04.06.2015
Who will fill the vacuum?
There is no viable radical left alternative, writes Toby Abse
Whilst prime minister Matteo Renzi’s centre-left Partito Democratica (PD) has won in five out of the seven regions contested on Sunday May 31, the outcome of the regional elections represents a serious setback for the arrogant young premier.
The unprecedented PD score of 40% in the European elections last year had raised the bar and made what in other circumstances might have seemed a reasonably satisfactory result, in which the PD averaged 25% across all the regions and remained the first party, seem completely inadequate. Only a PD win in six regions would have represented a clear victory, since it is universally acknowledged that the seventh, Veneto, is a stronghold of the right in general and the Lega Nord in particular - nobody would have expected the PD and its allies to win it even in the most favourable of circumstances.
The capture of Campania (the region of which Naples is the capital) from the centre-right in no way compensated for the loss of Liguria (the region around Genoa) to a Forza Italia candidate, Giovanni Toti. The collapse in the PD’s vote in this largely industrial working class region was fairly dramatic. The PD candidate for regional president obtained 27.8% (and the PD party list got 25.6%), whilst five years earlier the PD’s Claudio Burlando had won with 52.1%. What made this defeat even more bitter for Renzi and his followers was the fact that a former PD member, Luca Pastorino, gained 9.4%. Pastorino is closely linked to Pippo Civati, the third-placed contender in the 2013 primary contest for the PD leadership, who himself resigned from the PD in early May, challenging the party from the left.
And now the PD is blaming Pastorino and his supporters for the victory of Giovanni Toti, who scored 34.4% - if one assumes that all Pastorino’s vote share would have gone to PD’s Paita the outcome would have been reversed. As Paita put it in the immediate aftermath of her humiliation, “The cynical design of Cofferati, Civati, Pastore has been completely realised. They used our land as a shop window for their personal battles, for the attack on the PD and a government that enjoys wide consensus in the country.”1
Paita’s rival in the PD’s primary for the Ligurian presidency had been Sergio Cofferati, a longstanding member of the PD and its antecedents, going back to the days of the Partito Comunista Italiano. Cofferati is a former secretary of the CGIL trade union confederation, as well as a former mayor of Bologna, and had left the party shortly after his defeat by Renzi’s favoured candidate, after raising what seem very well founded claims that the Ligurian primary’s outcome had been decided by a substantial number of rightwingers with no previous connection with the PD registering to vote for Paita.
One of the two lists supporting Pastorino, the Rete a Sinistra (with 4.1%), had existed in Liguria prior to Cofferati, Civati and Pastorino leaving the PD, so it seems more than probable that some other more leftwing candidate would have stood against Paita in any event, although it must be acknowledged that the recent defections from the PD probably doubled the core vote of the radical left, whether or not they were actually the decisive factor in Toti’s victory over the PD. It remains to be seen whether this good score in Liguria will encourage others on the PD’s left wing to break with Renzi’s increasingly dogmatic neoliberalism, creating a viable national electoral alternative of a left social democratic type, as Nichi Vendola, the leader of Sinistra Ecologia e Libertà, currently hopes, or whether it will just intensify the internal disputes within the PD and push figures like former party leader Pierluigi Bersani into challenging Renzi’s leadership of the party with rather greater vigour and consistency than they have so far displayed.
Forza Italia
Toti’s presidential victory in Liguria has saved Silvio Berlusconi and his Forza Italia from humiliation, even if the party list in that region only got 12.7%, compared with the regionalist Lega Nord’s very impressive 20.3%. The overall result in the seven regions placed Forza Italia fourth behind not only Beppe Grillo’s Movimento Cinque Stelle (Five Star Movement - M5S), with its 15.5%, but also the Lega Nord, which recorded 12.9%. Forza Italia’s 11.2% was heavily dependent on its vote in the southern region of Campania (17.8%) and the northern region of Liguria (12.7%); it scored less than 10% in Tuscany, Umbria and the Marche and only obtained 6% in the Veneto. Calculations by the Istituto Cattaneo show that in arithmetical terms it lost 67% of its 2013 general election vote and 46.9% of its 2014 European election vote in the seven regions.
Whilst low turnout by Italian standards meant that abstention hit almost all the parties, it is hard to interpret the overall pattern as anything other than a gradual and probably irreversible decline. Berlusconi is well aware that his best days are behind him and a month or two ago he was probably contemplating abandoning active politics, even if in the end he threw himself into a fairly frantic round of rallies and television appearances in the last couple of weeks of campaigning. As his 79th birthday approaches in September, he shows increasing signs of age - having a fairly spectacular fall from a platform at one rally and going to the wrong eve-of-poll meeting in Arcore, the town close to his palatial Lombard residence, and endorsing the PD’s mayoral candidate by mistake.
It is worth noting that there was a split in Forza Italia in the course of the election campaign with Raffaele Fitto, Berlusconi’s leading critic at the national level within Forza Italia over the last year or so, backing a different candidate from Berlusconi in the contest for Puglian regional president. The total vote for the dissident candidate, Francesco Schittulli (18.3%) was higher than that for Adriana Poli Bortone, the candidate backed by Forza Italia (14.4%), even if Forza Italia’s party list got 10.8% more than Fitto’s own list, Oltre con Fitto, with 9.3%. Needless to say, this split on the right meant that the PD’s presidential candidate, Michele Emiliano, had an easy victory with 47.1% of the total.
Fitto and some of his parliamentary followers have left Forza Italia and aligned themselves in the European parliament with David Cameron’s Conservatives. There may be further defections from Forza Italia’s parliamentary groups in both the Chamber of Deputies and the Senate, but the Ligurian victory might dissuade some vacillating opportunists, waiting for the regional results before making up their minds to leave what they had thought was a sinking ship.
The situation within Forza Italia is complicated by a degree of rapprochement between two sets of dissidents: those led by Fitto who had opposed the Patto del Nazareno (Renzi’s deal with Berlusconi that came to an end with the PD’s success in electing Sergio Mattarella to the Italian presidency); and those led by Denis Verdini, who fell out with Berlusconi precisely because he has abandoned the Patto and returned to a more oppositional stance.2 Regardless of these self-proclaimed differences over political tactics and strategy, both Fitto and Verdini felt marginalised by Berlusconi’s increasing willingness in his months of relative political seclusion during the period of the community service order (which limited his movements) to listen to the ‘magic circle’ around his companion, Francesca Pasquale, and her friend, Mariarosaria Rossi, who regard Giovanni Toti with more favour.
The right
Although the regional elections have left M5S as the second force in Italian politics, it ought to be emphasised that just as M5S’s score in the European elections of 2014 was lower than its 2013 general election vote share, so this year’s regional total represents a further decline in both percentage and arithmetical terms. The Istituto Cattaneo calculations for M5S in the seven regions demonstrate that it has lost 59.8% of its general election vote and 40.4% of its European election total. Grillo and his supporters emphasise the fact that it has little previous experience of regional elections and that its presidential candidates came second in two of the seven regions (the Marche and Puglia), as well as the fact that its intransigent refusal to enter into electoral coalitions with other parties places it at a disadvantage in this type of contest, where most high-scoring presidential candidates are supported by more than one party or list.
Whether or not some of these explanations should be dismissed as special pleading, it is clear that M5S is now an established part of the Italian political scene and shows no sign of fading away, as some commentators familiar with the rapid rise and fall of Uomo Qualunque in Italy in the late 1940s or Poujadism in France in the late 1950s thought it might. The decline of Berlusconi and the lack of any credible successor to him on the mainstream centre-right means that it can continue to harvest some of the votes that used to go to Forza Italia and other such parties, whilst its presence as an anti-establishment protest party with, despite the elderly Grillo, a relatively youthful image in terms of its parliamentary groups, places severe limits on the vote that the radical left in its present disarray can gain in competition with the PD, even if the Ligurian result indicates that a cohesive force to the left of the PD might do rather better.3
The one party that has clearly gained from the regional elections, even if it has only re-elected one regional president - Luca Zaia in the Veneto with 50.1% - on this occasion, is the racist Europhobic right of Matteo Salvini’s Lega Nord. Rather like the UK Independence Party in Britain, it has been able to capitalise on the two issues of Europe and immigration, although in the Italian case the two are not so directly linked, since the immigrants against which it stirs up hatred are for the most part those coming from outside the European Union, even if Salvini’s call for tractors to raze gypsy camps to the ground is sometimes aimed at migrants from Romania.
Salvini went out of his way to show a complete lack of sympathy towards the tens of thousands of desperate refugees trying to cross the Mediterranean in the last month or two. Whilst the Italian government on occasions shows an eagerness to send a much larger number of migrants to other EU countries and complains about the burden the refugee crisis places on Italy, there is a reluctance to emulate Salvini’s racist rhetoric, at least at the national level - some PD mayors in the Veneto seem to have endorsed the views of the Lega.
The Lega has now taken an explicitly anti-European stance, calling for a return to the lira and blaming all Italy’s economic problems on the European Union - an easy target, given Angela Merkel’s rigid insistence on deflationary austerity policies that worsen unemployment in all the southern European countries. Under Salvini the Lega has sought and obtained an alliance with Marine Le Pen’s Front National at the European level and has formed alliances with various neo-fascist groups at home: apart from a joint demonstration with the notoriously violent, hard-line fascists of Casa Pound in Rome that I referred to in an earlier article,4 there has been a willingness to ally with the Fratelli d’Italia-Alleanza Nazionale, a rather more moderate electorally orientated set of neo-fascists who used to be inside Berlusconi’s Popolo della Libertà, but would not stomach the reversion to the Forza Italia label. In Tuscany the joint candidate of the Lega and Fratelli d’Italia actually came second in the contest for the regional presidency with 20%.
The Lega is the only serious force that has gained ground in the seven regions, both in terms of percentage and votes gained. The calculations of the Istituto Cattaneo show it obtained 50% more votes than in the European elections of 2014 and 109.4% more than in the general election of 2013.
Although the Italian economic statistics over the last two quarters are slightly more positive than for most of the period since the world crisis of 2007-08, by and large the working class and the petty bourgeois layers attracted by the Lega have not gained from this and the simplistic, false solutions offered by the Lega will continue to have a wide resonance, as long as the PD pursues an extreme neoliberal course5 and the radical left fails to regroup into a credible, united force at the national level.
Notes
2. Verdini is currently facing a variety of criminal charges arising from the collapse of his bank in rather mysterious circumstances and, whilst his parliamentary seat offers him some protection from any rapid trial, this was immensely enhanced by his role as a mediator between Renzi and Berlusconi - a role he assumed because as a very prominent Florentine he was already well acquainted with Renzi, Florence’s former mayor. Renzi doubtless has some sympathy for Verdini’s plight, since Renzi’s own father was tried for alleged fraudulent bankruptcy in connection with a business he had owned and subsequently acquitted of all wrongdoing. It must be emphasised that Verdini denies all wrongdoing both in relation to the bank’s collapse and the allegations of involvement with a group generally known as P3, since it supposedly replicated some of the practices of the notorious Masonic lodge, P2.
3. The radical left did not stand under one clear nationwide label. The hard-line Trotskyist groups did even worse than the more amorphous cartels with names like L’Altra Puglia or Altre Marche-Sinistra Unita - names which made some rather coded reference to L’Altra Europa con Tsipras in last year’s European elections and obtained results in the 1%-4% range. Aurelio Fabiani, the candidate of Marco Ferrrando’s Partito Comunista dei Lavoratori for the Umbrian presidency, got 0.5% and Michele Rizzi, the Partito d’Alternativa Comunista candidate for the Puglian presidency, got 0.3%.
4. ‘Lega Nord and neo-fascism’ Weekly Worker March 5 2015.
5. Whilst Renzi has repeatedly pleaded with Merkel for a less deflationary economic policy at the European level, showing some awareness of Italy’s real problems, at home he prefers to indulge in union-bashing, as not only the Jobs Act, but also the more recent conflict over the school system, demonstrates.