By YURII COLOMBO
THE BILLIONAIRE tycoon Silvio Berlusconi and his allies have triumphed in a general election in Italy. The election has spectacularly changed the political landscape of Italy; for the first time in since the end of the Second World War, socialist and communist representatives are now out of parliament. Only two years after the rise of the center-Left Prodi government, the center-Right has had its revenge.
There have been several developments in the past two years that prepared the earthquake of April 13–14, 2008.
The Prodi government was supported not only by Left Democrats (ex-communists) and the Daisy (ex-left Christian Democratic party), but also by the Left—the old Communist Party, the Greens, and Rifondazione Comunista (Communist Refoundation), a party of former communist dissidents founded in 1991. Only a few years ago, Rifondazione played a very significant role in the anti-globalization movement and was claimed by many on the left internationally to be the model of a new kind of left-wing party suited for the twenty-first century. Rifondazione led the 2001 anti-G8 mobilization in Genoa and helped build the network of social forums all over the Europe.
During his two years of government, Prodi was very unpopular. The center-Left developed a politics of tax cuts for the bosses, and promoted—with the support of the unions—“welfare reform,” i.e., a cut in the pensions. Prodi’s policies produced worsening living standard not only for the working class but also for the white-collar middle class. The Italian Institute of Statistics forecast for 2008 is that Italian GDP will increase only by 0.3 percent and 2009 will be a year of recession. According to polls, 40 percent of the population now describes itself as impoverished.
Rifondazione not only supported the social politics of Prodi’s government, but also backed Prodi’s aggressive foreign policy—his support for military intervention in Lebanon and Afghanistan, and the increase in Italy’s military budget.
When a senator of Rifondazione, Franco Turigliatto, decided to vote against the foreign policy of the ruling coalition, he was expelled from Rifondazione. It is therefore not surprising that in the past two years many branches of the party have shut down and many members have quit the party, whose membership has fallen from 100,000 to 60,000. Two left-wing tendencies inside Rifondazione have split away and formed two different organizations: Critical Left (the Italian section of United Secretariat of Fourth International) and the Workers Communist Party (the Italian section of Argentine Trotskyist Partido Obrero tendency).
Profound political changes are not only affecting the Left. A year ago there was a fusion of the Left Democrats and the Daisy that produced an American-style Democratic Party (the slogan of the electoral campaign 2008 was “yes, we can”), with Walter Veltroni—the ex-communist mayor of Rome—as its leader. On the right we have witnessed the birth of the House of Freedoms party with the fusion of Berlusconi’s Forward Italy and the far-right, ex-fascist National Alliance.
Fausto Bertinotti (a former leader of Rifondazione), sought to “fill the vacuum on the left” with the creation of a new political coalition with the Greens, the Italian Communists, and a little tendency of Left Democrats that has not adhered to the Democratic Party, in a new “political plural subject” called the Rainbow Left.
After the fall of Prodi’s government in January 2007, the ensuing electoral campaign was a typical two-party American campaign, where the programmatic differences were slight, as many commentators noted. Both the Democrats and the Berlusconians promised a tax cut for families and corporations, to combat crime and illegal immigration, and to promote a new role for Italy overseas.
The collapse of the Left vote makes the election unprecedented. The right-wing coalition won 46.81 percent of the vote in comparison with 37.54 percent for the Democratic Party. The racist and populist Northern League won 8.3 percent (double its 2006 vote). Among the minor parties, the Union of Christian and Center Democrats won 5.62 percent, and the Rainbow Left’s vote plummeted to 3.08 percent (against 10.2 percent in 2006). Most significantly, for the first time since the Second World War, the Communist Left is out of parliament.
The crash of the Rainbow Coalition has been quite spectacular: in two years it lost more than 2.8 million votes. In the industrial districts of the north of the country there was a clear shift by working-class voters from the Left to the Northern League. The influential newspaper Il Corriere della Sera went so far as to describe the Northern League as the new “workers’ party”:
The Northern League outstripped the Rainbow Left at Valdagno by 30 percent to 2.1 percent—a town where forty years ago rioters pulled down the statue of industrialist Count Gaetano Marzotto. The League also eclipsed the Left in Schio, with its Lanerossi factories, by 25 percent to 2.6 percent, and destroyed it at Arzignano, where the mayor is Center-Left, by 37 percent to 1.5 percent. The Left was annihilated in the two blue-collar towns of Chiampo (41 percent to 0.9 percent) and San Pietro Mussolino, where the local electorate, largely made up of factory workers and their families, gave Umberto Bossi [the leader of the Northern League] an amazing 49.8 percent of the vote and the grouping that somewhat presumptuously calls itself the “only Left” a miserable 0.6 percent.
The far Left—the Workers’ Communist Party and Critical Left—were only able to attract a minority of the ex-Rifondazione voters—who in the main either abstained or voted for the Northern League. Their combined vote totaled some 350,000, or 1 percent of the vote.
This election amounts to an electoral earthquake for the Left that will produce further fragmentation and despair—but also the possibility of building a new anticapitalist Left that understands the dead-end of reformist solutions to the crisis facing Italy.
Yurii Colombo is a socialist living in Milan, Italy.
