Neo- trasformismo : Historical legacies and populist revolt

Introduction

The Italian expression of the broader global phenomenon of ‘populism’ is politically ambiguous. The clearest expression of populism is the Movimento 5 stelle (M5S), which is neither right nor left. It combines anti-immigrant rhetoric with ecological themes and the demand for a universal basic income. The Lega Nord (LN) is a classically ‘right-wing populist’ organization. But it is regionally restricted, and is too well established in the political system to fully capture popular discontent. The outcome of the populist revolt in Italy has then been neither a break to the right nor the left, but rather two differently oriented connubia: first a right leaning coalition between M5S and the LN followed by a center left leaning one between M5S and the main center left party.

Giuseppe Conte, a rather gifted technocrat, was the prime minister of both governments, and the Covid-19 crisis has only strengthened his position. The post-2008 transformation of the Italian political system thus seems to be taking the form of trasformismo: a series of politically multichrome governments led by a formally apolitical technocrat. Thus, the central question of this article: why did the popular revolt against the political class in Italy take this form?

This article argues the Italian outcome can be explained as a consequence of three main factors. The first factor is the weakness and lack of political imagination of the Italian left. This is the political heritage of the particular history of Partito Communista Italiano (PCI), and constitutes a historical reversal. The PCI’s successor formations while blocking the emergence of newer forces, such as Podemos or Syriza, were far too politically timid, sclerotic, and ideologically supine to channel popular disillusionment. In this respect the Italian case resembles Hungary, which also features a neoliberalized left that isolated itself from any links to the Soviet political tradition (Scheiring and Szombati, 2020).

The second and third factors are more particular to Italy. In Italy ‘right-wing populism’, far from a new phenomenon after 2008, was a perduring feature of the political system. It had taken two forms historically: the post-fascist parties, which had their greatest strength in the south, and the LN, which was a more recent phenomenon, but which, by 2008, was the oldest party in the Italian political system. Thus the ‘populist right’, although better positioned to channel some of the political insurgency against Europe, was suspected especially by younger voters as being too integrated into the political system. This created the political space for a new formation, M5S, which was structurally squeezed between the missing right- and left-wing alternatives. In general, the Italian version of the revolt against neoliberalism is a late-comer phenomenon with respect to the country’s long prior history of both left-wing and right-wing radicalism. Emerging in this already crowded political space (Linz, 1980: 155), populism has assumed in Italy a specific form.

The final factor mitigating against a hard right or hard left break was the political tradition of trasformismo in which representatives easily switch parties, and in which governments can recycle themselves in slightly different colorations. This political pattern, which is deeply rooted in Italian political history, has produced a surprising situation. The churning of the party system has strengthened the position and popularity of a technocratic figure thought of as above the fray. The outcome then in Italy has been a meltdown of the political system and the rise of technocracy: not a politically clear break to the right or the left. In this article, I term this new formation neo-trasformismo.

The article is structured according to the major political periods of Italian politics from 1948 to the present. The divisions are most clearly evidenced in the electoral data assembled by Giovanni Pasquino (2018: 356). Pasquino usefully simplified the mosaic of the Italian party system into six basic categories: left, center left, ‘M5S’, center right, right, and others. On this basis three broad electoral periods are clearly evident from the postwar period: The First Republic (1948–1992), characterized by two dominant political forces, the PCI and Democrazia Cristiana (DC) who between them shared about 70% of the vote. This was followed by the Second Republic (1992–2008), characterized by the collapse of the DC and the rise of a ‘Center Right’ which expanded steadily from 1994 to 2008. Finally, a Third Republic (2008–present), marked above all by the rise of the M5S, a party which rose from nothing to about a third of the electorate. It will be useful to consider these periods a bit more closely.

The First Republic: 1948–1992

From 1948 to 1992 Italy was ruled primarily by one political party: DC. This was a heterogeneous centrist formation comprised of many currents held together by their common hostility to the largest and most intellectually vibrant communist party in Western Europe – the PCI. Italian communism’s distinctive political style was first established in 1944 following its leader, Palmiro Togliatti’s, declaration at Salerno that a Bolshevik style revolution was not on the immediate agenda in postwar Italy. Instead the PCI’s immediate task would be to establish a mass political party with the aim of decisively influencing the country’s new democratic constitution (Anderson, 2014: 86). The PCI’s participation in the constituent assembly came however at a heavy cost. Togliatti helped the DC protect the vast majority of the bureaucrats who had begun their careers under Mussolini, thus creating a continuity of the state between the fascist and post-fascist periods that differed sharply from what occurred in Germany (Anderson, 2014: 87–88; Pavone, 1995: 133).

Togliatti’s hope in formulating this new strategy was that the PCI would alternate in government with the DC. The actual outcome however was rather different. After suffering a crushing defeat in the elections of 1948 in which the DC enjoyed decisive support from the United States, the PCI was excluded from any role in government at the national level for some 30 years (Anderson, 2014: 89). Politically exiled from Rome, the party inserted itself into government at the local level, the leadership justifying its impotence with a heavily culturalist interpretation of Gramsci.

When the labor and student revolts of 1968 broke out, it was in the context of a blocked political system. Partly because of the rich heritage that Gramsci had left, the PCI was not as hostile to the student uprisings as was the French PCF. However, it proved unable to establish an effective alliance with them either. Instead it expelled its most creative minds to the Il Manifesto group (Anderson, 2014: 90).

The party, in place of any more ambitious project of transformation, placed its hopes in 1973 under Enrico Berlinguer in the achievement of a ‘historic compromise’ with the DC in the hopes of saving Italian democracy. The idea behind this move was much the same as what had inspired Togliatti in the initial Svolta di Salerno. The PCI would ally with the progressive elements of the DC to secure Italian democracy. However, Berlinguer also justified this move by invoking the example of Allende’s Chile, which supposedly contained dire implications for any attempt by the Italian left to rule alone. The DC, for its part, happily accepted communist support and a government of national unity duly emerged from the 1976 elections. The historic compromise, like its predecessor, failed spectacularly. At the 1979 elections the PCI lost a million and a half votes and was thrown out of the government (Anderson, 2014: 92).

Following the period of historic compromise, Italian politics entered into a holding pattern in which levels of political corruption, particularly under Bettino Craxi, increased vertiginously. In place of the attempted alliance between the DC and the PCI, a new five-party coalition emerged. This formed the immediate background for the political earthquake (Tangentopoli – Bribe City) that finally destroyed the First Republic.

When Tangentopoli swept the DC away in 1992 the road seemed open for the left to assume power. However, the PCI’s successor party, the Partito Democratico di Sinistra (PDS), proved unable to seize this opportunity: in part because, massively exacerbating the strategic errors described above during the Svolta di Salerno and the historical compromise, it foolishly abandoned its own political traditions (Anderson, 2014: 22). ¹

The Second Republic: 1992–2008

Given the situation of the left, the main beneficiary of Tangentopoli was bound to be on the right. In the case of Italy, the real-estate tycoon, and sometime pleasure cruise singer, Silvio Berlusconi. He came to power on the basis of an alliance with the fascist successor party Alleanza Nazionale (AN), led by Gianfranco Fini, and the LN led by Umberto Bossi. This coalition gave Berlusconi’s alliance a strong political basis both in the economically advanced north (through Bossi) and in the backward south (through Fini).

Berlusconi’s years in power prefigured the current global turn to ‘right-wing populism’ in many respects. He was a political outsider using a massive media presence to run on a simple and direct program promising infrastructural investment for the south, a crackdown on immigrants, and a reining in of the supposedly unaccountable judiciary (Anderson, 2014: 26; Ginsborg, 2003: 26, 43–44; Mazzoleni, 2018: 364–365). ² Berlusconi showered state employees with personal gifts and described his political followers as ‘friends’ and a ‘clan’, thereby prefiguring the ostentatious mixture of public and private life which has become prevalent among right-wing populists (Ginsborg, 2003: 43–44). Finally, he opened the Italian political system to the far right: a political element that had been excluded during the previous decades (Ginsborg, 2003: 25).

The years between 1994, Berlusconi’s first election, and 2013, when the Italian party system was reconfigured into its current form, saw the rise of the ‘Second Republic’: an arrangement with two main features. There was first the extreme personalization of politics as political leaders all now emerged as media personalities like Berlusconi himself. This constituted a sharp reversal, as the Italian political system prior to 1994 was characterized by very powerful, and relatively impersonal, political party organizations. Some of the personalization that set in during the 1990s was driven by broader cultural shifts such as the spread of television, and the collapse of the associational fabric of the ‘First Republic’ (Ginsborg, 1998: 207–215). The only major exception to this trend was the LN; this party was able to maintain the distinctively Italian tradition of a mass ‘Leninist’ (in the organizational, but not ideological, sense) party organization operating within a democratic context (Anderson, 2014: 64). Indeed, the party made serious inroads into the previous strongholds of the Italian left (Binni, 2019b: 7–8).

The second main feature of the new political system was an incipient system of party alternation with Berlusconi and the center right alternating in power with various center left governments: an unprecedented pattern in Italian political history (Pasquino, 2014: 432).

Precisely, however, because of the personalization of politics, the Second Republic did not produce a stable system of party alternation: instead Italian politics took the form of a shifting mosaic of parties around Berlusconi (Polo del Buon Governo and Polo per le Libertà including alternatively Forza Italia, Alleanza Nazionale, Lega – and the remnants of right wing DC) with the alternative constituted by equally labile coalitions in the anti-Berlusconi camp: Partito Democratico [PD], Ulivo, Italia dei Valori. To the left of this second grouping stood Rifondazione Communista (RC), which carried forward the banner of the historic PCI.

The general fragmentation of Italian political parties was most pronounced, however, on the left. During the 1990s and early 2000s the PD increasingly lost its hold on its working-class base. There are many reasons for this, but perhaps the most important was the party’s involvement with Prodi’s policy of budget cutting to comply with the Maastricht ‘convergence criteria’ in preparation for Italy’s entry into the Euro (Ignazi, 2019: 605–606). From this moment onward the center left became an easy target for a right that had only to point to economic stagnation and a spiraling cost of living.

However, the Second Republic was also somewhat damaging to the indigenous ‘populist’ right. In the first place, Fini’s post-fascist formation, AN, although originally benefitting from the alliance with Berlusconi, had disappeared as a significant factor in Italian politics by 2008 when it dissolved itself into the latest center right formation. Paradoxically, the heirs of Italian fascism were too much part of the establishment to act as a protest vehicle.

The case of the LN is more complex. The high-water mark of this formation followed the collapse of the first Berlusconi government, when the party reached over 10% running independently. However, in 1999, after suffering a drubbing in the European elections where it dropped to under 5% of the vote, Bossi decided to renew his alliance with Il Cavaliere (Berlusconi). In this form the center right continued in power up until 2006, when it was defeated by a weak center left coalition. Berlusconi swept back into power in 2008 for what would prove to be the final time.

Inter-regnum: 2008–2013

Berlusconi returned to power in 2008 together with the LN, which had now become a major party of the northern working class (Anderson, 2014: 63–64). This would seem to have been the moment for a true populism of the right. But the third Berlusconi government had the misfortune of being in power when the financial crisis hit from across the Atlantic. Interacting with an already weak and sluggish economy, the financial crisis immediately drove up the interest rate spread between Italian and German government bonds. Berlusconi hung on for another three years. However, saddled with pullulating sex scandals, and despised by the other European governments, he was forced out of power by the suave ex-communist President of the Republic, Giorgio Napolitano, in favor of the Goldman Sachs alumnus Mario Monti (Anderson, 2014: 128). The Monti government pursued an unimaginative policy of fiscal austerity and budget cutting designed to reduce the spread between Italian and German bond yields, which slowed employment and growth (Anderson, 2014: 136). The profoundly undemocratic policies of this period in which a government of unelected technocrats imposed austerity on the population were a political gift to the populist right (Pucciarelli, 2019: 14–15). This formed the immediate background to the political earthquake of 2013.

The Third Republic: 2013–present

The Italian elections of 2013 issued in a ‘Third Republic’. In place of the preceding system which had begun to move in the direction of an imperfect two party system opposing Berlusconi’s various center right formations to the center left made up of a combination of refugees from the old DC and the former PCI, now rechristened the PD, a tripolar system emerged organized around three groupings: a much-weakened PD on the left, a new force, the M5S in the center, and a motley combination of fascists, Berlusconians, and the LN on the right (Pasquino, 2018: 356). Paradoxically, the real political beneficiaries of this disintegration of the party system have not been populists themselves (M5S and LN), but rather a series of parliamentary maestros skilled in the art of forming complex multichrome coalition governments. Since 2013 there have been four such premiers, Enrico Letta, Matteo Renzi, Paolo Gentiloni, and Giuseppe Conte, not one of whom, with the possible exception of the telegenic Renzi, could remotely be described as a populist. To grasp this situation, it will be useful to first discuss the two ‘populist’ forces: M5S and LN.

The M5S emerged from the blog of Beppe Grillo, the son of a blowtorch factory owner who studied to be an accountant before embracing his career as a Sacha Baron Cohen like comedian. It is a mélange (Watkins, 2016: 11). Some of its policy positions seem recognizably to be on the left, and its quasi anarchist attitude towards the Italian state has drawn support from the likes of Antonio Negri (Dal Lago, 2013: 22–23). The movement is concerned with the environment, supports a universal basic income, and elements of the party support forms of direct democracy (Binni, 2019a: 5–6). The social profile of the party’s deputies also tends to be lower than that of any of the other parties: they are IT workers, students, and the unemployed, rather than lawyers, professors, and party officials. Deputies take only half their allotted salary, donating the rest to charity, and they are tied to the party by a constitutionally dubious imperative mandate that results in their expulsion if they break it (Binni, 2019a: 5–6; Watkins, 2016: 15).

At the same time, Grillo and his immediate entourage are crudely hostile to immigrants, and the party had been pulled sharply to the right by its alliance with the renewed Lega under the leadership of Matteo Salvini, although its profile may now be changing.

Aside from Beppe Grillo, the other face of populist revolt in Italy is the ubiquitous Matteo Salvini, the LN’s new leader. The transformation of the LN into a right-wing nationalist movement is profoundly paradoxical. The party arose in part as a revolt against the supposedly authoritarian and centralizing policies of the government in Rome, and in its earliest period was clearly anti-fascist; Bossi rejected comparisons with Le Pen’s FN, and his family had taken part in the partisan struggle at the end of the Second World War (Gatti, 2019: 67–68). Matteo Salvini himself began his political career on the regional left. He frequented the famous Milanese ‘social center’ Leoncavallo, listened to Fabrizio de André (the Italian Bob Dylan) and styled himself a ‘Padanian communist’ (Pucciarelli, 2019: 12). As Salvini rose through the ranks of the party, however, he increasingly adapted himself to its hard-right anti-immigrant profile. His ascent corresponded to a period in which the party seemed to be in terminal decline after a scandal that involved the Bossi family in the use of public funds. Indeed, by the end of Berlusconi’s final mandate in 2011, the party seemed finished as a significant force in national politics as Bossi suffered a stroke and a humiliating scandal (Pucciarelli, 2019: 11–12). Bossi then resigned the party’s leadership, to be replaced by his deputy, Roberto Maroni. It was only in the primaries that followed these changes of leadership that Salvini was able to seize control of the movement (Brunazzo and Gilbert, 2017: 631). Renzi’s government provided Salvini with the opening to steer the Lega out of its political ghetto. The attempt to transform the constitution, discussed below, revealed the PD as an arrogant and out of touch political force. But Salvini could take advantage of this opportunity only because he was shrewd enough to reorient the party away from its regionalist fantasies, and toward Euro-skepticism (Pucciarelli, 2019: 19–20). This was a fundamental departure since the Lega historically was pro-European, envisioning a Europe of Peoples in which ethnically homogeneous regions would replace nation states. Yet Salvini, partially under pressure from the M5S, was able to replace Rome with Brussels as the main enemy (Brunazzo and Gilbert, 2017: 631).

Aside from M5S and LN, the historical parties of ‘right-wing populism’ have not performed well at all since 2013. In the 2018 elections Berlusconi’s Forza Italia registered its lowest vote percentage since his entrance into politics in 1994 (Pasquino, 2018: 356). Furthermore, the fascist right (Forza Nuova, Italia agli Italiani, and CasaPound) received only a handful of votes and was excluded from parliament. The successor party to the AN, called now Fratelli d’Italia, garnered only a little over 4% of the vote (Pasquino, 2018: 355).

However, the government produced by the eighteenth parliament which emerged from the electoral earthquake of 2013 did not include M5S representatives since these refused to collaborate with any of the existing political forces. Instead, the immediate result was a government of ‘broad agreements’ including members of both the PD and the Berlusconi coalition (Pasquino, 2014: 433). This government, which was engineered by the President of the Republic, Giorgio Napolitano, had as its fundamental purpose constitutional reform. The process was initiated by group of 10 ‘wise men’ and carried through to a legislative proposal by a commission of experts (Arruzza, 2017: 123; Pasquino, 2018: 348).

Why was constitutional reform considered to be such a burning necessity? The Italian constitution is one of the most progressive fundamental charters in the world. To give a sense of the document, the first article states that ‘Italy is a Republic based on labor’. Sovereignty in the country ‘belongs to the people, who exercise it within constitutional forms and limits’ (Costituzione della Repubblica Italiana, Art. 1). The Italian Republic is obligated to ‘remove obstacles of an economic and social character . . . that impede the full development of the human personality and the effective participation of all workers in the political, economic, and social organization of the country’ (Costituzione della Repubblica Italiana, Art. 3). The Republic furthermore ‘recognizes the right of all citizens to work and promotes the conditions that render this right effective’ (Costituzione della Repubblica Italiana, Art. 4). As Piero Calamandrei put the point, the Republic ‘traded an actual social revolution for a promised revolution in the future’.

The focus of the constitutional reforms developed under the Renzi government was the Senate. In the constitution, the Italian Senate is a coequal branch of government; in the reforms it was to be reduced from 315 to 100 seats, made up of members of regional councils, presidential appointees, and mayors. After failing to gain the necessary two-thirds support in parliament, Renzi was forced to call a constitutional referendum (Arruzza, 2017: 120).

The defeat of Renzi’s referendum occurred on 4 December 2016, just weeks after Trump’s victory in the US and Brexit in the UK. This was, in the words of Gianfranco Pasquino (2018: 349), a ‘resounding . . . political and personal defeat of the prime minister and secretary of the P.D. Matteo Renzi’. In the elections in 2018 following this debacle the PD polled a miserable 23% of the vote. Indeed, the left as a whole made its worst showing of the entire post-Second World War period.

The 2018 elections however did not produce a government of the hard right, but rather a political connubium: a ‘populism’ that leant heavily to the right, but with discordant notes brought in by the ambiguous M5S. Even the common ‘anti-Brussels’ platform that the Lega and the M5S share is based on opposite policy stances: flat tax for the first, and universal basic income for the second (Pucciarelli, 2019: 23). Of course, within this balance, the specific weight of the right, despite its smaller electoral base, is clear. Part of this is due to Salvini’s innate political ability, but part is also due to the fact that a politics of anti-immigrant demagoguery is a much easier line than a serious confrontation with the EU on Maastricht criteria (Scarpari, 2019a: 8; 2019b: 6). Indeed, the ultimate outcome may be a government of the radical right: the first in the West since the postwar years (Ignazi, 2019: 611); however, so far, such an outcome has failed to emerge. Furthermore, Salvini’s ‘sovereignism’ seems to be losing popularity, partly because his support for Orbán has become a political embarrassment (Scarpari, 2019a: 10).

The friction between the Lega and the M5S prevented the establishment of a political cabinet, leading instead to two technocratic governments under Giuseppe Conte: who is now emerging as one of the more politically astute actors in contemporary Italian politics. The first of these governments was supported by the Giallo/Verde coalition (M5S and LN), but the second expresses a new alliance between the M5S and the PD. Fragmentation in the meantime has continued on both the center left and the center right as Matteo Renzi, former leader of the PD, has now formed his own list, Italia Viva (Living Italy), while Mara Carfagna (vice president of the Camera dei Deputati) has formed a moderate current within the Forza Italia (FI) that may become a new party (Voce Libera). ‘It is impossible’, Carfagna has stated, ‘to imagine an alliance with anyone today who is allied with the five stars’ (Scarano, 2020). Indeed, a new two-party, or bi-coalition system may be emerging. The most recent regional elections, those in Reggio-Emilia, suggest, that M5S is steadily losing support and its voters are re-polarized around left–right divisions. In these regionals those who had voted for M5S in the previous European elections moved sharply to the PD (Regalia et al., 2020: 4).

During this period a new version of a phenomenon with deep historical roots has also re-emerged: trasformismo (e.g. Scarpari, 2019c: 5–6). The phenomenon of centrist governments coalescing after elections, and therefore lacking clear electoral legitimacy, has been common in Italian politics since at least 1876 when Agostino Depretis initiated the practice. From this period onward, forms of trasformismo in which previous oppositions become supporting elements in shifting governments have been common (e.g. Valbruzzi, 2014). A version of this centrism even characterized Italian fascism, which, in sharp contrast to its German counterpart, blended a dominant nationalist right with a subordinate syndicalist left. However, in the post-Second World War period this generally occurred through the process of drawing entire groups or political parties into the governing coalition: a process best thought of as ‘group trasformismo’ (Valbruzzi, 2014: 178–179). After the early 1990s, individual deputies again began to engage in ‘turn-coatism’ transforming from one political grouping to another. This ‘party switching’ exploded in the period from 2013 to 2018. Over this period, party switching from M5S to the PD seems to have been the most common (Pasquino, 2018: 352).

Conclusion

Italy’s political reaction to the Great Recession defies the prevailing models of right and left ‘populism’. Because of the weakness of the left, the incorporation of the right, and the long-standing tradition of trasformismo the country has produced a politically multichrome response presided over by somewhat weak technocratic governments. It is particularly remarkable that representatives of the insurgent M5S have been willing to convert themselves into deputies of the center left. The scale of these individual transformations is unparalleled in the advanced capitalist world. To conceptualize this case, it may, then, be necessary to propose a third type of response to the general crisis of legitimacy after 2008: a trasformismo response. It is possible that the period that opened in 2013 is coming to a close as the Italian political system re-polarizes between center right and left. But the fragmentation of Italian politics seems to work against this trend.

The Covid-19 crisis has acted primarily to reinforce the trends toward neo-trasformismo already emerging after 2018. The new element on the scene is the substantial and largely unpredicted popularity of Giuseppe Conte, who has enjoyed sky-high approval ratings since the pandemic hit Italy (Diamanti, 2020). Conversely, Matteo Salvini’s support has been steadily eroding over the same period (Vassallo, 2020). ‘Populism’ may be one of the coronavirus’s many victims in Italy. However, nothing is guaranteed in a country that has historically shown an extraordinary ability to produce novel political formations over an extremely brief period of time. Surprises are perhaps the most likely outcome.