and, as long as he was a successful campaigner, deploying his trademark personalised and populist styles of campaigning, then his allies’ awareness of their dependence upon him meant that his leadership of the coalition, though it was challenged from time to time, was in essence unassailable. Finally, the conflict of interests between his position as owner of Italy’s three largest private television stations and his position as Prime Minister, together with his legal difficulties (involving, among others, allegations of false accounting and corruption) and his attempts to use his public position to secure ad personam legislation designed to resolve his difficulties, were frequently the subject of public outcries. Yet, in terms of his electoral following, he seemed not to be damaged by them and perhaps even benefitted, for they kept the media spotlight on him, ensuring that he was more or less constantly at the centre of public attention and that he and his role in politics remained the principle line of division across which political conflict took place. This, in turn, heightened the sense that political campaigning was a ‘personalised’ contest – which could only benefit the entrepreneur, who was clearly very proficient at it compared with most of his potential and actual competitors: it turned him into a celebrity and therefore one with whom voters could feel a sense of closeness and with whom they would desire contact. Therefore, while the allegations of impropriety against him would undoubtedly energise his left-wing opponents, they were unlikely to convince his own supporters, who, if anything, would be more likely to be mobilised in his defence. The outcries to which his pronouncements and his actions often gave rise therefore worked in paradoxical ways, and it seems a not unreasonable conjecture that Donald Trump may have taken inspiration from the Berlusconi phenomenon when he came to engage with politics in a very similar, if even more extreme, fashion, some years later. What seems certain is that it was Berlusconi’s successful personalisation of political campaigning that provides the essential explanation for the failure of the parties of the centre left, when in office from 1996 and again from 2006, to secure legislation that would deal effectively with the entrepreneur’s conflict of interests, for they were very well aware that efforts in that direction would inevitably be perceived by the public as a case of the use of public power to attack Berlusconi personally, to be perceived, therefore, as unreasonable and unlikely, therefore, to bring them any significant electoral dividends. Initially, however, it seemed as though Berlusconi’s political career would be short lived, as his first government was as litigious as any of those that had held office during the ‘First Republic’ and collapsed in December 1994, largely because the LN was aware that the overlap between its own populist themes and those of FI threatened its separate identity, so that it needed to mark its difference as the price of its survival.7 Observers were sceptical that Berlusconi’s

14  A tale of two republics launch of FI and his election victory would bring a permanent shift in Italian party politics, for, though he had introduced a radically different style of political campaigning, his party was without a clear profile separate from that of its founder and was therefore unlikely to survive him. Indeed, for the next six years, until May 2001, the entrepreneur languished in opposition where for a time his star seemed to have fallen. In the first place, his Government was replaced by a technocratic Government headed by his former treasury minister, Lamberto Dini, and supported by the LN and the parties of the centre left: a Government whose appointment once again illustrated the often crucial role of the President of the Republic in processes of government formation. The point is that Berlusconi complained loudly that thanks to the new electoral law resulting from the effects of the 1993 referendum, he had received a direct popular mandate, so that the LN’s withdrawal from his coalition, implying an unwillingness to respect that mandate, meant that there should be fresh elections for the conferral of a new mandate. Constitutionally, Berlusconi was incorrect: in parliamentary democracies like Italy voters elect legislatures not governments, whose legitimacy (or otherwise), in turn, derives from their enjoying (or otherwise) the confidence of the legislature. At the same time, President Oscar Luigi Scalfaro was aware that he could not legitimately sanction the formation of a government staffed by the LN and the parties that had lost the 1994 election, so the mandate he conferred on Dini was for the formation of a ‘caretaker’ government (none of whose members sat in Parliament): one designed to allow for a cooling of political temperatures and the achievement of a limited number of essential objectives before the holding of fresh elections, which happened in 1996. In the second place, then, Berlusconi lost these elections thanks to the LN’s insistence on contesting them independently (meaning that the centre right, anti-left, vote was split in several of the northern constituencies) and to the success of the parties opposed to Berlusconi and the LN in putting together a more electorally efficient coalition than the one they had been able to assemble in 1994. Then, as we saw, parties located in the centre of the political spectrum ran independently as the Pact for Italy. Now, in essence, the parties of the former Progressive Alliance were able to embrace (most of) them, thus extending the Alliance’s reach to the centre of the political spectrum, in a coalition now called l’Ulivo (the Olive Tree), headed by the mildmannered and moderate economics professor, Romano Prodi. In the third place, it seemed initially as though the arrival in office of the Prodi Government might mark the start of a new departure for the country: the start of a brighter future in which the political agenda would be set not by Berlusconi but by his opponents as the driving forces behind the two most significant political developments after 1996. The first of these was the setting up of the high-profile parliamentary commission (the so-called Bicamerale) chaired by PDS spokesperson, Massimo D’Alema, with the remit of drafting proposals for wide-ranging constitutional reform that would bring to a conclusion the process of regime transition that seemed to have been set in motion by the political upheavals and party-system transformation of the first half of the decade. The second was the series of reforms – concerning the level of public debt, administrative decentralisation, privatisation and the labour market – designed to ensure that Italy would qualify for membership of the Euro when it was launched in 1999. Italian political elites had always seen their country as suffering from deep-seated problems of governability, with modernising reforms only possible when forced on it by external circumstances, and, therefore, they had always favoured measures of European integration including the Euro, precisely because they saw them as setting up a vincolo esterno (external constraint) that would force the country to reform. So initially Berlusconi’s star seemed, as mentioned, to have fallen, but, in the longer term, political developments of the time worked very much in his favour. The Bicamerale collapsed in

A tale of two republics  15 June 1998 when Berlusconi withdrew his support for it, in the process revealing that the broad coalition of forces required in order to agree constitutional reforms had been unable to withstand the pressures arising from the more limited majority required for the passage of ordinary legislation. The government’s labour-market and other reforms did enable Italy to qualify for the Euro but, at the same time, put a strain on the Government’s relations with its most leftward leaning component, the PRC, leading to its collapse in October 1998. The episode marked the return of the politics of trasformismo – a new centre-left Government was cobbled together under Massimo D’Alema with the support of PRC dissidents in a new Partito dei Comunisti Italiani (Party of Italian Communists, PdCI) and a few dissidents from the centre right – and of the weak, mediator, prime ministers typical of the ‘First Republic’: D’Alema was forced to resign and form a second Government in December 1999 and to resign again in April 2000 when he gave way to a new Prime Minister, Giuliano Amato, who presided over the affairs of the country until the general election of 2001. Not surprisingly, given this background, and given the power of his populist message, Berlusconi’s appeal for an absolute majority for his coalition, in opposition to his centre-left opponents, enabled him to win the election handsomely. By then he had patched up his earlier quarrel with the LN, which, in contrast to 1996, now ran in tandem with the rest of the centre right, and the fact that he was the leader of a coalition that had been created in advance of the election, specifically appealing for an absolute majority, meant that when he became Prime Minister, he would, as a consequence, have considerably more authority than Italian prime ministers had traditionally enjoyed, precisely because they had been forced to act as meditators among parties that had coalesced only after elections had taken place. The parties of the centre left, meanwhile, failed to offer effective opposition to Berlusconi or to reduce the levels of popular cynicism, which, as I have already mentioned, have always been a salient feature of ordinary Italians’ attitudes to the world of politics. In the first place, party-system bipolarity and Berlusconi’s success led the centre-left parties to attempt to imitate his winning formula, choosing in 2001 the youthful and telegenic Francesco Rutelli as their coalition leader, so that (thanks to party-system bipolarity and Berlusconi’s success) election campaigns looked increasingly as though they would be ‘personalised’ contests between two prime-ministerial candidates each competing for overall majorities. But, if Berlusconi was able to exert some authority over his coalition, the same could not be said of leaders of the centre left, as they, unlike Berlusconi, were not backed by strong parties of their own and were therefore more or less always at the mercy of the coalition parties that were strong. Thus, while the centre right always had a single leader (Berlusconi), the centre left underwent a change of leader before all four of the general elections prior to 2013. Second, the parties of the centre left were unable, for the reasons I have already explained, to tackle Berlusconi’s conflict of interests effectively. Third, because of his conflict of interests (as well as his legal difficulties), the centre left’s competition with Berlusconi was always highly polarised – for them, he was unfit to hold public office; for him, he was the victim of a Communist-inspired witch hunt – and there can be little doubt that any ideas of politics as in any sense a noble profession concerned with the common good would have been considerably undermined by such a spectacle. Fourth, not far from being the only common denominator for the parties of the centre left, opposition to Berlusconi was by that token a further source of division and weakness for them as they squabbled over how, and how much, to attack him. Finally, the weaknesses of the centre left in opposing Berlusconi were compounded by the fact that just prior to the 2006 general election the media magnate used his parliamentary majority to secure a change to the electoral law. From that election onwards, the Chamber of Deputies would be elected by the list system of proportional representation (PR) with a majority premium of 340 seats (out of 630) for the most-voted coalition and a reduced exclusion threshold

16  A tale of two republics for parties competing as components of coalitions achieving at least 10 per cent of the vote. Similar arrangements were put in place for the Senate. The intentions behind the new law were ill-disguised. In contexts like that of 2006, where Berlusconi, as outgoing Prime Minister, had a mediocre record to defend and the election outcome was therefore uncertain, the new system encouraged the two competing coalitions of centre right and centre left to aggregate as many parties as possible in order to maximise their chances of winning the majority premium. However, since the centre left was by far the most unwieldy of the two coalitions, encompassing by far the largest number of parties, then even if it won the election, it would find it extremely difficult to govern. And this is precisely what happened. Berlusconi lost the election of 2006 (and with it the majority premium) by just 24,755 votes, Romano Prodi returned to office at the head of a centre-left coalition of no fewer than nine parties calling itself l‘Unione (the Union), the parties’ need for media attention as the price of survival required confrontation and dissent and, by January 2008, the Government had collapsed. By the general election held on 13 and 14 April 2008, three things of profound significance for subsequent political developments had happened. First, the Prodi Government had demonstrated that – despite its creditable record on matters such as tax evasion, the country’s notoriously high level of public debt and the rate of economic growth – coalitions assembled to win elections were not necessarily the ones best placed to govern. Second, partly because of this awareness, in 2007 the two largest components of the centre-left coalition had come together to form a new party, the Partito Democratico, bringing together ex-Communists and left-leaning former Christian Democrats to realise a vision that had been expressed on and off in Italian politics since the 1970s when it was first advanced: the so-called ‘historic compromise’, articulated by the then PCI leader, Enrico Berlinguer, and taken up by the Christian Democrat Aldo Moro, referring to the view that lasting progressive change could only come about peacefully in Italy through the creation of an enduring coalition between Communists, on the one hand, and ­progressive-minded Christian Democrats, on the other. From the beginning, the PD’s first leader, Walter Veltroni, articulated a ‘majoritarian vocation’ for his party – meaning that it would seek to occupy all of the political ground from the left to the centre, thereby enabling his party to dispense with the formation of the kind of unwieldy coalition that had underpinned the Prodi Government and so help the centre left to overcome its fragmentation. Third, in the run-up to the 2008 election, it had become obvious that Berlusconi’s centre right was once again the favourite to win and that re-proposing the same Unione coalition in opposition to him was simply not credible given its weaknesses over the previous two years. Under these circumstances, the electoral law created incentives that were the opposite of those it had created in 2006. In other words, since it seemed a near certainty, given his opinion-poll lead, that Berlusconi would take the majority premium, the incentive on Veltroni was to limit the size of his coalition, refusing alliances with smaller parties, in the almost certain knowledge that thereby they would fail to surmount the exclusion threshold and that almost all of the seats not going to Berlusconi’s coalition would be picked up by the PD. And in fact this is what happened – with an unprecedented reduction in the degree of fragmentation of the Italian parliament. In imitation of the amalgamation that had taken place under Veltroni, between 2007 and 2008 Berlusconi had managed to bring together FI and AN in Il popolo della libertà (the People of Freedom, PdL), and it and the PD, as the main opposition party, now shared 78 per cent of the seats between them – ­proportions higher than ever previously achieved since the war and well in line with the corresponding proportions for the other large European democracies. ‘Fragmented bipolarity’ seemed at last to have been overcome, and the ‘Second Republic’ seemed at last to have come of age. Italian politics looked set on a course towards a more positive future. Things went rapidly downhill from there.

A tale of two republics  17 Given the election outcome, it had initially seemed that the future might portend stable government, alternation in office and a reduction in the degree of political polarisation through the reciprocal recognition by governing and opposition parties of the legitimacy of the other’s claim to be a potentially governing actor, even if they continued to disagree on the substance of policy. Such hopes were soon put paid to by Berlusconi’s continued unwillingness to acknowledge his conflict of interests, by his continued attempts to secure the passage of legislation that were of doubtful public utility but that would benefit him personally and by his continued insistence that being forced to defend himself against a range of allegations, from corruption to false accounting, was evidence of the existence of a plot by Communist-inspired judicial personnel to drive him from public office. The following year he became caught up in a series of allegations concerning his sexual conduct – allegations which, precisely because he was already a colourful personality whose many public ‘gaffs’ were undoubtedly studied gestures designed to reinforce his image as a ‘man of the people’, could not really be described as causing a ‘scandal’ as such (Gundle, 2009). Nevertheless, his conduct was profoundly offensive to women in particular and helped to undermine his credibility as a Prime Minister who asked to be taken seriously. The following year, in 2010, a bitter public row took place between Berlusconi and Gianfranco Fini, who had led AN before its merger with FI. Fini saw himself as the natural successor to Berlusconi but was disappointed that the PdL had turned out to be just another ‘personal party’ without the clear ideological profile that was required of the formation he wanted to create, namely, a modern national party committed to law and order and upholding the constitution, which would give Italy the strong, moderate conservative party it had always lacked. Fini’s departure from the PdL considerably weakened the Government’s hold on office just when the Eurozone crisis was gathering pace. With the EU, the IMF and the ECB struggling to contain the risk of Greek debt and interest rates spiralling out of control, investors began to worry about Italy – whose public debt in 2011 stood at about 120 per cent of GDP and was second in size only to that of Greece – and the country’s capacity to deal with the problem, compromised as it was by a range of structural problems with its economy, including publicservice inefficiencies. In the summer of 2011, interest rates on Italian bonds began to rise – with the prospect that rising rates might bring about that very unsustainability of the debt that was driving rates up in the first place. Berlusconi’s Finance Minister, Giulio Tremonti, wanted spending cuts, opposed by the entrepreneur worried about declining popularity. The upshot was a budget that satisfied no one and the growing sense in international circles that a Government led by Berlusconi no longer enjoyed the authority necessary to effectively stave off the risk of sovereign debt default becoming a reality for Italy as well as Greece. Under pressure from his own parliamentary followers, from the President of the Republic and from Italy’s European partners (notably French President Nicholas Sarkozy and German Chancellor Angela Merkel) in November 2011, Berlusconi was forced to resign and to make way for the appointment of another technocratic government, this time one led by the economics professor and former EU commissioner, Mario Monti. The appointment of the Monti Government revealed at least two significant features of the Italian political landscape that had come to be created by Berlusconi’s departure. The first was that the political parties had reached a point at which they completely lacked the public authority and prestige to enable them to preside over a programme of austerity measures of the kind the Monti Government was now called upon to provide. The governing parties’ difficulties have already been described. As for the opposition parties, the issue of what kind of opposition to present to Berlusconi’s Government had continued, as ever, to divide them. The PD, which had been conceived by Veltroni as a partito leggero (or organisationally light-weight party), firmly led from the top, thereby suffered an erosion of its extra-parliamentary presence on the ground

18  A tale of two republics as well as of traditions and ideals that would provide people with incentives to join it. For both reasons, the centre left had struggled to convey the sense that it represented a convincing and attractive alternative to the Berlusconi Government. Consequently, with the collapse of that Government, both it and the centre right were obliged, in essence, to step aside and play a supporting role to the new emergency Government (none of whose members were party representatives) that now took office. The second significant feature of Italian politics revealed by the Monti Government’s appointment concerned, yet again, the importance of the President’s role in situations in which the parties were unable to combine to provide stable government in emergencies. Like the Draghi Government appointed just under ten years later, the Government headed by Monti was supported in the confirmatory vote of confidence in Parliament by the votes of almost all the parties represented therein, but it owed its authority to the authority of the President, who, in appointing the Government, revealed that the presidential role is far more than ceremonial and in a broad sense amounts to ‘governing’ even though presidents must remain super partes. This is because presidents’ most fundamental constitutional responsibility is to preserve national cohesion by acting to ensure that political actors with direct policy-making responsibilities interact in a manner consistent with the constitution. The presidential role is discussed in more detail in Chapter 2, but, for now, I will note two things. First, that the relative silence of the 1948 Constitution concerning the President’s duties was almost certainly deliberate: to ensure that the scope for presidential decision making – greater or lesser – would be appropriate to the context. Second, that, in the context of the Eurozone crisis, it seemed to many that the President’s pressure on Berlusconi to resign almost amounted to his dismissal by the President, leading many to wonder whether the country had come to acquire a de facto semi-presidential system of government. The most significant developments after the Monti Government took office and before the general election of February 2013 were three in number The first was that by the end of February 2012, the gross yield on 10-year Italian government bonds had fallen to 4.95 per cent – about the level it had been before the onset of the Italian debt crisis. The Government’s domestic and international prestige enabled it to pass measures which, in other circumstances, would probably have been unacceptable to both the two main parties. The second was the scandal that engulfed the LN in April, when it came to light that the party’s leader, Umberto Bossi, and members of his entourage had been involved in misusing money made available under the regulations providing for the public funding of political parties – a devastating blow for a party that had always made a virtue of its Spartan purity but was now revealed to be just another corrupt party like those whose corruption it had always condemned. The third was the explosive emergence of the Movimento Cinque Stelle at local elections held in May, as it was the latest populist formation, after the LN and FI, to experience a sudden explosion in popularity on the back of protest against a political elite seemingly uncaring about the interests of ordinary Italians. The M5S was very hard to place ideologically speaking. On the one hand, it appeared to stand for principles of participatory and deliberative democracy and post-material values and therefore, while manifesting a mistrust and rejection of conventional politics, also to display a high level of commitment to the political process. On the other hand, in claiming to be the only authentic representative of ordinary people in opposition to an oppressive elite, it ended up embracing the classic populist positions (1) that the only criterion that mattered from the point of view of democratic legitimacy was the backing of a majority and (2) that its opponents were illegitimate competitors for political office. Therefore – notwithstanding its early emphasis on participatory democracy – plebiscites and the counting of votes (which it practiced frequently through online votes among its membership) were what counted for the purposes of democracy not deliberation or minority rights. It took support from across the left–right spectrum and

A tale of two republics  19 therefore refused to entertain the idea of alliances with other parties (which would inevitably force a left–right ideological profile upon it), claiming that the terms ‘left’ and ‘right’ were no longer useful for understanding politics and that what counted was the resolution of ‘problems’. At the election of 2013, the M5S took 25.6 per cent of the vote and in doing so marked what looked like the end of an era. Given the movement’s strong showing in the run up to the election and the likelihood, therefore, that the vote would be split three ways, Berlusconi had counted on being able to win the majority premium with a relatively small share of the vote, since it was apparent that the M5S would take votes not only from the centre right but also from the centre left. As it was, he failed – but only just – to pull off the feat, taking 29.2 per cent to the centre left’s 29.6 per cent, which thus emerged as the winner, though only because its haemorrhage of support had been somewhat less than that suffered by the centre right. With the country now clearly divided, electorally, into three more or less equal segments, neither of the two logics – the ex-ante and majoritarian or the ex-post and proportional – that had previously informed processes of government formation were any longer available. The centre left had won the majority premium in the Chamber but not in the Senate, where the premium was distributed regionally rather than nationally, and this created a problem of governability, for, as we have seen, the Chamber and the Senate have co-equal legislative powers and governments can only remain in office if they enjoy the confidence of both branches of the legislature (a situation often referred to as ‘symmetric bicameralism’). The problem was that the M5S was unwilling to govern in coalition with the centre left. Therefore, what eventually transpired was a ‘grand coalition’, the first in the history of the Republic, with the M5S performing the role of an opposition party. As for Berlusconi, the outcome appeared to set the seal on his loss of office in 2011. His (narrow) failure to clinch victory meant that, from then on, although he would remain a party leader with a high profile on the Italian political stage, he would no longer set the agenda to the extent that he had done in the past. To an ever-increasing extent, his role would become confined to reacting to initiatives taken by others. And, while in the run-up to the next general election, in 2018, it looked as though he might just emerge in the role of king-maker, that hope too was dashed, and, by the end of the decade, his party had been reduced to the small change of Italian politics. The politics of the last ten years The politics of the seventeenth post-war legislature, inaugurated by the outcome of the election of 2013, revealed two salient and distinctive features of the politics of the ‘Second Republic’ generally. The first of these had to do with the effects of increasingly ‘personalised’ political campaigning, electoral fluidity, and what Bernard Manin (1997) called ‘audience democracy’ (that is, a democracy in which the role of relatively politically disengaged voters is reduced to reacting to the political spectacle played out in front of them by parties and party leaders). These circumstances enabled more or less populist leaders to emerge and to achieve a meteoric rise, only then to crash and burn in the wake of dashed popular expectations. In Berlusconi’s case, the parabola of his rise and fall extended over a period of twenty years; in the case of the Florentine Matteo Renzi, in office as Prime Minister from 22 February 2014 to 12 December 2016, the corresponding number of years was less than three. Renzi had first come to national prominence in the autumn of 2012, when, in primary elections won by ex-Communist and PD leader Pierluigi Bersani, he had narrowly failed to secure nomination as the centre-left coalition’s leader and prime ministerial candidate for the 2013 election. The following autumn, with the resignation of Bersani following the PD’s poor performance in the 2013 election, Renzi secured the party leadership, from which position he was able to stake a successful claim to the premiership, then in the hands of Enrico Letta, a

20  A tale of two republics 46-year-old former Christian Democrat and PD Deputy General Secretary. Renzi’s conquest of the premiership was due to two factors: first, his popularity among the PD rank-and-file as a candidate who offered a softer version of the anti-political message peddled by the M5S and its leader, Beppe Grillo, whose charisma made him the ‘Berlusconi of the left’ and would, they believed, restore the party’s fortunes. Second, having captured the party leadership, Renzi then managed to persuade the PD’s Direzione Nazionale, or executive committee, to pass a motion speaking of ‘the urgent need to initiate a new phase with a different executive’. Although the motion made no mention of Renzi taking Letta’s place, this, given the context in which it was passed, was understood by all concerned to be its political significance, and, given the dependence of the party’s deputies’ political careers on the executive committee and the General Secretary, they could be expected to fall into line. Letta understood that he had been deserted and resigned as Premier on 22 February. As expected, President Giorgio Napolitano duly conferred a mandate on Renzi, who thus became leader of the sixty-fifth Italian Government since the end of the war. Initially, Renzi’s authority was sustained by hopes and expectations that, as a youthful leader promising political renewal based on a displacement of traditional oligarchies, he would usher in a new, happier era for the Republic and by his success in taking his party to a record 40.8 per cent of the vote in the European Parliament election of May 2014. In the longer term, his authority began to slip when it became apparent that opposition to traditional oligarchies also meant an autocratic style of party leadership, one that did not appear to be informed by any obvious commitment to progressive principles and which appeared, rather, to reflect a non-ideological, ‘catch-all’ brand of politics, where all that counted was the construction of whatever alliances were necessary to secure the passage of given measures, regardless of the positions of the relevant interest groups. This political style was related to the second salient and distinctive feature of ‘Second Republic’ politics, namely, the seemingly endless search – one actually predating the aforementioned Bicamerale but continuing long after it – for majoritarian-inspired solutions to Italy’s problems of governance.8 Renzi’s proposed constitutional reforms, involving a considerable concentration of power and voted on in a referendum held on 4 December 2016, were therefore merely the latest manifestations of this constant search, one that had never borne fruit owing to the parties’ interlocking vetoes and the reform paradox (namely, the paradox that since the entities requiring reform are also the ones whose support is needed in order to achieve it, reform is prevented from taking place). The common denominator of the reforms that voters were asked to vote on was an attempt to significantly reduce the number of veto points throughout the political system and so enhance policy-makers’ capacity for decisive decision-making. The previous year, Renzi had managed to secure parliamentary approval for a new electoral law (called the Italicum) for the Chamber of Deputies that would distribute seats on the basis of a closed-list system of proportional representation with a majority premium for the most-voted party list, provided its vote total was at least 40 per cent, or else, in the event that no list reached 40 per cent, a majority premium for the most voted for of the two largest lists participating in a run-off ballot. Designed to maximise the prospects of a single party obtaining an absolute seat majority and to concentrate power in the hands of that party’s leader (with a consequent likely reduction in the extent to which its parliamentary representatives would be able to hold the leader to account), the electoral-law reform applied to the Chamber of Deputies only. Consequently, given the ‘symmetric bicameralism’ referred to above, the constitutional reforms voted on in December 2016 included a proposal to eliminate the constitutional parity of the Senate with the Chamber of Deputies through a reduction of its legislative powers and abolition of its power to unseat governments by votes of confidence.

A tale of two republics  21 Constitutional change requires two separate votes in favour, at a distance of not less than three months, by each branch of the legislature and can be made the subject of a popular referendum if passed with less than two-thirds’ majorities on the second vote of either of the two branches. In such cases, referenda must be held if requested by a fifth of the members of either branch of the legislature, by half a million electors or by five regional councils. Since Renzi was unable to command the support of two thirds of either branch of the legislature, the 4 December 2016 referendum was inevitable. In retrospect, the referendum outcome, resulting in defeat for the proposals by 59 per cent to 41 per cent and Renzi’s resignation a few days later, also seem to have been inevitable, for, by the time the vote was held, the Prime Minister’s approval ratings had declined to the point that the media’s framing of the consultation as a referendum on Renzi himself made it obvious that rejection of the proposals was far and away the most likely outcome. Because the vote was framed as a referendum on Renzi himself, that is what it became in fact, so the Prime Minister could only draw the inevitable conclusion and resign. Unfortunately for Renzi, it was not really open to him to challenge the media’s framing as to have done so would have been to say, in effect, that he did not actually believe in the constitutional reforms he was seeking to promote. The only credible response, therefore, was to accept the challenge that was being thrown down and to attempt to rise to it, and, unfortunately for Renzi, he was not able to do so successfully. The Government that replaced Renzi’s, one based on essentially the same, broad, PD-led coalition and headed by Renzi’s former foreign minister, Paolo Gentiloni, was understood by virtually all of the most relevant political actors as an interim administration whose main responsibility was to preside over the affairs of the country until the next general election, which had to take place no later than the spring of 2018. Consequently, among the most significant measures introduced during its term were an agreement reached with the fragile Government of Libya in February 2017, committing the latter to taking more strenuous measures to reduce the flow of migrants from North Africa, and a revised electoral law, passed in November of the same year. The first was significant, because it came at the end of a two-year period during which the number of migrants seeking to reach Europe across the Mediterranean, with many drowning in the process thanks to the absence of legal routes to Europe to claim asylum, had reached a peak with the predictable attempts of far-right populist parties to seek electoral advantage by drawing on popular resentments to foment anti-immigrant sentiments. The EU’s ‘Dublin regulation’ made it obligatory for asylum applications to be made and considered in the first member state of arrival. Consequently, the so-called ‘migrant crisis’ from 2015 had seen Italy engaged in unsuccessful negotiations with its European partners to achieve modification of the regulation, as well as a greater degree of ‘burden sharing’ among the EU member states. The Libya agreement therefore represented the failure of these efforts insofar as it involved the Italian Government in effect ‘externalising’ the country’s borders by supplying technical assistance to the Libyan coastguard, in addition to economic assistance, thereby in effect having the Libyan authorities patrol its borders for it. Widely criticised by humanitarian organisations as giving rise to significant human rights abuses, the agreement did result in significant reductions in the number of refugees actually making it to the Italian coast, but it completely failed to reduce the space available to the parties of the right to make political capital out of the crisis insofar as the LN – having dropped the qualifying adjective, ‘Nord’, from its title and rebranded itself as the nationalist, anti-immigrant Lega – made a historic advance at the 2018 election, after a campaign striking for its xenophobic and racist overtones.

22  A tale of two republics The electoral-law reform came about because rejection of the constitutional reform proposals in December 2016, with the consequence that the Senate would retain its powers, gave rise to the requirement, on pain of ungovernability, either of extending the Italicum to the Senate or of reforming the law itself in such a way as to maximise the likelihood that general elections would result in the same majorities being produced in both branches. The so-called Rosatellum, after Ettore Rosato, the PD deputy who was its principal sponsor, was the parties’ response to this requirement. The Rosatellum provides for 37 per cent of the seats in both the Chamber and the Senate to be distributed according to the single-member simple plurality system, 61 per cent according to the closed-list system of proportional representation (with the remaining 2 per cent being assigned to the constituency for Italians resident abroad). Each multi-member constituency is thus associated with two or more single-member constituencies. Parties can present candidates either separately or in coalition with other parties. In the latter case, the coalesced parties present ‘joint’ candidates in the single-member constituencies. The voter is given a ballot paper showing the names of their single-member candidates beneath each of which appear the symbols of the supporting party or parties together with the names of their multi-member candidates. To cast a valid vote, the voter can express a single preference, either for their chosen party, in which case the vote also counts in favour of the single-member candidate supported by the party, or else for the single-member candidate. Such votes are automatically distributed among the supporting parties, in proportion to their total vote in the relevant single-member constituency, and so also count for the purposes of assigning the multi-member seats.9 There are various exclusion thresholds which must be surmounted. In the case of the Chamber these are 3 per cent at national level for the lists of parties running separately, 10 per cent for coalitions and 3 per cent for their component lists. Within the coalitions, the votes of lists failing to attract 1 per cent of the valid votes cast are not counted for the purposes of determining the coalition’s vote total. In the case of the Senate, the exclusion thresholds are the same, but in addition there is a 20 per cent regional threshold that must be surmounted to access the distribution of the seats in the region concerned. The parties of the centre right – the League, FdI and FI – supported the Rosatellum, because it met their need both to project unity – so that together they could pose as a credible governing coalition and seek an overall majority on that basis – and to maintain the visibility of their distinctive profiles to enable them to appeal effectively to their distinctive constituencies. The Rosatellum satisfied this double requirement, because it enabled them both to present their own lists and to agree on candidates to be presented in the single-member constituencies, with all votes for the lists counting in favour of the single-member candidates and vice versa. The PD supported the Rosatellum, because, if the internal divisions created by Renzi’s leadership had meant that the ground to its left was now inhabited by a rather numerous array of parties and groups, it calculated that the law would disincentivise further defections to its left. It calculated, too, that the law would create difficulties for the M5S, whose candidates in the single-member constituencies would be obliged to wage war on two fronts – to their right and their left – and would have little of the local notoriety needed to enable them to benefit from any kind of personal following (the M5S having emerged as a party thanks to the Internet and therefore lacking much by way of a local presence). Finally, it calculated that, even if the new law failed to produce an overall majority for any coalition or party, then it would probably be able to reach a post-election agreement with FI to enable it to exclude both the post-Fascists (FdI) and the populists (the M5S and the League) from office. As it turned out, however, the PD and FI (both of which reached historic lows) were the two great losers of the election, the M5S and the League (both of which reached historic highs) the two great winners (Table 1.2). So, while the party system retained the tripolar format that had

A tale of two republics  23 emerged at the 2013 election – with the country remaining divided between three blocks none of which commanded an overall majority or would willingly enter into coalition with either of the others – this time, the government that emerged from the post-election negotiations was a coalition (under 53-year-old Giuseppe Conte) between the League and the M5S: Western Europe’s first ‘all-populist’ government of the post-war period. The two parties represented different varieties of populism, ‘exclusionary’ and ‘inclusionary’, with different priorities – the League representing a reaction to the erosion of traditional social values and customs, the M5S a reaction to a perceived lack of responsiveness of the political system in a context of economic distress – and this was the source of a range of tensions between them: tensions which came to a head with the European Parliament elections of May 2019. Then, the League made a striking advance to take 34.3 per cent of the vote (double its share in 2018), and in August the party sought to capitalise on its heightened popularity by attempting to engineer fresh elections but failed to do so, thanks essentially to the overriding desire of both the M5S (whose support had halved in May) and the PD to obstruct the advance of the hard right. The last government to hold office before the appointment of the Draghi Government described at the outset of this chapter was therefore a coalition whose main components were the PD and the M5S and which took office, as the second Conte Government, on 5 September 2019. By this time, Renzi’s position as leader of the PD had been taken by another – Nicola Zingaretti – and shortly thereafter the Florentine left the party, to form IV, with a number of parliamentary followers sufficient to enable him to exercise a power of veto in government policy-making and, in the end, to secure its demise – as we have seen. In the meantime, if the history of the previous legislature had been the history of, among other things, the rise and fall of Matteo Renzi, then the second Conte Government coincided with the rise and fall of yet another populist leader, Matteo Salvini, support for whose party declined by a third during the life of the Government and which, by the summer of 2022, was Table 1.2  Results of the 2018 Italian general election, Chamber of Deputies Votes

Seats

Lists and coalitions

N

%

PR

SMSP

Abroad

Total

Lega Forza Italia Fratelli d’Italia Noi con l’Italia-Unione di Centro FI-FdI-Movimento Nuova Valle D’Aosta Totals, centre-right coalition Movimento Cinque Stelle Partito Democratico +Europa Insieme Civica Popolare SVP-PATT PD-UV-UVP-EPAV Totals, centre-left coalition Liberi e Uguali Others Totals

5,705,925 4,586,672 1,440,107 431,042 5,533 12,169,279 10,748,372 6,153,081 845,406 191,489 180,539 134,613 14,429 7,519,557 1,114,298 1,354,919 32,906,425

17.3 13.9 4.4 1.3 0.0 37.0 32.7 18.7 2.6 0.6 0.5 0.4 0.0 22.9 3.4 4.1 100

73 59 19 0 – 151 133 86 0 0 0 2 – 88 14 0 386

50 43 13 5 0 111 93 21 2 1 2 2 0 28 0 0 232

2 1 – 0 – 3 1 5 1 – 0 – – 6 0 2 12

125 103 32 5 0 265 227 112 3 1 2 4 0 122 14 2 630

Sources: Chiaramonte and Paparo, 2019: 255, Table 11.3; Newell, 2021: 000, Table 7.1.

24  A tale of two republics half of what it had been at its height in 2019. The M5S, meanwhile, failed to recover any of the support it lost after entering government in 2018 and, by the summer of 2022, could muster only around 12 per cent in voting intentions polls. Once again, it seemed that the ability of parties and leaders to ride the tide of protest combined with their inability to establish enduring ties with their followers was the main underlying cause. In the case of Salvini, the onset of the COVID pandemic and the EU’s response in the form of Next Generation EU seemed to place him on the back foot, depriving his sovereigntist and anti-EU rhetoric of at least some of its force, as voters’ priorities shifted to the search for reliability (in the form of vaccines) and protection (in the form of the money promised by the EU). With the advent of the Draghi Government, Salvini also faced the problem that any anti-government protest on the right would be mobilised by his ally/ rival, Georgia Meloni’s FdI, so that he would also lose support in that direction. The Five-Star Movement’s problems arose from the fact that it had achieved office as a protest party mobilising support across the left–right spectrum. Therefore, once it took office, it was almost bound to decline, given that the making of policy inevitably involves making choices (thereby satisfying some while disappointing others) and given that such choices inevitably ‘place’ parties, whether they like it or not, somewhere on the left–right spectrum. Meanwhile, though the arrival of the pandemic had the effect of shortening the odds on the second Conte Government’s survival in the medium term, thanks to the well-known ‘rally round the flag’ effect (Mueller, 1970) and although, as the months passed, Conte came to be perceived to have managed reactions to the pandemic competently, he also found himself on the receiving end of unremitting hostility on the part of much of the mainstream media with their unrelenting criticism of a wide variety of supposed shortcomings in his handling of the nation’s affairs. The criticism was of doubtful justification in view of the key role played by Conte in securing the adoption of Next Generation EU (which represented a significant new departure in European integration and the overcoming of years of opposition to the principle of debt mutualisation on the part of Italy’s northern partners) and in view of the Government’s other responses to the pandemic. By January 2021, for example, as measured by the number vaccinated per 100 of population, rollout of Coronavirus vaccines had been faster than in any other EU country with the exception of Denmark and Slovenia. From its height of 40,902 on 14 November, the number of new confirmed COVID cases had declined to 23,477 on 1 January, the number of daily recorded deaths from a height of 993 on 4 December to 555 on 1 January, reflecting downward trends which elsewhere, notably in the UK and Germany, had failed to materialise. However, none of these successes did anything to stem the growing tide of media criticism to which the Prime Minister had been subject since the middle of the previous year – criticism which revolved essentially around allegations of incompetence in the day-to-day management of the emergency, of delays in drafting the NRRP and of authoritarian designs in its management and oversight – and which now provided the basis for a complex game of musical chairs between Conte and Renzi, who was apparently intent on bringing the Government down but who could only succeed in this endeavour if he could bring his parliamentary followers with him, which in turn required some degree of certainty that the Government’s fall would not result in fresh elections, as these would almost certainly spell disaster for the Florentine’s party. In this context, it was significant that media speculation on what would happen in the event of the Government’s fall included the suggestion that it might be replaced by a grand coalition under Draghi, an outcome that in fact came to pass, as, with each passing day, it came to seem more and more likely that it would be regarded favourably by the major parliamentary players, ­notably the PD and the League. On 25 January, Conte made a last-ditch attempt to save his ­Government by resigning – in the expectation that the President of the Republic would give him a fresh mandate – as, formally, he still had the confidence of the two chambers of Parliament – and that in that way he would send a clear ultimatum to the potential responsabili either to back

A tale of two republics  25 him clearly or to sack him. However, Conte failed to receive the fresh mandate he had hoped for, and the President also announced that he would not dissolve Parliament either. On 17 and 18 February, the Draghi Government received the necessary confirmatory votes of confidence with 262 and 535 votes in the Senate and Chamber respectively. One could be forgiven for feeling slightly bemused by the reception given to Mario Draghi – greeted by much of the mainstream media and by all accounts by much of public opinion too, as ‘Super Mario’, il Salvatore della patria – when he became Prime Minister on 13 February. After all, given that the new Government’s performance was likely to depend at least as much on the country’s politico-institutional legacy, which remained the same, as on its members, not all of whom were fresh faces, it was not immediately obvious why Draghi would succeed where Conte – who had a creditable record and remained popular – had apparently failed. Moreover, the Government led by Draghi seemed unlikely to be a government of progressive reform, headed, as it was, by a powerful Prime Minister who was arguably the most authoritative representative in Italy of the near hegemonic outlook in Western democracies according to which the existing order, unlimited economic growth and unregulated free markets are the keys to human improvement. So in the summer of 2021, one could be forgiven for having a pessimistic outlook about the prospects for progressive change in Italy. Of course, only time would tell whether the outlook was justified. But with the parties of the far right having managed to place themselves both in government and in opposition and with the parties of the centre left largely hamstrung by their participation in a government representing the suspension of conflict around competing world-views, it was not surprising that the former were riding high in voting intentions polls. Thanks to the outcome of the September 2020 constitutional referendum reducing the number of parliamentarians,10 and its likely effect on the conversion of vote into seat distributions, they had an additional reason to feel optimistic. For supporters of a more diverse, less unequal, Italy, the future looked rather bleak. Conclusion The political history of post-war Italy has been, among other things, the history of two different party systems: the ‘polarised pluralism’ (Sartori, 1976) of the so-called ‘First Republic’, and the fragmented bipolarity of the ‘Second’. During the ‘First’, the existence of a large number of parties spread out over a large ideological distance and the existence of a large centre party ‘condemned’ to permanence in office as a bulwark against the ‘anti-system’ extremes acted as an obstacle to coherent policy-making, by giving powers of veto to parties and party factions whose support was needed to keep the ‘pro-system’ governments in office. The party-system transformation that ushered in the period referred to as the ‘Second Republic’ saw electoral coalitions of centre left and centre right competing for overall majorities of seats and alternation in office, but, because the number of parties remained considerable, so did the number of veto players, so did government instability and so, therefore, did the obstacles to coherent policy making. The ‘Second Republic’ was therefore characterised by a permanent search for institutional reforms that would resolve what was perceived as a crisis of governability but was in fact a crisis of legitimacy (Floridia, 2018). The point is that, with the collapse of the Berlin Wall, the signing in 1992 of the Maastricht Treaty with its single-currency provisions and the revelations of widespread corruption, the shortcomings of Italian governance were perceived as lying at the door of proportionality and the political parties. Institutional reform projects are inevitably driven by normative conceptions concerning what a democratic system ideally ought to look like, and, therefore, the next quarter century saw the constant search for reforms that would enable Italian democracy to dispense

26  A tale of two republics with the intermediating role of the parties and establish a direct relationship between citizens and those called upon to govern them. However, because it proved impossible to find a reform that could limit party-system fragmentation – and because those that were found in many respects encouraged it and with it the blackmail power of even small parties – the effect was two-fold: on the one hand, to encourage the continuing spread of anti-party and anti-political sentiments and, on the other hand, to encourage the spread of populist attitudes according to which a healthy democracy is not one that facilitates deliberation and the achievement of compromises but one in which elections enable the direct investiture of leaders, enabling majorities to give authority to issue orders on the part of leaders unrestrained by the requirements of negotiation and respect for the rights of minorities. The parties therefore collaborated in their own growing delegitimation – ‘revealed by the emergence of parties that were too ashamed to call themselves such’ (Floridia, 2018: 115) – a process further encouraged by processes of globalisation and the slippage of power away from national governments, including the Italian, and therefore the parties’ decreasing capacities to articulate distinct political projects for society, in a vicious circle. The appointment of the Draghi Government in many ways represented the culmination of these developments with the parties reduced to a mere supporting role: the role of facilitators of the acts of a man of providence. The purpose of this chapter has been to provide an overview of the political history of Italy from the birth of the post-war Republic to the present, with a view to contextualising the matters to be addressed in the six chapters that follow. These develop in more detail the analysis of matters merely touched on here or mentioned only in passing: the institutions of government and the state, the party system and the electorate, organised interests and social movements, the administration of justice and Italy in the wider world. Study of the institutions of a political system, using historical and comparative methods, is important because political institutions are the rules of action and interaction enforced by the state. Institutions thereby create political order by creating expectations enabling people to orient their action. They thereby make possible and inform economic transactions and social and political interactions. Therefore it is Italy’s political institutions to which, in the chapter that follows, I turn my attention first. Notes 1 At its height in the early 1970s, party membership in Italy stood at around 15% of the electorate. By 2008 it was half that (Sandri, Seddone and Bulli, 2015: 124, Figure 8.1). 2 ‘Voter volatility’ can refer to one of two things: ‘gross volatility’ – the numbers of voters changing their behaviour from one election to the next – or ‘aggregate (or total) volatility’ – the change in the distribution of support between parties from one election to the next. Arguably, from the point of view of political stability, the most important of the two measures is the latter, since individual vote switches in one direction may be ‘cancelled out’ by switches in the other direction, so that, even though the number of individual switches is very large, the overall distribution of the vote between parties does not change very much. Aggregate volatility is usually measured by Pedersen’s (1979) index which is calculated as the sum of the absolute values of all gains and losses by parties competing at an election, divided by two. The resulting index varies between 0 (meaning that no parties gained and therefore none lost votes either) and 100 (meaning that all parties from the last election received zero votes at the current one). 3 This was a term coined by journalists to refer to parliamentarians on the centre right, who, in the period after Renzi had indicated his intention to withdraw from the Government but before it had become clear that its collapse would not lead to a dissolution of Parliament, had indicated that they might be willing to come over to the side of the Government, so ‘compensating’ for Renzi’s desertion. Had they done so, then they would have reflected a practice with a venerable tradition in Italian politics: what in the British political context would be referred to as ‘crossing the floor of the House’ and which in Italian goes under the name of trasformismo or transforming opponents into allies. This was a practice widely resorted to by the governments of so-called ‘liberal Italy’, prior to the rise of Fascism,

A tale of two republics  27 whereby they frequently sought to maintain themselves in office on the basis of shifting majorities constantly constructed and reconstructed by offering and distributing rewards to supporters and potential supporters. 4 As one of Berlusconi’s lieutenants, Giuliano Urbani (2009), put it at the time, ‘to be on the centre right means to support Berlusconi, to be on the centre left … to oppose him’. 5 Especially the difficulty of the new state in asserting its authority against established power centres and local elites which sought to manipulate state institutions for their own advantage (Newell, 2021a: 10–11). 6 Average annual growth rates were 5.3% between 1951 and 1958, 6.6% between 1958 and 1963 and 5.3% between 1963 and 1969 (Bull and Newell, 2005: 22, Table 2.1). 7 Although the stand-down arrangements it had reached with FI in the single-member constituencies had enabled it to increase its tally in terms of seats, in terms of votes, it had suffered a considerable slippage in the direction of FI, with 28% of those who had voted LN in 1992 now choosing Berlusconi’s party (Newell, 2000: 115, Table 6.1). In order to emphasise its difference, in 1996 it ran on an uncompromising ‘northern independence’ ticket, independently, thus sacrificing its seat share but consolidating its popular support at 10% of the vote. 8 Electoral-system reform, and institutional reform more generally, remained constantly on the agenda of Italian politics, sustained there by political elites convinced that the quality of Italian democracy depended upon it. Thus, the electoral system was changed in 1993, in 2005, in 2015 and again in 2017: a record among the advanced democracies. Between 1991 and 2009, there were no fewer than eight referenda on proposals concerning the electoral system. Between 2001 and 2020 there were four referenda on proposed constitutional changes, two successful (those concerning the powers of regional authorities and the reduction in the number of parliamentarians, in 2001 and 2020 respectively) and two unsuccessful (those concerning a wide range of changes to the institutional geography of the Republic, in 2006 and 2016, both of which would arguably have resulted in a considerable concentration of power at the centre together with a weakening of mechanisms of accountability). For further details, see Bull, 2006; 2017; Fusaro, 2017. 9 Alternatively, the voter can express a preference both for a single-member candidate and one of the supporting parties, but in that case the effect is the same as having expressed a single preference for the supporting party. What the voter cannot do is express a preference for a single-member candidate and for a party supporting some other single member candidate. In that case the vote is considered null and void. 10 Reducing the number of parliamentarians had for long been a flagship policy of the M5S, one of the trademarks of its anti-establishment politics, a key symbol of its claim to be the authentic representative of ordinary people and their interests in opposition to those of the governing class or la casta (the caste) as the movement referred to it, therefore a rallying cry for the mobilisation of popular resentments. The referendum was therefore held, on 20 and 21 September 2020, on a proposal to reduce the number of deputies from 630 to 400 and the number of senators from 315 to 200: a proposal that had been passed on second reading by the Senate on 11 July 2019 but without the support of two thirds of its members, thus making it possible for the proposal’s opponents to insist on the holding of a referendum before it was promulgated. To no one’s great surprise, the proposal was supported in the referendum by 70% (on a turnout of 51%). Constitutional experts, meanwhile, noted that the reform took no account of any knock-on effects on other parts of the political system because it was unrelated to any, more general, agreed-upon project for institutional reform. And they wondered how a reform that, if anything, increased the distance between electors and the elected and seemed likely to make it more difficult for the legislature to hold governments to account squared with the Five-Star Movement’s traditional emphases on deliberative and participatory democracy. It also seemed likely to render Parliament less representative by magnifying, in terms of seats, the majorities won by parties in terms of votes, reducing the likelihood of smaller parties obtaining representation

References Blumenthal, S. (1980), The Permanent Campaign: Inside the World of Elite Political Operatives, Boston: Beacon Press. Bull, Martin (2006), ‘The Constitutional Referendum of June 2006: End of the “Great Reform” but Not of Reform Itself’, pp. 99–118 in Jean-Louis Briquet and Alfio Mastropaolo (eds), Italian Politics: The Center-Left’s Poisoned Victory, New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books.

28  A tale of two republics Bull, Martin (2017), ‘Renzi Removed: The 2016 Italian Constitutional Referendum and its Outcome’, pp. 131–53 in Alessandro Chiaramonte and Alex Wilson (eds), Italian Politics: The Great Reform that Never Was, New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books. Bull, Martin J., and James L. Newell (2005), Italian Politics: Adjustment under Duress, Cambridge: Polity Press. Chiaramonte, Alessandro, and Aldo Paparo (2019), ‘Volatile Voters and a Volatile Party System: The ­Results of the 2018 Italian General Election’, pp. 247–70 in Luigi Ceccarini and James L. Newell (eds), The Italian General Election of 2018: Italy in Uncharted Territory, Basingstoke: Palgrave. Floridia, Antonio (2018), ‘Electoral Systems and Concepts of Democracy: Electoral Reform as a ­Permanent Policy Issue in the Italian Political System’, Contemporary Italian Politics 10: 112–31. Fusaro, Carlo (2017), ‘Yet Another Failed Attempt to Reform the Italian Constitution’, pp. 111–30 in ­Alessandro Chiaramonte and Alex Wilson (eds), Italian Politics: The Great Reform that Never Was, New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books. Gibelli, Antonio (2010), Berlusconi passato alla storia: L’Italia nell’era della democrazia autoritaria, Roma: Donzelli Editore. Gundle, Stephen (2009), ‘Berlusconi, Sex and the Avoidance of a Media Scandal’, pp. 29–75 in Marco Giuliani and Erik Jones (eds), Italian Politics: Managing Uncertainty, Brooklyn, NY: Berghahn Books. Manin, Bernard (1997), The Principles of Representative Government, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Mueller, John (1970), ‘Presidential Popularity from Truman to Johnson’, American Political Science ­Review 64: 18–34. Newell, James L. (2000), Parties and Democracy in Italy, Aldershot: Ashgate. Newell, James L. (2010), The Politics of Italy: Governance in a Normal Country, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Newell, James L. (2019), Silvio Berlusconi: A Study in Failure, Manchester: Manchester University Press. Newell, James L. (2021), Italy’s Contemporary Politics, London and New York: Routledge. Pareo, Elisa (2020), ‘Recensione a M. De Nicolò, E. Fimiani, Dal fascismo alla Repubblica: quanta continuità? Numeri, questioni, biografie Viella, Roma 2019’, Il pensiero storico: Rivista internazionale di storia delle idee, https://ilpensierostorico.com/la-continuita-dello-stato-dal-regime-fascista-alla-repubblica. Pavone, Claudio (1995), Alle origini della Repubblica, Turin: Bollati Boringhieri. Pedersen, Mogens N. (1979), ‘The Dynamics of European Party Systems: Changing Patterns of Electoral Volatility’, European Journal of Political Research 7: 1–26. Sandri, Giulia, Antonella Seddone and Giorgia Bulli (2015), ‘Party Membership in Italy’, pp. 117–33 in Emilie van Haute and Anika Gauja (eds), Party Members and Activists, London: Routledge. Sartori, Giovanni (1976), Parties and Party Systems: A Framework for Analysis, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Tsebelis, George (2003), Veto Players: How Political Institutions Work, Princeton: Princeton University Press. Urbani, G. (2009), Interview with Aldo Cazzullo, ‘Urbani: Il progretto del “nuovo” Pdl? La debolezza del Pd ci contaggia’, Corriere della Sera, 15 Jan.: 6.

2

Government and the state

Introduction The purpose of this chapter is to provide an account of the structure and functioning of the principal institutions of the Italian state, from both historical and comparative perspectives. Both perspectives are necessary to achieve understanding. Things are as they are, because the past has conspired to make them so. Comparison makes it possible to see things as instances of more or less abstract entities, that is, to categorise them in terms of general concepts: without such general concepts we would not be able to describe the world, we would not know what we were looking at. As an example of a liberal democracy, Italy has a Constitution vesting sovereignty in the people. The people therefore exercise sovereignty according to the principles of the ­Constitution which ensures that minority rights are protected by dividing power between the executive, the legislature and the judiciary. This is what is meant by the term ‘liberal democracy’: the majority principle tempered by the entrenchment of minority rights. So, to understand how Italian politics ‘works’, and why it works the way it does, one has to understand the origins and the substance of the Constitution, the structure and functioning of at least the main institutions it provides for – the presidency; Parliament, Prime Minister and Cabinet; the judiciary; the public administration and the sub-national tiers of government – and how they interact with each other. Of course, an account of a country’s institutions does not exhaust what is required for an understanding of its politics, but it is an important and indispensable part of it. The Constitution Constitutions, like all such documents, reflect the distribution of power between the ­political forces – their ambitions, perceptions and principles – that most directly shape them. Thus, ­standard accounts of the origins of the Italian Constitution talk of a document whose ­allegedly distinctive characteristics – perhaps best summed up as restrictions on central executive authority through the diffusion of power horizontally and vertically – can be explained by the commitment to anti-Fascism – the lodestar for the deliberations of the Constituent Assembly – and by the concerns of those on either side of the very deep, Cold War driven, left/right divide to guarantee themselves against the potential authoritarianism of those on the other (Hine, 1981: 64). Thus, the Constitution was said (e.g. Hine, 1981) to provide few if any guarantees of governability – which became a progressively more significant issue as the post-war years progressed and which consequently led to an increasingly high-profile debate on the issue of constitutional reform. That the founding document came to be perceived in this way is curious, because a constitution that provides no guarantees of governability is by definition a ‘no-effects’ constitution, DOI: 10.4324/9780203422120-3

30  Government and the state so that it is difficult to see how it can be blamed for ungovernability (and one could well ­argue that governance was not actually that bad given the multiple political difficulties associated with managing the Cold War divide and the linkages between state and civil society). If ­ungovernability was indeed a problem, then it was due to the political parties and their interaction, and it is difficult to see how alternative constitutional arrangements might have made a difference. For example, following years of complaints that the legislative process was excessively cumbersome thanks to the constitutional provisions enshrining ‘symmetric bicameralism’,1 the package of amendments defeated in the referendum of December 2016 included, as we saw in Chapter 1, a reform of the Senate, which would lose its parity with the Chamber in the authorisation of legislation. In some areas, its powers would remain unchanged, but, in most others, votes in the Chamber would be decisive. Yet data presented by Pasquino and Pelizzo (2016) suggest that the Italian Parliament produces more laws, more quickly, than its counterparts in France, Germany, the UK and the United States. Symmetric bicameralism should, all else being equal, facilitate legislative productivity, at least as compared to mono-cameral systems, as it allows two proposals to be considered simultaneously. The proposed reforms of 2016 put in place several distinct legislative procedures which differed in terms of how and with what majority the Chamber could overcome a divergence with the Senate (Pasquino and Capussela, 2016). It was therefore possible to imagine controversies arising over which procedure was to apply and to envisage senators being tempted to use legal uncertainties surrounding their powers as a means of filibustering. The point is that constitutions set out the rules of the game: they cannot determine whether the game itself is played well or badly, something that will always depend on the players.2 So, for democrats, the criterion in terms of which constitutions should be judged is not the ­substance of politics but how well constitutions enshrine rule-of-law principles and the principles of ­liberal democracy, that is, the majority principle tempered by the division of powers to guarantee inviolable rights to minorities. In this respect, there would appear, in recent years, to have been many more or less significant instances of popular misunderstanding: • At the time of the Tangentopoli scandal in the 1990s, there was a public debate surrounding the principle of parliamentary immunity: that is, the principle that parliamentarians cannot be prosecuted for the way they vote in Parliament or for what they say in the course of their duties and cannot be deprived of any of their personal freedoms without the authorisation of the chamber of Parliament to which they belong. The complaint was that this conflicted with the rule-of-law principle, because it enabled parliamentarians under suspicion at the time to escape justice thanks to the solidarity of their colleagues. So, in 1993, the requirement for authorisation to initiate judicial investigations against parliamentarians was abolished, although Parliament retained the power to decide whether or not to lift immunity to judicial restrictions on members’ personal freedoms – understandably so, for objections to the very principle of immunity sometimes expressed at the time missed the point. Historically, the principle had been included in the Constitution by Constituent Assembly members, who were aware that a number of instances of judicially based persecution of parliamentarians had helped the Fascists to achieve power. It had been included not to place parliamentarians above the law but, as is essential in a democracy, to underscore the principle of separation of powers. • In more recent years, the Movimento Cinque Stelle, driven by popular perceptions that members of Parliament are insufficiently responsive to public opinion, has sometimes advocated abolishing article 67 of the Constitution, which stipulates that ‘each Member of Parliament

Government and the state  31 represents the Nation and carries out their duties without a binding mandate’. For the Movement, the member of Parliament should not be free of mandates, for in its conception parliamentarians are delegates, not trustees, bound by the will of those who got them elected. Again, this misses the point, because it eliminates the space for deliberation and so offends against the liberal principle that decisions should be preceded by authentic discussion and debate and not merely the aggregation of preferences that occurs in voting. • Finally, towards the end of May 2018, the President of the Republic, Sergio Mattarella, was accused by some of acting unconstitutionally, because he refused to appoint as Finance Minister a person strongly wanted by the parties that were then attempting to form a government and which enjoyed large majorities in Parliament and in the country at large. Yet again, this misses the point. Article 92 of the Constitution states that ‘the President of the Republic appoints the President of the Council of Ministers and, on his proposal, the Ministers’. There is no reference to any obligation, on the part of the President, to agree to any specific proposal. The fact that the parties making the proposal had a majority is of no relevance to the case: democracy is not about the supremacy, regardless, of the will of a majority but about the exercise of popular sovereignty ‘in the forms and within the limits of the Constitution’ (as article 1 puts it extremely clearly). Otherwise, guaranteeing minority rights becomes impossible, and, without that, democracy ceases to exist as such. If, then, the Italian Constitution is to be judged according to liberal democratic principles, it seems improbable that close scrutiny would reveal it to be any less robust in these respects, and perhaps more so, than the constitutions of most other liberal democracies. As described in more detail below, Part I of the Constitution sets out the full array of fundamental rights designed, first, to eliminate the space for any arbitrary exercises of power against individual citizens on the part of the public authorities and, second, to ensure the free and equal participation of citizens in the exercise of popular sovereignty. Part II, which sets out the institutional geography of the Republic, provides for a legislature elected by universal suffrage, with a constitutionally limited term of office and for an executive accountable to the legislature. It provides for a head of state (with powers to appoint the executive and to dissolve the legislature), elected according to procedures designed to eliminate the space for capture of the office by a temporary majority. It contains a series of provisions designed to ensure the autonomy of the judicial authorities, whose acts are subject only to the rule of law and the Constitution. It does likewise with the various tiers of sub-national government. It enshrines the principle that all other branches of the state, such as the public administration, can function only as provided for by legislation whose constitutionality is guaranteed by the provision for a free-standing Constitutional Court with the power to void legislation it judges incompatible with constitutional principles. Finally, it protects itself from erosion by temporary majorities by stipulating that proposed changes can be made subject to a popular vote unless they are approved by large, qualified, majorities in Parliament. In virtue of the precise ways in which they set out the rules of the game, constitutions, as founding documents, are typically revealing of the perceptions of their authors of the kind of society they aspire to. The Italian Constitution is no exception to this. The Italian Constitution offered different bundles of principles and values to each of the major political groupings present in the Constituent Assembly. From the point of view of the left, the Constitution could be read as a strongly collectivist document with a heavy emphasis on the fundamental role of labour and social solidarity in the new republic. Indeed the very first clause of the constitutional charter asserts that ‘Italy is a democratic republic based on labour’ (or work). Article 39 recognises the rights of labour organisations to organise and recruit, and article 40 entrenches the

32  Government and the state right to strike. The strong civil-rights character of the Constitution, while having the support of the left, also depended on the efforts of leading liberal figures such as Piero Calamandrei and Luigi Einaudi who pressed for an emphasis on the inviolability of personal freedom (article 13), the freedom of the press (article 21) and peaceful assembly (article 17). The Democrazia Cristiana were particularly concerned to preserve the special relationship between Church and state known as the Lateran Pact and the Concordat signed by Mussolini and the Pope in 1929. The incorporation of the Lateran Pact into the Constitution in article 7 helped to smooth the Church’s objections to an otherwise secular Republic because it reaffirmed the Catholic faith as the official religion of Italy and the Church’s right to provide religious education in schools. This was counterbalanced by the provision, in article 8, that ‘all religious denominations are equally free before the law’. While some of the (what might be called) ‘aspirational provisions’ leave little room for doubt about their concrete implications, many of them leave room that is quite considerable. The former category might include article 39, which, among other things, stipulates that ‘no obligations may be imposed on trade unions other than registration at local or central offices, according to the provisions of the law’. Here it would be a relatively straightforward matter to determine whether legislation was compatible with the Constitution or not. On the other hand, article 31 stipulates that ‘the Republic assists the formation of the family and the fulfilment of its duties’, article 32 that ‘the Republic safeguards health as a fundamental right of the individual’ and article 35 that ‘the Republic protects work in all its forms and practices’. In all these cases, there might be room for considerable debate both as to whether an item of legislation were constitutional or not and as to what, pro-actively, must be legislated for to give effect to the relevant provisions. So, from the beginning, there has always been debate about what the constitutional articles imply in terms of ordinary legislation, about the extent, therefore, to which the Constitution itself has actually been implemented and, hence, about what the Constitution itself amounts to, for, clearly, what it is and requires cannot be inferred by consulting the constitutional document alone but also requires reference to conventions and interpretations which are, of course, subject to constant development and change. What is clear is that for many years after 1948, the Constitution that was envisaged by the Constituent Assembly was not reflected in legislation and practice on the ground, a state of affairs that provided the basis, in Italian public debate, for a distinction between la costituzione formale and la costituzione materiale, one often used – with some corruption of the meaning originally intended for it3 – to refer to the articles of the Constitution itself, on the one hand, and a presumed constitution ‘actually’ in force, on the other, with a consequent ‘devaluation’ of the former (Barbera and Fusaro, 2001: 26–7). At any rate, having drafted the constitutional document which came into force at the beginning of 1948, the political forces responsible for it then fell out with each other, thanks to political developments associated with the Cold War, and hence either found themselves unable to pass the enabling legislation necessary to give effect to its provisions or else, having passed the legislation, obstructed its implementation. The former case was exemplified by among others, article 114, providing for regional administrations, which were not fully legislated for until the late 1960s and early 1970s, largely because the DC was fearful that the regions might provide a power base for the Partito Comunista Italiano, bearing in mind that while the latter was a ‘pariah’ at national level, other parties were often willing to work with it in government at the local level. The latter case was exemplified by the Constitutional Court, which seemed likely to strike down much of the public order legislation inherited from Fascism but which was useful to the Ministry of the Interior in its efforts to contain ‘the allegedly anti-system opposition of the left’ (Hine, 1981: 65). Thus it was that the enabling legislation setting up the Court contained a provision ‘that the five judges chosen by

Government and the state  33 parliament (out of a total of fifteen) should be elected by a three-fifths majority [thus enabling] the government either to pack the court with conservative judges or, if it failed to win a majority, to prevent the court from starting its work by ensuring that no candidates obtained the necessary three-fifths majority in parliament’. Following the outcome of the 1953 election, ‘the parties adopted the latter course, and the deliberate obstructionism which followed ensured that the court was ready to hand down its first judgement only in 1956’ (Hine, 1981: 66). So while the ‘ideal’ constitution is one whose provisions political actors can take for granted as they get on and address the substantive issues of politics, the Italian Constitution has rarely been far from the forefront of political debate, and the period since the 1980s especially has been one in which institutional and especially electoral-system reform has had a more or less permanent and high-profile place on the political agenda, thanks to the aforementioned perceptions of ungovernability, where the latter term has generally been used to refer to the difficulties faced by governments in efficiently producing effective legislation – with the result of producing growing popular dissatisfaction – thanks to the presence within the system of multiple veto players. A veto player is, as the term suggests, a political actor with the power to block moves away from the status quo. As I have written elsewhere (Newell, 2019: 178), if policy change requires the agreement of at least two veto players, then as their number increases, change to the status quo does not become easier and may become more difficult depending on the actors’ preferences (Tsebelis, 2003). If policy change involves several different dimensions, and if the majority that can be constructed for change along one dimension fails to coincide with the majorities that can be constructed for change along one or more of the other dimensions, then it is probable that, in the absence of log-rolling, there will be no majority that can be constructed for the overall package.4 As a polity with large numbers of partisan veto players spread over a large ideological distance, Italy has (to the extent that it has even been described as ‘veto-ridden’ (Molina and Rhodes, 2007: 803)), for this reason, traditionally found reform, tout court, difficult. So, since the 1980s, there has, as we saw in the previous chapter, been a strong focus in public debate on efforts to realise institutional change having a majoritarian character, that is, change such as to enable a relative majority of voters to directly decide the colouring of the majority in parliament and thus of the government ‘in a competitive context in which voters have the possibility of choosing between at least two … governing alternatives’ (Oreste Massari, quoted in Paquino, 2000: 58–9, my translation). Efforts at change have been unsuccessful so far, but the issue remains on the agenda of Italian politics and, as we shall see in Chapters 3 and 7, may yet still come to fruition now that the parties of the right have a solid parliamentary majority and seem intent on pursuing constitutional reform designed to give Italy a presidential form of government. The presidency The Italian presidency sits awkwardly within the traditional frameworks of comparative politics. On the one hand, presidents’ powers do not extend as far as those enjoyed by heads of state in presidential systems of government. On the other hand, their powers extend beyond the essentially ceremonial ones typical of heads of state in parliamentary systems. Essentially, the power of the President is a variable quality deriving from the articles of the Constitution and therefore the legal framework surrounding the office and from the power other relevant political actors are able to wield from time to time. As far as the Constitution and the legal framework are concerned, arguably the most significant of the constitutional articles from the point of view of understanding Italian politics and how the Italian political system works are articles 74 (stipulating that ‘the President of the Republic

34  Government and the state may send Parliament a reasoned opinion to request that a law scheduled for promulgation be considered anew’), article 87 (stipulating that the President is ‘the Head of State and represents national unity’, authorises ‘the introduction to Parliament of bills initiated by the Government, promulgates laws and issues decrees having the force of law’), article 88 (stipulating that ‘in consultation with the presiding officers of Parliament, the President may dissolve one or both Houses of Parliament’) and article 92 (stipulating that ‘the President of the Republic appoints the President of the Council of Ministers and, on his proposal, the Ministers’). Together, these articles reflected a desire on the part of a majority of the Constituent Assembly to create a presidency whose powers (especially in relation to the dissolution of Parliament and appointment of the head of the executive) would be less qualified than in most other parliamentary democracies. For example, in the French Constitution of 1946 the power of dissolution could be exercised only in specific circumstances and on the basis of a decision of the Cabinet. The German Basic Law of 1949 stipulates that the President nominates the Chancellor only after they have been elected by the Bundestag (Neppi Modona and Di Giovine, 1995: 272). In turn, the desires of Constituent Assembly members reflect a specific view of the role and responsibilities of the President that has since come to be widely accepted. This is that while the President does not govern in the sense of having direct responsibility for pursuit of the substance of public policy (where the main responsibility lies with the Council of Ministers) nor is the President merely ‘the master of ceremonies envisaged by other constitutions’ (Meuccio Ruini, quoted in Neppi Modona and Di Giovine, 1995: 271). For this reason, the roles and responsibilities of the President were difficult to articulate in legal terms, and, for this reason, the President’s powers remain largely unqualified within the constitutional document itself. Any constitutional order, if it is to remain integral and intact, requires an institution tasked with determining, in cases of doubt, whether the substance of acts having the force of law are consistent with the Constitution itself. This is the role of the Constitutional Court. It also requires an institution with responsibility for ensuring that the political interactions and processes through which acts having the force of law are pursued take place in a manner consistent with the constitution. This is the role of the President. Consequently, one may say that the role of the President in the Italian political system is to coordinate and moderate the activities of the political actors directly involved in the processes of law-making. From this perspective, the President may be said to ‘govern’ in the broadest sense, a function which, as a president, he (they have all been male so far (Table 2.1)) can perform much more effectively than a monarchical head of state – who is handicapped by the lack of any representative principle underlying the office and whose powers therefore remain, typically, almost entirely symbolic.5 In order to ensure that the presidential incumbent is in a position to perform the governing function consensually and therefore effectively, the processes by which he comes to occupy the office have been made to conform to two criteria. First, his appointment requires the support of the political parties, which, in articulating and aggregating popular preferences and in being the main channels of recruitment to political office, are the central institutions linking civil society and the state. Second, the procedures for selection of the President are designed to eliminate, or at least minimise, the risk of the office being captured and bent to the will of some temporary majority. Thus it is that article 83 of the Constitution stipulates that The President of the Republic is elected by Parliament in joint session. Three delegates from every region elected by the Regional Council so as to ensure that minorities are represented shall participate in the election. Valle d’Aosta has one delegate only. The election of the President of the Republic is by secret ballot with a majority of two thirds of the assembly. After the third ballot an absolute majority shall suffice.

Government and the state  35 Table 2.1  Presidents of the Italian Republic President

Born–died

In office

Party of origin

Notes

Enrico de Nicola

1877–1959

1 July 1946 – 12 May 1948

PLI

12 May 1948 – 11 May 1955 11 May 1955 – 11 May 1962 11 May 1962 – 6 Dec. 1964

PLI

29 Dec. 1964 – 29 Dec. 1971 29 Dec. 1971 – 15 June 1978

PSDI

9 July 1978 – 29 June 1985 3 July 1985 – 28 Apr. 1992 28 May 1992 – 15 May 1999 18 May 1999 – 15 May 2006 15 May 2006 – 22 Apr. 2013

PSI

Elected by the Constituent Assembly at the first round of voting, with 405 of 556 votes, as provisional head of state. Served as President of the Republic on entry into force of the Constitution on 1 January 1948. Elected at the fourth round of voting with 518 of 900 votes. Elected at the fourth round of voting with 658 of 843 votes. Elected at the ninth round of voting with 443 of 854 votes. Resigned in 1964 on grounds of ill-health. Elected at the twenty-first round of voting with 646 of 963 votes. Elected at the twenty-third round of voting with 518 of 1008 votes. Forced to resign by media allegations concerning his presumed involvement in the Lockheed corruption scandal. Elected at the sixteenth round of voting with 832 of 1011 votes. Elected at the first round of voting with 752 of 1011 votes. Elected at the sixteenth round of voting with 672 of 1011 votes. Elected at the first round of voting with 707 of 1010 votes. Elected at the fourth round of voting with 543 of 1009 votes. First former Communist to be elected President. First President to serve for a second term. Elected at the sixth round of voting with 738 of 1007 votes. Resigned his second mandate early on health grounds. Elected at the fourth round of voting with 605 of 1009 votes. Elected at the eighth round of voting with 759 of 1009 votes.

Luigi Einaudi 1874–1961 Giovanni Gronchi Antonio Segni

1887–1978

Giuseppe Saragat Giovanni Leone

1898–1988

Sandro Pertini Francesco Cossiga Oscar Luigi Scalfaro Carlo Azeglio Ciampi Giorgio Napolitano

1896–1990

1891–1972

1908–2001

1928–2010 1918–2012 1920–2016 1925–2023

DC DC

DC

DC DC Independent PCI-PDS-DS

22 Apr. 2013 – 14 Jan. 2015 Sergio Mattarella

1941–

3 Feb. 2015 – 3 Feb. Independent 2022 3 Feb. 2022 – present

Article 85 stipulates that ‘the President of the Republic is elected for seven years’. All of these stipulations have a part to play in ensuring continuity, authority, independence and impartiality in the exercise of presidential powers. The avoidance of direct election is designed to prevent the undesirable degree of politicisation of the office that would derive from a competition involving the country at large. The secret ballot reduces the pressure of the party leaders on their followers’ decisions. The qualified majority minimises the risk of the office being captured by the Government of the day. The seven-year term, in exceeding the maximum legislative term by two years, diminishes the pressures to which the President may be subject from the legislature that was responsible for his appointment.

36  Government and the state None of this is to suggest that presidents are ‘neutral’ in the sense that they never take decisions driven by considerations of their substantive political consequences. This is clearly not the case, as was demonstrated by the aforementioned decision of President Sergio Mattarella not to sanction the appointment, as Finance Minister, of the academic Paolo Savona, on the grounds that, in the President’s own words, ‘the uncertainty of our position in the Euro has alarmed Italian and foreign investors who have placed money in shares and companies. Increases in the size of the spread increase the levels of debt and reduce the room available for social spending. This in turn destroys resources and firms’ savings with consequent risks for Italian families and citizens’ (Quotidiano Sanità, 2018). More generally, any decision by the occupant of a public office, insofar as it affects the distribution of power between actors, is political and therefore not ‘neutral’ in that sense. So, given the relative lack of qualification and specification in the relevant constitutional articles, the scope for presidential decision-making – the latitude Presidents enjoy – is – to recall the famous analogy with the bellows of an accordion made by the former Socialist and legal scholar, Giuliano Amato, cited by Pasquino (2003) – the greater or the lesser depending on the multiple power resources of other relevant political actors and therefore on the perceived legitimacy of the President’s decisions. To take an obvious example, it is hardly conceivable that a President could exercise the power of dissolution against a secure parliamentary majority with secure support in the country without provoking a constitutional crisis. In other circumstances, Presidents have, if anything, been under the opposite pressure, called upon to make full and pro-active use of the power. This was the case at the beginning of 1994 when, under the onslaught of the mani pulite investigations into the Tangentopoli scandal, the Parliament elected just two years earlier had been thoroughly delegitimised, the traditional governing parties had all but disintegrated and the above-mentioned new electoral law had recently been passed. The scope for presidential intervention varies considerably, even in those cases where the relevant powers are quite heavily qualified by the constitution. This is the case with article 74, which, in enabling Presidents to require Parliament to re-examine legislation, goes on to stipulate that if after the re-examination Parliament passes the legislation again, then the President must promulgate it. In a number of instances, this qualification has failed to act as any effective check whatsoever, simply because the presidents involved were able to prevent Parliament insisting on its course by relying, ultimately, on the power of public perceptions, attitudes and anxieties as expressed through the mass media. One example concerned the first President, Luigi Einaudi, who sent back to Parliament a law concerning the retention of a system of salary supplements for public employees (Fusaro, 2003: 90–1), another the decision of President Ciampi, in 2003, to send back the so-called Gasparri law, which sought to circumvent antitrust legislation and a number of rulings of the Constitutional Court apparently for the personal benefit of the Prime Minister. The most dramatic recent instance of a situation in which the President’s actual power has far exceeded his formal power came with the resignation of Silvio Berlusconi and his replacement as Prime Minister by Mario Monti at the end of 2011. This was effectively engineered by President Giorgio Napolitano leading many to wonder, at the time, whether Italy had acquired a de facto semi-presidential system of government (Newell, 2012). Because of the scope for presidential intervention and although presidents must renounce any party-political affiliations once elected, the parties are far from indifferent concerning who gets elected, and presidential elections are far from being without significant substantive political consequences, for ‘the positions parties take in presidential elections inevitably impinge on the positions they take in negotiating with other parties on “ordinary”, substantive matters. This is especially true in the early twenty-first century where the President’s actual, as opposed to formal, powers have become much more significant than they were in the past, thanks to the

Government and the state  37 “mediatisation” of politics and the relative weakness of the Italian parties’ (Newell and Giovannini, 2015). A very good example of this was provided by the presidential elections in January 2015, when, in the processes of inter-party negotiation leading up to them, it became clear that the political authority of two of the most significant party leaders – Silvio Berlusconi and Matteo Renzi – was at stake and the outcome created considerable friction between the two men and their parties over the issue of institutional reform (Newell and Giovannini, 2015).6 Because of presidents’ capacities, thanks to the drafters of the 1948 Constitution, to deploy their powers, where necessary, in a rather unique blend of impartial mediation and political activism, the presidency regularly emerges in opinion polls as the political institution in which Italians have the most confidence, while presidents, in turn, are careful to make full use of their powers, in combination with the mass media, to relate to the public in ways that will maintain their authority (Palladino, 2015). In a historical period in which Italian democracy itself has often seemed to one degree or another to be in crisis, this has arguably made no small contribution to the stability of the political system as a whole. Parliament, the Prime Minister, Cabinet and their interactions Parliament

The Italian Parliament is unusual in a number of respects. On the one hand, it has all of the features one would expect of a legislature in a parliamentary system of government. It is elected by universal suffrage, it can amend or reject legislation proposed by the executive, call it to account and remove it or any of its members from office by passing a vote of no confidence. On the other hand, whereas about three quarters of contemporary legislatures have one chamber (Newton and Van Deth, 2005: 47), Italy’s has two, and, whereas most bicameral systems are of the ‘weak’ variety, meaning that one chamber has more power than the other, in the case of Italy, the powers are identical. The terms of tenure (five years) are the same. The only difference is in the qualifying ages for membership (25 in the case of the 400-member Chamber; 40 in the case of the 200-member Senate),7 and there is a slight difference in the bodies’ composition thanks to the fact that the President of the Republic can appoint five senators for life. The chambers’ parity has a number of significant implications. Confidence in the executive and the approval of laws depends, necessarily, on perfect agreement between the two chambers (Neppi Modona and Di Giovine, 1995: 225). Consequently, their electoral systems must be sufficiently similar to provide reasonable certainty that parties able to command a majority in one are also able to command a majority in the other. This has been a significant issue in recent years thanks to the aforementioned pressures for institutional reform. For instance, in 2005, the outgoing Berlusconi Government legislated for a change in the electoral law that provided for voting to take place on the basis of proportional representation with a majority premium. When the proposed legislation was passed for scrutiny to the then President, Carlo Azeglio Ciampi, he apparently insisted, in the case of the Senate, that the premium be distributed region by region, rather than nationally (as in the case of the Chamber) – this in deference to article 57 of the constitution, which stipulates that ‘the Senate of the Republic is elected on a regional basis’. The result was that in 2006 and again in 2013, elections that gave the incoming government a secure majority in the Chamber failed to do so in the case of the Senate – thus adding to the difficulties of governments in attempting to pursue legislative programmes whose realisation was already difficult thanks to the fragmentation of the parliamentary parties and to standing orders unhelpful to governments in their attempts to steer the legislature. Indeed, in the case of the 2006 Government, the difficulties were so great that they led to its rapid demise and

38  Government and the state early elections: in the Senate, the majority was so small that, in the context of an especially fragmented coalition, not only individual parties but even individual senators became veto players. Having to spend enormous amounts of time in negotiations aimed at keeping the coalition together, the Prime Minister, Romano Prodi, found he had correspondingly little time to engage in the permanent campaigning (that is, mobilising popular support for government initiatives while taking initiatives to mobilise popular support) that all Prime Ministers must engage in to shore up their majorities in the country and thus in Parliament. In this context, the presidential power to appoint five life senators became significant, highlighting an ambiguity in the relevant constitutional article (article 59) about whether each President could nominate five or nominate a number such that there were no more than five at any given time. On the one hand, the power offered a potential life-line to the Government, but on the other involved obvious risks if it came to be seen as being used for partisan purposes.8 Ten years later, in 2016, the package of constitutional reform measures pursued by Prime Minister Matteo Renzi, envisaged a weakened Senate indirectly elected so that the requirement for similarity in the two chambers’ electoral laws seemed to have been overcome. Consequently, the December 2016 referendum on the measures had been preceded by yet another electoral-law reform – perceived as offering the potential for stronger, more cohesive, governments – but it applied to the Chamber only. Consequently, when in the referendum voters rejected the proposed constitutional changes, the Senate remained with all of its powers intact, and so electoral reform remained a significant problem, as the two branches of the legislature now had completely different systems for their election. The historical explanation for Italy’s symmetric bicameralism resides in the nature of the specific decisions members of the Constituent Assembly were called upon to make. The left was concerned to remove potential obstacles to reform and so favoured a single chamber, the DC to put in place institutional arrangements that would provide for thoughtful (and therefore presumably more moderate) law-making (Barbera and Fusaro, 2001: 230) and so favoured two chambers. If the bicameral option won the day, the question then was what representative criterion was to be used for the second chamber. Royal appointment had been the method used to select members of the Senate in liberal Italy, but this was ruled out by the outcome of the referendum of 2 June 1946 which had abolished the monarchy. In most bicameral systems, members of the second chamber are elected (directly or indirectly) to represent, local or regional, territorial units in accordance with principles of the territorial diffusion of power (as expressed in federalism, for example). But while some members of the Constituent Assembly wanted a break with the traditional political and administrative centralisation that had characterised liberal Italy (and while the idea of a Senate representative of the regions would make a come-back half a century later with the emergence and growth of the LN) a large number of considerations – irredentism in Trentino-Alto Adige, a nascent independence movement in Sicily, the north–south economic and social divide – pushed in the direction of the principle of ‘a sovereign people, one and indivisible’. If, then, both chambers were to be the expression of popular sovereignty, then identical powers for both followed almost as a matter of logical necessity. Prime ministers and governments

Prime ministers come by their positions through the conferral of a mandate for the formation of a government by the President of the Republic, who, in making his decision, is concerned, above all with whether the person appointed will be able to assemble a government capable of surviving the confirmatory votes of confidence – in the Chamber and in the Senate – to which all incoming governments are subject when they present themselves to Parliament for the first

Government and the state  39 time. Assembling a government, in turn, requires programmatic agreement among the relevant parties, since it is on the basis of its programme that an incoming government asks for a vote of confidence in the first place. All this means that presidents will not confer a full mandate on a prime ministerial candidate unless they have some minimum degree of certainty about the likelihood that he or she will survive the confidence vote, and, therefore, they do not do so until they have consulted with all the relevant political parties. This was highlighted especially well by the consultations that led up to the formation of the Government in the aftermath of the 2013 elections. Then, the largest party in Parliament was the Partito Democratico under Pierluigi Bersani who was given a conditional mandate (preincarico) on 22 March. Bersani’s fundamental problem was that his coalition was 36 seats short of a majority in the Senate. Scelta Civica’s (Civic Choice, SC) 21 seats were insufficient to make up the difference; the M5S had 54. If he could persuade a sufficient number of the senators belonging to parties or coalitions other than his own to absent themselves at the moment of the confidence vote, then in theory – some media commentators suggested – he could become Prime Minister at the head of a minority government whose measures the movement’s Beppe Grillo had indicated his party would be willing to support on a case-by-case basis. In fact, such a ‘solution’ was a complete non-starter even before it was suggested: given that President Napolitano would not confer a mandate in the absence of the necessary assurances – especially given the international financial crisis – and given that such assurances could not be given without agreement among the forces that would support the incoming government on what its programme would be, there was in fact no alternative to an attempt by Bersani to persuade a sufficient number of M5S senators to support him on the basis of a package of policy proposals agreed in advance. Ultimately, Bersani was unsuccessful and did not become Prime Minister. In 2018, in an apparent exception to the rule, President Mattarella sought to break through the impasse that had been created by the stand-off over Paolo Savona, by threatening to appoint the economist, Carlo Cottarelli, at the head of a technocratic government, in face of the near certainty, on the part of all concerned, that Cottarelli would fail to survive the confidence vote which in turn would require fresh elections just weeks after the elections on 4 March. But the move was soon revealed for what it was – an attempt to call the parties’ bluff – as the latter fell into line and formed a government shortly thereafter. Italian prime ministers, though constitutionally responsible for the general policy direction of the Government and for ‘coordinating the activity of the Ministers’ (article 95), have tended to enjoy none of the power and authority of their British counterparts, who are party leaders heading single-party governments. Until the political upheavals of the early 1990s, Italian prime ministers tended to be mediators seeking to reconcile the conflicting demands of factions and parties whose leaders would tend to stay out of government while agreeing policy among themselves in informal settings that came to be known as ‘majority summits’. In this way they could control the Government while retaining sufficient distance from it to enable them to avoid having to take responsibility for any policy mishaps. With the advent, from 1994, of bipolar competition (with its pre-constituted coalitions whose leaders were effectively candidates for the prime ministerial office), prime ministers gained in power and stature thanks to the novelty that they could now claim that their hold on office had been directly legitimated by the election outcomes themselves. However, where – as in the case of Romano Prodi from 1996 – they were coalition leaders but were backed by no parties of their own, the gain was somewhat limited as they remained beholden to the parties they were attempting to lead. It was only really with the advent of the Berlusconi Government in 2001 that there emerged a Prime Minister with significant authority: then Berlusconi was the head both of his coalition and its largest party – a party over which he exercised complete control and whose support was indispensable to the survival

40  Government and the state of the governing coalition itself. With the outcome of the 2018 election and the appointment as Prime Minister of the academic, Giuseppe Conte, it looked as though there might be something of a reversion to the tradition of weak prime ministers. As an ‘outsider’, with no previous experience of politics, Conte owed his position entirely to an agreement between the leaders of the governing parties who had reached agreement on a ‘contract’ for government before converging on the name of Conte, who looked, therefore, as though he would be able to be little more than the executor of an agreement reached by others. Against the background of these party-political constraints, and driven by the demands of the international arena (where short-lived prime ministers place Italy at a disadvantage as ­compared with her interlocutors with their longer-lasting chief executives) there have, starting in the 1980s been various attempts to use institutional reform to strengthen the role of the premiership in government. The first of these, involving the creation of an inner cabinet consisting of the ­highest-ranking party leaders in government (Cotta and Verzichelli, 2007: 125), was initiated under the Socialist Prime Minister Bettino Craxi, in 1983, and was part of a precisely worked out political strategy. The Craxi premiership was unusual, at the time, in that it was only the second occasion on which the premiership had not gone to the DC, and Craxi was the leader of his party. Capitalising on the DC’s retreat in that year’s elections and enjoying firm control of his party, Craxi decided to take the premiership for himself, for he understood that – by drawing upon the nascent mediatisation and personalisation of politics that came with the advent of commercial television controlled by his friend Silvio Berlusconi – he could use the reform as a means of cultivating and enhancing his reputation for decisiveness. Thereby he would raise his own and his party’s profile in competition with the PCI to his left and the DC to his right. One indicator of the success of the strategy was that Craxi managed to establish a record for the longest lasting government in republican Italy to that point. A second reform came in 1988 with the passage of law 400 which sought to strengthen the ­financial and bureaucratic resources at the disposal of the premiership through the office of Prime Minister, which increased the number of matters requiring cabinet discussion as opposed to the decisions of individual ministers and which contained rules designed to improve the circulation of information among cabinet ministers (Cotta and Verzichelli, 2007: 126). By increasing the collegiality and therefore the cohesion of governments in the process of policy formulation, the reform’s supporters also hoped to increase the capacity of governments to steer the legislative process generally. Government–Parliament interactions

Italian governments have always found it difficult to dominate the legislature to the extent that their counterparts in other democracies have typically been able to do. As we saw in Chapter 1, during the so-called ‘First Republic’, from 1948 to 1994, governments tended to be short-lived and unstable, with frequent changes of government and Prime Minister. The governing parties were highly factionalised entities, with the parties and their factions ever ready to block change if it threatened the interests of their clientele followings. Under these circumstances, governments had considerable difficulty in steering their parliamentary majorities by obliging them to act in a cohesive fashion, for the clientele politics informing relations with voters also informed relations within and between the governing parties, with clientele chains extending from the bottom to the top of the system through informal power networks. The position improved somewhat with the advent from 1994 of bipolar party competition and – thanks to all its myriad concomitants: the heightened profile of prime ministerial candidates, of governing programmes released prior to elections and so forth – with the consequent

Government and the state  41 potential for a greater concentration of power at the top. But this was counterbalanced by the party system’s greater fragmentation and by the awareness of party leaders that while their support might be required to help a coalition win an election, their blackmail power gave them freedom, after elections, to disregard coalition commitments when it came to their actions in Parliament. To these party-political difficulties have been added difficulties associated with the Constitution and Parliament’s standing orders. To dominate a legislature means having the power to influence what is debated, within what time frame and with what outcome. In all three areas, governments face considerable obstacles. As far as the first is concerned, article 70 of the ­Constitution, in giving the power of legislative initiative to Parliament’s chambers without qualification, gives backbench and government initiatives exactly the same status. Parliament’s standing orders ‘may allow priority to be given, in the parliamentary timetable, to particular categories of bill. What they cannot do, while remaining within the Constitution, is to allow the government … to decide, on its own authority, the priority its bills will be given in the parliamentary timetable’ (Newell, 2006: 390). Though timetabling arrangements have changed over the years (see Newell, 2006; Cotta and Verzichelli, 2007), their essential feature remains: timetabling is carried out by the chambers’ presidents together with the leaders of the parliamentary groups, including those of the opposition. Though planning must now take place taking account of the priorities outlined by the Government, it continues to reflect the basic principles that the assembly must be in charge of its own timetable and that the interests of minorities must be protected. Second, while it is true that opportunities for filibustering through ‘talking out’ proposals and the presentation of multiple amendments have gradually been closed down over the years, governments remain vulnerable to losses of control over the length of time required to achieve their legislative programmes by threats from parliamentarians to walk out and so render the assembly inquorate. Finally, while secret voting was almost completely abolished in 1988, governments continue to face obstacles to influencing the outcome of deliberations on their proposals thanks to article 72 of the Constitution. This stipulates that bills, once introduced, must be considered in committee (where they may be amended) before being voted on by the House. While, in accordance with the same article, they may be referred back to the House upon the request of the Government, the fact remains that ‘the Constitution gives Parliament’s committees a legally guaranteed sphere of autonomy which may not be infringed by any other body’, so that, until such time as referral back does take place, ‘the decisions of committees may not be overturned, thus making them, constitutionally speaking, fully independent powers’ (Newell, 2006: 388–9). As a consequence of these restrictions, the success rate of government bills is low in comparative terms,9 and, under increasing pressure from the international environment to act more decisively, governments have, over the years, had increasing recourse to procedures to enable them to by-pass Parliament. One involves use of the decree laws provided for by article 77 of the Constitution. This allows governments, ‘in cases of necessity and urgency’ to pass, on their own authority, measures having the force of law for a period of 60 days, extendable indefinitely if ratified by Parliament within that time period. If not so ratified, then until 1996, when the practice was largely outlawed by the Constitutional Court, it was not unusual for governments to repeatedly reissue decrees whose terms were about to expire. A second involves making use of the process of delegificazione (legislative simplification), aimed at driving law out of the administrative sphere that has been underway since the 1990s. This involves the passage of legislation stipulating that unwanted laws are to be repealed on the entry into force of regulations to replace them, thus allowing governments to draw on their powers to issue regulations in pursuit of a given law. A third, not too dissimilar measure, involves the use of laws of delegation (provided for by article 76), which empower governments to pass secondary legislation in pursuit of the

42  Government and the state principles and objectives set out in the laws. The increasing use of especially the second and the third of these measures, and Parliament’s acquiescence in them, has led observers to perceive the emergence of an increasingly significant ‘division of labour’ between governments and Parliament in recent years (Mazzoni Honorati, 2001; Capano and Giuliani, 2003). That is, delegificazione allows Parliament to make broad policy decisions, while leaving it to the Government to decide the details. Laws of delegation have made it possible for governments to respond efficiently and effectively to the increasing pressures deriving from the EU and other international forums – over which national parliaments have little real control – while Parliament itself has been increasingly content to focus its efforts on the tasks of scrutiny and oversight. In these areas, the period since the early 1990s has seen a dramatic increase in Parliament’s significance. Before then, the ordinary member of Parliament had had little interest in oversight activities, for, as Furlong (1990: 62) noted, ‘vigorous participation in formal Parliament business [had been] likely to preclude the kind of network building … required for junior members if they wish[ed] to ensure their re-election and to place themselves well in a strong faction’. Since then, there has been a considerable increase in the use of ex-ante guidance and direction (through motions and resolutions) and ex-post controls (through questions and interpellations) and the introduction of new instruments of scrutiny such as Prime Minister’s questions and urgent interpellations. Not only opposition parliamentarians but also government backbenchers have become increasingly involved in their use (Newell, 2006: 398–400). Thus it is that, while processes of globalisation and Europeanisation have reduced the centrality of Parliament in governance to the advantage of the executive (which is the only player in the international arena), Parliament has seemingly been successful in carving out a novel, even if diminished, role for itself in the process. The judiciary As in other democracies, so too in Italy, the judiciary has played an increasingly significant role in governance over the years – a process that has come to be known as the judicialisation of politics (Ferejohn, 2002), which refers to a cross-national trend encompassing a growing power of judicial institutions and the courts to limit and regulate other branches of government, a growing willingness of courts to make use of this power and, thirdly, a growing tendency on the part of political forces to make use of courts and judicial institutions as weapons of political competition. All three of these trends can be seen very clearly in the Italian case. With regard to the first, the framers of the Constitution actually sought to reduce to the minimum possible the risk of judicial interference in the free exercise of legislative powers by stipulating that ordinary judges, unlike their American counterparts, would not be allowed to refuse to apply statutes because they deemed them unconstitutional. Only the Constitutional Court, a body quite separate from the ordinary courts, would have the power to invalidate legislation in this way – so that the most an ordinary judge could do was to raise an issue of constitutionality before the Constitutional Court. The framers’ desires were not realised in practice. Part I of the Constitution, as noted above, sets out a number of fundamental rights and freedoms, which, by their nature, are expressed in abstract terms and therefore susceptible to a wide range of possible interpretations as to their meaning and implications in concrete terms.10 As a body entirely separate from the ordinary court system, the Constitutional Court is composed of judges without any direct authority over ordinary judges whose power to make decisions free of the relations of hierarchy or dependence of one position on another is in any case protected by articles 101 and 107 of the Constitution.11 The upshot has been, first, that the judiciary – that is the ordinary judiciary

Government and the state  43 and the constitutional judiciary, in dialogue through the process of constitutional referral – has been able to acquire a legislative function thanks to Part I of the Constitution and, second, that the legislature has found it difficult to limit the exercise of this function thanks to its fragmented character. This has made it difficult for Parliament to render constitutional, by changing the Constitution itself, acts that have been impugned, bearing in mind the high degree of consensus required among parties in order to achieve constitutional change under most ordinary circumstances.12 Moreover, as I have written elsewhere (Newell, 2005: 34), an increasing proportion of the judgements issued by the Constitutional Court over the years has consisted of what Stone Sweet (2000: 72) calls ‘binding interpretations’, that is, declarations that laws are to be considered constitutional only if interpreted in the way that the Court specifies. Such declarations in effect re-write legislation and thereby give the Court real authority over Parliament. For as the corpus of policy-relevant constitutional interpretations grows, legislators are increasingly obliged, in framing legislation, to anticipate the likelihood of referrals and thereby to engage, when proposing and debating legislation, in modes of reasoning similar to those employed by the Court itself. So the judiciary has, with the passage of time, enjoyed growing capacity to have a political impact, and it has also shown growing willingness actually to make use of this capacity. This has been due to an interlinked series of factors beginning with generational turnover in the judicial corps in the 1950s and 1960s. In the immediate post-war period, most of the most significantly placed judges had made their careers under Fascism and they were therefore content to take a charitable view of Fascist legislation that would be called into question after the Constitutional Court became operative in 1956 but which, before then, was regarded as useful, especially by the Ministry of the Interior, as we have seen, in efforts to contain the left. From the late 1950s, all this began to change as, with the passage of time, the places of older judges were increasingly taken by newer judges whose formative years had been those of the ‘Italian miracle’, the immediate post-war years of very rapid economic growth with their consequent dramatic social changes and thus the growing questioning of traditional social and political assumptions. As a result of this, the judiciary came increasingly to be composed of judges who were not content to interpret their roles as requiring them to act as passive bouches de la loi (Guarnieri, 1997: 158) but rather sought to play a more active role: to use their positions, in a society undergoing rapid change, to address – in areas such as workplace safety, environmental pollution, tax evasion and so on – the great social issues of the day. And they were assisted in this by an ongoing process of reform of judicial structures largely freeing the lower ranks of the judicial hierarchy from control by the senior ranks13 and by article 112 of the Constitution which obliges public prosecutors, in deference to the principle of equality before the law, to investigate all cases of alleged wrong-doing that come to their attention. What is formally an obligatory power is in reality a discretionary one, as, fairly obviously, it is not possible for prosecutors to investigate every single allegation that may happen to come to their attention – at the very least, judgements about priorities must be made – while, by the same token, the constitutional obligation enables them to justify initiating investigations not only on request from external bodies but also on their own initiative in relation to offences they think may have been committed (Newell, 2005: 37). With regard to the third trend – the growing recourse to courts as weapons of political ­struggle – there is a sense in which, in the Italian case, the tendency has long been present, with roots stretching back to the First Republic and the politics of clientelism and governing-party factionalism. If this provided fertile terrain for the development, in some instances, of links between individual politicians and organised crime and for the development of the system of

44  Government and the state corrupt party funding that came to light with the Tangentopoli scandal of the early 1990s (discussed further in Chapter 5), then it meant that compromising information was a more or less significant resource that could be used in negotiations between representatives of competing factions. It meant too that politicians had an incentive to exploit the multiple points of access through which they could establish relationships of connivance with individual members of the judiciary and so obtain for themselves judicial outcomes advantageous to them politically. For example, the power of the legislature to appoint a third of the members of the Consiglio Superiore della Magistratura (High Council of the Judiciary, CSM) and in turn the power of the Court of Cassation, the highest court in the ordinary judicial system, to move cases from the jurisdiction of one prosecutor’s office to that of another could be, and undoubtedly were, exploited from time to time to ‘bury’ cases that were politically sensitive.14 The development of factions within the judiciary’s professional body, the Associazione Nazionale Magistrati (National Association of Magistrates) – factions with different political colourings if not formal ties to the parties – was used – thanks to the factions’ tendency to field slates of candidates for CSM elections and thanks, in turn, to the role of the CSM in decisions concerning resources, judicial transfers and so forth – as another point of access for politicians seeking to influence judicial decisions. The potential of judicial institutions as weapons of political struggle gained a much higher profile with the emergence of Silvio Berlusconi as a front-line political actor. His conflict of interests as Prime Minister and the owner of Italy’s three largest private television stations, together with the personal legal difficulties he faced as a result of his commercial activities, inevitably left him open to attack from his opponents on the left and the centre left. Berlusconi, in his turn, was able to fight back by drawing on anti-political sentiments and low levels of public confidence in the efficiency and impartiality of public institutions generally, to insist that the attacks on his role in public life were part of an attempt by a coalition of ‘establishment’ politicians and left-wing judges to damage him as an outsider – to achieve by judicial means the victory over him they had been unable to obtain at the ballot box. It is difficult to know whether there was any actual growth in politicians’ recourse to the judiciary in efforts to damage opponents of the kind that appeared to be happening cross-nationally,15 though clearly it did happen from time to time. Ironically (given his complaints about how he was supposedly being attacked), a rather high-profile example of this sort of thing, in 2010, involved Berlusconi himself attempting to damage his former ally and President of the Chamber of Deputies, Gianfranco Fini, after the latter had broken with Berlusconi’s Popolo della Libertà party, weakening the entrepreneur’s Government in the process.16 As I am here concerned with the institutions of state for the purposes of understanding the political life of Italy, I have said little about the structure and functioning of the ordinary judiciary and court system. These are matters more closely related to the administration of justice rather than the conduct of politics – to relations between mostly private organisations and individuals rather than to policy making – as such, and, therefore, they are postponed until Chapter 5. For now I will proceed to consider the impact of the public administration on political processes and the processes of public policy-making. The administration For fairly obvious reasons, no democracy could exist without a state bureaucracy, from departmental heads down to filing clerks (Newton and Van Deth, 2005: 117), and, although conventionally politicians are thought of as having responsibility for making public policy, bureaucrats’ responsibility for implementing it, the central role of the latter in both aspects – through the provision of advice to ministers and through the delivery of services to the public – means two

Government and the state  45 things: first, that the line between the design and the administration of policy is virtually impossible to draw in practice; second, that public bureaucracies and their senior representatives are potentially extraordinarily powerful. A second difficulty is that the boundaries and therefore the dimensions of the state bureaucracy are extraordinarily difficult to pin down when one considers the range of organisations it might be said to encompass – in the Italian case: the ministries of central government; the public bodies (like the Istituto Nazionale per la Previdenza Sociale (National Institute for Social Security)); agencies (such as the Agenzia Nazionale per la Sicurezza del Volo (National Agency for the Safety of Civil Aviation)), and the independent regulatory commissions (such as the Autorità per le Garanzie nelle Comunicazioni, the communications regulator) – and the range of employment types – from those working at the Rome headquarters of (for example) the Ministries of Education and of Universities and Research potentially to school teachers and university lecturers. However it is delineated, the state bureaucracy needs, from the politician’s point of view, to be ‘steerable’ – meaning that it needs to be one that is willing to work pro-actively with the politician in the design and implementation of policy while avoiding the temptation to exploit its power to the extent that the minister ends up doing its bidding rather than it doing the minister’s (as should be the case in a parliamentary democracy where the minister is, in turn, accountable to Parliament). For much of the period following the war, Italian politicians found these twin, rather conflicting, goals difficult to achieve. Given article 97 of the Constitution, which stipulates that ‘public offices are organised according to the provisions of the law’, governments were unable to establish, reorganise or abolish ministries on their own authority. If the article served the noble purpose of erecting a barrier in the way of authoritarianism by vesting control of the bureaucracy firmly in Parliament, then, by depriving the executive of this power, it deprived it of an important tool with which to steer administrative action. It was likewise deprived by the limitations on its power to determine the terms and conditions of employment of public officials. Once again, these tended, in accordance with a long-standing tradition,17 to be written into law and so could not be amended without the approval of Parliament – through which change was in any case difficult to achieve because of the tendency of individual parliamentarians and parliamentary factions to seek to maintain and expand electoral followings through patronage measures and resistance to reforms potentially damaging to the vested interests whose support they courted. Finally, ministers were forced to come to terms with social obstacles to effective steering capacity – obstacles arising from the cultural differences between predominantly northern political leaders and predominantly southern administrative leaders, with the former keen to avoid the risk of the latter using their organisational resources to frustrate ministerial policy ambitions and the latter keen to avoid the risk of the former seeking to achieve policy ambitions by disrupting established career patterns. Consequently, in exchange for neutrality, civil servants got job security but little real policy influence, and, in exchange for non-interference in personnel matters, political leaders got freedom from policy interference but a somewhat passive, unhelpful bureaucracy – with the result that the political and administrative spheres were effectively isolated one from the other (Cassese, 1984). Since the early 1990s, there have been several attempts at reform driven by multiple pressures including public frustration – as expressed through the political upheavals and partysystem changes of the time – with the performance of public institutions, the implications of public administrative efficiency for economic growth and management of the public debt (the former slowing down considerably from 1990, the latter having topped 100 per cent of GDP in 1992) and the demands of European integration, which began to gather pace with the signing of the Maastricht Treaty in 1992 and with the advent of the single currency in 1999.

46  Government and the state Thus it was that in 1992 and 1993, the contracts of public employees were removed from the realm of statutes and made subject to private law – thus making it easier to move personnel between tasks, while giving senior administrators flexibility to manage their units by calling on the same powers as those enjoyed by private employers. In 1997, the passage of three very complex pieces of legislation, known as the Bassanini laws after the name of their sponsor, circumvented the restrictions of article 97 of the Constitution mentioned above by including provisions empowering the Government to issue legislative decrees enabling it to reorganise the public administration on its own authority.18 The laws made possible two further major changes, first, a certain closing of the gap between political and administrative spheres referred to above, achieved by allowing ministers to employ senior officials, from both inside and outside the administration, on fixed-term contracts, to provide greater linkage between political leaders and the bureaucracy. Second, the laws made possible the establishment of new, autonomous, agencies for the execution of technical and operational functions. Though they were attached to specific ministries, the agencies could provide services to a range of different parts of the public administration, so helping to eliminate duplication and overlap between them. Greater administrative efficiency was sought through the above-mentioned processes of delegificazione, the point being that the tendency, referred to in note 17, for administrative rules and procedures to have the force of law had tended to encourage an orientation to administrative activity dominated more by a concern for its formal correctness than its effectiveness in achieving defined substantive objectives. Finally, a number of new regulatory commissions were set up to regulate the behaviour of private actors belonging to some specific sector, such as the insurance industry, or private actors generally in given areas of activity, such as advertising, procurement or data protection. They can be said to have contributed to greater efficiency in a number of ways. First, their members are in most cases appointed by some combination of government and parliamentary bodies and once appointed cannot be removed before the expiry of their terms – meaning that they remain relatively protected from government and parliamentary interference. Second, they have organisational autonomy from other political and administrative institutions. Third, protected from outside interference and with autonomy to decide how they will organise themselves in pursuit of their remit, they have the power to issue regulations that have as much legal force as acts of Parliament. After the 1990s, reform of the public administration continued to occupy a high place on the agenda of Italian politics, a sign that the aspirations of earlier reformers had only been partially met in practice. Pressure for further reform also came from membership of the single currency (and the need for further efficiency savings implicit in the Stability and Growth Pact (SGP)) and from the downward pressures on spending created by of the Great Recession from 2008. From that year, the minister for public administration and innovation, Renato Brunetta, created a certain furore with public tirades against what he called the fannullioni (do-nothings), drawing, in doing so, on popular stereotypes based on the idea that public servants are, as a general rule, inefficient and unhelpful, his purpose being to mobilise public support against possible tradeunion opposition for a series of reforms that would heighten efficiency through efforts to combat absenteeism, reform the system of collective bargaining, achieve greater transparency and accountability and introduce new systems of performance evaluation. In 2015, the Government of Matteo Renzi launched a further programme of bureaucratic modernisation: the so-called ‘Madia reform’ after the name of the minister who sponsored it. Among other things, Madia sought to strengthen the administrative resources available to the Prime Minister, to provide policy direction and coordination, to bring greater assurances of impartiality to the procedures used for the appointment of senior personnel and, through the inclusion of freedom-of-information provisions, to increase the transparency and public accountability of the administration.

Government and the state  47 The past 30 years, then, have seen a wide range of attempts to reform the public administration as governments have sought to respond to an equally wide range of national and international pressures. In doing so, they have placed the period since 1990 in stark contrast to the 40 years of stagnation that preceded it (Capano, 1992), and, like their counterparts in other democracies, they have pursued objectives inspired by the principles of the so-called ‘new public management’ with its emphasis on the importance of criteria imported from the private sector. In the context of the austerity of recent years, the capacity of the public administration to do more with less has been at a premium and there is little doubt that this has been achieved. Against the background of the reforms, the years since the onset of the Great Recession have seen a decline in public-sector employment and average pay, which, as a proportion of GDP, has remained below the EU average (Di Mascio and Natalini, 2016: 169). On the other hand, the history of reform has not been one of unqualified success, for legislative changes are one thing, change on the ground, another. For example, with regard to the procedures for the evaluation of performance introduced by the Brunetta reform, there are undoubtedly cases where they worked very well, but these tended to be cases where the administration already worked quite well. Elsewhere, they were seen as a form of outside interference, applied formally and without enthusiasm and changed little – the lesson being that, ultimately, bureaucratic functioning is a matter of culture and attitudes, so that it is unrealistic to expect the mere passage of legislation and new procedures to bring improvement: more is required (Marra, 2010). If supported by a sufficient degree of public pressure, reform can bring effective change on the ground, but such pressure was difficult to generate in the case of the public administration reforms, which, in most cases, concerned technical questions hard to publicise through the media simply because they had little ‘news value’. Thus it is that from a comparative perspective, data suggest that the quality of Italian public administration still leaves much to be desired.19 Government at the sub-national level In democratic states, power is usually divided not only horizontally, between executives, legislatures, the judiciary and the bureaucracy, but also vertically, between national and sub-­national levels of government, with what is conventionally understood as ‘public policy’ being the product of the interaction of all of these various actors. Consequently, political scientists talk of ‘multilevel government’ – to which all states (democratic or otherwise) are subject simply because, aside from whatever sub-national arrangements they may have, they are enmeshed in systems of international government as provided by such organisations as the EU, NATO and the UN. Hence, political scientists also talk of ‘government’ having given way to ‘governance’, the idea that ‘the overall administration of social affairs which must take place in any society’ (Barrett, 1996: 6) is now only partially located at the national level having to a degree slipped away to levels above and below it. Discussion of Italy’s involvement in the institutions of the wider world is postponed until Chapter 6; here I consider the institutions of government below the national level. The issue of how, and on what basis, power is to be distributed between national and sub-­ national levels is integral to the question of how to ensure the integrity of the national community: a question that has rarely been far from the centre of public debate in Italy. Unification itself involved the task of integrating a heterogeneous set of kingdoms and principalities into a single entity. The economic and social divide between north and south has been an unresolved problem since 1861. The post-war restoration of democracy was accompanied by the emergence of independence movements in Sicily and Sardinia. The 1960s saw a series of terrorist attacks by representatives of the irredentist movement wanting the transfer of sovereignty over South Tyrol

48  Government and the state to Austria; the 1970s saw the delayed passage of legislation setting up the regions provided for by the 1948 Constitution; the 1980s the emergence of the Lega Lombarda (Lombard League) and then the Lega Nord demanding greater autonomy for the regions of the north – an issue that was addressed by the major reform of Title V of the Constitution in 2001 (redefining the distribution of competences between national and sub-national tiers of government) and which was also addressed by the constitutional reform proposals defeated in the referendum held on 4 December 2016. Against this background, the framers of the post-war Constitution decided to meet the challenge of national integration by steering a path between US-style federalism, on the one hand, and the pre-war Napoleonic conceptions, involving centralised power uniformly applied, on the other. Thus it was that, as the institutions of sub-national government (regions, provinces and municipalities) were specified in the Constitution itself, their existence was guaranteed against potential threat from simple political majorities at national level, and they had general competence within the law – meaning that, unlike in genuinely unitary states, the onus was on the national level to show that they had acted in ways that were ultra vires, not on them to show that their actions were sanctioned by some specific piece of national legislation. On the other hand, unlike in genuinely federal states there was no shared sovereignty: there were no competences reserved exclusively to them and their assent was not required for constitutional change. The constitutional framers sought to defuse actual and potential threats arising from independence movements and irredentism by giving Sicily, Sardinia, Trentino-Alto Adige, FriuliVenezia Giulia and the Valle d’Aosta, the status of ‘special statute’ regions – meaning that as their statutes had the status of constitutional rather than ordinary law,20 they could deviate from principles established elsewhere in the Constitution, so enjoying powers otherwise denied to the remaining 15 (‘ordinary’) regions. The latter acquired increased autonomy with the dawn of the new century. Originally, their statutes had to be approved by Parliament, but the constitutional reform of 1999 did away with this, meaning that since then they have had greater freedom to decide their own internal institutional arrangements. The constitutional reform of 2001 extended their legislative powers by doing away with the old list (in article 117) of areas in which they had competence and stipulating that they had competence in all areas not expressly reserved to the state (such as foreign policy, citizenship and defence). It also did away with the tools governments had previously had, through the regional commissioners, to obstruct regional legislation, essentially confining them to appeals to the Constitutional Court. Beneath the regions, provinces and municipalities have responsibilities conferred upon them by ordinary legislation, empowering them to issue regulations which – in deference to the principle that legal norms are given their legitimacy by other norms of greater legal force – must be consistent both with regional and parliamentary legislation and with the statutes of the provinces and municipalities themselves. These statutes can be adopted by the provinces and municipalities on their own authority subject only to the usual proviso that they are consistent with parliamentary legislation. Besides an appropriate degree of sub-national autonomy, effective national integration also requires action to address economic and social disparities between different parts of the country, as the emergence and growth of the LN, in the late 1980s and early 1990s, so plainly demonstrated. Such action may not always be compatible with the imperative of autonomy. Citizens understandably demand, in the name of equality, to have equal access to public services regardless of the part of the country in which they happen to reside – which points in the direction of top-down directives to ensure minimum standards of service provision as well as restrictions on sub-national tiers’ financial autonomy: enabling them to finance themselves by levying their

Government and the state  49 own taxes may disadvantage poorer areas which instead require a centralised fiscal regime and centrally managed equalisation funds. The financial arrangements for the sub-national tiers of government are revealing of the attempts that have been made to tread a careful path between these conflicting imperatives. On the one hand, the sub-national tiers of government have a constitutionally guaranteed right to levy their own taxes and to incur debts for investment expenditure; on the other hand, their powers must be exercised in such a way as to allow the effective coordination of public expenditure and the tax system as a whole and the state is prohibited from underwriting their debts, meaning that they must rely on their own credit worthiness. Meanwhile, the sub-national tiers have a right to share in the proceeds of taxes attributable to their areas, to disbursements from the state’s equalisation fund (designed to provide additional resources for areas with lower tax bases) and to central-government grants made available for socially desirable purposes. The quality of sub-national government is a third area of involvement for policy-makers concerned to promote national integration. In Italy, as elsewhere, the municipality, in particular, is significant for the citizen’s personal experience of the quality of public governance, for it is the government structure with which citizens have the most frequent direct contact, the structure through which, or by which, most of the public services most directly impinging on him or her are provided or organised. The quality of sub-national government has obvious implications for governments’ efforts to reduce regional disparities insofar as an area’s capacity to grow and develop is significantly affected by the success or otherwise of public institutions there in providing the infrastructure and services and in promoting the behaviours needed to encourage firms to invest. As the industrial districts of the so-called ‘Third Italy’21 have taught, the locality is not just a physical space in which market forces operate but a key element in the production process itself. It is not merely a geographical place in which firms assemble factors of production but also a complex network of social relationships, norms, institutions and understandings, which themselves have an important impact on economic development (Putnam, 1993). This realisation has driven several significant attempts to improve the quality of regional and local government in recent years, accompanied by a move away from attempts to encourage regional development through top-down programmes of intervention, towards efforts based on the principle of enabling regions and localities to help themselves. Once again, the early 1990s represent something of a watershed here. Before then, the capacity of regional and local government to act as a potential driver of development was stymied by the tendency of the political parties to link together centre and periphery through informal channels of clientelistic power-broking within and between them, thus suffocating the potential for distinctive sub-national systems of politics provided for by the formal, legal arrangements (Tarrow, 1977; Graziano, Girotti and Bonet, 1984). Consequently, many of the shortcomings of party politics at the national level – in terms of things like governing (in)stability and the (in) capacity for incisive policy-making – tended to be reflected fully by politics at the sub-national level. Variations in the size of the sub-national tiers of government, a legacy of the nineteenth century,22 created significant differences in their capacity to actually make use of their powers – especially in the case of the over 8,000 municipalities, which have under 100 inhabitants at one end and over a million at the other. Against this background, governments’ efforts to promote regional and local development through centrally initiated and managed programmes (most obviously in relation to the south), were largely unsuccessful. For example, the Cassa per il Mezogiorno (Development Fund for the South), set up in 1950, sought to use investment in large-scale industrial plants to create ‘poles of attraction’ for ancillary investment in the area but found that its effectiveness was undermined by the politics of clientelism, while the low levels of labour-intensity of the plants led them to becoming ‘cathedrals in the desert’.

50  Government and the state The period since 1990, then, has represented something of a renaissance of local and regional government in Italy. Concomitantly with the implosion of the traditional governing parties and the transformation of the party system, 1993 saw the passage of law no. 81 providing for the direct election of local mayors and stipulating that a vote of no confidence in a mayor by his or her council would bring about its own demise.23 This helped to improve the quality of local government, because it considerably strengthened the positions of mayors and local executives vis-à-vis their councils, as it gave mayors resources with which, potentially, to establish power bases independent of the parties and exposed them more directly to the winds of public opinion, increasing the significance of leadership and managerial skills in heading municipalities (Newell, 2007). Both the Bassanini laws and the 2001 constitutional reform sought to drive forward a process of administrative decentralisation in accordance with the principle that responsibilities would be devolved, not on the basis of the old tenets of uniformity, but taking account of authorities’ actual capacities as revealed by their demographic, territorial and organisational characteristics. Bassanini also included a number of provisions designed to encourage amalgamations and the creation of consortia to deal with the dis-economies of scale arising from municipalities that are too small as well as the setting up of sub-municipal structures to deal with the remoteness arising in those municipalities that are too large. Conclusion So Italy’s political institutions, like the political institutions of other liberal democracies, are subject to continual processes of flux and change, and their complexity (as well as the complexity of their interactions) are fully reflective of these processes. Geographical metaphors, like ‘watershed’ and ‘earthquake’, have arguably been used so frequently in accounts of recent Italian politics as to have lost – a bit like medicines – much of their power through overuse. And yet, despite the disappointments (discussed elsewhere in this volume) with the results of Italy’s immediate post-Cold War political upheavals, the early 1990s do seem to represent something of a caesura in the history of the country’s institutions of state. From then, although globalisation is by no means a new phenomenon (and arguably is in some respects actually less in evidence than in the past24), its pace appeared to accelerate, the world to become subject to integration at an ever increasing rate. Italy’s policy-makers, like their counterparts in other liberal democracies, have been obliged to react to the resulting challenges. The result has been that the period since the early 1990s has brought, if not perfection, certainly definite improvements in the functioning of Italy’s political institutions, and, as these improvements reflect cross-national and international pressures to which other democracies have also had to react, there has been growing similarity (in terms of their modes of operation and input to political processes) between the institutions of Italy and those of her democratic counterparts. As I argued at the outset of this chapter, in the final analysis, most of the problems that have been encountered in Italy in institutions’ functioning have had less to do with problems of institutional design as such, than they have had to do with the parties and party actors that have had responsibility for making them work. It is to these matters, therefore, that I direct my attention in the chapter that follows. Notes 1 As I explained in Chapter 1, the term refers to the fact that the two branches of Parliament, the Chamber of Deputies and the Senate, have identical powers when it comes to the passage of legislation – m ­ eaning that proposals must shuttle between the two assemblies until they can agree identically worded texts – and that to remain in office, governments must retain the confidence of both of them.

Government and the state  51 2 It is clear that constitutions do have significant effects (for example, majoritarian arrangements seem not to work well in deeply divided societies), and institutions generally matter a great deal for the understanding of political behaviour. The point is that no constitutional arrangements, however well designed, can guarantee anything about the quality of a country’s politics. As Newton and Van Deth (2005: 52–3) put it, ‘successful democracy cannot be imposed by constitutional law, no matter how well thought-out this may be; democratic politics must also be accepted and practised by political elites and citizens alike’. 3 The distinction was originally made by the constitutional lawyer, Costantino Mortati, in his book, La costituzione in senso materiale (1940), to refer, on the one hand, to the aims and values around which the predominant political forces converge at the founding moment of the constitutional order and, on the other, to the constitutional text, which is in some sense the ‘precipitate’ of those aims and values (Barbera and Fusaro, 2001: 26). 4 And where it is exists, log-rolling may throw up a whole new set of problems altogether. For example, the clientele politics characteristic of the ‘First Republic’ could be regarded as a form of log-rolling which notoriously multiplied the number of veto players present in the system. 5 Which is not to suggest that the role of a monarchical head of state is of little consequence. On the contrary, it seems reasonable to suggest that in cases such as the UK, for instance, the head of state has an impact on the political culture, with very real political consequences, that would be very different if the role were filled by a president rather than a monarch. 6 Another example was provided at the end of Mattarella’s term of office in January 2022, when it became clear that the election of his successor would have significant implications for the hold on office of Draghi’s national unity coalition. At the outset, Draghi himself was widely discussed as a possible presidential candidate, but it was apparent that to move him from the Prime Minister’s office in Palazzo Chigi to the presidential palace, the Quirinale, would be to deprive the governing coalition of its principal source of cohesion. On the other hand, electing an alternative candidate required there to be sufficient cohesion among the governing parties to enable them to agree on whom that person should be without destroying the governing majority through the creation of an alternative majority around such person. In the end, the problem was only resolved thanks to the willingness of Mattarella to serve a second term, for it became apparent, once voting got underway, that Mattarella was the only candidate capable of overcoming the impasse created by the governing parties’ inability to agree on an alternative candidate, on the one hand, and their unwillingness, at that stage, to put an end to their coalition, on the other. Hence, Mattarella was re-elected at the eighth round of voting with 75.2% or the support of 759 of the 1009 electors. 7 Until 2021, there was also a difference in the ages for voting: 18 in the case of the Chamber; 25 in the case of the Senate. 8 The issue was resolved, in October 2020, by article 3 of the same constitutional amendment that reduced the number of deputies and senators from 630 and 315 to 400 and 200 respectively. Article 59 of the Constitution therefore now clarifies that there can only be five presidential nominees in office at any given time. 9 It averaged 72.7% for each of the legislatures from the first (1948–53) to the thirteenth (1996–2001), though one should bear in mind that the law of anticipated reactions enjoins caution in using this indicator. Calculated from the data in Newell, 2006a: 397, Table 1. 10 A good example – in addition to those already citied earlier – would be article 2, stipulating that ‘the Republic expects that the fundamental duties of political, economic and social solidarity be fulfilled’ or article 3, stipulating that ‘it shall be the duty of the Republic to remove those obstacles of an economic or social nature which constrain the freedom and equality of citizens’. 11 These stipulate that judges ‘are subject only to the law’ (article 101) and that they differ ‘only in terms of their functions’ (article 107). 12 The process of constitutional amendment is governed by article 138 which stipulates that changes require the approval of both chambers in two successive votes at intervals of not less than three months, and the support of a majority of the members of each chamber in the second vote. Moreover, if the supporters of change at the second vote in either chamber amount to less than two-thirds of its members, then the change can be obstructed by a fifth of the members of either chamber (or by half a million citizens or by five regional councils) which, in that eventuality, have the right to insist that the proposed change be made subject to a confirmatory referendum. 13 These included the enabling legislation, in 1958, giving effect to article 104 of the Constitution which provides for an independent High Council of the Judiciary with responsibility for all matters concerning judicial appointments, promotions and discipline; the democratisation of the processes of selection

52  Government and the state of the Council’s members in 1975; the passage of legislation in 1963, 1966 and 1973 which detached advancement from the availability of positions further up the hierarchy in the sense that it became ­possible to move to the higher grades and achieve the corresponding salary increases even while ­continuing in the same role. 14 The Rome prosecutor’s office was for long held up to some ridicule, being known as the ‘foggy port’ owing to its alleged capacity to use all kinds of mysterious means to prevent politically sensitive cases from coming to trial. 15 This thanks to the growing personalisation and mediatisation of politics. Increasing attempts by political forces to make use of judicial arrangements for the purposes of ‘scandal mongering’ was perhaps exemplified by the Lewinsky scandal in the United States. Ginsberg and Shefter (1990) refer to the phenomenon as ‘politics by other means’. 16 In July 2010, Il Giornale, a newspaper owned by the Berlusconi family, claimed that Giancarlo ­Tulliani, the brother of Fini’s partner, was living in a flat that had been bequeathed to Fini’s former party, Alleanza Naionale, and then sold in 2008 to an offshore company in St Lucia for €300,000. Among the questions raised was how this figure related to the market value of the property and in what capacity Tulliani was living in the property. The matter was investigated by the Rome public prosecutor’s office. For details of how the matter played out and of the attempts of Berlusconi’s followers to force Fini to resign his position as a result of it, see Newell, 2011. 17 The tradition of codifying rules of conduct, rights and duties, of public officials in statutes is one that stretches back to the nineteenth century – a time before the era of ‘big government’ – when the practice seemed to be the surest way of ensuring that officials would deliver the precise and unvarying execution of political directives that was necessary if ministers were to be effectively accountable for officials’ actions. The tradition was underpinned after the war by article 70 of the Constitution which gives the power to legislate to the two chambers of Parliament without qualification or distinction – so underwriting a tendency for law to ‘invade’ areas which in other polities tended to be dealt with by administrative action. 18 This was possible despite the constitutional restriction because ordinary legislation can include what are known as leggi deleghe or ‘laws of delegation’, which, as referred to above, empower governments to issue decreti legislative or ‘legislative decrees’ pursuant to the objectives set out in the law. 19 While – for a variety of reasons too involved to go into here – they must be treated with (extreme) caution, the World Bank’s ‘governance indicators’ are of relevance here. Among the EU 28, Italy, in 2017, occupied 25th place (ahead of Greece, Romania and Bulgaria) in terms of ‘government effectiveness’ (measuring ‘perceptions of the quality of public services, the quality of the civil service and the degree of its independence from political pressures, the quality of policy formulation and implementation, and the credibility of the government’s commitment to such policies’) (World Bank, n.d.). 20 Constitutional law is law which, having been expressly provided for by the Constitution, has the same legal status as articles of the Constitution itself. 21 The term refers to the industrial districts, consisting of small firms producing high-quality products to be found in the regions of central and north-eastern Italy. Firms in these areas have been able to prosper thanks to a capacity to collaborate as well as to compete, a capacity that is sustained by high levels of social capital and supportive institutions of local government. The term ‘Third Italy’ was first used to distinguish the areas from the triangle formed by Milan, Turin and Genoa where large-scale mass production predominated (referred to as the ‘First Italy’) and the less developed south, referred to as the ‘Second Italy’ (Trigilia, 1995). 22 Essentially, the process of Unification in 1861 involved the imposition on existing structures of uniformity in the interests of equality at a time when the limited responsibilities of the state meant that it was relatively unproblematic to treat varied local entities as if they were homogeneous. 23 Similar arrangements are in place for provincial administrations and, although the constitutional reform of 2001 allows regions to derogate from them, also for regional administrations. 24 For instance, ‘the general increase in the level of international trade over the past 50 years only marks a return to around the level that had been attained prior to the First World War. Evidence shows, for example, that world merchandise exports in 1913 equalled about 12 per cent of world domestic product, shrinking to about 7 per cent in 1950, rising again to 12 per cent in the 1970s and about 17 per cent in the 1990s’ (Kelly and Prokhovnik, 2004: 114).

Government and the state  53 References Barbera, Augusto, and Carlo Fusaro (2001), Corso di diritto pubblico, Bologna: Il Mulino. Barrett, Chris (1996), Globalization: Implications for Democracy, Case Studies for Politics, 34, Department of Politics, University of York. Capano, G. (1992), L’improbabile riforma, Bologna: Il Mulino. Capano, G., and M. Giuliani (2003), ‘The Italian Parliament: In Search of a New Role?’, Journal of Legislative Studies 9: 8–34 Cassese, Sabino (1984), ‘The Higher Civil Service in Italy’, pp. 35–71 in Ezra N. Suleiman (ed.), Bureaucrats and Policy Making: A Comparative Overview, New York and London: Holmes and Meier. Cotta, Maurizio, and Luca Verzichelli (2007), Political Institutions in Italy, Cambridge: Cambridge ­University Press. Di Mascio, Fabrizio, and Alessandro Natalini (2016), ‘La riforma della pubblica amministrazione: ­Centralizzazione e ricomposizione dell’unità amministrativa’, pp. 165–84 in Maurizio Carbone and Simona Piattoni (eds), Politica in Italia: I fatti dell’anno e le interpretazioni, Bologna: Il Mulino. Ferejohn, J. (2002), ‘Judicializing Politics, Politicizing Law’, Law and Contemporary Problems 41: 41–68. Furlong, Paul (1990), ‘Parliament in Italian Politics’, West European Politics 13: 52–67. Fusaro, Carlo (2003), Il presidente della Repubblica, Bologna: Il Mulino. Ginsberg, B., and M. Shefter (1990), Politics by Other Means: The Declining Importance of Elections in America, New York: Basic Books. Graziano, Luigi, Fiorenzo Girotti and Luciano Bonet (1984), ‘Coalition Politics at the Regional Level and Centre–Periphery Relationships: The Case of Italy’, International Political Science Review 5: 429–41. Guarnieri, Carlo (1997), ‘The Judiciary in the Italian Political Crisis’, pp. 157–75 in Martin Bull and Martin Rhodes (eds), Crisis and Transition in Italian Politics, London and Portland, Oreg.: Frank Cass. Hine, David (1981), ‘Thirty Years of the Italian Republic: Governability and Constitutional Reform’, ­Parliamentary Affairs 34: 63–80. Kelly, Bob, and Raia Prokhovnik (2004), ‘Economic Globalisation?’, pp. 85–125 in David Held (ed.), A Globalizing World: Culture, Economics, Politics, 2nd edn, London and New York: Routledge. Marra, Mita (2010), ‘“Effetto Brunetta”: Valutazione e responsabilità nell’Italia federale’, pp. 225–45 in Marco Giuliani and Erik Jones (eds), Politica in Italia: I fatti dell’anno e le interpretazioni, Bologna: Il Mulino. Mazzoni Honorati, M.L. (2001), Diritto parlamentare, Turin: G. Giappichelli Editore. Molina, Oscar, and Martin Rhodes (2007), ‘Industrial Relations and the Welfare State in Italy: Assessing the Potential of Negotiated Change’, West European Politics 30: 803–29. Mortati, Costantino (1940), La costituzione in senso materiale, Milan: A. Giuffrè. Neppi Modona, Guido, and Alfonso Di Giovine (1995), Stato della Costituzione, Milan: Il Saggiatore. Newell, James L. (2005), ‘Americanization and the Judicialization of Italian Politics’, Journal of Modern Italian Studies 10: 27–42. Newell, James L. (2006), ‘Characterising the Italian Parliament: Legislative Change in Longitudinal ­Perspective’, Journal of Legislative Studies 12: 386–403. Newell, James L. (2007), ‘The Mayoralty in Italy’, pp. 157–72 in John Garrard (ed.), Heads of the Local State, Aldershot: Ashgate. Newell, James L. (2011), ‘Political Scandals in Liberal Democracies: Chance Affairs or “Politics by Other Means”?’, paper prepared for presentation at the 61st annual conference of the UK Political Studies ­Association, London, 19–21 Apr. 2011. Newell, James L. (2012), ‘Down But Not Out: Understanding the Berlusconi Resignation and Its Significance’, Italian Politics and Society: Review of the Conference Group on Italian Politics and Society 70: 30–41. Newell, James L. (2019), Silvio Berlusconi: A Study in Failure, Manchester: Manchester University Press.

54  Government and the state Newell, James L., and Arianna Giovannini (2015), ‘The Election of the New President has Strengthened Matteo Renzi’s Grip over Italian politics’, London School of Economics’ EUROPP: European Politics and Policy blog, http://bit.ly/1Domi05. Newton, Kenneth, and Jan W. Van Deth (2005), Foundations of Comparative Politics, Cambridge: ­Cambridge University Press. Palladino, N. (2015), ‘“Presidentialisations” in Italy: The Battle for Leadership between the Prime ­Minister and the President of the Republic’, Contemporary Italian Politics 7: 107–26. Pasquino, Gianfranco (2000), La transizione a parole, Bologna: Il Mulino. Pasquino, Gianfranco (2003), ‘The Government, the Opposition and the President of the Republic under Berlusconi’, Journal of Modern Italian Studies 8: 485–99. Pasquino, Gianfranco, and Andrea Capussela (2016), ‘Italy’s Constitutional Reform is Ill Conceived and Can Safely be Rejected’, EUROPP European Politics and Policy, http://blogs.lse.ac.uk /europpblog/2016 /09/27/italys-constitutional-reform-is-ill-conceived. Pasquino, Gianfranco, and Riccardo Pelizzo (2016), ‘Qual’è il parlamento piú produttivo?’, Casa della cultura, http://www.casadellacultura.it/431/qual-e-il-parlamento-piu-produttivo-. Putnam, Robert (1993), Making Democracy Work: Civic Traditions in Modern Italy, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Quotidiano Sanità (2018), ‘Mattarella conferma no a Savona: “Con lui rischio uscita Italia dall’euro ­praticamente inevitabile”: Possibile incarico a Cottarelli’, 27 May, https://www.quotidianosanita.it/ governo-e-parlamento/articolo.php?articolo_id=62253. Stone Sweet, A. (2000), Governing with Judges: Constitutional Politics in Europe, Oxford: Oxford ­University Press. Tarrow, Sidney (1977), Between Center and Periphery: Grassroots Politicians in Italy and France, New Haven, Conn. and London: Yale University Press. Trigilia, Carlo (1995), ‘A Tale of Two Districts: Work and Politics in the Third Italy’, pp. 31–50 in Arnaldo Bagnasco and Charles Sabel (eds), Small and Medium-Size Enterprises, London: Pinter. Tsebelis, George (2003), Veto Players: How Political Institutions Work, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. World Bank (n.d.), ‘World Governance Indicators’, http://info.worldbank.org/governance/wgi/#home.

3

The Italian party system and the electorate

Introduction Elections lie at the heart of representative democracy, because they are one of the main channels through which ordinary citizens have an input into the political process and affect public policy and because, thereby, they legitimise the public-policy decisions of those duly elected. Elections therefore perform bottom-up and top-down functions. On the one hand, provided a number of criteria are met, elections make it possible for ordinary citizens to hold politicians to account and to ensure that public policy broadly reflects public opinion most of the time. The most relevant criteria are that all citizens have access to the vote on equal terms, that the ballot is secret and that there are rules in place (such as those concerning campaign expenditure, the provision of political information and so on) to ensure that competition between candidates is ‘fair’. One could add to these a large number of additional criteria concerning the constitutional provisions (regarding political freedoms, the separation of powers and so on) that must be in place for elections to successfully ensure the accountability of the elected. However, provided that these things are in place, then it is likely that when – through the activities of pressure groups, the mass media and other organisations inhabiting the social space called ‘civil society’ – politicians become aware of public demands and shifts in public opinion, they are induced (as ‘rational utility maximisers’) to make those policy adjustments likely to have the most positive impact on their standing in voting intentions polls.1 Of course, it is necessary to add the caveat ‘all else being equal’ to this assertion, for the freedom of politicians to respond to public opinion is subject to numerous constraints, from their own ideological outlooks to the spending, taxation and innumerable other considerations that have to be taken into account in designing public policy. So elections are not a sufficient condition for ensuring accountability and responsiveness to citizens, but they are a necessary condition. On the other hand, the top-down function draws attention to the fact that, because of their legitimising role, elections also help to secure compliance with public policy. Put another way, thanks to their role in defining legitimate and illegitimate means of bringing about political change and to the, often considerable, substantive inequalities between voters affecting the amount of political influence they are able to wield, elections perpetuate power disparities. It was precisely because of their awareness of this that the early Socialist parties sought to become mass organisations, enrolling as many as possible of the members of the group that was their social referent: the working class. In that way, they would achieve two crucial things. First, they would make up in numbers and in many small contributions for the lack of the financial resources that were available to competing parties of the privileged. Second, they would contribute to the empowerment of their members and supporters by ensuring that they were organised, for it is above all when citizens are disorganised and lacking in social ties to their fellow citizens that they are most vulnerable to manipulation from above. DOI: 10.4324/9780203422120-4

56  The Italian party system and the electorate Both the bottom-up, accountability, and the top-down, legitimising, functions of elections help to ensure regime stability, for they provide legitimate channels for the expression of opposition, meaning that citizens dissatisfied with public policy and with the current incumbents of positions of political authority have institutionalised means of bringing about changes in both. In regimes without elections, these means are unavailable, so that the only way of changing policy and/or rulers is by challenging the regime itself – which means that such regimes are inherently less stable than those of representative democracy. In parliamentary systems, such as the Italian, any particular legislative election outcome can be understood as the result of the interactions of two categories of actor and one institution or set of rules: political parties and voters and electoral systems. Parties are important, because they provide the array of electoral platforms among which voters make their choices in the first place. Prior to the emergence of the mass franchise, which took place in most European countries in the second half of the nineteenth century, parties were little more than parliamentary factions. It was only when the number of voters whose support was required became too large to be mobilised by informal means (often bribery and corruption) that parties acquired an extra-parliamentary existence as ‘parties on the ground’. With voters mobilised in one direction or another by parties, those seeking election to public office had little alternative to near certain defeat than to seek the nomination of one party or another. So parties are central to elections in the age of the mass franchise, as they structure citizens’ voting choices and are the main channels of recruitment for those seeking election to public office. The electoral system, or the set of agreed-upon rules for translating given distributions of votes into given distributions of parliamentary seats, affects election outcomes in two ways: mechanical and psychological. Mechanically, by setting out the ballot structure, the district magnitude and the electoral formula, electoral systems affect outcomes by determining how people vote, how those votes are counted and how seats are allocated. However, they also affect outcomes long before any votes are cast by their (psychological) impact on parties’ and voters’ perceptions of their effects and therefore on parties’ and voters’ behaviour. For example, in single-member simple plurality systems, it is highly likely that at least some, if not most, voters will confine their decision-making to the two strongest candidates and vote for the one they dislike least in order not to waste their vote. In proportional systems, they are likely to feel freer to take into consideration a wider range of parties. Finally, therefore, voters’ decisions are the result of a myriad of influences, but these include not only factors exogenous to the political system but also endogenous factors including (their perceptions of) the (likely effects of the) electoral system. Given, then, that elections are central to representative democracies and given that parties, electoral systems and voters are central to elections, an understanding of these three elements is crucial to an understanding of the functioning of Italian democracy, and, therefore, the remainder of this chapter is structured as follows. In the following section I shall consider the political parties and party coalitions, their organisational features and the substance of their political messages. In the section that follows, I shall consider the nature of Italy’s electoral systems (there have been four since the early 1990s) and their effects. The fourth section considers the most significant among the political and social factors influencing citizens’ voting choices. The fifth section concludes. The parties and coalitions Since the party-system transformation of the early 1990s, one of the most salient characteristics of Italian political parties in general has been their constant appeal, through their campaigning but also through their organisational decisions, to the theme of popular empowerment – on the

The Italian party system and the electorate  57 assumption that it provided the key to electoral success and to addressing widespread cynicism concerning politicians and political parties. And yet, as we shall see, even those parties whose rhetorical commitment to the theme was greatest remained organisations in which power was heavily concentrated at the apex – as the reasoning of the so-called ‘elite theorists’ would have led us to expect. Politics is about power – the capacity to get other people to do what one wants – and about how it is won, exercised, transferred and lost. Parties, I have said, are essential to the functioning of modern democracies. Consequently, understanding how power is distributed within them is essential to understanding how politics is pursued in democracies. The Movimento Cinque Stelle provides the best example to draw on to illustrate these issues, precisely because its rhetorical commitment to popular empowerment has been the most conspicuous – as has – therefore – its failure to achieve it. The Five-Star Movement

As we saw in Chapter 1, the M5S first came to public prominence at local elections held in May 2012. Consequently, it was, at one and the same time, both a relatively old phenomenon and one that was completely new. What made it relatively old was that it was the expression of popular protest against the established parties, and mainstream politics in general. As such, it reflected a long-standing leitmotif in Italian party politics, one that had made possible the emergence and growth of new, challenger, parties many years before it. One thinks in this connection of the Lega Nord at the end of the 1980s and of Silvio Berlusconi’s Forza Italia from the early 1990s. Therefore, part of what made possible the emergence of yet another new protest party in 2012 was that by then both the LN and FI had become part of the political establishment. By then, beyond the brief few months in 1994, they had had two terms in government (from 2001 to 2006 and from 2008 to 2011). Their capacity to pose as outsiders, as the authentic representatives of the interests of ordinary people against a corrupt establishment, was therefore much reduced, as was their credibility as forces capable of getting to grips with the various problems of governance that bred popular protest and resentment in the first place. Moreover, at the end of the previous year, all of the parties then represented in Parliament had effectively conceded that they lacked the authority necessary to lead the country in a crisis. At that time, with the collapse of the Berlusconi Government, they had been forced to make way for the appointment of the technocratic Government headed by former EU Competition Commissioner, Mario Monti, and to play a merely supporting role in the passage and implementation of the programme of austerity the Government was required to preside over. So in a context of growing economic hardship, with the mainstream parties incapable of offering convincing leadership, the explosive emergence of the M5S was in retrospect not, perhaps, very surprising and was arguably merely the latest expression of a long-standing theme. What made the Movement very much a novel phenomenon, on the other hand, was the fact that it was organised exclusively through the Internet as an outgrowth of the comedian Beppe Grillo’s blog (Grillo, n.d.), its origins lying in a 2005 invitation issued by Grillo to the followers of his blog to use the social networking site, MeetUp.com, to get together and transform online discussion into a movement for change. Thanks to the success of this initiative, several groups were able to assemble in 2007 to agree on a number of principles for the creation of a network of non-party lists based on the principles of direct, participatory democracy and were considerably strengthened by the subsequent success of large rallies – called ‘V Days’, where ‘V’ stood for vafanculo! (fuck off!) – organised by Grillo in several cities in September and April 2008. What gave the rallies their power was that they were organized and publicized without the support of the mainstream media, entirely through the horizontal dissemination of information through the

58  The Italian party system and the electorate Web (Pepe and di Gennaro, 2009) and were therefore themselves powerful symbols of the direct democracy and political spontaneity Grillo himself claimed to stand for. With the authority he had thus acquired, he was able in 2008 to begin to coordinate and to establish principles for the network of non-party lists by announcing the requisites and commitments that would apply to candidate lists wanting his endorsement and publicity through his blog (Newell, 2012). The Movement was very difficult to place ideologically (Mosca and Tronconi, 2019; Berlucchi, 2021) – which was hardly surprising as it attracted support from across the left–right spectrum and therefore itself rejected any kind of left–right placement, arguing that the terms themselves were outdated and that what counted was the resolution of ‘problems’. This in turn gave rise to the additional contradiction that, while its anti-establishment rhetoric led it to decry conventional emphases on the value of experts, its rejection of left–right thinking also led it to the opposite position: that is, to the rejection of partisanship in favour of expertise in politics – leading some (e.g. Bickerton and Accetti, 2018) to suggest that it represented a completely new brand of politics altogether: ‘techno-populism’. On the one hand, it championed issues often associated with the libertarian left, such as environmental sustainability and social equality; on the other hand, in appearing to embrace – for example – Eurosceptical positions, it seemed closer to the nationalist right. However, the essence of its political offering revolved not around the substance of politics but around the way politics was carried on: the offer to respond to popular resentments by ‘giv[ing] the government back to the people through direct representation without organized parties’ (Urbinati, 2018). Since, for the M5S, the mainstream parties, representative democracy and professional journalism were the establishment, opposition to it implied hostility to partisanship, Parliament and an ‘opinionated’ media in favour of myths of nonpartisan democracy and the horizontal dissemination of ‘objective’ news, thus making possible the transformation of Italian democracy from the ‘outside in’ and the ‘bottom up’. In this way, it was able to project a profile as an ‘anti-party’ party, drawing on sentiments with deep roots in Italian political culture. Anti-party sentiments had already been a salient feature of the politics of the ‘First Republic’ – where the term partitocrazia (rule by parties) referred to the governing parties’ occupation of the interstices of the state for clientelistic purposes, their tendency therefore to obstruct reform when their clients’ interests were threatened and their behaviour, thus, to be perceived as illegitimate interference in public affairs. So as an ‘anti-party’ entity the M5S was able to campaign as a ‘catch-all’ formation, rejecting alliances with any of the established parties so that it could continue to speak in the name of ‘ordinary citizens’. From the beginning, therefore, the Movement’s world-view or ideology was an antinomy. As we saw in Chapter 1, it was possible to detect in its outlook both a commitment to ideals of deliberation and participatory democracy and populist attitudes. The coexistence of the two reflected the Movement’s commitment to a conception of politics as community service, therefore to a particular view of the values political engagement should adhere to, therefore to what Max Weber called an ‘ethic of conviction’ as opposed to an ‘ethic of responsibility’ (Starr, 1999). Participatory democracy is a model of democracy that aims to maximise the opportunities for members of a polity to actively contribute to decision-making by seeking to engage them in processes of deliberation where the ultimate goal is not only policy-making but, simultaneously, the development of the social and political capacities of each individual (Pateman, 1970). Deliberative democracy, meanwhile, suggests that the democratic quality of decision-making is not mainly a function of the aggregation of preferences through voting but rather of the opportunities for debate and discussion (deliberation) prior to voting, on terms of equality among the participants. The Movement’s commitment to these principles was therefore reflected in its slogan uno vale uno (everyone counts the same), in its insistence that representatives in public office be subject to term limits, in its rules concerning the periodic rotation of official positions

The Italian party system and the electorate  59 such as leadership of its parliamentary groups and in its practices of decision-making by means of online voting among ordinary members. Populism, on the other hand, is, ultimately, an anti-democratic outlook insofar as it portrays politics as a conflict between the interests of a ‘pure’ people and a ‘corrupt’ elite (according to Mudde’s (2004: 543) well-known formulation). The populist therefore implicitly claims to have privileged access to knowledge of what the people’s ‘interests’ are – thus implying that the political claims of others are illegitimate. Otherwise put, the populist’s outcry against the attacks of a self-serving elite on the interests of the people, with the implication that only he knows what these interests are and therefore that only he can legitimately represent the people, undermines principles of pluralist democracy. If politics is a conflict between ‘the people’ and corrupt elites, then competitor parties can only be the (more or less disguised) representatives of the elites that must be fought against. Since ‘the people’ is a singular entity whose will the populist leader represents by securing a majority, there is no place in politics for restrictions on the freedom of action of such a leader or for constitutional constraints guaranteeing the rights of minorities, since these undermine the capacity of the people to defend itself and its interests. The Movement’s populism was reflected in its self-confessed raison d’être as a movement that sought ‘to encourage ordinary people in every locality to come forward and speak for the community’s distrust and dislike of mainstream politics’ (Lloyd, 2012) and in its hostility to the institutions of representative democracy: its insistence (for example) that parliamentary representatives should be delegates not trustees and its insistence, in 2020, on cutting the number of parliamentarians, supposedly to reduce the costs of politics. The two outlooks – participatory and deliberative, on the one hand; populist, on the other – were fundamentally incompatible since the first implies a commitment to pluralism and to the legitimacy of political debate and disagreement, the second its opposite, for the affirmation of diversity within a polity denies the existence of an undifferentiated ‘people’ with its corresponding requirement of a privileged interpreter of its will. The Movement attempted to square the circle between the two outlooks by declaring in article 4 of its 2009 ‘Non-Statute’ that it sought to make possible the ‘efficient and effective exchange of ideas and democratic debate beyond the confines of associations and parties and without the mediation of governing or representative bodies, by giving Internet users generally a role in government and decision-making normally reserved to a few’. Yet it was unable to square the circle. Thus, on the one hand, article 4 went on to stipulate that the Movement was to be a tool for identifying and selecting election candidates who would promote the ideas shared through Grillo’s blog and was to be organised by relying on the Internet, which was to be given ‘a central role in signing people up to the Movement and in processes of consultation, deliberation, decision-making and election’. On the other hand, however, the Movement would, in essence, ‘belong’ to Grillo, for the article went on to stipulate that the Movement’s central office coincided with his blog – while article 1 stipulated that contact with it could be had exclusively via email and article 3 that Grillo himself was the ‘sole owner of the rights to use [the Movement’s symbol]’ – thus giving him, in effect, exclusive authority in matters of the Movement’s policy and candidates. Consequently, the Movement’s claim to be a novel vehicle for popular empowerment was essentially fraudulent, and this became increasingly evident with the passage of time as its profile grew and it underwent organisational change. Thus, from having originally been a means for mobilising activists on the ground, the Internet, through later iterations of the Movement’s statute, became the vehicle for a plebiscitarian linkage between the party in central office and the online members. For instance, while members had the right to participate in online consultations concerning a wide range of matters, article 4 of the 2017 statute made clear that consultations

60  The Italian party system and the electorate could only be initiated by the Comitato Direttivo (a five-member committee responsible for overseeing the day-to-day administration of the Movement) or the Garante (in practice, Beppe Grillo), whose term of office was indeterminate and who had final authority concerning how the statute was to be interpreted. As Crulli (2022) notes, ‘the power of initiative of consultations [was] therefore concentrated at the top so that consultations reflect[ed] a top-down model of ratification, with little scope for deliberation on the part of members’. When to this is added the power of the Comitato Direttivo and the Garante to instigate a repetition of any consultation (whose results would only be considered confirmed if supported by a majority of members entitled to vote), it becomes clear that the Movement’s statute described a party in which the party on the ground – the members, activists and supporters – was essentially dominated by the party in central office, in which power flowed overwhelmingly from the top down rather than from the bottom up. None of the more recent organisational or statutory changes have done anything to change this (see Crulli, 2022). So despite protestations to the contrary, the M5S has never succeeded in altering the b­ alance between ‘bottom-up’ and ‘top-down’ flows of power, either in the wider society or internally, and this is hardly surprising. The elite theorists Gaetano Mosca and Vilfredo Pareto had pointed out long ago that regime change, by revolution or otherwise, is inevitably a matter of the circulation of elites – while Robert Michels, drawing on these theories and on Max Weber’s analysis of bureaucracy, had pointed out that the imperatives of modern organisation – for competent leadership, centralised authority and an internal division of labour – give those at its apex ­resources – skills, knowledge, status and the control of organisational resources such as ­communication – which inevitably lead them to dominate the broader membership. As we have seen, exercising power from the bottom up requires that those at the bottom are able to escape elite manipulation by establishing connections between themselves and so draw on the resources of deliberation and organisation – and yet, as we have also seen, notwithstanding the ­Movement’s initial aspirations in this regard, its use of the Internet worked in precisely the ­opposite – ­plebiscitarian – direction. Therefore, it is not surprising, either, that, in the decade following its emergence, the M5S saw a rapid rise in its political fortunes followed by an almost equally rapid fall once disappointment with its failures began to set in. Once it took office in partnership with the League in 2018, it was called upon to make choices it had been able to avoid as a protest movement, forced to come to terms with the dilemma that all challenger parties seeking to overturn the status quo face once they take office, especially if they are in coalition: Do they remain true to principled positions in order to retain the support of diehard supporters but with the risk of undermining government stability? Or do they accept compromises in order to retain government stability, and thereby the support of more moderate supporters, but with the risk of alienating their diehard supporters? There is not the space here for a full account, but the history of the Movement’s experience of governing has to a significant extent been a history of reneging on positions of principle, largely because the price of the alternative course of action has in each case seemed too high. A couple of examples will have to suffice. First, the Movement had always supported the movement of opposition to the high-speed train link (Treno ad Alta Velocità, TAV) between Turin and Lyons, as part of its sustainability agenda, and, as Cecilia Biancalana (2019: 75) pointed out, once it was in government with the League, ‘stopping the TAV project [could] be seen both as a test of strength in relation to the Movement’s government ally [which strongly supported the TAV], and as a measure to reinforce the image of the M5S as a party “different from the others”, that is, one able to keep its promises’. In the summer of 2019, the Movement’s ministers allowed the project to proceed – essentially because not doing so would have meant the loss of EU funding, damage to the country’s relations with France and rupture

The Italian party system and the electorate  61 with its coalition partner – while attempting to save face by declaring that the final word would rest with Parliament – knowing full well that, in that arena, the motion opposing the project would fail to get the numbers necessary to pass (see Biancalna, 2020). Later, in the summer of 2021, still in government, it allowed the passage of a reform of the system of justice that essentially undermined another of its flagship policies – the so-called Bonafede law limiting the applicability of the statute of limitations as part of its anti-corruption agenda – by all accounts because it was bludgeoned into submission by a prime minister who threatened to resign and bring down the Government unless it toed the line (see Newell, 2021). It may well be the case that some populists manage successfully to avoid the dilemmas of being in power, managing successfully to be both governing actors and actors able to advance policies closest to the hearts of their most diehard supporters (Albertazzi and McDonnell 2015), but the M5S was not in this category, thanks largely to the fact that its ideological anchors were weak – beyond its populism, its ideology and objectives have been changing, contradictory and eclectic – and because it has, in government, been weakened by other political actors both more experienced and – in the case of the first Conte Government and the League – enjoying a greater media profile. So the Movement’s history has, as mentioned, described a trajectory of rapid rise and fall and, in doing so, has reflected salient features of its political environment. As we shall see, its experience of dramatic growth followed shortly after by an equally dramatic loss of popularity has been a feature of both parties and leaders generally since the demise of the parties of the ‘First Republic’. This, as I shall substantiate by considering the remainder of Italy’s political parties, is in turn due to ‘an epochal change in representative democracy’ such that the party system ‘has reached the line separating it from factional politics and populism’ (Urbinati, 2018). The parties of the centre right Forza Italia

The emergence of Silvio Berlusconi’s Forza Italia in 1994 marked the onset of this change for, as a ‘personal party’ – a party whose raison d’être was to further the political ambitions of its founder – its success set in motion, within political parties generally, a process ‘of personalistic atomisation’ that ‘threatened the cohesiveness – and sometimes the very survival – of Italy’s most consolidated political organisations (Musella, 2014: 222). In the first place, Berlusconi understood the importance, in the political context of the early 1990s – with the fading of old ideological divisions, the mediatisation of politics, anti-party sentiments and voters politically orphaned by the disintegration of the traditional parties – of a new, populist, style of political communication. This would be one that focussed on the leader, Berlusconi himself, and on the personal qualities that made him uniquely qualified, as a political outsider, to stand up for the interests of ordinary Italians in opposition to professional politicians – which would in turn enable him to acquire celebrity status and thereby establish a direct relationship with voters, who, through his use of striking and uncomplicated language, would be able to imagine him as one of their own. In truth, Berlusconi’s communication was not entirely original. More personalised styles of political campaigning had first begun to appear in Italian politics in the 1980s when Berlusconi’s mentor, the PSI leader, Bettino Craxi, had taken the then unusual step of combining the roles of party leader and Prime Minister, using the combination to build up a ‘fund of personal support as a political resource in the service of strong leadership and the attempt to sustain a virtuous circle between leadership and popularity’ (Newell, 2019a: 165). Meanwhile, the use of simple language, breaking with the formal and somewhat impenetrable styles of the traditional parties, had first been pioneered by LN leader, Umberto Bossi, as part of his own

62  The Italian party system and the electorate efforts to establish his credentials as a ‘man of the people’. However, given that the emergence of Berlusconi and FI coincided with the demise of their predecessors and with the party-system transformation that ensued, they did mark a decisive and permanent change in the nature of political communication in the country, for their success meant that their communication styles were progressively taken up by other political leaders. In the second place, in the case of FI, personalisation went hand in hand with a novel type of party organisation, one that was both professionalised (in the sense that it was heavily reliant on communications and political marketing experts) and highly centralised (in the sense that it was, among other things, a patrimonial entity: one that literally belonged to its founder whose authority within it was therefore absolute and whose discretion was unlimited). Given the political context of the 1990s – when institutional reforms2 increased the personalisation of executives at local and national levels, the mediatisation of politics was already a well-established development and long-standing partisan loyalties had been disrupted by the ‘First Republic’ parties’ demise – Berlusconi’s electoral success led other, competitor, parties, also born towards the start of the ‘Second Republic’, to attempt to imitate his formula. For instance, Italia dei Valori (Italy of Values, IdV) established in 1998 by Antonio di Pietro, the public prosecutor who became famous thanks to his central role in the investigations that gave rise to Tangentopoli, was very similar to FI in that it too was a vehicle for its founder’s political ambitions (in this case to bring about nothing less than the moralisation of public life). Di Pietro, too, presented himself as an outsider with respect to a corrupt political class, and he too adopted populist communication strategies that would enable him to establish credentials as a ‘man of the people’. IdV was ‘almost entirely dependent on the charismatic appeal of its founder leader and its organisation [also] remained completely centralised’ (Musella, 2014: 225). And IdV, like many other ‘Second Republic’ parties, ultimately had an existence that was short lived. Having acquired celebrity status and been feted as a national hero thanks to his role in bringing about the downfall and humiliation of so many of the traditional governing politicians, Di Pietro led his party to an all-time high of 8 per cent at the European elections of 2009. Italy of Values remained a minor (though in Sartori’s (1976) sense a ‘system relevant’) party, since, by the time it was established, the popular passions aroused by Tangentopoli had begun to cool while popular resentments and hostility towards the political class and the public institutions it represented had to some extent been diverted by Berlusconi into popular hostility towards the judiciary.3 Then, however, the emergence and growth of the M5S, for whom anti-corruption was a central and salient feature of its own message, essentially deprived IdV of its USP (unique selling point) – with the result that it failed to elect a single parliamentarian in 2013 from when it essentially disappeared from public life altogether. However, beyond the specific case of IdV, the advent of the personal party pioneered by Berlusconi has had the more general consequence of undermining the cohesion of ‘Second Republic’ parties generally. First of all, the ‘Second Republic’ personal parties have not generally (and IdV might be an exception here) been built around some clearly recognisable political project – meaning some political problem, general or specific, of policy or ideology – on the basis of which to mobilise voters and have certainly had nothing like the clear ideological profiles with which the ‘First Republic’ parties – as could be gathered from their very names: ‘Italian Socialist Party’, ‘Christian Democrats’ and so on – were all associated. Consequently, personal parties tend to be very brittle entities with few resources for retaining the loyalty of followers beyond personal allegiance to the leader, who has few means of preventing defections beyond whatever resources he has available to affect, positively or negatively, the personal interests of potential dissidents. In the second place, the increasing fragility of the ties between leaders and followers operates not only within parties but also at the level of the electorate as well with the absence of ideology and the breakdown of long-standing partisan loyalties obliging parties to recreate their

The Italian party system and the electorate  63 support bases at every election. Thirdly, therefore, parties suffer from a distinct loss of internal cohesion as the relations between members, supporters and voters become increasingly instrumental in nature, and they are bound together less and less by ideas and convictions. This has been apparent, first, in the dramatic increase, in recent legislatures, in the number of members of the Chamber of Deputies and the Senate switching between parliamentary groups, ‘a trend which has assumed unusual dimensions in terms of the MPs involved, the amount of group switching and the political effects on the stability of political parties and executives’ (Curreri, 2004: 8; cited in Musella, 2014: 229).4 ‘During the First Republic, ideological identity and party discipline did not allow MPs to abandon their parliamentary groups, as party switching would have led to a sort of political suicide’ (Musella, 2014: 229). Second, the phenomenon has been apparent in the increasingly frequent formation, in the ‘Second Republic’, of short-lived ‘micro parties’ – often emerging within Parliament as breakaways from other parties, seeking to prosper by their capacity to act as veto players (Tsebelis, 2003) or, like FI, functioning as vehicles for the pursuit of personal ambitions and ultimately failing to survive because of their inability to institutionalise or to put down any kind of ideological or social roots (Table 3.1). Several of these parties recall the long-standing traditions of notable and clientele politics and might once have operated as factions beneath the ideological veneer provided by the DC,5 but in contrast to that party’s factions – which, although they were expressions of the politics of clientelism, had some recognisable ideological colourings – current factions – whose proliferation is a third indicator of the loss of parties’ cohesion – are themselves personalised entities more often than not called by the names of their leaders, ‘who are allies of, or in competition with, the party leader’ (Musella, 2014: 227). Not even the PD, despite having a stronger organisation on the ground than most ‘Second Republic’ parties, has been immune to these tendencies – as we shall see. For now I turn my attention to the two remaining main parties of the centre right: the Lega and Fratelli d’Italia. The League

In its initial incarnation in the 1980s, the League was an expression of the long-standing and deep-seated economic and social disparities between the north and the south of the country. These had had political significance from the start of Italy’s existence as a unified nation state, since the country’s rulers understood that they were an obstacle to national integration and therefore, ultimately, to national security. North–south differences – of economic development and of political and social culture – therefore became conceptualised both as problematic and as indicative of a relationship of inferiority–superiority – the more so as they appeared impervious to the attempts of governments over the decades to overcome them. Consequently, when in 1984 Umberto Bossi founded the Lega Autonomista Lombarda (Lombard Autonomy League) – which in 1991 merged with five other northern regional autonomy parties to form the Lega Nord (Northern League) under Bossi’s leadership – his initial successes were to be explained by the fact that he was able to link popular resentments to a traditional division, a source of popular prejudices, that already had a strong hold on the public imagination. In essence, Bossi was especially successful in gaining a hearing in those parts of the north making up what had come to be referred to as the ‘Third Italy’, whose emergence thanks to the economic miracle referred to in Chapter 1, led to a growing conflict between, on the one hand, the interests of the small businesses that provided its dynamism and, on the other, clientelistic support for the DC and its governing allies in the south. By claiming that the larger proportion of the total tax take needed to finance public expenditure necessarily came from the richer North, and by blaming the inefficiency of public services on the efforts of a corrupt, party-dominated bureaucracy in far-away Rome to maintain its

64  The Italian party system and the electorate Table 3.1  Failed parties of the ‘Second Republic’ Party

Founded

Dissolved

Ideology

La Rete

24 Jan. 1991

27 Feb. 1999

Alleanza Democratica Patto di Rinascita Nazionale (Patto Segni) Parttito Popolare Italiano Centro Cristiano Democratico Partito Socialista Riformista Socialisti Italiani Cristiani Democratici Uniti Parttito Socialista Unione Democratica Rinnovamento Italiano Socialisti Democratici Italiani Partito dei Comunisti Italiani I Democratici

15 July 1993 5 Nov. 1993

1 Mar. 1997 21 June 2003

Social Catholicism, environmentalism, progressivism, anti-corruption Social liberalism Liberal Catholicism, liberalism

18 Jan. 1994

24 Mar. 2002

18 Jan. 1994

6 Dec. 2002

13 Nov. 1994

31 Jan. 1996

13 Nov. 1994 23 July 1995

8 Feb. 1998 6 Dec. 2002

24 Feb. 1996 26 Feb. 1996 28 Feb. 1996 10 May 1998

19 Jan. 2001 27 Feb. 1999 17 Mar. 2002 7 Oct. 2007

Social democracy Christian democracy, social conservatism Social democracy Social liberalism, social democracy Centrism, social liberalism Social democracy

11 Oct. 1998

26 June 2016

Communism, anti-capitalism

27 Feb. 1999

24 Mar. 2002

Democrazia Europea La Margherita

11 Feb. 2001 24 Mar. 2002

6 Dec. 2002 14 Oct. 2007

Sinistra Democratica

5 May 2007

24 Oct. 2010

La Destra

3 July 2007

18 Feb. 2017

Sinistra Critica

8 Dec. 2007

30 July 2013

Sinistra, Ecologia, Libertà Futuro e Libertà per l’Italia Grande Sud Fare per Fermare il Declino Il Megafono – Lista Crocetta Scelta Civica Nuovo Centro Destra

20 Dec. 2009

17 Dec. 2016

30 July 2010

18 Feb. 2017

Social liberalism, reformism, social democracy Democratic Catholicism Democratic Catholicism, social liberalism, reformism Social democracy, democratic socialism, environmentalism Neo-Fascism, nationalism, Euroscepticism Communism, Trotskyism, anticapitalism, feminism Democratic socialism, environmentalism, pacifism Conservatism, liberalism

5 Sept. 2011 27 Aug. 2012

23 Nov. 2013 May 2014

Southern autonomy Liberalism, European federalism

22 Nov. 2012

27 July 2017

Sicilian autonomy, social democracy

4 Jan. 2013 15 Nov. 2013

24 July 2019 18 Mar. 2017

Liberalism Democratic Catholicism, liberalism, social conservatism

Christian democracy, social Catholicism Christian democracy, social conservatism Social democracy

clientele-based power in an underdeveloped South, the League was able to tie small-business discontents firmly to its own autonomist concerns. It did this by arguing that a set of federalist arrangements were needed as these – by limiting the functions of the state to external defence, internal security, the administration of justice, and the provision of only the most indispensable of additional public goods – would remove from the central authorities all those functions which allowed it to tax the North while giving little or nothing in return. (Newell, 2000: 77–8)

The Italian party system and the electorate  65 Bossi’s party was the first since the war to emerge as a completely new formation and to successfully challenge the monopoly of the existing, established, parties. In order of time, Bossi was the first significant populist politician of the ‘Second Republic’, one who made his first major political breakthrough at the general election of 1992 and who therefore played a significant role in bringing about the demise of the ‘First Republic’ governing parties. By drawing on his potential supporters’ latent hostility to southerners, he was able to create a link between their material concerns and his demand for autonomy, such that the latter seemed to follow naturally from the former. By creating a centralised organisation, under strong charismatic leadership with power heavily concentrated at the top, Bossi brought into being a party that was effectively protected against the centrifugal threats inherent in its rapid growth. But the LN remained an ‘outsider’, or ‘challenger’, party until, from the beginning of the new century, it acquired a stable position within the coalition of the centre right, and even then its support was limited by the limits on the numbers of its potential supporters: residents of the north for whom a northern identity was politically significant. Matteo Salvini’s assumption of the leadership in December 2013 therefore represented a significant new departure for the party, for, by rebranding it as a far-right, anti-immigrant nationalist party, he enabled it to break out of its ghetto and in 2018, for the first time, to field candidates with realistic prospects of success throughout the country as a whole. The degree of novelty represented by this change must be qualified. On the one hand, it was significant. By drawing on the considerable decline in public sympathy for the EU in the years following the adoption of the Euro – when it became apparent that membership of the single currency involved significant limits on the state’s room for manoeuvre in dealing with its debt problem and therefore few alternatives to austerity – Salvini developed a new, xenophobic rhetoric. This deflected, in the direction of Brussels, the popular resentments that had once been directed at Rome and was given significant additional force by the so-called ‘EU migrant crisis’ of 2016, enabling him to drop the qualifier, ‘Nord’, from the party’s title in 2017 and to embark on the highly successful 2018 election campaign under the slogan, reminiscent of Donald Trump, Prima gli italiani! (Italians first!) On the other hand, xenophobia was actually a long-standing element in the party’s rhetoric, one that had already marked it out as a party of the radical right that sought to pursue a politics of identity by positing potential supporters as a community under threat from a variety of ‘others’, and, as Albertazzi, Giovannini and Seddone (2018) point out, although after Salvini took the helm the regionalist theme was set aside in the communication of the leader, it remained very much alive among the party’s middle-level elites for whom the change in the communication was perceived not as the abandonment of the party’s earlier goals but as a shift of emphasis for the purposes of maximising electoral support. The authors’ findings confirmed that the party had ‘two contrasting, yet coexisting souls, building on similar “exclusionary” values but showing allegiance to different “imagined communities” (Anderson 1991): the “nation” as far as the leader is concerned, “northern regions” in the case of party elites’ (Albertazzi, Giovannini and Seddone, 2018: 659). The findings confirmed that, although a ‘personalised’ entity (insofar as Salvini dominated its media communication), the Lega, unlike FI, was not a fully fledged ‘personal’ party, dependent on the political life-span of its leader: regional party branches continued to enjoy a degree of autonomy and to ‘take initiatives to increase the power of their own regions’ (Albertazzi, Giovannini and Seddone, 2018: 659) – as was especially evident during the early months of the COVID-19 outbreak in 2020 (Toth, 2021). Prior to that, at the general election of 2018, the League had for the first time overtaken FI to become the largest of the three main parties making up the coalition of the centre right, a position it retained until shortly after the advent of the Draghi Government, when – in decline since a polling high of 37.7 per cent reached in the aftermath of the 2019 European parliamentary elections – it was overtaken by FdI. This party’s support in voting intentions polls had grown

66  The Italian party system and the electorate more or less constantly since 2018, so that, by the summer of 2022, it was the largest of the centre-right parties on 22.8 per cent. Brothers of Italy

From one point of view, such support was surprising, for FdI was the latest party-political expression of a tradition that extended back to the immediate aftermath of the Second World War with the formation of the neo-Fascist Movimento Sociale Italiano by a number of junior officials in Benito Mussolini’s Repubblica di Salò. Throughout the ‘First Republic’, the MSI had been a pariah party, subject to the conventio ad excludendum and never attracting a share of the vote that went beyond single figures. In the early 1990s, its then leader, Gianfranco Fini, had repudiated Fascism, seeking to lend credibility to his gesture by changing the party’s name to Alleanza Nazionale, when it became clear that, by making available potential allies in a coalition to face down the parties of the centre left, the post-1989 transformation of the party system offered the party an opportunity to shed its pariah status. Yet it was never able entirely to rid itself of suspicions that Fascist sympathies lingered on within it, and it continued to be dogged by them as it became apparent over the years that Fini’s ideological repositioning was never entirely accepted by party officials and members. The point is that anti-Fascism was central to the founding ideology of the Italian republic. Just how powerful it was as a political message was confirmed by Umberto Bossi in the run-up to the 1994 general election when, in relation to the negotiations that were taking place for the formation of the coalition of the centre right, he had initially exclaimed (though he would later change his mind), Mai con i fascisti! (Never with the Fascists!) – clearly worried that the sheer strength of anti-Fascist sentiments among voters (especially in the north where the anti-Fascist resistance movement had mainly been based) made association with even a reformed MSI politically impossible to contemplate. In the immediate aftermath of the election, the European Parliament had greeted the prospect of AN joining the Government by passing a motion expressing the hope that the Government would conduct itself in conformity with European values – forcing the President, Oscar Luigi Scalfaro, to publicly defend the country’s institutions. And well into the new century, AN was obliged to act as a loyal coalition partner to Berlusconi’s FI, keeping a lower profile than the LN, aware that it owed its new found acceptability to the entrepreneur’s endorsement and that any resurgence of doubts concerning its democratic credentials would leave it vulnerable to the endorsement being withdrawn. As FdI – formed in 2012 as a breakaway from the Pdl, the formation that had brought together FI and AN in 2008 – the party could plausibly be described as one that embraces nationalism and conservatism, as it promotes family values, traditional cultural values, opposition to immigration and Euroscepticism. Yet the party’s logo remains essentially the one originally fielded by the MSI, and allegations concerning its links with Fascism continue to be made from time to time. So, given the centrality of anti-Fascism to Italian political culture, the high level of support for the party, as mentioned, is from one point of view surprising. From another point of view, its support is less surprising. First, as time has passed and the numbers of citizens for whom the Fascist regime was a lived experience has dwindled, appeals to anti-Fascism seem to have lost at least some of their power with the result that allegations about Fascism have gradually come to cut less ice. This is what appears, at least, to be suggested by media reports indicating a growing willingness, on the part of those on the receiving end of allegations, to push back against them as the conflict underlying them has become increasingly incorporated into a broader cultural conflict along the so-called GAL–TAN (‘green-alternativelibertarian’ versus ‘traditional-authoritarian-nationalist’) dimension of politics (globalist, 2019). Second, when in December 2012, FdI broke with the Pdl, it did so allegedly with Berlusconi’s agreement, as the entrepreneur was aware that, by giving rise to a new party that would appeal

The Italian party system and the electorate  67 to that specific variety of right-wing sentiment according to which being on the right meant having socially conservative attitudes and a feeling of affinity with the ideals of national pride, the split would work to the benefit of the centre-right coalition as a whole. And indeed, while FdI itself failed to rise above single figures in 2013 or 2018, its support doubled between the two elections, while its presence in the coalition, alongside FI and the League, added to the coalition’s effectiveness. Given that each of its component parties appealed to distinctive rightwing constituencies, ‘if the specific profile of each party potentially drove away voters, then the presence of one of the other two served to reassure them and keep them on side’ (Newell, 2019b: 122). Finally, its high level of support probably reflected the fact that it had remained in opposition throughout the eighteenth legislature, while other potential recipients of protest votes on the right, most obviously the League, had sacrificed some of this support by having been, intermittently, in government. However this may be, the recent growth in FdI represents a remarkable turnaround in the fortunes of representatives of the MSI heritage, which in 2013 had seemed on the verge of extinction. At that year’s election, thanks to the periodic defections from AN created by Fini’s recurring reiterations of his party’s ideological repositioning and thanks too to his own defection from the Pdl in 2010, FdI competed with a range of parties – Fini’s Futuro e Libertà per l’Italia (Future and Freedom for Italy); La Destra (the Right); Movimento Sociale-Fiamma Tricolore (Social Movement – Tricolour Flame) – all seeking to occupy similar, if not identical, ideological space – all of which performed disastrously, securing no parliamentary representation and therefore disappearing altogether or being confined to the margins of political life. At that time, therefore, it seemed that ‘ambitions raised by the collapse of the old party system in 1993’ had been all but destroyed (Raniolo and Tarchi, 2015: 178). Nearly a decade later therefore, FdI, whose project had essentially been to rebuild the former AN from scratch, appeared to be on the trajectory of initial rapid ascent familiar to those acquainted with the history of parties of the ‘Second Republic’. If, as seemed possible, not to say likely, in the run-up to the 2022 elections, it found itself at the head of a centre-right government with an absolute majority, the question that would probably be uppermost in the minds of observers is whether, as a far-right nationalist party in an integrating Europe, it would succeed in surviving the experience. The parties of the centre left The Democratic Party

The Partito Democratico came into existence in 2007 as an amalgamation of ex-Communists and left-leaning former Christian Democrats who were driven by a number of considerations. First, as we saw in Chapter 1, they were already ‘comrades in arms’ in the various coalitions of centre-left forces opposed to the coalition led by Silvio Berlusconi on the centre right, and, although their predecessors in the ‘First Republic’ had been divided by the ideological chasm underlying the Cold War conflict, their amalgamation project had a precedent in the so-called ‘historic compromise’ theorised by PCI leader Enrico Berlinguer in the 1970s. Second, they were aware that, unlike the coalition of the centre right, the centre left lacked a genuine ‘coalition maker’ – a party of sufficient size and authority to be able to dictate to potential allies the terms on which coalition formation was to take place – as a result of which, it was much less cohesive and, therefore, less electorally competitive than its centre-right opponent. Notoriously, the centre left’s leader, Romano Prodi, lacked a party of his own and was therefore more or less constantly vulnerable to the machinations of the parties he sought to lead. It was for this reason that, in 2005, with the following year’s general election then in sight, Prodi insisted that his position be subject to confirmation through the holding of a primary election – then an entirely

68  The Italian party system and the electorate novel institution in Italian politics – in which he would compete with others to be elected the coalition’s leader and its candidate Prime Minister, for he was aware that the resulting popular endorsement – and the participation of nearly 4.5 million voters made the election strikingly successful – would give him much needed authority in his efforts to impose discipline on his coalition. His subsequent experience in government, when he led a coalition of no fewer than nine parties with such a small majority in the Senate that even individual senators had a power of veto over Government policy, confirmed that, successful as it had been in terms of participation, the 2005 primary had been unsuccessful in delivering the leadership authority and coalition discipline that had been hoped for. Finally, then, the PD was a product of its promoters’ awareness that, to a greater degree than voters on the centre right, centre-left voters were subject to what was called fedeltà leggera (Natale, 2002), whose closest approximation in English is ‘weak partisanship’, since it referred to the combination of an unwillingness to switch between the two main coalitions combined with a growing willingness to shift between parties within the coalition with which the voter identified. In short, if centre-right voters identified first and foremost with their preferred party, then centre-left voters identified first and foremost with the coalition as a whole and therefore looked to its leaders to deliver the cohesion needed to make it competitive with its opponents. On the basis of the votes cast for the centre left in 2006, the amalgamation project bringing the PD into existence held out the prospect of delivering this cohesion, since getting on for two-thirds of centre-left supporters were supporters of the ­parties – the DS and the Margherita – that gave birth to the new formation. So the emergence of the PD was the product of considerable ambition: the ambition to overcome fragmentation on the centre left and thereby contribute to stable alternation and the rotation in office of two coalitions – both capable of surviving for an entire legislative term and therefore of pursuing incisive agendas of reform – widely seen as the sine qua non of a ‘mature democracy’. Italy’s nine governments since the PD’s emergence (Table 3.2), each surviving for less than two years on average, are therefore testimony to the failure of the PD project. To understand the reasons for this failure we have to understand the kind of party the PD’s founders sought to create when they brought it into existence, for they were driven by two conflicting imperatives. On the one hand, there was the imperative, deriving from the electoral environment, to concentrate power in the hands of a strong charismatic leader capable of delivering votes to the party. On the other hand, there was the imperative, mentioned at the start of this section, of popular empowerment. Deriving from declining party memberships and increasingly widespread anti-party sentiments, it suggested the need to devolve power downwards to the party and its supporters and potential supporters on the ground. The PD’s founders saw this as essential if the new party were to be successful in establishing and maintaining strong links with its extra-parliamentary base, especially as a significant proportion would almost certainly be drawn from the better educated, professional, administrative and managerial employees who had already revealed themselves to be a significant source of support for the centre left, who were more likely to be politically active than the less privileged and who had already given voice to feelings of discontent with the existing opportunities for exercising influence within the parties of the coalition (see Newell, 2003: 84–6). In essence, the PD’s founders were convinced that the characteristics of its most probable extra-parliamentary base pointed to the emergence of a new kind of political actor, which they distinguished from both the card-carrying party member and the professional politician: what they referred to as the ‘active citizen voter’, an individual whose activism was not continuous but who demanded the right to be heard and to count at the most decisive moments in the life of the party (Floridia, 2019: 20–24). At the same time, the party they conceived was one with ‘a majoritarian vocation’, meaning that it would aim to take on and beat the centre right singlehandedly, so that its leader would also be its candidate premier. Consequently, in the design

The Italian party system and the electorate  69 Table 3.2  Governments of the ‘Second Republic’ Government

Dates

Composition

Duration (days)

12th legislature, 15 April 1994 – 16 February 1996 (general election: 27 March 1994) Berlusconi I Dini

10 May 1994 – 22 Dec. 1994 17 Jan. 1995 – 17 May 1996

FI, LN, AN, CCD, UDC Independents

226 486

13th legislature, 9 May 1996 – 9 March 2001 (general election 21 April 1996) Prod I D’Alema I D’Alema II

18 May 1996 – 9 Oct. 1998 27 Oct. 1998 – 18 Dec. 1999 22 Dec. 1999 – 19 Apr. 2000

Amato II

25 Apr. 2000 – 11 June 2001

PDS, PPI, Dini List, UD, Greens Ulivo, PdCI, UDEUR DS, PPI, Democrats, UDEUR, PdCI, Greens, RI DS, PPI, Democrats, UDEUR, SDI, PdCI, Greens, RI, independents

876 423 119 398

14th legislature, 30 May 2001 – 27 April 2006 (general election: 13 May 2001) Berlusconi II

12 June 2001 – 23 Apr. 2005

Berlusconi III

23 Apr. 2005 – 17 May 2006

FI, AN, LN, CCD-CDU, independents

1,413 389

15th legislature, 28 April 2006 – 6 February 2008 (general election: 9 and 10 April 2006) Prodi II

17 May 2006 – 8 May 2 008

DS, Margherita, PRC, PdCI, Greens, 722 RnP, UDEUR, IdV

16th legislature, 29 April 2008 – 14 March 2013 (general election: 13 and 14 April 2008) Berlusconi IV Monti

8 May 2008 – 16 Nov. 2011 16 Nov. 2011 – 28 Apr. 2013

PdL, LN Independents

1,287 529

17th legislature, 15 March 2013 – 22 March 2018 (general election: 24 and 25 February 2013) Letta Renzi

28 Apr. 2013 – 22 Feb. 2014 22 Feb. 2014 – 12 Dec. 2016

Gentiloni

12 Dec. 2016 – 1 June 2018

PD, SC, UdC, NCD, PpI GS, PdL/FI, PD, NCD, UdC, SC, PSI, Demo. S, CD PD, AP, CpE, PSI, CI, Demo. S

300 1,024 536

18th legislature, 23 March 2018 – 12 October 2022 (general election 4 March 2018) Conte I Conte II Draghi

1 June 2018 – 5 Sep. 2019 5 Sep. 2019 – 13 Feb. 2021 13 Feb. 2021 – 22 Oct. 2022

M5S, Lega, MAIE M5S, PD, IV, LeU, MAIE M5S, Lega, PD, FI, IV, Art. 1, +Eu, NcI CD

461 527 616

19th legislature, 13 October 2022 – present (general election 25 September 2022) Meloni

22 Oct. 2022 – present

FdI, Lega, FI

of the new party, the leader was to be chosen by means of elections open to the participation not only of members but of any voter willing to pay a token contribution, to endorse the party programme and to allow their name to be included in a register of the party’s voters. Thereby, it was envisaged that the centre left would acquire and retain electoral competitiveness, for the so-called ‘primary elections’ would both give it a strong leader and extend opportunities for involvement to a wider base of supporters so enabling the party to reconcile the two imperatives it needed to meet.

70  The Italian party system and the electorate It is likely that this organisational feature in fact made the party less competitive than it might otherwise have been. First, since participation in the ‘primaries’ was no longer a privilege of membership, membership itself was disincentivised, for its only advantage was that the member could help to determine (through prior, member-only elections) the candidates to be admitted to these primaries. Second, members of the party’s National Assembly, its supreme policy-making body, were elected through closed lists linked to one or the other of the leadership candidates, so that its composition reflected the distribution of support among these candidates, its members having no autonomous source of legitimation. Third, therefore, the party became a kind of plebiscitary democracy with participation reduced to voting and voting reduced to securing the investiture of a leader thereby authorised to issue commands. And, as the organisations of the party on the ground were no longer forums for discussion and deliberation but assemblies for the ratification of decisions, both the organisations themselves and membership driven by ideals began to atrophy and give way to membership driven by personal, typically office-seeking, ambitions to be pursued by falling in behind this or that leadership candidate and their local supporters. Consequently, far from bringing empowerment and enhancing the exercise of power from the bottom up, the party’s statute had the opposite effect while also depriving it of a shared political culture or any very clearly defined political identity. Since the PD was an amalgamation of parties with cultural roots in two long-standing political traditions (the (post-)Communist and the Christian Democratic), it is probable that any concerted effort to develop a clear identity would have been divisive and therefore damaging to the new entity. Consequently, it was at most able to function as a catch-all party – providing an arena for the expression and management of the full range of interests expressed in civil society – rather than as a party able to offer representation to given, specific, interests and thereby to attempt to realise a vision for society as a whole. A party lacking such a vision lacks an ideology that can organise and render coherent the ideas and principles informing its programme and policies. This makes it more difficult for it to set the agenda of public political discussion and therefore to influence public opinion – as a result of which it is restricted to supporting or opposing the visions expressed by others, condemned constantly to follow or to adapt itself to public opinion. It also makes it more difficult for it to cultivate an audience of core supporters willing to back it through thick and thin, making it more likely that it is condemned to having to re-create its base of support afresh at each election. Given the organisational and ideological background just described, it is not surprising that the PD has never realised its majoritarian vocation or achieved the above-mentioned ambition of ‘stable alternation’ – or that, like other parties, it has for much, if not most, of its history fallen back on the attempt to build its election campaign strategies around the appeal of more or less charismatic leaders. This is a tendency that had its most striking expression in the leadership of Matteo Renzi who became the party’s General Secretary in December 2013, from which position he was able to launch a successful bid for the premiership the following February. Offering a milder version of the anti-political, populist rhetoric then being peddled mainly by the M5S, Renzi was known as il Rottamatore (‘the Scrapper’ or ‘Demolition Man’) in reference to the narrative that had accompanied his rise (Floridia, 2019: 136–7): that ‘we’ (meaning Renzi himself, his allies, the ‘innovators’) were seeking to displace ‘them’ (meaning the rest of the party, the ‘old’, those who had ‘failed’). It was a narrative that brought him quick success in a party disappointed by the outcome of the 2013 election and immediate-term popularity as Prime Minister. As a populist leader, he was impatient with the rights of minorities and the requirements of negotiation, which from his perspective stood in the way of political renewal, and he was sceptical of intellectuals and political programmes, so that he elevated opportunism to the level of a political principle, insofar as he was willing to embrace whatever alliances were necessary in order, from his perspective, to ‘get results’. If these were qualities that helped him and his party

The Italian party system and the electorate  71 to achieve considerable short-term success, then they would later provide the basis of growing popular hostility towards him, for the crucial weakness of charismatic leadership is that unless it successfully meets the popular expectations it generates then enthusiasm rapidly gives way to disappointment and resentment. This, ultimately, is what explains the party’s unprecedentedly poor performance at the general election of March 2018: from the 40.8 per cent it had won at the European election of May 2014, a few weeks after Renzi become Prime Minister, to not even half that (18.8 per cent) less than four years later. The parties of the left

One of the most remarkable, if not entirely unpredictable, developments in the Italian political party arena since the early 1990s has been the almost complete disintegration of the left. This has been a long drawn-out process, a consequence of the transformation of the PCI after 1989 and, in particular, of the fact that, having abandoned Communism as its ideology/political project, the party was never able to make up its mind what it wanted to put in its place. The obvious alternative was social democracy; however, the PCI had always defined itself in opposition to this ideology, and social democracy itself was under threat and in decline crossnationally (Newell, 2022: ch. 3). Consequently, those in the PCI that had decided to embrace its early 1990s transformation eventually ended up, as we have seen, merging with left-leaning former Christian Democrats in the PD, whose founders regarded it as a party that had to embrace an explicitly ‘post-ideological’ project. Those who, in the early 1990s, rejected the PCI’s ­transformation – mainly, its so-called ‘pro-Soviet’ wing, for whose spokespersons the Communist project required defending the Soviet Union from criticism from those on both left and right – came together with exponents of the libertarian or ‘new’ left, outside the PCI, to form the Partito della Rifondazione Comunista. This was, until the new century, the principal representative of the cultural heritage of the PCI, while it also contained the seeds of the eventual further decline of the heritage, since the term Rifondazione was – perhaps purposely – ambiguous: it could be understood to mean a reinforcement of the Communist project but also a rethinking or a revision of that project (such that the project itself might eventually change beyond recognition). The PRC itself suffered a split in 19986 when it came into conflict with the centre-left Ulivo coalition Government that had taken office thanks to the outcome of the 1996 election and that was seeking to pursue measures of fiscal containment to ensure that Italy would qualify for membership of the single currency at the end of the decade. It suffered further damage thanks to its participation in the nine-party centre-left coalition, l’Unione, that took office in 2006. As a small radical party, it faced a dilemma similar, if not identical, to the one mentioned above in connection with the M5S when it took office in 2018. Moreover, as the era was one of ‘permanent campaigning’ (Blumenthal, 1980), it faced the related dilemma that while its need for visibility required ‘obstructive’ behaviour in government, such behaviour aroused the ferocious criticism of the mainstream media whose framing of the Government as quarrelsome, its performance as ineffectual, created a self-fulfilling prophecy of imminent demise. That is, the more it was portrayed as performing badly, the further it fell in opinion polls. The further it fell in opinion polls, the more likely it was eventually to be brought down (as happened in January 2008) by the defection of one or other of the parties it relied upon for its majority. Since then, the parties to the left of the PD have been reduced to the small change of Italian politics, never having since been ‘system relevant’ in Sartori’s (1976) sense.7 At the 2008 election, when the PD attempted to pursue its majoritarian vocation and hegemonise all of the political ground from the centre leftwards, the PRC was obliged to compete with it as part of an alternative list – the Sinistra Arcobaleno (Rainbow Left), together with the PdCI, the Greens and the Sinistra Democratica (Democratic Left, SD)8 – which, however, failed to surmount the 4 per

72  The Italian party system and the electorate cent exclusion threshold, so that, for the first time since the war, the Italian Parliament contained not a single representative of the Socialist or Communist traditions. The left found itself caught up in an inescapable downward spiral. Lack of representation deprived it of both the funding made available by the legislation on the public funding of political parties and of the media attention it required to overcome this difficulty. By the 2013 election, the left’s problems meant that the PRC had suffered a further split so that the party itself failed once again to achieve any parliamentary representation, while its dissidents, which this time ran in tandem with the PD, elected 37 deputies and 7 senators as Sinistra, Ecologia, Libertà (the Left, Ecology, Freedom). By the 2018 election, Sinistra, Ecologia, Libertà had merged with three small parties of the left,9 all of which had emerged from the PD as fallouts of Renzi’s leadership, to form Liberi e Uguali, electing 14 deputies and 4 senators, while the PRC in Potere al Popolo (Power to the People), a coalition with the PdCI and others, once again elected no one. By 2022, it was apparent that what remained of Italy’s once mighty Communist tradition was divided between a handful of parliamentary representatives, under a variety of labels, whose outlooks, conscious or otherwise, were essentially social democratic, and a radical left that had been pushed definitively to the margins of the political system. The electoral system If the history of Italy’s political parties since the early 1990s can be interpreted as a series of responses to the delegitimation of the country’s democratic institutions, then the same can be said of the history, since that time, of electoral-system reform. Italy is an outlier among the advanced democracies in that, for the past three decades, the issue has rarely been far from the top of the political agenda, and I suggest, with Antonio Floridia (2018: 114), that ‘this fact constitutes an indicator of the degree of de-structuration of the political system and of the degree of permanence of such a condition’. So the reforms pursued have of course been a reflection of the pursuit of party advantage – but also of specific normative conceptions of democracy and of attempts to get to grips with the perceived shortcomings of the political system. Aside from the immediate post-war period, when the Christian Democrats pursued a measure that became notorious as the ‘Swindle law’,10 electoral-system reform first came onto the agenda of Italian politics in the 1980s, when it was viewed as a means of overcoming what had come to be seen as a ‘blocked’ political system: one in which the impossibility of alternation in government seemed profoundly dysfunctional in that it produced government instability and clientelism and stood in the way of much needed reform in a wide range of areas of public policy. The Socialists wanted the introduction of a 5 per cent exclusion threshold, which they saw as a means of obliging the smaller governing parties (the PSDI, the PRI and the PLI) to accept an electoral coalition under their leadership, which in turn would enable them to pose as a credible alternative to the PCI and eventually to replace it in a bipolar party system whose main contenders would be the DC on one side and themselves on the other. The DC wanted a majority premium for the most-voted electoral coalition, which, they reasoned, would also favour the emergence of a bipolar party system – one in which they would be able to pose as a modern conservative party and oblige the Socialists to make up their minds whether they wished to ally with them or with the opposition PCI. Finally, the Communists, steeped in the traditions of the historic compromise and before that the anti-Fascist CLN, had previously opposed electoralsystem reform, seeing the proportional system then in force as almost synonymous with democracy itself, but they were now in decline and, in view of the failure of the historic compromise, had come to see themselves as alternatives to, rather than potential allies of, the DC, so they too were willing to embrace the idea of electoral-system reform and party-system bipolarity.

The Italian party system and the electorate  73 However, reform was subject to the parties’ mutual vetoes, so it was not until the 1990s – when anti-party sentiments had reached a level of intensity such as to enable reformers to force the holding of a successful referendum on the issue, as we saw in Chapter 1 – that reform was finally achieved. The new law, as we have seen, entailed that three-quarters of the seats in both the Chamber and the Senate would be distributed according to the single-member simply plurality system, one-quarter proportionally. The political scientist, Giovanni Sartori (2000; 2001), dubbed it the Mattarellum – a Latin-sounding label that stuck, a play on the surname of its principal sponsor, Sergio Matarella, and the Italian word matto (mad) – to refer to what he regarded as the ‘slightly mad’ assumptions attending its adoption. Among other things, it was premised on the assumptions that it would bring about a reduction in the number of parties, party-system bipolarity, governing stability and therefore enhanced governability. All three assumptions were mistaken. Single-member simple plurality systems confine the rational voter’s choices to the two best-placed candidates in each constituency and therefore have a reductive effect on the number of parties constituency by constituency. However, a reduction in the number of parties nationally can only come about if the two best placed parties in each constituency also happen to be the two best placed across all or most of them. Where there are already two large parties nationally, as in the UK case, then the system can discourage the subsequent proliferation of parties, but it cannot ‘produce’ two large parties in the first place. In the Italian case, the system was introduced in a context in which old parties had disintegrated or were being transformed, and new ones were emerging. In that case, therefore, it had the effect of actually encouraging fragmentation, since it obliged the parties to reach stand-down arrangements – which gave them the power to blackmail each other in the negotiations leading up to such arrangements. Empirically, cross-national comparisons reveal that party-system bipolarity is unrelated to the nature of the electoral system. Stable government is insufficient to ensure governability, since it merely reflects duration not necessarily the capacity of an executive to provide government that is effective. Among the effects the new system did have was to reveal that it disadvantaged the coalition of the centre right. This was because, in the case of elections for the Chamber, it gave voters two votes – one for their choice of candidate in the plurality arena, the other for their choice of party in the proportional arena – and because it showed that the coalition tended to perform better in the latter than in the former arena. Otherwise put, voters who were willing to support the centre right in the proportional arena seemed unwilling to support it in the plurality arena when they were faced there with a candidate drawn from a party other than their preferred one, the reverse side of this coin being that the centre left tended to attract more votes in the plurality than in the proportional arena. Another effect of the Matarellum, therefore, was that it led to the introduction of yet another system in 2005 when the second Berlusconi Government used its parliamentary majority to secure the passage of what was dubbed the Porcellum (a play on the Italian porcata (roughly, ‘a pig’s breakfast’) and a sign that the use of Latin-sounding portmanteaux had caught on). The Porcellum was a closed list system of proportional representation (with exclusion thresholds and a majority premium for the most-voted party coalition), which helped the centre right in at least three ways. First, by combining the choices of party and coalition into a single choice, it enabled voters to support a coalition without having to cast a vote for a candidate drawn from a party other than their most preferred party, so removing, for voters, any potential conflict between the two choices. Second, it entailed that voters dissatisfied with the outgoing centre-right government led by Berlusconi and FI, would be able to give expression to their dissatisfaction by voting for an alternative party of the same coalition rather than by having to abstain or vote for the centre left. Third, given the uncertainty surrounding the likely outcome of the election

74  The Italian party system and the electorate of 2006, the Porcellum encouraged the two main contenders to construct the most inclusive coalitions possible, meaning that even if the centre left won, then, as the more heterogeneous and fragmented of the two, it would in all probability find it extremely difficult to govern (as proved, indeed, to be the case). In 2008, it had the opposite effect. Then, the outcome seemed certain, so that it encouraged the formation of ‘“minimum effective coalitions”, that is, electoral offerings that ma[d]e it possible to “divide” the proceeds – the 55 per cent of seats due to the majority and the 45 per cent due to the opposition – among the smallest possible number of party lists’ (Floridia, 2018: 116). What it also did was to encourage the further intensification of anti-political and anti-party sentiments, for, ultimately, what was decisive were coalitions’ national vote totals, with the leaders of these coalitions presenting themselves as candidates for the position of Prime Minister and parliamentary candidacies controlled by them and by their fellow party leaders from the top. These features reflected an assumption that effective governability required the direct investiture of a prime minister at the head of a secure parliamentary majority: a plebiscitarian conception of democracy whose effect was to undermine the authority and the democratic legitimacy of those elected to Parliament, since it was corrosive of their capacity to enforce the accountability of governments effectively. The inability of the Porcellum to ensure that the coalition with a majority in the Chamber would also enjoy a majority in the Senate (where the majority premium was distributed region by region) combined with the persistence of populist and plebescitarian assumptions in public discourses around the theme of ‘governability’ in Italian politics,11 paved the way for Matteo Renzi’s Italicum. For Renzi, ‘governability’ was synonymous with a single party obtaining an absolute majority of parliamentary seats. Consequently, the Italicum provided for a majority bonus of 340 of the 630 Chamber seats to go to the list obtaining at least 40 per cent at a first round of voting or else emerging as the most voted at a run-off ballot between the two lists best placed in the first round. The remaining 290 seats would be awarded proportionally to any of the remaining lists that had surmounted an exclusion threshold of 3 per cent of the votes cast at the first round of voting. Finally, there was to be no provision for electoral coalitions, which were perceived as being, by their nature, destabilising and obstructive of decision-making. The Italicum, though enacted, was never actually employed, because it was dependent on the broader set of constitutional changes proposed by Renzi but rejected in the referendum of 2016.12 However, if anything it was even more plebescitarian in design than the Porcellum. Deputies would be elected for constituencies of no more than six, with the voter being given two preference votes and the candidate heading each list being elected automatically. Hence, almost all parties’ parliamentarians would be the heads of their constituency lists, thus allowing the party leaders essentially to appoint their parliamentary followers (Pasquino, 2015: 297). Critics (e.g. Pasquino, 2015; Floridia, 2018) pointed out that the ‘ban’ on electoral coalitions seemed unlikely to reduce the blackmail power of smaller parties which would exercise it during list formation prior to the vote, between the first and second rounds, and after the vote through the formation of autonomous party groups in Parliament. Finally, the Rosatellum, which replaced the Italicum towards the end of 2017, seemed, in the run-up to the election of 2022, as though it might have an impact on the distribution of seats in Parliament such as to put the Constitution at risk. There were three reasons why commentators (e.g. Floridia, 2022; Mastropaolo, 2022) regarded this as a possibility. First, it was understood that the outcome of the 2020 constitutional referendum reducing the number of parliamentarians would have the effect of increasing the disproportionality between votes received and seats allotted, to the advantage of the winning parties and the disadvantage of smaller parties. Therefore, the parties supporting the second Conte Government had agreed to the principle that the reform would need to be accompanied by a change to the electoral system in a more

The Italian party system and the electorate  75 proportional direction. A proposal to that effect had been presented to Parliament by the M5S deputy Giuseppe Brescia, but, by the time Parliament was dissolved, it was still bogged down in the Constitutional Affairs Commission. Second, for several months prior to the dissolution, it had been apparent from opinion-poll data that far and away the most likely outcome was that the right would win comfortably, possibly with 40 to 45 per cent of the vote and that, depending on the extent to which the remaining parties, those of the centre left and the M5S, managed to coalesce in opposition to the right, the vote share for the latter might potentially translate into a seat share approaching two-thirds (Vernetti, 2022). This was an outcome that seemed even more likely once it had become apparent, in early August, that the PD had failed to coalesce either with the M5S or with the two small centrist parties, Renzi’s IV and Carlo Calenda’s Azione. Third, two-thirds of the seats in the hands of the centre right would enable it to change the Constitution on the strength of its own votes alone, without any possibility of being challenged by recourse to the constitutional referenda provided for by article 138 of the founding document. So given that the parties of the right had already revealed themselves to be keen to enact constitutional changes corrosive of individual liberties13 and principles of democratic accountability,14 suggestions that Italian democracy might be placed in danger by the outcome of the elections did not, on the evidence then available, appear to be wholly inappropriate. Voters Looking at the behaviour of voters in Italy in recent decades, two features stand out, the first being the decline in turnout (Figure 3.1). Until 1976, participation in general elections remained both unusually high from a comparative perspective and relatively stable at around 90 per cent: a proportion that reflected the success of the large parties of mass integration, organised around deep ideological divisions, in inculcating in voters strong and enduring political identities and therefore in mobilising them at election times. At every election since 1976, with the exception of the one in 2006, turnout has been lower than the one before and by 2018 had reached 72.9 per cent. This was still relatively high comparatively speaking – for instance, turnout at the 2019 general election in the UK was 67.3 per cent, at the 2017 legislative election in France, 48.7 per cent – but worrying nonetheless. It is true, as Gianfranco Pasquino has pointed out, that ‘no democracy has ever “collapsed” thanks to a lack of turnout’ (2022, my translation), but non-participation is an evident sign of a lack of public confidence in the political parties and may undermine democracy in the longer run. Those who do not vote give an advantage to those that do and make it difficult for the parties to respond with policies to meet their concerns. And to the extent that this sets in motion a vicious circle between declining turnouts and a lack of responsiveness on the part of the parties, it may create fertile ground for the further spread of anti-political, populist and plebiscitarian/authoritarian tendencies. The second notable feature of Italian voting behaviour as compared to the past is its volatility, and in Chapter 1 I explained that psephologists distinguish between ‘aggregate’, ‘total’ or ‘net’ volatility (referring to the change in the distribution of support between parties from one election and the next) and ‘individual’ or ‘gross’ volatility (referring to changes of party preference on the part of individual voters between one election and the next).15 Of the two, the latter is another indicator of the weakening of voters’ attachments to political parties, as it implies that voters are far less inclined than they were in earlier years to support unquestioningly their preferred political party at election after election – an assumption that appears to be confirmed by other evidence, such as the growth in the proportion of ‘late deciders’: those who make up their minds which party to vote for during the election campaign, if not the day of the vote itself, rather than beforehand (Bordignon, Ceccarini and Diamanti, 2018: 73–6).

76  The Italian party system and the electorate 100 90 80 70 60 50 40 30 20 10 0

Figure 3.1 Turnout at Italian general elections, 1948–2022 (author’s elaboration of data made available by the Italian Ministry of the Interior (Ministry of the Interior, n.d.))

The proportion leaving their decision to the last two or three weeks of the campaign rose from 22 per cent in 2006 to 36 per cent by 2018. Meanwhile, approximately two-fifths of the voters of 2008 made a different choice at the subsequent election of 2013 and approximately a third of the voters of 2013 made a different choice at the subsequent election of 2018 (Bordignon, Ceccarini and Diamanti, 2018: 76, 124). However, of aggregate and individual volatility, it is arguably the former that is of most significance, since the latter need not have any particular consequences for the party or political systems (as, for example, when multiple changes of individual voting decisions cancel each other out). The former, on the other hand, by definition implies party-system instability, which in turn may lead to political instability, especially if it reflects the rise of new parties and the decline of old ones. Like other European countries (Chiaramonte and Emanuele, 2017: 380), Italy has experienced more volatile elections in recent years (see Figure 1.1). If, then, we ask about the conditions under which aggregate volatility is most likely to give rise to political-system instability, then, taking my cue from Chiaramonte and Emanuele (2017) I suggest that there are two necessary conditions: (1) that a significant proportion of total volatility (TV) is accounted for by what is called ‘regeneration volatility’ (RV: changes in the distribution of the vote due to the disappearance of old parties and the emergence of new ones) and (2) that elections fulfilling this condition tend to occur sequentially ‘or at least to cluster within a certain period of time’ (Chiaramonte and Emanuele, 2017: 378). The fulfilment of these two conditions suggests that the party system in question is undergoing deinstitutionalisation: a process whereby the routine, stable and predictable patterns of interaction between parties become less so over time. This appears to be so for Italy. In 2013, TV at 36.7 per cent was well above average, as, at 34.8 per cent, was RV as a proportion of TV.16 In 2018, the latter figure (but not the former) was below average; however, this was due only to the fact that the major novelty in terms of the party scene – the explosive emergence of the M5S – had already occurred five years earlier. It remains to consider two questions: What explains the growth of electoral fluidity in recent years as compared to the past? What, now, explains electoral choices in Italy? With regard to the first question, the answer I suggest is one whose elements are – again – not peculiar to Italy. It is based on a distinction between changes in the nature of ‘political demand’

The Italian party system and the electorate  77 and ‘political supply’ factors – where the former have to do with influences on voters’ behaviour and outlooks stemming from the economic and social environment, the latter with what the political system offers – in terms of political parties, their messages and how they are organised and so on – by way of responses to voters’ demands and expectations. Against this background, early post-war Italy, like other European countries, was a place where social divisions – of class and, in the Italian case, of religion – were keenly felt and where voters perceived the parties they voted for as the political representatives of the social categories they saw themselves as belonging to. Consequently, voting choices were relatively unthinking and rarely changed from one election to another. The regular church-goer, for instance, would more likely than not, vote for the Christian Democrats through thick and thin, because they understood that the DC was the party of the Church, that it was the main bulwark against the godless Communists and that voting for the DC was simply what the faithful Catholic did. And their outlook was sustained, on the supply side, by the nature and the action of the party itself: a massmembership organisation that actively sought, like its Communist counterpart on the other side of the ideological divide, to use its organisational resources to sustain among followers the sense that they belonged to a political community so that support for the party was the expression of an affective bond. In the Italian case, this – combined with the significance of the parties as points of reference for ordinary citizens in the period of uncertainty between the collapse of Fascism and the consolidation of the post-war democracy – enabled the DC and the PCI (and to a lesser extent the other parties) to establish territorially based political subcultures: especially the so-called red belt in the central regions (Emilia Romagna, Umbria, Marche and Tuscany) where the PCI had its strongholds and the white belt in the north-eastern regions dominated by the DC. In each case, the party was able to draw on long-standing traditions – the anti-clericalism of the central regions as former Vatican possessions, and support for the clergy as the defender of Italian nationality against the Austrian Empire in the north-east – on its flanking organisations and on its control of local government to create an environment in which close cooperation between economic, social and political spheres sustained cultures of mutual assistance and civic solidarity made possible by and through the local hegemony of the dominant party. Besides the red and the white belts, it was common among students of Italian politics at the time to distinguish two further areas with distinctive political traditions: the south, an area where relative poverty and an absence of social capital17 brought voters and politicians together through clientelistic relations and where the DC was able to maintain a position of relative dominance through its control of agencies of the state and therefore its ability to supply the clientelistic favours its voters sought, and the north-west, where heavy industry and urbanised environments were most likely to be found and where voting came closest to being the expression of a rational weighing up of the various political programmes actually on offer. So an initial answer to the question of why voting behaviour has since become more fluid, has to point to the breakdown of these supports of voting stability. And again, the breakdown took place on both the demand and the supply side. There was, for example, the effect of the ‘economic miracle’ of the 1950s and 1960s, bringing with it growing affluence, rising levels of education and increasing rates of geographical and social mobility, all of which led voters to adopt more critical, less unthinking attitudes towards politics. Fewer people attended church regularly (Figure 4.2) and those that continued to do so became less likely to look automatically to the Church for political guidance (dramatically symbolised by the outcome of the 1974 referendum confirming the legalisation of divorce). On the other side, fewer of the PCI’s supporters looked to its case del popolo for leisure activities, preferring more privatised forms (such as television) or alternatives outside the locality. Meanwhile, political parties found it more difficult to recruit members so that the resources they had available to promote their followers’

78  The Italian party system and the electorate encadrement dwindled in a growing downward spiral. Once mass organisations reliant on their members for the transmission of their messages, their leaders, with the spread of television, acquired a capacity to appeal to voters directly, over the heads of their members, while being obliged to adapt their communication to media imperatives such that, with the demise of the traditional parties, the rise of Silvio Berlusconi and the advent of party-system bipolarity in the 1990s, political campaigning came to resemble a beauty contest (Garzia, Da Silva and De Angelis, 2021). This, and the fact that the party-system upheavals of this time effectively ‘orphaned’ vast swathes of the electorate, meant that voters’ attitudes to the new parties were necessarily critical, their support conditional and their relationship with parties and politicians increasingly resembling that of a detached audience (Manin, 1997) before which the political spectacle was played out. Early twenty-first-century Italy is therefore a place that has changed beyond all recognition compared to the Italy of the 1950s and 1960s. On the demand side, Italy is a country, like others in Western Europe, where, thanks to the fading of old class and religious cleavages, to the ‘silent revolution’18 and to the growth of ‘identity politics’, voters have essentially ceased to see society as divided into monolithic groups defined by religious observance or class or allencompassing ideologies, with political conflict increasingly reflecting the claims of a multitude of mainly non-economic categories, defined by gender, disability, ethnicity, generation, sexual orientation and so on. On the supply side, it is a place where parties’ organisations on the ground have largely atrophied, where they have become less and less about aggregating and conveying demands from citizens upwards and more and more about manipulating voters from the top down and where they have therefore become decreasingly effective in linking civil society and the state and where all this is reflected in growing popular disenchantment (see Toygür, 2018; Bergman, Passarelli and Serricchio, 2021). In early twenty-first-century Italy, voters’ choices are increasingly influenced by the emergence of a new political cleavage between the ‘winners’ and the ‘losers’ of globalisation (Kriesi, 2008). The former are those who have benefitted from the acceleration to processes of globalisation that came with the oil price shock of the 1970s, international deregulation and the development of computer technology that made possible the emergence of a post-Fordist regime of capital accumulation supporting highly skilled, well-paying white collar jobs. The ‘losers’ are semi-skilled and unskilled workers who have been vulnerable to unemployment and falling incomes as they have seen the demand for mass-produced goods increasingly met by robots or by production facilities outside the West, where processes of industrial restructuring have led to increasing regional disparities limiting access to employment for those living in regions in decline. Better educated than their Fordist counterparts, the winners of globalisation are more likely to live in cosmopolitan settings and to feel comfortable with the cultural implications of globalisation arising from mass migration and the hybridisation of cultures around the world. The losers, on the other hand, being older and less well-educated than average, are more likely to have conservative social values, to feel uncomfortable with globalisation’s cultural effects and to feel discriminated against by economic and political elites perceived as being unduly concerned with the rights of minorities. ‘Winners’ and ‘losers’ thus tend to divide sharply in terms of their voting habits. On the one hand, the winners have been a receptive audience for the claims of identity politics and therefore increasingly drawn to parties of the centre left with their commitments to principles of equality and anti-discrimination. Along with those in public employment and those with strong trade-union protection, they feel an affinity with the left-wing themes of cosmopolitanism, solidarity and market regulation, and so, although the mainstream left in Italy and Europe generally has been in decline overall, they have abandoned it in far fewer numbers than their brethren in less secure

The Italian party system and the electorate  79 circumstances, with the result, in the case of the PD, of bringing about the curiosity that it actually does better in the higher than in the lower classes: in 2018, for example it won 13.1 per cent among the self-perceived working class, 18.3 per cent in the self-perceived middle class and 31.2 per cent among the self-perceived upper-middle class, with the differences in voting propensities remaining even when controlling for related variables according to De Sio’s (2018) research. ‘Losers’ on the other hand, have been increasingly drawn to representatives of the anti-­ immigrant, populist right, such as the League, partly because of the way in which globalisation has undermined the capacity of national governments to deliver public goods, thereby diminishing the capacity of parties on the left to distinguish themselves programmatically from their competitors on the right, at least in economic terms. Consequently, workers who would once have supported the left ‘as a matter of course’ have increasingly come to doubt its relevance to their concerns. Unable to relate to the new, identity-based, claims for equality, they have come increasingly to feel ‘left behind’ or forgotten thanks to the emphasis the left gives to the new claims. They have been increasingly convinced by the invitations of right-wing populist parties to regard themselves as members of the category of ‘decent ordinary people’ whose interests are threatened by an unresponsive elite and by outsiders increasingly making them feel ‘strangers in their own land’.19 Consequently, their voting habits diverge sharply from – indeed are the mirror image of – those of ‘winners’. As Table 3.3 shows, they are much more likely to locate themselves on the right than on the left and much more likely to vote for a party such as the League than for the PD, while in each case ‘winners’ show the opposite tendency. Conclusion In the early twenty-first century, Italian party politics and voting behaviour have come increasingly to reflect those apparent elsewhere in Europe and have therefore lost much of their distinctiveness. To take just one example – the United Kingdom – in the early post-war period the two countries’ party systems were radically different, since Italy was an example of ‘polarised pluralism’ (Sartori, 1976), with a large number of parties stretched out over a large ideological distance, with significantly sized ‘anti-system’ parties and with a large centre party that was the mainstay of all feasible governing coalitions. The UK had none of this. It enjoyed alternation Table 3.3 Left–right self-placement and party voted for in 2018: ‘Winners’ and ‘losers’ of globalisation Left–right self-placement

‘Winners’

‘Losers’

Left Centre left Centre Centre right Right Declined to answer

29% 37% 6% 12% 2% 15%

8% 8% 6% 18% 18% 43%

37% 4% 5% 26%

7% 20% 24% 41%

Party voted for PD FI League M5S

Source: adapted from Bordignon, Ceccaraini and Diamanti 2018: 228, Table A2.

80  The Italian party system and the electorate in government and a stable two-party system. Italy had a religious divide that was virtually unknown in the UK, where it was famously suggested that ‘class is the basis of British party politics: all else is embellishment and detail’ (Pulzer, 1967: 98). Such differences are today virtually non-existent. Both countries have bipolar party systems, the politics of both countries have been significantly affected by the rise of populism and both – in common with other European countries – have witnessed a significant decline in party membership and in the political fortunes of the mainstream left, along with the emergence of a significant new political cleavage between ‘winners’ and ‘losers’ of globalisation. So to describe and analyse the politics of Italy is increasingly to focus on trends and developments as significant in other European countries. This is only to be expected. Notwithstanding the possibility that (with the rise of China and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine) globalisation may have stalled, there is no reason to think that the growth of social interaction across nation states or the increasing interpenetration of economic and social practices that have been part and parcel of globalisation and European integration hitherto will go into reverse any time soon. For these reasons, it is reasonable to expect the growing similarity in party and electoral politics, as in other areas, between Italy and its neighbours to continue into the future. In this chapter I have explored how, in Italy, civil society and the state are brought together through the political parties, the electoral system and electoral participation, noting how their interaction makes possible the exercise of influence from civil society upwards and from the state downwards. Such interaction constitutes one channel through which states and policymakers retain the allegiance of, and are held accountable to, their citizens in democratic political systems. Another is through the interaction that takes place between policy-makers and interest groups, so it is to the nature of this interaction in Italy that I turn my attention in the chapter that follows. Notes 1 Elections are conducive to the responsiveness of governors even in the absence of any clear public signals. The so-called ‘law of anticipated reactions’ refers to idea that it is sufficient for policy-makers to be aware of how, hypothetically, the public would react to given initiatives for them to pursue or refrain from them. 2 In particular the 1993 electoral law reform and the reform of the same year providing for the direct election of local mayors (law 81/1993). The latter considerably raised the power and authority of mayors vis-à-vis their councils and executives so enhancing their visibility and importance in local electoral competitions (see Newell, 2007). 3 Thanks to his trade-mark allegations ‘that his legal difficulties were the product of a witch-hunt by judicial officials with Communist sympathies out to exploit their positions to damage him politically’ (Newell, 2015: 221). 4 In the eighteenth legislature, for example, there were no fewer than 456 switches of parliamentary group involving 304 members of the legislature or almost a third of the total, reflecting the fact that 99 members switched more than once (Openpolis, 2022). Such switches are unpopular as they make it more difficult for voters to hold their representatives to account at the end of their mandates. They also tend to damage the images and the credibility of the groups involved. Moreover, if a parliamentary group loses members, then its capacity to influence the political agenda is correspondingly reduced. 5 One thinks here of Lamberto Dini’s Rinnovamento Italiano, Rocco Buttiglione’s CDU and Clemente Mastella’s UDEUR – all of which were formed in the 1990s and none of which exist any longer. 6 Giving birth to the Partito dei Comunisti Italiani, whose emergence also reflected tensions between the above-mentioned ‘pro-Soviets’ under Armando Cossutta (who favoured continued support for the Government) and the ‘left libertarians’ under Fausto Bertinotti (who favoured breaking with it). 7 A party is ‘system relevant’, i.e. relevant for the numerical criterion used to classify party systems, when it has either ‘coalition potential’ (meaning that it is needed as a coalition partner for one or more of the possible governing majorities) or ‘blackmail potential’ (meaning that it is of sufficient size as

The Italian party system and the electorate  81 to affect the tactics and especially the direction of the competition of the governing-oriented parties) (Sartori, 1976: 122–3). 8 Members of the DS who rejected the project of merger with the Margherita. 9 Sinistra Italiana (Italian Left), Articolo 1 – Movimento Democratico e Progressista (Article 1 – The Democratic and Progressive Movement) and Possibile (Possible). 10 This was a law that was designed to provide a majority premium of 65% of the seats to the party or coalition of parties winning at least 50% of the vote, ostensibly to promote government stability but which provoked massive controversy not least because of memories of the Acerbo law which in 1923 provided a majority premium of two-thirds of the seats to the most voted of the lists winning at least 25%, which enabled Mussolini to consolidate his hold on power. In 1953, the coalition, consisting of the DC, the PSDI, the PLI, the PRI, the Südtiproler Volkspartei and the Partito Sardo d’Azione, failed to win the majority premium by the tiny margin of some 54,000 votes and the following year the law was repealed. 11 And a Constitutional Court judgement of 2014 striking down clauses of the Porcellum. 12 That is to say, the Italicum applied to the Chamber only, while the constitutional reform package envisaged, among other things, abolishing the requirement for governments to retain the confidence of the Senate. Rejection of the package therefore entailed that electoral-system reform remained a problem, one that could be resolved only by extending the Italicum to the Senate or by a completely different system for both legislative branches. 13 In March 2018, FdI leader, Giorgia Meloni, had presented a proposal that sought to enshrine in the Constitution the principle that Italian law always had precedence over European Community law – which would make Italy an ally of Poland in respect of formal challenges to the supremacy of European law, would undermine the single market and would weaken the protection of individual liberties guaranteed by EU law (Fabbrini, 2022). 14 In June 2018, Meloni had presented a proposal envisaging the direct election of the President. The President would be the head of the Government as well as head of state, with power to appoint members of the executive and dissolve Parliament. Parliament would have power to enforce the resignation of a presidentially appointed Government only by the indication of an alternative in a constructive vote of no confidence. This appeared to be yet another proposal inspired by plebescitarian principles, one that would effectively destroy the capacity of the legislature to perform its function of holding governments to account given that, as the constitutional lawyer Gustavo Zagrabelsky pointed out, the proposal handed the President, or the party of the President, considerable power to blackmail the legislature (Fiori, 2022). 15 Clearly, the two are not unrelated. However, the latter is necessary but insufficient for the former, meaning that it is not possible to draw conclusions about changes in the latter from changes in the former and vice versa. 16 The bases on which the averages are calculated are the votes received by parties at the 336 elections held in 19 West European countries between 1945 and 2015 (see Chiaramonte and Emanuele, 2017: 379). 17 Meaning ‘features of social organization, such as trust, norms, and networks that can improve the efficiency of society by facilitating coordination actions’ (Putnam, 1993: 167). 18 That is, the suggestion, based on the work of Ronald Inglehart (1977; 1990), that with the passage of time, value priorities in advanced industrial societies have undergone a shift from the material to the post-material (i.e. from concerns related to physical and economic needs to those having to do with autonomy and self-expression) as the post-war generations, whose formative years have been ones of relative prosperity, have gradually replaced the pre-war generations whose formative years were ones of relative economic scarcity. 19 The title of a book (Russell Hochschild, 2016) on the white American working class.

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4

Organised interests and social movements

Introduction In the previous chapter, I described some of the profound changes that have marked the development of party and electoral politics in Italy since the war. In this chapter, I do the same for the world of group politics, which, as we shall see, has over the period been marked by changes at least as profound. By ‘group politics’ I mean patterns of political interaction whose main protagonists are organised groups – pressure groups – not, for the most part, forming part of the state. Such groups are often associated with broader social movements, such as the women’s movement, the labour movement, the peace movement, the environmental movement and so forth, and they sometimes use protest as a form of political activism and campaigning. Pressure groups are voluntary organisations that resemble political parties in some respects, but which differ from them in three important ways, as Garnett and Lynch explain: One of the main functions of political parties is to contest elections. Pressure groups do not normally put up candidates; if they do, they are usually aiming to win publicity rather than form a government (or even to win a single seat). The goal of pressure groups is to exert influence over office-holders. Political parties seek to hold office themselves. Parties develop policies over a wide range of issues. Pressure groups tend to focus on one specific area of policy (though subjects like the environment generate proposals which affect many policy areas). (Garnett and Lynch, 2007: 456–7) A social movement, as Heywood (2007: 308) explains, ‘is a particular form of collective behaviour in which the motive to act springs largely from the attitudes and aspirations of members, typically acting within a loose organizational framework … A movement is different from spontaneous mass action (such as an uprising or rebellion) in that it implies a level of intended and planned action in pursuit of a recognized social goal’. Consequently, while uprisings take place and then end, social movements endure through time. ‘Not uncommonly, social movements embrace interest groups and may even spawn political parties: trade unions and socialist parties, for instance, can be seen as part of a broader labour movement’ (Heywood, 2007: 308). So, unlike pressure groups, which have a formal organisation and ‘members’, social movements consist of informal, loosely organised, social networks of ‘supporters’ rather than members. Study of the organised interests and social movements salient to the politics of a country is important for at least four reasons. First, they provide an additional (and arguably at least as important) channel, alongside parties and voting, for the transmission of demands from civil society to the state, contributing thereby to the all-important functions of responsiveness and accountability of ruler to ruled. They provide important policy-making resources to the ruler: DOI: 10.4324/9780203422120-5

86  Organised interests and social movements information concerning public preferences and, often, expertise and advice essential for the efficient and effective framing of policy. They help to inform and educate their members and followers concerning the areas of public policy that exercise them. In short, they contribute to the linkage between civil society and the state. Second, therefore, their activities have significant implications for the quality of democracy to be found in the country concerned, as this is heavily influenced by the characteristics of the groups themselves and by the characteristics of the relations they entertain with those in public office. Since ‘democracy’ means ‘rule by the people’, a high-quality democracy is one that maximises political equality between citizens in the sense of their capacity to influence the nature of public policy. Consequently, it makes a significant difference to the quality of democracy in a country if pressure groups are unequal in terms of their power and the influence they can wield – if they mainly perpetuate the influence of the already powerful or if they have some capacity to enhance the influence of those with little power. It makes a significant difference if interaction between groups and policy-makers is open and transparent or if it is secretive and shielded from public scrutiny – with the consequent risk of corruption and other forms of ‘equality denying’ influence. Finally, it makes a significant difference if popularly elected governments, while providing groups access to decision-making, are able to maintain autonomy from them or if they are subject to vested interests whose positions in the economic and/or social structure give them a power of veto over public policy that is not subject to public accountability and by-passes the representative process. Third, a country’s group politics tell us how securely rooted democracy in the country is. The constitutionally guaranteed liberties making possible freedom of association, in the absence of which pressure group activity is not possible to begin with, are part of what we understand by the distinction between democratic regimes and regimes that are not democratic. The conquest of civil rights relating to freedom of association represented a relatively early stage in the emergence of democracy in Europe (being followed by the conquest of political rights having to do with extensions of the franchise and with voting and later social rights associated with the emergence of the welfare state). Consequently, freedom of association and possible limitations on it are among the indicators used to compile democracy indices such as that of Freedom House, a Washington-based non-profit organisation that conducts research and advocacy on democracy, political freedom and human rights. Each year, Freedom House publishes an annual report, entitled Freedom in the World, in which it assesses countries in terms of the extent to which they guarantee political rights and civil liberties, scoring them from 0 to 100. To do this, it assigns the countries points for a series of indicators that take the form of questions, including three concerning associational and organisational rights: Is there freedom of assembly? Is there freedom for non-governmental organizations, particularly those that are engaged in human rights and governance-related work? Is there freedom for trade unions and similar professional or labour organizations? In its 2022 report, Italy was ranked 39th (along with Liechtenstein, Slovakia, Slovenia and Spain) out of 210 countries, with a score of 90 out of 100, scoring full marks in terms of each of the three associational and organisational rights, which are guaranteed by the Constitution. For example, freedom of assembly and freedom to form associations are guaranteed by articles 17 and 18. Meanwhile, articles 39 and 40 establish the rights to form trade unions and to strike. Matters arising from the country’s group politics that have given cause for concern in recent years include corruption, discussed in more detail in the chapter that follows, and restrictions on the activities of non-governmental-organisation vessels engaged in search-and-rescue operations in the Mediterranean (reflecting the growth of nationalism and xenophobia in recent years). Fourth, a country’s group politics are important because they impact heavily on the efficiency and effectiveness of governance. As we shall see, this was a significant issue for much of the life

Organised interests and social movements  87 of the so-called ‘First Republic’, when the permeability of the state to interest-group concerns, with a corresponding multiplication of veto points in the political system, acted as an effective block on a wide range of reforms widely perceived as necessary. Later, as we shall see, the state’s authority was displaced upwards, by processes of globalisation and Europeanisation, as well as downwards, through measures enhancing regional autonomy, so that decisions came increasingly to be made further away from sites providing access to group demands. Meanwhile, the state became less permeable to these demands, as globalisation and Europeanisation drives that limited national state capacity at the same time strengthened its boundaries with civil society. This led Vincent Della Sala (1997) to speak of a process of ‘hollowing out and hardening’ of the Italian state in the years leading up to adoption of the Euro as Italian governments battled to meet the socalled ‘convergence criteria’ for economic and monetary union (EMU). More recently, we have witnessed a not dissimilar situation with the drafting and implementation of the post-COVID-19 National Recovery and Resilience Plan in response to the EU’s €750 billion post-pandemic recovery instrument, Next Generation EU, which saw the Italian Government under Mario Draghi successfully marginalise stakeholders and civil-society organisations in the development of the NRRP. Moreover, as with the issues involved in EMU, so ‘the need to fulfil the conditions required by the EU have led to a sort of depoliticization of the issues in the formulation of the NRRP and in what has recently been dubbed the ‘Draghi agenda’’ (Di Mascio, Natalini and Profeti, 2022) – hence further insulating them from political bargaining and the influence of groups. The remainder of the chapter is structured as follows. In the following section, I discuss the nature of relations between the state and the main sectional groups, and how they have changed since the period of the ‘First Republic’. ‘Sectional groups’ are groups like trade unions, trade associations, professional associations, pensioners’ groups and so on, whose purpose is to advance the interests of their members. They are typically distinguished from ‘cause groups’, which, in contrast, are concerned with the promotion of broad societal goals, such as the enhancement of civil liberties or the rights of minorities, in whose achievement their members may or may not have a direct material stake. I consider these in the third section, noting that they tend, as in other democracies, to be ‘outsider groups’. This means that they either do not or cannot gain access to government and therefore seek to advance their causes by taking their cases to citizens generally (typically by seeking media attention), seeking thereby to shift public values and set the political agenda. They are typically distinguished from ‘insider groups’, which have the opposite characteristics. These are groups, which, thanks to their information and expertise, are usually consulted on the development of policy and are therefore able to advance their causes by bargaining with politicians and officials with whom they form ‘policy communities’ based on close, stable and cooperative relationships. Consequently, they will not appeal to citizens generally, if to do so threatens to undermine their privileged access to policy-makers. In the fourth section, I consider the political role of ‘institutional groups’, that is, formal organisations, like universities and churches, not formed for the purposes of influencing public policy but which do in fact do so from time to time. The final section concludes. Sectional groups Owing to the circumstances surrounding the fall of Fascism in 1943, the Italian political system of the immediate post-war period was one in which ‘there was a considerable degree of overlap between the personnel of the parties, on the one hand, and interest groups and administrative positions, on the other, making it difficult to draw clear boundaries between these entities’ (Bull and Newell, 2005: 81). The immediate consequence of the fall of Fascism was the creation of a power vacuum (with the Italian Government, the Nazis and Fascists and the CLN all seeking to fill it) and a state

88  Organised interests and social movements of generalised uncertainty (in which the newly emergent political parties in the CLN, and the Catholic Church, were looked to by ordinary Italians as points of reference for the working out of ideas and attitudes). On the one hand, therefore, the parties themselves became the principal agents of the reconstruction of many of the most important interest groups in Fascism’s aftermath and were initially closely associated with them, organisationally and ideologically. For example, the Confederazione Generale Italiana del Lavoro (General Confederation of Italian Labour, CGIL) was founded by the main political parties, as part and parcel of the struggle for national liberation, in June 1944 – before splitting in 1950 when, as a reflection of the growing Cold War conflict and the parties’ divisions, Catholics formed the Confederazione Italiana Sindacati Lavoratori (Italian Confederation of Workers’ Unions, CISL) and republicans and social democrats the Unione Italiana dei Lavoratori (Italian Workers’ Union, UIL). The CGIL was thus pushed firmly into the embrace of the PCI, becoming, for the party, a ‘transmission belt’: an organisation with an obligation to put the party’s policies and ideas into practice. The DC, meanwhile, dominated the small-farmers’ organisation, Coltivatori Diretti, formed in October 1944 by the 34-year-old Catholic political activist Paolo Bonomi, who sought to entrench small farmers firmly in the political camp dominated by anti-Communism and the Catholic Church. On the other hand, if interest-group ties shored up popular support for the parties, then the ­latter became a favoured channel through which some of the most influential groups sought to communicate with decision-makers. Consequently, instead of aggregating demands, the parties often acted as instruments of the groups, transmitting to government sectional demands – and thus helping to sustain a tendency for power to be managed in clientelistic ways. Coltivatori Diretti can again serve as an illustrative example. On the one hand, it was able to secure near total coverage of the social category whose interests it sought to advance by virtue of its success in gaining control of a range of entities, such as agricultural consortia, of direct economic importance to farmers. On the other hand, thanks to the electoral law’s provision for preference voting, it was able, if not to control completely, at least to heavily influence, how the peasant farmer voted.1 In return for the support thus engineered, the individual farmer could expect the provision of clientelistic favours of both an immediate and individualistic kind (such as help in obtaining the award of old age and invalidity pensions), as well as favours of a more general kind. In other words, in return for his support he could expect the parliamentarians so elected to use their influence within the ranks of the DC’s legislators to secure the passage of a range of laws of direct interest to him. (Bull and Newell, 2005: 87) On the one hand, Coltivattori Diretti actually provided, or controlled the election of, around 10 per cent of DC parliamentarians. On the other hand, once elected, these parliamentarians could use the legislature’s standing orders, and especially its power to confer law-making powers on its individual committees, to secure the passage of micro-sectional legislation through Parliament’s committees able to deliberate relatively free of the constraints of public attention (see Chapter 2). If, then, interest groups heavily conditioned the functioning of Italy’s post-war democracy, the distinctive characteristics of the latter significantly affected the ways in which groups sought to advance their members’ interests. In the first place, the dominance of the DC (as the main bulwark against Communism), its status as the mainstay of all feasible governing coalitions and therefore its permanence in office, meant, as we have seen, that it was a significant – perhaps, better, the most significant – gatekeeper controlling access to the rule-making sphere of government. This turned it into a ‘brokerage party’ consisting of a number of groups competing with

Organised interests and social movements  89 one another within it. In the second place, the party’s leaders were aware that, in order to play the political role the Cold War context had assigned to it effectively, with the imperative that it be able to act as a catch-all party drawing support across class and confessional divides, it could in no sense be beholden to this or that group. It therefore sought, along with its coalition partners, to colonize a wide range of public bodies that could be exploited for patronage purposes, enable it to maintain financial independence from organisations such as the Church or the employers’ association, Confindustria, and be drawn upon by its candidates, if not actually to ‘bribe’ voters, to influence them through the distribution of ‘favours’. This had two major consequences for the way in which the principal organised interests sought to gain access to and to influence points of decision- and policy-making within government. In the first place, groups sought to establish what LaPalombara (1964) called ties of parentela or clientela, where the first kind, operating within the dominant party, was exemplified by the case of the Coltivatori Diretti and gave access to both the rule-making and ruleapplying spheres through the party’s ability to influence the public administration. The second kind was exemplified by Confindustria. Regarded by the Ministry of Industry and Commerce as its natural interlocutor in the performance of its functions, Confindustria was able therefore to have the ministry act as its unofficial representative within government (in exchange for which it would exert pressure, when necessary, on other branches of government on the ministry’s behalf). Thus, it was able to influence policy through ties external to the dominant party. In the second place, the impossibility of alternation in government, competition among the governing parties and party factions to control the interstices of the state in pursuit of small-scale distributive measures and the consequent instability and short duration of governments, limited the capacity of the political system to provide the degree of policy-making certainty necessary to the making of rational investment decisions. Thus it was that entrepreneurs, ‘dependent on the favour of politicians for a range of routine business matters – from town-planning decisions to those concerning the award of public-works contracts’, sought to establish stable relationships with politicians whereby, in exchange for financial support at a time when the cost of politics was rising, they would obtain more of the certainty needed for finance and investment to be managed and planned rationally. There therefore developed a whole series of improper relations between economic and political power – ­including concomitants like the infamous P2 Masonic lodge, exposed in 1981, implicated in numerous crimes and sometimes described as ‘a state within a state’ – giving rise to veritable clans whose purpose was nothing other than mutual assistance in the management and ­enhancement of the power of their members. (Newell, 2021a: 17) The upshot of all this was that Italy’s group politics played a significant role in the disintegration of the traditional parties of government and in the transformation of the party system in the early 1990s. The penetration of decision-making structures by a wide range of economic and social interests perpetuated perceptions of the state as ‘something to be conquered by one’s own group to the disadvantage of others, rather than as an entity that could reasonably be relied upon to further the general interest’ (Bull and Newell, 2005: 81). The parties were closer to ­being agents of mediation between complex constellations of interests, each with a power of veto whenever some major policy initiative had to be taken, than to being united actors capable of decisive action. This hastened the demise, between 1992 and 1994, of the traditional governing parties deprived, by the end of the Cold War, of their ideological support and submerged by the revelations of the mani pulite investigations. For they had become giants with feet of clay, the range of whose control of political processes was matched by severe limits on the strength of

90  Organised interests and social movements that control (Cotta, 1996). The politics of clientelism, by turning rights into favours, had helped to sustain a level of popular cynicism that meant that support for the parties would always be brittle no matter how forceful the ideological appeals associated with the Church and the Cold War had previously been. The early 1990s were, therefore, a watershed in group politics, as in so much else in Italian public life. From then on, it became ‘much more difficult for societal interests to find access points and to penetrate decision-making structures’ (Della Sala, 1997: 14), and there were at least two reasons for this. First, EMU meant that control of monetary policy shifted upwards to the EU and that fiscal policy became tightly constrained by the same circumstance, especially given Italy’s unusually high levels of public debt, which had begun to expand from the mid-1970s at least partly because of the impact of group politics.2 As a Eurozone country, Italy was required to adhere to the terms of the Stability and Growth Pact, meaning that it had to ensure that budget deficits did not exceed 3 per cent of GDP each year3 and was obliged each year to obtain European Commission approval for its proposed budgetary measures given its SGP obligations. Consequently, executives became better able to resist group demands. They were assisted in this by institutional reforms such as those of 1988 and 2012. The first (law no. 362/88) amended procedures for approval of the annual budget so that Parliament’s agreement to financial limits would have to be obtained before any consideration of new expenditure could proceed. Thereby it put an end to the earlier situation whereby the annual Finance Bill had often been the object of group demands and the related clientelistic concerns of parliamentarians, so that it regularly came to assume vast proportions, requiring endless hours of negotiation and most often failing to secure parliamentary approval within the statutory time limits laid down for its enactment. The second (constitutional law no. 1/2012) gave effect to the Treaty on Stability, Co-ordination and Governance in the Economic and Monetary Union (2012) agreed to in the wake of the Eurozone crisis, by introducing a ‘balanced budget rule’ and making it constitutionally binding. Second, there have been at least three occasions since the early 1990s when Italy has faced external pressures that have to a significant extent dictated public policy in the sense of creating policy problems whose resolution has required removing ‘partisan, ideological and political considerations from the discussion of drastic measures’ (Della Sala, 1997: 29). The first and the third were the above-mentioned periods leading up to the adoption of the single currency in 1999 and following the arrival of the COVID-19 pandemic in March 2020, the second, the period of the Eurozone crisis from 2009. All three instances saw the effective ‘removal’ of politics from government decision-making with the appointment of technocratic governments: that is, ones staffed by ministers not recruited through parties, whose policies were not decided within parties and whose decisions were not made by elected party officials (McDonnell and Valbruzzi, 2014) – those of Lamberto Dini (1995–96) and Mario Monti (2011–13) – and/ or technocrat-led governments – those of Carlo Azeglio Ciampi (1993–94) and Mario Draghi (2021–22). Of course, these governments made decisions that had political implications, but the circumstances of their appointment meant that they were relatively free of partisan pressures as their authority derived from something other than ex-ante parliamentary majorities of which they were the expression. Consequently, their decisions could be presented as ones that were ­‘apolitical’ in the dual sense of being above the partisan fray and inescapable responses to objective ­circumstances – thereby making them less open to challenge by societal interests. None of this is to suggest that organised interests have been without influence since the early 1990s. On the contrary, there have been times, especially in the run-up to adoption of the Euro, when external pressures have led governments to formulate the corresponding policy responses in close consultation with the main producer groups: Confindustria and the other employers’

Organised interests and social movements  91 organisations, along with the three main trade-union confederations, CGIL, CISL and UIL. For example, the so-called ‘convergence criteria’ – the series of economic parameters countries aspiring to adopt the Euro would have to observe – included targets on inflation and levels of public debt, as a result of which the Amato Government (1992–93) was driven to abolish the inflation-linked wage escalator that had been in force since 1975 on the basis of an agreement concluded with employers and unions in July 1992. Meanwhile, the Dini Government (1995– 96) succeeded in reaching agreement with the unions on a reduction in expenditure on pensions. This was considered crucial to addressing the debt problem, given both the comparatively high proportion of public spending allocated to pensions and the country’s declining population and labour force. Later public policy responses to external pressures, such as those arising from the Eurozone crisis, were in contrast notable for being the product of decisions taken by governments unilaterally, on the basis of the conscious exclusion of the producer groups from any processes of consultation. Much has been written about the implications of the involvement of producer groups in government decision-making, often referred to as ‘corporatism’ or ‘concertation’. As a model of policy-making it has its supporters and its detractors. Thus, it is said on the one hand to help governments to solve concrete policy problems by enabling them to obtain the compliance of groups that wield potentially significant veto powers, so serving both expressive (legitimation) and instrumental (problem-solving) functions (Traxler, 2010). On the other hand, it is criticised from left-wing and right-wing perspectives. From the left, it is said that in facilitating compromises between labour and capital – such that organised labour becomes a party to agreements in relation to which it must then ensure the compliance of its members – it effectively blunts the effectiveness of trade unions as entities seeking to defend their members’ interests. From a right-wing perspective, it is suggested that practices of concertation are an indicator of excessive power on the part of self-interested organisations whose capacities and sometimes threats to veto public-policy decisions undermine the authority of elected governments, so that the organisations should be excluded from public policy-making. A not unrelated issue concerns the conditions under which governments will opt for one or the other: that is, when they will seek to include producer groups in policy-making and when to exclude them, especially because, as we have seen in the Italian case, it varies between similar conditions. That is, both in the run-up to EMU and in the aftermath of the Eurozone crisis governments faced external economic pressures. Yet the former period saw the pressures confronted through ‘the emergence of cooperative behaviour in domestic policymaking between the state and the organised producer groups of capital and labour’ (Tassinari, 2021: 1), the latter the opposite. Tassinari (2021) argues that whether governments opt for the one or the other approach depends on their role in sending signals to an international audience of creditors, credit-ratings agencies and others with the power to influence the country’s credit-worthiness. In other words, governments will choose one or the other approach depending on the effects they think it will have in alleviating external pressures to adopt liberalising measures and measures of austerity by increasing the confidence of external actors in the governments’ capacities to deliver the required measures. Where governments believe that producer groups have significant veto powers and that concertation has in the past been successful, then they will regard cooperative policy-making with producer groups as a useful signal to reassure external actors. When, in contrast, they consider producer groups to have significant veto powers but that concertation has in the past obstructed liberalising reforms, then they will seek to reassure external actors by self-consciously excluding the groups from policy-making. Notwithstanding its role in the run-up to EMU, concertation had by the onset of the Eurozone crisis, come to be widely perceived as an obstacle to, rather than a facilitator of, far-reaching

92  Organised interests and social movements liberalisation, as an impediment to economic performance. This, as measured in terms of rates of growth of GDP, had, since 1990, consistently been below that of the Eurozone as a whole (Figure 4.1). It was blamed partially on the policy outcomes of concertation. This was perceived as having allowed producer groups, and especially the unions, to obstruct reform thanks to veto powers, which in turn arose from high density and mobilisation capacities among categories such as pensioners and their involvement in institutions and processes around things like the authorisation of dismissals and short-time working schemes (Tassinari, 2021: 13). For example, the 1990s pensions reforms had had, as the price of union support for them, to include a slow phase-in period protecting older workers (Lynch and Ceretti, 2015: 242). The Berlusconi Government that took office in 2001 had complained, in its Libro bianco sul mercato del lavoro (Labour Market White Paper), that concertation had ‘performed governing functions well beyond the objectives of developing a proper relationship between the parties’. In the face of union opposition it had unsuccessfully tried to abolish the symbolically significant article 18 of the 1970 ‘Workers’ Statute’.4 Trade union membership, and therefore union strength, were relatively high by European standards.5 The unions had institutionalised roles in policy-making through bodies such as the Consiglio Nazionale dell’Economia e del Lavoro (National Council for the Economy and Labour) and the Istituto Nazionale della Previdenza Sociale (National Social Security Institute)6 (Newell, 2010: 186–9). Consequently, by the time of the 2008 international financial crisis, concertation had in many respects become discredited, governments were reluctant to resort to it for the purposes of crisis management and policy-makers were convinced that external actors required signs of decisive unilateral action as the price of relief from pressure on Italian public borrowing. Thus it was that, with the fall from office in November 2011 of Berlusconi – forced out essentially by a lack of confidence on the part of EU leaders and other international stakeholders that he enjoyed sufficient authority to take the measures required to stave off the risk of sovereign debt default (Newell, 2012) – a strategy of self-conscious unilateralism was embarked upon. In order to signal to international investors its resolve to face down domestic veto players and act ‘responsibly’, the technocratic Monti Government which replaced Berlusconi’s drew up a pensions reform in two weeks, ‘breaking a tradition of negotiated adjustment in pensions policy dating 10 8 6 4 2 2020

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Figure 4.1 Italy GDP growth (annual %), 1961–2021 (compiled from World Bank data (World Bank, n.d.))

Organised interests and social movements  93 back to the early 1990s’ (Tassinari, 2021: 14). In 2012, the Government won plaudits from the international financial press for its determination to press ahead, against union opposition, with structural labour-market reforms. In 2014, the Renzi Government took office with the avowed purpose of limiting the influence of domestic interest groups and seeing its capacity to drive through reforms regardless of protest as the ultimate test of its international credibility. Its ‘Jobs Act’, thus, among other things, relaxed employment protection legislation for permanent contracts, limiting the reach of article 18, while reinforcing conditionality mechanisms for workers benefitting from wage supplementation schemes (Pinelli et al., 2017) – all ‘amid a general strike and strong union protests’ (Tassinari, 2021: 15). More recently, the COVID-19 pandemic and Next Generation EU have provided a further opportunity for the marginalisation of interest groups, by virtue of externally imposed conditions surrounding the development of NRRPs and thus providing the basis for discourses about the absence of alternatives (and thus for executive autonomy) and for technocratic discourses (and thus the depoliticisation of potentially controversial issues). Thus, beyond the ritual consultations, decisions on NRRP priorities have remained firmly centralised within the executive. ‘In the case of employment policies, for example, there was little or no dialogue with the trade unions or other interest groups, in line with the pre-pandemic trend towards the marginalization of social concertation in policy making’ (Di Mascio, Natalini and Profeti, 2022). But whether, from the point of view of governance, this marginalization was to be welcomed was not particularly clear. While it is true that permeability to group concerns can undermine the efficiency and effectiveness of governance, it is also true that the exclusion of groups can have a similar effect. In the case of the north–south divide, for example, the exclusion of relevant stakeholders seemed, by virtue of the feeling of alienation top-down planning induces, likely to undermine rather than enhance the NRRP’s impact, as Cerruto, Cersosimo and Raniolo (2022) have argued. Cause groups, social movements and protest Cause groups in Italian politics come in a bewildering variety of organisational forms, political affiliations, sizes and types of political action and interaction. In terms of organisation, there are, on the one hand, the well-organised and enduring entities such as Legambiente, Italy’s largest environmental organisation, with over 100,000 members, founded in 1980, or, older still, ARCI, a recreational association associated with the left, promoting initiatives in a wide range of areas, with over a million members, formed in 1957. On the other hand, there are the much more loosely organised and seemingly more ephemeral entities among which one of the most recent and high-profile examples has been the Sardines, a network that came together in the autumn of 2019 with the initial objective of halting the advance of the right in the regional elections of January 2020 (Caruso and De Blasio, 2021). The arrival of the COVID-19 pandemic and the imposition of the initial lockdowns undermined the Sardines’ efforts to put down secure organisational roots and establish new objectives for themselves, and, by the end of the year, they had largely disappeared from public view. Often, groups are referred to as ‘movements’, reflecting the fact that on the continuum separating formal organisations with paid-up members and informal networks based on supporters with shared ideas and beliefs, they are closer to the latter than to the former – and/or reflecting the fact that they share ideas and often work in conjunction with other like-minded groups, as do those making up the environmental or the feminist movements, for example. There seems little doubt that in Italy, as elsewhere, the proportion of informally, as opposed to formally, organised groups has grown in recent years, due, among other things, to the advent of the Internet. This has massively reduced the organisational and other resources groups require to achieve visibility

94  Organised interests and social movements and to mobilise supporters, so that internal hierarchies have become shorter and bureaucracies smaller, while the meaning of membership has also been transformed. In the case of the traditional pressure group, membership was acquired by means of the payment of a subscription whose periodic renewal represented the reaffirmation of an ideological commitment and a political identity. With the advent of the Internet, membership is acquired by subscribing, free of charge, to a mailing list thus making possible more individualised and intermittent forms of involvement (such as signing online petitions), while allowing the organisation to carry on its campaigning activities by periodically appealing to subscribers for funds and information (Ceccarini, 2022). In terms of political affiliations, there are groups associated with the far right (such as CasaPound, a network of far-right social centres7 arising from the occupation of a government building in Rome in 2003), others associated with the Catholic tradition (such as Mani Tese aiming to promote peace, cross-cultural cooperation and sustainable development) and still others, associated with the left (like the above-mentioned ARCI). On occasions, groups with different political affiliations have been able to work together on joint initiatives. Thus, ‘Catholic peace and development organizations like Beati costruttori di pace, Pax Christi, and Mani Tese join[ed] with environmental groups like Legambiente, grassroots unions like COBAS [comitati di base] and cultural associations of the left like ARCI in promoting a counter-summit against the G7 summit in Naples in July 1994’ (Fabbri and Diani, 2015: 226). At other times they have campaigned against each other, as happened in 2019 when the city of Verona hosted the thirteenth World Congress of Families8 which counter-posed the initiatives of Catholic and other groups exercised by the Congress’ themes and those of a range of LGBTQI organisations opposed to them. Not surprisingly, groups and movements vary in scale from those with a focus on a strictly local issue to those associated with transnational movements and INGOs. Into the former category one could probably place the ‘No Tav’ movement which emerged in the early 1990s in opposition to the proposed construction of the high-speed rail link between Lyons in France and Turin, but there are many other, and more recent, local protest movements one might mention.9 Groups in the latter category reflect the growing potential, thanks to the Internet, for the emergence of transnational communities and for transnational mobilisation initiatives such as those of Fridays for Future, which in 2019 staged what were likely the largest climate strikes in world history including the participation of over a million Italian school children. Finally, unless they are insiders, with regular access to decision-making arenas within the state machine, the collective action undertaken by groups and movements to advance their causes is likely to take place in the public sphere outside institutional channels. Here, in the arena where political communication between decision-makers and citizens takes place (Kriesi, 2014: 269), groups take a wide range of actions that serve an almost equally wide range of purposes. First, and most straightforwardly, groups seek to take action that will attract media attention and so draw public attention to problems and change attitudes. Since causes are almost by definition usually defined in opposition to something – be it an organisation, a policy or a set of values – and since media and public attention require the generation of controversy, much of groups’ action is focussed on organising protest events. Second, such events may also serve a ‘direct-action’ purpose, in other words, a direct attempt to enact desired changes by, for example, blocking a road to try to prevent the construction of a new by-pass. Third, besides advocacy, groups may also provide services of various kinds and thus carry out activities akin to those of charities or voluntary associations. An example of this is Emergency.

Organised interests and social movements  95 Founded in 1994 by Gino Strada, a surgeon and a human-rights and peace activist, Emergency provides medical assistance to victims of war and poverty on the basis that high-quality healthcare is a fundamental human right. For such groups, the provision of services functions both as a form of direct action and as the vehicle through which they make their opinions heard. They have been given specific encouragement by legislative decree no. 460 of 1997 which gave special legal status to not-for-profit organisations carrying on activities aimed at assisting disadvantaged people in one or more sectors specified in the legislation: organizzazioni non lucrative di utilità sociale, usually referred to by their acronym, ONLUS. The legislation provides such organisations with tax exemptions and simplifies the accounting requirements they are obliged to observe. Fourth, regardless of whether a group’s activities are successful in helping it to achieve its manifest objectives, the activities also serve an important internal purpose. That is, they allow activists to give expression to the principles to which they subscribe, to assert their claims and so, regardless of any impact beyond the ranks of activists themselves, to reaffirm their commitments and to strengthen the group itself. Perhaps the best example of this phenomenon is given by the above-mentioned social centres, which first emerged in Italy in the 1970s, through the occupation of decommissioned buildings, as expressions of a commitment to the values of the libertarian left, enabling their participants to engage in the attempt to build counter-cultural networks from the bottom up. Protest activities deserve some additional consideration. A protest is simply an expression of dissent by words or actions and therefore covers everything from acts of terrorism at one extreme, through riots, occupations, strikes and marches to signing petitions on the other. Groups are under some pressure to manage protest, especially the more disruptive forms, carefully, for it may backfire and change public attitudes in ways unfavourable to group objectives, and it may provoke the repressive intervention of the state as it implicitly throws down a challenge to the public authorities. Groups may therefore be expected, normally, to treat the more disruptive forms of protest warily. Despite this, protest has, in a number of different ways, played a significant role in the unfolding of Italian politics since the war. In the first place, the protest that the authorities have been willing to tolerate has, as I have written elsewhere (Newell, 2010: 197), often been rather limited. This was especially the case in the immediate post-war period, in the 1950s, at the height of the Cold War when the authorities appear to have been especially fearful of strikers and left-wing demonstrators. They were presumably influenced by the size of the PCI and by their memories of how marches and mass movements had led to the rise of Fascism. The 1950s thus become notorious for the frequent recourse to firearms against protestors and restrictions on the exercise of rights guaranteed by the Constitution on the part of authorities apparently convinced that the preservation of democracy required the adoption of a policy of ‘preventive repression’. Despite this, the period from the late 1960s – which became famous, in Italy as in other countries, for the wave of worker and student protests that gave rise to new, left-libertarian ideologies and movements – saw the growing spread of radical and sometimes illegal forms of protest – and, in extreme cases, violence. As we have seen, the 1970s thus became known as the ‘years of lead’ – which saw bombings, kidnappings and groups of the extreme left and right drawn into, sometimes daily, street clashes, as well as the development of the so-called ‘strategy of tension’ – the creation of a climate of fear and disorder that would provoke calls for an authoritarian restoration of order part of which would involve the organisational dismantling of the left’ (Newell, 2021a: 24). Police action against the groups concerned eventually put an end to the violence, and the 1980s ushered in a new era in group politics in Italy. This was one in which economic and social change, cross-national in scale (the decline of Fordist manufacturing, the

96  Organised interests and social movements growing pace of globalisation and a dramatic decline in industrial militancy) brought about cultural change every bit as profound as that of the 1960s and 1970s. In this context – one of renewed economic growth after the difficulties of the 1970s, of a fading of the associated social and political tensions and of what became known as a ‘retreat to the private sphere’ – group politics took on a different character. Less concerned with all embracing ideologies, it came to be dominated by issues of individual aspiration, the issues of what would come to be called ‘identity politics’. Third, the experience of the 1960s and 1970s in Italy has left a legacy of particularly imaginative forms of protest less often found in other political contexts. One example would be the social centres, another would be spesa proletaria (proletarian shopping), both children of the socalled ‘1977 Movement’. This was expressed by a wave of student protests focussed on direct action involving the appropriation of goods and social spaces whose take-over was claimed as a right. Consequently, besides the occupation of uninhabited or abandoned dwellings, the movement became famous for actions such as proletarian shopping and l’autoriduzione dei prezzi (unilateral price reductions). These would – for example – see a large group of persons descend on a supermarket and fill a trolley with items while leaving a sum of money amounting to less than the advertised prices of the goods taken. Since the number of people involved was large, it was often difficult for the authorities to determine who in particular had been responsible for expropriating the goods and so bring charges. Often, the goods would be distributed among the inhabitants of the area in which the action had taken place, so giving it a communicative as well as a direct-action purpose. It was revived on at least one occasion a quarter of a century later, on 6 November 2004, when representatives of the social centres and the extra-parliamentary left descended on a supermarket in Rome as part of a protest against employment insecurity and the rising cost of living. Finally, if protest has at times been driven by feelings of hostility towards established institutions and parties – as was particularly the case during the 1970s when the PCI was seeking to advance the fortunes of the left through a ‘historic compromise’10 strategy diametrically opposed to that of the left-wing groups willing to employ violence – sometimes the opposite has been the case. Most recently, for example, the Sardines have offered critical support to the PD and the centre left. This is precisely because, as they emerged to oppose the far right, represented by the League and Matteo Salvini, their raison d’être immediately became that of resisting ‘populism and expressions of hate in politics, which were counter-posed to a style of political debate that is respectful of adversaries and of constitutional principles symbolically represented by the values of the Resistance and of anti-fascism’ (Caruso and De Blasio, 2021: 243–4). Other examples of groups that have succeeded in finding allies among the political parties include those associated with the environmental movement, which found a representative in the corridors of power in the form of the Green Party after it was formed in 1980, and the ‘No Tav’ movement, which for a time found a willing spokesperson in the M5S. Not always have such alliances born fruit (the M5S, once in government, ultimately betrayed the demands of the ‘No Tav’ movement), but not infrequently they have been helpful (as when, for example, political allies in local authorities have been willing to sponsor conferences, cultural events and so on). Consequently, although the authorities have often distinguished themselves for their draconian responses to protest (as happened, notoriously, in the case of the alternative globalisation protests at the G8 Summit in Genoa in July 2001 which left one person dead and several others injured), they have also, in several instances, been responsive to the demands of protest. Landmark reforms, such as the 1970 Workers’ Statute or the introduction of divorce, are plausibly attributed to the protests of the late 1960s. It is difficult to imagine reforms such as the Cirinnà law of 2016 (giving legal recognition to same-sex couples as ‘civil partnerships’) being passed in the absence of the shift in social values that has taken place thanks to the campaigning over many years of groups

Organised interests and social movements  97 representing the gay and lesbian communities. In a number of instances, the authorities have even been willing to give legal recognition to, and to subsidise, the social centres, in order to enable them to fill gaps in the provisions of the welfare state (Della Porta, 1996). Institutional groups I suggested earlier that the early 1990s (with the end of the Cold War and the party-system transformation that then took place) represented a watershed as much for group as for party politics. No more was this so than in the case of arguably the most significant of the institutional groups, the Roman Catholic Church. Institutional groups, the reader will recall, are those with a raison d’être other than advocacy or the pursuit of members’ interests, but which, by virtue of their role in society or government, are required to devote large proportions of their resources, in terms of time, money and personnel, to seeking to influence decision makers. Examples, from the sphere of government, would include the ministry of Agriculture, Food and Forestry, which carries out its remit to a very large extent by lobbying to secure funding or to prioritize certain issues and to ensure that the policies of other departments do not impact negatively on the achievement of its own objectives. Examples from the sphere of society would include the think tanks such as the prestigious Istituto Affari Internazionali, founded in 1965 by the Communist politician and European Federalist Altiero Spinelli. The Institute’s aims are to promote ‘the understanding of international politics through research, training, conferences and publications’. Precisely because of its success in pursuit of these aims, it is able to interact and to exercise influence with government and the public administration in pursuit of its other aims. These are ‘to contribute to the promotion of European integration and to increase the prospects for all countries to move towards some form of supranational organization and to pursue democratic freedoms, economic development and social equity’ (Istituto Affari Intenazionali, 2014). But while the examples could be multiplied, I shall here focus on the Catholic Church, whose role in Italian politics has for most of the period since the war arguably been the most high-profile and contentious, certainly subject to the most significant change with the transition from the ‘First’ to the ‘Second’ Republic. Historically, churches have until relatively recently been significant actors in the politics of most Western countries because of their considerable social authority. That is to say, even after the French Revolution initiated the process whereby Church and polity came to be uncoupled, the pre-revolutionary age, when there had been little or no conception that moral rules (as defined by the Church) and legal rules could diverge, left a lasting legacy. Religious precepts for long continued to inform the most significant rites of passage in the lives of ordinary citizens, their social attitudes (on matters such as the rights of women, for example) and their reflections on the deepest existential and moral questions facing them. Consequently, though manifest religiosity and levels of religious participation have declined with the passage of time, nominal religious identities have been slower to fade even though, or perhaps precisely because, they rarely surface discursively. In Italy, the Church has been especially influential owing to the location of its global headquarters in the country’s capital city. This meant that the nineteenth-century movement for Italian Unification that gave birth to the Italian state in 1861 inevitably came into conflict with the Church, whose temporal possessions the movement threatened. It meant, too, that the Church’s initial refusal to recognise the new state significantly undermined the latter’s authority. Consequently, the Church had a very high-profile, and controversial, role in the political life of the Italian state from the beginning, the 1929 Lateran Pacts and Concordat being an effort to put an end to a situation in which the Church’s presence posed a, potentially existential, threat to the state itself. Claiming a monopoly on ultimate truth with regard to all spheres of human existence,

98  Organised interests and social movements the Church potentially remained an alternative focus for the political allegiance of the faithful in opposition to the allegiance demanded by the state. Given the state’s need to remain free of religious tutelage as the condition of its retention of sovereignty, a condition of latent tension inevitably undelay relations between Church and state well into the twentieth century. The pacts were successful in reducing the tension because they provided for a cessation of hostilities from which both parties stood to gain. Thus, in exchange for recognition, the state threw its weight behind the social authority of the Church – agreeing, for example, to the principle that Church marriages were legally sufficient, so continuing a legacy of the confessional state, antedating the French Revolution, when religious and secular formalities had amounted to the same thing. From this point of view, the pacts, subsequently written into the 1948 Constitution, represented a revival of the confessional state’s ‘alliance between the throne and the alter [which had] found its logical justification insofar as each of the two orders could have recourse to the powers of the other to better control the subjects of the former, who were at the same time also the believers of the latter’ (Loprieno, 2015: 146). In the aftermath of the Second World War, the Church remained influential, thanks, first, to the fact that its positions defined one side in the main, and profoundly felt, division running through Italian politics: the one informed by the Cold War, pitting the Christian Democrats and their allies against the Communists and their allies. Thus it was that the initial post-war election, in 1948, became famous as the ‘Christ-versus-Communism’ election, when the Church threatened to withdraw the sacraments to anyone voting for the PCI. Once it had become clear that the likelihood of the Communists taking power was remote, especially after they had been abandoned by the Socialists and their status as a ‘pariah party’ had been confirmed (see Chapter 1), Church interventions in elections were somewhat less blatant. Nonetheless, popes and bishops continued to provide ‘guidance’ to the faithful. Second, the Church’s wide variety of collateral associations gave it a significant presence in more or less every locality in the country. Third, though the DC remained organisationally independent of the Church, aware, as mentioned earlier, that independence was essential to its effectiveness as a bulwark against Communism, informal ties between Vatican representatives and senior DC politicians, such as twice Prime Minister Aldo Moro, remained close, giving the Vatican a direct channel of access to the heart of government. The 1974 referendum concerning the legalisation of divorce was the first evident sign that the economic and social changes of the post-war period were threatening to undermine the authority of the Church. Bringing a decline in Church attendance (Figure 4.2) and a decline in the willingness of those continuing to attend to adhere unreflectingly to Church directives, they suggested that the Vatican might no longer be able to rely on a large ‘Catholic vote’ to give it political influence. The disintegration of the DC was a double blow, destroying a channel of access to policy-makers and the political cohesiveness of Catholic voters whose support would from then on be divided among parties in both of the electoral coalitions of centre left and centre right claiming to offer representation to Catholics. This has meant that the Church has had to avoid being identified with any one political party to the exclusion of others and to place increasing reliance on the mass media and on direct appeals to the public as a means of influencing policy. The Church retains influence in Italian public life thanks to two phenomena. First, the number of religion-related issues on the agenda of public discussion has, if anything, increased in recent years – which have seen passionate debates on euthanasia, artificial insemination, the rights of the LGBTQI community and gender-based violence to name a few. Thanks to the end of the Cold War and the demise of the political party with which it was once exclusively identified, the Church, in taking positions on these issues, has been faced with a public that is no longer either prejudicially for or prejudicially against its specific messages. Consequently, it is still able to score policy successes – as it did in 2005, for example, when it urged voters not to participate

Organised interests and social movements  99 50 45 40 35 30 25 20 15 10 5 0 1965

1970

1975

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1985

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Figure 4.2 Weekly church attendance (% respondents) in Italy, 1968–2008 (Vezzoni and Biolcati-Rinaldi, 2015: 108)

in the four referenda on artificial insemination, thus ensuring that they would fail to reach the 50 per cent turnouts required to pass. Second, in exploiting popular resentments, parties of the right have sought to mobilise support partly by leveraging citizens’ residual religious identities. Thus, in exciting popular fears around migration and the cultural effects of globalisation, Matteo Salvini and the League counter-pose, in their narratives, the ordinary Church-going Italian to the migrant and the Muslim. Meanwhile, as part of efforts to position FdI as a conservative party, Giorgia Meloni claims to defend Dio, patria e famiglia, and therefore to be a reliable defender of the established order. Consequently, in matters of gender and sexuality (for example), the Church and organisations supportive of conservative positions are normally able to rely on secure parliamentary majorities against reform with the result that Italy continues to occupy a low position in international rankings concerning such matters as the recognition of LGBTQI rights11 – unsurprisingly so. For example, the Cirinnà law, referred to above, was approved only after 20 years of effort had failed to produce any results, and it continues to deny several of the rights (such as adoption) afforded to heterosexual couples. In 2021, a proposal seeking to update legislation criminalizing incitement to racial, ethnic and religious hatred by bringing within its purview incitement to hatred on grounds of sex, gender, sexual orientation, gender identity or disability was finally buried, after months of parliamentary effort, by the parties of the right, ably assisted by Matteo Renzi and Italia Viva. It appears that the right-wing populist parties’ use of religion as a cultural marker to define their constituencies in opposition to outsiders is a general phenomenon not confined to the Italian case only (Cremer, 2018; Marzouki, McDonnell and Roy, 2016). However, it may be that in the Italian context there is an additional reason for the parties’ tendency to exploit religion in this way, one that has to do, specifically, with the papacy of Francis, who was elected in 2013. Francis has distinguished himself for his disinclination to become involved in partisan politics (Faggioli, 2018) but also for his outspoken views on social and economic justice and immigration and his opposition to populism and xenophobia (Franzi, 2018). It may therefore be that Salvini and Meloni identify closely with established religious themes and symbols (Salvini has become notorious for his studied display of a rosary during party rallies and electoral events) as a means of blunting the potentially negative impact of the Pope’s stated positions on electoral support for

100  Organised interests and social movements their parties. In other words, by identifying with the Church while foregrounding its conservative positions on ‘biopolitical’ issues, and attending well-publicised meetings with Francis’ severest critics within the Vatican (Kirchgaessner, 2018), Salvini in particular has been pursuing a thinly disguised strategy. This is one aimed at ensuring that any losses of support for his party among practising Catholics resulting from the Pope’s pronouncements will be (more than) compensated for by the party’s close identification with the Church’s conservative positions on other issues. Conclusion It is true, therefore, that the role of the Church in Italian politics is nothing like that of the period before the 1990s, when Church attendance was widespread and the Vatican was a mainstay of support for the country’s largest party. Yet it is also true that the presence of the headquarters of world-wide Catholicism on Italian soil ensures that its profile in that country’s politics continues to be greater than in the politics of other Catholic countries. Its influence is changing and may evolve still further under a Pope whose concerns have shifted away from an emphasis on the ‘bio-political’ issues to an emphasis on those of global justice, but it remains. In this respect, it reflects that of the sectional and the main producer groups, which demonstrate their significance even when excluded from the processes of government policy-making, indeed have shown that they are influential precisely because governments have often in recent years felt the need to make a public show of excluding them. Finally, cause groups too make a significant contribution to the political life of the country in that one can point to several landmark reforms (such as the above-mentioned Cirinnà law) that would almost certainly not have been introduced, or introduced as soon, in the absence of the groups’ campaigning activities. Group politics is therefore central to an understanding of Italian public life, a crucial component of what makes Italy a pluralist democracy in the first place, a sine qua non of its status as a democratic polity. Group politics has, with some notable exceptions – such as those associated with the ‘years of lead’ – enhanced the quality of democracy in post-war Italy. I now turn my attention to the three major issues that have often threatened significantly to undermine it: political corruption, organised crime and the administration of justice. Notes 1 ‘Peasant farmers in each district are told what combination of preference-vote numbers to cast. While this method does not completely destroy secrecy of the ballot, it does give the leadership an opportunity to gauge how closely each district adheres to the line established by the leaders. Where deviation is too pronounced, retaliatory measures can be taken’ (LaPalombara, 1964: 242). 2 One thinks here of the movements of protest of workers and students in the late 1960s which led to reforms in the areas of income protection, pensions, the health service and university access. Subsequently, the slowdown in growth following the end of the post-war ‘economic miracle’ and the socalled ‘oil shock’ in the early 1970s, meant that the public debt continued to rise since, even though spending on the reforms was constrained, low growth and interest payments made it increasingly difficult to pay down debt. 3 The rationale for this, as I have explained elsewhere, is that ‘under conditions of monetary union the incentives on governments to pursue “responsible” budgetary policies are fewer than they are when the governments have their own, national, currencies. When governments have their own currencies, the possibilities for “excessive” budget deficits are limited by their effects on interest and exchange rates and therefore on countries’ capacities to export. In a monetary union, member countries are not subject to such constraints. Moreover, if a number of them run excessive deficits they may create inflationary pressures obliging the central bank to raise interest rates with the result of depressing economic activity even in countries without, or with lower, deficits (Bini Smaghi, 2001: 46). So ultimately, the rationale for the Pact has to do with perceptions of equity between members of the euro zone’ (Newell, 2010: 267).

Organised interests and social movements  101 4 This was the product of the so-called ‘hot autumn’ of union agitation in 1969 and established a number of workplace rights including that of article 18, which provided for a right to be reinstated in the event of unfair dismissal. 5 Although union density, defined as the percentage of workers belonging to unions, had declined in Italy as elsewhere, in 1995 it remained at 44% and therefore well above the levels of such other European countries as the UK (32.9%), Germany (28.9%) and France (9.1%) (International Labour Organisation, 1997). 6 The National Council for the Economy and Labour, bringing together representatives of sectors of industry and commerce, is provided for by article 99 of the Constitution which describes its functions as being to advise Parliament and the Government and, where required, to initiate legislation and contribute to the drafting of economic and social legislation. The National Social Security Institute provides pensions to employees and many of the self-employed and is supervised by a governing body consisting of representatives of the trade unions, industry and commerce. 7 Self-managed organisations offering a wide range of services and activities, usually linked with a counter-cultural ideology or network and often arising out of the occupation of a public space, usually a building publicly or privately owned. 8 ‘An international event aimed at celebrating the ‘natural family’ as well as discussing the manifold challenges created for it by the contemporary socio-political context’ (Pavan, 2020: 243). 9 They include the movements of opposition to the construction of the ‘Gronda’ motorway in Genoa, to the siting of a US air base at the Dal Molin airport in Vicenza and to construction of the Trans-Adriatic Pipeline in Puglia. 10 This was the title given to the strategy enunciated by PCI leader Enrico Berlinguer who sought a repeat of the party’s experience from 1944 to 1947, in the form of a governing arrangement with the DC, in the belief that only an alliance between the party and the more progressive elements of Christian democracy would make possible a Socialist transition without running the risk of a right-wing coup d’etat of the kind that had been provoked when Salvador Allende had attempted socialist transition in Chile (see Chapter 1). 11 ‘According to the human rights organisation, ILGA [International Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Trans and Intersex Association] Europe, Italy is in 35th place out of 49 European countries in terms of the rights and protection afforded to LGBTQI people’ (Newell, 2021b: 293). ‘A homophobia and transphobia helpline run by the Gay Center association in Italy receives about 20,000 requests for help a year from those who experience violence or threats’ (Roberts, 2021).

References Bini Smaghi, Lorenzo (2001), L’euro, Bologna: Il Mulino. Bull, Martin J., and James L. Newell (2005), Italian Politics: Adjustment under Duress, Cambridge: Polity Press. Caruso, Loris, and Emiliana de Blasio (2021), ‘From the Streets to the Web: Communication and Democratic Participation in the Case of the “Sardines’’’, Contemporary Italian Politics 13: 242–58. Ceccarini, Luigi (2022), Postpolitica: Cittadini, spazio pubblico, democrazia, Bologna: Il Mulino. Cerruto, Maurizio, Domenico Cersosimo and Francesco Raniolo (2022), ‘The NRRP and the South of Italy’, Contemporary Italian Politics 14: 472–86. Cotta, Maurizio (1996), ‘La crisi del governo di partito all’italiana’, pp. 11–52 in Maurizio Cotta and Pierangelo Isernia, Il gigante dai piedi di argilla, Bologna: Il Mulino. Cremer, Tobias (2018), ‘Defenders of the Faith: Why Right-Wing Populists are Embracing Religion’, New Statesman, 30 May, https://www.newstatesman.com/politics/religion/2018/05/defenders-faith-0. Della Porta, Donatella (1996), Movimenti collettivi e sistema politico in Italia 1960–1995, Rome and Bari: Laterza. Della Sala, Vincent (1997), ‘Hollowing Out and Hardening the State: European Integration and the Italian Economy’, pp. 14–33 in Martin Bull and Martin Rhodes (eds), Crisis and Transition in Italian Politics, London: Frank Cass. Di Mascio, Fabrizio, Alessandro Natalini and Stefania Profeti (2022), ‘The Draghi Government Put to the Test by the National Recovery and Resilience Plan’, Contemporary Italian Politics, 14: 402–8. Fabbri, Maria, and Mario Diani (2015), ‘Social Movement Campaigns from Global Justice Activism to Movimento Cinque Stelle’, pp. 225–36 in Andrea Mammone, Ercole Giap Parini and Giuseppe A. Veltri (eds), The Routledge Handbook of Contemporary Italy, London: Routledge.

102  Organised interests and social movements Faggioli, Massimo (2018), ‘Italian Politics and the Catholic Church’, Il Mulino, 26 Jan., https://www. rivistailmulino.it/a/italian-politics-and-the-catholic-church. Franzi, Alessandro (2018), ‘The Nationalist Italian Government is a Challenge to the Church’, 23 July, London School of Economics and Political Science, https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/eurocrisispress/2018/07/23/ the-nationalist-italian-government-is-a-challenge-to-the-church. Garnett, M., and P. Lynch (2007), Exploring British Politics, Harlow, Essex: Pearson. Heywood, A. (2007), Politics, 3rd edn, Basingstoke: Palgrave. International Labour Organisation (1997), ‘ILO Highlights Global Challenge to Trade Unions’, 4 Nov., https://www.ilo.org/global/about-the-ilo/newsroom /news/WCMS_008032. Istituto Affari Intenazionali (2014), Statute, 30 Oct., https://www.iai.it/sites/default/files/statute2014.pdf. Kirchgaessner, Stephanie (2018), ‘Salvini meets Cardinal Burke, Staunch Critic of Pope Francis’, The Guardian, 17 June, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/jun/17/matteo-salvini-cardinal-burkecritic-of-pope-francis. Kriesi, Hanspeter (2014), ‘Social Movements’, pp. 267–83 in Daniele Caramani (ed.), Comparative ­Politics, 3rd edn, Oxford: Oxford University Press. LaPalombara, Joseph (1964), Interest Groups in Italian Politics, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Loprieno, Donatella (2015), ‘Religion and the State’, pp. 145–53 in Andrea Mammone, Ercole Giap Parini and Giuseppe A. Veltri (eds), The Routledge Handbook of Contemporary Italy, London: Routledge. Lynch, Julia, and Peter Ceretti (2015), ‘Welfare, Italian Style: From Bismarkian Beginnings to Crisis and Reform’, pp. 239–51 in Andrea Mammone, Ercole Giap Parini and Giuseppe A. Veltri (eds), The ­Routledge Handbook of Contemporary Italy, London: Routledge. McDonnell, Duncan, and Marco Valbruzzi (2014), ‘Defining and Classifying Technocrat-Led and ­Technocratic Governments’, European Journal of Political Research 53: 654–71. Marzouki, Nadia, Duncan McDonnell and Olivier Roy (eds) (2016), Saving the People: How Populists Hijack Religion, London: C. Hurst & Co. Newell, James L. (2010), The Politics of Italy: Governance in a Normal Country, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Newell, James L. (2012), ‘Down But Not Out: Understanding the Berlusconi Resignation and Its Significance’, Italian Politics and Society: Review of the Conference Group on Italian Politics and Society 70: 30–41. Newell, James L. (2021a), Italy’s Contemporary Politics, London and New York: Routledge. Newell, James L. (2021b), ‘Building Back Better? Italian Politics in the Summer of 2021’, Bulletin of Italian Politics 13: 293–5. Pavan, Elena, (2020), ‘We are Family: The Conflict between Conservative Movements and Feminists’, Contemporary Italian Politics 12: 243–57. Pinelli, Dino, Roberta Torre, Lucianajulia Pace, Laura Cassio and Alfonso Arpaia (2017), ‘The Recent Reform of the Labour Market in Italy: A Review’, European Commission, Discussion Paper 072, Dec., https://ec.europa.eu/info/sites/default/files/economy-finance/dp072_en.pdf. Roberts, Hannah (2021), ‘LGBT Hate Crime Bill Polarizes Italy’, Politico, 21 May, https://www.politico. eu/article/lgbt-hate-crime-bill-italy. Tassinari, Arianna (2021), ‘Reassuring the Markets: The New Politics of Social Concertation in Acute ­Crisis Times’, Working Paper, European University Institute, https://cadmus.eui.eu//handle/1814/69723. Traxler, F. (2010), ‘Corporatism(s) and Pacts: Changing Functions and Structures under Rising Economic Liberalism and Declining Liberal Democracy’, pp. 45–82 in P. Pochet, M. Keune and D. Natali (eds.), After the Euro and Enlargement: Social Pacts in the EU, Brussels: ETUI. Vezzoni, Cristiano, and Ferruccio Biolcati-Rinaldi (2015), ‘Church Attendance and Religious Change in Italy, 1968–2010: A Multilevel Analysis of Pooled Datasets’, Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 54: 100–18. World Bank (n.d.), ‘GDP Growth (Annual %) – Italy’, https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP. MKTP.KD.ZG?locations=IT.

5

Political corruption, organised crime and the administration of justice

Introduction A bit like the issue in UK politics of Britain’s role in (or outside) the European Union, so, in Italian politics, political corruption, organised crime and the administration of justice are three broad issues which in one form or another have for long had a more or less permanent and highprofile place on the public agenda. So, just as it would be difficult, if not impossible, to gain a genuine appreciation of public life in Britain without an understanding of why the issue of Europe has been perceived as a problem in its politics for several decades, the same is true of corruption, organised crime and justice in the Italian case. This chapter is therefore devoted to a discussion of each of these issues in turn. Starting with the issue of political corruption, I take a largely historical perspective on it, as it has been strongly path dependent. The notion of path dependency refers to the idea that a given behaviour may well persist despite changes in the circumstances that gave rise to it in the first place, because people find that it involves fewer costs or lower risks than the alternatives. This is certainly true when it comes to behaviour commonly referred to as ‘corrupt’, for, as we shall see, the behaviour in question tends beyond a certain point to be self-perpetuating. This leads directly onto the issue of organised crime, with which corruption has been intimately related. In fact, it is probably true to say that the organised-crime phenomenon would not have manifested itself in the way that it has done, and would not have been such an intractable problem, in the absence of the corruption with which it has formed a vicious circle. That is, if bribery has been one of the ways, if not the way, in which organised-crime groups have sought impunity for themselves, then their impunity has enabled them both to be parties to corrupt transactions and to underwrite the corrupt transactions of others, as we shall see. Finally, the administration of justice has been intimately related both to the corruption problem and to the problem of organised crime, partly because it too forms part of a vicious circle difficult to break out of. That is, if inefficiencies in the administration of justice make it difficult to combat illegality, then illegality has tended to undermine efforts to improve judicial efficiency if only because of the backlog in the number of cases that has been associated with it. By occupying long-standing, high-profile places on the agenda of Italian politics, corruption, organised crime and the administration of justice, just like Europe in the UK case, have posed fundamental questions of national integration and of public confidence in the institutions of government themselves. In each case, I consider, in the three sections that follow, to what the relevant terms ‘corruption’, ‘organised crime’ and so on have been used to refer, why they have been perceived as problems and therefore as ‘issues’ as such, what has been done by way of attempts to deal with them and how successful these attempts have been. DOI: 10.4324/9780203422120-6

104  Corruption, organised crime and justice Political corruption From the point of view of popular perceptions, Italy has a reputation for being an unusually corrupt country. Whether the reputation is deserved or not is another matter. On the one hand, the Corruption Perceptions Index (CPI), produced annually by the Berlin-based international non-governmental organisation, Transparency International (TI), regularly places Italy near the bottom among the EU 28 and, indeed, ranks it below some so-called ‘third-world’ countries, which, because of their relatively low levels of development (and what this implies in terms of relevant variables such as poverty, the robustness of public institutions, education levels and so on), one would naturally expect to be below a developed country such as Italy. For example, in the 2017 CPI, Italy was ranked joint 22nd among the EU member states,1 and below countries such as Rwanda and Namibia with per capita GDPs of US$748 and US$5,227 respectively in 2017 as compared to Italy’s US$31,953. On the other hand, very few Italians have any direct experience of corruption: just 7% according to TI’s Global Corruption Barometer 2015/16/17.2 Moreover, the cross-country comparison that would be necessary in order to demonstrate scientifically that corruption was relatively significant in Italy is extraordinarily difficult to execute. First, it presupposes that there is consensus on the kinds of acts that fall into the corrupt category – which is notoriously not the case (perhaps not surprisingly, given that, whatever else it is, corruption is a type of rule infringement and rules vary from place to place).3 Second, even if one had the necessary consensus, since ‘corruption’ is, by definition, something bad, and therefore something its perpetrators try to hide, it eludes accurate measurement, rendering all of the most commonly used indicators problematic in one way or another. Judicial records or media reports, for example, can never tell us about anything more than the corruption that has actually come to light. All that said, the fact remains that corruption in public life has for long been widely perceived as an unusually significant problem in Italy – not just by outside observers, with their own standards, but also by Italians themselves4 – and this in itself is a social fact with real consequences. In order to begin to understand why it has been perceived as significant and what the consequences have been, it will be useful to begin by noting that corruption is a kind of behaviour that bears on the boundary between the public and the private and that societies differ in terms of their success in managing this boundary effectively. Historically, the idea of a public–private distinction is one that took root with the end of feudalism, the emergence of the rule-of-law principle and the limited state and the growth of industrial capitalism, and its effective management helps to ensure that the pursuit of wealth and power takes place in an orderly and therefore legitimate fashion. Since the dawn of humanity, human beings have associated the notion of transgressing the boundaries keeping things separate with the idea of uncleanliness (Bratsis, 2003), so, since the emergence of industrial society, the (pre-existing) notion of corruption has become associated with the idea of pursuing wealth and power in ways which, because they transgress the public–private boundary, are illegitimate. Hence the notion of corruption as ‘the abuse of public office for private gain’. In some societies, legitimate state institutions along with widely adhered to principles of transparency and accountability, checks and balances and so forth, help to keep the boundary strong (the states of Scandinavia might be examples). In others, the boundary is more permeable. The weakness of judicial and representative institutions, of civil society and of the media render economic gains insecure, so driving attempts to achieve the necessary security in ways, such as bribery, that transgress the boundary, so weakening it further in a vicious circle (states like Russia might be examples). At the extreme end of the spectrum, the boundary collapses altogether and the state in effect becomes ‘criminalised’ (some of the sub-Saharan dictatorships

Corruption, organised crime and justice  105 might be examples). So a first answer to the question of why corruption has traditionally been seen as more significant in Italy than in some other Western European countries (say) is one that has to do with the relative weakness of her public institutions and therefore with the difficulties that have been placed in the way of effective management of the public–private distinction. In order to understand this weakness and these difficulties, I, first, go back to the circumstances surrounding the creation of the Italian state itself, bearing in mind that it came into existence as the result of a process which – notwithstanding the popular myths surrounding Giuseppe Garibaldi (who has with some justice been described as the first modern celebrity5) – is far more accurately described as an act of conquest than as any kind of genuine popular uprising. The state’s emergence was, in effect, the result of the annexation of the entire peninsula by the House of Savoy – supported by southern landlords, who got a guarantee of social order, and by northern bourgeois interests, who got the elimination of tariff barriers. For the ordinary peasant it meant little more than the addition of oppression by Piedmontese tax collectors to the oppression inflicted by the local landlord (Hine, 1993: 13). The church the peasant attended every Sunday refused to recognise the new state. The peasant had no vote. He remained dependent on the arbitrary authority of local notables, who, in exchange for the maintenance of order, got access to government patronage, which they were able to use in turn to reinforce their local power by managing it on a clientelistic basis. So there was little sense of allegiance to the newly emergent nation-state. Meanwhile, as the nineteenth century progressed and drew to a close, the fact that the growing strength of principles of universalism and political equality stood alongside the reality of clientelism helped to sustain widespread attitudes of popular cynicism towards a state bureaucracy perceived as arbitrary, faceless, inaccessible and corrupt. And if awareness of the divergence between formal and actual rules helped to perpetuate ideas that law and its enforcement is something negotiable (LaPalombara, 1987: 50), then it also helped to undermine commitment to the kinds of civic responsibility, such as volunteering and community engagement, that express and help to build cooperation and trust among citizens. Trust and its lack are self-reinforcing: the absence of trust induces A to take precisely the kinds of action that lead B to conclude that he was right not to trust A in the first place – with the result that B, in turn, acts in ways that reinforce A’s mistrust. A lack of trust, in turn, tends to lead to a proliferation of the formal rules and regulations that are needed to compensate for uncertainty surrounding people’s willingness to behave in accordance with informal norms of responsibility towards each other. But by becoming burdensome, rules and regulations create incentives for corruption, as officials see in them opportunities to do elicit favours to help citizens circumvent them, while citizens see in their burdensome quality the need to collude with officials to the same end. A second answer to the question of why public institutions have traditionally been weak in Italy is one that has to do with the circumstances in which the fall of Fascism and the end of the war came about. The fall of Mussolini in July 1943 led to a two-year period of massive uncertainty for ordinary Italians, who were suddenly faced both with the demise of the man who had given them their sense of nationhood and with a sense of shame that they had believed his bombastic claims. In the power vacuum that ensued, the ordinary Italian was confused as to whom to look to as a point of reference – whether the Kingdom of the South, the Allied military government, the Fascist puppet government, the Germans, the Vatican or the partisans – and as to where the loyalties of the patriotic Italian were now supposed to lie. This had three important general consequences. First, the ‘official ideology’ of post-war republican Italy was both antiFascist and anti-national, both elements finding full expression in the 1948 Constitution.6 If the first element provided for a degree of mutual acceptance between two parties – the Democrazia

106  Corruption, organised crime and justice Cristiana and the Partito Comunista Italiano – that were otherwise profoundly divided, then both it and the second element offered the prospect of redemption and a degree of relief from painful memories of the past. However, ‘the anti-Fascist agreement of the parties of the so-called ‘constitutional arch’ (those who had been responsible for writing the 1948 Constitution) inevitably excluded the parties outside the arch and those among ordinary Italians who looked back on the Fascist experience with a sense of nostalgia’ (Newell, 2019: 139). Second, neither the DC nor the PCI were able to carry out the pedagogical functions of political parties effectively. That is, they were unable to inculcate among members and followers the sense of allegiance to a community whose members have ties and obligations more profound than the issues that divide them, because their basic points of reference were other than the national society: the world-wide Catholic faith in the case of the DC; the international working class in the case of the PCI. Third, in the power vacuum that followed upon the fall of Fascism, the Church and the Resistance movement were the only entities with any real presence in society, the only points of real contact for ordinary Italians, other than the Nazis and the Fascists. The political parties built upon the Church and the Resistance – the DC and the PCI – thus became mass organisations, exercising a profound influence over the reconstruction of social organisations and interest groups, subordinating them to their interests, and, once the war was over, they were able to penetrate the interstices of the state. They thus became the main channels through which interests small and large gained access to the state, helping to reinforce the tendency for allegiances to be partisan and ideological rather than national in focus. Thus it was that, thanks to the consequences of Fascism’s end, cultural legacies from preFascist Italy retained much of their force. If the sense of a national community was relatively weak, then so was a sense of citizenship – the sense that one was entitled to certain rights and subject to certain obligations, regardless of one’s connections or political affiliations. Under these circumstances, both citizens and public officials were apt to find full acceptance of the civic responsibilities that make for strong public institutions – responsibilities involving respect for the law, respect for the rights and opinions of others, participation in community life and paying taxes honestly – not entirely unproblematic: in a situation in which one cannot reasonably be certain that everyone else will play by the rules, then it is at least doubtful that it makes sense to do so oneself. Against this background, the characteristics of the post-war party system created fertile terrain for practices conducive to political corruption. The parties functioned poorly as vehicles for the aggregation of demands, becoming instead channels through which groups were able to transmit to government unaggregated, sectional demands, helping to mobilise electoral support for the parties in exchange. This state of affairs had the important consequence that legislation was extremely fragmented, thanks also to the capacity of the Italian Parliament to produce laws in vast numbers. As we saw in Chapter 2, the Constitution gives the power of legislative initiative to ordinary parliamentarians without qualification, and it stipulates that proposals, once introduced, must be considered in committee. Committee meetings are relatively private affairs, reducing members’ exposure to cross-cutting pressures and making possible, in a way that the full assembly’s size makes impossible, deliberation. Moreover, Parliament’s standing orders enable committees to pass legislation, unless it is referred back, on their own authority. Consequently, Parliament was the focus of much interest-group activity in pursuit of the thousands of leggine (little laws) that would enable them to advance their causes. This made the pursuit of policy agendas of a more general, long-term focus difficult, the policy environment uncertain and, in making investment decisions more risky, it encouraged entrepreneurs, as we saw in Chapter 4, to seek to compensate for the deficiency by cultivating the support of

Corruption, organised crime and justice  107 individual politicians willing to further entrepreneurs’ interests in exchange for support that was not infrequently corrupt. For example, the entrepreneur might help the politician to translate his capacity to assist directly into electoral support or else help him to do so indirectly, by handing over cash, as Della Porta and Vannucci note: Gabriele Serriello, a Neapolitan manager stated: ‘I was obliged to hire innumerable people by the DC and PSI, all strongly recommended. They had no desire whatsoever to work and were incompetent in the majority of cases. In the end it was too much: the labour costs, for that kind of personnel, were too high … So they asked for money and I paid it’. Instead of hiring a hundred clients little disposed to work, Serriello preferred to pay 1.3 billion lire in order to obtain the 350 billion lire contract for the privatisation of municipal refuse collection. (Della Porta and Vannucci, 1997: 242) Thus it was that the post-war years saw the emergence of veritable ‘clans’ bringing together groups of politicians and entrepreneurs, all of whom were able to assist each other in the management and enhancement of the economic and political power of their members through clientele chains running from the top to the bottom of the political system: As McCarthy (1995: 60) points out, Andreotti had a clan, comprising the chemicals industrialist, Nino Rovelli, the building contractors of the Caltagirone family, parts of the Catholic banking sector and numerous politicians such as Sbardella (responsible for Rome) and Salvo Lima (responsible for Sicily), while Berlusconi (who would hardly have been able to make his fortune without political support) belonged to Craxi’s clan. (Newell, 2000: 107–8) As far as one is able to tell (bearing in mind what I said above about the problems of measurement) political corruption in the initial post-war years was, compared to what came later, relatively contained. In the initial post-war years, with the Cold War at its height, the DC in particular was under some pressure to remain relatively ‘clean’ as the price of being able to act as an effective bulwark against Communism and, in any event, obtained the sums that would enable it to meet its funding needs – in vast amounts, by all accounts – from the Americans. Moreover, the corrupt transaction is, as far as transactions in general go, relatively rare, because all else being equal, the parties to it have an incentive to cheat their counterparts based on the fact that neither can have recourse to the public authorities to seek the enforcement of its terms – with the result that unless the trust problem can be overcome, neither will enter into it in the first place. On the other hand, as the years progressed, the situation changed. From the early 1970s, with the development of détente, sources of funding based abroad began to dry up, the office and technological revolutions confronted the parties with new calls on their funds and the development of the welfare state, including the establishment of a fully funded public health service in 1978, created new opportunities for profitable exchanges between politicians and business people (Rhodes, 1997). Moreover, though difficult to establish initially, corrupt relationships are, all else being equal, likely to become more solid and to spread with the passage of time, for corruption is a self-reinforcing phenomenon: an entrepreneur involved in a corrupt transaction (enabling him or her to evade tax liabilities, for example) obtains a cost advantage as compared to his or her competitors, thus creating an incentive for the latter too to contemplate corrupt transactions. As they too begin to be drawn into networks of corrupt exchange, so the resources available to combat it have to be spread increasingly thinly, with the result that, as the costs of corruption (in terms of the risks of exposure) go down, so others are attracted to it and so on. A point may eventually be reached where the trust problem is entirely overcome – as was brought

108  Corruption, organised crime and justice home to one entrepreneur, interested in obtaining permission to build on a piece of land, during the course of a heated exchange: You have to honour the commitment. If you say, I’ll give you the six million when I see the building regulation plan and then you don’t pay you might as well shoot yourself … Afterwards, every time you have to deal with the Commune, the Province or the Region or whatever, they will throw it out. (quoted in Della Porta and Vannucci, 1997: 247) Thus it was (if trends in the numbers of cases reported and exposed are to be relied upon) that, as the years passed, political corruption became increasingly widespread: Figures given by Cazzola (1988) show that from the mid-1970s, reported crimes of corruption and embezzlement involving the public administration rose significantly, going from 412 in 1975 to 1065 in 1985. Meanwhile, annual averages rose from 514 in 1963–75; to 681 for 1976–78; to 808 for 1979–86. As regards press reports of corruption, the influential national daily, la Repubblica, carried reports of 117 separate cases of political corruption between 1976 and 1979; 110 between 1979 and 1983; and 208 between 1983 and 1986 (Cazzola, 1988: 67). (Newell and Bull, 2003: 38) Against this background, it is perhaps not surprising that the extent of the corrupt party funding that was revealed by the great Tangentopoli7 scandal, when it broke in 1992, was as massive as it was, as it had by then, by all accounts, become systemic in many areas of public life (Della Porta, 1993; Della Porta and Vannucci, 1999) – to the extent that when an entrepreneur moved into an area, they might in all probability not wait to be asked for bribe payments but rather pro-actively make enquiries as to whom monies were to be paid. If this seems an odd attitude to an outsider, then it seems considerably less odd as soon as one remembers that, if entrepreneurs are under an obligation to behave legally, then they are also under obligations to their workers and their shareholders: The system of tendering is strongly influenced by the obligations that the administrators, or those who decide on the award of contracts, are able to impose on firms. I did not freely choose to give money to these people, but once I had set up my business with sophisticated and costly machinery and taken on a large number of highly qualified people, it was essential for me to win public contracts if the firm was to survive (interview with the entrepreneur Ugo Fossati in Carlucci, 1992; cited in Della Porta, 1993: 232, my translation). Tangentopoli was by no means the first corruption scandal to hit the newspaper headlines in post-war Italy, but it was the largest. It therefore had massive consequences, leading to the disintegration of the traditional parties of government and helping – with the collapse of the Berlin Wall and against the background of several important social and political changes which matured at this time8 – to bring about a transformation of the party system. The scandal itself first broke on 17 February 1992, when Mario Chiesa, the head of the Milanese old people’s home, the Pio Albergo Trivulzio, was caught in the act of taking a bribe from the proprietor of a small cleaning firm and, having asked to go to the bathroom, was then caught flushing the proceeds of several other bribes, down the toilet. A member of the Partito Socialista Italiano and of the faction headed by Paolo Pilittieri, brother-in-law of party leader and former Prime Minister, Bettino Craxi, Chiesa seems initially to have expected to be able to rely on the party to get him off the hook: Normally the clientelist system was such that when members got into trouble with the judicial authorities, the party would quickly erect a large protective wall around them [by, for

Corruption, organised crime and justice  109 instance, getting them elected to Parliament, where they would enjoy parliamentary immunity]. But Chiesa had been caught ‘with his hands in the marmalade’ and a general election was due on 5 April. Frequently the object of media satire for its shaky grasp of probity,9 the party abandoned him to his fate. He was, in Craxi’s words, ‘un mariuolo’ (‘a little rascal’) who had thrown ‘a shadow over the entire image of a party which, in fifty years in Milan – not five but fifty – [had] never had an administrator convicted for grave crimes against the public administration’. Faced with this evidence that his political career was in ruins, Chiesa decided to empty the sack. (Newell, 2006: 2) What then happened was that, given the sheer extent of the network of ‘mutually beneficial linkages’ (Waters, 1994: 170) between the political parties and powerful economic groups that existed in the city, Chiesa’s confessions implicated others, whose confessions in their turn implicated a still wider group, so that the scandal as it unfolded and grew larger gave the effect of a set of collapsing dominoes or the ripple effect of a stone thrown into a pond. Judicial investigators have the power to hold suspects on remand if there is a risk of them tampering with evidence, escaping, or posing a danger to the public. This may have played a part in the sheer speed with which the scandal unfolded – by May it had touched leading politicians in the major governing parties and by December, Craxi himself – creating for those involved in it a sort of prisoner’s dilemma. That is, those held on remand may have reasoned that they in effect had a choice between remaining in prison or release if they confessed implicating those still at large; those still at large, not knowing if they had been implicated or to what extent, that their interests might best be served by turning themselves in early (Bull and Newell, 1995: 74; Nelken, 1996: 109; Newell, 2000: 56; 2006: 3). From one point of view, Tangentopoli was the result of fortuitous, ‘chance’ events. Chiesa was ultimately implicated and started the ball rolling because his ex-wife had complained that he was not respecting the terms of their divorce settlement (thus drawing attention to his bank accounts) and because the above-mentioned cleaning-firm proprietor had been persuaded to meet him with a briefcase containing a number of listening devices. From another point of view it was almost ‘bound’ to happen sooner or later given the collapse of the Berlin Wall and the consequent transformation of the PCI into a non-Communist party with a new name. This is so for two reasons. First, as we saw in Chapter 2, the judiciary had come to be staffed by judges and prosecutors who, despite Italy’s civil-law tradition, saw themselves as problem-solvers not mere interpreters of statute, and political corruption was a well-known and widely condemned problem.10 However, the PCI, especially under Enrico Berlinguer, its general secretary from 1972 to 1984, had always made the so-called ‘moral question’ one of its own great battle cries. Consequently, before the 1990s, there had always been a risk that a concerted judicial campaign against corruption of the kind that underlay Tangentopoli11 would play into the hands of the left. Second, as we also saw in Chapter 2, in the past, politicians had often managed to use informal relations of connivance with members of the judiciary to quietly ‘bury’ cases politically inconvenient to them (the Italian term for this was insabbiamento or ‘covering with sand’). Following the collapse of the Berlin Wall, neither of these conditions any longer held. The Cold War was at an end, the Communists had declared that they were no longer such and the 1992 election, which took place seven weeks after Chiesa’s arrest, revealed that the DC had lost one of the main planks (anti-Communism) on which it had hitherto always been able to appeal for votes: it fell to below 30 per cent for the first time in its history. The election also revealed that the idea of a campaign to moralise public life had fired the public imagination: the newly emergent LN, campaigning against Roma ladrona (thieving Rome), had shot up from two to 80 parliamentary seats, while in the south, the anti-Mafia Rete (the Network) had taken 15. It was clear that quietly burying cases would no longer be as straightforward as it had been in the past.

110  Corruption, organised crime and justice Thus it was that, as the scandal and the investigations unfolded, capturing ever larger numbers of politicians in its net, it took on all the characteristics of a morality play featuring an epic struggle of good against evil, with Di Pietro and his colleagues cast in the role of David against Goliath. Exposed, day after day, to a barrage of media reports of the investigations and ensuing trials, ordinary citizens were delighted to see so many powerful and once untouchable politicians at last getting their comeuppance – people for whom they had voted, year after year, not because they had been in any way positively attracted to them, but simply because they had felt they had no alternative. The sense of joyously righteous indignation was palpable. It was apparent, then, that beneath the unfolding of Tangentopoli, a massive cultural clash was going on. On the one side, stood the judiciary and its principal representatives, inspired by the ideals of the 1948 Constitution and by a vision of what a robust Italian democracy – ­committed to the rule of law and ethical rectitude in public life – could and should look like. On the other side stood the politicians who sought to defend themselves. Their point of view was no better expressed than by the suicide note written by Sergio Moroni, the Socialist deputy who killed himself on 2 September 1992: An enormous veil of hypocrisy (shared by all) has for many years shrouded the mode of functioning of the parties and the means whereby they have been financed. The establishment of regulations and laws that one knows cannot be respected is a typically Italian way of doing things – one that is inspired by the tacit assumption that at the same time it will be possible to agree upon the establishment of procedures and behaviours which, however, violate the very same regulations …. I began my political activity in the PSI when I was very young, only 17 years of age. I still remember passionately many political and ideological battles, but I made a mistake in accepting the ‘system’, believing that accepting contributions and help for the party was justified in a context in which this was the normal practice. (Colaprico, 1996: 31–2, my translation and emphasis) It was a position which, if not laudable, was comprehensible, based as it was on the unconscious recognition that righteous indignation always involves an element of bad faith (‘let he who is without sin cast the first stone’), that, if violation of rules is widespread and generally tolerated, then to condemn only some for so doing is to fail to uphold the universal norm of reciprocity. The consequence of Tangentopoli was to destroy the traditional governing parties thanks to processes that were financial, organisational and electoral. Having run up massive debts and finding their illegal sources of funding now cut off, they quickly became bankrupt. Having been publicly exposed as vehicles not for the pursuit of ideals but for the pursuit of upward mobility and the realisation of personal material ambitions and no longer able to serve as such, they were abandoned by venal and idealistic members alike. In local, provincial and regional elections held in the period leading up to the general election of 1994, they were reduced to the small change of Italian politics. That election, held on the basis of a new, largely ‘first-past-the-post’, electoral system, saw a transformation of the party system and the start of the long period of political ascendency of Silvio Berlusconi as the leader of his ‘personal party’, Forza Italia, and of the coalition of the centre right. In the 30-odd years since Tangentopoli, political corruption has remained a significant issue in Italian politics for three reasons. First, while Tangentopoli had captured the public imagination, the enthusiasm could not be sustained forever, and, in any event, a judicial campaign of moralisation could never do anything more than identify and punish perpetrators. It could not

Corruption, organised crime and justice  111 address the cultural and institutional shortcomings that provided the basis for perpetrators’ actions in the first place. Indeed, as Justice Piercamillo Davigo has suggested, the effects of Tangentopoli may even have been negative: ‘The repression of criminals has the same effects as those typically exerted by predators in processes of natural selection, namely, improvement of the abilities of the prey. We caught only the slowest prey, leaving free those who ran fastest’ (Barbacetto, Gomez and Travaglio, 2003: 678). While the less ‘adept’ or capable corrupt agents were caught and therefore eliminated from the ‘corruption environment’, the more talented ones survived. (Vannucci, 2009: 242–3) Second, therefore, one has to reckon with the shortcomings of the administration of justice, discussed below, and, again, it may be that the effects of Tangentopoli have been if anything negative, with the ineffectiveness of attempts at prosecution – writing in 2000, former Justice Gherardo Colombo suggested that of 3,200 defendants, 2,200 would get away with their crimes thanks to the statute of limitations (Vannucci, 2009: 242) – having created a ‘sense of impunity’ which lowers the perceived costs of corrupt activity. Finally, the long ascendency of Silvio Berlusconi in the years following Tangentopoli is a third reason why corruption has remained a significant problem. The agenda setter in Italian politics, whether in government or in opposition, Berlsuconi had a role in public life that has had three major consequences for the corruption issue. First, while the period since he left office in 2011 has seen some concerted efforts to tackle the problem, especially with the Autorità Anticorruzione under Raffaele Cantone (see Newell, 2018) – and while the issue has undoubtedly been one of the most significant driving forces behind the emergence and growth of the M5S – the period prior to that saw few, if any significant measures taken. While this might seem surprising in view of the depth of the public indignation revealed by Tangentopoli, in reality it is not. From an immediate (though obviously not from a broader) perspective, corruption is a victimless crime. As we saw at the beginning, few ordinary Italians have any personal experience of it. Measures to combat it involve technical questions of little political value in terms of their capacity to mobilise support by being publicised through the mass media. As we shall see, the measures in the field that were taken, were as likely as not to exacerbate the problem as to diminish it, because they were designed to help Berlusconi, the Prime Minister, resolve his own, personal legal difficulties. Herein – second – lies the clue as to why, despite himself being under investigation for corruption-related offences, he was able to get himself elected Prime Minister in 2001 and again in 2008, for a large part of his appeal and his claim to public office was based on his assertions that he was an ‘outsider’ capable of engineering a ‘new Italian miracle’ but subject to a witch-hunt by politically motivated prosecutors attempting to abuse their positions to undermine him. In this way he was able to deflect popular resentments once expressed in strong support for action against politicians accused of corruption, focussing it instead on the allegedly arbitrary power of judges. Third, this then made it extremely difficult for the centre left to take up and campaign on the theme of probity in public life, for it was impossible to do so without prompting questions about Berlusconi’s role in politics with the conflict of interests that it involved and, therefore, impossible to do without being accused of attacking him personally and thus (when he was in office) of behaving undemocratically. And in any event the centre left was aware that for many, if not most of its supporters and potential supporters, Berlusconi’s personal circumstances was not an issue that could arouse much passion.

112  Corruption, organised crime and justice Organised crime Like corruption, organised crime is extremely difficult to quantify, because what does and does not belong in the category is not straightforward. If the term ‘organisation’ denotes a structure of roles existing independently of their incumbents, among whom there are stable and routine patterns of interaction, then it varies in terms of formality: at one end of the spectrum, there are highly informal organisations, such as groups of friends, street-corner groups, delinquent gangs and so forth, which do not have a consciously decided-upon structure for the achievement of some collective goal. At the other end of the spectrum, there are highly formal organisations, such as business firms and universities which have a clear division of labour, which limit entrance and which have explicitly stated rules and organisational objectives. This means that organisation is a matter of degree and that only with difficulty can the term ‘organised crime’ be used to distinguish one type of crime from another. As Donald R. Cressey (1972: 12) put it: ‘There is some degree of organization even in a group of two middle-class girls who, on the way home from school, drift into Woolworths and shoplift some lipsticks’. Whatever one chooses to include, or exclude, from the category, in contexts like those of Western Europe with their relatively efficient agencies of law enforcement, all else being equal, one would expect criminal organisations to remain small-scale, thanks to the illegality of their activities. Obliged ‘to operate under the constant threat of being arrested and having their assets confiscated by law enforcement agencies’, criminal organisations would be expected to find it necessary to reduce ‘the number of customers and employees (which are vulnerable points of information leak) … [in order] to reduce their vulnerability to law enforcement efforts’. For the same reason, one would expect opportunities for vertical integration, either upstream or downstream, to remain limited (Paoli, 2003a: 34–5). In short, the lack of trust – a minimum degree of which, as we have seen, is necessary for any transaction at all – places severe limits on the extent to which, under most circumstances, any individual organisation can grow. This means paradoxically, that phenomena such as drug trafficking are likely to be difficult to eliminate, not because law enforcement agencies are faced with powerful large-scale criminal organisations but because they are actually faced with the opposite situation. That is, since the drugs market is supplied by large numbers of small-scale traffickers, each with his or her own supplier, even the seizure of large amounts of drugs rarely has an impact on availability. For example, ‘in 1994 over five tons of cocaine were seized on the outskirts of Milan. As a key expert put it, “the news of the day was not the seizure, but the fact that the Milanese market did not run out of cocaine even for half a day”’ (Paoli, 2003a: 37). Finally, organised crime and corruption are likely to be intimately connected in two ways. First, in an effort to secure impunity for themselves, criminals have an obvious incentive to attempt to bribe law-enforcement officers, who, especially if they are poorly paid, will be more vulnerable than those in other professional categories to bribery, bearing in mind that they come into more frequent contact with criminals. Second, criminals may be willing to offer the threat of violence as a means of underwriting corrupt transactions. This underwriting function is the equivalent, in the world of illegal transactions, of the part played by the public authorities in the world of transactions of the legal kind. In both cases, the threat of sanctions serves to minimise the risk of non-compliance by either party, so facilitating the transaction itself. As we shall see, these general reflections on organised crime are confirmed empirically in the Italian case, but first it is necessary to deal with the common stereotype which, presumably because of the Mafia phenomenon and the way it has been exploited by the entertainment industry, would more closely associate Italy than other developed countries with the phenomenon of organised crime. Comparative data, with all their difficulties, point away from the idea that

Corruption, organised crime and justice  113 threats commonly associated with it are more likely to be found in Italy than in similar countries. In 2016, the number of intentional homicides per 100,000 of population in Italy was, at 0.7, lower than in Finland (1.4), Germany (1.2) the United Kingdom (1.2) and the United States (5.4) not to mention such non-Western countries as South Africa (34.0) and Venezuela (56.3) for example (World Bank, n.d.). UN data suggest that you are more likely to be the victim of serious assault in England and Wales or in France, Belgium and Germany than you are in Italy.12 The same data source for the same year suggests you are about twice as likely to be a victim of theft in Denmark, Sweden and Finland as you are in Italy. Of course this might be due to a paradox: that theft is in fact a rarity in the three Scandinavian countries and that precisely for this reason people are more likely to report it there, but note that the same data also suggest higher rates of theft in France and in England and Wales than in Italy.13 Enough has probably been said to make the point: comparative data ‘do not suggest that Italy’s rates of crime and illegality are especially unusual’ (Paoli and Wolfgang, 2001). Even at the height of the so-called ‘Mafia War’ in the 1980s, homicide rates remained below 5 in 100,000 (United Nations, 2010: 254). This, then, begs the question: Why has organised crime, as an issue, traditionally had a high profile on the agenda of Italian politics? The answer, I think, is four-fold. First, it is a localised phenomenon with significant social and political implications for the areas in which it is most in evidence. Second, given the specific forms it has taken, it has often seemed to raise questions of governance and stability, thus raising, for policy-makers, issues which go beyond the ‘normal’ ones of public security. Third, it has at various times led to attention-grabbing acts of violence which have therefore been given very high media profiles. Fourth, as an issue, it has tended to be perceived and discussed in close connection with more general problems, especially ones associated with the north–south divide. I shall consider each of these issues in turn in relation to the most high-profile of the manifestations of organised-crime in Italy: especially the Mafia but also the ‘Ngrangheta and the Camorra. With regard to the first issue, I note, first, that each is rooted in a specific area – the Mafia in Sicily, the ‘Ngrangheta in Calabria and the Camorra in Naples – and therefore, while they have been associated with criminal activity elsewhere in Italy and abroad, it is misleading to think of them as underworld multinational corporations, well integrated, with sophisticated internal divisions of labour. The idea clashes with the expectations of small scale, discussed above, and with the empirical finding that the numbers of persons reported for membership of them show extreme variation even within the areas where they are most in evidence (Figure 5.1). In fact, the available evidence suggests that they are not singular entities, as might be inferred from the individual labels used for them, rather, they are each made up of several different groups with their own, jealously guarded, ‘turf’, where their unitary nature – what cohesion there is among the groups – stems from the simple recognition on the part of their members that they have certain aims, beliefs and concerns in common.14 So they are examples of what Durkheim (1893) called ‘mechanical’ as opposed to ‘organic’ solidarity,15 and, while their commonality and their mutual recognition facilitates cooperation among them from time to time, they have rarely been able to develop overarching structures of command and coordination, which, after all, presuppose the existence of power centres, separate from the groups, with the capacity to impose decisions upon them (Paoli, 2003b). As such, they seek to control territory. That is, within the specific geographical area assumed by the members of a group and by the members of other groups to fall within its purview, the group uses the threat of violence to accumulate wealth and power. It is able to do this, not only by trading in illegal commodities, notably drugs, but by running protection rackets, through which it ‘taxes’ economic activity, by underwriting contracts, from which it extracts rents, and by settling disputes, which serves to reinforce its power and thus its capacity to ‘tax’ and extract

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rents in a vicious circle. Consequently, Mafia-type groups have traditionally sought to regulate the economic life of the areas under their control and thereby, although localised, they have often had very significant impacts on the communities where they have been strong. That is to say, their power and influence has often been such that community residents, though perhaps fearful and resentful of them, have found themselves acting in ways that perpetuate the power and influence that obliged them to submit to the groups’ dictates in the first place. In order to appreciate the significance of this, it is necessary to understand that the groups are essentially the product of contexts where, historically, for reasons of culture and geography, the post-Unification Italian state found it difficult to assert its authority against traditional power structures. Viewed as a foreign imposition, the authorities faced hostility and suspicion. Finding it difficult, therefore, to effectively enforce the rights they had formally been set up to guarantee, they failed to generate public confidence in their capacity to do so, thus undermining their actual capacity and so on. The Mafia and its counterparts in Calabria and Naples therefore provided, as a private good, that protection which the state struggled to offer as a public good. Using the threat of violence to underwrite contracts and resolve disputes, Mafia groups offered a certain guarantee of social order and, through extortion, were able to enjoy a degree of popular acquiescence in the areas where they were strong. As ex-mafioso Gaspare Mutolo said: When the entrepreneur then gets in touch and pays, he sometimes benefits too: first, because a friendship develops between the person who goes to collect the monthly payment, and the entrepreneur, who is thus able to see that the local mafioso is a normal person who behaves that way for the money; and secondly because he has the guarantee that if something is stolen from him, those in mafia circles will make it their business to see that he gets back what has been stolen … So it is not the case that the entrepreneur only loses: sometimes he gains. With the development of such a relationship, naturally, when a lady or a man comes to me and says, ‘Listen, my son is about to get married and needs a job’, I take the matter up among these factories and I find work for him. (CPM, 1993: 1223, my translation) So, in the areas of their greatest influence, Mafia groups have traditionally both expressed and reinforced attitudes and patterns of behaviour which have kept the authorities weak. Drawing

Corruption, organised crime and justice  115 power from a lack of confidence in and hostility towards the authorities, their power has in turn reinforced omertà or the ‘conspiracy of silence’, even where they are much disliked. Thereby, they have been strengthened, as even those opposed to omertà have been obliged to come to terms with it and so diminish even further the capacity of the agencies of law enforcement to provide the guarantees that citizens legitimately demand. This, then, throws a spotlight on the second issue: the questions of governance and stability raised by the groups in their areas of strength, for in such areas they have struck at the very heart of the state’s authority. By enabling them to pose as an alternative source of the legitimate exercise of force, their power has implicitly challenged the state’s claim to a monopoly in this area, and, precisely because of this, the state has sometimes found it easier to seek ‘peaceful coexistence’ with the Mafia rather than its complete elimination, relying on it for help in maintaining order.16 Meanwhile, politicians who have accepted Mafia-controlled votes and other illegal favours have found that, by putting themselves on the wrong side of the law, they have deprived themselves of the law’s protection and so been obliged to defend the organisation’s interests whenever this has been demanded of them. ‘It is perhaps not surprising then that the extent of Mafia infiltration of the institutions of local government is such that between 1991 and May 2005, no fewer than 135 town councils (of which all but one were in the South) were dissolved because of suspected infiltration of this type (Mareso and Serpone, 2005)’ (Newell, 2010: 166). Third, then, Mafia and similar groups have sometimes been involved in spectacular acts of violence. On the one hand, while their power and influence rests on the credible threat of violence, actual violence is something that they seek to use sparingly, for it conveys the message that their authority has been challenged and obliges the authorities to intervene even while being necessary to restore the credibility of its threatened use. On the other hand, the potential for violent outbursts is never far below the surface in typical Mafia-type organisations, for, if the status contracts by which they secure their internal cohesion allow for the brutal exploitation of subordinates by leaders, then the requirement for secrecy (and therefore the fact that information circulates within groups on a strictly ‘need-to-know’ basis) means that paranoia among members is acute (Newell, 2018: 92–3; Dickie, 2004: 6). 1992 was a year in which Mafia violence was especially spectacular, seeing, as it did, the murder of Giovanni Falcone who in 1986 and 1987 had led the prosecution in what became known as the ‘Maxi Trial’ of numerous Mafia suspects and who, at the time of his assassination on 23 May, was working as Director General of the Department for Penal Affairs at the Ministry of Justice. His killing was followed, on 19 July, by the murder of his friend and collaborator, another well-known public prosecutor, Paolo Borsellino. Given their high profiles, the two men’s deaths immediately became iconic both of the Mafia’s power and of the state’s struggle against it. The killings had been preceded, in 1991, by the failed attempt (thanks in part to pressure from Falcone) of lawyers acting on behalf of several ‘Maxi Trial’ defendants to secure the release of the latter before the Court of Cassation and by the Mafia killing, on 12 March 1992, of Salvo Lima. Lima had been the then Prime Minister, Giulio Andreotti’s, ‘right-hand man’ in Sicily. The two men had been counted upon, in vain, to ensure the appointment of Corrado Carnevale, known as ‘the sentence killer’, to oversee the Court of Cassation’s review of the ‘Maxi Trial’ sentences. The assassinations were followed, on 17 September 1992, by the Mafia killing of Ignazio Salvo, a wealthy businessmen who, together with his cousin, Nino, had been given a lucrative concession for the collection of taxes in Sicily in exchange for loyalty to Lima and the Andreotti faction of the DC. The assassinations of Falcone and Borsellino were thus revealing of the close and intricate connections that had by then been consolidated between criminal, economic and political power at the highest levels, provoked massive public outrage and led to a significant change of gear in the public authorities’ efforts to repress organised crime (see Catanzaro, 1993).

116  Corruption, organised crime and justice One of the most respected students of the Mafia phenomenon, Salvatore Lupo (2007: 298) attributes the aforementioned and other dramatic instances of violence around about this time to the ‘demonstration effect’ of the earlier terrorist activities of the Red Brigades and the extreme right that had famously characterised the so-called ‘years of lead’. Violence necessarily rendered the issue of organised crime a high-profile political issue by making it extremely visible, by provoking social alarm, by fuelling discussion and debate about the quality of the country’s public institutions and by generating public demands for adequate responses. Since the early 1990s, the number of killings has declined dramatically, with apparently many fewer instances of ‘turf wars’ between rival groups and a seeming end to assassinations of those with high profiles in public life. And yet organised crime has not disappeared as a significant political issue either from the point of view of its media profile or from the point of view of its status as an actual problem. In the first place, from time-to-time, killings continue to occur; from time to time, allegations of collusion between individual politicians and ‘Ngrangheta, Camorra and Mafia groups become public and, from time to time, high-profile criminal suspects are arrested. One very notable instance occurred in 2006 with the capture of Bernardo Provenzano, an event that was significant not merely for the suspect’s identity, the considerable power that had been attributed to him or the fact that he had been a fugitive for many decades, but more importantly because it aroused considerable public curiosity: it came after many years of relative calm in terms of numbers of Mafia-related homicides. People wondered who would take the place of a man to whom had been attributed the status of ‘boss of bosses’ in the world of the Mafia; journalists wondered how the shabby and unsophisticated profile of the man was to be reconciled with his status as the supposed head of the huge, fearsome and apparently omnipotent organisation many imagined the Mafia to be. In short, Provenzano’s arrest, like other similar instances, provoked considerable media attention and concomitant public discussion. In the second place, even though organised crime now hits the headlines less frequently than it did during the early 1990s, it remains a significant issue because of the way in which it is an integral part of the social contexts which, historically, have given rise to it. As Lupo has argued, in relation to the Mafia, its power is embedded, that is, deeply ‘rooted’, ‘encapsulated’, ‘lodged’ in Sicilian society, situated not only in its depths but also in its visible domains. It could not exist if not by intertwining itself with the more visible and formally organised domains of power in politics, the economy and public institutions. It exists because it carries out, in part, their functions (public security, the underwriting of certain economic transactions, the right to raise taxes) these being in most cases – in some form – delegated. The word mafia has always referred, it cannot but refer, to a multifaceted phenomenon, which operates on various levels, involving actors of a range of types or statuses. (Lupo, 2007: 306, my translation) For this reason it remains very difficult to root out, as a focus on clearly identifiable criminal groups such as ‘Cosa Nostra’ neglects the broader social networks of corruption and complicity on which they rely for their power, while a focus on the latter risks depriving of due attention efforts to eliminate the former. Thus I come to the fourth reason for the traditionally high profile occupied by organised crime as an issue in Italy: its close connection with narratives surrounding the north–south divide. The so-called ‘Southern Question’, rooted in the considerable economic and therefore social disparities between north and south, has existed since Unification. The unifiers of Italy came to identify it as a ‘Question’ – as a political issue worthy of analysis and discussion – thanks to what they perceived as its implications for the creation of a ‘modern state’, understood as one capable of sustaining allegiance to the constitutional and liberal values – of universalism,

Corruption, organised crime and justice  117 guaranteed rights and equality before the law – that would give it the strength to meet the multiple challenges of Italian and European industrial development. The most important government ministers, industrialists and intellectuals who set the public agenda in the politics of the new state were northerners who therefore saw the roots of the Question as being ultimately cultural in nature. Thus, in the famous concluding statement to the Lettere meridionali, published in 1875, the parliamentarian, Pasquale Villari, noted: ‘the poor man who wastes away in the hovels of Naples can say to us and you: After the unification of Italy you’ve got no way out – either turn us into civilized people or we’ll turn you into barbarians’ (quoted in Moe, 1998: 54–5, 60). In his contribution to Sicilia nel 1876, published two years later, Villari’s fellow parliamentarian, Leopoldo Franchetti is explicit on the point: The coexistence of Sicilian civilization and that of central and northern Italy in the same nation is incompatible with the prosperity of the nation and, in the long run, with its very existence, for it produces a weakness that renders it vulnerable to disintegration from the slightest push from outside. One of these two civilizations must therefore disappear in those parts of it which are incompatible with the other. And we believe that for any Sicilian of good faith and moderate intelligence there can be no doubt as to which of the two must make room for the other. (quoted in Moe, 1998: 68) Against this background, it was perhaps not surprising that the Mafia, the ‘Ngrangheta and the Camorra came to be viewed as integral to the Southern Question for they were phenomena quite alien to northern middle-class liberals. As Denis Mack Smith has noted, ‘northerners in general had been so ignorant of southern Italy that … they had not quite understood what it would mean to encounter 90 per cent illiteracy, a thoroughly feudal countryside, an unintelligible language, and ways of behaviour associated with the Neapolitan camorra and the mafia of western and central Sicily’ (1968: 364–5). This would have made it difficult for them to see these, and other contra legem phenomena in the south, notably banditry, for what they actually were – a form of rebellion against and cultural resistance to the authority of the new state – as opposed to something much more inchoate, as ‘nothing but “mass delinquency” and barbarism’ (Hobsbawm, 1978: 21). They would – through the publication of such works as those by Colajanni (1885; 1900), Cutrera (1900), Alongi (1887) and Franchetti (1877), and of course more recent works – gradually have come to understand that the Mafia and similar phenomena reflected the defence of traditional ways of life against the intrusions of foreign authorities and that ‘once a man is on the run, therefore, he is naturally protected by the peasants and by the weight of local conventions which stands for “our” law – custom, blood-feud or whatever it might be – against “theirs”, and “our” justice against that of the rich’ (Hobsbawm, 1978: 16). Thus it is that ever since Unification, the phenomenon of organised crime has been inextricably bound up with the issue of ‘what to do about the south’: a phenomenon which, objectively, exerts downward pressure on inward investment in the area, thus obstructing the resolution of its economic and social problems and which, at the level of stereotypes, feeds into popular narratives (on which the emergent Northern League built its fortunes) according to which the south is a place ‘characterized by a lack of civic commitment among (its inhabitants) who supposedly react passively to the influence which the Mafia exercises over the territory’ (Parini, 2000: 10). The administration of justice The judicial system has had a high profile on the agenda of Italian politics in recent years not only because of its obvious connections with the even more high-profile issues considered in

118  Corruption, organised crime and justice the previous two sections, but also because of questions surrounding ‘fairness’ and the extent to which it guarantees the rights of defendants, matters that have implications for public confidence in the authorities generally. Here, public attitudes have tended to be infused with heavy doses of populism and therefore somewhat contradictory. On the one hand, many citizens have been driven by an insistence on garantismo (a word almost impossible to translate but which refers to robust protection against possible abuses of power by the authorities) when it comes to their own brushes with the law but, on the other hand, by attitudes of giustizialismo (a word equally impossible to translate but which captures the idea of ‘zero-tolerance’ approaches which might even border on summary justice) when it comes to dealing with allegations against perceived ‘elites’ or ‘outsiders’ such as migrants. Second, there have been issues surrounding the efficiency of the administration of justice and especially the speed with which proceedings take place, a matter with obvious implications for the country’s capacity to attract inward investment and therefore to resolve problems of low growth and the huge public debt (currently running at 150 per cent of GDP). Finally, during the years of the Berlusconi ascendency, the justice issue provided the substance of a number of especially heated debates thanks to the entrepreneur’s apparent determination, when Prime Minister, to drive forward, in the area, reforms that would help him to resolve legal difficulties he faced in his capacity as a private citizen. With regard to the first issue, it hardly needs stating that essential to ensuring compliance with the law is the perception that laws themselves and their enforcement are respectful of rights designed to eliminate the possibility of arbitrary exercises of power, so rights go the heart of the way in which the Italian system of justice is designed and operates, especially rights to have one’s case dealt with by judicial personnel who are independent of outside influences and impartial between the parties in dispute. The very real dilemmas to which such principles can sometimes give rise was brought home very forcefully by the circumstances surrounding the outcome of the ‘Maxi Trial’ against the Mafia, referred to above. In 1991, it transpired that a number of the defendants would, while awaiting the outcome of appeals they had lodged with the Court of Cassation, have to be released from prison, owing to the limits, in the Code of Criminal Procedure, on the length of time for which they could be held on remand. The problem was that the defendants in question were highly dangerous and accused of grave crimes. Thus it was that the Minister of Justice, Claudio Martelli, and the Minister of the Interior, Vincenzo Scotti, concluded that they had no alternative but to issue a decree law in relation to the Code, the effect of which would be to bring the men back to prison – giving rise to suggestions that the ministers had destroyed the independence of the judiciary by issuing what amounted to an arrest warrant of dubious constitutionality (Catanzaro, 1993: 244–5). Otherwise, the principles of judicial independence and impartiality, together with the connected rights, are underpinned, first, by the free-standing Consiglio Superiore della Magistratura discussed in Chapter 2, with responsibility for the recruitment, appointment, promotion and transfer of judicial personnel as well as for disciplinary proceedings against them and two thirds of whose members are elected by justices themselves. Both judges and public prosecutors (with responsibility for pursuing investigations and assembling evidence in relation to alleged offences) are recruited from among law graduates on the basis of open competitions and are therefore part of the same professional body. Consequently, there are a number of safeguards in place to ensure their independence of each other. Thus, the giudice delle indagini preliminari (judge for the preliminary investigations, GIP) whose role is to ensure that the prosecutor’s evidence-gathering is carried on legally, may not also act as the giudice dell’udienza preliminare (judge for the preliminary hearing, GUP). This is the judge to whom the pubblico ministero (prosecutor, PM) must apply, at the conclusion of his or her investigations, either for a ruling that the case be dropped or that it be sent for trial and, in the latter case, the GUP must examine the application in the presence of the defendant and his or her legal representative.

Corruption, organised crime and justice  119 As a civil-law system embodying the inquisitorial model, where trial judges make decisions of fact as well as of law and where the main source of law is statutes, Italian justice seeks to ensure the independence and impartiality of trial judges by insisting that they may not have been investigating judges in the cases they hear, that they must hear both incriminating and exculpating evidence through procedures of cross examination by the PM and defence, that their decisions must be accompanied by a formal, written, statement of the reasons for them and that there is an automatic right of appeal: these go from the tribunale to the corte d’appello (or from the corte d’assise to the corte d’assise d’appello in the case of the most serious criminal offences) and from there (though only on grounds of legal interpretation) to the Corte di Cassazione (Court of Cassation). Finally, the requirement for judicial independence and impartiality that is embodied in the right to be tried by a ‘natural judge’ (that is, one nominated before the event to try all cases of the kind in question, not one appointed ad hoc, to try the specific case in question) is underpinned by defining the jurisdiction of the courts and prosecutors’ offices territorially, through a series of circondari each of which, in turn, belongs to one or the other of 29 distretti giudiziari (judicial districts). Despite all this, critics have in recent years questioned the system’s capacity for independent justice, impartially administered. One major, and ongoing, concern arises from the circumstance that judges and prosecutors often work in neighbouring offices frequently switching between roles and that the main body of evidence trial judges will have to go on arises from the work of their investigating colleagues. Given this, and given that judges must arrive at conclusions concerning facts as well as law, the issue is how to ensure that trials can do more than merely confirm the conclusions reached by the PM during the pre-trial investigation phase. Then, although there are limits on prosecutors’ powers of independent initiative in relation to evidence coming to their attention outside the course of their official duties, they can acquire evidence not only through the reports of others but also on their own initiative. Although there are strict criteria that have to be fulfilled before a judge can issue an injunction enabling a PM to hold a suspect on remand, injunctions are made entirely on the basis of evidence supplied by the PM, and the defence has no opportunity to contest them before they become effective. Finally, when applying for a case to be sent for trial, a PM has to formulate a specific charge – implying a certain discretion, as he or she must inevitably decide which of a large number of laws, with varying penal implications, the charges are to be brought under. So the concern is how to ensure that trials do not end up merely confirming charges of guilt that might potentially have been pursued with a persecutory intent. A first attempt to grapple with the problem came with the 1988 reform of the Code of Criminal Procedure which sought to borrow from common-law systems and the adversarial model to establish the principle that the only evidence admissible in trials was to be that adduced by the prosecution and defence through their activities of public debate and cross-examination at the trial itself. In particular, only in exceptional circumstances would evidence otherwise acquired by the court be admissible, as would statements made to prosecutors during the investigation phase but which the person concerned was unwilling to confirm when cross-examined at the trial phase. Unfortunately for their proponents, many of the specific changes to the Code then fell foul of the Constitutional Court, which in essence found them incompatible with the fundamental assumptions of an inquisitorial system in which it is the responsibility of the judge to ascertain the truth. Given this, the Court reasoned, it was essentially irrational to stipulate rules of procedure limiting the capacity of the judge to ascertain facts necessary to arrive at just decisions and as such was inconsistent with a system based on the rule of law (Constitutional Court, sentence 111/1993).

120  Corruption, organised crime and justice Once again, the matter highlighted a major dilemma associated with the administration of justice, as it had inevitable implications for the potential outcome of organised-crime trials where the prosecution’s case relied on the evidence of informers – as well as having implications, in this particular case, for relations between the different branches of government. Normally when the Constitutional Court finds statutes wanting, it prefers, when it can, to issue binding interpretations (rulings about how statutes must be interpreted) rather than striking them down altogether, with Parliament preferring to amend legislation found unconstitutional rather than attempting to save it by amending the Constitution itself, for such an approach implies a conflict between the branches of government – whereas binding interpretations and legislative amendments enable Court and legislature to work together relatively harmoniously in the process of law making. They were unable to do so in this particular case: in 1999 Parliament took steps to save the principles that had been introduced with the 1988 reform by amending article 111 of the Constitution, which now stipulates that ‘in criminal trials, evidence may only be established according to the principle of confrontation between the parties’ and that ‘no defendant may be found guilty on the basis of testimony given by witnesses who have freely and deliberately avoided crossexamination by the defence’. Unfortunately from the point of view of strengthening the citizen’s right to an independent and impartial system of justice, it was not obvious that this development resolved the problem, for what it did was to equate the role of the PM with that of the prosecution in common-law systems – which is inaccurate, as the responsibility of the PM is not to attempt to secure a conviction come what may but, like the judge, to attempt to ascertain the truth, giving as much consideration, during the investigation phase, to evidence that speaks in the suspect’s favour as to evidence against. The reform thus strengthened calls for a separation of the careers of PMs and trial judges leading to the passage of law no. 150 of 2005 which sought to make it all but impossible for investigating judges to take on the role of trial judges and vice versa (Pederzoli, 2005). However, it raised the question of what would happen to the independence of investigating judges if the further step were taken to make them institutionally independent of trial judges, for, if their independence was arguably assured by the fact that along with trial judges they formed a body separate from the other institutions of the state, then, detached from this body and located elsewhere, they risked becoming dependent on the legislative or executive powers and so potentially subject to questionable degrees of political influence (Salazar, 2002: 17; Newell, 2010). This throws a spotlight on the second issue – the efficiency of the administration of justice – since part of what it means to deliver justice respectful of principles of ‘fairness’ is that it should be delivered within a reasonable time frame: as the saying has it, ‘justice delayed is justice denied’. The data showing that judicial proceedings are typically very lengthy by international standards are frequently rehearsed by students of the Italian legal system. To take one recent set of observations at random, Justin O. Frosini (2010: 209) points out that it takes about 450 days to evict a tenant who has not paid rent or, in other words, 426 days more than in the Netherlands, which has one of the more efficient judicial systems, and 83 more than in Austria, which, like Italy, has one of the less efficient. Injunctions issued in connection with cheques that have bounced require about 415 days to obtain or, in other words, 115 days more than in Portugal (the country with the second most lengthy proceedings among what, in 2004, were the EU 15) and 395 more than in Belgium (the country with the swiftest proceedings among this group of states). About half of the referrals from Italy to the European Court of Human Rights concern the excessive duration of court proceedings. The problem is significant for a whole host of reasons that go beyond abstract principles of fairness. First, it undermines the capacity of the judicial system to deal effectively with criminal behaviour – either because delays can allow the guilty to avoid punishment (if proceedings

Corruption, organised crime and justice  121 come to be barred by the statute of limitations) or because they oblige judges to hand down unjustifiably lenient sentences.17 And as I mentioned earlier, this has implications for crimes not yet committed, as it enters into potential offenders’ calculations of the likely costs and benefits of illegal activities. This, in turn, considerably obstructs economic development, because illegality undermines the security of investments. Meanwhile, the difficulties of the system in dealing rapidly with civil disputes, making contracts expensive and time-consuming to enforce, add to firms’ costs. These in turn might either be passed on to consumers or else dissuade firms from investing at all. In 2010, the then president of the Court of Cassation suggested that debt recovery through the courts took on average 1,210 days at a cost of 29.9 per cent of the debts’ value, while delays in the resolution of civil disputes added €2.3 billion to firms’ costs (cited in Pederzoli, 2011: 171). Finally, inefficiency and delays inevitably help to fuel public cynicism. When citizens see rich and powerful individuals able to escape justice thanks to their ability to hire expensive lawyers they cannot afford – lawyers able to exploit inefficiencies to ensure that the offences their clients are accused of become statute barred – then they not surprisingly conclude that claims about equality before the law are bogus. When they hear, in the aftermath of events such as the 2009 Acquila earthquake, which cost the lives of 309 people, that a number of the public buildings which collapsed had been constructed in contravention of building regulations, they are not surprisingly drawn to populist, outsider parties with their diatribes about a corrupt establishment. The causes of inefficiency have been argued to be associated with a wide range of features of the judicial system including automatic access to two levels of appeal, the complexity of the rules of procedure, the constant backlog of cases (in 2009, the average justice apparently had between 300 and 450 cases pending (Frosini, 2010: 209) for a total of 5,625,057 cases pending in the civil courts and 3,270,979 in the criminal courts (Pederzoli, 2011: 172)) and the system’s (lack of) access to financial resources (which will inevitably have been under even greater pressure since the onset of the Great Recession). However this may be, policy-makers have in recent years attempted to address the problem with a number of initiatives of which four are worthy of special mention. First, in 1998, an attempt was made to increase the rate of judicial throughput by including in the above-mentioned reform of the Code of Criminal Procedure provisions allowing defendants willing to forgo a trial and have their cases decided by the GUP, to benefit from a reduction in sentence of one third. Meanwhile, article 449 of the Code provides that where the defendant has been caught in flagrante or has confessed, the prosecutor can apply to the GIP for a decision that the case be sent for trial directly. Second, 2001 saw the introduction of the so-called Pinto law (after the name of its sponsor). This was designed to relieve the pressure from the number of cases coming to the European Court of Human Rights for violations of article 6 of the European Convention on Human Rights, which provides that ‘everyone is entitled to a fair and public hearing within a reasonable time’. Consequently, Pinto established domestic arrangements to enable citizens to make claims for material and non-material damage suffered as the result of having been involved in unreasonably lengthy legal proceedings. Third, in 2006, a legislative decree pursuant to the aforementioned law no. 150 of 2005 sought to get to grips with the legal autonomy of judicial offices – and therefore with variations in the efficiency of their organisation and schemes of governance – by stipulating that confirmation in post of chief justices and chief prosecutors would be made conditional upon the results of evaluations of their managerial performance. Finally, there have since 2001 been a range of initiatives taken at local level by individual chief justices and prosecutors acting under the stimulus of international bodies such as the

122  Corruption, organised crime and justice European Commission for the Efficiency of Justice and making use of European structural funds. By issuing reports and recommendations, bodies like the Commission can be effective even though they lack formal supervisory powers or the power to impose sanctions, because, by providing open discussion forums for their member states, they create informal pressures on states’ representatives to account for themselves. Initiatives taken include the digitisation of civil proceedings and the introduction of quality management, monitoring and evaluation schemes: their significance being that they have enabled their promoters to act as change agents. That is, with the passing of the Berlusconi executive in 2011 and a consequent reduction in the level of conflict (see below) between the judicial and executive branches of state, several senior justices were able to accept appointments as officials leading the departments of the Ministry of Justice with the result that local examples of ‘best practice’ could thus be taken as the basis for national requirements introduced through ministerial decrees (Piana, 2017).18 Data suggest that these initiatives have had some positive results in recent years. Figures made available by the Istituto Nazionale di Statistica (National Statistics Institute) suggest that between 2014 and 2016, the time required to conclude civil cases went down from 494 to 460 days on overage (ISTAT, 2017). Meanwhile, Ministry of Justice figures suggest that the number of civil cases pending declined from over five million in 2009 to just over three million in 2017, although proceedings remain slow by international standards (Ministry of Justice, 2023; European Commission, n.d.). This, then, throws a spotlight on the third reason for the high profile occupied by the administration of justice as a political issue in recent years – the Berlusconi premierships from 2001 to 2006 and from 2008 to 2011 – for part of the problem surrounding the length of judicial proceedings is that top-down efficiency-oriented reforms inevitably raise questions about the internal and external independence of the judiciary and therefore have a quite high likelihood of encountering resistance. During the Berlusconi years, attempts at reform became tangled up with the entrepreneur’s own legal difficulties and his attempts to (ab)use his position as Prime Minister to resolve them, and, because these attempts were widely perceived as illegitimate and in some cases actually obstructive of judicial efficiency, the potential for conflict between executive and judiciary had an especially high propensity to break out into actual conflict. A few examples will suffice to illustrate the point. In 2002, Berlusconi was seeking to defend himself from a number of allegations, including that he had bribed judges to find in his favour in a civil dispute concerning the acquisition of shares in the Società Meridionale di Elettricità (Southern Electricity Company). Meanwhile, his close associate Cesare Previti was seeking to defend himself against allegations that he bribed judges to help Berlusconi acquire control of the large Mondadori publisher in the 1990s. As I have written elsewhere (Newell, 2019: ch. 5), in 2000, Berlusconi’s lawyers asked the presiding judge to rule as inadmissible as evidence documents obtained from Switzerland on the grounds of a number of formal irregularities but were rebuffed, so, in October 2001, Parliament passed legislation (law no. 367/2001) in the matter of rogatory letters to give legal underpinning to the case of inadmissibility Berlusconi’s lawyers had sought to make. However, law 367/2001 proved ineffective as courts were able to circumvent it in deference to the precedence to be accorded to European over national ­legislation – giving rise to a war of words between government spokespersons and representatives of the judiciary that at times had all the appearances of a major constitutional conflict between the highest institutions of the state. Consequently, Berlusconi and his co-defendants attempted to persuade the Court of Cassation to shift the hearings from the court in Milan to the one in Brescia, on the grounds of ‘serious threats to public order’, drawing upon the above-mentioned war of words, among other things, to make their case. Failure then resulted in law 248/2002 or the so-called Cirami law. This introduced into the Code of Criminal Procedure the concept of

Corruption, organised crime and justice  123 ‘legitimate suspicion’ or in other words doubts about the impartiality of the judges involved in trying a case, making it possible for defendants to apply to the Court of Cassation for a transfer of proceedings on these grounds. Most importantly, from Berlusconi’s perspective, the law also stipulated that judges would, when requested by the prosecution or defence, reconsider matters already dealt with before the proceedings were transferred. Not surprisingly, the provision was the subject of huge controversy given the additional opportunities it created for obstruction and thus the likelihood of trials collapsing at the hands of the statute of limitations. Similarly controversial measures introduced and attempted during Berlusconi’s subsequent term from 2008 to 2011 were likewise corrosive of harmonious relations between representatives of the judiciary and the executive and, precisely because of this, were also corrosive of relations between the parties of the governing coalition (not to mention relations between the government and the parties of opposition). It is a reasonable supposition that the government’s loss of cohesion was not without consequence for its legislative capacity, widely judged as disappointing – and not only by commentators on the left.19 This in turn cannot but have been especially damaging to it given the high expectations that had accompanied its arrival in office, for, in terms of the size of its majority and its composition, it had begun its life in 2008 as the strongest government in the history of the Italian republic. Conclusion Problems of corruption, organised crime and the administration of justice are, as we have seen, inextricably bound up with one another and partly for that reason have been very difficult to grapple with and solve effectively: it is hardly possible to solve any one of these problems without solving either or both of the others – but if that is the case, then the likelihood is that none of them can easily be resolved if at all. All are long-standing, with roots stretching as far back as the circumstances surrounding Italian Unification itself – this created an additional source of difficulty in the way of attempts to get to grips with them. As problems embedded in sets of practices and cultural outlooks inherited from the past, they inevitably give rise to collective action problems creating significant disincentives in the way of shifts away from the status quo. For this reason, they remain on the public agenda and therefore at the centre of media discussion. They are perceived as problems, at least partly if not mainly, because of their implications for public confidence in the authorities and in the institutions of government and therefore for the capacity of the country to compete effectively in world markets and to hold its own on the world stage. Not only does a state with significant problems in the three areas find it difficult to grow and attract inward investment, but, precisely because of this, it finds it more difficult than states with less significant problems to project soft power and thus to get its way in the wider world. It is to Italy and the wider world – to the issues confronting it in the international area, how it has dealt with them and with what success – that I turn my attention in the chapter that follows. Notes 1 Along with Slovakia. The five states below it were Croatia, Greece, Romania, Hungary and Bulgaria (Transparency International, 2017). 2 The question asked was: ‘Did you, or any member of your household, make an unofficial payment or gift when using these services over the past 12 months? The road police, public agencies issuing official documents, the civil courts, public education (primary or secondary), public education (vocation), public medical care, public agencies in charge of unemployment benefits or any other public agencies in charge of other social security benefits?’ (Transparency International, n.d.).

124  Corruption, organised crime and justice 3 Rules vary because, as criteria of behaviour that indicate right and wrong ways of doing things, they can only exist in virtue of social interaction and therefore of people’s perceptions, which themselves vary. Thus it is that, while it would probably be frowned upon in Western Europe, giving a gift to a public official for services rendered, for example, is in Thailand not viewed as corruption but as an act of good will (Newell, 2018: 200). 4 According to Transparency International’s Global Corruption Barometer 2015/16/17, 28% of Italians responded ‘corruption’ when asked to name the three most important problems facing the country that the government should address. The corresponding percentages for Germany and the UK were 2% and 16% respectively (Transparency International, n.d.). 5 By Lucy Riall (2007), who associates his celebrity status with the emergence, for the first time, of the mass circulation of books, magazines and printed portraits of him. 6 For example, article 11 of the Constitution famously states: ‘Italy rejects war as an instrument of ­oppression against the freedoms of other peoples and as a means for settling international disputes; it agrees on conditions of equality with other states, to the limitations of sovereignty necessary to create an order that ensures peace and justice among Nations; it promotes and encourages international organisations having such ends in view’. 7 The term was coined by journalists, in reference to the fact that the scandal first broke in the city of Milan, to poke fun at the tendency (real or presumed) of the Milanese to consider themselves more upstanding than Italians living elsewhere, to the extent that the city, Italy’s commercial capital, was sometimes referred to as la capitale morale (the moral capital). 8 Especially, heightened individualism, a decline in the strength of traditional party loyalties, the transformation of the PCI into a non-communist party with a new name, the emergence of significant new parties such as the Lega Nord and the electoral law referendum of 1993. 9 The comedian, Beppe Grillo, who 15 years later, would launch the Movimento Cinque Stelle was in 1986, publicly rebuked, live on air, by the presenter, Pippo Baudo, for a joke he told about the Socialists who had at the time sent an official delegation to China: ‘At a certain point Martelli calls Craxi and he says: “Listen, here there are a billion of them, and they’re all socialists”. Craxi replies: “Yes, why?” “Well then if they are all socialists, who do they steal from?”’ The joke also cost Grillo his contract with the Italian state broadcaster, Radiotelevisione Italiana. 10 The leading Tangentopoli investigator, Antonio Di Pietro, had first come to public attention ‘with a 1987 investigation into corruption in the issuance of driving licences – where, according to biographers, what was at stake for Di Pietro was less the identification of offenders than the prevention of a potential massacre, his mission being ‘to rid Milan of “this cancer”, “to clean up the region of Lombardy”, “to enact a process of social disinfestation”, to reclaim the State’ (Pozzi, 1997: 335, my translation)’ (Newell, 2015). 11 The investigations themselves were known as the mani pulite (clean hands) investigations. 12 Police-recorded offences per 100,000 of population in 2015 were, according to the UN, 741.57 for England and Wales, 375.73 for France, 600.55 for Belgium, 155.92 for Germany and 107.63 Italy (United Nations, n.d. a). 13 Police-recorded offences of theft per 100,000 of population in 2015: Denmark, 3,970.47, Sweden, 4,093.24, Finland, 2,229.60, France, 2,167.89, England and Wales, 2,182.49, Italy 1,756.81 (United Nations, n.d. b). 14 Their ‘plural’ nature is well captured by the Italian word cosche (meaning gangs, mobs or crime syndicates), itself plural and often used to refer generically to the Mafia or its counterparts elsewhere. 15 Durkheim used the terms ‘mechanical’ and ‘organic’ solidarity to refer to the different sources of the cohesion and integration of societies. Those exhibiting mechanical solidarity cohere because of the awareness of their members of their likeness and similarity, their common rituals and routines. Those exhibiting ‘organic solidarity’ do so thanks to the existence of internal differentiation and specialisation of roles where the resulting interdependence renders each individual dependent on all of the others. 16 ‘For example, there is considerable evidence that between 1945 and 1990, fear in ruling circles of the apparent threat posed by the PCI provided the rationale for a range of illegal activities on the part of elements of the political class and state bureaucracy, including making use of the Mafia’s ability to control the votes of citizens in the areas where it is strong’ (Newell, 2010). 17 For example, the defendant in a given case may have previous convictions from courts of first or second instance. Since, however, such convictions cannot be considered final until the defendant has exhausted all rights of appeal, they cannot be taken into account by the judge in deciding sentence in the given case (Guarnieri, 2001: 76).

Corruption, organised crime and justice  125 18 One might also mention the 2021 Cartabia reform (after the Minister of Justice, Marta Cartabia) which ostensibly sought to respond to the objective, set out in Italy’s NRRP, of reducing the length of criminal trials through provisions concerning the ‘inadmissability’ (improcediibilità) of proceedings at appeal stage and in the Court of Cassation, after two years and one year respectively. The measure was a curious piece of legislation because on the one hand, Cartabia herself claimed that it was necessary in order to ensure defendants’ constitutionally guaranteed right to be tried within a reasonable time and to respond to European Commission criticisms concerning the length of judicial proceedings in Italy, but, on the other hand, critics (e.g. Stella, 2021; Travaglio, 2021) pointed out that the EU’s concerns had to do with civil rather than criminal proceedings, that improcedibilità looked suspiciously like the reintroduction of the statute of limitations whose application had been limited by a M5S flagship measure in 2019 and that, far from supporting the statute, the EU had frequently criticised it. This was because it created a significant bias in the judicial system in favour the de facto impunity of whitecollar and wealthy defendants who could afford to pay for lawyers able to engage in delaying tactics until proceedings became statute barred and had to be abandoned (Newell, 2021). 19 See, for example, the comment by E. Galli Della Loggia, Corriere della Sera, 28 June 2010, quoted in Gualmini and Pasotti, 2011: 47.

References Alongi, Giuseppe (1887), La mafia nei suoi fattori e nelle sue manifestazioni, Turin: Fratelli Bocca. Barbacetto, G., P. Gomez and M. Travaglio (2003), Mani pulite, Rome: Editori Riuniti. Bratsis, Peter (2003), ‘The Construction of Corruption, or Rules of Separation and Illusions of Purity in Bourgeois Society’, Social Text 77 21(4): 9–33. Bull, M. J., and J. L. Newell (1995), ‘Italy Changes Course? The 1994 Elections and the Victory of the Right’, Parliamentary Affairs 46(2): 72–99. Carlucci, A. (1992), Tangentomani: Storie, affari e tutti i documenti sui barbari che hanno saccheggiato Milano, Milan: Baldini and Castoldi. Catanzaro, Raimondo (1993), ‘A Watershed Year for Both the Mafia and the State’, pp. 134–50 in ­Gianfranco Pasquino and Stephen Hellman (eds), Italian Politics, vol. 8, London and New York: Pinter. Cazzola, F. (1988), Della corruzione: Fisiologia e patologia di un sistema politico, Bologna: Il Mulino. Colajanni, Napoleone (1885), La delinquenza della Scilia e le sue cause, Palermo: Tipografia del Giornale di Sicilia. Colajanni, Napoleone (1900), Nel regno della mafia, dai Borboni ai Sabaudi, Palermo: Remo Sandron. Colaprico, P. (1996), Capire Tangentopoli, Milan: Il Saggiatore. CPM [Commissione parlamentare d’inchiesta sul fenomeno della mafia e sulle altre associazioni similari] (1993), Audizione del collaboratore di giustizia Gaspare Mutolo, XI legislature, 9 Feb., www.liberliber. it/biblioteca/i/italia/verbali_della_commissione_parlamentare_antimafia/html/violante01/25_00.htm. Cressey, Donald R. (1972), Criminal Organization, London: Heinemann. Cutrera, Antonino (1900), La mafia e i mafiosi: Origini e manifestazioni, Palermo: Alberto Reber. Della Porta, Donatella (1993), ‘La capitale immorale: Le tangenti di Milano’, pp. 219–40 in Stephen Hellman and Gianfranco Pasquino (eds), Politica in Italia: I fatti dell’anno e le interpretazioni, Bologna: Il Mulino. Della Porta, Donatella, and Alberto Vannucci (1997), ‘The Resources of Corruption: Some Reflections from the Italian Case’, Crime, Law and Social Change 27: 231–54. Della Porta, Donatella, and Alberto Vannucci (1999), Corrupt Exchanges: Actors, Resources and Mechanisms of Political Corruption, Berlin and New York: De Gruyter. Dickie, John (2004), Cosa Nostra: A History of the Sicilian Mafia, London: Hodder & Stoughton. Durkheim, Émile (1893), De la division du travail social: Étude sur l’organisation des sociétés supérieures, Paris: Félix Alcan Éditeur. European Commission (n.d.), ‘Justice Scoreboard’, https://commission.europa.eu/strategy-and-policy/ policies/justice-and-fundamental-rights/upholding-rule-law/eu-justice-scoreboard_en. Franchetti, Leopoldo (1877), Condizioni politiche e amministrative della Sicilia, Florence: Berbera. Frosini, Justin O. (2010), ‘Il solito vecchio film: I guai senza fine del sistema giudiziario italiano’, pp. 205–23 in Marco Giuliani and Erik Jones (eds), Politica in Italia: I fatti dell’anno e le interpretazioni, Bologna: Il Mulino.

126  Corruption, organised crime and justice Gualmini, E. and E. Pasotti (2011), ‘Introduzione: Molto rumore per nulla?’, pp. 47–67 in E. Gualmini and E. Pasotti (eds), Politica in Italia, Bologna: Il Mulino. Guarnieri, Carlo (2001), La giustizia in Italia, Bologna: Il Mulino. Hine, David (1993), Governing Italy: The Politics of Bargained Pluralism, Oxford: Clarendon Press. Hobsbawm, Eric J. (1978), Primitive Rebels: Studies in Archaic Forms of Social Movement in the 19th and 20th Centuries, Manchester: Manchester University Press. ISTAT [Istituto Nazionale di Statistica] (2017), ‘Rapporto Bes 2017: Il benessere equo e sostenibile in Italia’, https://www.istat.it/it/files//2017/12/cap06.pdf. LaPalombara, Joseph (1987), Democracy Italian Style, New Haven, Conn., and London: Yale University Press. Lupo, Salvatore (2007), ‘Hanno catturato Provenzano’, pp. 297–312 in Jean-Louis Briquet and Alfio ­Mastropaolo (eds), Politica in Italia: I fatti dell’anno e le interpretazioni, Bologna: Il Mulino. McCarthy, Patrick (1995), ‘Forza Italia: Nascita e sviluppo di un partito virtuale’, pp. 49–72 in Piero Ignazi and Richard S. Katz (eds), Politica in Italia: I fatti dell’anno e le interpretazioni, Bologna: Il Mulino. Mack Smith, Denis (1968), The Making of Italy 1796–1870, London and Melbourne: Macmillan. Mareso, Manuela, and Luana Serpone (2005), ‘Democrazia sospesa, per mafia’, http://www.libera.it/­ public/File/17.%20comuni%20commissariati.doc. Ministry of Justice (2023), ‘Monitoraggio della giustizia civile: Anni 2003 – I trimestre 2023’, https:// www.giustizia.it/giustizia/it/mg_1_14_1.page?contentId=SST1287132. Moe, Nelson (1998), ‘The Emergence of the Southern Question in Villari, Franchetti, and Sonnino’, pp. 51–76 in Jane Schneider (ed.), Italy’s ‘Southern Question’: Orientalism in One Country, Oxford and New York: Berg. Nelken, D. (1996), ‘The Judges and Political Corruption in Italy’, Journal of Law and Society 23: 95–112. Newell, James L. (2000), Parties and Democracy in Italy, Aldershot: Ashgate. Newell, James L. (2006), ‘Introduction’, pp. 1–9 in John Garrard and James L. Newell (eds), Scandals in Past and Contemporary Politics, Manchester: Manchester University Press. Newell, James L. (2010), The Politics of Italy: Governance in a Normal Country, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Newell, James L. (2015), ‘Magistrates Going into Politics: Antonio Di Pietro and Italy of Values’,­ pp. 215–24 in Andrea Mammone, Giap Parini and Giuseppe Veltri (eds), Routledge Handbook of ­Contemporary Italy: History, Politics and Society, London: Routledge. Newell, James L. (2018), Corruption in Contemporary Politics: A New Travel Guide, Manchester: ­Manchester University Press. Newell, James L. (2019), Silvio Berlusconi: A Study in Failure, Manchester: Manchester University Press. Newell, James L. (2021), ‘Building Back Better? Italian Politics in the Summer of 2021’, Contemporary ­Italian Politics 13: 293–5. Newell, James L., and Martin J. Bull (2003), ‘Political Corruption in Italy’, pp. 37–49 in Martin J. Bull and James L. Newell (eds), Corruption in Contemporary Politics, Basingstoke: Palgrave. Paoli, Letizia (2003a), ‘The Invisible Hand of the Market: The Illegal Drugs Trade in Germany, Italy and Russia’, pp. 19–40 in Petrus van Duyne, Klaus von Lampe and James L. Newell (eds), Criminal ­Finances and Organising Crime in Europe, Nijmegen: Wolf Legal Publishers. Paoli, Letizia (2003b), Mafia Brotherhoods: Organised Crime, Italian Style, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Paoli, Letizia, and Marvin E. Wolfgang (2001), ‘Crime, Italian Style’, Daedalus, http://www.findarticles. com/p/articles/mi_qa3671/is_200107/ai_n8963559. Parini, Ercole Giap (2000), ‘Mafia and Civil Society: Stereotypes and Perspectives, ECPR News 11(4): 10–11. Pederzoli, Patrizia (2005), ‘La riforma dell’ordinamento giudiziario’, pp. 185–203 in Carlo Guarnieri and James L. Newell (eds.), Politica in Italia: I fatti dell’anno e le interpretazioni, Bologna: Il Mulino. Pederzoli, Patrizia (2011), ‘Riforme della giustizia? Intercettazioni, legittimo impedimento, processo breve’, pp. 167–86 in Elisabetta Gualmini and Eleonora Pasotti, Politica in Italia: I fatti dell’anno e le interpretazioni, Bologna: Il Mulino.

Corruption, organised crime and justice  127 Piana, Daniela (2017), ‘Who Wins in the “Quality of Justice”? The Redistributive Effects of Two Waves of Judicial Reform in Italy’, Contemporary Italian Politics 9: 185–200. Pozzi, E. (1997), ‘Antonio Di Pietro: Invenzione di un Italiano’, pp. 316–53 in Sergio Bertelli (ed.), La Chioma della Vittoria: Scritti sull’identità degli italiani dall’Unità alla seconda Repubblica, Florence: Ponte alle Grazie. Rhodes, Martin (1997), ‘Financing Party Politics in Italy: A Case of Systemic Corruption’, pp. 54–80 in Martin Bull and Martin Rhodes (eds), Crisis and Transition in Italian Politics, London and Portland, Oreg.: Frank Cass. Riall, Lucy (2007), ‘Garibaldi: The First Celebrity’, History Today 57(8): 41–7. Salazar, Carmela (2002), La magistratura, Rome and Bari: Laterza. Stella, Valentina (2021), ‘“Improcedibilità”, il surrogate della prescrizione con un mare di incognite’, Il Dubbio, 10 July, https://www.ildubbio.news/2021/07/09/improcedibilita-il-surrogato-dellaprescrizione-con-un-mare-dincognite. Transparency International (2017), Corruption Perceptions Index, https://www.transparency.org/news/ feature/corruption_perceptions_index_2017#table. Transparency International (n.d.), Global Corruption Barometer, https://www.transparency.org/research/ gcb/gcb_2015_16/0. Travaglio, Marco (2021), ‘Forza Italia, Il Fatto Quotidiano, 9 July, https://www.ilfattoquotidiano.it/ in-edicola/articoli/2021/07/09/forza-italia/6255650. United Nations (2010), The Globalization of Crime: A Transnational Organized Crime Threat Assessment, United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, https://www.unodc.org/documents/data-and-analysis/tocta/ TOCTA_Report_2010 _low_res.pdf. United Nations (n.d. a), Serious Assault, https://dataunodc.un.org/crime/serious_assault. United Nations (n.d. b), Theft, https://dataunodc.un.org/crime/theft. Vannucci, Alberto (2009), ‘The Controversial Legacy of ‘Mani Pulite’: A Critical Analysis of Italian ­Corruption and Anti-Corruption Policies’, Bulletin of Italian Politics 1: 233–64. Waters, S. (1994), ‘“Tangentopoli” and the Emergence of a New Political Order in Italy’, West European Politics 17(1): 169–82. World Bank (n.d.), Intentional Homicides (per 100,000 People), https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/ VC.IHR.PSRC.P5.

6

Italy and the wider world

Introduction A complete understanding of a country’s politics is impossible without an understanding of its position within the international community. This is, first, because international pressures of all kinds have profound implications for what goes on internally and, second, because the inter-­ governmental and supranational organisations through which international relations are conducted permeate the political and economic structures of their member states (Ratti, 2002: 5). The sheer range of international organisations (dealing with matters ranging from aviation to justice) with which most states and their separate institutions interact means that ‘the time when “foreign policy” concerned only foreign ministries has gone for good’ (Dehousse, 1997: 40). Moreover, the period since the war has seen a considerable increase in the significance of both of these two phenomena: first, it has become a commonplace to observe that states have increasingly found themselves confronted with significant problems (such as migration or climate change) extending beyond the jurisdiction of each of them individually and which they are unable to solve by acting alone, and, second, the period since the war has seen a great proliferation of international organisations as post-war planners initiated a process of institution- and rule-building, which, they hoped, would lend economic, political and social stability to the international system and which continues to this day (Blutstein, 2016: 4). In the aftermath of 1989, the international system of which Italy forms a part changed in at least four fundamental ways, each with profound implications for both the country’s foreign and security and its domestic policy agendas. First, and most obviously, there was an end to the Cold War superpower rivalry between the United States and the Soviet Union with the demise of the Soviet Union itself. This, as we shall see, increased Italy’s ‘room for manoeuvre’ in pursuit of its foreign and security policy ambitions and meant that from having been a ‘security consumer’ it had to become a ‘security producer’ (Croci, 2003). Second, the process of globalisation gathered pace bringing with it issues of migration and growing inequality and thus new tensions internally. Third, Italy had to manage such tensions against the background of enhanced European integration, locking her into sets of norms and rules which created formidable constraints on state action. Fourth, the period since 1989 has seen the rise of China and other new centres of economic power with significant implications for the capacity of the country’s producers to compete in world markets. In the remainder of this chapter, I will discuss each of these changes and their implications for Italian politics, in turn. The end of the Cold War During the Cold War, superpower rivalry imposed a degree of international stability, conditioning, if not determining, everything else that happened on the world stage, with other countries DOI: 10.4324/9780203422120-7

Italy and the wider world  129 having little room for the pursuit of autonomous foreign policies. The end of the Cold War thus constituted a watershed moment. Coinciding, initially, at least, with the emergence of a new, unipolar world, with the United States having no serious political or economic rivals in the international system, it seemed to many likely to mark the beginning of a new era of international peace and stability. Such a view was given a certain academic credibility with the publication of Francis Fukuyama’s ‘The End of History’ in 1989. Fukuyama argued that the emergence of the unipolar world in effect represented a world-wide ideological victory for free-market capitalism and liberal democracy over Communism and the one-party state. Ideologies that sought to challenge liberalism – Fascism and Marxism – had lost their appeal so that what was being witnessed was not just the end of the Cold War ‘but the end of history as such: that is, the end point of mankind’s ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government’ (Fukuyama, 1989: 3). If one looked beyond Fascism and Marxism to other ideologies that might possibly challenge liberalism, then one discovered religious fundamentalism and nationalism. But, Fukuyama argued, religious fundamentalism had little appeal beyond religious fundamentalists themselves, while nationalism did not offer a programme that was fundamentally incompatible with liberal values the way Communism and Fascism were. Therefore, it seemed likely that humanity would inhabit a world which, with no ideological bases for major conflict between countries, would not see large-scale conflict between states. Yes, international conflict would still continue, especially thanks to unresolved national grievances – for example, the Israeli–Palestinian conflict – but conflicts would not be major conflagrations of the kind witnessed in the twentieth century. In one sense, Fukuyama was right. There was a significant increase in the number of democracies following the collapse of communism, most obviously, in Central and Eastern Europe, and democracies have at all times been far less likely to go to war with one another than nondemocracies, because they are by definition committed to principles of peaceful negotiation as means of dispute resolution. But he was also clearly wrong. First, he underestimated the power of religious fundamentalism as a source of conflict, as the Twin Towers attack of 2001 revealed so forcefully. Second, while the prospect of an American–Russian nuclear exchange initially seemed ‘more remote than it had ever been’ (Best et al., 2004: 493–4), the possibility of nuclear war did not really go away (and, with the Russian invasion of Ukraine, has come to seem, if anything, less remote than it has ever been). The relative political and economic turmoil that ensued in Russia and its near neighbours gave rise to significant concern in the West ‘that the former Soviet Union’s vast nuclear arsenals might fall into the “wrong hands” [with the result that] some of the so-called “rogue states” or even a terrorist organization, might acquire a nuclear weapons capability’ (Best et al., 2004: 493–4). Nuclear non-proliferation treaties ‘did not produce foolproof methods of preventing the proliferation of nuclear weapons, as was made clear when India and Pakistan conducted a series of well-publicized … nuclear tests in 1998’ (Best et al., 2004: 493). As a consequence of these two developments, ‘the United States continued with the experiments it had begun in the 1980s to develop a national missile defence programme that would make it immune to attack. This, however, was a controversial field of activity, for it threatened to disturb the existing nuclear balance and risked provoking a new arms race’ (Best et al., 2004: 494). Third, the United States, as the now single hegemonic world power, was unable to use its power and influence to fully resolve disputes around the world. In some cases – such as the first Gulf War or the Northern Ireland conflict – it was successful; in others – for example, Somalia in 1992–93, Rwanda in 1994, the Balkans and the former Yugoslavia, which occupied essentially the whole of the 1990s – it was unsuccessful. Fourth, meanwhile, it was increasingly subject to the so-called ‘CNN effect’ (Livingston, 1997): real-time saturation coverage of events around the world, which sets the policy agenda and places politicians under unusual pressure to take swift decisions, so potentially complicating sensitive diplomatic relations between states.

130  Italy and the wider world Consequently, the emergence of a unipolar world did not lead to the reduction of international political instability or to a safer world. Ironically, in fact, it is possible to argue that if anything the reverse was the case: whereas during the Cold War, old nationalist conflicts, such as those in the Balkans, had been kept at bay by the Cold War itself, and conflict between the superpowers had been kept at bay by the logic of Mutually Assured Destruction, now the old nationalist conflicts re-emerged to make, together with new ideological conflicts around religion, the 1990s a dangerous and uncertain time. Against this background, the end of the Cold War represented a corresponding watershed moment for Italian foreign policy. Whether by obligation or by choice, prior to 1989, Italy tended to play a rather passive, non-assertive role on the world stage and in international organisations. In the first place, at least until the later years, the ideological divisions between the governing Democrazia Cristiana and the opposition Partito Comunista Italiano were on every level too profound to enable the emergence of a sufficient degree of cross-party consensus on the national interest to make a robust pursuit of it possible. In the second place, while NATO membership from 1949 had enabled Italy to take a decisive step towards regaining its international sovereignty after the 1947 Paris Treaty had imposed the demilitarisation of its frontiers, it had also involved the surrender of a degree of sovereignty as NATO was dominated by the United States. In the third place, with the Cold War conflict running right the way through its internal politics, Italy was subject to considerable American tutelage, not to say interference, exercised through three channels: military, diplomatic and domestic (Newell, 2010). Bilateral agreements gave the US a significant military presence in Italy, including nuclear weapons installations, and provided the basis for contingency planning featuring military intervention in the event of a PCI electoral victory. Diplomatic channels enabled the US to periodically prod Italian governments into taking steps – such as those of Mario Scelba who in the 1950s was noted for his use of force against strikers and street protesters – that would counter threats of a ‘drift to the left’. Covert channels made possible the development of a series of links between the American and Italian intelligence communities, providing the basis for the ‘strategy of tension’: a series of illegal operations ranging from the Piano Solo coup plot of 1964, through the Piazza Fontana bombing in 1969 and the Aldo Moro kidnapping in 1978. By keeping Italy in a state of internal weakness, the resulting instability enabled the US to hope to thwart any potential ambitions on the part of the country to become a more active player in any areas where such ambitions might threaten the US’s own interests. As Western allies facing a seemingly common threat from the Soviets, Italy and the United States maintained outwardly amicable relations, but relations between them were not without occasional resentments on both sides. By and large the United States believed that Italian governments were not as robust in their management of the PCI as they should have been, while Italian governments by and large believed that the Americans had insufficient understanding of Italian politics on the ground to appreciate that less negative containment projects could be more effective.1 They were also aware that while the Americans provided the nuclear umbrella under which Italy was able to shelter, in so doing, ‘they emphasised the dependence and subordination of the country on the international stage’ (Newell, 2019: 139). Consequently, the pre-1989 years were not entirely devoid of displays of assertiveness2 or attempts to resist American domination,3 but, generally speaking, Italy’s elites were aware that given the country’s geographical location, that its largest party of the left was a communist party and that there were few international issues without implications for the superpower conflict, American self-interest would enable policy-makers to trade security for sovereignty. Thus it was that, without having to play any very active role in NATO or other forums and by accepting US interventions and vetoes in domestic politics, they got the more or less cast-iron guarantee that

Italy and the wider world  131 the country would be safe both from left-wing subversion from within and from invasion from without. After 1989, all this changed. Italian policy-makers were aware that the more uncertain and less secure international environment of the post-Cold War era created both the incentives and the opportunities for a more assertive role on the world stage and therefore for Italy’s assumption of greater responsibilities for the provision of its own and others’ security. There were at least four reasons for this. First, Italian policy-makers were aware that they could not rely on the United States to guarantee the country’s security to the extent that they had in the past, for America’s initial reaction to the apparent triumph of capitalism and liberal democracy was to give off signals that it would from then on play a far less assertive role on the world stage. For one thing, in place of the strategy of ‘containment’ of the Cold War era, the US put in place a strategy of ‘enlargement’. This was designed to integrate countries into new and existing international institutions for the promotion of economic globalisation, capitalism and free trade, which, by promoting global prosperity, would increase the likelihood of the spread of democracy and therefore of peace around the world. As part and parcel of this, the US attempted to promote the resolution of international disputes not through the formation of alliances, balances of power, arms build-ups and the mutual threats that had seemed to be the leitmotifs of the Cold War era – but rather through negotiations in international organisations that would enable states to provide multilateral responses to aggression by any one of them. A good example of this was the First Gulf War, which, officially at least, was spearheaded by the United Nations rather than the US because the end of the Cold War meant that the UN Security Council could act without facing a veto by one of its permanent members (Ambrosius, 2008: 397). It was not that the US was not pursuing its own self-interest, but rather that there was at least the belief on the part of US policy-makers that its interests could be pursued by it being less imposing militarily than in the past (Suri, 2009: 622). For another thing, beyond promoting capitalism and democracy, US administrations had little idea of what they wanted to achieve in foreign affairs or at least ideas about how to achieve what they did want: now that the Soviet Union was no more, it was difficult to know what the purpose of foreign policy was. ‘What were US national interests after the Cold War? What were the key threats? Which policies promised the greatest security and prosperity to the nation? None of the leading figures in the administrations of George W.H. Bush and Bill Clinton answered these questions coherently’ (Suri, 2009: 613). Now that the Cold War was over, ‘Americans demanded a “peace dividend”. With sluggish economic growth … citizens wanted to limit the nation’s commitments abroad. In response to public pressures, Congress cut the manpower for the standing American military … and curtailed … participation in international organizations’ (Suri, 2009: 615). In the post-Cold War world, ‘the … threats to American interests were both more defuse and more numerous. They were difficult to think about in systematic terms’ (Suri, 2009: 614–15). Second, the collapse of Communism abroad was accompanied by the collapse of Communism at home and by the transformation of Italy’s party system. Consequently, signs of a possible US ‘retreat’ from international commitments were accompanied by a decline in American interest in Italy’s internal affairs and therefore of American tutelage. Third, for a number of reasons, the end of the Cold War was accompanied by an increase in multilateral interventions in the name of protecting and promoting human rights: as part and parcel of the strategy of ‘enlargement’, international organisations gained a higher profile. The end of the threat that the two superpowers would use their vetoes in the UN Security Council against each other meant that the UN could be more active in responding to threats to peace and security (MacFarlane, 2009: 49–50). ‘Interstate war had largely disappeared by the end of the Cold War, while the incidence of internal war continued to rise’ (MacFarlane, 2009: 50).

132  Italy and the wider world The result was a humanitarian crisis, raising the prospect of substantial movements of peoples across borders. Thanks to the globalisation of means of communication, such human suffering could be less easily ignored than in the past: citizens watched it on their televisions and so put their governments under pressure to do something. ‘States, intergovernmental organisations and non-governmental organisations were increasingly pre-disposed to deliver assistance and protection within zones of conflict, given the increasing reluctance of states to welcome asylum seekers’ (MacFarlane, 2009: 51). Linked to the apparent victory of democracy in the Cold War was an increasingly widely held view that the principle of international respect for a state’s sovereignty should no longer be absolute and unqualified but rather should be conditional upon a state’s fulfilment of responsibilities to its citizens (MacFarlane, 2009: 52). All of this created new opportunities for Italy: by becoming more active in contributing to international humanitarian efforts, it could exert soft power, raise its international profile and reap important reputational benefits. As Christopher Hill (2011) has argued, if the Italian elite had always been preoccupied with the country’s rank internationally and with the associated fear of exclusion, then, if it could accept that the wrong was, perhaps, unlikely to be righted, given the country’s weight, and if it could accept that it perhaps did not matter much anyway, then, through participation in Operation Alba4 and similar missions, it might find itself able to make significant contributions to international order from a lower position in the hierarchy, ‘as Sweden, Norway, Denmark and Switzerland regularly prove’ (Hill, 2011: xiv). Finally, the end of the Cold War was accompanied by changes in Italian party politics that made more likely the emergence of internal consensus on what a new, more active foreign policy should actually look like. Scholars differ about the extent of this consensus (Carbone, 2011: 7). After all, the two coalitions that emerged from the early 1990s party-system transformation constantly delegitimised each other, and they sometimes differed sharply on specific foreign-policy stances (for example, over the invasion of Iraq in 2003). While some attributed significance to these differences, others played them down, arguing that most of the time they were differences of form rather than substance (Walston, 2007). Meanwhile, delegitimising rhetoric helped the two coalitions preserve their cohesion, masking considerable continuity between their respective governments in terms of actual policy (Croci, 2008). Perhaps the position that comes closest to the truth is the one emphasising both difference and similarity. On the one hand, the centre right tended to favour Atlanticism and inter-governmentalism, the centre left Europeanism and supranationalism. The centre right placed emphasis on pursuit of the country’s interests through the development of special relations with strategically placed interlocutors such as Russia and Libya, the centre left on pursuit of the national interest through dialogue with multiple interlocutors by cooperative engagement in international institutions. On the other hand, the two coalitions were united in terms of the underlying goal: to ensure for Italy the international credibility (through, for example, participating in peace-keeping operations, offering to mediate in crisis situations) necessary to enable the country to play a significant role on the world stage and so reduce or eliminate the risk of marginalisation (such as that which occurs when the country finds itself excluded from ad hoc groups – like the ‘P5 + 1’ group to discuss the Iran nuclear crisis – taking decisions relevant to its interests). Globalisation As is true of many if not most of the other advanced democracies, recent years have seen Italy’s domestic political agenda increasingly dominated by issues whose significance is directly attributable to world-wide trends and tendencies associated with globalisation. Two of the most significant of these issues have been mass migration and growing inequality.

Italy and the wider world  133 The extent to which globalisation is a genuinely new and increasing phenomenon is a matter of disagreement. Economically, increases in the proportion of goods traded internationally over the past half century or so only represent a return to the proportions seen just before the First World War (Grieco and Ikenberry, 2003: 2; Kelly and Prokhovnik, 2004: 114), most international trade is regional rather than global and a genuinely integrated global economy would be one where multinational corporations not only had production facilities in different ­countries but also lacked any kind of national base. As this is true of very few firms, the governments of the large, economically advanced states retain power to shape international economic ­developments – as they regularly do by imposing tariffs and threatening trade wars. Culturally, while it is true that recent decades have seen dramatic increases in the volume of cultural trade and in ownership of the technology required to support this trade, the resulting increase in cultural homogenisation globally has by no means been uniform or unidirectional (Mckay, 2004). Politically, it is true that states increasingly share power with international organisations, which in some cases are more powerful than states are. But while some states can merely adapt to them, others retain enough power to influence and sometimes ignore them, and in any case they are arenas of contestation, in which the views of states (but also those of international pressure groups) are expressed and debated (McGrew, 2004). So the idea that globalisation has thrown up issues to which governments have been obliged to react but which they cannot shape or influence is one that can, perhaps, be supported in certain specific instances but which cannot go unqualified if offered as a generalisation. Be this as it may, what cannot be doubted are certain basic facts: over the past half century the rate of growth in international flows of goods, capital, technology and cultural products (as measured by the growth in word trade of all kinds) has been more rapid than the rate of growth of output (leading to a tripling of the world trade/GDP ratio). Meanwhile, international migration has increased by a commensurate amount – ‘the share of the foreign-born population living in the OECD area [for example] has also tripled (from about 3 to 10 percent)’ (Rapoport, 2016: 2) – with most of it having taken place from developing to developed countries. The two phenomena have been connected by differential birth rates between developing and developed countries (where declining birth rates and growing life expectancy have also brought ageing populations). Conflict (for example, war and human-rights abuses) and environmental change (for example, endangered water security) have played a role, and the connection between the world trade/GDP ratio and migration has also been forged partly by the technological and related cultural changes associated with globalisation. These have contributed to a spread of knowledge of other societies and of information about how to reach them, and they have made possible the establishment of the personal networks and connections necessary to make migration a practical possibility. So, over the last 30 years, Italy, from having been a country where immigration was virtually unknown, has become transformed into a society whose foreign-born resident population now amounts to 8.3 per cent. This social change has provided the basis for the emergence of immigration as a significant political issue thanks to several events and developments over the years. They include the economic and social consequences of rates of growth, which since the early 1990s have been below EU averages; the growth in the salience of international terrorism and human trafficking; sensationalist portrayals of migrants by the media, which have often associated them with crime; technical issues about how to handle the cases of illegal migrants (Hill, Silvestri and Cetin, 2016: 244) and most recently the debate around the citizenship law.5 All these have given opportunities to political entrepreneurs such as the Lega Nord to seek to grow by drawing upon popular resentments and channelling them in an anti-immigrant direction. And they have been the more successful for the weakness of the forces pushing in the opposite ­direction. Those on the left, willing to celebrate immigration and the opportunities it

134  Italy and the wider world afforded – in terms of multiculturalism, the greater sustainability of the pensions system (thanks to higher fertility rates among migrants) and eliminating labour shortages in certain sectors – were simply too few to make their voices effectively heard. Governments of both the centre left and the centre right were largely inert when it came to the development of effective strategies for the support and integration of new arrivals, leaving it to the regional and local authorities as well as to the voluntary sector to fill the gaps left by the state (Hill, Silvestri and Cetin, 2016: 241–3; Castelli Gattinara, 2017: 326). Placed on the back foot by anti-immigrant actors, they would often seek to recover themselves by emulating rather than challenging the claims and assumptions of these actors (for example, that immigration was a security issue) thereby reinforcing them. Finally, the immigrant communities themselves were too fragmented and lacking in resources to give rise to visible, strong communities able to assert claims to representation (for example, in the media) or to demand specific rights (Hill, Silvestri and Cetin, 2016: 242). It was not surprising, then, that, by the time the humanitarian crisis widely referred to as the ‘European migrant emergency’ broke early in 2015, Italy was very badly placed to deal with it effectively. By that time, the proportion of respondents agreeing that migrants represented a threat to public order and security had reached 35 per cent and grew to 40 per cent in 2016. In 2017, over 40 per cent considered immigration to be the most important problem facing Italy (Castelli Gattinara, 2017: 322–3). Although ‘the growth in migration flows across the Mediterranean had in fact been foreseen by migration experts for decades’ (Castelli Gattinara, 2017: 319), there was no clear strategy in place for dealing with it. The inability of the authorities to cope triggered tensions with the EU, and the public controversies to which these tensions gave rise provided new opportunities for the growth of new and not-so-new anti-immigrant and populist parties, the NL and the Movimento Cinque Stella, which were able to reap the resulting electoral rewards at the general election of 2018. The crisis itself arose in the context of conflicts and refugee crises in vast parts of Africa and in a number of Asian countries, notably, Afghanistan, Syria and Iraq, which brought the number of displaced peoples around the world to around 60 million, the highest total since the war. Already by 2013, the central Mediterranean, between Libya and Italy, had become the principal route taken by refugees and asylum seekers looking to reach Europe, its importance having been increased by the fall of the Ghaddafi regime in 2011: the ensuing violence and humanrights abuses meant that, having once been a destination country for African migrants, Libya now became a country they sought to flee from. The migrant shipwreck of 3 October 2013, with the loss of some 360 lives, led the Italian government to establish the search-and-rescue operation known as Mare Nostrum, but its cost, along with anti-immigrant sentiments, led to its suspension in October 2014. In the meantime, the Italian government had sought to persuade its European partners to accept that the crisis was a European rather than a specifically Italian one, but, although Mare Nostrum had received a modest amount of EU funding, its suspension led only to its replacement by the smaller-scale Operation Triton under the auspices of Frontex, the EU’s border agency. Moreover Triton’s focus was as much on border patrol as on search and rescue, and the inevitable consequence was that the number of migrant deaths in the Mediterranean continued to rise, not declining until 2017 (when it still remained, however, at over 3,000) (UNHCR, n.d.). The crisis and governments’ handling of it has deeply affected Italy in all three of the domestic, the European and the foreign-policy arenas. Domestically, it has led to widespread acceptance of the idea that migration is an emergency phenomenon that must be repressed. May 2015 saw the launch of Operation Sophia under an Italian naval commander to identify, capture and dispose of the vessels and assets being used by suspected migrant smugglers. In February 2017, the Italian government reached an agreement to fund the Libyan coastguard. In July 2017, it drew up a

Italy and the wider world  135 code of conduct for NGOs involved in Mediterranean rescue operations, implying that they were operating in cooperation with human smugglers and threatening to refuse access to Italian ports to ships not complying with the code. By providing the basis for a moral panic, allowing ‘exclusionary actors, as well as mainstream political parties and the mass media, to perform the role of entrepreneurs of fear’, all this ‘resulted in major changes in Italian politics and society’ (Castelli Gattinara, 2017: 327) as confirmed by the outcome of the 2018 election. In the European arena, the crisis led Italy to take the lead in several, unsuccessful, searches for comprehensive EU-wide responses. In particular it was keen to achieve agreement to a system of quotas for the distribution of non-EU migrants among EU member states and to overcome the so-called ‘Dublin principle’ whereby applications for asylum must be filed in the first EU country of arrival and applicants attempting to file in other countries can be transferred back to the country deemed responsible. The absence of EU-wide solidarity on these matters resulted in inevitable tensions between Rome and other European capitals leading Italian citizens to feel sorely abandoned and increasingly Eurosceptical. Finally, the crisis inevitably had an impact on Italy’s diplomatic relations more generally: given that it ultimately arose from, and has continued to be affected by, its own and its European and North American allies’ action and inaction in the Middle East, North Africa and elsewhere, it has inevitably become a matter of considerable importance in the foreign-policy choices Italy makes in relation to large numbers of states around the world. Meanwhile, Italy like its neighbours and allies, has been considerably affected by the distribution implications of globalisation. Lower trade barriers, growing international trade, increases in the volume of foreign direct investments and advances in communications and transportation enabling multinational corporations to coordinate their activities across the globe have had particular benefits for countries like China and India and so forth, enabling the transfer of technology to them, foreign investment in them and thus opportunities for industrialisation they would not have had otherwise. On the one hand, this has resulted in declining inequality between countries: Average per capita economic growth in developing and emerging economies has exceeded that of advanced economies for most of the period since the early 1980s, allowing their mean incomes to begin to converge toward those of advanced economies … The pick-up of growth in China was an especially important factor given the large weight of the country’s population. The decline in inter-country inequality accelerated after 1990, and especially 2000, as further progress on economic reforms led to rising growth in a broader group of developing economies, including other populous countries such as India. (Qureshi, n.d.: 1) On the other hand, the same period has seen a rise in inequality within countries, and this has been especially so among the advanced economies. The reasons for this are easy to imagine and have also been connected with globalisation. In the first place, in a world of greater capital mobility, those with larger or smaller share portfolios have been able to maintain income streams by shifting investments appropriately from lower to higher growth areas. In the second place, if the better educated, in well-paid, secure employment, have been relatively well protected against the effects of technological change favouring higher skills and against structural changes in labour markets, then the very same forces have left the less-well educated, with little if any financial or human capital, increasingly exposed to heightened job insecurity and depressed employment incomes (thanks to the effects of greater capital mobility and competition from lower-wage countries); meanwhile, shifts towards less progressive fiscal regimes (as governments seek to attract inward investment) have left them having to bear relatively larger shares of the tax burden.

136  Italy and the wider world Italy has not been immune to any of this, indeed quite the reverse: the period since 1990 has seen much lower rates of growth as compared to the rates achieved during the previous 40 years – thus fuelling a debate on the ‘decline’ of the Italian economy, with some arguing that factors such as the north–south divide, the very high levels of public debt, problems in the delivery of public services and the characteristics of Italian industry, all constitute structural shortcomings placing considerable obstacles in the way of any resumption of economic dynamism in the foreseeable future (Trento, 2003). As measured by the Gini coefficient, inequality in the distribution of household incomes grew rapidly during the recession of the early 1990s, even though it has not changed significantly since then, ‘either during the modest expansion that occurred until 2007, or during the following long recession’ (Luiss Open, 2017). However, this lack of aggregate change masks significant changes in the relative positions of specific socio-demographic groups, such as workers compared to pensioners, the young compared to the elderly, those living in families born in Italy compared to those living in families born abroad. Consequently, as we saw in Chapter 3, Italy, like other countries of the developed world, has in recent years seen the emergence of a new social and political cleavage between what have been referred to as the ‘winners’ and ‘losers’ of globalisation (Kriesi et al., 2006). The winners are those, cosmopolitan in outlook, who have been relatively immune to the economic dislocations brought about by globalisation and are relatively comfortable with its associated cultural changes, such as those that have accompanied mass migration. The losers are those, conservative in outlook, who have been left economically insecure by globalisation and are relatively uncomfortable with its associated cultural changes. The distinction is important, because, in the past, the losers would have constituted the natural reservoir of support for the left, in the Italian case, the PCI. But throughout Europe, the principal parties of the left have for the past 40 years been in a state of decline due to economic and social changes that have brought about a decline in the significance of traditional cleavages associated with religion and class, cultural changes that have brought about more individualistic lifestyles and aspirational outlooks, political changes that have brought about the mediatisation and personalisation of politics and a corresponding decline in the presence of party organisations on the ground, in the localities. If the consequence of this has been the rise of ‘audience democracy’ (Manin, 1997), with parties playing to passive, rather than politically engaged, spectators, then these spectators have become increasingly disenchanted with mainstream parties which have found it increasingly difficult to offer voters any really distinctive programmes, thanks to the way in which the forces of globalisation have restricted the capacities of national governments autonomously to manage their own economies (see below). So, obliged to incorporate the neoliberal narratives of their adversaries on the right, failing thereby to offer representation to voters who feel threatened by the effects of globalisation, especially austerity and mass migration, the left has found that its natural constituency has been left prey to alternative appeals coming mainly come from anti-establishment parties and parties of the anti-immigrant right. It is fair to say that scholars have been virtually unanimous in pointing to this broad set of changes as having been, alongside the specific issues of immigration and other perceived sources of insecurity, the basic underlying causes of the outcome of the general election of March 2018 which brought to power what was essentially the first populist government in a major Western European country since the Second World War (see e.g. Ceccarini and Newell, 2019; Bordignon, Ceccarini and Diamanti, 2018; Valbruzzi and Vignati, 2018; ITANES, 2018). So here is a second example of the way in which international developments have profoundly affected the nature of Italian politics and society in the most recent period. Further examples derive from Italy’s membership of the European Union, a matter to which I turn in the section that follows.

Italy and the wider world  137 The European Union The EU’s precursors, the European Coal and Steel Community from 1952 and, from 1957, the European Economic Community (EEC), came into being along with a number of other European-wide institutions – NATO, the Western European Union, Euratom – in the immediate post-war period because then, the two main international issues from the point of view of the West were the containment of both Communism and a resurgent Germany. The European Coal and Steel Community and the EEC would solve both problems because, by providing for integration (that is, the pooling of sovereignty), first, in coal and steel production and then in other policy areas, they would lock Germany into a set of supranational institutions obliging her to work in tandem with her Western European neighbours, while allowing her growing strength to reinforce Western Europe as a whole against the USSR. Germany, for its part, was a keen supporter of integration, as was Italy, because for both it offered a way back into international polite society following the outcome of the war. If those who had inspired the integration project had initially envisaged the new structures as taking over large chunks of their member states’ sovereignty, then the failure of the European Defence Community project in 1954 had revealed early on that there would be considerable resistance within the member states to the pooling of sovereignty in such ‘high politics’ areas, so the EEC was premised on an alternative approach: ‘spillover’. This referred to the idea that if integration could be achieved, first, in relatively ‘lowpolitics’ areas, then integration in other areas would come with time because policy-makers would learn that the pooling of sovereignty in one area (for example, agriculture) would require, for its full realisation, integration in successively larger numbers of related areas (for example, energy and transport) in a continuous, ongoing, process. The principal milestones on the road to increasing European integration were the setting up of the EEC itself, the Single European Act of 1986, the Maastricht Treaty of 1992 and the Lisbon Treaty of 2009. The EEC had a Commission (responsible for proposing Community legislation and ensuring its implementation, whose members were nominated by the member states but enjoined to be independent of them), a Council (composed of one minister from each member state accountable to their own political system, with responsibility for approving legislation by majority or unanimity) and a Parliament (with the right to be consulted and consisting of national MPs serving on a part-time basis). Direct elections to the European Parliament were held for the first time in 1979. The subsequent treaties enhanced the significance of the supranational at the expense of the inter-governmental dimensions of these three basic institutions while taking forward the process of integration in substantive areas of policy making. Thus, the Single European Act established the goal of achieving a single market by 1992 and to that end introduced the cooperation procedure making it possible for the Council, with the support of Parliament, to adopt proposals by qualified majority and by unanimity, if the support of Parliament was lacking. The Maastricht Treaty established what was originally referred to as the ‘co-decision procedure’ (subsequently, the ‘ordinary legislative procedure’) reassigning the Council’s power to approve legislation to the Council and Parliament jointly, and it established the so-called ‘convergence criteria’ associated with Economic and Monetary Union and adoption of the single currency in 1999. Finally, the Lisbon Treaty extended the ordinary legislative procedure to almost all areas of policy, raised the number of areas in which voting in the Council would be by qualified majority as opposed to unanimity and increased the role of Parliament in the appointment of the Commission. Commission presidents would be nominated by the heads of the member-states’ governments (meeting as the European Council) taking account of the results of the most recent European Parliament elections, and then they would be elected by Parliament. Commissioners would be appointed by the President in consultation with the member states, with Parliament having the power to vote down the proposed Commission as a whole.

138  Italy and the wider world Until the advent of the single currency, both Italian policy-makers and ordinary citizens, by and large, had been very much in favour of this process of increasing European integration (at least rhetorically: the country did not have the best of reputations when it came to the implementation of European directives). Favourable attitudes were driven by perceptions that the Italian political system faced a number of problems, such that integration would create a series of ‘external constraints’ effectively forcing Italian politicians to modernise. For example, it was apparent that Italy had difficulties in the area of public finances: the period since 1970 had seen a variety of economic and social changes (such as the growing significance to the economy of small and very small enterprises with their relatively high propensity for tax evasion) thus putting upward pressure on the level of public debt (also difficult to contain thanks to the procedures surrounding approval of the annual Finance Law which regularly fell victim to the politics of clientelism (Verzichelli, 1999)). Membership of the single currency would bring fiscal discipline thanks to the Stability and Growth Pact that went with it. This was agreed by the European Council at its Dublin summit of 1996 and built upon the above-mentioned convergence criteria to stipulate that Eurozone countries were to ensure that their budget deficits did not exceed 3 per cent of GDP in any one year and that they did not allow total public debt to exceed 60 per cent of GDP. Membership of the single currency was perceived as bringing with it several further advantages besides. Restrictions on national governments’ freedom to run budget deficits would help to contain interest rates and therefore the costs of investment. It would eliminate the risks, uncertainties and transaction costs that are involved when trade requires currency conversions – a significant consideration for a country like Italy whose largest trading partners are in the EU. Finally, the single currency and single-currency membership were perceived as necessary thanks to the effects of spillover (Rossi, 2000: 119–20; Sadeh, 2002: 10). That is, ‘completion of the Single Market project created pressure for monetary integration by creating the risk that, as one of the few remaining barriers to trade, national currencies might be used as the basis for competitive devaluations among countries’ (Newell, 2010). Once the single currency had been launched, favourable attitudes towards Europe began to grow less favourable, as the Italian public became increasingly aware that the external constraints the currency created had a number of disadvantages besides the potential advantages described above. In effect, control of monetary policy had been relinquished to Europe, and this meant that governments could no longer use exchange rates as a means of adjustment to cyclical dis-­ equilibria. Meanwhile, interest rates were controlled by the European Central Bank and would be set in accordance with rates of inflation in the Eurozone as a whole. This meant, potentially, that, if inflation were below the average in Italy, the country might find domestic economic activity being depressed to address dis-equilibria elsewhere. Meanwhile, the constraints on budgetary policy implicit in the SGP – constraints designed to minimise the likelihood of inflationary pressures forcing the ECB to respond with interest-rate rises – deprived governments of space for using tax and spending as measures of cyclical adjustment. This was an especially serious consideration for a country like Italy given its very high level of public debt (which had forced governments to run primary surpluses since the early 1990s in order to stop debt levels rising as a result of the accumulation of interest). This meant, in a recessionary situation, that the pressures on the public finances would be immense (thanks to lower tax receipts and demands for higher social-security spending), and yet the SGP would stand as a barrier in the way of the necessary borrowing. Thus was the stage set for significant tensions between the EU and the Italian government. Already in 2005, prior to the onset of the world-wide recession in 2008, Italy’s budget deficit had reached 4.3 per cent of GDP leading the Commission to recommend application of the Excessive Deficit Procedure (involving the imposition of sanctions on countries failing to comply with Council decisions on corrective action to reduce deficits deemed excessive), giving Italy until 2007 to

Italy and the wider world  139 bring the deficit to below 3 per cent. The Procedure (and, prior to its application, ‘early warnings’) had been intended as a mechanism that would promote fiscal discipline not just thanks to its formal pressures but (especially in the cases of countries, like Italy, with high levels of indebtedness) also thanks to the market pressures it would create. That is, it was anticipated that early warnings and the Procedure would act as signals to the markets that a country’s sovereign debt was increasingly risky, so raising the costs of borrowing for the country concerned (Della Sala, 2006: 157–8). These were very tight constraints indeed, and, never far from the centre of any public discussion of government economic policy, they acquired an even higher profile with the onset of the Eurozone sovereign debt crisis in 2010. As a series of events, the letter led ultimately to the fall from office of the Prime Minister himself after his inability to command his parliamentary majority had been revealed in a crucial public-finance vote on 10 October 2011 (Newell, 2012). What all these tensions revealed was that Italian governments were caught up in a seemingly unsolvable dilemma. On the one hand, they needed to be able to generate the higher levels of growth that would enable them to pay down debt without unsustainable social costs; on the other hand, in the context of the single currency, the very high levels of debt themselves acted as obstacles to the kinds of expansionary taxation and spending measures that could generate the growth in the first place. On the one hand, governments needed the freedom to take the kinds of expansionary measures that would favour growth (and in their absence were forced to rely on micro-economic policy); on the other hand, moves in this direction were always viewed with diffidence by the Commission, the Council and other member states, aware that in the final analysis their own prosperity was potentially put at risk by any adverse consequences for the Italian debt and its management. Thus it was that as the constraints and dilemmas (with their social consequences) involved in single-currency membership increasingly penetrated the public consciousness, so levels of Euroscepticism grew. By 2017, for example, although those in favour of the Euro outnumbered those against (Termometropolitico, 2017), there had been a dramatic decline in confidence in the EU itself, down to 34 per cent from the 72 per cent expressing some degree of confidence in Europe at the time of the currency’s advent (European Union, 2017). The consequence of this, in turn, was that the 2018 election had a distinctly novel element in featuring the EU’s legitimacy crisis as a particularly salient theme: prior to the turn of the century, and especially before the 1990s, European integration had not gone far enough for it really to feature in member states’ election campaigns to any significant degree; now, arguably, it had not gone far enough to prevent it doing so. This provided new opportunities for such populist parties as the M5S and the NL. The latter, in particular, was able to achieve a dramatic advance at the election by undergoing a metamorphosis. It had hitherto been a regional-autonomy party directing anti-­establishment protest against Rome. Under the leadership of Matteo Salvini from 2013, it sought to direct anti-establishment sentiment against Brussels by becoming a nationalist party hostile to the restrictions involved in Euro membership (and in EU approaches to ­immigration) – ­restrictions in practice accepted, however unwillingly, by the outgoing government. Dropping the word ‘Northern’ from its title, it was now able, thanks to its transformation, to field candidates throughout the country, achieving as a result a four-fold increase in support, dominance of the centre right and a secure position in government. So, since the start of the new millennium, Italy has become a less uncritical European integrationist than it was previously, especially when governments of the centre right have been in office, and this has been reflected in the stances it has taken in fields other than the economic. That is, in seeking, as it has done from time to time, to obtain relaxation of the constraints involved in membership of the single currency, it has manifested the desire it has, across the range of policy areas, to collaborate with, but also autonomously to influence, its European

140  Italy and the wider world partners. During the 1990s, its stance had been different. The European integration processes had been a resource for governments, providing them with a ‘salvation myth’ (Aliboni and Greco, 1996), enabling them to enjoy a ‘permissive consensus’ (Giuliani and Piattoni, 2006) that would strengthen them and so bring about a ‘hollowing out and hardening’ of the state (Della Sala, 1997) as they took what would have otherwise been unpopular measures necessary to prepare for advent of the single currency. So they had been content, on the whole, simply to lend their weight to European developments, more or less uncritically. Prior to the 1990s, ‘state capacity [had been] negatively affected by the pervasive power of the political parties, which limited the capacity of the executive to act autonomously’ (Carbone and Quaglia, 2011: 162). The weakness of prime ministers vis-à-vis their cabinets and of the latter vis-à-vis the legislature made for high government turnover and therefore for a weak negotiating hand in international forums like the EU, where the country’s interlocutors could never be quite sure of, and Italian negotiators were unable to give especially firm guarantees about, the country’s capacity to actually deliver on agreements reached. The new millennium and especially the advent of the 2001 Berlusconi Government therefore represented a significant change of direction in bringing at least somewhat stronger governments and prime ministers (therefore executives with somewhat clearer ideas of what they wanted and a greater capacity to get it). Especially since then, therefore, it has been possible to describe the country’s stance as one involving support for an EU that is, yes, strong but is an EU in which Italy also has freedom of action with respect to its institutions and the larger European powers (Felsen, 2018: 114). In exercising this freedom of action, Italian foreign-policy-makers seek to manage the actual and potential trade-offs between pursuit of what they see as the country’s interests in the EU arena and pursuit of the country’s interests in other arenas, especially the one constituted by its relations with America and the one constituted by its relations with countries elsewhere, especially those of the Mediterranean. Examples of the links, and occasional conflicts, between Italy’s ambitions in these arenas are numerous. Within the EU, it may be taken as a given that Italy wants to enjoy good relations, as far as possible, with all of its fellow member states. At the same time, however, it also wants to enjoy good relations with the US, which means support for a continuation of the centrality of NATO to European defence in place of the more autonomous European defence policy favoured by France and Germany. Since Italy has always sought to prevent the emergence, within the EU, of any informal Franco-German directoire, reducing its own influence (as the third largest country economically and in terms of population), it might find itself taking stances enabling it to achieve both this and its ‘Atlanticist’ ambitions but at the cost of dividing it from France and Germany. For example, ‘when, in the mid-1990s, the French government proposed that command of AFSOUTH (one of the three main subdivisions of NATO command of military forces) be given to a European, Italy refused to go along with a plan that would have loosened American ties without offering any concrete gain in terms of the defence of Europe’s southern flank (Croci, 2002: 14–15)’ (Newell, 2010: 338). To take another example: in the run-up to the Iraq war in 2003, the government had to contend with opposition to the invasion on the part of France and Germany and opposition to participation in it on the part of its own public. So, siding with France and Germany would have helped its popularity at home and diminished prospects for the emergence of the aforementioned directoire. However, siding with the countries favouring the emergence of a stronger European defence identity independent of America would have rendered the divide between the US and Europe even larger than it then was. Thus it was that Italy sought as best it could to juggle the two positions by, in the end, supporting the invasion but only involving any of its military personnel once the invasion had come to a conclusion and then only in a supposedly peace-keeping capacity.

Italy and the wider world  141 A final example involves the profound changes that took place recently in the Atlantic and EU arenas, changes that have led Italy to having to assert itself more forcefully in the Mediterranean arena. In the first of the three, the election of Donald Trump brought various signs of a shift towards isolationism in American foreign policy. Implying a threat to Italy’s ability to use the US connection as a means of countering the influence of France and Germany in Europe, it also meant a failure of Italian attempts to secure greater American support for its efforts in Libya, aimed at addressing the migrant crisis. In the EU, Brexit too has potentially deprived Italy of an important lever in seeking to contain the influence of the larger European powers, which have been less than completely supportive of its demands for greater flexibility in the area of public finances and for an EU-wide approach to the migrant crisis. Left, then, to deal with the crisis on its own, Italy has sought to exploit more fully its role as a significant power in the Mediterranean, using its influence to attempt to bring an end to the conflict in Libya and so stem the flow of refugees. During the course of 2017, these efforts appeared to have brought some success. Although Italy’s own diplomatic efforts were pre-empted by those of France, bringing heightened tension between the two countries, talks involving the various factions in Libya resulted in an agreement on the construction of refugee camps within the country and on efforts to stem the flow of migrants to Libya from Chad, Niger and Algeria, the result being a fall in the number of migrants coming from Libya to Italy with respect to the previous year (Felsen, 2018). The rise of China and other new centres of economic power Inseparable from the trends and tendencies associated with globalisation has been the rise of East Asia (especially China, Japan, South Korea and Taiwan) and their growing economic and therefore political importance in international affairs, since 1945. As ever, the Cold War placed considerable constraints on the states’ capacities for the autonomous pursuit of their interests on the world stage, but, in the case of Japan, it was a significant factor in the economic growth that gave the country the status of second-largest capitalist economy in the world by the 1970s. It made it possible for Japan to shelter under the US security umbrella without having to contribute significant resources of its own, while motivating the US itself to drive forward Japan’s development as a tool for the containment of Communism. Public policies reflecting the ‘developmental state’ model (Johnson, 1982), land reform and political continuity were also important drivers of Japan’s economic miracle, and it was in part because these characteristics were also present in South Korea and Taiwan that they too underwent ‘economic miracles’, starting about a decade after the initiation of Japan’s. China’s emergence was driven by partly contrasting sets of circumstances. Following the disastrous results of Mao Zedong’s attempts to drive forward development starting from isolationist and autarchic assumptions, his successor, Deng Xioping, dramatically opened up China to the outside world through a number of sweeping economic reforms as part of what become known as the ‘Open Door Policy’. Instead of rejecting the capitalist system, Deng embraced it, first, by allowing the peasants to farm their own land and create rural industries (Kornberg and Faust, 2005: 67), then, by gradually allowing private production and distribution of goods in the cities and turning to the outside world for aid, trade and technology (Kornberg and Faust, 2005: 65). As had happened in the case of Japan decades earlier, thousands of students were sent abroad, often with government assistance, ‘to learn about science and technology as well as new business and administration techniques’ – the idea being that ‘they would then bring this knowledge back to China and help China catch up with the West’ (Kornberg and Faust, 2005: 70). Capital and technology was sought from abroad – the idea being that foreign companies could be encouraged to invest by the promise of exceptionally cheap labour and then that they

142  Italy and the wider world would export their goods back to their home countries, which would provide China with much needed hard currency. The upshot of all of this was that over the past half century the countries of East Asia have come to account for rapidly increasing shares of world trade and have become increasingly integrated into the world economy. China, in particular, by exporting labour-intensive products, such as shoes, textiles, clothing, toys and glassware, and importing capital-intensive machine tools and goods produced abroad, has become the new engine of global economic growth. Thanks to the technological underpinnings of globalisation and therefore to its cultural effects, it is now much easier for Western companies to find a market for their goods in China but also for the Chinese to find markets for their goods and to attract inward investment. This, in turn, has enabled China to extend its political influence in various parts of the world through the exercise of soft power. For example, there has been significant expansion, in recent years, in Chinese trade and investment on the African continent and a spread of Chinese-led infrastructure projects there. Thanks to this economic engagement, China is viewed positively by large numbers of people in Africa, and this has enabled China to extend its influence there through the setting up of Chinese language and cultural institutes – which in their turn have led to a growing number of entrepreneurs visiting China and a growing desire on their part for African economies to be tied more closely to China’s economy. While all of these developments have created the potential for significant new conflicts, as well as some actual ones, on the world stage generally, they have had a number of specific implications for Italy in particular, since the structure of its industry has left it unusually exposed to the growth of competition from newly industrialising countries like China. In the first place, these countries are characterised by a concentration on precisely those sectors – such as clothing, textiles, footwear, furniture and wood products – in which Italy specialises, and, given that the sectors in question are labour intensive and that labour is precisely the factor of production that is most abundantly available in these countries, their products are particularly competitive. Since the advent of the Euro, Italy has no longer been able to maintain its competitive advantage by having recourse, as it once could and did, to devaluation of its currency. Concentrating, to an above-average degree, on production in small-scale enterprises using employees with relatively low levels of human capital, Italian firms have, by and large, found it difficult to engage in the research and development needed to keep pace with shifts in patterns of world demand. Despite this, the main focus of the heightened Italian activism on the world stage since the end of the Cold War has continued to be the traditional three arenas: the US, Europe and the Mediterranean (where, for geographical reasons the country has obvious economic and other concerns: for example, about a quarter of natural gas imports come from Algeria and Libya, and civil wars in Syria and Libya have been major drivers of the migrant crisis). Countries outside the three arenas have tended not to be the subject of consistent or coherent strategies: ‘Italy has no foreign policy towards China or any other Asian country. It has only prejudices – positive and negative, but still prejudices’ (Sisci, 2009: 123). The countries have tended to feature only insofar as they have been relevant for the achievement of this or that immediate term objective, as in the case of the joint opposition of Italy and China to the ambitions of Germany and Japan to acquire permanent membership of the United Nations Security Council. Correspondingly, while scholars have tended to interpret Italy’s place in the world and its international action in terms of the three arenas, or ‘three circles’ (Felsen, 2018), framework, other regions and countries have tended to be overlooked (Carbone and Coralluzzo, 2011). Yet it would be a mistake to neglect the profound potential and actual implications of the growth of new centres of economic power around the world both for Italy’s domestic politics and for her international action. Domestically, their growth has already demonstrated their

Italy and the wider world  143 potential to lead to a heightening of the kinds of populist and nationalist sentiments that have fuelled the recent resurgence of the League. For example, during the second Berlusconi Government from 2001, policy towards China was accompanied by a number of very public and highprofile expressions of alarm on the part of government spokespersons about China’s growing competitiveness and about suggestions that it was flooding Italian markets with masses of counterfeit products, leading representatives of the NL to demand the unilateral imposition of trade tariffs (Carbone and Coralluzzo, 2011: 187). Internationally, Italy’s trade with countries outside the ‘three circles’ inevitably has (potentially profound) implications for her diplomatic relations within them. It affects the stances the country feels obliged to take in EU negotiations on free trade agreements with other countries and trade blocks. It affects the stances it takes on other EU matters. For example, the 2018 League–Five-Star Government took office demanding an end to Brussels sanctions on Moscow, aware that Italian exports to Russia had fallen from $14 billion to $9 billion between 2013 and 2017 and that Russia was a key player in Libya – where, however, its interests conflict with France, a circumstance that could complicate its efforts to work with the French in efforts to achieve Eurozone reform (Stratfor, 2018). Conclusion So Italian foreign policy, like the foreign policy of most states, is inevitably complex, reflecting foreign-policy-makers’ awareness of the interconnectedness of the country’s interests and the ever-changing nature of the world order in which the country is situated. If it refers to stable patterns of relations between states, then the notion that there is a ‘world order’ (as opposed to disorder) at all may legitimately be questioned, but if the idea can be accepted broadly speaking, then, as I have suggested, the world order since 1989 has displayed significant features of novelty – features which, with antecedents prior to that year, have confronted Italy with significant new challenges compared to the early post-war years. The end of geopolitical bipolarity, globalisation, mass migration, European integration and the growth of China and other newly industrialised countries have all completely transformed the international background against which policy-makers have had to make their decisions, and, most importantly, they have meant that international developments have permeated Italian politics, setting domestic agendas to a degree that is without precedent since at least the end of the war. This has also worked the other way around: as a ‘middle ranking power’, Italy has had to conduct a foreign policy driven by the constant search for visibility and status, the need to ensure that its room for manoeuvre is not restricted by exclusion on the part of other states, with its success or otherwise in such efforts having been heavily conditioned by the nature and substance of its domestic politics. If this means that Italian policy-makers have had to operate in a world of multilevel governance, extending above the state beyond its borders as well as below the state to the sub-national levels, then it means that they have had to play a constant game of adaptation and change. And as the pace of change in the international arena shows no signs of slowing down, it is unlikely that the game of adaptation and change will come to an end any time soon. Notes 1 Meeting Henry Kissinger and US President Gerald Ford in August 1975, for instance, Aldo Moro tried to explain that most of those who voted PCI were ‘also in favour of freedom and liberty’ and that ‘with détente the people “ask why … we keep these rigid barriers when you can see that the American President is talking to the Soviet leaders”’ (Gualtieri, 2004: 439). 2 Such as those of Giuseppe Pella in relation to Trieste or Enrico Mattei in relation to the ‘Seven Sisters’ oil cartel.

144  Italy and the wider world 3 The most famous of these was the one giving rise to the diplomatic incident at the Sigonella air base in Sicily in 1985 following the Achille Lauro affair. The delight at Prime Minister Bettino Craxi’s success in forcing US President Ronald Reagan to back down was palpable. Craxi was, according to the press, ‘the only politician who ha[d] had the balls to stand up to the United States’ (Il Fastidioso, 2019). 4 This was the codename given to the mission to restore order in Albania in 1997 following the collapse of financial pyramid schemes which gave rise to considerable social unrest in the country. 5 This has arisen because the law as it currently stands is based on the jus sanguinis principle and therefore denies full rights of citizenship, including the right to vote, to some two-million secondgeneration migrants, born and resident in Italy and therefore Italian for all practical purposes.

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Italy and the wider world  145 Fukuyama, Francis (1989), ‘The End of History’, National Interest, 16: 3–18. Giuliani, M., and S. Piattoni (2006), ‘Italy: Back to the Future or Steps Towards Normality?’, pp. 85–106 in E.B. Pirro and EE. Zeff (eds), The European Union and the Member States, Boulder, Colo.: Lynne Rienner. Grieco, J.M., and G.J. Ikenberry (2003), State Power and World Markets, New York: Norton. Gualtieri, Roberto (2004), ‘The Italian Political System and Détente (1963–1981)’, Journal of Modern Italian Studies 9: 428–49. Hill, Christopher (2011), ‘Foreword’, pp. xi–xv in Maurizio Carbone (ed.), Italy in the Post-Cold War Order: Adaptation, Bipartisanship, Visibility, Plymouth: Lexington Books. Hill, Christopher, Sara Silvestri and Elif Cetin (2016), ‘Il fenomeno migratorio e I problemi del multiculturalismo in Italia’, pp. 239–58 in Maurizio Carbone and Simona Piattoni (eds), Politica in Italia: I fatti dell’anno e le interpretazioni, Bologna: Il Mulino. Il Fastidioso (2019), ‘34 anni fa “La notte di Sigonella”: Su Bettino Craxi si può dire di tutto, ma nella nostra Storia è stato l’unico politico che ha avuto le palle di farsi rispettare dagli Stati Uniti! … E questa è stata anche la sua fine?’, 9 Oct., https://ilfastidioso.myblog.it/2019/10/09/la-notte-di-sigonella. ITANES [Italian National Election Study] (2018), Vox populi – Il voto ad alta voce del 2018, Bologna: Il Mulino. Johnson, Chalmers (1982), MITI and the Japanese Miracle: The Growth of Industrial Policy 1925–1975, Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press. Kelly, Bob, and Raia Prokhovnik (2004), ‘Economic Globalisation?’, pp. 85–125 in David Held (ed.), A Globalizing World: Culture, Economics, Politics, 2nd edn, London and New York: Routledge. Kornberg, Judith F., and John R. Faust (2005), China in World Politics: Policies, Processes, Prospects, Boulder Colo.: Lynne Rienner. Kriesi, Hanspeter, Edgar Grande, Romain Lachat, Martin Dolezal, Simon Bornschier and Timotheos Frey (2006), ‘Globalization and the Transformation of the National Political Space: Six European Countries Compared’, European Journal of Political Research 45: 921–56. Livingston, Steven (1997), ‘Clarifying the CNN Effect: An Examination of Media Effects According to Type of Military Intervention’, Press, Politics, Public Policy Research paper R-18, John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University, https://shorensteincenter.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/ r18_livingston.pdf. Luiss Open (2017), ‘Inequality and Stagnating Family Income in Italy’, 8 Dec., http://open.luiss.it/ en/2017/12/08/disuguaglianza-e-stagnazione-dei-redditi-familiari-in-italia. MacFarlane, S. Neil (2009), ‘Post-Cold War Intervention’, Adelphi Papers 42(350): 49–76, doi: 10.1080/05679320208459468. McGrew, Anthony (2004), ‘Power Shift: From National Government to Global Governance?’, pp. 127–67 in David Held (ed.), A Globalizing World: Culture, Economics, Politics, 2nd edn, London and New York: Routledge. Mckay, Hugh (2004), ‘The Globalization of Culture?’, pp. 47–84 in David Held (ed.), A Globalizing World: Culture, Economics, Politics, 2nd edn, London and New York: Routledge. Manin, Bernard (1997), The Principles of Representative Government, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Newell, James L. (2010), The Politics of Italy: Governance in a Normal Country, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Newell, James L. (2012), ‘Down But Not Out: Understanding the Berlusconi Resignation and Its Significance’, Italian Politics and Society: Review of the Conference Group on Italian Politics and Society, 70: 30–41. Newell, James L. (2019), Silvio Berlusconi: A Study in Failure, Manchester: Manchester University Press. Qureshi, Zia (n.d.), ‘Trends in Income Inequality: Global, Inter-country and within Countries’, https:// www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2017/12/global-inequality.pdf. Rapoport, Hillel (2016), ‘Magration and Globalization: What’s in it for Developing Countries?’, Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA), Discussion paper no. 10109, http://ftp.iza.org/dp10109.pdf. Ratti, Luca (2002), ‘Continuity and Consensus in Italian Foreign Policy’, paper presented to the 52nd ­Annual Conference of the UK Political Studies Association, University of Aberdeen, 5–7 April.

146  Italy and the wider world Rossi, Salvatore (2000), La politica economica italiana 1968–2000, Rome and Bari: Laterza. Sadeh, Tal (2002), ‘The Establishment of the European Monetary System: On the Role of Leadership and Reciprocity in Cognitive Evolution’, paper presented to the annual meeting of the International Studies Association, New Orleans, 24–7 Mar., http://www.isanet.org/noarchive/Isa01.pdf. Sisci, F. (2009), ‘China, the Italian Prejudice’, International Spectator 44(2): 119–23. Stratfor (2018), ‘What Italy’s Foreign Policy will Look Like under New Rulers’, 18 June, https://­worldview. com/article/italy-foreign-policy-under-five-star-league. Suri, Jeremi (2009), ‘American Grand Strategy from the Cold War’s End to 9/11’, Orbis 53: 611–27. Termometropolitico (2017), ‘Sondaggi politici, euro visto con favore dal 59% degli italiani, ma è il dato più basso nell’eurozona’, https://www.termometropolitico.it/1281114_sondaggi-politici-euro.html. Trento, Sandro (2003), ‘Stagnazione e frammentazione produttiva’, Il Mulino, 6: 1093–1102. UNHCR [United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees] (n.d.), ‘Mediterranean Situation’, https:// data2.unhcr.org/en/situations/mediterranean. Valbruzzi, Marco, and Rinaldo Vignati (eds) (2018), Il vicolo cieco: Le elezioni del 4 marzo 2018, ­Bologna: Il Mulino. Verzichelli (1999), La legge finanziaria, Bologna: Il Mulino. Walston, James (2007), ‘Italian Foreign Policy in the “Second Republic”: Changes of Form and ­Substance’, Modern Italy 12: 91–104.

7 Conclusion The Italy of Berlusconi and his successors

Introduction So far, in this book I have looked back at the past in order to understand the present (Chapter 1). I have then (in Chapters 2 to 6) explored the nature of Italian democracy by considering it from the perspectives of polity, politics and policy: the institutional frameworks within which and through which political competition takes place (polity), the actors, ideologies and procedures informing political competition (politics) and the issues and public decisions forming the substance of political contention (policy). In this final chapter, I consider Italian democracy in the round, discussing it using the concepts of comparative politics in order to draw some conclusions about its overall health and the direction in which it may be headed, especially in the light of the landmark general election of 25 September 2022. I have entitled this chapter ‘The Italy of Berlusconi and his successors’ to reflect the fact that the advent of the entrepreneur marked the beginning of an almost completely new phase for Italian democracy. It was one in which, as I have discussed hitherto, polity, politics and policy were marked by radical and in all probability permanent changes compared with the preceding years. In this chapter, therefore, I attempt to draw the threads of my earlier discussion together by considering, in light of the changes, the salient features of the political system as a whole and its possible future trajectory. The remainder of this chapter is structured as follows. In the following section I highlight the principal contrasts in the nature of Italian democracy before and after the 1990s. I then consider the impacts these have had in terms of political behaviour and political engagement in early twenty-first-century Italy. In the third section, I consider the outcome of the general election of September 2022, and in the fourth section I consider the possible implications for the future. The nature of Italian democracy Among the most significant of the novel features of Italian democracy, as it has taken shape since the end of the Cold War, I should mention, in the first instance, is the growth of populist politics. This has made Italian politics increasingly like the politics of other countries, for populist parties have since the turn of the century been on the rise more or less everywhere. Populists, as Professor Sir Richard Evans notes claim that behind the elaborate structures of representative democracy, of general elections, political parties, national legislatures, supposedly independent judiciaries, business and banking institutions, universities and educational systems, lurk elites that are all linked together to control society for their own benefit. Often populists go further and claim that these elites are also linked to international interests that betray those of the nation and its people. DOI: 10.4324/9780203422120-8

148 Conclusion Mainstream political parties might seem to oppose each other, but underneath the surface they are both the same, vehicles for the self-perpetuation of entrenched elites who are in politics for their own gain. Populism asserts the participatory rights of parts of the nation that feel left out. (Evans, 2020: 2) Berlusconi’s appeal, when he ‘took to the field’ in 1994 was clearly populist in this sense, for it revolved around the idea that his opponents were the professional politicians, the state and the intellectual elites in the parties of the left (and shortly thereafter the judiciary as well), who conspired against ordinary Italians of whom he was the most authentic representative. He claimed to be uniquely qualified to represent the interests of ordinary Italians as he, unlike the professional politicians, who were ‘capable of producing only incomprehensible jargon’ (Newell, 2019a: 48), was a self-made man who had given proof of his extraordinary abilities as a successful entrepreneur and who could therefore do for Italy what he had done for himself. Populism was not new to Italian politics. Fascism is a brand of populism, and populism had briefly resurfaced in the immediate post-war period in the form of Guglielmo Giannini’s Fronte dell’Uomo Qualunque, which claimed to speak for the interests of the ‘common man’ who simply wanted to be left alone both by the Fascists and by the newly ascendant democratic party politicians. It gained not insignificant, if short-lived, support by leveraging popular fears and resentments arising from the combination of the then economic hardships and political uncertainties, especially those associated with the risk of sanctions being imposed on those who, to one degree or another, were guilty of involvement in Mussolini’s fallen regime. However, although not new, populism, as a political appeal, had then been completely crowded out by the ideological politics of the ‘First Republic’, by the Cold War division and by the anti-Fascism implied by support for the republican Constitution. In this context, qualunquismo had become a widely used term of abuse to refer to an indifference to ideological commitments, a refusal to accept one’s political responsibilities to stand up for constitutional values and therefore closet sympathies for Fascism and the far right. With the collapse or transformation of the traditional parties of mass integration, especially the DC and the PCI, which had been the main expressions and drivers of the ideological cleavage at the heart of ‘First Republic’ politics, populism re-emerged, because it was able to draw on long-standing and widespread anti-political sentiments. The demise of the traditional parties left vast swathes of the electorate politically orphaned and therefore available for mobilisation by populist appeals, the more so given Tangentopoli and the loss of authority of everyone affected by it. Finally, it had a very effective spearhead in the form of Berlusconi, who, in the new bipolar world of Italian party politics, was a far more effective campaigner than his opponents. This was a world in which party-system fragmentation and government instability continued to undermine public confidence in the political establishment. It was a world in which preconstituted electoral coalitions competed with each other for overall majorities of parliamentary seats, whose leaders were therefore de facto candidates for the position of Prime Minister and on whom far and away the greater share of media attention was therefore focused. It was a world in which the personalisation and the mediatisation of politics, together with the disappearance of the old ideological certainties, meant that personality, charisma, celebrity, language and image counted for much more than in the past. Berlusconi understood this much better than his rivals, enabling him to pose as a man of the people, an outsider ready to take on an unworthy and untrustworthy political establishment. The parties of the left attempted to imitate his campaign style, but it was not until the arrival in office of Matteo Renzi that it bore any fruit. Before then, it tended not to work for the left as it ignored the fact that the entrepreneur had a significant ‘first-mover’ advantage. That is to say,

Conclusion  149 it had been Berlusconi who had introduced populist politics and personalised campaigning to electoral competition in Italy after the end of the Cold War. Therefore, attempts to outdo him in this area tended only to reinforce his advantage. In 2008, for example, Walter Veltroni had been put up against Berlusconi in the election campaign of that year precisely because he was considered to be a good match for him as a communicator. Famously, Veltroni spent the campaign refusing to refer to Berlusconi by name, instead referring to him only as ‘my adversary’, apparently in an attempt to deprive Berlusconi’s personalised campaigning of its power. However, if the task of effective campaigning is to break down the frames used by one’s opponents, then Veltroni’s had to be considered a failure (and in fact he lost the election) since the effect of denying frames is to reinforce them, as George Lakoff (2004) has famously explained.1 By 2013, when Renzi became leader of the PD, Berlusconi had been removed from office as Prime Minister and had lost the 2013 election. It was therefore becoming clear that, though he might continue to be an influential figure in Italian politics, his role would increasingly be confined to reacting to agendas set by others, rather than, as he had managed to do for nearly two decades, setting the agenda of public debate himself. Renzi, in other words, managed to reach unprecedented heights of popularity (in the 2014 European Parliament election, just three months after he had managed to capture the premiership, he took his party to a record 40.8 per cent of the vote) on the basis of his own brand of personalised and populist politics, because by then he had the field to himself. In many respects, his populism reflected that of Berlusconi – so that he was at times referred to as the ‘Berlusconi of the left’ (Bordingon, 2013; 2014). Like Berlusconi’s, his populism reflected the drive of populist leaders towards disintermediation in their relationships with citizens. They pose as the most authentic representatives of ‘the people’ with which they therefore seek to establish a direct relationship, unmediated by parties and party bureaucracies. Berlusconi’s FI was therefore a party formed precisely for the purpose of furthering his own political ambitions, under his total control, without any kind of political identity separate from that of its founder and leader. Renzi’s claim to leadership of the PD was based on the theme that, in order to make up lost ground, the PD needed to elect a leader with a highly personalised leadership style who would challenge the party’s established oligarchies. He demanded, in other words, to make decisions free of any constraints of the party’s elites and to be accountable only to the electorate, so that the party itself became nothing more than a caucus for election of the leader (Salvati, 2016: 9).2 Because they claim to be uniquely qualified to represent the interests of the people, populist leaders pose as ‘men of providence’ and therefore there is often considerable religious symbolism in their messaging. If this was definitely true of Berlusconi, who once even went as far as to describe himself as having been unto dal Signore (anointed by God (see Parotto, 2007)), then the themes that accompanied Renzi’s rise – that he was ‘predestined’ to lead and that only he could save the country from the economic and political crisis into which the country had been plunged by the international financial meltdown of 2008 – revealed that religious overtones were present in his messaging too. Like Berlusconi, Renzi saw his opponents as being elites – professional politicians, trade union leaders, experts and university professors – who would obstruct his autonomous decision-making, limiting his room for manoeuvre. What was, perhaps, novel about Renzi’s brand of populism was that it had the connotations of a generational challenge in the sense that he was the youngest Prime Minister in Italy’s history so that his opposition to established elites had the appearance, for many, of a revolt of the young against the old. The two other main brands of populism to have attracted significant electoral support are those of the League (under Umberto Bossi initially, and subsequently under Matteo Salvini) and of the M5S. Like those of Berlusconi and Renzi, these populisms too experienced meteoric rises (at the 2018 election, the M5S took 32 per cent of the vote at what was only its second

150 Conclusion outing in a national election, while the League took a record 17 per cent) only then to crash and burn: a reflection of the loss of the traditional ideological anchors of the earlier Cold War period, of the extreme electoral fluidity of the period since then and of the difficulties all populist ­movements – catalysed by crises (economic in the case of the M5S, cultural in the case of the League) and expressions of protest – have when they enter government and are forced to make choices either betraying initial demands or favouring some groups at the expense of others. The two represent contrasting varieties of populism: exclusionary in the first case, inclusionary in the second. This means that, whereas the League defines ‘the people’ in cultural terms – as consisting of white, heterosexual, Christians – for the M5S, legal criteria suffice, so that it takes, on the whole, a less hostile attitude than the League to multiculturalism, immigration (which Salvini’s party frames as a security issue) and other expressions of ‘otherness’. So whereas ‘Them’, for the League consists mainly of migrants, Muslims and so on, for the M5S it consists mainly of the financial world of international speculators, the ECB, the IMF and so on. Both parties define the elites, in opposition to which they claim to be the people’s authentic representatives, as privileged oligarchies in and around the mainstream parties unable or unwilling to assert the interests of the people (‘Us’) against those of others (‘Them’). However, whereas the League ‘puts greater emphasis in its political offer on providing protection from the crisis in an ethnic-cultural sense, the M5S places more emphasis on its role as an innovator with respect to the old politics which is no longer representative’ (Caiani, 2019: 247). Italian democracy, in short, has acquired a profound populist vein to it in the period since the end of the Cold War, which is worrying because of the threat populism poses to liberal democracy. Populists’ attacks on ‘the Establishment’ are an implicit claim that existing systems of representative democracy fail to make it possible for citizens to oust established elites. In claiming to represent the people, populists are anti-pluralist, for ‘the people’ in their conception is a singular entity to an understanding of whose interests they claim to have privileged access, so that the claims of dissenters and opponents are inherently illegitimate. One of the reasons, then, why populism has acquired such a high profile in Italian politics since the early 1990s is that perceptions of the inherent illegitimacy of oppositions have extremely deep roots in Italian political culture, ones that extend back to the so-called ‘liberal era’ antedating Fascism (Salvadori, 1994) and which were significantly strengthened by the so-called conventio ad excludendum of the Cold War era. Claiming to have privileged access to the interests of the people, populists, in a process of reasoning that is entirely circular, regard these interests as being what the populists say they are. Consequently, constitutional constraints on the freedom of action of populist leaders, whose success in winning elections is taken as proof positive of their status as the people’s authentic representatives, are illegitimate. For populists, sovereignty, in the words of article 1 of the Italian Constitution ‘belongs to the people’, but it is exercised not, as the remainder of the article stipulates, ‘in the forms and within the limits of the Constitution’ but rather through the unfettered actions of the populist leader. Consequently, when populists lose elections or constitutional decisions go against them, these facts in themselves become proof of the elitist conspiracies they rail against: elections become stolen (Trump in 2020), judges become ‘enemies of the people’ (the Daily Mail and Brexit in 2016), presidents deserving of impeachment (the M5S in 2018). Populism is intimately bound up with a second significant feature of the Italian political system since the early 1990s, its constant search – driven by disappointment with the results of the upheavals of that period – for institutional reform reflective of plebescitarian principles of government, all of which has been driven by an assumption that elections serve merely an investiture function and not, also, an accountability function. In essence, the lack of public authority

Conclusion  151 of – the crisis of legitimacy surrounding – the country’s political parties became translated into a crisis of legitimacy of the country’s political institutions. The political upheavals of the early 1990s – when the end of the Cold War and revelations of widespread political corruption brought a disintegration of the traditional parties and a transformation of the party system – were called by some (e.g. Gilbert, 1995) a ‘revolution’, one marking the transition between a ‘First’ and a ‘Second’ Republic. This was because the country was perceived as having for long been suffering from a crisis of governability, which the partysystem transformation itself would put an end to. The crisis was essentially perceived as one arising from an excessively large number of veto points in the political system, its inability to resist the penetration of particularistic interests and therefore governing instability and the lack of capacity for decisive decision-making – unless forced on the system by the power of external circumstances. The advent of party-system bipolarity from 1994, involving two coalitions competing for overall majorities of seats, was thought likely to be the precursor to significant improvement. Prime ministers who owed their authority directly to election outcomes would find their authority in government enhanced; a governing coalition, subject to the competitive pressures of an alternative potentially governing coalition, would as a result remain cohesive. However, it soon became clear that as the party-system remained fragmented – and as fragmentation was indeed enhanced by the 1993 electoral-system reform, introduced, as it was, in a context of party-system de-structuration – governing coalitions remained fragile and impermanent and to no appreciable degree more capable of decisive decision-making than those of the past. There was therefore a very profound sense, one that became deeper with the passage of time, that the transition to the ‘Second Republic’ had failed to meet the expectations to which it had given rise, that the seeming crisis of governability remained unresolved. Institutional reform therefore rose to the top of the political agenda, as it was perceived as a means of resolving a crisis that party-system transformation had on its own, seemingly, been insufficient to solve. And since the problem was perceived as lying in the party system – in its excessive fragmentation, in the lack of public authority of the political parties and in the fragility of governing coalitions – attempts at reform focussed on institutional changes that would side-line the parties, concentrate power at the centre of the political system and de facto enable citizens to elect the leader of government. As such, they embodied a plebescitarian conception of democracy: ‘a conception of elections as mechanisms for the direct investiture of leaders – elections as mechanisms for giving the authority to issue orders’ (Floridia, 2018: 115). A reform embodying such a conception had already been introduced at local level in 1993, when provision had been made for the direct election of local authority mayors (Newell, 2007). This was perceived to have been a very positive reform, since it enabled mayors so elected to exercise virtually untrammelled power over local councils by virtue of the stipulation that a mayor’s departure from office, either through voluntary resignation or a vote of no confidence, would automatically lead to the dissolution of the council and fresh elections. The parties, in other words, could only unseat a mayor at the cost of unseating their own council members, and this was perceived to have considerably improved political stability in local councils and enhanced the efficiency and effectiveness of policy-making. It was no accident, therefore, that Renzi, as Prime Minister, drew on positive perceptions of this system by referring to the proposed electoral reform he pursued as one that would enable voters, at long last, to elect ‘the mayor of Italy’. Advanced in combination with the array of constitutional reform proposals defeated in the referendum of 4 December 2016, Renzi’s proposal was driven by the assumption that it would make it possible, in the immediate aftermath of an election, ‘to proceed to the rapid formation of a one-party government without any need for inter-party bargaining’ (Pasquino, 2015a: 298) and that this would enhance governability. There were reasons for doubting that this would have

152 Conclusion been the system’s effect had it been applied,3 but what seemed quite certain was that any effect on governability would have come at the expense of Parliament’s role in ensuring government accountability. To say that one person or institution is ‘accountable’ to another is to say that the first is required to explain their actions to the second when called upon to do so, that they are obliged to put right any mistakes that may come to light as a result of having to explain their actions and that the second has the power to remove the first from office. One of the conditions that must be fulfilled if legislatures are to be effective in ensuring the popular accountability of governments is that their members are themselves accountable (in the sense that voters may remove them from office through elections) and that they are responsive to the preferences of their electorates between elections. But what happens when members of a legislature are, in effect, ‘appointed’ by the leaders of their parties? This was a significant risk with Renzi’s reform proposal which provided for 100 constituencies, most of them electing no more than six deputies, with voters being able to cast two preference votes but with the candidate heading each party list being elected automatically – with the probable result that the vast majority, if not all, of a party’s representatives would, as a consequence, have been ‘appointed’ by its leader. A second condition of effective accountability is the existence of a cohesive parliamentary opposition, something that was hardly likely to be encouraged by a system that, having assured a majority to the single winning list, sustained the fragmentation of the remaining, losing, lists. In short, Renzi’s reform represented the culmination of a series of reforms and attempted reforms over a period of 30 years that, in seeking to respond to what was perceived as a crisis of governability, reflected and contributed to what was in fact a crisis of legitimacy of the political institutions. In reflecting populist, plebescitarian and majoritarian assumptions, reforms embodied an impoverished conception of democratic legitimacy, as Floridia (2018) has argued.4 In seeking, in the name of governability, to concentrate power, they threatened to undermine the quality of Italian democracy by attacking accountability. Accountability was in fact undermined by the one attempt at constitutional reform that was successful in being passed: the reduction in the number of parliamentarians approved by the referendum of September 2020. As I argued in Chapter 1, reducing the number of parliamentarians seemed likely, all else being equal, to reduce the efficiency and effectiveness with which they could scrutinise government and hold it to account, simply by virtue of increasing their workloads. All else being equal, it seemed likely to reduce citizens’ access to political decisionmaking processes simply because parliamentarians would have to represent larger constituencies and work that much harder to remain in contact with their constituents. So the Italian political system in the early twenty-first century could best be described as one in which ‘populist leaders and movements ha[d] transformed Italy into a battleground where they fiercely compete[d] in order to obtain the support’ of discontented citizens (Pasquino, 2015b: 208). This was a situation that both reflected and had contributed to an undermining of the authority of some of the country’s most important political institutions. In this respect, as in others, Italy’s politics were not very different from the politics of other European democracies whose citizens had also in large numbers been seduced by populist politicians with drastic institutional consequences, most notably, of course, in the UK, Hungary and Poland. The question was whether Italy would at some stage follow them. Political behaviour and engagement In this context, the early twenty-first-century Italian citizen, like his or her counterpart in other European democracies, is one who engages with politics in a radically different way compared

Conclusion  153 to his or her forbears of the initial post-war decades. ‘The political space that was previously occupied by political parties, which acted as intermediaries between citizens and institutions, has been replaced by individual leaderships and a form of political communication heavily based on marketing’ (Salvati, 2016: 11). If these elements allow leaders to cultivate direct relationships with their followers, in the process exploiting pre-existing popular discontents, then they also help to generate discontent, creating a growing expectations gap, in a vicious circle. For, in a post-ideological world in which leaders are obliged to compete by claiming that only they have the qualities necessary to solve voters’ problems, the effect is two-fold. One is to raise expectations and the risk of disappointment, the other to undermine the authority of political institutions and their representatives and with it civicness: the commitment to political tolerance5 and to principles of active citizenship. Citizens are therefore now more inclined to electoral volatility, less likely to participate in elections and more polarised in their attitudes. This is especially so as, in a post-ideological world, the growing space occupied by identity politics has provided the basis for cultural conflict between groups of citizens and the struggle for dominance of their values, belief-systems and lifestyle choices. And it is especially so in a world in which the technological developments associated with the spread of social media have made it increasingly likely that citizens’ attitudes and beliefs become amplified and reinforced by communication within echo chambers and by the operation of filter bubbles. In a world in which social media and Internet technologies have become taken-for-granted facets of everyday life, discontented citizens engage in politics on a more continuous basis through new avenues of participation that have given them enormously enhanced power as compared to the past. As the Italian political scientist, Luigi Ceccarini has put it, blogs, forums and online campaigns encourage the emergence of opinion movements and offer a sort of infrastructure for the potential of popular control and positive citizenship. They strengthen the deliberative and participatory logic in civil society and the local dimension. Specifically, the democratic counter-powers that have taken shape in the shadow of electoral representative democracy and in a climate of democratic distrust can be expressed in a variety of modes, mainly of three diverse types: powers of oversight; forms of prevention, and testing of judgements (Rosanvallon 2008, 8). Together they give form and substance to counter-democracy. (Ceccarini, 2021: 107) Politics takes pace through communication. Since the top-down, one-to-many communication of the broadcasting era that began 100 years ago has been supplemented with the bottom-up, many-to-many communication made possible by social media, political participation is no longer the merely intermittent activity that took place when the citizen cast a vote or took part in a street protest; rather, the citizen can be politically active constantly. The same technological developments place in the citizen’s hands, resources – access to information and technological means of capturing and transmitting information – that have considerably reduced power disparities between organised groups of citizens and established institutions. The political ­significance and the impact of this development has, at the same time, been much enhanced by accountability norms, whose reach has contemporaneously been extended to a range of new areas. This has been due to the growth of the ‘new public management’ (with its emphasis on market competition and therefore on ‘customer focus’) to concerns about public integrity (with the establishment of the anti-corruption agency, the Autorità Nazionale Anticorruzione, and similar bodies) and to the growth of legally protected citizens’ rights (in areas such as disability, age, sexual orientation, freedom of information and so on). The outcomes of this combination of developments have been seen in phenomena such as – for example – the scandals surrounding

154 Conclusion sex abuse within the Catholic Church. It is highly significant that some of the allegations have related to incidents that took place several decades ago. For this is revealing of the enormous obstacles that once stood in the way of allegations being communicated and passing the credibility test and of how the new technologies have swept these obstacles aside, making it possible for complainants to come together in, for example, web-based action committees despite being widely dispersed geographically and to do so with unprecedented rapidity. So, it is possible to speak of the emergence of ‘counter-democracy’ as a phenomenon that has taken shape in the shadow of representative democracy. One must be careful not to exaggerate the impact of the new technologies. Some research suggests that claims concerning the widely touted negative impacts of echo chambers, for example, may be weaker than widely assumed. For example, Rita Marchetti and Rosella Rega carried out research looking at incivility in online political discussions among Italian citizens at the time of the general election of 2018. Her findings showed that ‘those “apocalyptic” interpretations concerning the toxicity of debates that take place on social media’ were in need of refinement, suggesting that ‘the volume of messages harmful to democracy is in reality quite small and related to specific circumstances (such as debates concerning controversial topics and the communities around populist leaders and the extreme right)’ (Marchetti and Rega, 2021: 1). Meanwhile, for all of the claims concerning the capacity of the new technologies to increase political participation and the empowerment of citizens, critics have warned of their lack of capacity to be inclusive, pointing to the ‘digital divide’ between those with and without secure access to the Internet and, therefore, between those who can and those who cannot participate democratically. For example, in Italy, around one-third of households were without a computer in 2021 (Orlandi, 2021) with the consequence – at a time when the pandemic made distance learning a necessity – of restricting access to the information and education resources necessary both for escaping poverty and for effective political participation. Meanwhile, Cellini and Antonucci (2022) carried out research into ‘participatory budgeting’ in the city of Milan to find out to what extent it had an impact in terms of greater democratic participation of the population involved and of citizens’ empowerment. They found that participants were older, better educated and wealthier than the average resident of the city and that participation tended to be confined to those who were already politically active. Therefore, while the new technologies may significantly empower the already politically engaged, a question would appear to remain about the extent to which they have empowered citizens across the board, and have secured any degree of greater equality in terms of citizens’ empowerment. They may do so in the future, as more and more citizens engage with them for political purposes. At the time of the 2018 election, 53 per cent of Italian citizens reported obtaining political information ‘sometimes’ or ‘often’ from the internet or social media (22 per cent from social messaging apps, such as WhatsApp), compared with 88 per cent who mentioned television. However, among the youngest cohort, aged 18 to 29, far and away the most popular source, at 92 per cent, was the first of these three, while the proportion for the second was 32 per cent (Bordignon, Ceccarini and Diamanti, 2018: Figure 2.2, Table 2.1). Therefore, the significance of the new technologies for political engagement will almost certainly increase in the future. The citizen who engages in politics in changed ways also changes him or herself. By way of illustration, I refer, first, to the role of the Internet in enabling leaders to gain control of their self-presentation. Thereby, they are able to influence their online followers not simply because the latter are convinced that the leaders embody their political claims. Rather, they can do so, much more powerfully, by copying the self-presentation styles of online influencers – with the result that their audiences ‘become invested in the “micro” aspects’ of the everyday life of the leader, with whom they feel a high level of ‘affective intimacy’ (Starita and Trillò, 2022: 332).

Conclusion  155 An example is Matteo Salvini’s ‘good morning selfies’, posted online ‘to offer his followers a sneak peek into his private life, revealing allegedly private information to foster a feeling of intimacy’ and ‘support his populist claim to ordinariness’ (Starita and Trillò, 2022: 337). In short, the engaged citizen comes to feel that they have a relationship of personal trust with the leader they support: a relationship that is radically different from the feeling of political, but impersonal, loyalty based on the ideological commitments of the past. Second, as ‘surveillance is a central element in the online citizenship perspective’ (Ceccarini, 2021: 110), the ‘citizen-voter’ becomes the ‘citizen-watchdog’. In other words, active citizenship and political commitments are no longer expressed principally by the act of voting but rather by taking up the opportunities afforded by the new technologies to participate in online activities aimed at monitoring, exposing, evaluating and, potentially, resisting the actions of the authorities. Third, the citizen who is engaged online is one who, in their everyday life, combines attention to their own private interests with attention to the public good, through, for example, their consumption choices, such that the public and private – everyday and citizenship practices – become hybridised. Finally, the engaged citizen’s political identity or self-understanding is less unitary and decreasingly derived from social positions, such as class, or from mass, hierarchical organisations, like parties and trade unions, and is, instead, increasingly multiple, individualised and self-created. Finally, the emergence, as a result of these developments, of a new kind of citizenship – one that reflects mistrust of political institutions and their representatives but which is also positive responsible and active – reflects the emergence among Italian citizens, as among those of other European countries, of a new cleavage: the one between the ‘losers’ and the ‘winners’ of globalisation I described in Chapter 3. ‘Winners’ have relatively high levels of ‘political efficacy’: the belief that one can understand and therefore participate in politics, combined with the belief that government will respond to one’s demands (Campbell et al., 1954; Balch, 1974). ‘Winners’ are therefore more likely than others to interact proactively with the globalised environment and the new, technological opportunities for democratic engagement. If they are attracted to populist groups or movements, then they are attracted to those, reflecting a ‘participative-mobilizing style’, ‘that use social media to give direct control of policy-making processes to “the people”’ (Starita and Trillò, 2022: 337). ‘Losers’, on the other hand, have relatively low levels of political efficacy. Feeling that governments will not respond to their demands and fearful of a globalised environment they find disorientating, they feel resentful towards those they perceive as above (the elites) and below them (immigrants and other outsiders). If they are attracted to populist movements, then they are attracted above all to those reflecting an ‘electoral-delegative style’, that is, those with charismatic leaders who promise to solve their problems for them. They therefore engage in politics less than ‘winners’ and are less likely to participate in elections (Baratta, 2022). Given the correlation between economic well-being and electoral participation and given that economic inequality in Italy had been growing considerably in the years leading up to the election (Oxfam Italia, 2022), it was perhaps to be expected that turnout on 25 September 2022 would register a further decline, continuing the downward trend that had begun in the mid 1970s. In fact, turnout underwent its largest fall since 1948, to reach a historic low of 64 per cent, the election of 2022 being the third in succession in which the numbers abstaining were larger than those voting for any of the parties or coalitions, including the winners. Abstention was probably to be interpreted, at least in part, as the reflection of perceptions of a relative absence of ‘protest options’, given that both the M5S and the League had been governing parties for all or most of the legislature prior to the elections. It was a worrying development, for groups that do not vote forgo the opportunity provided by elections to bring their needs to the attention of policy-makers, raising the likelihood that they are ignored and thereby adding to

156 Conclusion the many other sources of growing inequality among Italian citizens. And since the effects of the war in Ukraine, rising inflation and soaring energy prices would have a far larger impact on the economic well-being and security of the poorer than of the richer, the problem of inequality would only grow more serious. The question was what, if anything, the incoming government would do about it. The general election of September 2022 The government that was sworn in on 22 October, although it had secure seat majorities, was, given the fall in turnout described above, far from enjoying the support of a majority of citizens (Table 7.1). From this point of view, interpretations of the election outcome as a massive shift to the right were wide of the mark. The outcome merely registered what opinion polls had been suggesting for many months. The far right FdI did, it is true, register a stunning advance (taking 26 per cent, up from 4.3 per cent in 2018). However, to a large extent, this represented a redistribution of support within the coalition of the right, since both the League and FI retreated significantly, and in fact the coalition’s overall increase in support (from 37 per cent to 43.8 per cent) was far from amounting to a landslide. Together, the three main formations opposing the coalition from positions to its left – the PD and its allies, the M5S and Azione-Italia Viva led by Carlo Calenda and Matteo Renzi – took 49.6 per cent, but were far outdistanced by the right in terms of seats because they were split, their division arising from their contrasting attitudes to the outgoing Draghi Government. This, as we saw in Chapter 1, was a ‘national unity’ government that, with the exception of FdI and a handful of parliamentarians to the left of the PD, had the support of all parties Table 7.1  Results of the 2022 Italian general election, Chamber of Deputies Votes Lists and coalitions Lega Forza Italia Fratelli d’Italia Noi moderati / Lupi-Toti-Brugnaro-UDC Lega-FI-Noi moderati-FdI Lega-FI-FdI Totals, centre-right coalition Movimento Cinque Stelle Partito Democratico +Europa Alleanza Verdi e Sinistra Impegno Civico Luigi di Maio-Centro Democratico VdA-APF Totals, centre-left coalition Azione-Italia Viva-Calenda Others Totals

N

Seats %

PR

SMSP

Abroad

Total

2,464,005 2,278,217 7,302,517 255,505

8.4 7.8 25.0 0.9

23 22 69 0

42 23 49 7

0 0 0 0

65 45 118 7

16,016 281,949 12,598,209 4,427,310 5,661,939 823,932 1,071,663 180,755

0.0 1.0 43.1 15.1 19.4 2.8 3.7 0.6

0 – 114 41 57 0 11 0

0 – 121 10 8 2 1 1

0 2 2 1 4 0 0 0

0 2 237 52 69 2 12 1

20,763 7,738,289 2,247,246 2,194,117 29,225,934

0.1 26.6 7.7 7.5 100.0

– 68 21 1 245

1 13 0 3 147

– 4 0 1 8

1 85 21 5 400

Source: author’s elaboration of data made available by the Italian Ministry of the Interior (Ministry of the Interior, n.d.). Note: percentages shown in the third column differ slightly from those cited in the text as they include the votes cast in Valle d’Aosta and by Italians resident abroad.

Conclusion  157 represented in Parliament. Appointed to deal with the COVID-19 emergency and to complete the drafting of Italy’s NRRP, the government was led by a man who enjoyed considerable personal authority as well as the personal backing of the President of the Republic. This had obliged parties unable to form a parliamentary majority prior to Draghi’s appointment to fall in behind him, with the result that his Government was initially relatively free of partisan pressures, making Draghi himself relatively powerful as Italian prime ministers go. However, it seemed likely that, with the passing of the emergency and the approach of elections that had to be held by the spring of 2023 at the latest, there would be an increase in the Government’s fragility and a decline in Draghi’s authority. For the parties would begin to jockey for position in the upcoming contest and so ‘snatch back’ (Capano and Sandri 2022) the power they had relinquished with the Government’s appointment the previous February. This, in essence, is precisely what happened, though the resulting election was called earlier than had widely been expected. As late as the end of June, few commentators seemed willing to bet that [the Government] would fail to survive until the end of the legislature. Parties such as the League and the M5s were languishing in the opinion polls; a third of parliamentarians were guaranteed not to return with the next legislature thanks to the September 2020 referendum reducing their number, and opinion polls suggested that a large majority of citizens wanted the Government to continue. (Newell, 2022b: 289–90) Against this background, Draghi’s resignation on 21 July and the President’s decision, the same day, to dissolve Parliament were curious events. In essence, they were the consequences, first, of tensions, between Draghi and the M5S, which came to a head on 14 July with the decision of the latter not to participate in a vote on a cost-of-living package which it regarded as insufficient but whose passage Draghi had decided to make a matter of confidence. Second, they were precipitated, on 20 July, by a second confidence vote – which Draghi again won but this time without the participation, besides the M5S, of FI or the League either. Draghi claimed that his resignation came at the end of several months of ultimatums by his party colleagues. However, by insisting that his continuation in office depended on the participation and positive support of all the governing parties in the 20 July vote, he too was delivering an ultimatum. Therefore, it was hard not to agree with those who held him at least equally responsible for the Government’s demise, given that he resigned despite continuing, formally, to enjoy the confidence of Parliament. The election outcome could be explained, first and foremost, by the divisions among the parties of the centre left. Although one cannot assume that those who voted for the PD and its allies, for the M5S and for Azione-Italia Viva, would have voted for candidates supported by all three had these formations cooperated, it is reasonable to assume that most would have done so. Summing, therefore, the votes going to the three formations’ candidates in the single-member constituencies and comparing them with the votes cast for the candidates fielded by the right suggests that of the 59 single-member constituencies won by the right in the Senate, 31 would have gone to the centre left had it been united. Carlo Calenda had made it clear as far back as 2019 that he would not countenance cooperation with the M5S under any circumstances, so a united front against the right was, perhaps, never a realistic possibility. However, cooperation between the PD and the M5S was realistic, and their combined vote totals on their own exceeded the votes cast for the candidates of the right in at least 21 cases. Consequently, since the right had a 15-seat majority in the Senate, it seems reasonable to suggest that cooperation in just a few constituencies might have been sufficient to prevent the right obtaining a majority and so winning government office.

158 Conclusion Ostensibly, the PD refused cooperation with the M5S because of Enrico Letta’s party’s support for what came to be called, during what was a lacklustre election campaign, ‘the Draghi agenda’ and because it blamed Giuseppe Conte’s party for the demise of the Draghi Government. However, behind the failure of the two to come together, there appeared to be two contrasting strategic outlooks. On the one hand, the M5S, was aware that its experience since the start of the previous legislature had given it a left-wing profile despite itself and that it was from the left of the political spectrum that most of its support therefore now came. It therefore conducted itself accordingly, giving a high profile to its welfare and environmental policies and speaking up much more clearly than the PD for the poor and the unemployed (thereby performing better than had been widely assumed at the outset of the campaign, taking 15.4 per cent of the vote and outperforming the PD in all the regions of the less-developed south). On the other hand, the PD seemingly sought to pursue a ‘technocratic-centrist’ strategy, probably hoping thereby to win over voters from the moderate right and, if not itself wining, perhaps depriving the right of a majority (De Sio, 2022). However, since ‘the Draghi agenda’ was purely technocratic in nature, it had none of the emotional resonance a political narrative needs in order to carry weight and was likely to seem disingenuous, for it made the implicit claim that what were in fact political choices could be reduced to nothing more than technical problems. It would also prevent the party from tapping the support of those dissatisfied with a government that had done little to address the growing economic difficulties of increasing numbers of citizens6 (thereby preventing the party, with 19.1 per cent, from making any substantial improvement on its performance at the election five years previously). The right-wing parties’ opinion-poll lead and their opponents’ divisions had therefore made the election outcome seem to many to be certain even before the campaign had begun (which was an additional possible explanation for the unprecedentedly low turnout). Much less certain was what the new government portended, and, as it was the most right-wing government since the war and the first headed by a Prime Minister whose deepest cultural roots lay in the neo-Fascist tradition, commentators were soon busy trying to work out whether Giorgia Meloni was a wolf in sheep’s clothing or a sheep in wolf’s clothing. Those inclined to the former interpretation pointed to her explicit attempts to court the moderate vote during the election campaign, her expressions of Atlanticism, the lack of obvious alarm on the part of the markets and the obvious European and international constraints she would face. Others suggested that partly because of these constraints, she might be the more tempted to appease those of her followers with more openly Fascist sympathies by the corresponding measures in other areas such as civil liberties and immigration. Implications for the future Perhaps the most plausible interpretation of what the advent of Meloni meant was three-fold. First, the likelihood of a return of Fascism was remote to say the least. Fascism was ‘a militaristic movement, with violence and aggression at its heart, the product above all of the brutalizing effects of the First World War. Its very aims were militaristic, driving forward the conquest of Europe’ (Evans, 2020: 7), and there is no evidence that either Meloni or anyone else in her government has aims of this kind. Second, though Meloni is not a Fascist, she is an opponent, by all accounts, of anti-Fascism, the ideology that inspired the drafting of the post-war Constitution. To the extent that that was the case, the easier might the Government find it to translate the conquest of office into changes to the political system. Third, therefore, though the return of Fascism was highly unlikely, creeping authoritarianism and democratic backsliding were not. There were potential sources of instability the Government would have to face. First, it would be dependent for the maintenance of its majority on the support of two minor parties, FI

Conclusion  159 and the League, both needing to prevent further losses of electoral support. Meeting this need would require visibility and therefore, potentially, dissent. Compliant behaviour carried the risk that they would come to be perceived as irrelevant. Second, Meloni, during the campaign, had been the change candidate, the leader of the only party that had been in opposition to Draghi. A number of her initial ministerial appointments, including two7 who had been in the outgoing Government and a number who had served in governments before that, suggested that those who had looked to her for a break with the past might end up being disappointed. Finally, the incoming Government would have to face challenges of unprecedented magnitude linked to the war in Ukraine, its threat to global supply chains and the threat of inflation. Pressure on resources, the resulting accentuation of distributional conflict and the consequent difficulties involved in securing important reforms such as those associated with the NRRP would all be significant tests of the new government’s cohesion. Further clues as to the likely direction of change in Italian politics came on 25 October. In the programmatic speech with which, on that day, she asked the Chamber of Deputies to pass the confirmatory vote of confidence in her new government, Giorgia Meloni honoured tradition by confining herself mainly to statements of aspiration, such as guaranteeing to all Italians ‘a future of greater freedom, justice, well-being and security’. Politicians prefer such statements to those implying definite commitments, as they create fewer hostages to fortune and, by appealing to universally held beliefs and values, are difficult for opponents to question. In the absence of much that is concrete in them, drawing conclusions about the political significance of such speeches requires a willingness to interpret and to read between the lines. From this point of view, it was difficult to disagree with those (e.g. Cancellato, 2022) for whom the speech was an uncompromising statement of the values of the right. Many fewer than half of Italian citizens voted for the parties staffing her Government. Nevertheless, she began by referring to ‘the clear indication expressed by the Italian people on 25 September’, going on to claim that her Government was ‘wholly representative of the will of the people’ – thereby signalling that rather than attempting to be inclusive, rather than governing through the search for workable compromises, hers was a government that would brook no opposition. Her Government would not she said, shrink from taking decisions, where necessary, that were unpopular. The only reference to ‘diversity’ came, not in connection with the idea of cultural diversity or pluralism, but in reference to the right’s frequently made juxtaposition between ‘European integration’ and ‘nations with ancient histories’ ‘each with its own identity’. The theme of protectionism, if not autarchy, was present in references to ‘predatory ambitions threatening to undermine strategic national industries’, to ‘technological sovereignty’ and to the need ‘to ensure that we are not dependent on far-away countries to provide food for our children’. There were no references to the role of international cooperation in the resolution of problems. Although there were references to Fascism and its anti-Semitic laws as ‘the most dishonourable episodes in Italian history’, these were by implication qualified by the later condemnation of ‘the years of political violence’ when ‘in the name of anti-Fascism’ ‘innocent youths were clubbed to death with spanners’. However, Meloni did make reference to at least four more or less specific commitments of note. One was the commitment to the constitutional reform, referred to in Chapter 3, that would give Italy a presidential form of government, to be introduced by the search for cross-party consensus if possible, but which the Government would not back down on in the face of any opposition of principle. The second was deregulation. The third was a tax amnesty. The fourth, abolition of the anti-poverty ‘citizenship income’, significantly framed as a subsidy to people who failed ‘to do their bit for Italy’. In addition, there was a commitment to additional measures to stop the arrival of refugees from North Africa, referred to as ‘illegal immigration’ and framed, as ever, as a security issue.

160 Conclusion Conclusion All of this suggested that Meloni had a clear vision of the Italy she wanted to create: an Italy that was economically neo-liberal, socially conservative and politically rather authoritarian. Yet there was little in her vision that was new. Even what was arguably the most radical aspect of her programme, namely the proposal for constitutional reform, reflected assumptions from the past: those, discussed above, concerning a supposed governance problem that required the adoption of plebescitarian principles in order to be resolved. In response, then, to the question of whether future historians might look back on 2022 as representing the start of a new departure in Italian politics, the answer could only be that this was highly uncertain. On the one hand, there were significant continuities with the past, in terms of policies, personnel and outlooks, and, in any event, in a globalised world and especially given the context in which the Government came to office, much would depend on developments beyond the country’s borders and therefore on developments far beyond the Government’s capacity to control. On the other hand, the very clarity of the Government’s vision suggested that this might, paradoxically, help the PD, in its new-found role as a party of opposition, to at last clarify the nature of its own vision, as it so sorely needed to do if it were ever to stand a chance of making an electoral come-back. And if (as seemed possible, if not likely) the proposed constitutional reform involved democratic backsliding, undermining Parliament’s capacity to hold governments to account, then the opposition would have an enormous amount to get excited about. What was certain was that given the unprecedented fluidity of Italian politics in the early twenty-first century, the future was highly uncertain. And, as this was the case, it seemed likely that the country’s politics would, for the foreseeable future, continue to provide much rich material for analysts to speculate on and to write about. Notes 1 ‘When I teach the study of framing at Berkeley, in Cognitive Science 101, the first thing I do is I give my students an exercise. The exercise is: Don’t think of an elephant! Whatever you do, do not think of an elephant. I’ve never found a student who is able to do this. Every word, like elephant, evokes a frame which can be an image or other kinds of knowledge: Elephants are large, have floppy ears and a trunk, are associated with circuses, and so on. The word is defined relative to that frame. When we negate a frame, we evoke the frame. Richard Nixon found that out the hard way. While under pressure to resign during the Watergate scandal, Nixon addressed the nation on TV. He stood before the nation and said, “I am not a crook”. And everybody thought about him as a crook’ (Lakoff, 2004: 3). 2 Owing to his domination of the party, political satirists during Renzi’s tenure referred to the PD as the PdR: the ‘Partito di Renzi’ or ‘the Renzi Party’. 3 Among them: ‘governability’ is about the capacity of a government to govern a country effectively, not just about government stability, which may, rather, betoken stagnation and stalemate. Second, the banning of electoral coalitions could not exclude the possibility that multiple parties might find accommodation within the single lists to be fielded for elections, only then to ‘re-emerge’ as such, in the parliamentary arena, once elections had been held thus defeating the objective of single-party government. 4 Pointing out for instance that application of the majority principle to decision-making is on its own insufficient to give a decision democratic legitimacy: at least as important as the aggregation of given preferences is the process by which the preferences are themselves arrived at. 5 As Sara Bentivegna (2022: 2) has noted, ‘on the one hand, the Five-star Movement (M5s) has since its beginning used incivility as a strategic weapon (Herbst, 2010) to gain visibility and win the support of a wide range of voters disillusioned with the traditional parties – as exemplified by its early ‘Vaffaday’ (literally: ‘Fuck-off Day’) rallies. On the other hand, Umberto Bossi’s Lega Nord (Northern League), now the League led by Matteo Salvini, aiming to win the support of voters positioned further to the right, has not only sought to exploit divisive issues through the development of narratives built around

Conclusion  161 binary and Manichean oppositions (such as immigrants versus Italians, or the élite versus the people); but, through the combined use of various media platforms, it has also sought to accelerate the take-up in public discourse of crude and vulgar forms of expression. These changes in the political context together with the increasing use in public discussion of informal registers, ones aimed at activating among listeners systems of mirroring effective in mobilising support, may have helped, we believe, to raise the threshold of what citizens consider to be uncivil.’ 6 Thanks to the fall-out from the COVID-19 pandemic and the war in Ukraine. 7 Giancarlo Giorgetti, at the Economy and Finance (previously at Economic Development in the Draghi Government) and Giliberto Pichetti Fratin at Environment and Energy Security (previously deputy to Giorgetti at Economic Development).

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162 Conclusion Marchetti, Rita and Rossella Rega (2021), “Uncivil users’ comments in online public discussions: An examination of Facebook during the 2018 Italian general election”, paper presented to the International Political Studies Association World Congress, 10–15 July. Ministry of the Interior (n.d.), ‘L’Archivio’, https://elezionistorico.interno.gov.it. Newell, James L. (2007), ‘‘The Mayoralty in Italy’, pp. 157–72 in John Garrard (ed.), Heads of the Local State, Aldershot: Ashgate. Newell, James L. (2019a), Silvio Berlusconi: A Study in Failure, Manchester: Manchester University Press. Newell, James L. (2022b), ‘A Gathering Storm on the Horizon: Italian Politics in the Summer of 2022’, Contemporary Italian Politics 14: 289–92. Orlandi, Giorgia (2021), ‘Italy’s Digital Divide: One Third of Students Don’t Have Access to Online Lessons’, euronews, 2 Apr., https://www.euronews.com/2021/04/01/italy-s-digital-divide-one-third-ofstudents-don-t-have-access-to-online-lessons. Oxfam Italia (2022), ‘La pandemia delle disugaglianze’, 17 Jan., https://www.oxfamitalia.org/lapandemia-della-disuguaglianza. Parotto, Giuliana (2007), Sacra Officina: La simbolica religiosa di Silvio Berlusconi, Milan: FrancoAngeli. Pasquino, Gianfranco (2015a), ‘Italy has Yet Another Electoral Law’, Contemporary Italian Politics 7: 293–300. Pasquino, Gianfranco (2015b), L’Italia populista. Dal qualunquismo a Beppe Grillo, by Marco Tarchi, book review, Contemporary Italian Politics 7: 208–9. Rosanvallon, P. (2008), Counter-Democracy: Politics in an Age of Distrust, Cambridge: Cambridge ­University Press. Starita, Giovanni Daniele, and Tommaso Trillò (2022), ‘“Happy Monday Friends! Coffee?” Matteo ­Salvini, Good Morning Selfies, and the Influencer Politician’, Contemporary Italian Politics 14: 331–51. Salvadori, Massimo L. (1994), Storia d’Italia e crisi di regime, Bologna: Il Mulino. Salvati, Eugenio (2016), ‘Matteo Renzi: A New Leadership Style for the Italian Democratic Party and ­Italian Politics’, Modern Italy 21: 7–18.

Index

Note: Bold page numbers refer to tables, italic page numbers refer to figures and page numbers followed by “n” refer to end notes. accountability 152 AD see Alleanza Democratica administration 44–7 Africa 21, 142, 159 AFSOUTH 140 Agenzia Nazionale per la Sicurezza del Volo (National Agency for the Safety of Civil Aviation) 45 Alleanza dei Progressisti (Progressive Alliance) 12, 14 Alleanza Democratica (Democratic Alliance, AD) 12 Alleanza Nazionale (National Alliance, AN) 12, 16, 17, 66, 67 Amato, Giuliano 15, 36, 91 AN see Alleanza Nazionale Andreotti, Giulio 115 anti‑Fascism 7, 29, 66, 96, 105–6, 148 ARCI see Assocazione Ricreativa e Culturale Italiana Assocazione Ricreativa e Culturale Italiana (Italian Recreational and Cultural Association, ARCI) 93, 94 Associazione Nazionale Magistrati (National Association of Magistrates) 44 asylum seekers 21, 132, 134, 135 ‘audience democracy’ 19, 136 austerity 17, 65, 91 l’autoriduzione dei prezzi (unilateral price reductions) 96 Autorità Anticorruzione 111 Autorità per le Garanzie nelle Comunicazioni 45 Azione 75 Azione‑Italia Viva 156, 157 Bassanini laws 46, 50 Beati costruttori di pace 94 Belgium 113 Berlinguer, Enrico 16, 67, 101n10, 109 Berlin Wall collapse 10, 25, 109

Berlusconi Silvio 5, 36, 39–40, 61–2, 66, 73, 92, 110–11; allegations of impropriety against 13, 17, 122–3; and the ‘First Republic’ 10, 12–13; and the judiciary 44; and populism 147–9; resignation of 36; and the ‘Second Republic’ 13–19 Bersani, Pierluigi 19, 39 Bicamerale 14 ‘binding interpretations’ 43 Bonafede law 61 Bonomi, Paolo 88–9 Borsellino, Paolo 115 Bossi, Umberto 18, 61, 63, 65, 66 Brescia, Giuseppe 75 Brexit 141 bribery 103, 108, 112, 122; see also corruption Brothers of Italy see Fratelli d’Italia Brunetta, Renato 46, 47 bureaucracy 44–5, 60, 105 Calabria 113, 114 Calamandrei, Piero 32 Calenda, Carlo 75, 156, 157 Camorra 113, 114, 116, 117 Campi, Carlo Azeglio 36, 37 Cantone, Raffaele 111 Carnevale, Corrado 115 Cartabia reform 125n18 CasaPound 94 Cassa per il Mezogiorno (Development Fund for the South) 49 Catholic Church 97–100, 106; sex abuse scandal 153–4; and the state 32; weekly attendance 99 cause groups 93–7 CCD see Centro Cristiano Democratico Ceccarini, Luigi 153 centralisation 38 Centro Cristiano Democratico (Christian Democratic Centre, CCD) 12

164  Index CGIL see Confederazione Generale Italiana del Lavoro Chamber of Deputies 15, 20, 23, 156 Chiesa, Mario 11, 108–9 China 135, 141–3 Ciampi, Carlo Azeglio 90 Cirami law 122 Cirinnà law 96, 99 CISL see Confederazione Italiana Sindacati Lavoratori citizenship: active 68, 153, 155; law 133; sense of 106 civic responsibility 105, 106 civil disputes 121–2 civil liberties 86 ‘clans’ 107 clientela 89 clientelism 43, 49, 63, 88, 90, 105, 108–9, 138 CLN see Comitato per la Liberazione Nazionale ‘CNN effect’ 129 COBAS (comitati di base) 94 ‘co‑decision procedure’ 137 Code of Criminal Procedure 118–20, 121–2 Cold War 7, 29–30, 32, 88, 79, 95, 98, 109, 128–2, 141 Coltivatori Diretti 88, 89 Comitato per la Liberazione Nazionale (Committee for National Liberation, CLN) 7, 72, 87–88 communication 153 concertation 91, 92 Confederazione Generale Italiana del Lavoro (General Confederation of Italian Labour, CGIL) 88, 91 Confederazione Italiana Sindacati Lavoratori (Italian Confederation of Workers’ Unions, CISL) 88, 91 Confindustria 89, 90 Consiglio Nazionale dell’Economia e del Lavoro (National Council for the Economy and Labour) 92 Constituent Assembly 29, 30, 31, 32, 34, 38 Constitution 29–33, 105, 106; on presidency 18, 33–4; on public referenda 11; on sub‑national government 48 ‘constitutional arch’ 106 Constitutional Court 31, 34, 36, 42–3, 119–20 constitutional reforms 20–1, 50 Conte, Giuseppe 4, 5, 6, 23–5, 40, 61, 74, 158 conventio ad excludendum 7, 150 ‘convergence criteria’ 93, 137 corporatism 91 corruption 10–11, 18, 103–12 Corruption Perceptions Index (CPI) 104 Cottarelli, Carlo 39 ‘counter‑democracy’ 153, 154 Court of Cassation 44, 118, 119, 121–3

COVID‑19 pandemic 6, 24, 65, 87, 90, 93 CPI see Corruption Perceptions Index Craxi, Bettino 12, 40, 61, 108–9 CSM see Consiglio Superiore della Magistratura culture 133 D’Alema, Massimo 14, 15 DC see Democrazia Cristiana deinstitutionalisation 76 delegificazione (legislative simplification) 41–2, 46 Della Sala, Vincent 87 democracy 147–52; ‘audience’ 19, 136; and electoral turnout 75; and group politics 86; liberal 29, 129; participatory 18, 58; plebescitarian conception of 151–2; pluralist 59; promotion of 131; representative 56, 59; and social media 154 ‘democratic backsliding’ 3 democratic participation 154; see also political behaviour Democratic Party see Partito Democratico Democrazia Cristiana (Christian Democrats, DC) 38, 40, 72, 77, 88, 105–7, 130; and the Catholic Church 98; and the Constitution 32; and the ‘First Republic’ 7, 9, 10, 12, 148; and the ‘Second Republic’ 16 Deng Xioping 141 Denmark 113, 132 Destra, La (the Right) 67 de‑structuration 72, 151 Di Pietro, Antonio 62, 110 ‘digital divide’ 154 Dini, Lamberto 14, 90, 91 direct representation 58 divorce 77, 96, 98 Draghi, Mario 4, 5, 23–5, 65, 87, 90, 157–8 ‘Draghi agenda’ 87, 158 drug trafficking 112 ‘Dublin principle’ 135 Durkheim, Émile 113 East Asia 141–2 ECB see European Central Bank Economic and Monetary Union (EMU) 87, 90, 91 economic growth 16, 25, 43, 96, 135 ‘economic miracle’ 9–10, 77 EEC see European Economic Community Einaudi, Luigi 32, 36 elections 55, 151; and populism 150; September 2022 156–59; and Tangentopoli scandal 110; turnout 75, 76, 155; see also electoral law; electoral system; electoral volatility; political behaviour; voters electoral law 11–12, 15, 16, 20, 22, 32, 38; see also Italicum; Rosatellum electoral system 27n8, 33, 56, 72–75, 151–2

Index 165 electoral volatility 9, 153 electorate 55–80; see also political behaviour; voters Emergency 94–5 EMU see Economic and Monetary Union England 113 ‘enlargement’ strategy 131 ‘ethic of conviction’ 58 EU see European Union Euratom 137 Euro 14–15, 36, 65, 87, 90–1, 139, 142; see also single currency European Central Bank (ECB) 4, 138, 150 European Coal and Steel Community 137 European Convention of Human Rights 121 European Court of Human Rights 121 European Defence Community 137 European Economic Community (EEC) 137 European integration 14, 45, 137–8, 140 Europeanisation 42, 87 European Union (EU) 42, 47, 60, 90, 92, 138–1, 143; decline in confidence in 65, 139; and migrant crisis 21, 65, 134–5; and political corruption 104; post‑COVID response 6, 24, 87, 93 Euroscepticism 58, 66, 135, 139 Eurozone crisis 17, 18, 90, 91 Evans, Richard 147 Falcone, Giovanni 115 fannullioni 46 farmers 88 Fascism 32, 43, 66, 87–8, 95, 105–6, 158–9; and populism 148; transition from 7 FdI see Fratelli d’Italia fedeltà leggera 68 federalism 38 FI see Forza Italia Fini, Gianfranco 17, 44, 66, 67 Finland 113 ‘First Republic’ 6–13, 25, 58, 62–3, 87, 148, 151; anti‑party sentiments 58; governments of 8–9, 40 Floridia, Antonio 72, 152 foreign policy 2, 128–5, 140–3 Forza Italia (FI) 5, 12–14, 16, 22, 55, 59–1, 110 fragmentation 9, 16, 37, 73 France 34, 113, 140–1, 143 Francis (Pope) 99–100 Fratelli d’Italia (Brothers of Italy, FdI) 5, 6, 22, 24, 66–7, 99 Freedom House 86 Freedom in the World report 86 freedom of assembly 86 freedom of association 86 freedom of the press 32 Fridays for Future 94

Friuli‑Venezia Giulia 48 Fronte dell’Uomo Qualunque 148 Fukuyama, Francis 129 Futuro e Libertà per l’Italia (Future and Freedom for Italy) 67 GAL‑TAN 66 garantismo 118 Garibaldi, Giuseppe 105 Gasparri law 36 GDP see Gross Domestic Product Gentiloni, Paolo 21 Germany 34, 113, 137, 140–2 Giannini, Guglielmo 148 Gilbert, Mark 1 Ginsborg, Paul 1 GIP see giudice delle indagini preliminary giudice delle indagini preliminary (judge for the preliminary investigations, GIP) 118, 121 giustizalismo 118 globalisation 42, 87, 99, 132–6, 141; protests against 96; ‘winners and losers’ 76–78, 136, 155 governability 29–30, 74, 152, 160n3 governance 47 government: instability 9; multilevel 47; and the Parliament 40–2; and prime ministers 38–40; and the ‘Second Republic’ 68, 69; sub‑national 47–50; technocratic 17, 39, 57, 90, 92–3 Greece 17 Greens 12, 71, 96 Grillo, Beppe 20, 39, 57–9 Gross Domestic Product (GDP) 90, 92, 104, 138 group politics 85–7, 89–90, 95–6, 100 GUP see iudice dell’udienza preliminare high‑speed trains 60, 94 Hill, Christopher 132 ‘historic compromise’ 16, 67, 72, 96 homicides 113, 116 identity politics 65, 78–9 IdV see Italia dei Valori IMF see International Monetary Fund immigration 99, 133–4, 136, 159; see also migration India 135 institutional groups 97–100 interest rates 17 International Monetary Fund (IMF) 17, 150 Internet 57, 59, 93–4, 153–4; see also social media Iraq war 132, 140 Istituto Affari Internazionali 97 Istituto Nazionale della Previdenza Sociale (National Social Security Institute) 92 Istituto Nazionale per la Previdenza Sociale (National Institute for Social Security) 45

166  Index Italia dei Valori (Italy of Values, IdV) 62 Italian Revolution: The End of Politics, Italian Style?, The 1 Italia Viva (IV) 4, 99; see also Azione‑Italia Viva Italicum 20, 22, 74, 81n12 iudice dell’udienza preliminare (judge for the preliminary investigations, GUP) 118, 121 IV see Italia Viva Japan 141, 142 judges 42 judicialisation 42 judicial system 117–21 judiciary 42–4 justice, administration of 103, 117–23 Lakoff, George 149 Lateran Pact 32 League see Lega Lega (League) 5, 21–3, 63–6, 149–50, 156, 157 Lega Autonomista Lombarda (Lombard Autonomy League) 63 Lega Lombarda (Lombard League) 48 Legambiente 93, 94 Lega Nord (Northern League, LN) 5, 11–15, 18, 21, 48, 57, 63, 109, 139, 143 leggine (little laws) 106 Letta, Enrico 19–20, 158 LeU see Liberi e Uguali LGBTQI community 94, 98, 99, 101n11 liberal democracy 29, 129 liberalism 129 Liberi e Uguali (Free and Equal, LeU) 5, 72 Libya 21, 132, 134, 141, 142, 143 Lima, Salvo 115 Lisbon Treaty 137 LN see Lega Nord Lupo, Salvatore 116 M5S see Movimento Cinque Stelle Maastricht Treaty 25, 45, 137 ‘Madia reform’ 46 Mafia 112–17; membership of 114 ‘majority summits’ 39 Manin, Bernard 19 Mani Tese 94 Mao Zedong 141 Marchetti, Rita 154 Mare Nostrum 134 Marshall Plan 10 Martelli, Claudio 118 mass media 36, 37, 55, 98, 111, 135 mass migration 78, 132, 136, 143 Mattarella, Sergio 6, 31, 36, 39, 51n6, 73 Mattarellum 73 ‘Maxi Trial’ 115, 118 ‘mediatisation’ 37, 61, 62, 136

Meloni, Giorgia 3, 24, 99, 158–60 Merkel, Angela 17 Michels, Robert 60 ‘migrant crisis’ 21, 65, 134, 141, 142 migration 21; internal 10; mass 78, 132, 136, 143; see also immigration’; ‘migrant crisis’ Monti, Mario 17–18, 36, 57, 90, 92 Moro, Aldo 16, 98, 130 Moroni, Sergio 110 Mosca, Gaetano 60 ‘Movement of 1977’ 95 Movimento Cinque Stelle (Five‑Star Movement, M5S) 4, 5, 18–19, 22–4, 39, 57–61, 75, 139; and the Constitution 30–1; and general election of September 2022 156–8; and populism 149–50 Movimento Sociale‑Fiamma Tricolore (Social Movement – Tricolour Flame) 67 Movimento Sociale Italiano (Italian Social Movement, MSI) 5, 7, 12, 66–7 MSI see Movimento Sociale Italiano municipality 49 Mussolini, Benito 5, 6, 66, 105 Naples 113 Napolitano, Giorgio 20, 36, 39 national cohesion 18 national integration 48–9, 63 nationalism 129 National Recovery and Resilience Plan (NRRP) 6, 24, 87, 93, 125n18, 157, 159 NATO see North Atlantic Treaty Organisation ‘new public management’ 46 Next Generation EU 24, 87, 93 NGOs see non‑governmental organizations ‘Ngrangheta 113, 116, 117 non‑governmental organizations (NGOs) 86, 104, 132, 135 North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) 47, 130, 137, 140 north–south divide 63–5, 77, 93, 116–17 Norway 132 No Tav movement 94, 96 NRRP see National Recovery and Resilience Plan nuclear weapons 129 omertà 115 online consultations 59–60 ONLUS (organizzazioni non lucrative di utilità sociale) 95 Operation Sophia 134 Operation Triton 134 organised crime 43, 103, 112–17 parentela 89 Pareto, Vilfredo 60

Index  167 Parliament, the 37–8; and corruption 11, 106; and governments 40–2; increase of significance 42; and justice system 120; see also parliamentary immunity parliamentary immunity 30, 109 participatory democracy 18, 58 Partito Comunista Italiano (Italian Communist Party, PCI) 71, 72, 77, 88, 106, 109, 130; and the Catholic Church 98; and the ‘First Republic’ 7, 9–13, 32, 148 partitocrazia (rule by parties) 58 Partito dei Comunisti Italiani (Party of Italian Communists, PdCI) 15 Partito della Rifondazione Comunista (Party of Communist Refoundation, PRC) 12, 15, 71 Partito Democratico (Democratic Party, PD) 4, 5, 16, 17, 19–24, 39, 67–72, 75, 96, 149; and general election of September 2022 156–8 Partito Democratico della Sinistra (Democratic Party of the Left, PDS) 11, 12, 14 Partito Liberale Italiano (Italian Liberal Party, PLI) 7 Partito Repubblicano Italiano (Italian Republican Party, PRI) 7 Partito Socialista Democratico Italiano (Italian Social Democratic Party, PSDI) 7 Partito Socialista Italiano (Italian Socialist Party, PSI) 7, 9, 11 party system 55–80 Pasquino, Gianfranco 75 path dependency 103 Patto per l’Italia (Pact for Italy) 12 Pavone, Claudio 6 Pax Christi 94 PCI see Partito Comunista Italiano PD see Partito Democratico PdCI see Partito dei Comunisti Italiani PdL see Popolo della Libertà PDS see Partito Democratico della Sinistra peaceful assembly 32 Pedersen’s index 9 pensions 91–2, 134 personal freedom 32 personal parties 4, 5, 12, 13, 17, 61–2 Pinto law 121 Pio Albergo Trivulzo 11 PLI see Partito Liberale Italiano PM see pubblico ministero policy‑making 2, 18, 20, 23, 25, 44, 49–50, 80, 131, 137–8, 143; and group politics 89–93; and social media 155; see also foreign policy; public policy political behaviour 152–6; see also electoral volatility; voters political campaigning 12–14, 19 political institutions 29–50 political rights 86

Popolo della Libertà (People of Freedom, PdL) 16, 17, 44, 66 populism 12, 23, 59, 99, 147–50, 152–4 Porcellum 73–4 Potere al Popolo (Power to the People) 72 PR see proportional representation PRC see Partito della Rifondazione Comunista presidency 33–7 presidents 35; role and responsibilities 18, 34; scope for intervention 36 pressure groups 85 ‘preventive repression’ 95 Previti, Cesare 122 PRI see Partito Repubblicano Italiano prime ministers 38–40 Prodi, Romano 14, 16, 38, 67–8 producer groups 90–2, 100 proportional representation (PR) 15, 20, 22, 37, 73 protest activities 94–6 Provenzano, Bernardo 116 PSDI see Partito Socialista Democratico Italiano PSI see Partito Socialista Italiano pubblico ministero (public prosecutor, PM) 118–20 public administration 46–7 public debt 16, 17, 65, 90, 138–9 public employees 46 public institutions 4, 44, 45, 49, 62, 105–6, 116 public policy 9, 34, 47, 55–6, 86–7, 90–1 public–private distinction 104–5 public referenda 11–12 qualunquismo 148 Red Brigades 10, 116 religion 32, 77, 98–9; see also Catholic Church religious education 32 religious fundamentalism 129 Renzi, Matteo 4, 5, 19–24, 37, 38, 75, 156; charismatic leadership 70–1; populism 70, 148–9; reforms 20–1, 46, 74, 93, 151–2 Repubblica di Salò 66 Resistance movement 7, 66, 106 Roma ladrona (thieving Rome) 11, 109 Rosatellum 22, 74 Rosato, Ettore 22 rule of law 30, 31, 104, 110, 119 Russia 129, 132, 143 Rutelli, Francesco 15 Salvini, Matteo 5, 23–4, 65, 96, 100, 155 Salvo, Ignazio 115 Sardines, the 93, 96 Sardinia 47, 48 Sarkozy, Nicholas 17 Sartori, Giovanni 73 Savona, Paolo 36, 39

168  Index SC see Scelta Civica Scalfaro, Oscar Luigi 14, 66 Scelba, Mario 130 Scelta Civica (Civic Choice SC) 39 schools 32 Scotti, Vincenzo 118 SD see Sinistra Democratica ‘Second Republic’ 6, 13–19, 25, 62, 151; failed parties of 63, 64; governments of 68, 69 sectional groups 87–93 Senate 11, 16, 37, 38 SGP see Stability and Growth Pact Sicily 38, 47, 48, 113, 115, 117 ‘silent revolution’ 78 single currency 25, 45–6, 65, 71, 90, 137–40; see also Euro Single European Act of 1986 137 Single Market 137, 138 single‑member simple plurality (SMSP) 11 Sinistra Arcobaleno (Rainbow Left) 71 Sinistra Democratica (Democratic Left, SD) 71 Sinistra, Ecologia, Libertà (the Left, Ecology, Freedom) 72 SMSP see single‑member simple plurality social capital 77 social media 153–5 social movements 85–100 social networking 57 South Africa 113 South Korea 141 sovereignty 29, 31, 130, 133, 137, 150, 159 Soviet Union 71, 128, 129, 131 ‘special statute’ regions 48 spesa proletaria (proletarian shopping) 96 Spinelli, Altiero 97 Stability and Growth Pact (SGP) 46, 92, 138 state, the: and the Church 32; ‘the continuity of’ 6; emergence of 105 Strada, Gino 95 ‘strategy of tension’ 10, 95 sub‑national government 31, 47–50 Superiore della Magistratura (High Council of the Judiciary, CSM) 44 Sweden 113, 132 ‘Swindle law’ 72 symmetric bicameralism 11, 19, 20, 30, 38

TAV see Treno ad Alta Velocità techno‑populism 58 television 78; see also TV broadcasting ‘Third Italy’ 49, 52n21, 63 TI see Transparency International trade unions 32, 86, 91–3, 101n5 transformismo 15 transnational movements 94 Transparency International (TI) 104 Treaty on Stability, Co‑ordination and Governance in the Economic and Monetary Union 90 Tremontri, Julio 17 Treno ad Alta Velocità (high‑speed train, TAV) 60 Trentino‑Alto Adige 38, 48 Trump, Donald 13, 65, 141 trust 105, 112, 155 TV broadcasting 12; see also television

Taiwan 141 Tangentopoli scandal 11, 30, 36, 44, 62, 108–11, 148

‘years of lead’ 10, 95, 116

UIL see Unione Italiana dei Lavoratori Ukraine 80, 129, 156, 159 l’Ulivo (the Olive Tree) 14, 71 UN see United Nations Unification 47, 52n22, 97, 114, 116–17, 123 l’Unione (the Union) 16, 71 Unione Italiana dei Lavoratori (Italian Workers’ Union, UIL) 88, 91 United Kingdom (UK) 75, 79–80, 103, 113, 140 United Nations (UN) 47, 131, 142 United Nations Security Council 142 United States 10, 113, 129–31, 140–1 vaccination 24 Valle d’Aosta 48 ‘V Days’ 57 Veltroni, Walter 16, 17, 149 Venezuela 113 violence 10, 95–6, 112–16 voters 4, 5, 26n2, 75–9, 155; see also political behaviour, electoral volatility Wales 113 Weber, Max 58, 60 Western European Union 137 xenophobia 65, 99

Zingaretti, Nicola 23