Italian Election Results

Berlusconi wins big

Well, the election is over. The earth has opened and swallowed the hopes of many Italians, most Bolognese (and a few Canadians as well.) The Berlusconi right-wing coalition has won a sizeable majority in both houses of parliament and the country is very definitely moving rightward. The center-right coalition, together with the separatist Northern League (which wants to jetison southern Italy) achieved 47% of the vote, and the center-left coalition of the Democratic Party and Italy of Values Party received 38%

The hot-button issue in this election seems to have been immigration, especially from Eastern Europe and Africa. Indeed, one of the parties in the election had the following exhortation as a background in its posters: "Security, clandestine immigration, family, work, tradition." There is a moral panic in the land. Stories of white Italians murdered, raped, robbed, assaulted by individuals and gangs of "foreigners" (not Canadians, we must add) abound, even from the mouths of otherwise progressive people. Berlusconi himself has been quite coy on the issue. He lets the parties and politicians to the right of him make the more outrageous accusations, but he doesn't disagree, and he is ready to form a governing coalition with them.

An Italian friend of ours, decrying the hysteria over immigration, had an interesting observation. He said that Italians admire the fact that the descendants of Italian emigrants to Canada, US, South America and Australia have kept much of language, food, customs and other ties to the old country for several generations after the departure from Italy. But Italians expect immigrants to THEIR country to abandon all ties to the old country immediately upon arriving here.

Perhaps more interesting than the victory of the right is the fact that parties to the left of the Italian Democratic Party (led by Walter Veltroni) were competely shut out in this election.

Whoever wrote the current Wikipedia entry on the 2008 election had this to say: "With the elimination of the The Left - The Rainbow from the legislature, and the absorption of the other successor parties to the Italian Communist Party into the Democratic Party, this will be the first Italian legislature since World War II to contain no self-identified Communists. This is a remarkable transformation in a country which as recently as the 1980s had the largest non-ruling Communist Party in Europe. Since the Italian Greens chose to align themselves with the far left, they have also been eliminated from the legislature, making Italy one of the few European countries where the Greens have no representation."

Immediately after the election, the Wikipedia article suggested that Veltroni and his associates in the Democratic Party had deliberately decided to lose the election rather than have any kind of coalition with parties farther left. By today, that rash (???) comment had been altered, but what remains says enough: "For the Democratic Party, the strategy of this election was to merge the left-of-center into a single party. Walter Veltroni refused to form a coalition with the far left parties in the interest of longer term party development. His strategy was partly successful — he eliminated competition from the far left — but despite this the new party's share of the vote improved only slightly from its predecessor's performance in the 2006 election, gaining about 2%."

A lot of the people we hang out with here in Bologna are devastated by the results (kind of like Canadians on the victory of Stephen Harper or Americans when George Bush won.) They fear for the already-weak social programs, especially in health, education and welfare. People in the arts and culture, where we are conducting research are also dismayed and fear further cuts to culture budgets and growing privatisation.

Another friend suggests that Italy is now, at its heart, a right-wing rather than a left-wing country (as it has usually been thought of from outside.) Other than in Fiat (which has shrunk considerably) and a few other large employers, Italy is dominated by small to medium-sized businesses and the working class has lost its former oomph. Its trade unions, once the strongest in Europe, have declined.

Italy is a prosperous country now, but it's a country where large-scale poverty was a fact of life within the memory of many here. Thus individualism and fear of losing the good fortune is still quite strong. If a rejection of materialism, or a "post-materialist" orientation (as political scientist Ronald Inglehart suggests) becomes stronger in each succeeding generation after material success, then Italy is markedly behind most of the norther European countries and it may take several decades before this shows up in Italian politics. As historian Paul Ginsborg, in his Italy and its Discontents (if you're interested in Italy, it's a must) says: "...it was clear that that which [Inglehart] called 'cultural shift' was going to be a slow and much contested transition in Italian society."