Originally published as an op-ed in Greek newspaper Kathimerini, 30 August 2022.
History often plays strange games. Take Italy, for example. Exactly one hundred years after Mussolini’s March on Rome, the so-called Brothers of Italy – a new party with roots in postwar fascism – look set to be the winner of the Italian elections to be held on September 25. In that case, the Brothers will almost certainly form a government with the right-wing parties of Matteo Salvini and Silvio Berlusconi. Italy will not suddenly turn fascist, of course. It will however continue to both flounder about in conditions of political instability and fret about its dire economic prospects.
The great malaise in Italy began in 1993. That year, its post-war party and political system collapsed within a rotten political climate. In the decades that followed, Italy experimented with four political models – populism, direct democracy, nativism, and technocracy – but none of them proved capable of pulling this country out of its political and economic quagmire.
The first experiment was populism. In January 1994, the business tycoon Berlusconi founded the Forza Italia party with which he won that year’s elections and his first premiership. Three more premierships followed, during which Italy had the misfortune of witnessing not only the scandalous life of its leader, but also the rapid decline of its institutions and the—somewhat slower—loss of international prestige. Berlusconi’s political career seemed to end in 2012, when he received a prison sentence for tax evasion, but he proved indestructible. Not only did he survive politically, but continued to this day to play an important political role.
The second experiment began in 2009, with the appearance of comedian Beppe Grillo on the political scene. He founded one of the most bizarre parties in Europe, the Five Star Movement, which, without having any clear ideological identification with either the left or the right, set itself the goal of establishing a kind of direct democracy through collective decisions taken online. In the 2013 national elections, one in four Italians voted for Grillo’s party and brought it into second place. In the 2018 elections, the Five Star Party came first with 31% of the vote. According to recent polls, the party’s electoral share could drop to single-digit numbers in the upcoming elections.
A third experiment was attempted by the Northern League, a party that originally developed in wealthy northern Italy. After 2013, Salvini, who had just taken over the leadership of the then small party, decided to turn it towards Euroscepticism and against immigration while cultivating particularly friendly relations with Putin. Soon, the League gained popularity in the south as well, and as a result, it rocketed to third place in the 2018 elections (and first place in the 2019 European elections). Thereafter, the nativist League was invited to join a coalition government, but it was not to survive for long as in the summer of 2019 the opportunistic Salvini withdrew his support and the government collapsed.
A fourth experiment, though this one not exclusively Italian-inspired, was the four technocratic governments Italy has had in recent decades. The first was the government of Carlo Angelo Ciampi, former governor of the Bank of Italy, who took office in 1993 amidst a financial crisis and corruption scandals. It was followed in 1995 by the government of Lamberto Dini, an economist and former IMF executive director. In 2011, again amid a crisis, former European Commissioner Mario Monti was asked to implement austerity measures. And in 2021, Mario Draghi, former president of the European Central Bank, tried to rescue Italy from the crisis that the parties had led it into.
In the upcoming elections, Italy seems poised to attempt a fifth in this series of political experiments. This time testing ultraconservative nationalism. The president of the Brothers of Italy, sister Giorgia Meloni, is a right-wing and deeply conservative politician – especially on family and social values – an enemy of immigration and the bearer of a new Italian nationalism. She has, however, condemned the Russian invasion and promises to send additional weapons and equipment to Ukraine if she comes to power. Although a supporter of the European Union (if only for the resources of the Recovery Fund secured for Italy by the Draghi government), she supports the idea of a ‘new’ Europe that is a loose confederation of nations rather than a single supranational entity.
Contemporary Italy is the ultimate political laboratory to which we can look to understand what happens when the model of post-war liberal democracy is caught in deadlocks. The rich Italian experience is valuable for the whole of Europe. But it is even more valuable for us here in Greece.
