power, with deep-rooted democratic traditions that has, in recent decades, sunk into profound economic stagnation and political tumult.
Some commentators tell us that things were always like this – that Italy was forever backward and dysfunctional, that it never got over fascism, or that this land of ‘functional illiterates’ has been prey to demagogues ever since Caesar. Yet what is happening today really is new. In the postwar decades, Italy enjoyed such rapid economic growth that it even surpassed British GDP per capita; its anomaly was precisely that it had a permanent party of government as well as the West’s largest Communist Party, in opposition.
Yet, if this was the normality even into the 1980s, today the opposite holds true. The Second Republic inaugurated after the end of the Cold War has instead seen one of Europe’s best-performing economies turn into among the weakest, with dismal investment, withering infrastructure, and around a third of young people neither in work nor study. This shift is also reflected in political turmoil, with no force able to impose itself in an enduring way.
In the 1990s, many insisted that the modernisation of Italy relied on the ‘external bind’ provided by the European project. Italy was, at that point, one of the most federalist countries, seduced by the prospect of becoming a ‘normal country’. Back then, not only the liberal centre-left but the Lega Nord and Silvio Berlusconi held up the EU as a force that would ‘heal’ Italy’s public finances and improve its political culture. Yet, in 2020, Italians’ Euroscepticism today rivals even that of their British counterparts.
Europe can little withstand a mounting climate of Italian disaffection. The third-largest eurozone economy, an Italian default or exit from the single currency would spoke wide-scale turmoil. Yet the necessary relief through debt cancellation would jeopardise the eurozone’s most fundamental dogmas. Both Too Big to Fail and Too Big to Save, Italy is instead condemned to a permanent crisis-management regime, outright collapse forever kicked a few months down the road.
There is little appetite for an open break with the euro. Before the 2018 general election, both the Movimento Cinque Stelle (Five Star Movement; M5S) and the Lega renounced any prospect of leaving the single currency. In recent years, these insurgents have exploited a climate of popular discontent also expressed in Italians’ mounting distrust for Brussels. But this political malaise also entails a general loss of faith in great collective endeavours, preventing even these forces from foreseeing a leap into the dark outside the eurozone.
The extreme volatility in Italian politics has come hand-in-hand with the narrowing of political choice. The theatre of personality and identity intensifies, whereas the prospect of a change of economic priorities is abandoned. If even such insurgents as M5S and the Lega speak not of the collective interests of the Italian people, but only of defending the ‘ordinary citizen’, they seem less to galvanise the masses in a populist revolt as to reflect a pervasive mood of atomised, individual despair.
To explain the volatile times in which these parties have risen to prominence, this book is patterned following the key developments in recent Italian history, from the end of the Cold War to the Berlusconi era and the wake of the 2008 economic crisis. It examines the insurgents’ political agenda and forms of mobilisation and how their opponents contrived to provide them a road to power. A study of this national history moreover allows us to identify tensions pulling public life apart across the West.
Chapter 1 explains how the Lega Nord made its first appearance on the political scene. It argues that the collapse of the Cold War order and the destruction of the parties on which it was based opened the door to an assault on democratic standards. Exploiting the anti-corruption mood, the northern-chauvinist Lega allied with other populist forces – from Silvio Berlusconi to the postfascists – to impose a new ‘anti-political’ common sense, through which the hard right could push its own cultural tropes.
Chapter 2 looks at the demise of the opposition to these rising reactionary forces – and the collapse of the once-mighty Italian left. In particular, this chapter examines how in the 1990s and 2000s the parties of a ‘modernised’ centre-left tried – and failed – to change their base, riding the wave of anti-corruption politics, anti-Berlusconism, and the mania for privatisation to reorient toward a liberal Europeanist identity.
Chapter 3 presents Italy as a gerontocracy – a country for old men. In an era in which young people are unable to find work and most are forced to live with their parents, property owners and those with established positions of authority cement their social control. A focus on youth emigration, as well as ministers’ rhetoric around the ‘lazy’, ‘choosy’ young people unable to make their way in Italy, highlights the sources of youth disillusionment with the political process.
Chapter 4 examines the breakthrough of new political forces harnessing the mood of discontent. It argues that the promise of M5S to smash open Italy’s gerontocracy has flipped into a technocratic and depoliticised vision of government, offering the atomised citizen a more rational state administration. Yet the party also draws on a deep welter of mistrust in institutions, with the hollowing-out of public debate, falling voter turnout, and the search for technocratic quick fixes.
The rise of M5S, cannibalising the youth and working-class vote and upending the centre-left, has, in turn, served as a springboard for Matteo Salvini’s Lega, notwithstanding this party’s very different base of support. Chapter 5 argues that even as the Lega radicalises it is moving closer to a prize unclaimed in decades: the creation of a nationwide conservative party, integrating traditional elites even in once-inhospitable regions.
We begin with a plunge into Italy’s recent history – with the Lega’s first arrival on the political scene.
Even before the election was called, the insurgents’ antics in the Chamber of Deputies illustrated their rising confidence. As evidence mounted of the former prime minister’s criminal ties, one Lega Nord MP even waved a noose at the government benches. And when Italians did pass their verdict at the polls, they issued a withering condemnation of the establishment parties. More than two-thirds of incumbent MPs lost their seats, as an anti-corruption movement founded just three years previously became the biggest party in the Chamber of Deputies. The Lega Nord’s venom against the ex-Communist centre-left complemented its war on the bankrupt traditional right, whose MPs it now unseated across the upper part of Italy. Identifying its own electoral offensive with the magistrates’ exposal of a vast web of bribes and kickbacks, the northern-chauvinist party promised to impose its radical agenda on a new populist administration.
This isn’t a description of Matteo Salvini’s breakthrough in 2018, but of a political revolution that took place a quarter century previously. In the 1994 general election, Umberto Bossi’s Lega Nord – an alliance of six regional leagues that formed a single force at the end of the 1980s – elected more MPs than any other party, taking 117 seats in the 630-member Chamber of Deputies. Based on 8.5 per cent of the vote, the Lega Nord’s tally owed to the geographical concentration of its support – and despite its seat numbers, it entered government as a junior partner in Silvio Berlusconi’s coalition. Yet its anti-political sentiment had attracted broad-based support in Italian society, as it united a populist deprecation of political elites with the free-marketeer call for a Thatcherite revolution in Italy. Bossi’s party portrayed itself as the voice of the productive, modern North in rebellion against ‘thieving Rome’ and the ‘lazy, corrupt South’.
By 2018, the Lega was a rather different beast – it had become an all-Italian nationalist party, indeed a nationwide challenge to Berlusconi. Yet its success under Salvini’s leadership would