Month: January 2020

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 by Daniele Albertazzi (PiAP Principal Investigator) & Davide Pellegrino (University of Torino) – Originally published by The Conversation

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A regional election in northern Italy has delivered a blow to populist right-wing figure Matteo Salvini. But while the center-left candidate in the elections for the Emilia-Romagna region saw off the populist threat – with the help of a grassroots campaign movement called The Sardines – his party’s national government looks far from secure.

Stefano Bonaccini’s re-election as the governor of Emilia-Romagna matters because it has given hope that the erosion of the left’s traditional dominance of local politics in the four central regions once known as the red belt — Tuscany, Umbria, the Marches and Emilia-Romagna — is not unstoppable.

Emilia-Romagna is the richest, most populous and, historically, also the most solidly left-wing area in the red belt. But the right-wing League has been growing in popularity in the area, especially since Salvini took over the party in 2013.

He saw this regional election as a golden opportunity to bring down the government – a fragile coalition between the center-left Democratic Party (PD) and the anti-establishment Five Star Movement (M5S). The latter had been in national government with Salvini until their partnership collapsed in 2019 and many see the new arrangement as being geared more towards keeping Salvini away from power rather than providing a functioning administration.

Salvini therefore sought to turn this regional election into a test of whether the national government enjoyed the confidence of the electorate. A right-wing victory would have set off a campaign to force the governing parties to stand down and hold a general election.

The League has become increasingly popular in Emilia-Romagna, while the incumbent PD has been shrinking, so the vote was considered winnable by Salvini and his supporters. Pre-election polls showed the race between Bonaccini, the PD-backed candidate for the governorship, and Lucia Borgonzoni, the League’s candidate, was in fact very tight.

Sardines Against Salvini

Salvini ran a polarizing campaign, which in turn sparked a new grassroots movement on the left called the Sardines. This group was started by ordinary citizens opposed to the radicalism of Salvini’s League.

Turnout was 67.7% in this regional election – a significant increase on 2014, when just 37.7% of eligible voters took part. This mirrors recent events in Austria, Germany, the Netherlands, Switzerland, and Spain, where the possibility of an electoral victory for a populist radical right-party has increased interest in politics and boosted participation.

But Bonaccini’s success appears heavily tied to his personal appeal. He himself is considerably more popular than the coalition of parties that backed his election. Meanwhile, the PD’s ally in government, the M5S, has almost disappeared in the region. It shrank to a pitiful 4.7% of the vote, while the League won 32%, similar to its share in the European elections last May. These are all bad signs for the government.

What Now for National Government?

The very poor performance of the M5S in this election, and in the other regional election held on the same day in Calabria), is bound to cause instability for the national government. The party has never done well at local and regional levels but this result, coupled with recent turmoil at the top, will be taken by many as a sign of imminent collapse.

The party’s leader, Luigi Di Maio, recently resigned, unable to command the support of the party as it slumped in the polls since entering government one and a half years ago.

Since 2018, 30 M5S parliamentarians have been fired or have quit to join the League or other groups. More could now follow, which would be deadly for a governing coalition with a very small majority in the Senate.

Even if no one leaves, internal tensions within the M5S may still bring the governing coalition to an end, as more and more Five Star representatives judge its experience in power alongside the left as a failure. Moving to the opposition benches would at least allow the M5S to recover its long-lost “purity” as an anti-establishment party

As for the PD, it is still in search of an identity and an electoral strategy 12 years after having been founded. In Emilia-Romagna, it basically owes its victory to others (particularly the incumbent governor, Bonaccini, and his ability to attract the votes of former M5S supporters).

While it is difficult to say when a general election will happen, it seems unlikely that the governing coalition can hold. The PD’s victory in Emilia-Romagna has bought it a little time, but we do not expect the two governing parties to stick together until the end of the legislature.

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By Mattia Zulianello (PiAP Italy focused Research fellow) – Originally published by the LSE’s European Politics and Policy Blog

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On Wednesday, Luigi Di Maio resigned as leader of Italy’s Five Star Movement (M5S). Why, in contrast to other populist parties, has M5S appears to have imploded while in office?

The Five Star Movement has been characterized as a “valence populist party“. That label has been applied because, M5S is not a “left” or “right” populist party. Instead, it is among those who predominantly, if not exclusively, compete by focusing on non-positional issues such as the fight against corruption, increased transparency, democratic reform, and moral integrity. These parties may adopt specific positions (for example, M5S’s advocacy of a basic income), but their primary and prevailing competitive emphasis is placed on their competence and performance on “valence issues”, achieving goals that are widely shared by voters.

The policy stances of valence populists are informed by an unadulterated conception of populism in which other ideological elements play a marginal or secondary role. Policies are flexible, free-floating, and often inconsistent. While valence populist parties are common in Eastern Europe — an example is ANO 2011 in the Czech Republic — M5S is the only contemporary case of this populist variety in the West.

The M5S originally emerged and remained until 2018 as an anti-system party that rejected cooperation with the other factions in the system. Five Star presented itself as a separate pole in opposition to both the center-right and center-left, declaring that it would only work with other parties on a strict issue-by-issue (and law-by-law) basis. The M5S rejected their legitimacy in the strongest terms, so fully-fledged cooperation was out of the question.

However, anti-system parties often eventually integrate into the system which they previously opposed. This is especially true for populist parties as the “new normal” in European party systems and governments. The integration and legitimation of populist parties can be a long or short process, according to the various incentives of the political system and electoral results, and it is usually accompanied by a series of programmatic and organizational reforms.

The zenith of the integration of populist parties is their entry into national office. In many cases, populist parties are able to survive this, and even to gain votes in subsequent elections. After a first disastrous experience in office (1994), Italy’s Lega benefited over time from a learning process. It now has a long record of government participation and dominates the Italian agenda. According to all polls, the party led by Matteo Salvini is by far the strongest in the country, with support estimated at 32%.

The astonishing success of Salvini is the story, first of all, of a successful process of organization: the centralization of the party machine, a cohesive dominant coalition, the socialization of its activists and elites via value infusion, and the persistence of various structures and purposes of the “old” mass party. The Lega is then capable of acting as a strategic actor well beyond the short term, and converting sudden pressures or shocks — such as the Gregoretti trial over the alleged kidnapping of migrants — into competitive weapons by making them fit its narrative.

In contrast, the crisis that the M5S has experienced since 2018, culminating in Di Maio’s resignation, is the outcome of a failed process of integration by an anti-system party despite organizational reforms and programmatic adaptation before entering office. Although M5S has implemented a form of top-down management through a strictly centralized structure, internal conflict has been a constant: its dominant coalition lacks cohesion, and it lacks the instruments to ensure value infusion among elites and activists. Its public image remains that of a conflict-ridden party.

These problems are the consequence of a flawed organisational project, incapable of effectively absorbing internal conflict. They are also linked to the peculiar nature of the Five Star Movement’s ideological profile. Valence populist parties seek to transcend left and right, and the integration into the coalition game with other parties implies choosing between one of the two sides.

M5S first governed with the right-wing Lega, then with the center-left Democratic Party (PD). While the PD had long been the sworn enemy of Five Star, cooperation between the two parties was not necessarily doomed to failure. In many cases, parties can successfully cooperate after years of reciprocal hostility. However, in the case of M5S, it led to a fiasco.

The absence of mechanisms to absorb internal conflict made it impossible to explain effectively to voters the rationale, expectations, and benefits of M5S’s strategic repositioning. The party failed to articulate a coherent and consistent message, a failure compounded by its organisational chaos.

The nature of a valence populist party is linked to the idea of communicating competence and performance in achieving widely-shared political goals. Five Star did not fulfil this idea.

The outcome is what we see today: a party that lacks a clear direction, is plagued by internal conflict, and is suffering a string of electoral debacles. M5S is learning — or at least should be learning — that agency matters, and parties remain the masters of their own success or failure.