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Will Italy Find a Way Out of the Crisis?

In mid-April early elections will be taking place in Italy. A new kind of party seems to be being formed, but a return to Berlusconi-style politics is also possible.

The question is not whether Italy is in a crisis. The question is whether it will ever cease to be in one. For decades now it has been demonstrated time and again that a state of emergency can be the rule rather than the exception.

Roman soldier on Ponte Vittorio Emanuele II, Rome, Italy
Photo: iStockphoto

Yet currently the crisis seems particularly acute. Refuse collection problems in Naples, a catastrophic health system, poor marks for Italy's education system compared with other countries, and on top of all that a stagnating economy. What is more, January 2008 saw the collapse of yet another government when the multi-party coalition led by Romano Prodi had to resign following a vote of no confidence. This was Italy's sixty-first government since 1945.

"When things are at their worst, that's when Italy starts to make things happen,” Franco Pavoncello, a political scientist at the John Cabot University in Rome, predicted on 5 March 2008 in an interview with Eric J. Lyman published by the Swiss ISN Security Watch.

But is the situation bad enough yet? Is there a chance that things will change when the Italians elect a new parliament on 13 and 14 April?

Veltroni – A Figure of Hope?

"The 2008 elections will not resemble previous ones, and may signal the start of normalisation in Italy, after a decade of rather chaotic transition. The promised change is due to the birth of the Democratic Party," Marc Lazar speculated on 12 February 2008 in the daily La Repubblica.

And indeed, the Democratic Party (DP) is planning to do things differently. Using the US political system as a model the party held a kind of "primary" in October 2007 in which the electorate was able to decide who should be the new party chairman. The appointment of Walter Veltroni, the popular ex-mayor of Rome, to that post gave the DP a skilled election campaigner who poses serious opposition to Silvio Berlusconi, the candidate for the largest right-wing party, Veltroni may not be such a good orator as Barack Obama, but like Obama he is attempting to win over a nation that is sick of politics by promising a new start, Paul Kreiner wrote in the Tagesspiegel of 25 March 2008.

Internal Party Democracy

New parties emerge in Italy at every election, but what is different about Veltroni's Democratic Party is that it promises to be a real party, and a democratic one to boot. A party based on grassroots support is unusual in Italy. Indeed, many believe that this is the main reason for the country's wretched political state – even more so than the much criticised electoral law, which produces unstable party alliances.

"What is missing in Italy are properly organised parties with programs in which political objectives are formulated within the party by democratic means," Wolfgang Schieder wrote in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung of 18 March 2008. "Electoral associations continue to be organised around individuals, have a clientelistic structure and are represented exclusively by oligarchs. Even in the Giolitti era before the First World War these oligarchs were known as 'Grandi elettori' (grand electors), Even today they decide what happens in Italian politics." The multi-billionaire and media magnate Berlusconi took this form of clientelistic politics to its extreme.

A Departure from Alliance Politics

Veltroni's Democratic Party, formed from an alliance of Social Democrats and the left-wing of the Christian Democrats, is standing for election alone. This represents a departure from the multi-party alliances that have characterised Italian politics until now. Such alliances were capable of winning elections but they were not capable of governing. The government of Romano Prodi fell in January because of a corruption affair involving Justice Minister Clemente Mastella, a member of the small Udeur party, one of Prodi's eight coalition partners.

Even Berlusconi this time avoided forming too broad an electoral coalition. Instead, his "Forza Italia” joined forces with just one other party, the right-wing "Alleanza Nationale" to form the "Popolo della Liberta" (People of Freedom) party, which is set to become a major national party.

"Italy is currently undergoing a sea change of a kind it hasn't experienced in a long time," Stefan Ulrich commented in the Süddeutsche Zeitung of 13 February 2008.

La Mafia continua

A transformation of this kind would do Italy good, for the list of challenges it faces is a long one. Organised crime, whether it involves the Camorra, the N'Drangheta, the Sacra Corona Unita or the Mafia, is undermining the country. That issue is not, however, on the election agenda, not even for the Left, as the journalist and mafia expert Roberto Saviano lamented in Corriere della Sera on 13 March: "The intelligence of the left has always been to claim that the mafia only concerns the other side."

The damage caused by the mafia problem has been all too apparent in Naples for years. The city, particularly the outskirts, is drowning in refuse because the local council has been unable to find an alternative to the closed illegal waste dumps controlled by the Camorra. But there are other problems too: violence in football stadiums that is getting out of hand, a shortage of teachers, the rotten health system, an unsuccessful education policy, empty pension funds, growing xenophobia and a stagnating economy are providing material for prophets of doom.

Not all the books have such dramatic titles as Saviano's "Gomorrha". But all of them – "La Rana cinese" (The Chinese Frog) by the Trieste politician and coffee importer Riccardo Illy, "L'arte del non governo" (The Art of Non-Government) by journalist Luca Ricolfi or "La Casta" (The Caste) – have diagnosed a failure of the political system on many fronts.

Self-Enrichment and Disappointment

"Joining the euro zone was the last great political achievement," was Rudolf Stamm's comment on Italian politics in the Neue Zürcher Zeitung of 8 February 2008. Italy joined the European monetary union ten years ago. Since then inefficiency and the practice of officials helping themselves to public money have led to alienation between the state and its citizens. In their books both Rizzo and Stella reveal the shameless self-enrichment of the political caste. Taking account of inflation, a member of parliament now earns five times as much as sixty years ago.

It therefore comes as no surprise that only 7.8 percent of Italians trust the parliament, as the recent Censis report showed. One in three respondents could imagine an authoritarian regime coming to power under certain circumstances, and every second Italian thinks the cabaret artist Beppe Grillo is the best politician. Grillo's website is the most visited in Italy and his rhetoric of outrage has been tremendously successful.

Do the Italians in fact have exactly the state they deserve, as Beppe Grillo maintains?

"The Italians are prone to gut reactions," Giancarlo de Cataldo wrote in Libération of 13 March 2008. "And a sensational news report or a populist's demagogical rant, with its questionable vocabulary, has a far stronger impact at the gut level than a well-argued debate. The taste for emergency comes from below, the elite is only adapting to it."

Other commentators are less fatalistic. "The only hope is that 2008 may be the year when the depression hits rock bottom," Francesco Merlo noted in La Repubblica on 28 December 2007. The political scientist Pavoncello also sees this as a source of hope. "Italy may be on the edge of the abyss. But never underestimate an Italian gazing into the abyss."

Christoph Mayerl

Born in 1976, Christoph Mayerl studied journalism, philosophy and politics in Eichstätt, Bavaria. He works as a free-lance journalist in Berlin.
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