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Introduction

As an English resident of Rome, I never cease to hear middle-class Italians singing the praises of a ‘normal country’ – Britain. Seen from Italy, ours is a land of efficient bus services, friendly locals offering up trays of tea and cakes, and earnest professionalism in public life. When one recent Italian president came under criticism in a wiretapping scandal, the country’s leading newspaper lamented the absence of the ‘businesslike respect’ that supposedly characterises exchanges in the House of Commons.

This isn’t the only curious model. As Italy prepared to join the eurozone, one leading editor at La Repubblica issued a book entitled Germanizzazione, characterising the single currency as a German takeover – but saying this was a good thing. Mario Monti, who became prime minister in 2011, concurred that if Italy was to become a ‘normal country’ it would require some ‘external bind’ – what he called ‘denying our own selves a little’. What seemed least of all ‘normal’ in such comments was their obsession with foreign models.

Perhaps we should instead question the idea that Italy is really so unusual. Studies of Italian political history often present it as a patchwork of cultural peculiarities, the anomalous result of late national unification and its position on the periphery of Europe. Yet, in the age of Brexit and Donald Trump, the volatility and fragmentation of Italian public life no longer seem unique. Today, its institutional turmoil is rather less a mark of backwardness and more like a vision of our own future.

Former Trump aide Steve Bannon recognised this in October 2018 when he chose to site his populist academy at a monastery near Rome – what he called the ‘centre of the political universe’. He came to Italy to learn from Matteo Salvini, the latest leader to turn the country’s politics upside down. After almost three decades in which democratic institutions have withered, Salvini has not just turned his Lega into an all-Italian force but polarised the entire political field around his nationalist agenda.

The last thirty years of turmoil have, indeed, made volatility the new normal in Italian public life. Its parties change names constantly; leading political personnel are prone to outrageous antics; and Italians love to talk about the idiosyncrasies that supposedly make this country beyond comparison. Yet, underneath the noise and colour is a simpler reality – a major industrialised power, with deep-rooted democratic traditions that has, in recent decades, sunk into profound economic stagnation and political tumult.

Some commentators tell us that things were always like this – that Italy was forever backward and dysfunctional, that it never got over fascism, or that this land of ‘functional illiterates’ has been prey to demagogues ever since Caesar. Yet what is happening today really is new. In the postwar decades, Italy enjoyed such rapid economic growth that it even surpassed British GDP per capita; its anomaly was precisely that it had a permanent party of government as well as the West’s largest Communist Party, in opposition.

Yet, if this was the normality even into the 1980s, today the opposite holds true. The Second Republic inaugurated after the end of the Cold War has instead seen one of Europe’s best-performing economies turn into among the weakest, with dismal investment, withering infrastructure, and around a third of young people neither in work nor study. This shift is also reflected in political turmoil, with no force able to impose itself in an enduring way.

In the 1990s, many insisted that the modernisation of Italy relied on the ‘external bind’ provided by the European project. Italy was, at that point, one of the most federalist countries, seduced by the prospect of becoming a ‘normal country’. Back then, not only the liberal centre-left but the Lega Nord and Silvio Berlusconi held up the EU as a force that would ‘heal’ Italy’s public finances and improve its political culture. Yet, in 2020, Italians’ Euroscepticism today rivals even that of their British counterparts.

Europe can little withstand a mounting climate of Italian disaffection. The third-largest eurozone economy, an Italian default or exit from the single currency would spoke wide-scale turmoil. Yet the necessary relief through debt cancellation would jeopardise the eurozone’s most fundamental dogmas. Both Too Big to Fail and Too Big to Save, Italy is instead condemned to a permanent crisis-management regime, outright collapse forever kicked a few months down the road.

There is little appetite for an open break with the euro. Before the 2018 general election, both the Movimento Cinque Stelle (Five Star Movement; M5S) and the Lega renounced any prospect of leaving the single currency. In recent years, these insurgents have exploited a climate of popular discontent also expressed in Italians’ mounting distrust for Brussels. But this political malaise also entails a general loss of faith in great collective endeavours, preventing even these forces from foreseeing a leap into the dark outside the eurozone.

The extreme volatility in Italian politics has come hand-in-hand with the narrowing of political choice. The theatre of personality and identity intensifies, whereas the prospect of a change of economic priorities is abandoned. If even such insurgents as M5S and the Lega speak not of the collective interests of the Italian people, but only of defending the ‘ordinary citizen’, they seem less to galvanise the masses in a populist revolt as to reflect a pervasive mood of atomised, individual despair.

To explain the volatile times in which these parties have risen to prominence, this book is patterned following the key developments in recent Italian history, from the end of the Cold War to the Berlusconi era and the wake of the 2008 economic crisis. It examines the insurgents’ political agenda and forms of mobilisation and how their opponents contrived to provide them a road to power. A study of this national history moreover allows us to identify tensions pulling public life apart across the West.

Chapter 1 explains how the Lega Nord made its first appearance on the political scene. It argues that the collapse of the Cold War order and the destruction of the parties on which it was based opened the door to an assault on democratic standards. Exploiting the anti-corruption mood, the northern-chauvinist Lega allied with other populist forces – from Silvio Berlusconi to the postfascists – to impose a new ‘anti-political’ common sense, through which the hard right could push its own cultural tropes.

Chapter 2 looks at the demise of the opposition to these rising reactionary forces – and the collapse of the once-mighty Italian left. In particular, this chapter examines how in the 1990s and 2000s the parties of a ‘modernised’ centre-left tried – and failed – to change their base, riding the wave of anti-corruption politics, anti-Berlusconism, and the mania for privatisation to reorient toward a liberal Europeanist identity.

Chapter 3 presents Italy as a gerontocracy – a country for old men. In an era in which young people are unable to find work and most are forced to live with their parents, property owners and those with established positions of authority cement their social control. A focus on youth emigration, as well as ministers’ rhetoric around the ‘lazy’, ‘choosy’ young people unable to make their way in Italy, highlights the sources of youth disillusionment with the political process.

Chapter 4 examines the breakthrough of new political forces harnessing the mood of discontent. It argues that the promise of M5S to smash open Italy’s gerontocracy has flipped into a technocratic and depoliticised vision of government, offering the atomised citizen a more rational state administration. Yet the party also draws on a deep welter of mistrust in institutions, with the hollowing-out of public debate, falling voter turnout, and the search for technocratic quick fixes.

The rise of M5S, cannibalising the youth and working-class vote and upending the centre-left, has, in turn, served as a springboard for Matteo Salvini’s Lega, notwithstanding this party’s very different base of support. Chapter 5 argues that even as the Lega radicalises it is moving closer to a prize unclaimed in decades: the creation of a nationwide conservative party, integrating traditional elites even in once-inhospitable regions.

We begin with a plunge into Italy’s recent history – with the Lega’s first arrival on the political scene.