06.02.2014
Italy: Back into the centre of politics
Haggling over the new electoral law has given the former premier some breathing space, writes Toby Abse
2014 seems to be turning into an unexpectedly good year for Silvio Berlusconi, who on February 2 was able to give a full-page interview to the Corriere della Sera about the general political situation without the slightest reference to his own legal troubles. On January 18 Matteo Renzi, the rabidly neoliberal mayor of Florence and recently elected secretary of the Partito Democratico (PD), had brought the apparently discredited and increasingly depressed 77-year-old ex-premier right back into the very centre of Italian politics.
Berlusconi had apparently been marginalised first by the split in the former Popolo della Libertà (PdL), which had left him without the parliamentary forces to bring down Enrico Letta’s PD-led coalition, and then by his own ignominious expulsion from the senate. But by publicly summoning the felon to the national headquarters of the PD to discuss a new electoral law, Renzi has in effect not only completely rehabilitated him, but placed him once again in a position to blackmail his nominal political adversaries in the PD.
Renzi, like many leaders of the PD and its predecessor organisations before him - most notably Massimo D’Alema and Walter Veltroni in 1996-98 and 2008 respectively - imagines such a rotten compromise gives him and not the far more intelligent and experienced convicted fraudster, the upper hand. Whilst the PD is currently comfortably ahead of Berlusconi’s revived Forza Italia in the opinion polls, the logic of a bipolar system will inevitably favour the more unscrupulous operator, who over the last 20 years has always been prepared to make alliances with any combination of forces - centrist Christian Democrats, assorted neo-fascist fragments, the regionalist Lega Nord - required to ensure an arithmetical majority in parliament. Office holding and its pecuniary advantages have always been far more important to Berlusconi and most of his courtiers than any claim to ideological uniformity or even coherence.
The trigger for the sudden acceleration in the longstanding parliamentary discussions about a new electoral law was the decision of the Consulta (constitutional court) in December 2013 that the Porcellum (‘Pig Law’) brought in by the Lega Nord’s Roberto Calderoli on Berlusconi’s instigation in 2005, was unconstitutional. The Pig Law introduced the notion of majority premiums for both chambers of the Italian parliament. Its undemocratic nature was fully exposed by the 2013 election, when the victorious centre-left won 55% of the seats in the chamber of deputies with less than 30% of the vote - only fractionally more than the centre-right’s share.
However, the cancellation of all the majority premiums for both the chamber and the senate had left Italy with a system of proportional representation, even if one qualified by a threshold of 4%, which denied parliamentary representation to smaller forces outside a major electoral coalition. In short, this default position would in present circumstances guarantee substantial parliamentary representation to Beppe Grillo’s Movimento Cinque Stelle (Five Star Movement - M5S) and make some form of multi-party coalition - perhaps a ‘grand coalition’ between the PD and Forza Italia - extremely probable. Such outcomes do not appeal to Matteo Renzi, who is far more hostile to any deal with M5S than was his predecessor as PD leader, Pier Luigi Bersani.
The initial provisional agreement between Berlusconi and Renzi was largely based on the current Spanish electoral system (and referred to as the ‘Ispanicum’). This has a combination of apparent proportionality and relatively small multi-member constituencies that in practice sets a very high threshold - outside regions with strong nationalist parties, such as Catalonia and the Basque country, it largely excludes smaller parties, as Izquierda Unida (United Left) has found to its cost. However, the necessity of gaining the agreement of Angelino Alfano’s Nuovo Centrodestra (New Centre-Right) meant that some modifications were essential and most mainstream commentators call the resultant system the ‘Italicum’ - even if more consistent opponents of Berlusconi have branded it the Caimanum.1
The proposed new electoral system, like the Pig Law, includes a majority premium. However, unlike the Pig Law, which did not specify a minimum vote share for the leading party or coalition to benefit from the premium, the strongest coalition has to get 37% of the vote before the majority premium comes into operation. This premium takes the form of a further 15%, giving the winning coalition 52% of the seats, a working majority. If that coalition receives more than 37%, the size of the premium decreases accordingly, so that the total never rises above 52%. In the event of no coalition winning more than 37%, there would be a second round of voting in which the two leading coalitions2 would compete to win the majority premium - a provision that owes more to France than to Spain.
Undemocratic
However, the majority premium is not the only undemocratic feature of the Italicum. Arguably, it is by no means the worst either. There are various provisions that tilt the system further in favour of the two biggest parties - the PD and Forza Italia. Small parties within a major coalition will need to get 4.5% of the vote in order to get parliamentary representation, whilst parties outside a coalition need 8%. Moreover, a coalition that does not get at least 12% is automatically excluded from parliamentary representation. The first two thresholds may well have been invented for Berlusconi’s benefit, so that small parties of the centre-right - for example, Alfano’s NCD - would have no alternative but to return to the fold to avoid the 8% barrier, but might still fail to reach the 4.5% threshold. Nonetheless, their votes would be included in the Berlusconi coalition’s share of the total vote needed for the majority premium.
But the 12% rule for coalitions seems much more likely to have been a device of Renzi’s aimed against the radical left. In both the 2008 and 2013 general elections communists - both the Partito della Rifondazione Comunista (PRC) and the Partito dei Comunisti Italiani (PdCI) - were involved in electoral coalitions and, although both these cartels failed to cross a much lower 4% barrier, Renzi is extremely anxious to eliminate any possibility of serious electoral competition to his left. He especially needs to dissuade any of his defeated internal opponents within the PD’s social democratic left wing, which he has systematically humiliated rather than tactfully conciliated, from breaking away and forming a cartel along the lines of the Front de Gauche in France.
The PRC has publicly argued that the Italicum is even less democratic than the Acerbo law used in Mussolini’s 1924 general election, under which the Partito Comunista d’Italia obtained independent parliamentary representation with a much lower share of the vote than the Italicum would require of the PRC. Even some PD parliamentarians, by no means all on the party’s left, have pointed out that the 4.5% threshold might alienate its electoral partner, the soft-left Sinistra Ecologia Libertà (SEL) - a party with little chance of reaching even the lower threshold might feel inclined to conclude that it might as well lose with far more dignity and rather more votes by advancing an independent programme rather than acting as Renzi’s bag carriers and boosting the centre-left’s global total without getting any parliamentary seats in return.
Another feature of the Italicum - resulting from its convoluted attempt to graft elements of the Spanish system onto something not that far removed from the outlawed Porcellum - is the existence of small, multi-member constituencies, whose votes are not counted on a genuinely territorial basis, constituency by constituency, but added up at the national level in a way that is totally at variance with the roughly equivalent systems in Spain or the Republic of Ireland. The reason for this utterly bizarre concoction is that the Consulta judgement specifically condemned very long national party lists as making it impossible for citizens to know who they are voting for. Renzi and Berlusconi have assumed that if party lists presented to the voters in individual constituencies are much shorter - perhaps half a dozen names for each party on the ballot paper - it can be argued that the voters will have a far better idea of who the rival candidates are. Behind this spurious façade of giving the voters more choice, in reality both Berlusconi and Renzi want to ensure that they control the order in which candidates are placed on party lists, so that the loyalists are at the top and mavericks or potential rebels at the bottom.3
The individuals whose civil legal action was responsible for persuading the Consulta to assess the constitutional legitimacy of the Porcellum had wanted a return to the voter’s right to express a single preference for a candidate of their choosing within the party list - the system that operated between 1992 and 2005. Both the NCD and the PD’s left wing are still in favour of restoring the single preference vote, but it currently seems unlikely that such a modification will be made during the Italicum’s passage through parliament.
After years of inconclusive discussion about electoral reform, the Italicum has moved forward with great rapidity. The initial Renzi-Berlusconi agreement on January 18 was followed by the submission of the text of a new law to the constitutional affairs commission of the chamber of deputies with the backing of the PD, Forza Italia and the NCD on January 22. The full chamber then voted on the opposition objections to the law’s constitutionality on January 31. The law will return to the floor of the chamber for a discussion on its substance on February 11 and it is forecast that it will be approved by the end of this month.
M5S antics
The most vigorous objections to the Italicum in parliament have come from M5S, which rightly sees it as an attempt by Italy’s established parties - particularly the PD and Forza Italia - to sideline Grillo’s party, regarded as a bunch of interlopers in the parliamentary game. Consequently M5S has mounted a concerted campaign of disruption, not only employing filibustering tactics which almost inevitably provoked the use of a parliamentary guillotine by the speaker of the chamber of deputies, but also engaged in attempts at physical disruption of the commission proceedings.
Most of these actions have numerous precedents in the far from peaceful or orderly methods adopted by the PCI’s parliamentarians against the Legge Truffa of 19534 and against Italy’s entry into Nato in 1949, as well as in the behaviour of the Radicals, the Lega Nord and others on a number of much more recent occasions. These precedents rather undermine the numerous articles by mainstream journalists in recent days branding M5S as a threat to parliamentary democracy purely on the basis of its somewhat rowdy behaviour in parliament over the last week or so.
However, it has to be acknowledged that M5S’s descent into extremely crude misogyny has distracted attention from the substantive issue - the thoroughly regressive and undemocratic nature of the Renzi-Berlusconi electoral law - providing a convenient escape route for many centre-left commentators, who were initially far from happy with either Renzi’s very cordial meeting with Berlusconi on January 18 or the grotesque law that emerged from it.5 Massimo Felice De Rosa’s insult to the PD’s female deputies - “You are only here because you are good at giving blow jobs” - may well give rise to legal action and has got M5S a great deal of unfavourable publicity.
Whilst it was initially assumed that Grillo and Gianroberto Casaleggio, the entrepreneur who edits Grillo’s blog, had intervened with the M5S parliamentarians to curb their verbal and physical excesses and to urge them to concentrate on a clause-by-clause demolition of the bill itself, Grillo has in fact fuelled the fire on his immensely popular blog. His rants against the speaker of the chamber, Laura Boldrini, for imposing the guillotine culminated in the posting of a video entitled: “What would happen if you found yourself alone in a car with Boldrini?”, which Boldrini herself saw as an “instigation to violence” by “potential rapists”. With good reason, since this unleashed a massive stream of threats to rape or kill her, which could have been very easily predicted by anybody as familiar with the dynamics of the internet as either of the M5S leaders,6 even if one chooses, as did some M5S parliamentarians interviewed in the press, not to interpret Grillo’s posting as an implicit incitement to make such threats.
However, whilst the violent misogyny of M5S should come as a surprise only to those who still persist in seeing these rightwing populists as part of the left, the most immediate danger to Italian democracy and any possibility of genuine working class political representation comes not from Grillo, but from the new lash-up between Renzi and Berlusconi. Their deal has been blessed by president Giorgio Napolitano and very reluctantly accepted by prime minister Enrico Letta, who is sufficiently lucid to know that overt resistance would only speed up his own political demise.
Notes
1. Berlusconi is often called ‘Il Caimano’, after a reptile of that name. Indeed leftwing film director Nanni Moretti once made a film called Il Caimano, in which Berlusconi featured as a central character.
2. It is, of course, possible that the run-off could be between either a centre-left or a centre-right coalition and M5S, which stands as a single party and rejects all alliances on principle.
3. Older readers may remember that a similar issue arose over the Labour Party’s European election lists in 1999, provoking the minor split led by Ken Coates and Hugh Kerr. In the Italian context it should be stressed that the combination of multiple preference votes and proportional representation current until 1991 led to increased corruption, clientelism and personality-driven politics, especially amongst the Christian Democrats, so that cynicism about the motives of Renzi and Berlusconi should not be confused with an endorsement of a system whose record over four decades left a lot to be desired.
4. This law would have given two-thirds of the seats in parliament to any coalition that got over 50% of the vote. The law was passed, despite the PCI’s vigorous efforts to obstruct its passage, but in the event the Christian Democrats and their Liberal, Social Democratic and Republican allies narrowly failed to achieve their target in the 1953 general election and the law was subsequently repealed.
5. Even those journalists and political scientists who did not look to an idealised version of the Anglo-American ‘first past the post’ were far more attracted by the French or German electoral systems than by a modified Porcellum in Spanish dress.
6. Grillo’s own conviction years ago for killing somebody in a car accident makes this particular posting seem spectacularly tasteless.