Italian elections: The right rules the roost as the Rainbow dissolves - PR9

Given the frequency of national polls in Italy – more than 60 since 1945 – one might be slightly cynical about the outcome of still another exercise in bourgeois democracy Italian style, contested by a colourful collection of more than 30 lists across the country.

The election that took place in April appears, however, to have been a watershed. Shameless media tycoon and holiday host of Tony and Cherie Blair, Silvio Berlusconi, was returned as prime minister for the third time at the age of 71 after an absence of two years. As opinion polls had suggested for weeks in advance, Berlusconi’s coalition of the centre and far right holds an absolute majority in both the Italian Senate and the nation’s lower house, the Chamber of Deputies.

For the April election, Berlusconi had repackaged and rebranded his previous vehicle, Forza Italia, as the Popolo della Liberta (People of Freedom). This coalition effectively incorporated the Alleanza Nazionale (AN) the party of Gianfranco Fini, who has dragged the ex-Mussolini acolytes of the MSI into the mainstream of electoral politics. Berlusconi’s big tent was able to accommodate the Mussolini family in the person of Il Duce’s granddaughter, Alessandra.

The People of Freedom lists captured some 38% of the popular vote, and in alliance with Umberto Bossi’s Lega Nord (LN), Berlusconi’s bloc controls 340 of 630 seats in the Chamber of Deputies. This is a result of the electoral law which effectively ensures the single largest bloc at least 55% of the total deputies. On the surface the LN emerged as the big winner, chalking up more than 8% of the popular vote overall and commanding some 70 seats between the Chamber of Deputies and the Senate. The LN has gained posts in the Berlusconi cabinet, including the interior ministry now run by Roberto Moroni. The cabinet also includes the AN’s Ignazio
La Russa as Defence Minister and Mara Carfagna, a former glamour model, turned champion of “family values” as the Minister for Equal Opportunities.

While not a fascist formation, the LN is certainly of the far right. In fact it is far more unabashedly racist than the AN. The campaign it waged had an unrelenting focus on opposition to immigration, and this appears to have been only too attractive to many working class voters. The LN’s vote approached 25% in the Veneto as well as in traditionally working class areas of Lombardy and the Piedmont.

The Democratic Party, a marriage of convenience between one-time Euro-communists and the Margherita formation (largely ex-Christian Democrats) under the vacuous leadership of the former mayor of Rome, Walter Veltroni, came a distant second. La Sinistra Arcobaleno, or Rainbow Left, an alliance of Rifondazione Comunista (PRC) and the Italian Greens, emerged without a single seat in either house of the new parliament. So for the first time in the history of post-war Italy no self-described “communist” will sit in either house of the legislature.

Further evidence of the electorate’s sharp right turn came soon after the general election, as voters in Rome returned AN supporter, Gianni Alemanno, to local office. An agriculture minister in the previous Berlusconi administration, Alemanno joined the fascist MSI and was a co-founder of a hard right faction within the AN. His electoral pledges included the immediate removal from the eternal city of some 20,000 “migrant criminals”. In the wake of his victory jubilant supporters were photographed on the steps of the Rome’s city hall giving the classic Il Duce right-arm fascist salute.

The April poll also sounded the almost certain death knell for the political career of Fausto Bertinotti, who had assumed the role of leader in the Chamber of Deputies after the narrow election win in 2006 scored by the centre-left coalition headed by Romano Prodi. For 12 years prior to this role in the Italian lower house, Bertinotti had been the charismatic leader of PRC, a left split that emerged from the post-1989 wreckage of the pioneer of Euro-communism, the PCI.

Bertinotti, who recently turned 68, cut his teeth in the unions, becoming a leading figure in the CGIL confederation before entering party politics. A silver-tongued orator, Bertinotti oversaw the PRC’s entry into the first Prodi-led government in the mid-90s before eventually triggering its fall in 1998. For a time he was a darling of the anti-globalisation circuit at the European Social Forums, while much of the English-speaking far left saw in the PRC a model for a successful broad formation to the left of social democracy. He even appeared at a 2001 London conference organised by the Socialist Alliance at a time when both the SWP and Socialist Party were still in it.

Bertinotti has now fallen on his sword, while the man who succeeded him as party general secretary, Franco Giordano, has been shown the door. An emergency PRC conference is due in July and a split, possibly three ways, looks all but certain.

The past two years in government had wrought considerable harm to the image and reputation of the PRC, which was the leading component of the Rainbow Left, a loose coalition that also embraced the Italian Greens but excluded most if not all of the Trotskyist left. The PRC and its partners gained little more than 3% of the popular vote, compared to 5.8% just two years before for the PRC on its own. Its three component parts went from a little over 10% of the 2006 vote to barely more than 3%, in the process losing all of nearly 110 seats they previously held in the Chamber of Deputies and the Senate.

Three organisations laying claim to the Trotskyist tradition had either been expelled from the PRC or left over its behaviour in the Prodi coalition. The largest of these, Sinistra Critica, which aligns itself with the United Secretariat of the Fourth International, stood candidates on a distinct slate for the first time, and captured nearly 167,000 votes (or 0.6% of the total poll). The Communist Workers Party, led by Marco Ferrando and associated with the Morenoite “international”, based in Argentina, gained a somewhat higher poll with a more explicit appeal to working class militants as opposed to Sinistra Critica’s soft focus stance against capitalist globalisation.

So why did the Rainbow Left fare so badly? While a small proportion of its support presumably went to the various Trotskyist lists, others fled to Veltroni’s Democrats in the forlorn hope of stopping the Berlusconi bandwagon. Perhaps of greatest significance, however, was an increase in abstention. While still very high by British standards with around 80% of the electorate participating, the turnout fell by some 4% when compared with 2006. Initial analyses suggest that abstention rates rose particularly among younger voters, where the PRC and Greens had developed a significant base of support in recent years.

The explanation for young voters’ abstention lies in the reality of the PRC’s performance in the coalition. First Bertinotti and co failed to challenge the neo-liberal trajectory of Prodi’s counter-reforms, including an increase in the retirement age. The PRC leadership also capitulated over the question of Italy’s continued role in the occupation of Afghanistan. The supposedly principled opponent of imperialist wars insisted that his elected parliamentarians back the Prodi coalition’s commitment to keeping Italian troops in the war-ravaged country. In stark contrast to thousands of its members who demonstrated their opposition, the PRC parliamentarians failed to oppose the extension of the US/NATO air base at Vicenza.

For those leftists in Italy itself and elsewhere in Europe who saw the PRC as a beacon for future developments in their own countries, the party’s decisive defeat must give pause for serious reflection. It challenges the strategy of “broad left” formations with their focus on unaccountable “charismatic” leaders, their downplaying of the ideological battle within the working class’ base organisations, and the adherence to a parliamentary road to socialism.

Since the election migrant workers have already faced intensified attacks from the Italian state. Further legislation against migration is now a top priority for Berlusconi’s administration; meanwhile, large-scale round-ups of alleged “illegals” have begun, with some 400 arrested in mid-May. Of these 53 were summarily deported and a further 65 placed in detention centres. And the government is promising new detention centres, with the prospect of migrants being held in custody for 18 months, a proposal also peddled by French president Nicolas Sarkozy.

The Roma population has already come under physical attack in Naples with a latter-day lynch mob torching a Roma encampment in Ponticelli on the city’s impoverished outskirts. It was the culmination of two nights of violence against Roma, sparked by a rumour of a 16-year-old attempting to abduct a baby. Rioters threw Molotov cocktails into another two Roma camps. Though Naples is outside the Lega Nord’s historic sphere of influence, the LN’s historic leader, Umberto Bossi, effectively gave his public blessing to the violence in Naples.

On a positive note, thousands took to Verona’s streets to protest against the attacks on the Roma, many of them Italian citizens, and on migrants more generally. Naples, however, seems immersed in a bitter “Guerra fra poveri” (war among the poor) associated with a still unresolved crisis over refuse and toxic waste disposal that has benefited the bosses of the city’s notorious Camorra.

There are likely to be other attacks on social gains for the most oppressed in Italy. Severely limited abortion rights will be in jeopardy and a homophobic backlash is likely to be another feature of the coming period.

Members of the main CGIL federation and the militants of the alternative COBAS (committees of the base) will need to prepare for a much sharper employers’ offensive over the coming weeks and months. There is a real possibility that the Berlusconi regime will press ahead with aggressive moves to restructure Italian capitalism in an attempt to restore a competitive position.

This has declined drastically in the last decade, with Spain’s per capita GDP now outstripping that of Italy. Growth was an anaemic 0.6% in 2007 and sections of the working and middle classes have still not recovered from the inflationary impact of the Euro’s introduction at the start of the decade.

The head of the main Italian employers’ federation, Luca
de Montezmolo, has issued a virtual declaration of war against the unions, which he branded as an “unrepresentative caste”. Perversely, a restraining influence on Berlusconi may for now at least come from the LN, which has sought to cultivate a working class base in its northern strongholds.

There is undoubtedly a great deal of fight left in the Italian working class, which has yet to suffer a strategic defeat at the hands of the bosses. But the working class enters coming battles disorientated and rudderless. Having just ditched one historic mis-leadership, embodied in Bertinotti, there is no obvious replacement on the horizon. Italian revolutionaries have entered into a period less turbulent than the late 1960 and 70s, but one fraught with dangers. There is an urgent need to combat racism both ideologically and physically, while at the same time preparing for a sustained wave of resistance to intensified attacks on migrants and the workers’ movement.

For a jaundiced but informative account of the scale of the left’s defeat:

For an interview in French with one of the leading figures of Sinistra Critica, Lidio Cirillo, see:

http://www.alencontre.org/Italie/ ItalieBilanElect04_08.html

Sat 04, October 2008 @ 13:01