13/01/2014
Michele Salvati, Facoltà di Scienze Politiche, Università di Milano
Matteo Renzi's landslide victory in the primaries for the leadership of the Partito Democratico on December 8 is the first good news of the Italian political system. Both Spain and Italy are living in economic strangulation, a suffocation prompted by their structural weaknesses in the current context of the European Monetary System and its rules: but the political system in Spain is on the side of the assets, and Italy's is on the side of the liabilities.
How we have arrived here was the question I tried to explain in a long essay called "Two Nations? Civil Society, Governance and Politics in Berlusconi's Italy" published in the book coordinated by Víctor Pérez-Díaz, Europe and the Global Crisis, FAES, Madrid 2012, and I will refer to it with regard to this issue. The account told in that essay is interrupted at the beginning of 2011, but since then the bad news have only continued. The government, which seemed to have a solid majority in parliament–Berlusconi–was forced to resign due to its inability to cope with the economic crisis. The President thus formed a "technical" government led by Mario Monti (November 2011) which, after some major structural reforms was also forced to resign, therefore calling for early elections in February 2013.
More bad news came with these elections: a populist movement led by comedian Beppe Grillo, powered by a radical contempt for politicians and parties–whether from the left or the right–scored a runaway success, with similar results to those of the Partito Democratico and of the Popolo Della Libertà. As a result of the Italian electoral system and the need to have a majority in both the Chamber of Deputies and the Senate, the country could not be ruled, unless two of the three major parties made an alliance. After a political journey handled terribly by the Partito Democratico (the elections for President of the Republic were also in between) Giorgio Napolitano was re-elected president, who commissioned the moderate Partito Democratico member Letta to form a broad consensus government between the Partito Democratico and the Popolo Della Libertà.
Anyone who wishes to get a taste of the Italian political disarray has only to compare how this solution was reached by the German grosse Koalition. Further turmoil broke out last summer to mark Silvio Berlusconi's first final criminal conviction, and his attempt to make Letta's government fall. This, however, was prevented by the secession of a sufficient number of his MPs, who created a new group called–how original– Nuovo Centro Destra.In short, the government was therefore held by this new group, by the Partito Democratico and by the centrists Monti and Casini, while the personalist and populist groups shifted to the opposition: Grillo's movement and Berlusconi's party, renamed with its old name Forza Italia.
It is against this backdrop that the extraordinary success of the young mayor of Florence, inside the Partito Democratico, has taken place. I don't think that the reasons for this success lie in an improvised shift of prevalent ideological orientations among the voters and activists of this party–Renzi is probably closer to the liberal-democratic values than to the Social Democratic/Catholic ones of the precedent leader–but rather in the exhaustion of the old narrative's appeal before the electorate of the left and on a greater appreciation of the leadership abilities of the government candidates. The electoral defeat– because the election results of the February 2013 elections were felt as such by the left–and the widespread perception of confusion and uncertainty in the management of the subsequent crises by the precedent government, explain much of Renzi's triumph. Not the whole triumph, however. The rest is explained by his undoubted leadership ability, by the courage with which he has upheld his challenge and by his youth and personal charisma that allow comparison with Tony Blair's.
But Renzi's task is much more complicated than that of Blair in 1997. The latter was in a solid political context and with favourable economic conditions. He only needed the electoral defeat of the Tories, exhausted after four terms in office. Renzi should work especially with Letta and Napolitano–and this will not be easy–to build a constitutional and electoral system that allows it to win a duel against two aggressive opponents–Berlusconi and Grillo–capable of mobilising the electorate that feels disillusioned, fearful and hostile to parties. Only after passing this first test will he be able to face a second one, winning the elections and running the country. Ruling by making the Italians understand that a long period of economic difficulties awaits them in which some of those reforms which they refused to carry out when the economic conditions were far more favourable shall have to be conducted.
Renzi's victory and the eradication of the old catholic-communist control apparatus of the Partito Democratico is good news. I fear, however–and I hope I'm wrong–that the long series of bad news is not over yet.