Last week Italian prime
minister Enrico Letta resigned, with the general secretary of the Partito
Democratico, Matteo Renzi, expected to take over as the country’s new PM. Arianna
Giovannini and James L. Newell assess
Renzi’s transition to power and the stakes for both his party and the wider
situation in Italy. They note that although Renzi was the obvious successor to
Letta, he was expected to wait until new elections before making a bid to
become prime minister. By moving now he is taking a calculated gamble that his image
as a ‘reformer’ will not be undermined by the fractious coalition that hobbled
his predecessor.
Nearly
one year after Italy’s watershed elections – elections which produced no clear
winner and led to the creation of a wavering grand coalition government – the
country faces yet another unexpected political turn. After a mere ten months in
office, the PM Enrico Letta was ousted by his own party (the Partito
Democratico, PD) on Thursday last week, and tendered his resignation to the
President of the Republic, Giorgio Napolitano, the day after. Matteo Renzi, the young and ambitious new general secretary
of the PD – the main party of the centre left, and Italy’s largest – is now
expected to receive a mandate to form a new government in the next few days,
becoming the country’s youngest PM at 39. What explains this development, and
what is its significance for Italian politics and more broadly?
Who is Matteo Renzi?
As
far as the first (and, indeed, the second) of these questions is concerned one
has to appreciate, in the first place, who Renzi is. He had first acquired
attention at national level as mayor of Florence from 2009 – big-city mayors
having been well-placed in recent years to cultivate very high profiles and
considerable personal followings for themselves thanks to a 1993 reform giving
them enhanced powers and enabling them to run councils on presidential lines.
From such a position he had been able to build a considerable following within
the PD, earning himself the nickname, il
Rottamatore (“the scrapper”), with his calls for internal party reform
based on a generational turnover among its leadership ranks. Though in 2012 he
had been defeated by PD general secretary, Pierluigi Bersani, in primary
elections to choose the centre left’s candidate prime minister for the general
election of 2013, the fact that the PD failed, against expectations, to win,
paved the way for an election to replace Bersani – for a challenge, that is,
that Renzi was only too willing to take up.
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| Matteo Renzi, Italy's new PM |
Victory
at the 8 December general secretary elections, open to ordinary voters, had
been a foregone conclusion: he was the “change candidate” promising to overturn
the traditional oligarchies in a party born, a few years previously, from the
simple merger of the bureaucratic apparatuses of its predecessors and which
therefore struggled to appear to be something genuinely new. He successfully
projected himself as a politician offering a “soft” form of the anti-political
sentiments espoused by Beppe Grillo and the Five-star Movement, enabling him to
articulate the centre-left electorate’s growing mistrust of the political
class.
Unexpected challenge to
Letta
In
the second place, his successful challenge to Enrico Letta has come as a
surprise to many. Not long ago, in a previous blog post, we argued that it would be unrealistic
to expect Letta to cede place to the Florentine mayor without putting up a
fight for the premiership, or to expect Renzi to lead a revolt against his own
party’s PM. On the one hand, it seemed that the lifespan of the incumbent government had probably been shortened by
the mayor’s emergence, since his credibility as an agent of change necessarily
implied distancing himself from an executive which, by its very nature as a
grand coalition, was driven by a constant search for compromise. After all,
Renzi sought to project himself as a young and charismatic leader, one capable
of delivering a Blair-style policy revolution which, by inaugurating a
“third way” designed to appeal to both sides of the left-right divide, would
also revolutionise Italian politics generally.
On
the other hand, though winning the 8 December contest handsomely, Renzi had
only minority support among PD members
and it seemed he would want to avoid jeopardising his popularity outside the
party by being seen to be responsible for an early government collapse. Biding
his time as the leader of a reformed
PD, a leader standing outside the Government, it seemed likely that he would be
in a position potentially to lead the centre left into fresh elections, free of
the burden of having to defend the record of an outgoing austerity
administration in which his own party had been the senior partner. In January
he appeared to have succeeded, where so many others before him had failed, in
achieving cross-party agreement for much needed reform of the electoral
law. The expectation was, then, the one he had encouraged in the aftermath of his coronation as
PD secretary when he had publicly declared his hostility to “wide coalitions”,
arguing that he wanted to become prime minister by winning an election, so as
to assume office with a public mandate.
Renzi’s gamble
In the third place, then, one has to have some
answers to the question why, against these expectations, Renzi has chosen to take the risk of
losing his credibility (and, as a consequence, any forthcoming electoral contest)
by making a strategic move which is reminiscent, in a most alarming way, of the
First Republic and its ruthless political class.
One
possible answer is straightforward personal ambition. Media commentary since
the move has been dominated by observations concerning the risks he is running.
His actions have exposed him to charges that he has grabbed power by cunning rather
than through an above-board contest following an electoral-law reform, and that
he is therefore little different to the politicians he vowed to “scrap”. He has
also faced the accusation that his sweeping reform proposals (which include a
new electoral law, reform of the labour market, a revision of the bicameral
system, and cuts in public spending) are unrealistic and indicative of personal
arrogance, given they are dependent on a profoundly divided parliament and the
same fractious coalition that hobbled his predecessor.
But,
in an age of personalised and mediatised politics, perhaps such commentary in
fact explains precisely why Renzi has
made his move: he is a man with little ideological baggage; his popular appeal
lies precisely in his reputation for wanting to take on and shake up the
existing power structures against the odds. Adopting a strategy framed in the
media as “foolhardy”, then, paradoxically adds to his stature as a politician –
adding to a perception that he is someone in whom hopes for “salvation” can
justifiably be placed, given his seeming preparedness to put his entire career
at stake in the cause of breaking the power of the old guard, the hated
“political caste”.
How the move took place
Finally, then, with a possible answer to the
question of “why?”, one has to have a sense of how the change has come about. The first problem was Letta’s
removal from office – which could not realistically be expected to be achieved
through a parliamentary vote of no confidence at the hands of one of the
governing parties, in the absence of a specific pretext for calling such a
vote. It could only come through the first-hand actions of Renzi himself through
the extra-parliamentary organisations of the party he now led. Of these
organisations, the one chosen was the Direzione
nazionale – the executive committee for the party’s supreme policy-making
body, the Assemblea nazionale,
elected in concomitance with the general secretary.
The motion proposed by Renzi spoke of “the urgent
need to initiate a new phase with a different executive, one that has the
political strength to deal with the issues confronting the country with a view
to completing the legislative term together with the current governing
coalition and a programme open to the requests of social and economic interest
groups”. It was approved by 136 votes to 16 with 2 abstentions. Although it
made no mention of the possibility of Renzi taking Letta’s place, this, given
the context in which it was passed, was understood by all concerned to be the
motion’s political significance. And there were several reasons for expecting
this understanding to be borne out by events.
Renzi was gambling on being able to exploit his
popularity to head an executive capable of lasting longer and being more
incisive than that of his predecessor. He had persuaded the Direzione to back his gamble and
thereby, indirectly, had persuaded his party’s parliamentary representatives to
do so: the longer they kept their seats without facing fresh elections the more
their pensions would be enhanced; they could be expected to fall in line with
the wishes of a Direzione and general
secretary on whom their political careers were more or less dependent.
Letta understood he had been deserted and resigned.
Napolitano could be expected to confer a mandate on Renzi given that all the
signs were that he would succeed in winning the confirmatory vote of confidence
that all new governments must, constitutionally, ask for, once they have been
sworn in. And the expectation concerning Napolitano’s conduct was reinforced by
the stated ambition for the new executive to see out the legislative term
(which would end in 2018).
What now for Italy?
If the latest turn in Italian politics has been
driven by forces that can be more or less accurately reconstructed, then it is
somewhat harder to pin down its likely future significance. Three things,
however, seem clear. Renzi’s administration will be the third government in
just over two years to have taken office as a consequence of events other than
the winning of a parliamentary majority through victory in an election contest.
This in itself will constitute an element of weakness the new government will
have to contend with: a confirmation of the democratic deficit currently
expressed by Italy’s political institutions.
Second, the associated risks seem especially great
in the present as compared to the previous two instances. Mario Monti took
office as a technocrat with the specific remit of dealing with an economic
emergency. Letta took office as the head of a grand coalition aware that economic
and political stability required it. Renzi, on the other hand, will take office
thanks to a mere shift of
power from one party faction to another: a shift orchestrated by Renzi and his
team from within the ranks of the PD, with a degree of (indirect) support from
the President. Moreover he will take over from Letta thanks to an
extra-parliamentary decision for which – arguably – no real political
explanation has been given other than the need put in office an individual
deemed to be a good communicator, but of whose political principles and
capacities for national office little is in reality known.
Finally,
therefore, if Renzi fails in his reform programme, if he fails to reduce the
pressures of Italian citizens’ disenchantment, lack of trust and occasional
overt rejection of their political class, then the consequences could be very
serious indeed: not just for himself and his party but for the political system
as a whole. As the Italian journalist Eugenio Scalfari points out, referencing
a well-known song from the 1930s, before long Italy and Renzi may be heading
for ‘stormy weather’.
** this article was originally published by LSE's EUROPP blog.
