09.06.2016
M5S on course to take Rome
Toby Abse reports on last weekend’s local elections
The June 5 first round of local elections in a number of Italy’s major cities - principally Rome, Milan, Turin, Bologna and Naples - have greatly weakened the authority of Partito Democratico (PD) premier Matteo Renzi, even if the October referendum on his constitutional reforms will be the decisive factor in terms of his continuing hold over both the PD and the country as a whole.
On June 6, as the full impact of the election results sunk in, the usually manically optimistic Renzi admitted to journalists: “We are not happy. We have some problems.” He also had to acknowledge: “The alliance with Verdini [leader of the rightwing Alleanza Liberalpopolare-Autonomi] is not working. We have definitively consigned it to the archives.”1 Significantly, the editorial of La Repubblica - very much a paper of the centre-left rather than the radical left - damned Renzi’s stridently neo-Blairite project in its headline: “In search of the lost PD - the party needs a soul, not one man in command.”
The Movimento Cinque Stelle (Five Star Movement - M5S) is now clearly on course to take control of Rome after the second round on June 19. Beppe Grillo’s failure to appear at the final M5S rally on June 3 in Rome’s central Piazza del Popolo, except via a video link, seems to have made no difference and, contrary to some commentators’ forecasts, the failure to fill more than about half the square did not indicate a real drop in support for M5S at the ballot box or any lack of interest in the mayoral contest - the turnout in Rome was 56.49% on this occasion, compared with 52.8% in the 2013 municipal elections and 51.93% at the 2014 European election. In fact M5S gained a higher percentage in Rome last Sunday than in any previous election.2
M5S mayoral candidate Virginia Raggi’s 35.2% put her very far ahead of the second-placed Roberto Giachetti of the PD, with his 24.9%.3 Whilst Giacchetti has managed to make it into the second-round run-off, pushing Giorgia Meloni4 of the neo-fascist Fratelli d’Italia (FdI) into third place, with 20.6%, he has almost no chance of avoiding a humiliating defeat at Raggi’s hands in the final contest. Even in the somewhat unlikely event that he wins all the votes of the radical left candidate, Stefano Fassina of Sinistra Italiana (4.4%)5, and the majority of the votes of the moderate centre-right candidate, Alfio Marchini (10.9%)6, it is a certainty that any of Meloni’s supporters who participate in the second round will cast their votes for Raggi, not for a representative of the PD - a party which Rome’s numerous and unrepentant neo-fascists still perceive as ‘communist’.
Nor did the results in the other major Italian cities provide much comfort to Renzi and the PD. In Turin - traditionally Italy’s most industrial city and the site of Fiat’s largest factory - the sitting PD mayor, Piero Fassino, only got 41.8%, whilst Chiara Appendino of the M5S came second with 30.9%, so there is a possibility of M5S taking the city once renowned for its trade union militancy in the second round, if the bulk of the votes for the rightwing candidates transfer to M5S - Alberto Morano, the candidate of the Lega Nord, supported by the FdI, came third with 8.4%, ahead of his more moderate Forza Italia rival, Osvaldo Napoli, with his 5.3%7. The fifth -placed candidate, Roberto Rosso, is a former Forza Italia parliamentarian, so the 5.1% of his Lista Civica (Civic List) would also represent a largely rightwing electorate.
Giorgio Airaudo, a leftwing candidate well known for his leading role in the engineering union, FIOM, gained 3.7%. Nowadays this is arguably a respectable vote for this sort of candidate elsewhere in Italy, but a rather disappointing score for one standing in the most industrial of Italy’s major cities - one dominated by the car industry, in which his union is particularly militant, despite Fiat’s attempts to marginalise it.
Even in Bologna - whose municipal administration was for decades the jewel in the crown of the old Partito Comunista Italiano - the sitting PD mayor, Virginio Merola, failed to be re-elected in the first round, only securing 39.5%: more than 10% below the threshold for avoiding a run-off ballot. Whilst his rightwing challenger from the Lega Nord, Lucia Borgonzini, is less likely to unify all those who voted for lists other than the PD behind her candidacy on the second round in the way an M5S challenger might have done, the PD cannot afford to be too complacent here.
M5S’s ultra-loyalist candidate, Massimo Bugani, is undoubtedly extremely disappointed to have come in third with 16.6% and is trying to blame his M5S internal opponents elsewhere in the region of Emilia Romagna, such as the dissident mayor of Parma, for his failure to make a breakthrough. However, it is worth noting that Manes Bernardini, leading a nominally independent Lista Civica, who got 10.4%, is a former Lega Nord member, even if he claimed the Lega had become too extreme in the last couple of years and allied himself with centrist groupings such as the Nuovo Centrodestra (NCD - New Centre Right) in the mayoral contest. In short, many of his voters could well line up behind Borgonzini against the PD in the second round. Whilst Federico Martelloni’s Coalizione Civica is clearly to the left of the PD, gaining support from young radicals in the centri sociali, it is not at all clear that his 7% would transfer to Merola in the second round, despite his activists’ detestation of the Lega.
Milan has in recent decades experienced a long period of rightwing administration, so it is less surprising that the outcome of the first round here leaves its fate on a knife edge. Although the PD’s Giuseppe Sala gained first place with 41.7%, the Forza Italia candidate, Stefano Parisi - in this instance backed by the Lega and the FdI - was not far behind with 40.8%. It has to be pointed out that some of Sala’s vote was due to the fact that the soft-left Sinistra Ecologia e Libertà (Left Ecology and Freedom - SEL) had allowed itself to be trapped inside a wider centre-left coalition of a type that Renzi had rejected in Rome, Turin and Naples. Not all the radical left could copy SEL in stomaching Sala, and so Basilio Rizzo, who has a long record of left activism in the city, gained 3.56% in opposition to the PD candidate. Although M5S has never put down substantial roots in Milan, its candidate, Gianluca Corrado, who finished in third place with 10.1%, took enough votes to be able to swing the balance either way in the second-round run-off. Marco Cappato of the Radicali Italiani scored 1.85%; he had started off as a councillor for the centre-left coalition in 2011 before falling out with Pisapia in a quite acrimonious way, so it is difficult to judge whether his voters will rally to Sala or not.
Even Renzi has had to recognise that the PD’s result in Naples was an absolute disaster - “There is no longer a PD there; I must go there with napalm”.8 Whilst Renzi’s deadly enemy, the outgoing maverick leftwing mayor, Luigi De Magistris, was not re-elected in the first ballot, he scored a very respectable 42.6% against the PD candidate, Valeria Valente’s 21.2%. This placed her behind the centre-right candidate, Gianni Lettieri of Forza Italia, who, on the strength of his 24.1%, will be De Magistris’s only challenger in the run-off ballot. The PD’s rout occurred despite a last-minute reconciliation between Valente and Antonio Bassolino, a previous centre-left mayor of Naples, whom she had defeated in this year’s primary by what appeared to be underhand means in five of the Neapolitan polling districts,9 and despite the support of some very shady characters linked to Denis Verdini’s Alleanza Liberalpopolare-Autonomie (a grouping created in 2015 and largely made up of defectors from Forza Italia), who were widely believed to have close connections with the Neapolitan Camorra. Whether the Neapolitan PD will make an overt or covert deal with Forza Italia to topple De Magistris in the second round is uncertain, but, given Renzi’s fondness for back-stabbing and scheming, one cannot rule it out.
It is worth emphasising that the only mayor of a relatively substantial urban centre, the main Sardinian city of Cagliari, who was re-elected on the first round was Massimo Zedda, an SEL member, who was at the head of a very broad centre-left coalition of a type that Renzi - eager to purge the hard left - no longer finds attractive. Zedda got 50.9% of the vote on the basis of his record and in many ways his success reminds us of another era. I am referring to May-June 2011, when Silvio Berlusconi was defeated - first in the local elections and then in a number of referendums - by a wave of relatively spontaneous, largely youthful, leftism, beyond the control of the PD, even if often marked by the flaws of left populism.10
Sadly, De Magistris aside, most of the anger of the young and of the poor at the manifest failure of Renzi’s economic policies is now being channelled into the rightwing populism of M5S or by the more conventional and resurgent far right of the Lega Nord and the FdI.11 Whilst the results achieved by Fassina in Rome, Rizzo in Milan, Airaudo in Turin or Martelloni in Bologna are not as insignificant as Renzi - in his bid to keep the PD on a Blairite path - claims, they are hardly signs of a coordinated nationwide radical left revival. Most of these candidates are not even as leftwing as Rifondazione Comunista was at its peak.
Notes
1. Quotations taken from La Repubblica June 7 2016.
2. In the previous Roman municipal election in 2013, M5S gained only 12.82% and even in the general election of that year, its highest previous total, it managed a less staggering 27.27%.
3. Raggi was ahead of Giacchetti in 13 of Rome’s 15 boroughs.
4. For more detail about Giorgia Meloni and her mayoral campaign, see ‘Divisions continue to multiply’ Weekly Worker June 2 2016.
5. Fassina, a recent defector from the PD, who was personally insulted by Renzi’s infamous, provocatively offensive Fassina chi? remark (‘Fassina who?’, implying he did not know who the interviewer was talking about), is not likely to urge his supporters to vote for a PD candidate who, far from coming from an ex-communist background, holds dual membership of the PD and the Partito Radicale and who, whilst he might distance himself from the prime minister for opportunist reasons, is clearly on the right of the PD. By the way, I am informed by David Broder, who has been in Rome during the election campaign, that a well-known anti-fascist blog called Militant has urged committed left voters to back M5S against the PD. This is despite the fact that Matteo Salvini, the leader of the Lega Nord, has said: “In Rome I would vote for Raggi and in Turin I would vote for Appendino” (ie, the M5S candidates - Corriere della Sera June 8). This is cast-iron proof of the links between the far-right Lega and M5S.
6. Marchini himself would undoubtedly regard Raggi as a menace to Rome’s economic elite, of which he is an integral part, and, as I explained in my article last week, he is the heir to a dynasty of builders which originally had some links with the Roman federation of the Partito Comunista Italiano (‘Divisions continue to multiply’ Weekly Worker June 2).
7. Given the way not only Parma but even Livorno fell to M5S in the past, when a strange combination of forces ganged up with M5S against the PD in the second-round run-off, a similar outcome in this ‘red’ city cannot be ruled out. For more on Livorno and Parma, see my earlier articles ‘M5S takes ex-communist stronghold’ Weekly Worker June 12 2014; and ‘Scandal hits M5S’ Weekly Worker May 19 2016.
8. La Repubblica June 7 2016.
9. Bassolino made various unsuccessful attempts to challenge the result after video footage appeared to indicate Valente’s supporters were bribing voters.
10. See my article, ‘Silvio Berlusconi trounced again’ (Weekly Worker June 17 2011). It is perhaps more obvious in retrospect that this was the Italian variant of a general southern European and Middle Eastern phenomenon that also included the Spanish Indignados and the Arab Spring, and had as by-products the somewhat less impressive American Occupy and the British student militancy of 2010-11.
11. There is already some preliminary commentary on the sociology of the election results, pointing out that the PD vote is now coming from the more prosperous parts of the major cities, not the old working class Giorgi strongholds of the Partito Comunista Italiano, whilst the votes for M5S - and in some cases, where M5S is weaker, the more conventional right and far right - come from the poorer suburbs. The parallels with Britain and France should be obvious: when formerly social democratic parties abandon any attempt, however partial and distorted, to represent the working class and the poor, their traditional constituencies turn elsewhere.