08.09.2022

Opting for electoral suicide

Toby Abse surveys the mosaic of parliamentary centre-left and centre-right parties, factions and breakaways in the run-up to what looks likely to be a far-right landslide

The outcome of the Italian general election, which will be held on September 25, has been predictable since late July. The decision of Enrico Letta, leader of the centrist Partito Democratico, to refuse to make any electoral agreement - even of a purely technical, rather than governmental or programmatic nature - with Giuseppe Conte’s Movimento Cinque Stelle (M5S - Five Star Movement) has guaranteed a landslide victory for the rightwing coalition led by the neo-fascist Fratelli d’Italia (FdI).

The rightwing coalition - whose three major components are the FdI, led by its prime ministerial candidate, Giorgia Meloni, Matteo Salvini’s Lega and Silvio Berlusconi’s Forza Italia - has been scoring around 45% in all recent opinion polls. The PD currently has about 23% and could perhaps, with the help of its minor coalition allies get about 30%. Those allies include Sinistra Italiana (Italian Left), Europa Verde (Green Europe), More Europa, Luigi di Maio’s Impegno Civico (Civic Commitment), etc.

M5S will probably score somewhere between 10% and 13%. In other words, a broad centre-left coalition, centred around the PD and M5S, would have had some chance of stopping Meloni, particularly if it had mobilised some of those who have recently abstained, such as in the June 2022 local elections, where the turnout was particularly low. The PD’s narrow coalition, which had deliberately excluded M5S, has no chance whatsoever of stopping the Meloni landslide.

Although it is not my intention in this article to get too bogged down in the technicalities of electoral systems, I had better point out that, while the current Italian system is more proportional than the Westminster one, about one-third of the seats are awarded on a single-member-constituency, ‘first past the post’ basis. Therefore, a united coalition, whose national average is around 45%, will get most of those FPTP seats if it faces a fragmented opposition (divided at least three ways, between the PD’s coalition, M5S standing alone, and an independent centrist bloc of Carlo Calenda’s Azione and Matteo Renzi’s Italia Viva, quite apart from such minor groupings as were able to collect enough valid signatures to stand candidates by the August 21 deadline). In short, 45% of the vote for Meloni’s coalition will translate into about 60% of the seats in parliament, and possibly even give the right the two-thirds majority necessary to change the constitution without any ratification by referendum.

A further technical point is that the Italian electorate cannot split their vote in the manner of, say, London or Scottish elections - if you vote for a party’s proportional list, you automatically vote for the candidate that the party or its coalition partners are standing in your local FPTP constituency. This rule also means that a party cannot make a ‘stand down’ deal to surreptitiously help the ‘lesser evil’ in a FPTP seat in which it has no chance of winning.

Given that mainstream professional politicians normally want to win elections rather than just publicise their ideas, how can we account for the PD’s electoral suicide? The PD can hardly claim to have consistently opposed making any deals with M5S. I will leave to one side former PD leader Pier Luigi Bersani’s doomed attempt to reach an agreement in the immediate aftermath of the inconclusive 2013 general election, and instead concentrate on the last three years. The PD was quite prepared to be a junior partner in Giuseppe Conte’s M5S-led second government (September 2019 - February 2021), and to sit in the same cabinet as M5S ministers during Mario Draghi’s National Unity government (February 2021 - July 2022). Whilst the PD’s parliamentarians toppled Nicola Zingaretti, the more social democratic PD leader, who had originally advocated that the PD and M5S should be the core of a centre-left coalition, his more rightwing successor, Enrico Letta, seemed to endorse the same project - despite grumblings from some of the PD’s more rightwing ex-Renzian parliamentarians and regional councillors - until a few weeks ago.

M5S’s cardinal sin, according to Letta, was its refusal to give Draghi a confidence vote either on July 14 or July 20. In the first instance, Draghi still had a substantial majority in the Senate without M5S.¹ It needs to be underlined that the split of Luigi di Maio’s faction from M5S a couple of weeks earlier meant that in mathematical terms Draghi could have carried on for some months at the head of a broad ‘national unity’ government, including the Lega, Forza Italia, the PD, Italia Viva, to soft-left Liberi e Uguali (Free and Equal - LeU) and di Maio’s Insieme per il Futuro, provided no other party deserted him.

What actually brought Draghi down on July 20 was not the M5S abstention in itself, but Forza Italia’s decision just before the vote to endorse Salvini’s proposal to do so, rather than to instruct their allies in the Lega to calm down and keep the tottering ‘national unity’ government for the time being. Once the two rightwing parties in that government, Forza Italia and the Lega, had deserted it, M5S’s vote was a mathematical irrelevance. Given the fact that now Draghi’s fall was inevitable, Conte had nothing to gain by yielding to last-minute pleas from both the PD and LeU to do a U-turn and instruct the M5S senators to vote in favour of a doomed government, with whose rabidly neoliberal and warmongering agenda he had little sympathy.

Draghi agenda

The PD had endlessly been congratulating itself on its undying loyalty to Draghi back in July, and has repeatedly insisted that it still stands for the ‘Draghi agenda’. This meant that it prioritised a quest for an alliance with two rabidly neoliberal factions - Carlo Calenda’s Azione and Emma Bonino’s More Europa - over any attempt to gain allies to its left. It drew up a joint document with Calenda (or perhaps one should say, signed on the dotted line to a document drawn up by Calenda), committing itself to extreme neoliberalism.

Calenda comes from a very wealthy family, and was brought up in Rome’s wealthiest district, Parioli. It is not clear whether his thuggish appearance and manners represent a desperate attempt to give himself a ‘common touch’, or are just the equivalent of the British Bullingdon Bully syndrome, but he certainly seemed to intimidate a bespectacled former academic like Enrico Letta.

The PD’s agreement with Calenda lasted less than a week in early August, even though he extracted a deal under which his miniscule Azione would get 30% of the ‘first past the post’ candidates to the PD’s 70%. He took grave exception - publicly expressed in a series of childishly abusive tweets - to the PD making any sort of technical and electoral, as opposed to governmental or programmatic, agreement with the Green Left Alliance (Verde Europa and Sinistra Italiana, which are standing a joint list in the proportional section). The PD had been prepared to accept Calenda’s veto on the Green leader, Angelo Bonelli, or the Sinistra Italiana leader, Nicola Fratoianni, standing as coalition candidates in FPTP seats, but this round of tantrums about who the PD was allowed to work with was too much even for Letta, although it should be noted that it was the bully from Azione who made the public break.

Calenda’s original electoral partner, More Europa’s Emma Bonino, broke with him in response to what she regarded as his outrageous breach of contract with the PD, which means the PD is still in alliance with the equally neoliberal More Europa. Moreover, the PD has persuaded Carlo Cottarelli, the hard-line neoliberal economist notorious for his “spending review”,² to desert Calenda for a place on the PD list, so there has been no repudiation of the Draghi agenda, and the PD even seems to want to compete with the new electoral lash-up between Calenda’s Azione and Matteo Renzi’s Italia Viva as to who best represents that agenda.

Given that the PD has obstinately refused to do any deal with M5S that could have been presented as a popular front-style alliance in defence of the 1948 constitution against a fascist-led coalition which is publicly committed to both a presidential republic and “differential autonomy” (ie, the right of Italy’s wealthier northern regions, such as Lombardy and the Veneto, to withhold public resources from poorer southern regions), one has to wonder why any force to the PD’s left has been willing to throw in its lot with a narrow PD-led coalition committed to the Draghi agenda. What remains of LeU, after Sinistra Italiana left it in February 2021 in protest against its participation in the Draghi government - ie, essentially the Movimento Democratico e Progessista (MDP)/Articiolo Uno - seems to be more or less liquidating itself into the PD list, which is nominally labelled Italia Democratica e Progressita to sugar the pill.

This return to the mother party may ensure a parliamentary seat for Roberto Speranza, the LeU health minister in both the second Conte government and the Draghi ‘national unity’ government, and perhaps one or two others from Articolo Uno. PierLuigi Bersani, formerly PD leader at the time of the 2013 general election and subsequently the founding leader of the MDP/Articolo Uno, who split from the PD in disgust at Renzi’s Jobs Act, has decided to retire from politics. Although this is perfectly understandable for a man of 70 who has spent decades of his life in public office at local, regional and national level, one suspects his failure to build a viable left social democratic alternative to the increasingly neoliberal PD has something to do with it.

Positive?

Whilst the decision taken a couple of months ago by Sinistra Italiana and Europa Verde to form an electoral alliance is in principle a positive development, given their convergence on an agenda that combines social justice with ecological transition, their more recent decision to make a limited, purely electoral agreement with the PD is less welcome. Together, Europa Verde and Sinistra Italiana were in a strong position to exceed the 3% threshold for parliamentary representation without hanging onto the coat-tails of a neoliberal PD, whose more rightwing representatives made little secret of their contempt for the green agenda, provocatively extolling the need for more incinerators and regasifiers in the same way as Calenda does.

Whilst Calenda’s break with the PD had made the deal a little more palatable to both groupings in the Green Left Alliance, given the Azione leader’s tendency to bombard Sinistra Italiana’s Nicola Fratoianni and the Greens’ Angelo Bonelli with abusive tweets, it may well be that they will have difficulty in mobilising their members, let alone their potential voters. There was considerable opposition to the deal with the PD amongst the delegates to Sinistra Italiana’s National Assembly - an opposition that increased in size the second time the deal was discussed after Calenda’s agreement with the PD (but before Calenda repudiated his own deal). The shortage of time available before the legal election deadline kicked in was adduced by Fratoianni and the majority faction to oppose the membership ballot on the agreement with the PD that the minority leaders such as Luciana Castellini called for.

In relation to the PD’s unwillingness to contemplate any discussion with M5S, it is worth remarking that Calenda has pointed out that Fratoianni has voted against Draghi on confidence motions no less than 55 times, and had opposed both the increases in Italian military expenditure and Italy’s arming of Zelensky’s regime, in order to show the obvious contradiction between the PD’s willingness to do a deal with Sinistra Italiana and their total repudiation of any negotiations with M5S, who had only abstained on two confidence motions and, despite Conte’s publicly expressed unhappiness with Draghi’s militarism, had never actually taken a stand against Draghi in votes on military expenditure and arming Ukraine.

Letta’s attempt to address his own contradictions appeared to suggest that, while Fratoianni’s pacifism was clearly anti-Putin - the Sinistra Italiana leader had condemned Russia’s invasion - Conte’s was not. This is, of course, quite outrageous: if any substantial element within M5S had any links with Putin, it was the close associates of Luigi di Maio like Manlio Di Stefano, not Giuseppe Conte and his immediate circle. And di Maio’s Impegno Civico is fighting the election as part of the PD’s narrow coalition.³ 

1. M5S abstained rather than actually voting against a decree that very provocatively included a clause about an incinerator in Rome that MS were known to oppose. This was totally unrelated to the main body of the decree, which concerned increased government assistance to families facing much higher gas bills and so forth.↩︎

2. This choice of an English phrase was designed to demonstrate its Thatcherite rigour.↩︎

3. The stance of individual and rather idiosyncratic former M5S parliamentarians like Emmanuele Dessi, who has joined Marco Rizzo’s hard Stalinist Partito Comunista, and the now expelled Vito Petroselli, nicknamed ‘Comrade Petrov’, who joined M5S after a long spell in the Stalinist-Maoist CARC, is irrelevant to the more substantial issue around Di Maio, Conte and alleged high-level M5S links with Putin or the United Russia Party.↩︎