15.12.2016
A vote on Renzi, not Europe
Toby Abse looks at the possibilities following the referendum defeat and subsequent resignation of the prime minister
The scale of Matteo Renzi’s defeat in the December 4 constitutional referendum far exceeded anybody’s expectations, although I was by no means alone in predicting a ‘no’ vote. The overwhelming landslide in favour of rejection - 59.1% to 40.9% - was nothing like the narrow victory for one side or the other that most observers expected. Even if Renzi himself had probably accepted - in the closing fortnight of the campaign - that his chances of success were slim, he had not envisaged such a total humiliation.
The 68.5% turnout for those voting in Italy itself far exceeded that of previous constitutional referenda - 34.05% in 2001, and 53.8% in 2006 - demonstrating a much higher level of popular involvement than might have been expected over a question that seemed to have much less immediate resonance than divorce, abortion or nuclear power - to cite the most contentious issues on which Italian referenda have been held in the past. Conversely, whilst Renzi did indeed win the overseas vote by 64.7% to 35.3%, the turnout amongst Italians abroad was only 30.7%, and, far from tipping the balance - as Renzi had hoped (and many ‘no’ campaigners had feared) in the last weeks of the campaign, during which there had been much talk of legal action if the overseas voters overturned an Italian majority - was ultimately of no real significance in the overall result.
Only three regions (out of 20) voted ‘yes’, of which two - Tuscany and Emilia-Romagna - are the most solid of the four traditionally ‘red’ regions, where the Partito Democratico (PD) can still draw on the legacy of the Partito Comunista Italiano (PCI); Umbria and the Marche voted ‘no’, even if more narrowly than other regions with no such PCI tradition. The only three major cities to give a ‘yes’ majority were Bologna, Florence and Italy’s commercial metropolis, Milan. However, the overall (52.2%) ‘yes’ vote in ‘Red Bologna’ conceals a reality in which the poorer polling districts voted ‘no’. Similarly, in Milan the overall ‘yes’ vote (51.1%) was a product of a 64.8% ‘yes’ majority in the bourgeois central districts. All the major regions of the mainland south recorded an above-average ‘no’ vote. This would suggest that the south voted against Renzi out of resentment at the continuing prevalence of mass unemployment, as well as badly paid, precarious and illegal employment.1
According to a survey quoted in La Repubblica (December 6) for occupational categories, 66% of manual workers and 72% of the unemployed voted ‘no’ - hardly surprising in view of Renzi’s massive attack on workers’ rights in his Jobs Act and his failure to make any sustained inroads into unemployment during his three years in office, despite his promotion of insecure, poorly paid employment as a universal panacea in the name of ‘labour market flexibility’. It is clear that the highest ‘no’ vote was amongst voters under 35 (the highest ‘yes’ was amongst those over 65) - the 41-year-old Renzi, who relentlessly stresses his own youth by comparison with Italy’s traditional elite, is obviously no hero in the eyes of the younger generations, who have suffered most from unemployment, low wages and zero-hours contracts.
Europhobes
It is necessary to stress that, contrary to the screaming front-page headline of the Daily Mail on December 5 and various incendiary statements by Nigel Farage, Marine Le Pen, Geert Wilders and others of a similar disposition, it was not primarily a referendum on the euro or the European Union, but one on the Italian constitution - a document drawn up almost a decade prior to Italy’s entry into the European Economic Community in 1957. In practice it was, of course, also a referendum on the personality and record of Matteo Renzi - particularly his aggressively neoliberal approach to Italy’s social and economic problems. And, true to his word, Renzi promptly announced his resignation when the result was declared - although he remains PD leader and hopes to make his comeback after the likely early general election, probably in June 2017.
His successor, Paolo Gentiloni, was immediately faced with a banking crisis, but this had nothing to do with Italy’s EU membership. European issues were only on the periphery of the discussion, which was overwhelmingly domestic. This is not to deny that there were Europhobic, rightwing-populist demagogues alongside the trade unionists, the left both inside and outside the PD, eminent constitutional experts and former partisans (and orthodox neoliberal former premiers, such as Mario Monti and Lamberto Dini) on the ‘no’ side - such very diverse agglomerations are inevitably produced by the stark, binary nature of referenda - but the immediate outcome is not comparable to the Brexit triumph on June 23. Keeping the existing constitution does not weaken Italy’s ties with the European Union!
The 1948 constitution, drawn up in the light of the Mussolini experience, presents a serious barrier to any rapid move towards authoritarian rule by a single individual.2 So blocking what appeared to be a relatively mild Bonapartist project in Renzi’s Blairite hands also means blocking the path towards a potential dictatorship by more sinister figures, such as Matteo Salvini of theLega Nord, Giorgia Meloni of the neo-fascist Fratelli d’Italia or Beppe Grillo of the Movimento 5 Stelle(M5S - Five Star Movement). The fact that Salvini, Meloni and Grillo opposed Renzi’s plan (for their own opportunist, short-term reasons) is extremely ironic, given the record of the Italian right during the cold war years, when the neo-fascist Movimento Sociale Italiano consistently advocated a presidential republic, and the murderous plotters of Licio Gelli’s P2 Masonic Lodge devised the ‘Plan for National Rebirth’, which would have swept aside the 1948 constitution.
Furthermore, although the new premier is a man in Renzi’s own image, the defeat slightly increases the chances of internal opponents turning the PD away from the extreme Blairism of the last three years, and back towards something with at least some resemblance to traditional social democracy. The balance of forces within the PD direzione (roughly the equivalent of Labour’s national executive) still favours the right, but Roberto Speranza, a leading spokesman for Pierluigi Bersani’s traditionalist faction, has advocated a government that “should have a political connotation which, while it seeks agreement on an electoral law, puts on the agenda changes in the Jobs Act and the school reform”3 - an open call for a partial reversal of Renzi’s two most neoliberal measures.
Renzi’s own response to the referendum result was, rather predictably, both narcissistic and totally irresponsible. He initially announced his immediate resignation in the early hours of December 5. Sergio Mattarella, the president of the republic, spent several hours persuading his obstinate and self-centred premier that it was his duty to remain in office for a few days until the budget had been finally approved by the Senate (as occurred on December 7). Given the extent to which Renzi and his influential friends on the staff of the Financial Times had, in the last week of the campaign, deliberately spooked the markets about the alleged consequences of a ‘no’ vote for the Italian economy in general, and Italian banks in particular, he should not have needed to be told by Mattarella that creating a crisis that blocked the budget could have unleashed mayhem on Europe’s stock exchanges.
Italy’s Kinnock
However, foreign observers who believed that Renzi intended to emulate David Cameron and retire from public life had completely misunderstood the situation. Arguably, a better British parallel would be with Neil Kinnock after his first general election defeat in 1987. Renzi not only wanted to remain leader of the PD, but also had no real inclination to allow anybody else from the PD to become a caretaker prime minister for the period leading up to the general election - a reasonable time span, in which to reach some wide agreement amongst a broad spectrum of parliamentary forces on a new electoral law for both chambers that avoided the massive contradiction between a majoritarian lower house and a proportional upper house (a contradiction which Renzi’s failure to abolish the democratically elected Senate had created).
Whilst the calls for an immediate general election by the Lega’s Matteo Salvini and M5S’s Beppe Grillo clearly made sense in terms of their own parties’ best interests, Renzi’s eagerness to join in the chorus did not. His belief that the 41% ‘yes’ vote in the referendum meant that the PD would gain the same support in a general election (the very percentage it had gained in the 2014 European election) and thus defeat both M5S and the divided centre-right was utterly delusional.
Obviously, surveys that try to correlate voters’ political preferences in the 2014 European elections and their binary choice in the referendum, such as the one carried by Corriera della Sera on December 7, have their flaws, but they do give a plausible general picture. According to that survey, 80.6% of 2014 PD supporters had voted ‘yes’ in December 2016, but so had 48.7% of 2014 voters for the centrist Nuovo Centro Destra and the Unione di Centro, not to mention 23.8% of Forza Italia voters, 10.9% of Lega voters and 9.9% of M5S voters. It is not only Renzi’s long-standing adversaries in the PD - Bersani and Massimo d’Alema - who have mocked his equation between ‘yes’ and PD voters: a leading opinion pollster believes that only 25% from that 41% are firm PD supporters.
The remarkably patient Matarella was once again forced to knock a bit of sense into Renzi’s thick skull, pointing out that an immediate general election was “inconceivable”, and that no election could be contemplated until the electoral systems of the Chamber and the Senate had been rendered homogeneous - which should have been blindingly obvious, since as things stand they could easily produce two completely different majorities and make the country ungovernable. As Renzi ought to have remembered, Mattarella has a certain degree of expertise in such matters: the Mattarellum, the electoral law used for general elections in 1994, 1996 and 2001, was primarily his creation.
On December 6, the Consulta (constitutional court) announced that its long-awaited decision on whether the Italicum (Renzi’s electoral law for the Lower House) was constitutional in its present form would be taken on January 24. This news put an end to Renzi’s crazed desire for a February election, which probably would have produced a second-round majority in the lower house for the followers of Beppe Grillo rather than a first-round victory for a PD that won more than 40% of the vote - a scenario only plausible in Renzi’s solipsistic imagination. Needless to say, Renzi himself was behind talk of a conspiracy against him by Mattarella, who was a member of the Consulta immediately prior to his election as president. Renzi was probably equally responsible for a leak to the Corriera della Sera claiming that there was a piece of paper on his desk at the Palazzo Chighi, on which was written “March 19 or 26; at the latest April 2” - demonstrating his eagerness for an early election.
As I have pointed out, M5S and the Lega Nord - the political parties most vocal in supporting the ‘no’ campaign - called for an immediate election as soon as they heard the referendum results. The Lega seems indifferent about which voting system is applied - presumably it merely hopes for a markedly increased vote share, overtaking Forza Italia. As for Salvini, despite intermittent press speculation about a name change that drops ‘Nord’ from the party’s title, it seems highly unlikely that the Lega will win the substantial number of votes in the discontented south, which would be needed for any serious challenge for national power.
The opportunism and hierarchical nature of M5S was once again displayed in the wake of Grillo’s instant instructions on December 5 to drop any opposition to the Italicum, which M5S parliamentarians had vehemently opposed using their habitually crude language, when Renzi pushed it through parliament using repeated votes of confidence. M5S have not only suddenly started to favour the previously detested Italicum in its present form for the Chamber, but have actually suggested that a regionally modified form of it would be the best solution for the Senate as well. Unlike Renzi, Grillo has grasped the mathematical lessons of the June 2016 municipal elections - as long as the traditional centre-right is divided, M5S can pick up the vast majority of rightist voters in any second-round contest with the PD.
Notes
1. The internationally famous Neapolitan author and campaigner against organised crime, Roberto Saviani, made this case in Ha perso la politica che ignora il Sud in La Repubblica December 6 2016.
2. As I have already pointed out in a previous article (‘Are Renzi’s days numbered? Weekly Worker December 1 2016).
3. La Repubblica December 7 2016.