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A guide to Italy’s post-Napolitano presidential puzzle

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Renzi NapolitanoPhoto credit to Roberto Monaldo / LaPresse.

Italy’s presidential election functions more like a papal conclave than a direct election or even like a party-line legislative vote like the recent failed attempts to elect a new Greek president.Italy Flag Icon

The long-awaited decision today by Italian president Giorgio Napolitano to resign after nine years in office is not likely to result immediately in snap elections in Italy, as it did recently in Greece. Nevertheless, the resulting attempt to select Napolitano’s successor presents Italian prime minister Matteo Renzi with perhaps the most treacherous political task since taking office last February.

Napolitano’s legacy

Napolitano, at age 89, was anxious to step down after Italy relinquishes its six-month rotating European presidency this week. Elected president in 2006, Napolitano (pictured above, left, with Renzi), a former moderate figure within Italy’s former Communist Party, is Italy’s longest serving president, reelected to an unprecedented second seven-year term in 2013 when the divided Italian political scene couldn’t agree on anyone else after five prior ballots.

Critics refer to Napolitano as ‘Re Giorgio‘ (King George), but there’s little doubt that he was consequential during Italy’s financial markets crisis in late 2011 by nudging Silvio Berlusconi, who first came to power in 1994, out of office — seemingly once and for all. Napolitano’s behind-the-scenes maneuvering may have prevented Italy from the humiliating step of seeking a bailout from European authorities though his detractors argue that he circumvented the democratic process by engineering Berlusconi’s ouster and appointing former European commissioner Mario Monti as prime minister. Monti, who stepped down after 2013 national elections, largely failed to push through major economic reforms that many investors believe Italy needs to become more competitive, and that Renzi now promises to enact.

Napolitano, who will remain a ‘senator for life’ in the upper chamber of the Italian parliament, steps down with generally high regard from most Italians, who believe that he, in particular, has been a stabilizing force throughout the country’s worst postwar economic recession.

An opaque process to select a president

The process to appoint his successor involves an electoral assembly that comprises members of both houses of the Italian parliament, plus 58 additional electors from the country’s 20 regions — a total of 1,009 electors. Within 15 days, the group must hold its first vote, though it may only hold a maximum of two voter per day. For the first three ballots, a presidential candidate must win a two-thirds majority. On the fourth and successive ballots, however, a simple majority of 505 votes is sufficient. Continue reading A guide to Italy’s post-Napolitano presidential puzzle →

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What the Alfano-Berlusconi split means for Italian politics

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Et tu, Angelino?Italy Flag Icon

In a stunning weekend move, deputy prime minister Angelino Alfano, the longtime political heir of former prime minister Silvio Berlusconi, refused to join Berlusconi’s newly rechristened Forza Italia political group.  Instead, Alfano will form his own center-right faction, the Nuovo Centrodestra (or the ‘New Center-Right’).  Alfano, who also serves as the interior minister in the ‘grand coalition’ government headed by center-left prime minister Enrico Letta, disagreed with Berlusconi’s attempt in late September to bring down Letta’s government in order to make way for early elections — ultimately, even Berlusconi backed down when it came time to hold a vote of no confidence.

The timing of the split comes at a critical point for Berlusconi (pictured above, right, with Alfano) and the Italian center-right.  Berlusconi faces expulsion from the Senato (Senate), Italy’s upper parliamentary chamber, in a vote scheduled to take place on November 27 — a direct result of a final conviction against Berlusconi for tax evasion in relation to his corporate media empire.  He’s set to serve a one-year sentence sometime this autumn and, due to his age, Berlusconi has elected community service over prison.

Berlusconi is preparing to take his reduced Forza Italia core — essentially the renamed version of his longtime Il Popolo della Libertà (PdL, People of Freedom), which itself was known as Forza Italia between 1994 and 2007 — into opposition.

Most immediately, the new Alfano center-right faction’s emergence insulates the government from Berlusconi’s whims by delivering enough center-right senators and deputies to keep the government in place.  In that regard, Alfano’s move this weekend has done more to stabilize Italian politics for the foreseeable future than anything in the past seven months of the Letta government.  While Alfano still opposes Berlusconi’s expulsion from the Senate next week, Berlusconi seems unlikely to win against the combined force of the Italian left and the protest Movimento 5 Stelle (M5S, the Five Star Movement).

The move could paint Alfano as a public servant willing to place governance and stability over scoring political points, and voters could reward Alfano when elections are held (still likely next year).  The move also makes it very likely that Alfano will lead the center-right into the next election, just as popular Florence mayor Matteo Renzi seems likely to win a landslide victory for the leadership of the Letta’s center-left Partito Democratico (PD, Democratic Party) in a vote that will be held on December 8.

Regardless of whether Letta, age 47, or Renzi, age 38, ultimately becomes the center-left prime ministerial candidate in the next election, a new generation of leadership is emerging in Italian politics — especially as the 43-year-old Alfano supplants the 77-year-old Berlusconi and other statesmen like Monti, age 70, and former Democratic Party leader Pier Luigi Bersani, age 62, fade from the center of Italian politics.

But it’s been a maxim of Italian politics for the past two decades that you count out Berlusconi at your own risk.   Continue reading What the Alfano-Berlusconi split means for Italian politics →

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Making sense of today’s Italian election results

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UPDATE, 7:30 p.m.: Here’s an additional piece on where Italy goes from here — a look at four potential outcomes to watch for in the days ahead.

* * * * *

The election results from Italy’s general election have largely been counted, and they’re backing up the exit polls (not the initial instant polls from the preceding hours leading up to the election) that show a hung parliament — leaving the short-term future of Italy’s government unclear.Italy Flag Icon

Right now, it certainly looks like Pier Luigi Bersani’s centrosinistra (center-left) coalition will win a majority in the elections for Camera dei Deputati (House of Deputies), Italy’s lower house, while former prime minister Silvio Berlusconi’s centrodestra (center-right) coalition will win a majority in the elections for Italy’s upper house, the Senato (Senate).

Nonetheless, the big winner is the Movimento 5 Stelle (M5S, the Five Star Movement), the protest group of blogger and comedian Beppe Grillo (pictured above), which has significantly outperformed polling expectations and may well become the single largest ‘party’ in the Italian parliament.

Bersani leads in Italy’s lower house

In the 630-member lower house, the latest projections show Bersani’s centrosinistra with a small lead of around 29% or 30% to just 28% or 29% for the centrodestra, and a whopping 25% or 26% for the Five Star Movement.  Far behind in fourth place is prime minister Mario Monti’s centrist coalition with around 11%.  The communist, green, anti-corruption Rivoluzione Civile (RC, Civil Revolution) headed by antimafia magistrate Antonio Ingroia has won barely over 2%.

If that result holds, it means Bersani will command an automatic majority in the lower house — the winner of the largest share of the votes wins 54% of the seats in the Camera dei Deputati, so Bersani is likely to hold 340 seats.

Berlusconi leads in Italy’s upper house

In the Senato, however, seats are awarded proportionally on a regional basis, with a regional ‘bonus’ — the winner of the largest share of the votes in each region automatically wins 55% of the seats in that region.

It’s too soon to tell whether Bersani or Berlusconi will win the greater number of votes nationally in the senatorial elections, but it’s likely that Berlusconi may emerge with the greatest number of the 315 seats up for election today (though far short of a majority) — the latest projections show the centrodestra with 114 seats, the centrosinistra with 113 seats, the Five Star Movement with 57 and Monti’s coalition with 17.

Berlusconi wins Piedmont, sweeps southern Italy in senatorial elections

When you look at the results region-by-region, you begin to see just how amazing the comeback has been for Berlusconi.

Right now, it appears that Berlusconi’s coalition has not only won Piedmont and Veneto in northern Italy, but also Lombardy, Italy’s most-populous region, by what appears to be a whopping 38.0% to 29.5% victory.  That doesn’t bode well for the centrosinistra in regional elections in Lombardy, where the centrodestra is trying to hold onto power under its candidate for regional president, Roberto Maroni, since 2012 the national leader of the Lega Nord (Northern League).  Maroni faces a tough challenge from the leftist candidate, Umberto Ambrosoli.  Exit polls showed a very close regional race. 

In southern Italy, where the centrosinistra was hoping to break through with a credible chance at sweeping the south, Berlusconi’s coalition has apparently won each region, excepting Basilicata.  That includes Campania and Sicily, Italy’s third- and fourth-most populous regions, respectively.  Berlusconi leads 37.2% to 29.1% in Campania and by 33.2% to 27% in Sicily (where Grillo’s Five Star Movement, not typically strong in the south, won 29.5%).  It also includes Puglia, the home of twice-elected regional president Nichi Vendola, the leader of the socialist Sinistra Ecologia Libertà (SEL, Left Ecology Freedom) that is part of Bersani’s coalition.  Although SEL won nearly 7% in Puglia, its best result nationwide, it wasn’t enough to power the centrosinistra to victory, where it was trailing with 28.3% to the centrodestra‘s 34.5%.

Grillo is the biggest winner, Monti the biggest loser

All in all, the result is a victory for Grillo — his movement outpolled Berlusconi’s party (though not his broader coalition), the Popolo della Libertà (PdL, People of Freedom) and it’s still too soon to tell, but there’s a chance the Five Star Movement outpolled Bersani’s party, the Partito Democratico (PD, Democratic Party) as well.

Going down the list of senatorial results, it looks like the Five Star Movement outpolled both the PD and the PdL in Veneto in the northeast, Liguria in the northwest, Marche, Abruzzo and Molise in the center of Italy, and Sicily and Sardinia as well, with Grillo’s movement winning around 30% in some of his strongest regions.

Monti, by contrast, appears to have finished in fourth place — and a far-off fourth place — in every region.  Despite his alliance with the Christian Democrats — long-dominant in Italy’s south — Monti polled worst in Italy’s south, and did best (winning double digits of up to 12%) in the northern industrial regions like Piedmont, Lombardy, Friuli and Veneto.

That means that, even if they could find a way to build a coalition, Monti and Bersani are unlikely to have sufficient strength in Italy’s upper house to form a coalition.

Other winners and losers Continue reading Making sense of today’s Italian election results →

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What will Italy’s election mean for LGBT rights?

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Last weekend, Nichi Vendola, the openly gay regional president of Puglia, pluckily posted to Twitter a photo of himself campaigning alongside Pier Luigi Bersani, the leader of the center-left Partito Democratico (PD, Democratic Party), captioned ‘coppia di fatto‘ (‘de facto couple’).

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Vendola, the leader of the more stridently leftist Sinistra Ecologia Libertà (SEL, Left Ecology Freedom), is part of the broad centrosinistra (center-left) coalition that hopes to elect Bersani as Italy’s next prime minister this weekend, and the pun subtly reinforced the role that gay rights has played in Italy’s election campaign.

The subtlety speaks a lot to how the issue of gay rights and same-sex marriage has hummed along the surface of a campaign that’s been almost entirely fought over economic policy — he state of Italy’s finances, economic reforms, budget austerity and the encroaching control of Brussels and Berlin on Italian governance.  Nonetheless, the gay rights issue is probably the most important social issue as the election approaches.

Given that Rome, Italy’s capital, is also home to the Vatican, gay rights is also one of the most polarizing issues of Italian public life.

nichi

Vendola (pictured above) is perhaps the most vigorous advocate of gay rights and same-sex marriage in Italy, but the progress elsewhere in Europe has also underscored Italy’s lack of progress on gay rights.

With parliaments in two of Europe’s four most-populous countries — the United Kingdom and France — passing legislation that allows for same-sex marriage in the past month, there’s some pressure on Italy to follow suit.  Italy also lacks any anti-discrimination laws or hate crime laws designed to prevent crimes with a particularly anti-gay bias.  Although southern Europe isn’t traditionally as socially liberal as northern Europe, both Spain and Portugal have promulgated full same-same marriage rights — Spain did so eight years ago.

Continue reading What will Italy’s election mean for LGBT rights? →

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History shows Italy’s likely center-left coalition will likely be short-lived and tenuous

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In the last days of Italy’s election campaign, it’s become somewhat conventional wisdom that although the broad centrosinistra (center-left) coalition headed by prime ministerial candidate Pier Luigi Bersani is still on target to win control of Italy’s lower house of parliament, the Camera dei Deputati (House of Deputies), it’s now a toss-up as to whether Bersani’s coalition will win enough of the 315 seats up for election to the upper house, the Senato (Senate), to form a stable government.Italy Flag Icon

The reason is based on some odd quirks of Italian electoral and constitutional law — the key point is that while elections to both the Camera dei Deputati and the Senato are conducted according to proportional representation, seats are awarded differently between the two.  The party or coalition that wins the largest proportion of the vote nationally will be guaranteed at least 54% of the seats in the Camera dei Deputati, but seats are awarded to the Senato only on a regional basis, so that the largest vote-winner in each of Italy’s 20 regions is guaranteed a majority of the region’s seats.  Given that Lombardy, Campania and Sicily, three of Italy’s four largest regions, are essentially tossups, the centrodestra could win those three regions and deny Bersani a senatorial majority.

For Bersani to control the lower house, but not the upper house, of Italy’s parliament is certainly somewhat of a nightmare for a campaign that led by double digits when the campaign began.

Thus the hand-wringing that Bersani will be forced to assemble a governing coalition that includes not only his electoral partner, the socialist Sinistra Ecologia Libertà (SEL, Left Ecology Freedom), the party of the two-term regional president of Puglia, Nichi Vendola (pictured above, left, with Bersani, right), but also turn to other partners — practically, this means some sort of alliance, in the upper house at least, with the centrist coalition led by prime minister Mario Monti, Con Monti per l’Italia (with Monti for Italy).

If the senatorial balance were, however, incredibly close (say, one to three seats), Bersani might also turn to a tiny number of senators likely to be elected from the predominantly communist Rivoluzione Civile (Civil Revolution) coalition, though it remains to be seen whether they would back Bersani — Vendola would certainly find more common cause with them than with Monti and his allies.

Monti and Vendola have mutually ruled out serving together in the same coalition — although Bersani has already committed to many of the reforms that Monti began, Vendola has been much more critical of the Monti government’s efforts, whcih have included tax increases and tax and labor reform.

It doesn’t help that Vendola, who is openly gay and supports same-sex marriage in Italy, is at contretemps with the social conservative bent of Monti’s coalition.  Although Monti has expressly opposed same-sex marriage and adopt by same-sex couples, the coalition includes the Unione di Centro (UdC, Union of the Centre), comprised of former Christian Democrats and led by Pier Ferdinando Casini, who has very close ties to the Vatican, and Futuro e Libertà per l’Italia (FLI, Future and Freedom), a party formed by Gianfranco Fini, a moderate who once served as Silvio Berlusconi’s foreign minister.

There are no easy answers for Bersani, and on Monday, Wolfgang Münchau at The Financial Times predicted a re-run of the prior leftist government of former prime minister Romano Prodi, who came to office in April 2006 as the moderate head of a wide-ranging leftist coalition that included relatively moderate former Christian Democrats, more progressive social democrats and die-hard communists (including Fausto Bertinotti, who became the president of the Camera dei Deputati from 2006 to 2008).

That government fell in early 2008 over a vote of no confidence in the Senato, when senator-for-life and former Christian Democratic prime minister Giulio Andreotti scuttled an attempt to pass equal civil rights for same-sex partners.

So Münchau is right to predict that the chances of a full five-year — or even one-year — government are fairly slim in the event of an unwieldy coalition that would include not only Vendola and Bersani (difficult enough), but also Casini, Fini and Monti.

That will certainly cause even more hand-wringing and not just in Milan and Rome, but in Berlin, Brussels, London and Washington, too — without a stable government to assure investors, a new Italian financial crisis could once again endanger the future viability of the single currency.  That’s assuming that Italy, and the other troubled economies of the eurozone, finds a path out from the wilderness of increasing unemployment and low or declining GDP growth.  The reality is that the next government, whether led by Monti, Berlusconi or Bersani, will face a lot of incredibly difficult and painful choices for Italy’s future.

But the troubling precedents go beyond the most recent Prodi government — the Italian left has been long fragmented and disorganized since the end of the ‘first republic’ and the breakup of the former Partito Comunista Italiano (PCI, Italian Communist Party), which goes a long way in explaining how dysfunctional leftist governments have been in Italy.  Continue reading History shows Italy’s likely center-left coalition will likely be short-lived and tenuous →

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What the papal abdication means for Italy’s upcoming general election

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The shock news earlier this week that Pope Benedict XVI (pictured above, right, with Italian prime minister Mario Monti) would step aside as the leader of the Roman Catholic Church on February 28 has overshadowed the campaign currently taking place in advance of Italy’s general election — an election that will take place on February 24 and 25, just hours before the first papal abdication in six centuries.Italy Flag Iconvatican flag

So what does that mean for Italy’s election?

First and foremost, it means that much of the week’s media coverage has been focused on Benedict XVI (above all on Ash Wednesday, of all days) in Italy, not the election campaign.  It’s hard to know exactly what the result of that has been; perhaps it may freeze in place the state of the campaign from the end of last week, and perhaps it might even staunch the incremental momentum of Silvio Berlusconi’s Popolo della Libertà (PdL, People of Freedom), and Beppe Grillo’s Movimento 5 Stelle (M5S, the Five Star Movement), both of which were seen inching up in support in polls at the end of last week.

Substantively, the Vatican has long been one of the most powerful forces in Italian politics, and its long-standing support for Italy’s former Democrazia Cristiana (DC, Christian Democracy) allowed it to govern Italy uninterrupted from the postwar era until the ‘Tangentopoli’ (‘Bribesville’) scandal in 1993 that scrambled Italian politics and begat a new ‘second republic’ in Italy.

In many ways, the Catholic Church and the former Partito Comunista Italiano (PCI, Italian Communist Party) were the two major, and counterbalancing, ideological and social bulwarks of postwar Italy — given that the Christian Democrats always found ways to foreclose the avenues of power to the Communists, the Communist Party became as much a cultural and social force as a traditional political party.

Many organizations associated with the Catholic Church became booster organizations for the Christian Democrats as well — the Christian Democrats shared much in common with the previously Catholicist party, the Partito Popolare (Popular Party), which was disbanded in 1926 shortly upon the rise of Benito Mussolini to power.  The social organization Azione Cattolica (Catholic Action), which was associated with the Church and not actively engaged in politics (and therefore not disbanded during the fascist era), quickly swung behind the Christian Democrats in advance of the 1946 general election that swept Alcide De Gasperi to power. 

That support held firm for 30 years, and in the 1976 and 1979 elections, the closest that the Communists ever came to winning an election in Italy under longtime leader Enrico Berlinguer, Catholic groups also played a key role.  Comunione e Liberazione (Communion and Liberation), a traditionalist and political Catholic movement (very closely associated, by the way, with longtime and now outgoing Lombardy regional president Roberto Formigoni) were crucial in holding back the Communist gains in the late 1970s, despite having mobilized an unsuccessful effort in the 1974 referendum to roll back Italy’s 1970 law allowing divorce. 

The Catholic-DC alliance was cemented anew in 1979 with the elevation of the Polish cardinal Karol Wojtyła (pictured below with former prime minister Giulio Andreotti) to the papacy in 1979 as John Paul II. In a world where U.S. foreign policy interests were keen on keeping Italy’s Communist Party out of office during the Cold War, and where John Paul II would become in many ways a vital spiritual warrior against the Soviet Union’s officially atheist and communist domination of Eastern Europe, it was clear that the Vatican’s full political power (and the United States’s considerable influence) would remain behind the Christian Democrats until the Iron Curtain fell.

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For what it’s worth, the Vatican has all but endorsed prime minister Mario Monti and his centrist coalition — the Vatican’s chief newspaper, L’Osservatore Romano and a semi-official mouthpiece for the Holy See, announced its support for Monti in late December 2012:

È in sintesi l’espressione di un appello a recuperare il senso più alto e più nobile della politica che è pur sempre, anche etimologicamente, cura del bene comune. [Monti’s campaign is in synthesis the expression of a call to return to the highest and most noble sense of politics which exists, as always, even at a etymological level, for the common good.]

The support came days after Benedict himself seemed to indicate a veiled preference for Monti in his Christmas message to Italians:

The pope, in his Christmas greetings in 65 languages, said in his special message to Italians that he hoped the spirit of the day would “make people reflect, favour the spirit of cooperation for the common good and lead to a reflection on the hierarchy of values when making the most important of choices.”

In the past, the Vatican has generally supported Silvio Berlusconi and his centrodestra (center-right) coalition in government to the detriment of Italy’s center-left.  In 2008, former prime minister and senator for life Giulio Andreotti, a longtime fixture in Italian politics (he even has his own biopic!), is said to have sunk prime minister Romano Prodi’s government — on the Vatican’s orders — by opposing Prodi’s attempt to pass a law in the Italian state to give unmarried couples (including same-sex couples) special health, welfare and inheritance rights.

But this time around, in light of Berlusconi’s various bunga bunga scandals — including the solicitation of sex for money from  allegedly underage, North African girls — it would hardly seem befitting the family values of the Catholic Church to endorse such a tawdry candidate.

All the same, the Vatican’s power, in Italy as elsewhere in an increasingly secular Europe, isn’t what it once was, and its stances on contraception, abortion and same-sex marriage stand at odds with the majority of Italian and European voters.

So even if Benedict XVI had a vital grip on the papacy and were willing to engage in a sustained, long-term effort, it’s not clear that the Vatican could necessarily swing the vote significantly towards Monti, and even in an alternative universe with a more engaged pope or in the event that a successor to Benedict XVI had been chosen prior to the election, it’s doubtful that the Vatican could have — or would have — swung more actively into political action.

Given that Benedict XVI is meeting with Monti today, there may well be a benefit to Monti through his association with a pope that’s now certain to dominate headlines through the rest of the election, but it certainly won’t be enough to pull Monti’s coalition, currently polling in fourth place, to victory.  Continue reading What the papal abdication means for Italy’s upcoming general election →

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How the Italian election, Bersani’s to lose, became a Berlusconi-Monti dogfight

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There are now less than two weeks to go before Italians select a new prime minister, and if you watched the dueling soundbites, you would be forgiven if you thought the two main contenders were current prime minister Mario Monti and former prime minister Silvio Berlusconi.Italy Flag Icon

But while Berlusconi and Monti have taken up much of the headlines, the centrosinistra (center-left) coalition headed by Pier Luigi Bersani, the leader of Italy’s center-left Partito Democratico (PD, Democratic Party), still seems more likely than not to win the Feb. 24 and 25 parliamentary elections, guaranteeing a majority in the 630-member Camera dei Deputati (House of Deputies), the lower house of the  Parlamento Italiano (Italian Parliament) and a plurality of the seats among the 315 elected members of its upper house, the Senato (Senate).

As of last Friday — the last day under Italian law that new polls can be published in advance of the election — the broad centrosinistra coalition still held a single-digit, but steady, lead over the centrodestra coalition dominated by Berlusconi’s Popolo della Libertà (PdL, People of Freedom).  After consolidating the center-right, especially by gaining the support of the autonomist Lega Nord (Northern League), Berlusconi’s coalition has pulled to within a modest deficit with the centrosinistra, despite the fact that polls show his PdL with less than 20% support and the PD with consistently over 30%.

Meanwhile, the centrosinistra coalition has lost some support to both the centrist coalition headed by Monti, the outgoing technocratic prime minister, and the anti-austerity protest Movimento 5 Stelle (M5S, the Five Star Movement) of comedian Beppe Grillo was also gaining steam going into the final two weeks of the campaign.

So if the centrosinistra lead has been whittled down a bit, the race to govern Italy still seems like Bersani’s fight to lose.  It’s a much more fragile lead than it was when the campaign started, but in Italy, you’d expect the race to tighten, especially with Berlusconi’s full-court press — even in his weakened political state, Berlusconi remains one of Italy’s richest men, and he commands a significant amount of media control.

Since the start of the campaign, even with Bersani and his center-left allies campaigning hard, sparks have flown strongest not between Bersani and Berlusconi, but between Berlusconi and Monti.

Monti, in shifting from an above-the-fray technocrat to an off-with-the-gloves politician, has attacked Berlusconi as the ‘pied piper’ of Italian politics, mocked his ‘family values’ by referencing Berlusconi’s tawdry sex scandal-ridden past, and said that a victory for Berlusconi would be a ‘disaster’ for Italy.  Earlier this week, he attacked Berlusconi’s promise to abolish — and refund to taxpayers — an unpopular housing tax as a ruse to buy votes with money the Italian government doesn’t have.

Berlusconi, for his part, launched his campaign in December 2012 by accusing Monti of dragging Italy back into recession with ‘German-centric’ policies and, despite an odd offer before Christmas to step down in favor of a united Monti-led coalition, has hammered away at Monti’s efforts to appease European interests from Brussels to Berlin, efforts that Berlusconi claims have come at the cost of improving everyday life in Italy.

In the midst of the back-and-forth between il cavaliere and il professore, where exactly does that leave the centrosinistra? And how did Berlusconi and Monti, whose parties have arguably less support than either of Bersani’s PD or Grillo’s Five Star Movement, come to dominate the campaign?

Continue reading How the Italian election, Bersani’s to lose, became a Berlusconi-Monti dogfight →

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Italian prime minister Mario Monti has a ‘Goldilocks’ problem

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One of the enduring questions of the Italian election has been whether outgoing prime minister Mario Monti will run or not.Italy Flag Icon

Given the popularity of his reforms with the European Union leadership generally and with international investors, his return as prime minister after the February elections is by far their top preference.  Any indication that Italy will make a U-turn on its recent reforms could send Italian bond rates skyrocketing back to the 7%-and-climbing levels of November 2011.

Presumably, too, Monti would very much like to return for a longer term as prime minister to see through further reforms, further budget cuts, and be remembered as the ‘grown-up’ prime minister that put Italy on a long-term path for future growth.

But it’s an important question not just for Italy, but for all of Europe, and the U.S. economy as well.

Legally, of course, Monti cannot run for office in his own right because he’s a senator for life’ and thus, is unable run for a seat in Italy’s lower parliamentary house, the Camera dei Deputati (House of Deputies) — but that’s not really an answer as to whether he’s ‘running’ or not.

Over the weekend, Monti sort-of emerged as a candidate for the elections — he said he is ‘willing’ to lead a coalition of small centrist parties, each of which would vote to install Monti as prime minister for a second Monti-led government.  He had harsh words for Silvio Berlusconi, who has returned, despite his massive unpopularity, to lead the conservative Popolo della Libertà (PdL, People of Freedom) by asserting over the weekend that Berlusconi has demonstrated a ‘certain volatility in judgment’ — an incredibly muted criticism, perhaps, but a criticism nonetheless.  He continued his aggressive tone today with respect to Pier Luigi Bersani, who leads a center-left coalition that features the  Partito Democratico (PD, Democratic Party), by urging Bersani to silence the extremists within his own alliance.

It’s an incredibly difficult tightrope walk for Monti, given that the polls show his coalition is set to finish no better than fourth, so the only way he can return as prime minister is through the election of a hung parliament.

Monti must at least provide a pro forma argument for supporting the ‘pro-Monti’ coalition, or he would risk minimizing the number of votes that will go to the ‘Monti coalition’ — without at least some floor of campaign activity from the incumbent prime minister himself, votes will inevitably slip away from the center to the two main center-right and center-left blocs, leading to what polls show would be a clear win for Bersani, not a hung parliament.

If Monti campaigns too hard, however, he risks diminishing his above-the-fray ‘technocratic’ mien.  He’s already done that now, to some degree, by directly engaging his political rivals.  But more fundamentally, if Monti campaigns too hard and voters are seen to have directly rejected Monti, he will have diminished not only his own political capital, but the cause of political reform that’s been his government’s chief aim.  His political rivals will feel even less pressure to continue Italy’s reformist path.  Continue reading Italian prime minister Mario Monti has a ‘Goldilocks’ problem →

Italy

Five reasons Berlusconi returned to run in the upcoming Italian election

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After leading a symbolic ‘walk-out’ among his center-right Popolo della Libertà (PdL, People of Freedom) from the Italian senate on Thursday in opposition to the austerity measures and other reforms of caretaker prime minister Mario Monti, Il Cavaliere himself, Silvio Berlusconi (pictured above), today announced that he will lead the PdL as its candidate for prime minister in the upcoming Italian general election against a broad center-left alliance anchored by the Partito Democratico (PD, Democratic Party).

So much for a ‘third republic’ in Italian politics — with the selection of the Italian left’s old-guard’s candidate, Pier Luigi Bersani, in the center-left’s broad primary earlier this month against Florence mayor Matteo Renzi (the latter remains Italy’s most popular politician), Italy remains, for now, stuck in the same-old politics as before.

Indeed, a Berlusconi-Bersani face-off would not have raised eyebrows a decade ago.

This time around, though, Berlusconi will face none of the political luck or goodwill that’s marked most of his career — he left office in November 2011 with Italian 10-year bond rates at an unsustainable 7% amid a growing financial crisis that threatened not only Italy, but the entire eurozone.  In addition, Berlusconi has little to show for his stint in office in the way of policy accomplishments, was convicted (subject to appeal) for tax evasion earlier this autumn, and he’s been shamed by accusations of sex with underage women at the now-famous and much derided ‘bunga bunga’ parties and using his influence for the benefit of at least one of those women, a Moroccan immigrant.

So his return to office in many ways would be met with not just disdain, but outright hostility, from outside investors and much of the European political establishment, including the leaders of the European Union, French president François Hollande and German chancellor Angela Merkel.

Berlusconi’s return has been met with chilly responses across the Italian political spectrum.  Monti, who is not contesting the election but has indicated he would be available to lead a second government in the event of a hung parliament, cautioned against populism and warned that Italy must avoid returning to a position whereby Italy’s finances threatened trigger the eurozone’s wider implosion.  Beppe Grillo, a blogger and social critic, as well as the leader of the populist and anti-austerity Movimento 5 Stelle (M5S, the Five Star Movement), savaged what he called Berlusconi’s ‘exhumation.’

Berlusconi’s one-time ally, Gianfranco Fini, who served as deputy prime minister, foreign minister and a former president of Italy’s lower house, the Chamber of Deputies (Camera die Deputati), and who is running under the newly-formed Futuro e Libertà per l’Italia (FLI, Future and Freedom), also sounded alarm, noting that the PdL decision exposes Italy to additional risks.

Given the long odds — the PdL stands far behind the center-left coalition in every poll conducted for next year’s election (and sometimes behind the Five Star Movement, too) — why would the 76-year-old Berlusconi make a bid for a fourth term as Italy’s prime minister?

Here are five reasons why he could be making the race.

Continue reading Five reasons Berlusconi returned to run in the upcoming Italian election →

Italy

Bersani routs Renzi in ‘centrosinistra’ primary to lead Italian left next spring

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Florence’s brash, young mayor Matteo Renzi and his campaign to lead the Italian left threatened to remake Italian politics at a time of upheaval and uncertainty greater than at any point in the past two decades.

But the rank-and-file of the Italian left chose the more familiar path on Sunday, elevating instead the familiar, older and more staid, even boring, president of Italy’s largest center-left party, the Partito Democratico (PD, Democratic Party), Pier Luigi Bersani (pictured above, enjoying a post-election beer).

The 61-year-old Bersani easily defeated the 37-year-old Renzi with around 61.1% of the vote (with just 38.8% for Renzi) — a victory so complete for Bersani that Renzi was winning only in Tuscany, the central Italian region that’s home to Florence, and even there, only with about 55% of the vote.

For many reasons, I argued last week that Bersani’s victory was very likely: his control of the PD party machinery, Italian cultural values that respect longevity (i.e. can you think of anyone in the past 50 years that could be described as ‘Italy’s JFK’?), close ties to Italy’s largest union, the Confederazione Generale Italiana del Lavoro (CGIL, General Confederation of Labour) and support from the candidate who placed third in the first round of the primary election, Nichi Vendola.  Vendola is the openly-gay, two-term regional president of Puglia, a more leftist candidate who is the leader and founder of the Sinistra Ecologia Libertà (SEL, Left Ecology Freedom), which will join with a handful of other small leftist parties in supporting Bersani as a candidate for prime minister in Italy’s general election, scheduled to be held on or before April 2013.  Vendola memorably said, on the same day as his endorsement, that Bersani’s words were ‘profumare di sinistra‘ — perfumed with leftism.

Current technocratic prime minister Mario Monti is not running in the upcoming election.  Monti has shepherded labor reforms, budget cuts and tax increases through the Italian parliament since the PD joined with the main center-right party, the center-right Popolo della Libertà (PdL, People of Freedom) in November 2011 to appoint Monti in the midst of a public finance crisis that resulted in Berlusconi’s resignation.

So what happens next?

Continue reading Bersani routs Renzi in ‘centrosinistra’ primary to lead Italian left next spring →

Italy

Bersani leads as Italian ‘centrosinistra’ primary heads to Sunday runoff

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After last weekend’s first round of the primaries to choose the Italian center-left (‘centrosinistra‘) candidate for prime minister in advance of expected national elections in April, the current leader of Italy’s largest center-left party, the Partito Democratico (PD, Democratic Party), Pier Luigi Bersani looks like a favorite — even if just slightly — to win the runoff this Sunday.

Bersani (pictured above) won 44.9% of last weekend’s primary vote of around 3 million Italian voters, while the youthful mayor of Florence, Matteo Renzi, placed a close second with 35.5%.  The two faced off in a television debate earlier Wednesday, although the two candidate disagree more on tactics and broad themes than individual policies.

The regional president of Puglia — Italy’s southeastern corner — Nichy Vendola, who is openly gay and the most leftist of the three candidates, as well as the founder and leader of the more radical Sinistra Ecologia Libertà (SEL, Left Ecology Freedom), placed third with 15.6% — the SEL and a handful of other small parties have agreed to unite behind the winner of the centrosinistra primary as the prime ministerial candidate of the broad Italian left.

So with the centrosinistra primary set to end with the December 2 runoff between Bersani and Renzi, it appears that Bersani will win, despite the momentum behind Renzi’s candidacy and his promise to bring a new generation of leadership to Italy.  Vendola, earlier today, endorsed Bersani after indicating earlier that Bersani’s words were more ‘profumare di sinistra‘ — perfumed with leftism — than Renzi’s.

The battle between Renzi and Bersani is less ideological than generational — at 61, Bersani personifies the boring and staid leadership of the past 20 years of the Italian left.  At age 37, however, Renzi is something quite new in Italian politics.  His campaign’s theme is essentially that Italy is in need of a new generation of leadership — namely, Renzi’s, on the basis that a Renzi premiership would open a new and more productive era in Italian governance.  He’s not only called for an end to the era of former prime minister Silvio Berlusconi, but for a clean sweep of the Italian left as well.  Renzi’s even picked a fight with Sergio Marchionne, the CEO of Italian carmaker Fiat.

Both Renzi and Bersani have pledged to continue the era of budget discipline enacted by Italy’s current ‘technocratic’ prime minister Mario Monti, who took office in December 2011.

Monti has consistently refused to run for prime minister in his own right in the upcoming elections.  Monti, however, has indicated that he would be available to serve as technocratic prime minister again in the event of a hung parliament, and business leaders overwhelmingly favor a second Monti government to see through the budget cuts, labor reforms and tax increases that have brought Italy back from the brink of financial crisis.

Both candidates, too, have pledged to pursue more growth-oriented policies, even though it remains unclear exactly what either candidate could actually accomplish in an era of austerity throughout much of Europe.

That doesn’t mean there aren’t ideological differences between the two.

Bersani, with greater ties to Italy’s largest union, the Confederazione Generale Italiana del Lavoro (CGIL, General Confederation of Labour), comes from a stronger social democratic tradition than Renzi, who has styled himself as a modernizer not unlike former UK prime minister Tony Blair.  Bersani, the son of a mechanic, served as regional president of the leftist region of Emilia-Romagna in central Italy in the 1990s and as minister of economic development under former prime minister Romano Prodi from 2006 to 2008, where he tried to liberalize the Italian labor market.

Renzi, however, has refused to consider a potential governing coalition with the Unione di Centro (UdC, Union of the Centre), a small centrist group led by Pier Ferdinando Casini.  The UdC essentially represents the remnants of the long-dominant Italian Christian Democrats and, while Casini and the UdC would likely find overlapping interests on economic policy, the UdC, with its ties to the Vatican, remains socially conservative (e.g., it opposes same-sex marriage).  Bersani, although he is seen as slightly more leftist than Renzi, has nonetheless remained open to a coalition with Casini’s centrists.

Ultimately, it’s hard for me to believe that Renzi will actually win on December 2.  The ‘primary’ itself seems skewed in Bersani’s favor — he’s already the leader of the PD, has the support of much of the ‘old guard’ of the Italian left (such as former prime minister and foreign minister Massimo D’Alema), and accordingly, he has access to the left’s strongest party machinery, not to mention the benefit of his CGIL ties.  He now apparently has Vendola’s support from the SEL as well.

Furthermore, in a country that shows perhaps more respect for its elders than anywhere else in Europe, it seems unlikely that Italy will anoint as a potential prime minister someone so incredibly young.  The contest is especially meaningful because the PD looks set to win the upcoming elections (although the contest remains exceptionally fluid and unpredictable, even by the sometime operatic standards of Italian politics).

Continue reading Bersani leads as Italian ‘centrosinistra’ primary heads to Sunday runoff →

Italy

Bersani and Renzi offer two distinct personalities for Italy’s center-left

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Many have led Italy’s long-fractuous center-left over the past two decades, but none have succeeded in building a durable coalition that can win an election and govern for a whole parliament.

Achille Occhetto, the leader of the Partito Comunista Italiano, Italy’s then-Communist Party, failed miserably in the 1994 elections against Silvio Berlusconi.  Francesco Rutelli, the former mayor of Rome throughout much of the 1990s, led the center-left L’Ulivo ‘Olive Tree’ coalition to defeat in 2001, and his successor, Walter Veltroni led the newly-formed Partito Democratico (PD, Democratic Party) to defeat in 2008.  The only successful leftist has been the plodding Romano Prodi, who barely won the 1996 and 2006 elections, only to watch his coalitions, after both elections, crumble within a year or two.  And that’s not even counting the pretenders, such as Massimo D’Alema, who succeeded Prodi as prime minister from 1998 to 2000 and who served as foreign minister from 2006 to 2008.

With Berlusconi now (mostly) in the sidelines as the upcoming general election approaches, the Italian left is hoping to change that, and the first step will be November 25’s primary election to determine who will lead Italy’s broad left into the general elections, which will be held on or before April 13.  In addition to the PD, the more radical left Sinistra Ecologia Libertà (SEL, Left Ecology Freedom) of Puglia’s regional president Nicchi Vendola, the minor Partito Socialista Italiano (PSI, Italian Socialist Party), the centrist Alleanza per l’Italia (ApI, Alliance for Italy) launched by Rutelli in 2009 and the perennial anti-corruption party Italia dei Valori (IdV, Italy of Values) led by former prosecutor Antonio di Pietro.

The current PD leader, Pier Luigi Bersani (pictured above, top), follows in the long line of steady, if boring and uninspired center-left politicians in Italy.  He served as the regional president of the traditional leftist stronghold of Emilia-Romagna in central Italy from 1993 to 1996, as a minister in the Prodi and D’Alema cabinets in the late 1990s and most recently, as the minister of economic development in Prodi’s second government from 2006 to 2008.  As economic development minister, he worked to bring about reforms to liberalize Italy’s labor market and its economy.  But at age 61, Bersani nearly personifies the staid tradition of the Italian left, and he would likely be a prime minister in the Prodi tradition — solidly leftist, but more of the social democratic variety than the socialist.  He has the support of most of the center-left establishment, including that of D’Alema.

His main rival, however, is hoping to end that trend — Matteo Renzi (pictured above, bottom) is the 37-year old mayor of Florence, the largest city in the central region of Tuscany.  Renzi, who served as president of the province of Florence from 2004 to 2009 before his election as mayor, has called on all of the current politicians on the left and the right to step aside to make way for a new generation of leadership — presumably his.

Despite Renzi’s considerably more populist approach to the primaries and to Italian politics, evocative of times of the ‘third-way’ style of former UK prime minister Tony Blair, both Bersani and Renzi would posture more to the center in the general election.

In addition to Bersani and Renzi, Vendola, who was served as Puglia’s leftist — and openly gay — regional president since 2005, is also running, to the strident left of both Bersani and Renzi.  Bruno Tabacci of the ApI, a former regional president of Lombardy, and Laura Puppato of the PD, a regional councillor in Veneto, are also running.

Continue reading Bersani and Renzi offer two distinct personalities for Italy’s center-left →

Italy, Sicily

Today’s Sicilian elections showcase potential party strength before 2013 Italian election

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Today, one of Italy’s most iconic regions — Sicily — goes to the polls to elect the 90 members of its regional legislature and, indirectly, a new regional president.

For all the beauty of its landscape, the majesty of its architecture and the divinity of its food and wine, Sicily, the home of the well known Cosa Nostra, the Sicilian organized crime group that has become synonymous with the word mafia, is not the world’s model showcase for good governance.

Sunday’s elections come six month early after the resignation on July 31 of regional president Raffaele Lombardo, who was elected overwhelmingly in 2008, but stepped down under a cloud of corruption — depressingly familiar charges of complicity with the Sicilian mafia.  The election also comes as a bit of a dress rehearsal for Italy’s expected upcoming general election (along with early elections expected soon in Lombardy as well) — just a couple days after former prime minister Silvio Berlusconi’s conviction in a Milan court for tax fraud.

Rosario Crocetta (pictured above, top), the leading leftist candidate for president and the mafia-fighting former mayor of Gela (Sicily’s sixth-largest city) would be Sicily’s first openly-gay regional president and has campaign marks the best chance of the center-left in a generation to govern Sicily.  But polling nearly as well as the broad center-right and the center-left is the new anti-austerity protest party, the Movimento 5 Stelle (M5S, Five Star Movement) of blogger and comedian Beppe Grillo — he made a splash by swimming across the Strait of Messina from the Italian peninsula to Sicily at the beginning of the campaign (pictured above, bottom).

In one way or another, each of the five main parties competing in today’s election in Sicily will be able to pull lessons from the result in advance of national elections that, although just six months away, remain incredibly fluid.

Italy’s technocratic prime minister Mario Monti, who was appointed in November 2011 to push through budget, tax and labor reforms in the midst of an Italian sovereign debt crisis, remains popular, but has said he won’t run in his own right for election (although could remain available to head a future technocratic government).

Berlusconi had pledged as recently as last Wednesday that he would not run for prime minister as the leader of his own center-right Popolo della Libertà (PdL, People of Freedom), though the unpredictable former prime minister has already said he plans on staying in politics to some degree.  Yesterday, in a Nixonesque, hourlong rant, the enraged, newly-convicted Berlusconi hinted he might even try to bring down Monti’s government to bring forward a snap election even sooner, lashing out at Monti, German chancellor Angela Merkel, former French president Nicolas Sarkozy, and a ‘judge-ocracy’ that he says is ruling Italy.  With plenty of money and control over Italy’s private media, he’ll be able to influence politics as long as he wants.  Currently, the PdL secretary is Angelino Alfano, a 41-year-old former justice minister who is from Sicily and rising star who’s thought to be the leading contender to lead the PdL into the next general election.

Meanwhile, the center-left Partito Democratico (PD, Democratic Party) expects to choose its candidate for prime minister in November.

With 5 million people, Sicily features just around 8.5% of Italy’s total population.  Despite a national GDP per capita of around $31,000, Sicily’s is something like $19,000, vying for Italy’s poorest region with a handful of other southern provinces — it’s nearly half the GDP per capita of the richest province, Lombardy (around $39,000).

In the prior regional elections in 2008, Lombardo led a center-right coalition that included the PdL, the Unione di Centro (UdC, Union of the Center), remains of what used to be the once-formidable Christian Democratic party and his own regionalist Movimento per le Autonomie (MpA, Movement for Autonomies) and together won 65.4% of the vote and 61 of the 90 seats in Sicily’s regional parliament.  A PD-led leftist coalition, headed by Anna Finocchiaro, won just 29 seats at 30.4% of the vote.  The vast majority of the seats (80) will be chosen by proportional representation, with a 5% threshold for winning seats; an additional 10 members are elected with a block-voting system.

In today’s regional elections, though, there are five coalitions/parties, each fielding its own candidate for regional president — polls are hard to come by, but it’s a bit of a free-for-all.

Near the top of the polls is the PdL coalition, headed by Sebastiano ‘Nello’ Musumeci.  Musumeci, a member of the European Parliament, is himself a member of a small autonomist right-wing party in Sicily, Alleanza Siciliana (Sicilian Alliance), having his roots in the now-defunct National Alliance, a stridently right-wing party which had neofascist roots.  Although he’s not actually a member of the PdL, a broad win for Musumeci would bolster the PdL nonetheless and, in particular, boost Alfano’s chances of leading the PdL into the next elections — despite record-low polling for the PdL nationally, Alfano would be attempting to become Italy’s first Sicilian prime minister since Mario Scelba led the Italian government from 1954 to 1955.

Also at the top of the tolls is Crocetta’s PD-led coalition (also supported by the UdC).  Crocetta’s election would be historic in at least two ways.   Continue reading Today’s Sicilian elections showcase potential party strength before 2013 Italian election →

Italy

Is Italy headed into a post-Berlusconi ‘third republic’ era of national politics?

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Silvio Berlusconi this week all but conceded that he would not run as the main center-right candidate for prime minister in Italy’s upcoming elections, due to be held before April 2013 — and he even hinted he could support a moderate coalition in favor of continuing the economic reforms of current technocratic prime minister Mario Monti (pictured above).

I’m not convinced this is the last we’ve heard from Il Cavaliere, though, and I’m pretty sure this isn’t his last word on whether he’ll run in 2013.

Berlusconi has been the central figure of Italian politics since 1994, so if he changes his mind tomorrow, or next month, or next year, he has sufficient money and control over Italian media to play a huge role in the upcoming election.  Current polls indicate, however, that most Italians are ready to turn the page on Berlusconi.

Many political scientists and Italians alike consider the period from 1945 to around 1993 Italy’s ‘first republic’ — a period where Italy’s Christian Democratic party (and various allies) essentially controlled the government continuously, through less-than-stable coalitions that often split and re-formed in various permutations of the center-right and center-left.  Despite consistently strong opposition from Italy’s Communists, the Communists never had enough strength — or were permitted to gather enough strength — to enter government.

After the Tangentopoli (‘Bribesville’) scandal that implicated essentially every major politician in Italian public life in the 1990s, Italy entered its ‘second republic’ — an era that’s been dominated by Berlusconi and has featured somewhat more stability — Italian politics since the 1994 general election can be seen as a struggle between a largely rightist coalition and another largely leftist coalition (despite Italy’s reputation for pizza topping politics).  Governments have been more stable, but media freedom has in some ways regressed, in large part due to Berlusconi’s overweening control of private (and sometimes public) media in Italy.

If Berlusconi indeed remains on the sidelines in the upcoming election, however, we could see a tectonic shift in Italian politics that represents yet another era — a new ‘third republic’ — one where Italy continues to develop even more engrained democratic norms and stronger liberal freedoms.  Even if that somewhat overstates the case, 2013 is set to become as much a transformative year in Italian politics as 1994.  What’s striking is that, no more than six months before the next general election, what we know about the future of Italian politics is massively outweighed by what we don’t.

The latest poll, as of October 9 from Ipsos, currently shows Berlusconi’s center-right Il Popolo della Libertà (PdL, the People of Freedom) winning just 18.0% of the vote, to 28.5% for Italy’s main center-left party, the Partito Democratico (PD, Democratic Party) and the Movimento 5 Stelle (M5S, the Five-Star Movement), a populist protest vehicle of popular comedian and blogger Beppe Grillo, with 17.4%. Those numbers, however, are very likely to change between now and the election.

At the risk of dumping a laundry list of minor parties at my readers, it’s important to note the other actors in Italian politics and where they stand:

  • the rump of Italy’s once-dominant Christian Democrats, led by the highly respected Pier Ferdinando Casini, the Unione di Centro (UdC, Union of the Centre) wins 6.4%;
  • the centrist, anti-corruption Italia dei Valori (IdV, Italy of Values) of former Tangentopoli prosecutor Antonio Di Pietro wins 6.0%;
  • the socialist Sinistra Ecologia Libertà (SEL, Left Ecology Freedom) of the popular — and openly gay — president of Puglia, Nichi Vendola, wins 5.6%;
  • the separatist Lega Nord (LN, Northern League), under the new leadership of Roberto Maroni following a corruption scandal involving former longtime leader Umberto Bossi, wins just 4.9%;
  • no other party wins more than 3% of the vote — the most notable of the smaller parties is the newly-formed free-market liberal Futuro e Libertà (FLI, Future and Freedom) of former foreign minister Gianfranco Fini, a former Berlusconi ally who once headed the neofascist National Alliance party (although he worked to move it from the fringes to the center).

With all of that in mind, consider exactly everything we don’t know about an election ostensibly just six months away: Continue reading Is Italy headed into a post-Berlusconi ‘third republic’ era of national politics? →