Centre-left win masks Italian social crisis
By Franco Turigliatto and Dick Nichols
TURIN — At the end of a long election campaign, the Olive Tree, the centre-left alliance led by former state industry boss Romano Prodi with the Democratic Party of the Left (PDS, ex-Communist Party of Italy) as its backbone, succeeded in defeating the right-wing Freedom Pole of millionaire media baron Silvio Berlusconi.
The Olive Tree and supporters won a narrow majority in the Senate, but will need to rely on the support of Party of Communist Refoundation (PRC) MPs in the Chamber of Deputies. The electoral gain of Communist Refoundation is one of the main features of the poll.
The project of Berlusconi and Gianfranco Fini, leader of the neo-fascist National Alliance (AN) — to establish a strong authoritarian right-wing government — has failed, removing the immediate danger that this would have meant for Italian society and the very operation of democracy.
However, the political contest also resurrected the Northern League of Umberto Bossi. Running without partners, the league, which many polls and political analysts had given up for dead, obtained more than 10% nationally, establishing itself as the main party in the north.
The centre-left won, after a poor start to its election campaign, thanks to interrelated factors.
Many sectors, aware of the seriousness of the threat represented by a possible Berlusconi-Fini government, ended up voting for the lesser evil of "recycled and unpresentable" candidates of the Olive Tree.
The centre-left managed to present itself as the defender of the welfare state against the savage free-market right, even though the welfare state occupies a tiny space in the centre-left's own program.
Important sections of the ruling class, confident of their capacity to draw the centre-left more towards the centre, supported Prodi out of fear of the social polarisation a right government would provoke.
The success of the moderate components of the Olive Tree (such as Italian Renewal of outgoing Prime Minister Lamberto Dini and the Italian People's Party of Gerardo Bianco) expressed this trend.
However, the centre-left would not have got home, were it not for the PRC tactic of not opposing centre-left candidates in the first-past-the-post seats that account for about 75% of MPs. This approach was based on the view that the most important immediate job was to stop the authoritarian right wing.
Winners and losers
Although the PDS of Massimo D'Alema is now the biggest party in parliament, it gained only 40,000 votes more than in the 1994 poll, falling well short of predictions. Ex-Christian Democrats picked up roughly a third of all Olive Tree seats.
The Greens suffered a sharp setback, winning only 2.5% of the vote (below the 4% threshold in the seats elected by proportional representation), and obtaining their 28 MPs only thanks to participating in Olive Tree lists in first-past-the-post seats.
Within the Freedom Pole, Berlusconi's Forza Italia maintained its lead over the National Alliance. However, beset by scandals and under pressure from rivals, the media magnate needed to get back into government. This failure marks the beginning of his decline.
Fini had trouble in disassociating AN from the ultra-free market image of Forza Italia, which frustrated his attempts to expand AN's mass base with a populist and "social" rhetoric. In the North, AN made no headway against the Northern League. In the South, in Lazio, and in other regions, AN consolidated its position, and it would be completely wrong to believe that the Fini danger is now passed.
The Northern League again succeeded in winning broad sectors of the small and middle bourgeoisie in the north, but it has also made gains among some of the least politically conscious workers. While in retreat in cities like Milan and Turin, it has advanced in the medium-sized cities and in the countryside. A sizeable section of the swinging vote went to the league at the last moment.
The league carried out a violently reactionary and "anti-system" campaign against what Bossi calls "Rome's colonial domination of the north", and managed to turn to its advantage the tax revolt originally launched by the Freedom Pole.
No end to crisis
Social discontent is very strong, and the supposed willingness of Prodi and his incoming government to respond to it positively is a total fantasy.
The centre-left has won a political victory, but, looking at the result from a social point of view, the country has not turned to the left. Only the split between the Northern League and the Pole allowed a centre-left victory.
More generally, the elections don't put an end to the long social and political crisis, but represent a new stage in it. The government majority is rather narrow and, as far as capital and the leaders of the Olive Tree themselves are concerned, too dependent on Communist Refoundation.
Both D'Alema and Prodi, as well as the leaders of the Confindustria (the Italian equivalent of the Business Council of Australia), have already begun a twin-track strategy, on one hand inviting the PRC to be "serious" and "reasonable", on the other putting out feelers towards the Northern League.
Everyone is thinking of the broadest possible alliances in a period when Italy faces the application of the anti-popular measures needed to satisfy the famous Maastricht criteria.
Italy's ruling elites have also drawn the lessons of 1994, when Berlusconi's frontal attack on the workers and the unions provoked a bigger fight back than that of France in 1995. A gradual application of austerity managed by a centre-left government supported by the trade union bureaucracy remains the safest bet for capital, an option with which Green Left readers will be very familiar!
Refoundation
Communist Refoundation has enjoyed a major boost, the result of a strong and grassroots election campaign denouncing neo-liberal policies and defending the rights and living standards of the working and popular masses.
The PRC proposed the reintroduction of full wage indexation, the reduction of the working week with no loss in pay, the development and modernisation of the welfare state and a program of socially useful public works, all funded out of taxes on profits and other non-wage income.
The PRC vote went from 6 to 8.6%, reaching 3,216,000 votes — 872,000 more than in 1994. The party has consolidated its position on a national scale, obtaining its best results in some regions of central Italy and in a number of core working-class centres like Turin, Genoa and Venice-Mestre, with above average results in Rome and Naples.
Moreover, the PRC support base has shown itself to be the most solid and least liable to desert to other parties. Most importantly, a significant slice of the old PDS base voted PRC at this poll.
The PRC parliamentarians are now the determining factor for the formation of a centre-left government, placing complex tactical and political problems in the lap of the party, given its deep programmatic differences with the Olive Tree. Secretary Fausto Bertinotti repeated the position of the party immediately after the poll: the PRC will not oppose the formation of a centre-left government, but it will defend its own positions and seek to build a broad support for these.
Immediately after the poll Bertinotti challenged Prodi to provide a sign of good faith to the electorate by reintroducing full wage indexation. This fell on deaf ears.