A Second Italian Republic?
Article Summary and Author Biography
"The first Italian republic is all but dead... anti-communism was the only reason why the Italian people tolerated it. As soon as they were able to junk the systems safely, they set about the task with gusto... Much more difficult to foresee is the process by which Italians will tackle the vested interests and habits that the first republic will leave behind".
Angelo Codevilla is a Senior Research Fellow at the Hoover Institution. His next book is entitled Governments and Consequences.
Politics in Italy has changed less in recent decades than in any other Western nation. Now, however, major changes, if not a brand new constitutional order, are under way. On June 10, 1991, Italian voters approved a referendum to make a marginal change in the country’s electoral law. Approved by 95.6 percent, against the strenuous opposition of the country’s political establishment, the referendum was the equivalent of a small hole in an earthen dam: it allowed the near unanimous outpouring of the Italian people’s pent?up sentiments against the political parties that have ruled the country in a kind of oligopoly since 1944.
After that vote Italy’s powerful parties tried to preempt serious institutional changes by proposing reforms to strengthen the system. But the issue of reform escaped the parties’ control and dominated the campaign for the general elections of April 5, 1992. The election results weakened the parties’ capacity to resist changes that would drastically reduce their influence. The system is not likely to survive the massive, open iconoclasm that has spread from the general population to the political class itself.
II
The central fact of contemporary Italian political life is that it is dominated by party organizations and that the people have never had a chance to say no.
The parties’ oligopoly actually began in 1919 when parliament scrapped the traditional single?member?district electoral system (such as exists in the United States and France) and instituted proportional representation. Ever since 1892 the Italian Socialist Party had bound its parliamentary members to vote as directed by party leaders. The inchoate Liberal majority in the Italian parliament, struggling to build governing coalitions against the disciplined bloc?voting Socialists, hoped that proportional representation would bring discipline to its own ranks. In a contest that hinged on discipline, however, victory went to Benito Mussolini’s Fascists, an even more disciplined offshoot of the Socialist Party. Beginning in 1922 the Fascists drove the other parties underground, abroad or into the Vatican. The Fascists also absorbed and expanded most of the socialist and Catholic mass organizations and patronage networks.
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