Prime Minister Mario
Monti's recent resignation and former Prime Minister Silivio
Berlusconi’s return to politics are unlikely to be game changers. In
fact, they are simply the latest examples of a broader problem in
Italian politics: the inability of conservatives to build a credible
political party.
Silvio Berlusconi in 2011. (Tony Gentile / Courtesy Reuters)
Italy's inconclusive election on February 25 did nothing to help the
country's image abroad. In noting that more than half of Italians cast
their vote for either Silvio Berlusconi, the former prime minister, or
Beppe Grillo, leader of the Five Stars Movement, international observers
resorted to familiar tropes. Painting Italy's political system as
farcical and chaotic, the German Social Democratic leader Peer
Steinbrück commented that Italy had elected
two clowns.
Of course one of them, Grillo, is an actual comedian, whose party
polled an extraordinary 25 percent of the vote in its first national
election. But Steinbrück should not have been so quick to condemn: the
results of the Italian election are a reflection -- albeit an
exaggerated one -- of trends that all European democracies are facing.
Italy's political impasse is the direct result of declining popular
support for the two broad political coalitions that have shaped its
politics for the last two decades: the center-left, currently organized
around the Democratic Party (PD), and the conservatives, dominated by
the People of Freedom (PDL), led by Berlusconi. Throughout the 1990s and
2000s, one of these coalitions generally won enough parliamentary seats
to form a government, albeit often by including unpredictable minor
parties in their governing majority.
This time, though, neither has garnered anywhere near enough support
to form a government. The Italian constitution requires a government to
win a majority in both houses of parliament before it can take the
reins. The PD has a comfortable majority in the lower house, thanks
mostly to electoral laws that grant a generous number of bonus house
seats to the winning coalition. The party is far short of majority in
the Senate, though, since the law allocates Senate bonus seats at the
regional level, which benefited the PD and PDL more or less equally.
The current Italian electoral law was passed in 2005 by Berlusconi's
government in an attempt to cement his grip on power. By allocating seat
bonuses to the winning coalition, it was supposed to ensure a secure
parliamentary majority for the government. But this only works if the
two main coalitions dominate the contest. Together, the lists of Pier
Luigi Bersani (of the PD) and Berlusconi pulled in only 59 percent of
the vote in this election, almost 30 points fewer than their results in
the last election in 2008. Widespread surprise at the Berlusconi
coalition's strong comeback in the election, coming close to winning
victory in the lower house, has distracted from the fact that it has
hemorrhaged more than seven million votes since 2008. The center-left
coalition, meanwhile, lost more than three and half million votes. The
outgoing prime ,minister, Mario Monti, who
unwisely stood at the head of a centrist coalition, also performed well below expectations, coming in at only ten percent of the vote.
One reading of this extraordinary outcome is that it was a protest
against the painful spending cuts, tax increases, and economic reforms
that Monti's government implemented as a precondition (albeit an
unstated one) for European Central Bank support. The fact that,
together, Grillo, who promised a referendum on the euro, and Berlusconi,
who took a
euroskeptic stance throughout 2012, won more than half of the votes was
described by the economist Joseph Stiglitz as "a clear message to Europe's leaders: the austerity policies that they have pursued are being rejected by voters."
But the Italian election is telling us much more than that. In fact,
Grillo's party, founded only in 2009, focused less on euroskepticism
than on a blanket rejection of the established Italian political elite
and its way of doing politics. Rejecting traditional campaign techniques
in favor of social media, the party pushed its agenda of, first, ending
the generous state subsidies and salaries paid to Italy's political
parties and elected politicians and, second, replacing them with a
vaguely conceived Internet-based representation system. The Grillo
phenomenon is a challenge not only to austerity politics, but to the
traditional party system itself. The economic crisis gave Grillo a
favorable wind, but his offensive against Italy's corrupt and
self-serving politicians was brewing even before the downturn began.
It would be unwise to dismiss the election results as yet another
Italian anomaly. All across Europe, membership of political parties is
at its lowest level since the World War II. Voters are also less loyal
than ever to traditional parties -- they are more likely to switch votes
to a rival party or an entirely new one. Only days after Grillo's
triumph, the UK Independence Party, which campaigns for British
withdrawal from the EU, came to within 2,000 votes of winning a
by-election held to replace a disgraced Liberal Democrat MP, pushing the
ruling Conservatives into third place. And the success of the Pirate
Party in Sweden, the anti-Islam party led by Geert Wilders in the
Netherlands, and more established populist parties such as the French
Front National, confirm that Italy is far from being an outlier.
The economic crisis in Europe is threatening the very survival of the
mainstream political parties. European citizens have been showing signs
of frustration and dissatisfaction with their elected politicians for
years. Even before the crisis, voters had tired of choosing between
broadly similar political parties whose policy options are constrained
by European laws or the pressures of globalization. Faced with the worst
economic crisis since the Great Depression, this frustration is boiling
over into resentment and rejection. And the imposition of draconian
measures by supranational institutions only makes things worse. All that
has created a crisis of legitimacy for Europe's ailing political
parties. If the established political class can be blown out of the
water in Italy, politicians Europe-wide must be wondering how safe they
are from a similar fate. Political parties not only need to address the
economic crisis, they also need to reconnect with voters and revitalize
their central role in democratic politics. If they do not, what happened
in Italy may soon repeat.
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