Italy since the 1996 Elections: A Special Case with General Lessons

The array of forces within Italian politics since the elections of April 1996 seems odd: a minority Government of reconstructed Communists, some Catholics and a few neo-liberals relies for support on a party of unreconstructed Communists and confronts an opposition coalition of postindustrial media people, financiers and superficially reconstructed fascists, plus some other Catholics and a large number of neo-liberals, while on the wings sit the northern separatists, the Lega Nord, representing some of the wealthiest and most modern regions of Europe by deploying medieval symbolism to define a territory that has no historical meaning. Nevertheless, the Lega Nord apart, there is something prototypical and generalisable about this emerging pattern of alignments. The postwar pattern of Italian parties had collapsed spectacularly in the early 1990s, and although the reconstruction taking place is certainly not de nuovoÐpolitical alignments never areÐItalians are enjoying an opportunity to shape their politics in more immediate response to contemporary pressures than are most other advanced democracies where past legacies are more enduring. One must not exaggerate the scope for generalisation. There are very special features of the Italian case: almost unimaginably vast political corruption; divisions between north and south greater than those between many nations; and an oddly skewed modernisation. However, even on these points Italians seem to have suffered larger-than-life versions of more general malaises. True, in no other country has the leading national political figure of the postwar period been put on trial for suspected deep involvement with the world's largest and nastiest criminal organisation; but very few democracies have come through the past two decades without corruption scandals of some kind. Nothing in the advanced world can quite compare with the regional antagonisms between Italian southerners and northerners, who ostensibly share an ethnicity; but Belgium, Canada, Spain, the United Kingdom and now possibly Germany know something of the kind. It is easy to be puzzled by a country which can lead the world in fashion and modern design but still find it impossible to run an efficient administrative system without recourse to forms of clientilism that ought not to have survived the nineteenth century. But is that so very much more comical than the nation that produced the first industrial revolution still having a largely hereditary parliamentary chamber and continuing to be obsessed with the matrimonial complications of its royal family? Italian politicians share with those of virtually all other democracies at the present time a near-universal desire to square the circle of conceding more and more space to private forces and (wealthy) individuals while claiming to address certain major and urgent collective tasks. If there is anything interestingly unusual about Italy it is its need to address this common dilemma while