10.06.2009

Disaster for radical left

Toby Abse reports on the Italian Euro elections and some extremely dubious alliances

European election results in Italy were not such a triumph for Berlusconi as has been widely supposed in the UK. Whilst the Italian right has clearly won these elections, it was Umberto Bossi’s rabidly anti-immigrant Lega Nord, rather than Berlusconi’s Popolo della Libertà (PdL), that made most headway. The man who seems, if the photographs that appeared in the Spanish press are authentic, to conduct himself in his Sardinian villa in a style reminiscent of Roman emperors like Nero and Caligula, has not been enthroned as Italy’s new caesar.

The PdL’s 35.3% is far less than the 45-50% Berlusconi dreamt of at the beginning of the electoral campaign - when, in a tasteless publicity stunt, he moved the site of the forthcoming G8 to the earthquake-stricken city of L’Aquila - or even the 40% he hoped for in recent weeks. The Noemi Letitzia scandal has clearly impacted on voting patterns, even if the alleged sexual relationship between the 72-year-old tycoon - whose face-lifts and hair-transplants render him an ever more grotesque spectacle - and an 18 year old aspirant model had less impact in Italy than a similar scandal would have had in Britain or the USA.

Lega Nord’s 10.2% is more than double the 5% it scored in the 2004 European elections, and represents an advance over last year’s general election. Projects based on a two-party system - PdL and Partito Democratico (PD) - and a presidential republic, which would have consolidated Berlusconi’s informal video Bonapartism into a new, more permanent constitutional arrangement. Now this seems to have been ruled out by his continuing and ever-increasing dependence on his awkward and unreliable ally, Bossi. Although the Lega failed to overtake the PdL in Lombardy, or even in the Veneto, its 19.4% in the North-Western and 19.0% in the North-Eastern constituency make the PdL reliant on the Lega as a coalition ally right across the north of Italy for any local, provincial, regional or national election. The memory of 1996, when the Lega’s independent intervention handed a general election to Prodi and the left, which forced the media magnate into opposition for five years, continues to haunt Berlusconi.

The election result represents another blow for the vacuous and Americanising PD, which only obtained 26.1% nationally, compared with the 31.1% the electoral cartel Uniti nell’Ulivo, which gave birth to the PD, obtained in 2004. It is also worth underlining that it represents a decline from the PD’s rather unimpressive achievement of 33.2% in the general election last year. The change of leader from former communist Walter Veltroni to former Christian Democrat Dario Franceschini has not yielded any dividends in terms of winning centrist Catholic voters frightened of any communist legacy, however remote. Indeed, a leadership challenge to Franceschini seems likely at the Democrats’ next congress. The PD was not only beaten by the PdL at the national level, but also in all five of the European electoral constituencies, even in the Centre, where Berlusconi’s party got 37.4% to Franceschini’s 32.3%. The PdL even beat the PD in two traditionally ‘red’ regions - 35.2% to 29.9% in Le Marche, and 35.8% to 33.9% in Umbria. Only in Emilia Romagna and Tuscany did the PD remain the first party, although escaping the kind of humiliation the Labour Party received in Wales this week is a meagre consolation for a mainstream party of the centre-left.

Di Pietro’s Italia dei Valori (IdV) has made the only real advance amongst the anti-Berlusconi forces - moving from 2.1% in the 2004 European elections to an impressive 8% this week - further advancing on its score in the 2008 general election. For all its numerous deficiencies, not least its stance on immigration, the IdV has had the indisputable merit of actually consistently opposing Berlusconi, instead of colluding with him, as the PD has all too frequently done - for example, in raising the threshold for European as well as parliamentary elections in what has proved to be a successful bid to exclude the radical left from assemblies beyond the local level, depriving the working class of any effective political representation.

The remaining force to gain seats in Europe is the UDC, a centre-right Christian Democrat formation, whose main stronghold is Sicily, with all that such links imply. This got 6.5% and doubtless D’Alema and others within the PD will revive notions of allying with this rather repulsive grouping, which was for some years in partnership with Berlusconi before they fell out over the spoils of office.

Sadly, the election has also been a disaster for the radical left. The abysmal performance of the Sinistra Arcobaleno (Rainbow Left) in last year’s parliamentary elections led to a change of policy and leadership at Rifondazione’s congress last July. The refusal of the defeated Vendola-Giordano-Bertinotti minority to accept the results of Ferrero’s victory - primarily the congress’s rejection of the potentially liquidationist Arcobaleno project in favour of a renewed emphasis on a communist identity - led them to split from the party earlier this year. This split lies at the root of the current disaster.

The Anti-Capitalist list (essentially the PRC and Diliberto’s PdC) got 3.4% and the rotten liquidationist logic of their project became impossible to deny. If Sinistra e Libertà had gained seats, they would have negotiated terms for joining the PD as its left wing, whilst the Anti-Capitalist list stood for class struggle and independent working class representation. Almost inevitably, neither formation crossed the 4% threshold, even if their combined 6.5% total comfortably exceeded it.

The electoral competition from the dogmatic sectarians of Marco Ferrando’s Partito Comunista dei Lavoratori undoubtedly played some role in the failure of the serious communist list to obtain a seat in the European parliament, since the appearance of another list using the hammer and sickle - a symbol consciously rejected by Sinistra e Libertà - weakened the impression of communist unity which Ferrero and Diliberto had tried so hard to achieve by bringing the PRC and the PdCI together. But it was a unity project from which Ferrando, like Sinistra Critica, excluded himself, rather than being subjected to any ban or proscription by the PRC, which itself includes two other Trotskyist currents: Falce e Martello and Controcorrente.

Whilst Sinistra Critica decided not to stand in the European elections, it was unwilling to support, even critically, the Anti-Capitalist list, and in some instances at the local level formed extremely dubious alliances for municipal elections with elements to the right of Rifondazione against candidates standing on a principled basis independently of the PD. For example, in Livorno it backed a populist mayoral candidate allied not only with the Greens but with local followers of the frequently reactionary comedian, Beppe Grillo, against the Rifondazione mayoral candidate who openly praised local rioters for adopting illegal methods to defend Senegalese immigrants against the authorities.