Matteo Renzi’s transition to power is a gamble not just for his party, but for the Italian political system as a whole**

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.

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.

Italy after the 2013 indecisive, but dismal general elections **

by Gianfranco Pasquino (James Anderson Senior Adjunct Professor at Johns Hopkins University, Bologna) 

As all elections in parliamentary democracies, the February 2013 Italian elections were meant to give birth to a new Parliament. As in all parliamentary democracies, the distribution of seats in the new Parliament should have led to the inauguration of a new government. The contribution of the existing electoral system dubbed Porcellum (proportional plus a majority bonus) to the overall outcome has been quite significant. Thanks to a fistful of votes, the coalition made of the Partito Democratico, Sinistra Ecologia Libertà and the Socialisti Italiani won the majority bonus for the House of Deputies obtaining 340 seats. Because the allocation of the majority bonus for the Senate takes place region by region, there is no majority in the Senate. The Partito Democratico and its allies could not reach the absolute majority of seats in the Senate even after adding the seats won by Scelta Civica led by former Prime Minister Mario Monti. Since the Italian symmetrical bicameralism requires that all governments must receive an explicit vote of confidence from the absolute majority of parliamentarians in both Houses, the formation of a government appeared from the beginning close to impossible. Moreover, because of a curious coincidence, that had already manifested itself in two previous situations (1992 and 2006), the new Parliament also had the task of electing the President of the Republic. 

Giorgio Napolitano (President of The Republic) and Enrico Letta (PM)

Following the dismal failure of Bersani, the Secretary of the Partito Democratico, to muster a clear, solid, and reliable parliamentary majority in the Senate because the majority bonus had fabricated a sizable PD+SEL majority in the House of Deputies, the leaders of the Partito Democratico, of the Popolo della Libertà and of Scelta Civica felt to be obliged to elect first the President of the Republic. Napolitano had preempted any request for his re-election stressing personal (age) and institutional (not to create a precedent) reasons. A mixture of chaos and havoc within the Democratic Party quickly “burned” two official candidates (Franco Marini and Romano Prodi), none of them having, in my opinion, the “presidential” qualities required by the Constitution. What appeared to be a dramatic moment for the institutions obliged Bersani, Berlusconi and other party leaders, with the exception of Grillo, to ask Napolitano to accept to serve another term. Napolitano gave an affirmative answer on one fundamental condition. The Partito Democratico, the Popolo della Libertà and Scelta Civica had to commit themselves to the formation of a government, immediately called “delle larghe intese” (“broad agreements”), led by someone the President himself was going to choose and appoint. The government of the larghe intese was yet another instance of the “government of the President”, such as, some significant variations aside, Monti’s had been (November 2011-December 2012). The two parliamentary bases were quite similar, but the composition of the two governments was completely different. Monti’s government had been a fully non-partisan government, that is, entirely made of non-politicians, while Enrico Letta’s is an avowed partisan and political government.
The somewhat surprising element is that in the two moments of truth of the life of the new Italian Parliament, the Five Stars Movement played absolutely no role. Its 108 Deputies and 54 Senators remained completely at the margins of the political and parliamentary developments. Their lack of experience and political knowledge and the fact that their leaders, the comedian Beppe Grillo and the web guru Roberto Casaleggio, are both “extraparliamentarians” go some way to explaining the irrelevance of their activities. Their rejection of any political agreement with the other parties puts them at the margins of parliamentary politics. Widespread protest brought them to Parliament. The inability to formulate any acceptable proposals makes their presence ineffective.

In a way, the 2013 elections seem to have put an end to a twenty year period of hostile bipolar confrontation. To some extent, the so-called bipolarism was the product of the electoral rules. The electoral law called Mattarellum (1994, 1996, 2001) had encouraged the formation of two pre-electoral coalitions in order to support the candidates in single-member constituencies. The Porcellum gave a similar impetus towards the formation of two competing coalitions because the party/coalition winning more votes is granted a large bonus of parliamentary seats. There is no way of denying, however, that the most important, positive and negative, contribution to the establishment of bipolarism was made by Silvio Berlusconi. From the very beginning he shaped his political appeal and deployed his activities both in the government and in the opposition around a clear divide: “us against them”. On all possible occasions, he tried to polarize Italian politics, almost always reaping a fair amount of success. The paradox is that the return of his party into the government put an end, how temporarily it is difficult to say, to bipolarism and produced a situation similar to the one that had existed from 1947 to 1992: all oversized governmental coalitions  besieged by two oppositions (the Communists and the NeoFascists). Following  the November 2013 split of the Popolo della Libertà and Berlusconi’s withdrawal from the government, there are now two oppositions, the Five Stars and Forza Italia, both led by extraparliamentary leaders, both encircling and attacking Enrico Letta’s government.

The latest development has been engineered by the new secretary of the Partito Democratico, Matteo Renzi. Having been elected by a massive 68 per cent of almost three millions voters, Renzi has decided to “resuscitate” Berlusconi in order to draft with him a new electoral law that will give advantages to both major parties. The illusion that an electoral mechanism will solve major political problems and will restructure Italian parties and the party system seems hard to die. In the meantime, though nobody is willing to recognize the truth, the Italian political system remains fully dependent on the institutional wisdom and political acumen, and, above all, on the health and strength of an 88-year old President of the Republic. 


** this article was originally published by the PSA Blog.

Silvio Berlusconi’s revival of Forza Italia is unlikely to bring him back to power, but his career in Italian politics is far from finished**

For the past few decades, Italian politics has been marked by the presence of Silvio Berlusconi. As the IPSG convenor Daniele Albertazzi writes, Berlusconi’s revival of his old political party, Forza Italia, is his latest attempt to retain political influence within the country’s party system. He argues that while Berlusconi is unlikely to enjoy the same success that he first had with the party, with Forza Italia currently polling around 21 per cent of the vote it would be reckless to dismiss his political prospects.

On 18 November 2013, the Italian right-wing leader Silvio Berlusconi dissolved his party, Popolo della Libertà (PDL – People of Freedom), the founding of which he had announced to his supporters in Milan exactly six years earlier. He also relaunched the party he had first created in 1993: Forza Italia (FI – Go Italy). Allegedly born from the ‘fusion’ of FI with the post-fascist Alleanza Nazionale (AN – National Alliance), throughout its short existence the PDL turned out to be extremely divided, lacking purpose and a clear sense of identity.

Following the loss of roughly half of the PDL’s votes in the 2013 general election (6 million in total), and after its negative experience in government between 2008 and 2011 (characterised by the worsening of every national economic indicator), Berlusconi came to the conclusion that the PDL brand had become toxic. Moreover, the decision to bring the experiment of the PDL to an end was also dictated by Berlusconi’s desire to take full control of the party he was leading once again.

As his failure to bring down the left-right executive currently governing Italy (in retaliation for the left’s decision to press ahead with his expulsion from the Senate) had painfully shown once again, only a few days before the PDL’s disbandment, by 2013 Berlusconi was no longer the ‘owner’ of the PDL and he could no longer be sure that it would consistently pursue the line he was dictating to it. Making it crystal clear that he wished to ‘resurrect’ the FI of 1993 and recapture the ‘spirit’ of those years, in his speech in November 2013 Berlusconi repeated word for word many of the promises and claims that he had made back in 1993 when he launched his political career.

As shown in the Table below, according to recent polls, the re-established FI attracts roughly the same level of support the party enjoyed in the first election it contested in 1994, and it will most probably remain key to the centre-right’s chances to beat the left and form a government in the foreseeable future. However, unlike 1993, Berlusconi’s initiative is very unlikely to turn him into the fulcrum of Italian politics yet again.

Table: Voting intention in Italy (January 2014 / December 2013)

Note: Figures are from Agora (IXE) polls carried out on 10 January 2014 and 20 December 2013.

The main reason for this is that in the mid-nineties FI had managed to fill the huge gap that had opened up following the collapse of all governing parties in Italy, first and foremost the centrist Democrazia Cristiana (DC – Christian Democracy), due to high-profile investigations that had uncovered political corruption at the highest levels. Today, there is no such ‘opening’. The Italian political landscape remains crowded with other large parties which, on the basis of what we know at the moment, have a good chance of doing well at the polls if a general election is held in the near future.

Of these, the most important is the centre-left Partito Democratico (PD – Democratic Party) which, according to current data, carries more than 30 per cent of the vote (versus FI’s 21 per cent). It has strong coalition potential, since any centre-left electoral alliance would need to gravitate around it. As explained in James Newell and Arianna Giovannini’s recent article, the mayor of Florence Matteo Renzi recently won the PD’s leadership contest (by a large margin), having argued for years that the party ‘needed to undergo fundamental renewal based on a generational turnover among its leaders and principal spokespeople’.

Whereas in 1994 Berlusconi could brand himself as the novelty of the forthcoming election, a savvy entrepreneur ‘loaned’ to politics and ready to do for Italy what he had done for himself; today he would be leading his party into an election as the longest-serving former PM in Italian post-war history, someone who led his first cabinet when François Mitterrand and Boris Yeltsin were in power. Even turning a blind eye to Berlusconi’s age (which is twice that of Renzi), it has become impossible for the right-wing leader to convincingly argue that he is, in any sense, ‘new’.

Although he will not be the centre-right candidate for prime minister in a forthcoming election, as he has lost the right to stand for public office for several years as a consequence of his recent conviction for tax evasion, he remains the leader of the largest party of the right. Given the widespread disillusionment of the Italian electorate with the traditional political class, the fact that Berlusconi is now very much a member of it will hardly help his cause, and that of the alliance which the right-wing leader will need to build to beat the left.

The second major competitor on the right is the Movimento 5 Stelle (M5S – Five Star Movement), Western Europe’s most successful new party – one that has managed to grow from 0 to 25 per cent approval in four years thanks to its criticism of the political class, the communication skills of its leader Beppe Grillo and the movement’s ability to effectively integrate the use of new media with face-to-face campaigning. Although support for the M5S has diminished by a few percentage points since the general election of April 2013, it still matches Berlusconi’s FI. Importantly, it is now the M5S that gives voice to those voters (and there are many) who are disappointed by politicians as a whole, many of whom had previously voted for the PDL.

Not only is there no political vacuum for Berlusconi’s ‘re-founded’ FI to fill but, due to the decision by some former PDL ministers and MPs to break away from Berlusconi in recent weeks and create a splinter centre-right party (NCD), FI now leans more heavily to the right than its predecessors and, as such, it may find it more difficult to attract moderate voters (the target of Berlusconi’s efforts, according to him).

The most interesting similarity between the recreated FI and its predecessors concerns its nature as a personal party created by Berlusconi for Berlusconi – as the speed at which the PDL was shelved shows. In short, the re-established FI will certainly be yet another vehicle through which the right-wing leader will try to fulfil his political vision, pursue his interests and defend himself from the justice system. The fact that Berlusconi has already provided around €110 million worth of bank guarantees to the new party would seem to support this claim.

Speculating about the possible consequences of this ‘return’ for the political system as a whole is especially challenging because the current electoral law (passed by a Berlusconi government in 2005) was declared unconstitutional by the Constitutional Court in December 2013, making it unclear under what legislation the next election will be held. If, like the present one, the new law encourages the creation of pre-electoral alliances, then not much is likely to change because of FI’s re-establishment.

In that case, Berlusconi would be forced to try and revive a large coalition of the right as the general election approaches, and this will most probably have to include anyone who is willing to oppose the left. In the end, as a member of this right-wing coalition, FI would find itself fighting the election alongside those who have recently broken away from their leader. The real game changer may instead turn out to be Matteo Renzi’s election as the PD’s leader, if he can attract those who have turned to the M5S in recent years, or supported the right, not to mention abstainers and the undecided – the latter constituting two in five voters at present.

Like Berlusconi in 1994, Renzi has portrayed himself as the ‘enemy’ of the traditional political class, and strengthened his credibility by waging war on his own party’s nomenclatura for several years. If he can convince a sufficient number of disillusioned voters to give a ‘renewed’ PD a chance, the centre-left coalition may manage to win outright this time. That would be a turning point in Italian politics – a clear-cut victory delivering strong majorities in both Houses of Parliament to the centre-left, which has failed to achieve this since Berlusconi launched his political career in 1994.

At this stage, however, this is merely speculation. While some foreign journalists have persistently announced Berlusconi’s political demise – a sport that started spreading shortly after the collapse of his first government in 1994 and continues to prove popular to this day – more sophisticated observers of Italian politics have always been aware of his ability to give voice to an important section of the Italian electorate on crucial issues such as, for instance, taxation.

Having lost many votes, his Senate seat and the chance to hold public office for several years, it is now safe to say that Berlusconi’s star is waning. However, he is far from finished, as he has a good understanding of what centre-right voters want, he remains very much in control of the media and financial empire through which he launched his political career twenty years ago, and he seems determined to keep leading the largest political party of the Italian right in the foreseeable future.

Given the stamina and determination he has amply demonstrated during the last two decades as a political leader, and despite the many setbacks of recent months, those who write Berlusconi off now as irrelevant and announce the end of his political career do so at their own peril and are likely to be proven wrong yet again, as they have been many times in the past.

** this article was originally published by the LSE EUROPP blog.