From Chaos to Opportunity: How COVID-19 Has Given Italian Politics a New Lease on Life
Palazzo Montecitorio, home of the Italian Parliament’s House of Deputies. Photo courtesy of Vlad Lesnov.
66. The number of governments that have held power in Italy since 1945. That averages to little more than one year per government. If one of democracy’s crucial outcomes is promoting political stability, these are alarming numbers. Yet in Italy, short-lived governments have become commonplace. A political system filled with an abundance of weak parties that fosters coalition politics has fuelled a culture of instability which endangers the country’s democratic spirit. While highly problematic, this is not a hopeless situation. In fact, the COVID-19 pandemic has provided an opportunity to address Italy’s political woes.
A Fraught History
When Italy held its first referendum as a postwar nation on June 2, 1946, it asked its people a simple question: monarchy or republic? Italians, exhausted by over two decades of authoritarianism, chose the latter option. In doing so, they laid the foundations for a future defined by complex and often frustrating party politics.
The aftermath of the referendum saw two parties, the Christian Democratic Party (Democrazia Cristiana - DC) and the Italian Communist Party (Partito Comunista Italiano - PCI), emerge as leading forces in Italian politics. In a reflection of global geopolitics, the country’s historic devotion to Christianity faced off against the newest threat to western democracy. To Italians, this was an unsurprising development. They were beginning to experience this ideological conflict on a daily basis, both at home and in the workplace. In a reflection of the conflict’s preponderance, electoral statistics reveal a Christian Democrat and Italian Communist political hegemony during the decades which followed Italy’s first referendum. From the early 1950s to the late 1970s, the two parties earned over 70% of the votes cast by Italians. Such limited pluralism—a bipolar political system in which few parties hold power—and the political stability it provided bore great economic fruits. In what economists have come to define as the “Italian economic miracle,” Italy experienced an annual GDP growth rate of between five and six percent every year between 1951 and 1973.
Then, in the late 1980s, the USSR’s collapse triggered a series of radical changes in the Italian political landscape. With communism virtually dead, the Italian Communist Party broke down, giving birth to the Italian Socialist Party (Partito Socialista Italiano - PSI). The Christian Democrats, having always campaigned as the alternative to radical communism, similarly lost support. The weakness of the DC institution and the newborn PSI allowed other parties, namely the Italian Socialist Democratic Party (Partito Socialista Democratico Italiano - PSDI), the Italian Republican Party (Partito della Repubblica Italiana - PRI), and the Italian Liberal Party (Partito Liberale Italiano - PLI), to gain a foothold in Italian politics. The PSI and the DC were thus faced with either a nonexistent or a reduced voter base. In light of such a dire prospect, they coalesced with these three new parties to secure their hold on power. And so the “Pentapartito,” a five-party coalition that lies at the heart of Italy’s modern-day political troubles, was born.
Endangering Democracy
The Pentapartito transformed the Italian political system, bringing about a shift from limited pluralism to a form of coalition-based bipolarism which stands to this day. A series of government-wide fraud scandals during the early 1990s known as “Tangentopoli” reinforced this shift. The Tangentopoli scandals left the Pentapartito in tatters, causing the death of the Christian Democratic and Italian Socialist parties. Eager to win over a disillusioned Italian public hungry for change, a myriad of new parties soon vied to fill this void. Italy was thus left with dozens of weak, newborn parties. In a political system in which a party must gain control of both the House of Deputies and Senate to establish its dominance, these frail parties could do little but follow the example of the Pentapartito and form coalitions.
The significance of such change cannot be understated. All Italian governments since 1993 have been coalitions between the left and the right. Often frail due to natural differences in ideology, these bipolar unions have doomed Italian governments over the past 30 years to short terms. Such rapid turnover has fostered a political environment which sees parties come and go. As a result of such an environment, Italy, unlike the United States or United Kingdom, possesses no parties with a rich political history and thus a reliable voter base. Italy’s latest government demonstrates this condition most clearly. Of the five parties which united to form the Draghi coalition in 2021, the oldest was the Democratic Party (Partito Democratico - PD)—a party founded in 2007—and the youngest was the two-year-old Italy Alive (Italia Viva - IV). The lack of political experience amongst these parties completes an unbreakable cycle of party weakness, and thus further contributes to the formation of fragile coalitions.
Most concerning is the threat coalition politics poses to Italian democracy. In a system where single parties are incapable of obtaining the dual majority necessary to size governmental control, elections lose their enfranchising potential. Italians, aware that their preferred party has virtually no chance of winning alone, must confront the prospect of voting to empower politicians whose views they don’t agree with. Put differently, Italian coalitions do not accurately represent the people’s interests. Other countries, such as the Netherlands, function as full-fledged democracies while having coalition governments because their coalitions are not imbued with factional bias. The power vacuum which followed the “Tangentopoli” scandals incentivised the formation of numerous parties with different, nuanced objectives. Given the opportunity to refill Italy’s political ranks, parties were desperate to secure some semblance of support, regardless of how specific it was. Yet the emergence of many parties each tailored to a particular policy area has resulted in a country in which an elected politician represents the interest of not the many, but the few. This disincentivizes many Italians from voting. The last general elections, held in 2018, recorded the lowest voter turnout in Italy since the formation of the Italian Republic in 1946. Even amongst those who did vote, many claimed they headed to the polls with little conviction. Amongst millennials, one in two voters reported voting for the “least worst” party. Furthermore, coalitions and the existence of many parties add complexity to politics. For many Italians, the absence of readily-available voter cues normally found in a two-party system makes identifying what a party stands for and how it differs from others rather difficult. Such difficulty has driven many voters away from an intimidating political system they struggle to understand. It is then not difficult to see why The Economist defined Italy as a “flawed democracy” in its 2019 Democracy Index.
An Opportunity
Italy’s situation is without a doubt precarious. Political engagement will continue to decline if politicians do not take measures, and the country risks losing part or all of its democratic credibility. But how can Italy identify such measures? Its most recent government may provide an answer to this paramount question.
The Draghi government—formed by Mario Draghi in 2021—can be defined best as a national unity government set in place to tackle the COVID-19 pandemic. In typical Italian fashion, it builds upon a coalition of six different parties. Unusually, it is largely technocratic in nature. Such a novel form of government has forced politicians to put an end to their bickering and focus their energy on resolving issues related to COVID-19. Surprisingly, these conditions have produced positive results. Italy has one of Europe’s highest vaccination rates and has done well in distributing relief payments to its citizens, two factors which earned it The Economist's “2021 Country of the Year” title. Additionally, there has been little talk of a new government since the formation of Draghi’s.
Yet such administrative success only reaffirms the need for change. A political system which proves effective and stable in times of struggle but not on a daily basis is problematic. Crisis compels unison, but only for the duration of the crisis itself. Italy’s reliance upon coalitions and the saturation of its political system with many feeble parties function during crises only. In other words, COVID-19 indirectly proves that the Italian political system is ill-suited for everyday governance in its current state.
The stability of the Draghi government provides a unique opportunity to address this issue. More unified than many of its predecessors, it must accept the inefficiency of Italy’s political ways and exploit its cohesion to pursue reform. If politicians choose to employ history’s lessons, such measures should seek, at least in part, to re-establish the limited pluralism which defined post-war Italy. Such change can be achieved in two ways. On the one hand, parties could fuse to form leading organizations on the left and the right. While this would restrict the number of active parties, it is likely an infeasible solution because of its unstructured and abstract nature. The prospect of party leaders willingly renouncing their positions of power to go work with or, even worse, under their opponents seems outlandish at best. It is also difficult to define how the fusion of parties would unfold.
On the other hand, Italy could turn to a winner-takes-all electoral system. Majoritarian institutions would provide a political form of natural selection which would eventually leave two parties at the helm of Italian politics. The prospect of losing political access and eventually disintegrating would force parties to unite under a more classic pair of opposing factions. In doing so, it would provide guidelines and incentives for the abstract concept of fusing many small parties into two larger ones. Such an outcome would also strengthen the parties themselves. In pooling their resources and electoral bases, smaller political organizations could achieve the sort of wide-ranging influence—both economic and political—they have historically sorely lacked.
Crucially, majoritarianism would return some of the democratic spirit Italy has lost in recent times. In the absence of coalitions, Italians would no longer need to worry about electing politicians who do not align with their values. This would give them far greater influence in the process of forming their country’s leadership. Additionally, the continuous, stable existence of two large parties would provide voters a crucial set of voter cues. Italians would be able to evaluate politicians more easily by comparing them to their party’s official views. While this phenomenon applies to all parties, in Italy these partisan views would become more widely renowned because of the permanence and exclusivity of parties operating under a two-party system. Such public pervasiveness would in turn broaden their scope, providing more people with the tools necessary to analyze candidates and thus make an informed decision before voting. The notion of the informed voter is nothing if not an emblem of democracy.
Only time will tell if Italy’s politicians possess the foresight and self-awareness necessary to identify the opportunity COVID-19 has provided them and implement radical changes to the Italian political system. However, it is certain that the window for reform is closing. If something doesn’t change soon, more and more Italians will be asking themselves what has become of their country.
Giulio Maria Bianco is a staff writer at CPR. He is a freshman studying History and Political Science at Columbia College. During his free time, he can be found reading books on WWII or cooking pasta.