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The rise of Berlusconi
While electoral reforms failed to produce the desired political stability after 1993, they nevertheless helped transform Italy’s political landscape from one of multiple national parties that formed shifting parliamentary coalitions to one of parties, often with a distinct regional basis, that formed electoral coalitions, which then often failed to withstand the rigors of parliamentary cooperation.
In the north, and especially in the Veneto and Lombardy, local or regional “leagues” had developed in the early 1980s to protest corrupt party rule by the central government in Rome, as well as high taxes, poor public services, organized crime (which they often blamed on southerners), and immigration (especially from Africa but later from Albania). These leagues united in 1991 to form a federation, the Northern League (Lega Nord). In 1992, when numerous Socialist and Christian Democratic leaders were being arrested and the Communists were seeking a new identity after the failure of state socialism in eastern Europe, the Northern League secured almost 20 percent of the northern vote in the parliamentary elections. Later it advocated a new constitution with a federal Italy divided into three autonomous republics that would have separate responsibility for everything except defense, foreign affairs, and monetary policy. The northern part of this system was to be known as “Padania.”
The decline of Italy’s major political parties as a result of the corruption scandals of the early 1990s created a political vacuum. The Northern League filled part of this vacuum, as did the “post-Fascist” National Alliance led by Gianfranco Fini, which in Rome and the mainland south became the party of continuing Italian patriotism as well as of continuing state subsidies and economic interventionism. Above all, the political vacuum was filled early in 1994 by media entrepreneur Berlusconi, who controlled three national commercial television channels, much of the press, and the highly successful A.C. Milan football (soccer) club. Berlusconi hastily founded an ad hoc political association, Forza Italia, with a message of populist anticommunism, and formed an equally ad hoc electoral alliance with the Northern League (in the north) and the AN (in the south). This loose right-wing coalition won a majority of about 50 seats in the Chamber of Deputies (although not in the Senate) in the March 1994 parliamentary election, the first held under the new electoral law.
Berlusconi, who became prime minister, had pledged to cut taxes, lower public spending, decentralize government, and generate a million new jobs. However, the new government—which had neofascist ministers for the first time since World War II, as well as a Northern League interior minister—was just as faction-ridden as previous governments. During huge protests against AN-led inheritance and pension reforms, the trade unions managed to mobilize more than a million people onto the streets of Rome. In July 1994 Berlusconi himself became the subject of anticorruption investigations that he was unable to halt. The allegations weakened Berlusconi’s government, as did his attempts to control the state-owned media, which not only had criticized the government but also competed directly with his privately owned media outlets. Berlusconi promised at various times to sell his television stations or leave them to be managed by a “blind trust,” but they continued to broadcast propaganda in his favor. Finally, in December 1994 the Northern League ended its alliance with Berlusconi, and his government fell.
Shifting power
Once again, President Scalfaro invited a banker to head the government, this time Lamberto Dini, the former chief executive of the Bank of Italy and previously Berlusconi’s treasury minister. In January 1995 Dini formed a government of nonpolitical “technocrats,” supported by the Northern League and by the left-wing parties in parliament (the losers in the 1994 elections). This new government, known on the right as the “turnabout” (ribaltone), reached a long-term agreement on pensions and limited the budget deficit. Dini’s government lasted until the spring of 1996, when President Scalfaro called for new parliamentary elections.
In the period of electoral alliances and unstable governments that followed the collapse of Italy’s party system—a period that became known as the “second republic”—the president assumed a more powerful role. Powers that the parties had previously exercised—such as the decision to dissolve parliament—rested increasingly with the president. Scalfaro adhered to his constitutional responsibilities in times of crisis, but his disquiet with aspects of the new populist right was clear, and he was often accused of favoring the center-left at key moments.
Like the right-wing parties, a group of left-wing parties including the PDS had formed an electoral alliance. After the failure of this alliance in the 1994 elections, Massimo d’Alema assumed leadership of the PDS and began to build alliances with the center. In 1995 Romano Prodi, a former Christian Democratic minister and former head of IRI, proposed to lead a new center-left alliance known as L’Ulivo (“the Olive Tree”). Promising to enable Italy to adopt the euro and to reform the bureaucracy and civil service, Prodi won the support of the PDS and the other major left and center parties. With a few exceptions, such as Milan, the left managed to take control of most important city governments in the 1990s. Some of these cities proved to be important laboratories of stable government and reform, including Venice under Massimo Cacciari, Rome under the Green Party’s Francesco Rutelli, and Naples under Antonio Bassolino.
Meanwhile, the bitterness inspired by Northern League leader Umberto Bossi’s “betrayal” of Berlusconi in 1994 kept the right divided in the north. Berlusconi went into the 1996 elections supported by some smaller Catholic parties and the AN but without the support of the Northern League, which did better than expected in the north. Encouraged by these results, the Northern League issued a symbolic declaration of independence for the northern “Republic of Padania.” However, polls showed that the vast majority of the league’s voters did not want complete separation, and the league, without the media power of Berlusconi behind it, began to lose ground.
At the same time, the division on the right in 1996 allowed the Olive Tree to win a surprise victory, and Prodi assumed the premiership. However, the Olive Tree coalition’s small majority in the lower house made it dependent on the cooperation of the Refounded Communists (the PRC). In October 1998 PRC dissatisfaction led to a narrow defeat in a confidence vote that forced Prodi to resign. D’Alema, leader of the Democrats of the Left (Democratici di Sinistra; DS), as the PDS had renamed itself, assembled a working majority and became prime minister.
D’Alema’s government continued the fiscal discipline of Prodi’s administration but with less conviction and under continual pressure from various allies. It remained unpopular in the country, while on the right the division and resentments of 1994 were beginning to subside. A new law regulated television time for all parties, but nothing was done about opposition leader Berlusconi’s huge media advantage. The left began to hemorrhage votes and, in a highly symbolic defeat, even lost “red Bologna” in 1999 to the center-right after 50 years of communist city governments. Another heavy defeat followed in the European elections. D’Alema limped on until April 2000, when a new electoral alliance between Berlusconi, the Northern League, and the AN crushed the center-left in regional elections. D’Alema resigned, and Giuliano Amato assumed leadership of a further weakened center-left government, which fell in 2001 when Berlusconi led his center-right coalition back into power and began his second tenure as prime minister, one of the longest in recent history.
In the contentious and close elections of 2006, Prodi returned to the national spotlight to lead his center-left coalition against Berlusconi, whom he replaced as prime minister. Just 20 months later, in January 2008, Prodi lost a vote of confidence in the Senate and resigned once again. Italian Pres. Giorgio Napolitano called for the formation of an interim government, charged with revising the country’s problematic electoral law that had been pushed through parliament by Berlusconi just months before the 2006 elections. Many cited the law, which overturned changes to the electoral system made in the 1990s, as the reason for Prodi’s downfall. Attempts to form an interim government failed, however, and Napolitano dissolved parliament in February. In the national elections held in April, Berlusconi—heading a new party known as the People of Freedom (Popolo della Libertà; PdL)—clinched a third term as prime minister.
Martin Clark John Foot