Stella Tang

The recent Italian elections take the temperature of the current political dialectic in Europe. One marked by the emergence of a reactionary discourse of security, the crisis of the left, and the eradication of political struggle. Here we go again. Berlusconi comes back to power with an overwhelming parliamentary majority and nearly 3.5 million votes ahead of the opposition led by Walter Veltroni.

A mixture of incredulity, contempt, and worry for the country’s future accompanies virtually all commentaries in reputable papers such as the FT, The Economist, or the Wall Street Journal. Bu it would be foolish to limit the reach of Berlusconi’s victory to the Italian reality, merely interpreting it as the expression of a country in profound social crisis unable or unwilling to cope with the challenges of globalisation. Berlusconi is the overblown, even farcical representation of a profound malaise in contemporary democracies. The keyword of the past elections is a word that finds echoes in virtually every other European capital: “security”.

This is clearly expressed in a boom in votes for the party of the Lega Nord, which only runs in Italy’s prosperous Northern regions, with an election campaign marked by vociferous attacks on the centralised state, accused of draining resources from the richest areas to the benefit of the backwards South, and a violent demonisation of the migrant population, “stealing jobs” from Italian citizens. As in the competing regions of Spain or Belgium, as in the increased animosity between settled and migrant populations in the Netherlands, the particularisation of interest and the collapse of solidarity is a growing characteristic of the European political landscape. In the European year of inter-cultural dialogue, “identity” and “community” become new buzzwords, pitted against the foreign and its herald, the foreigner, as a ready-made cure for the evils of an increasingly turbulent globe.

At the beginning of the twentieth century proto-fascist thinker Julius Evola first approached the community as an organic whole to be protected against contamination, preserved against disintegration and corruption, and cared for against threats of decadence. Today, in the name of community, ministers of the Lega Nord walk pigs to defecate on the future site of a mosque, wear t-shirts with the offensive Islamic cartoons on prime-time TV, argue that “mice are easier to exterminate than gypsies, because they are smaller”. In the name of community the recently elected post-fascist mayor of Rome, Gianni Alemanno, has promised the deportation of 20,000 Romanians from the city. In the name of community a group of his supporters have attacked a nomad camp at the outskirts of the city. But there is an inescapable and frightful conclusion: this is what the majority of the people have voted for.

The most telling result to have come out of these elections is that workers, the long-established stronghold of the Italian Communist Party “inherited” by the new social-democratic formations, seem to have deserted their traditional basis. Faced with increased impoverishment in the global competition of labour they have supported the right wing coalition en masse: 48% of the votes, with a steep rise for the Lega Nord. There is something very telling here: the “losers” of globalisation, the disenfranchised lower classes whose lifestyle is being eroded by inflation and job insecurity, no longer find a clear political representation in the form of left-wing, socialist or communist-oriented parties. And the vacuum of representation is being filled by reactionary and regressive formations offering a clearly identifiable enemy against whom to vent one’s resentment (the migrant) and a clearly comprehensible solution: barriers.

Both economic, as in the tariffs against China or India often advocated by future finance minister Giulio Tremoni, and social, with a tough new stance on migration, a return to “order and morality” in the form of heightened police surveillance, criminalisation of different lifestyles (homosexuals, single mothers, divorced, etc.), and the hegemony of the catholic family. A Polish route for Italy? The left-wing or progressive groups bear an enormous responsibility. By joining the game of political normalisation, with its devaluation of the political in favour of the administrative, the rejection of the dialectical and of the oppositional in favour of the consensual and the technocratic, they have turned their back to the struggle for the political emancipation of all citizens and their right to economic and social dignity. Berlusconi’s return to power is likely to hinder even further the emergence of any meaningful and alternative political dialectic in the country.

The Italian parliament that came out of these elections is arguably the only continental-European assembly where no groups directly referring back to either socialism or communism are represented. The disaster of the left-wing formations has been shattering – from over 10% of the votes to exclusion from both the Senate and the Chamber of Deputies. The result is that only two major formations are represented: Berlusconi’s own and Walter Veltroni’s post-communist, post-socialist, post-leftist Partito Democratico (PD). While the political development of the young PD, founded a mere six months ago, still calls for the benefit of doubt, the current situation seems to represent a profound shift to the right of national political discourse. But there is more.

For as long as the “radical” fights of the opposition of the PD are focussed on containing the sprawling power of Berlusconi and his control over the country’s media, the secessionists and xenophobic rants of the Lega Nord party, the economically disastrous policies of finance minister Giulio Tremonti, we are faced with an opposition whose main prospect is militating for the normalisation of the country. There is a profound political risk in this dialectic: the moment the Italian “left” takes as its main objective to return the country to the European mainstream, understood as a mixture of well-functioning democratic public sphere and efficient market-led development, the future of Italy is reduced to the present of Christian-democratic Germany.

The curtain draws on political innovation, taking current hegemonic “consensus” as the sought-after object of desire. This is bad news for Italy: a society where the progressive groups merely try to “catch up” with the centre is one we usually associate with peripheral countries, not with what still today is the sixth world economy. But this is also bad news for Europe: by reducing parliamentary struggle to a quest for normalisation today’s Italy seems to confirm the disappearance of serious political alternatives at the core of contemporary democracies, validating the flattening of the opposition between “left” and “right” in favour of a technocratic problem-solving machine. We are in the home ground of Giddens and Beck. The only rational solution (represented by the PD) against archaic longings failing to stand up to the new paradigm of globalisation (with the odd couple of Berlusconi and the Communist factions in the role of the cavemen).

But the Italian elections tell us more – the technocratic problem-solving machine emerges as a fragile toy, producing a “surplus” of unrepresented social classes vulnerable to the siren’s call of the new populists. Italy’s historical role in the construction of the European Union has been of fundamental importance. From the visionary writings of Altiero Spinelli to the impetus of Alcide De Gasperi in the immediate after war, from the historical decision of the Italian Communist Party, Europe’s largest, to take an active European stance, to the torch-bearing in the 1980s for closer economic and political integration [see next article]. But today Italian pro-Europeanism seems to lack the power to propose a fully articulated conception of a united Europe, resting content with the keyword of “integration” as a good in itself. Berlusconi’s victory is likely to further promote this tendency.

Not only because Berlusconi’s European credentials are minimal, but because for the opposition forces Europe is no longer a utopia to be constructed but a mere status quo to aspire to.