23.04.2008
Where now for working class representation?
Toby Abse analyses the situation in Italy following the wipe out of communists in the general election
The result of the Italian general election of April 13-14 marks a watershed in western European politics. For the first time since the foundation of the Communist Party of Italy in 1921 a free election has taken place in which not a single communist has been elected to parliament. Moreover, there is not a single deputy from any party calling itself socialist, or social democratic either. In short, what has occurred is the total Americanisation of a European political system and the disappearance of working class political representation at the national level.
Silvio Berlusconi’s victory was predictable, but its scale was not. Provided that the 71- year-old’s health remains reasonably good - and many cynics believe that a recent episode of heart trouble was deliberately exaggerated to avoid an embarrassing court appearance - his clear parliamentary majority should guarantee him five years as prime minister and a good chance of obtaining a seven-year term as president of the republic at the end of his premiership, still on 39.1%, more or less the same as it scored in a poll compiled on February 18-20. The final result for the chamber of deputies gave Berlusconi’s coalition 46.8% and the bloc led by his principal rival, Democratic Party leader Walter Veltroni, 37.5% - a crushing defeat in any two-party contest.
The dire economic situation (with inflation at a 12-year high, the IMF forecasting 0.3% growth for 2008 and real wages falling) and the dispiriting balance sheet of Romano Prodi’s 2006-08 centre-left Unione government (which slowed down rather than reversed Berlusconi’s attack on pensions, did little or nothing to help agency workers and withdrew troops from Iraq but not Afghanistan) diminished the likelihood that disillusioned supporters of the centre-left would be galvanised into voting by Veltroni’s incessant incantations of Barack Obama’s somewhat vacuous slogan, ‘Yes, we can!’ (sometimes translated into Italian on election posters as Si puo fare and sometimes delivered at rallies in the original English) in the closing days of the campaign. Overall abstention increased by 4% compared with the 2006 general election (with turnout dropping from 66.5% to 62.5%) and it is extremely likely that there was differential abstention - in other words that some Berlusconi supporters who had abstained in 2006 when their hero’s government had ended in economic disaster now returned to the fold, whilst rather larger numbers of those who had backed Prodi and the Unione in 2006 abstained this year.
Given Berlusconi’s lack of achievements during both his first, brief, premiership in 1994 and during his second premiership in 2001-06, at first sight it seems hard to believe that this ageing demagogue - who desperately tries to hold the years at bay with hair transplants, face lifts and perpetual suntan - has been given a third opportunity to lead the nation. In 1993-94 in the wake of the collapse of the traditional party system of the cold war years, Berlusconi could present himself as a dynamic entrepreneur ‘taking the field’ of politics - to use his own footballing metaphor - for the very first time and offering something radically new with Forza Italia, a political party created out of his business empire.
In 2001 he was still in a position to claim that his enemies had previously not given him a chance to prove himself and that with more time a million new jobs and massive public works projects, like the much discussed bridge over the Straits of Messina between Sicily and the Southern mainland, would materialise. However, after 15 years the initial novelty had long since worn off and all he could offer during the election campaign was an increasingly stale combination of anti-communist rhetoric (largely directed against the ex-communist, Veltroni, not the communist, Bertinotti) and self-evidently fraudulent promises of economic miracles - in the current case the instantaneous resurrection of the ailing Al Italia by a mysterious consortium of patriotic businessmen allegedly very willing to offer far better terms than the Air France-KLM bidders whose extremely fraught negotiations with the present owners and the numerous trade unions representing airline and airport staff was the gloomy backdrop to much of the election campaign, symbolising national decline.
Whilst it would be foolish to discount the role of television altogether - Berlusconi’s continuing inbuilt advantage in controlling three of the six main channels, and exerting some influence on RAI1 and RAI2, where he carried out extensive purges of state television during his previous term of office, cannot be ignored, it seems reasonable to ascribe some of the geriatric tycoon’s strength to his opponents’ weakness. The good result obtained by Berlusconi’s allies in the Lega Nord (8.3% for the chamber of deputies, 8.1% for the senate) reinforces the likelihood that television was not as crucial as on some previous occasions in recent years - unlike Forza Italia and now the Popolo della Liberta, the Lega relies on public meetings and street-level campaigning.
It is worth emphasising that Berlusconi came out ahead despite quarrelling with the most centrist component of his old coalition, the Casa delle Liberta (House of Freedoms): namely Casini’s UdC (Unione di Centro, or Union of the Centre), which stood independently, obtaining 5.6% in the lower house (36 deputies) and three senators. The UdC’s close links with such key members of the church hierarchy as cardinal Ruini meant Berlusconi did not get such unequivocal clerical support as on some previous occasions. And it ought to be added that, despite his close friendship with Tony Blair, he has a poor reputation internationally amongst many representatives of the capitalist class - it is no accident that The Economist came out clearly for Veltroni and subsequently lamented the return of the man it had some years ago labelled as “unfit to govern Italy” and that neither the Financial Times nor the Wall Street Journal have a high opinion of Italy’s richest man.
End of Unione
After Prodi’s fall in February, it would always have been difficult to prevent Berlusconi’s return to high office, but it was the actions of Veltroni and the Democratic Party which made it impossible by wilfully destroying the broad, popular front-style alliance against Berlusconi - the Unione - that had existed in 2006.
Whilst many on the far left have argued that the parties of what the mainstream Italian press calls the ‘radical left’ (Rifondazione Comunista, the more traditionalist pro-Cuban Partito dei Comunisti Italiani, the Greens and, more recently, the left social democratic Sinistra Democratica - which despite its own previous evolution from PCI to PDS to DS, refused to take the final step in the long liquidationist journey that started in 1989-91 and enter the Democratic Party) ought to have brought down Prodi over Italy’s continuing presence in Afghanistan (as Tariq Ali argued in Il Manifesto over a year ago) or over a variety of domestic issues, they did not do so. The Prodi government was brought down not by Bertinotti, Giordano, Diliberto, Mussi or Pecorario Scanio, but by Mastella and Dini, politicians on the right of Prodi’s coalition who had been part of Berlusconi’s original 1994 government.
Accordingly, some sort of electoral bloc on the lines of the Unione in 2006, or the Ulivo in 1996 was theoretically possible. Whilst the formation of the Democratic Party, fusing the majority of the DS with the christian democratic Margherita (Daisy) in the course of 2007, and the belated and only partly completed formation of the Sinistra l’Arcobaleno (Rainbow Left) may have implied a permanent formalisation of the division between ‘centre-left’ and ‘radical left’, it was Veltroni who, in the immediate aftermath of Prodi’s fall, took a decision to make an immediate break with the ‘radical left’.
The Sinistra l’Arcobaleno, consisting of Rifondazione, the PdCI, Greens and the SD, remained a purely electoral cartel - and one that seems to be falling apart after the electoral defeat - not an organic fusion on the lines of the German Linke. Bertinotti, the principal architect of the European Left Party, saw Die Linke as a model, but the Greens insisted on the ‘Rainbow’ name and the dropping of the hammer and sickle emblem associated with the two communist parties.
Nevertheless, Veltroni’s decision to split the Unione inevitably pushed the ‘radical left’ further leftwards, and by the beginning of April Bertinotti was willing to admit that the PRC’s participation in the government had been a mistake.1 While Sinistra Critica’s candidate for prime minister, Flavia D’Angeli, responded, “Too late!”2 and the disastrous election result for the Rainbow Left indicated she was echoing widely-held sentiments amongst workers who had previously voted for Rifondazione, a more measured assessment from the point of view of organised labour and the social movements would have been ‘Better late than never’, since any revival of what has become an ‘extra-parliamentary left’ is now dependent on the combination of unity and intransigent refusal of ministerial office in the future.
However, the sentiments expressed by the leader of the least leftwing current in the Sinistra l’Arcobaleno - Fabio Mussi of the SD - give a clear indication of the initial reluctance with which the Sinistra l’Arcobaleno greeted the break with the centre-left: “With my friends of the Sinistra l’Arcobaleno, I insisted a lot on the day after the government crisis that we have a meeting with Veltroni to see what the margins for manoeuvre were. We made the move, but on the other side we encountered a brick wall.
The leader of the PD let it be believed that in the end there had been a consensual separation. But when did that ever happen? The choice was theirs. To the devil with the left!3" Whilst Veltroni’s turn of phrase was presumably somewhat more polite than Galloway’s at the infamous Tower Hamlets meeting that marked the culmination of the Respect split, the implications were just as dramatic - this was a declaration of all-out war against the ‘radical left’ by the leader of the Democratic Party.
The Democratic Party has tried to present its actions as a principled shift away from Italy’s confused coalitionist politics towards Anglo-American politics, in which the electorate is allegedly offered a straightforward choice between two parties, with clearly designated prime ministerial or presidential candidates. But Veltroni’s willingness to do a deal with Antonio Di Pietro’s Lista Di Pietro/Italia dei Valori (which obtained 4.4% of Veltroni’s 37.5% score for the chamber of deputies), as well as to engage in rather more murky negotiations with the Radicals - who, despite refusing to dissolve themselves into the Democratic Party before its formation, and showing no signs of doing so now, were nonetheless assigned some places on its lists - showed that his self-proclaimed principled opposition to coalitionism was a paper-thin mask for an unremitting hostility to the ‘radical left’.
Indeed, it may not be too cynical to presume that Veltroni’s primary objective in the recent election was not to defeat Berlusconi, whom he treated with excessive courtesy, but to permanently marginalise the Sinistra Arcobaleno, by excluding these opponents of war and privatisation from the senate (where every region has an 8% minimum threshold) and if possible from the chamber of deputies (where there is a nationwide 4% threshold). Given that opinion polls were still giving the Sinistra Arcobaleno 6% in late March, it is probable that even Veltroni would have been surprised that it only managed 3.1% on April 12-13 and were therefore excluded from the lower as well as the upper house. But it was an outcome he had dreamed of for so many years.
Veltroni may presume that in subsequent elections the ‘radical left’ electorate will be compelled to vote for the Democratic Party in the absence of a viable left alternative and thus make him prime minister five years hence. In any future discussion of electoral reform he will undoubtedly favour shifts towards a system reminiscent of Britain, France or Spain that by some mechanism or other totally or virtually excludes the ‘Radical Left’ from parliament. He will collude with Berlusconi against any adoption of a German system that would allow the return of a revived ‘radical left’ if it crossed a 5% threshold.
During the election campaign Dario Franceschini, the former Christian Democrat deputy leader of the Democratic Party, equated Fausto Bertinotti with Ralph Nader and stated that a vote for the Sinistra Arcobaleno would have the same effect on the Italian Democrats’ chances of beating Berlusconi as Nader’s votes were alleged to have had on the American Democrats’ chances of beating Bush in 20004. In actual fact this was a gross oversimplification in mathematical terms on Franceschini’s part, at least as far as the senate is concerned, and the fact that many natural Sinistra Arcobaleno voters followed the Democrats’ advice to cast a ‘useful vote’ (voto utile) may well have increased Berlusconi’s majority in the upper house.
There was a chance that, just as in 2006, the result in the senate could have been a draw rather than an outright victory for either of the two main blocs because of the bizarre electoral system which Berlusconi created a few weeks before the end of his previous term of office - when he rightly assumed that he was going to lose the election and sought to sabotage his opponents’ chances of forming a stable government; this ridiculous system gives majority premiums to the winning coalition in each individual region, which, unlike the nationwide majority premium in the chamber of deputies, generally cancel each other out because of Italy’s extremely regionalised political traditions and turn the overall result in the senate into a lottery. In practical terms the impact of this system for the senate actually meant that in some regions at least a vote for the Sinistra Arcobaleno could have deprived the Popolo della Liberta of seats, and some less ideological regional PD leaders - in Emilia-Romagna, for example - gave public advice to their followers on tactical voting (PD for the chamber, Sinistra Arcobaleno for the senate).
Arch-liquidationist
The politics of the Democratic Party represent the most blatant and overt attempt to deprive the working class of political representation seen so far in a western European parliamentary democracy, going beyond even New Labour in terms of conscious Americanisation - a truly astonishing development in a country which once had the strongest mass Communist Party in western Europe. Veltroni - who years ago wrote a crass hagiography of Robert Kennedy, has long been obsessed with Hollywood films and adopted the Village People’s ‘YMCA’ as his campaign song (with a new chorus of ‘I am PD’, in English!5) - is arguably the purest example of the former Eurocommunist career bureaucrat to reach high office in Italy.
Veltroni became a full-time official of the FGCI (Young Communist League) in his teens in the 1970s, never went to university, never worked in any role outside the PCI/PDS/DS, never showed any signs of ‘leftism’ and certainly did not come from a working class background - his father had a well paid job in state television. It would be very hard to argue that he has ever sold out, since there is no clear evidence that he ever was a ‘communist’, even what some might term an ‘official communist’, in the first place - youthful hero-worship of the charismatic Enrico Berlinguer was probably the sum total of his ideological commitment.
He has shown a rigour in his liquidationist approach to the DS in 2007-08 that Achille Occhetto never equalled in dissolving the PCI in 1989-91. For Veltroni it was not just a question of repudiating the communist label, but of repudiating any linkage with the European workers’ movement, whether communist, socialist or social democratic, and modelling himself on the Kennedys and Barack Obama; admittedly, about a decade ago he seemed absolutely delighted to be described by Italian journalists as ‘Baby Blair’ but one cannot imagine that he sees anything to imitate in the far less telegenic Gordon Brown.
Given Veltroni’s adoption of the American model, in which the votes of Irish American and Italian American catholics have always been crucial in New York and Chicago, it is perhaps not so surprising that his Italian Democratic Party includes many religious bigots whose hard-line catholicism is equal to that of George Galloway at his worst. Many of those who played a key role in wrecking the Prodi government’s moves towards civil partnerships are prominent in the PD, as are many opponents of abortion, stem cell research and in-vitro fertilisation. The PD’s Roman mayoral candidate has been the object of particular criticism from Rome’s gay community.
Whilst it would be unfair to suggest that all the PD leadership are equally reactionary on such questions - the party was undoubtedly embarrassed by the statements of a retired general standing on its list, who suggested that gays should be excluded from the army and special military brothels be set up for Italian troops serving abroad - the PD is unlikely to take up any official stance in favour of women’s rights, gay rights or secularism. This is in marked contrast to both the Sinistra Arcobaleno and Sinistra Critica, who heavily emphasised such questions in their electoral propaganda. Indeed, the PD was quick to condemn the disruption by feminists and far lefts of the election meetings of Giuliano Ferrara’s anti-abortion list in cities such as Bologna.
The PD’s refusal to identify itself with the working class seems to be mirrored in a lack of enthusiasm for the PD amongst manual workers, according to recent opinion polls.6 Whilst some rather fragmentary data exists in post-election surveys, I will rely on the more exhaustive material available for March 2008, subject to the proviso that it may underestimate the rightward shift on election day itself.
In March Veltroni’s coalition was strongest amongst white-collar public sector employees (51.2% in favour), pensioners (45.7%) and students (43.7%). Amongst manual workers its support was only 31.6%, whilst Berlusconi’s coalition had 46.5% amongst this group. Although in March the Sinistra Arcobaleno had a higher score amongst manual workers than amongst any other social group (11.9%), the bulk of working class disaffection with the results of the Prodi government already seemed likely to express itself in terms of votes for Berlusconi’s PdL or Bossi’s Lega Nord or in abstention rather than through a vote for the Sinistra Arcobaleno or groups further to the left such as Sinistra Critica or Marco Ferrando’s Partito Comunista dei Lavoratori; the real outcome on April 12-13 showed a deepening of this trend.
Nonetheless, the PD’s assertion that class is becoming less important is not substantiated by surveys of popular opinion. Between May 2006 and March 2008 the number of those identifying themselves as working class rose from 40.2% to 46.1%, whilst those identifying themselves as middle class dropped from 53.7% to 48.8% While the subjectively defined ‘middle class’ is still larger than the ‘working class’, it has to be remembered that the dominant ideology means workers are more likely to define themselves as ‘middle class’ than objectively middle class groups to define themselves as ‘working class’, so it is the trend, not the absolute figures, that is significant.
The poll found that 60.3% of the self-defined working class see the future as uncertain and 62.8% of this group see their own economic situation as having declined over the last five years. Moreover 51.8% of this group saw the need for an increase in salaries and pensions as the main problem facing Italy. This is hardly surprising, given that in the last year bread has gone up in price by 13.2%, pasta by 17% and milk by 10.5%,7 whilst the cost of oil has gone up by 20.2% and petrol by 13.2%.8 The contrast between the drop in working class living standards and increasing class consciousness on the one hand and Veltroni’s rhetoric about the death of class politics on the other is glaringly obvious.
In a recent interview Veltroni asked, “How is Italian society composed - divided into bosses and workers? Or is it not made up of millions of people, for the most part ex-workers, who have become entrepreneurs who now work together with their current employees? And he who knows reality, not ideology, knows that the relationship between givers of work and workers in small enterprises is a relationship amongst brothers, an absolute communality of destinies, even in material conditions, often even in their income.” Is it surprising that so few workers vote PD if the party leader talks such nonsense that ignores the greater intensity of exploitation of both immigrant worker and family members that all too often characterises these small enterprises?
Whilst the participation of the ‘radical left’ in the Prodi government clearly weakened its base in society - a national score of 3.1% for the chamber of deputies, compared with the 10% obtained by three of the four parties making up the Sinistra Arcobaleno in the 2006 general election, was catastrophic - the Sinistra Arcobaleno fought the campaign on a clearly leftwing programme that could also be described as ecological, feminist and secularist. What some might called ‘transitional demands’ for index-linked wages and pensions that clearly refer back to the scala mobile of the 1970s were also raised by the Sinistra Arcobaleno’s electoral propaganda. During the election campaign Rifondazione’s Liberazione published articles, interviews and letters critical of the PRC’s role in the Prodi government and, towards its end, Bertinotti admitted his mistake in joining that government. In such circumstances a vote for the Sinistra Arcobaleno seemed the best option for the left and, given the fluid and pluralist nature of this rather undefined project, there seemed no a priori reason for any left current to reject working inside it.
Left splinters
This brings me to the question which I have so far avoided addressing directly: the position taken by those such as Sinistra Critica and the Partito Comunista dei Lavoratori, which had left Rifondazione. They had done so either in response to the formation of the Sinistra Arcobaleno in the case of Sinistra Critica (which had remained inside the party despite Turigliatto’s expulsion after his senate vote against the Italian military presence in Afghanistan in February 2007) or in response to Rifondazione’s acceptance in ministerial office in 2006 in the case of Ferrando’s group.
Both these currents stood candidates against the Sinistra Arcobaleno and thus in the election to the chamber of deputies must bear some of the moral responsibility for the consequent lack of working class representation - the Trotskyist votes would have been enough to push the Sinistra Arcobaleno over the 4% threshold for the lower house.
Subsequent opinion poll surveys published in the mainstream press reveal that Sinistra Critica took votes from Rifondazione , whilst Ferrando’s more dogmatic brand of Trotskyism appealed to a section of the PdCI’s electorate. In my view these groups have taken up an ultra-left position, have gained minuscule votes - Sinistra Critica got 0.5% for the chamber and 0.4% for the senate, whilst the Partito Comunista dei Lavoratori got 0.6% for the chamber and 0.5% for the senate - and will have less opportunity to influence people than they had inside Rifondazione and probably would have had inside Sinistra Arcobaleno in the future if they had not played a role in wrecking the project before it really got started. Their position was further weakened by the fact that they stood against each other, which meant that any disillusioned Rifondazione or PdCI voter unversed in the minute details of Trotskyist feuds would have been even more disorientated and tempted by abstention.
In addition a further Trotskyist group called the Partito d’Alternativa Comunista seemed to be standing - their relatively young female prime ministerial candidate had about 30 seconds of RAI I’s election coverage - but its candidates’ score has not surfaced in any table of results published by mainstream dailies such as La Repubblica and Corriere della Sera; I presume this group, which split from Ferrando’s current in 2006 and left Rifondazione immediately after the 2006 general election victory was announced, did rather worse than the other two.
The endorsement of Sinistra Critica by first Ken Loach and then Noam Chomsky was picked up by the bourgeois press, but I doubt if it shifted many votes in the factories or on council estates. The groups would doubtless claim that participating in the election gave them visibility on television. However, whilst Flavia D’Angeli’s two 30-second appearances on RAI news programmes demonstrated her admirable capacity for a rapid, comprehensive and fluent summary of the group’s positions (it seemed to me a lot more productive than Ferrando’s equally short intervention, which was almost entirely devoted to barbed but coded comments about Bertinotti and the PRC), I did wonder how many uncommitted Italian voters would have paid equal attention - in most households the programme is just left on in the background whilst people eat their evening meal.
The two more successful Trotskyist groups spent €20,000 each on their campaigns, compared with the Sinistra Arcobaleno’s €8 million. At the end of the day it may well have been the use of the traditional hammer and sickle on the ballot paper rather than minimal television coverage or foreign celebrity endorsements that won them some votes.
Where next?
The period since the election has been marked by feuding between the components of the rapidly disintegrating Sinistra Arcobaleno. Bertinotti has resigned as leader of the coalition and, for the time being at least, ceased to play any public political role. The majority of the PdCI seem to blame the abandonment of an overtly communist identity for the defeat and seem anxious to repudiate a project identified with Bertinotti and the PRC. But even here there are internal divisions, since representatives of a pro-unity PdCI current attended a Florentine gathering associated with the idea of the continuation of the Sinistra Arcobaleno - probably under another name, organised by a group led by Paul Ginsborg on Saturday April 19.
The Greens are being courted by environmentalists within the PD and the more centrist elements within the party may well been inclined to break their link with the two communist parties. Some people within Sinistra Democratica seem to be looking towards the residual Partito Socialista, which scored about 1% and also failed to gain parliamentary representation - although the common ideological reference point in traditional European social democracy is counter-balanced by the PS’s Craxian heritage, which provokes visceral disgust amongst some erstwhile Berlinguerians.
Within the PRC itself there has been a rapid change of leadership. The Bertinottian, Franco Giordano, hurriedly imposed on the party in 2006 when Bertinotti took the speakership of the chamber of deputies, has resigned, faced with a national political committee in which he no longer had a majority. The opposition to Giordano has been led by Ferrero, the PRC’s welfare minister in the Prodi government. Whilst Ferrero has talked left, repudiating the compromise involved in the Sinistra Arcobaleno in favour of a renewed stress on the PRC’s identity as a communist party, this hard line is not altogether convincing - particularly if it is true, as Giordano claimed at the April 19 political committee meeting, that when withdrawal from the government was discussed in the aftermath of the October 2007 demonstration over welfare and pensions, Ferrero was the principal advocate of continuing ministerialism.
A 12-member collective leadership will steer the party until an emergency congress in mid-July; whilst Giordano has clearly lost out, Ferrero looks likely to be challenged by Nichi Vendola, representing the Bertinottian position in favour of some sort of broader left formation, when the congress elects a new party leader. Ferrero’s supporters are a potentially unstable amalgam of Grassi’s pro-Cuban traditionalists, some former Demoproletari such as Giovanni Russo Spena, some ex-Bertinottiani and the Grantite Trotskyists of Falce e Martello (Hammer and Sickle).
It is far too early to predict the future of Italian communism; the only obvious point to be made is that further fragmentation between and within the parties to the left of the Democrats will lead to a total loss of credibility amongst the working class, and reduce the chances of regaining any kind of independent political representation for that class in the future.
Notes
1. Il Manifesto April 6.
2. La Repubblica April 7.
3. Ibid.
4. La Repubblica April 6.
5. Given the homophobic attitudes of some of his chosen candidates, this was clearly not consciously aimed at winning the gay vote - the place of the original song in Anglo-American popular culture seems unknown to him.
6. La Repubblica March 21.
7. Liberazione April 1.
8. Il Manifesto April 1.