The Italian experiment

Democratic Party and Five Star Movement are engaged in a major step in their evolution and designing their future even by reforming the electoral law

This article is also published in the November/December issue of eastwest.

“A parliamentary majority exists and a government has been formed and the decision now rests with parliament and the government which in the coming days will ask for a vote of confidence and present the programme”. With these words the Italian President Sergio Mattarella announced the birth – in less than a month – of the second Conte government. As is well known, this government was born out of a crisis of the political majority – a coalition between the Five Star Movement and the League – triggered by the League’s leader Matteo Salvini’s decision on 8 August to suddenly call for the early dissolution of parliament.

The birth of the sixty-sixth government in seventy two years of republican history was made possible by the creation of a coalition that is almost completely at odds with the previous one, based on an agreement between the following parties: the 5 Star Movement, the Democratic Party and the left wing party Liberi e Uguali as well as a splinter group of the Democratic Party, Italia Viva, a formation led by Matteo Renzi which in the meantime has set itself up as an autonomous parliamentary group.

This coalition, decidedly different to the previous one and heavily left-leaning, now known as  the “yellow-red experiment” as  opposed to the previous “yellow-green” one, is the third and ultimately successful attempt to give rise to a government based on an agreement between the 5 Star Movement and the Democratic Party, after the failed attempts in 2013 and 2018.

Yet, perhaps as proof of the strong heterogeneous character internal to these two political entities and the social and cultural divide between the electorates of the two main parties of this government, there are three aspects to the yellow-red experiment that need to be examined to understand whether it is more or less likely that the current alliance between the 5 Star Movement and the Democratic can become something more structurally sound.

The first element to be taken into consideration is exclusively political. Can a government that has come into being as a result of a democratic emergency – with a negative connotation, as a bulwark against Salvini, who, as part of his permanent electoral campaigning, had gone so far as to invoke “full powers” – aim to live, or better survive, without giving itself a positive mission or at least attempting to? In other words, can this government team form a real alliance, with a transformative and lasting purpose, or will it restrict itself, as a famous scholar of the Seventies once wrote, to just “surviving without governing”?

This is the main challenge facing the yellow-red experiment, in its attempt to build a social and cultural coherence among its electorate, through shared government policies.

Of course this is no mean challenge. Especially when the party constructions are extremely fluctuating: with the 5 Star Movement prey to Bernstein’s “minimum programme” and the well-known slogan “the end is nothing, the movement is all”, and the Democratic Party which, after Matteo Renzi’s split, still hasn’t decided on the path it intends to take to smooth over this split and curtail its repercussions in terms of its effects on the party’s electoral consensus.

The fact of the matter is that the “winning combination”, within this mutual stalemate, as they await the result of the regional elections in Umbria at the end of October – the first in which the two parties, the 5 Star Movement and the Democratic Party, are running together in a structured alliance –has yet to be forthcoming. In fact, the longer it goes on, the more the contrasts between the party management and the voters of the respective parties come to the fore, all the more so given the excessive bursts of volunteering by certain figures who, in these delicate early stages, rather rashly end up emphasising the underlying roots of their reciprocal differences: a case in point being Virginia Raggi , the incumbent 5 Star mayor of Rome, and the suggestion she might attempt to run again, an outrageous provocation for the Democratic Party’s electorate and especially for its Roman contingent.

In these instances, then, if the intent is to seek a more structured alliance, the path to be steered is not a typically political one, but rather a more orderly and progressive approach addressing the individual sector policies separately.

Yet, once again – and this is the second consideration – problems still arise. Starting with the issue of justice in relation to which the position of the Democratic Party, within the context of the broad guarantees promoted by a liberal and democratic left wing, appear to be completely at odds compared to the proposals put forward by the 5 Star Movement and voiced by Justice Minister Alfonso Bonafede. Similarly, there is the incipient issue of the budget which, within the narrow constraints of a formulation that pays a price for the extremely costly choices made by the previous government (though most of these form a major pillar of the new one), seems to be very much lacking in strategic  breathing room.

Last but not least, there’s the issue of institutional reform along with a new electoral law, unavoidable now that the political agreement between the 5 Star Movement and the Democratic Party, ratified through the approval on fourth reading of the draft constitutional reform bill that reduces the number of the member of parliament. This is a key issue for the 5S but one which the Democratic Party had strongly opposed during its first three readings. Its approval, with the positive vote of the Democratic Party on its fourth reading, as confirmation of the agreement, now means the second part of the political agreement has to be move ahead, meaning the reforms needed to rebalance the number of members: this involves the reassessment of the constitutional quorums for the election of the Republican President, the reform of parliamentary regulations and a new electoral law.

The signs, right now, seem to indicate that a full alignment in terms of goals is on the cards, though the real sticking point will be the future electoral law.

After all, and this is the third aspect, the yellow-red experiment will make the voters of the two parties compatible, and reach a complete agreement, provided they manage to overcome this one dilemma: if the political management truly believe in a structured alliance, thus eliminating the risk that a central force may rise up capable of attracting votes away from both the right of and potentially from the left of the 5 Star Movement and the Democratic Party, it should work to promote the restoration of a true two-party coalition system, possibly by way of a majority electoral system with a double run-off on a national scale.

However, this kind of electoral system does not curry favour with the majority of the two parties, both more attracted to a proportional dynamic, which allows the weight of their two electorates to be counted. Conversely, if the two political sides opt for a proportional system, this would naturally unhinge the political and institutional incentives that are instead very useful when promoting a structured rather than an emergency alliance.

So there are plenty of choices that need to be made. And that is why, rightfully enough, what we are witnessing right now is termed an experiment, with the compatibility of the two players under constant assessment, and, to quote the famous historian Antonio Gramsci, based on the readiness “to start out afresh every day”.

@ClementiF

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