the billionaire tycoon’s ad personam legislation. This included backing for the infamous Gasparri bill, which protected Berlusconi’s media empire, or the measures known as Lodo Schifani and Lodo Alfano, to protect ministers from police investigation. When the Constitutional Court threatened to block this latter bill, Bossi said he was prepared to ‘lead the people in arms’ to ‘defend democracy’.27
The contradictions in the Lega’s anti-corruption agenda were not limited to its ties to Berlusconi – rather, they were also reflected in its own internal structures. Already in the Clean Hands years, Bossi had appeared in a dual guise, cheering on the magistrates before being called into the dock himself. But, while Bossi’s admission of illicit funding from the Montedison industrial group had seen him escape with a suspended sentence – sparing the Lega any immediate political fall out – his own opaque control made party funds increasingly inscrutable. When Bossi suffered a stroke in 2004 (forcing him to miss the Pontida rally, which was, in turn, cancelled), he opted not to begin a succession process, but rather to centralise his authority against potential rivals for the leadership. The ‘magic circle’ of party insiders organised by his wife excluded even figures like Interior Minister Maroni and began treating the party as well as its finances like family property. Though Bossi purported to play an executive role in the Lega, allowing him to discipline the ministers in Rome, in fact he was unaccountable to the base.
The end of Berlusconi’s last government in autumn 2011, which again pushed the Lega into opposition, was soon followed by the final explosion of this set-up. On 8 January 2012, Il Secolo XIX newspaper broke the news that Lega Nord treasurer Francesco Belsito, a Bossi appointee, had illicitly drawn on state funds from Cyprus and Tanzania, using the cash to provide personal favours to fellow members of the ‘magic circle’. Three days later, the scandal intensified as Bossi voted to shield from prosecution Nicola Cosentino, an MP from Berlusconi’s party who had been arrested for his alleged ties to the Naples mafia. The combination of internal impropriety and support for Berlusconi finally provoked a revolt in the leghista base, who called on Maroni to take action to reclaim the party. Bossi went on the counteroffensive, cancelling all public meetings involving the former interior minister. Nine days later, a protest against Mario Monti’s centrist government instead became the scene of an open clash between followers of these rival Lega leaders.
Revelations into the Lega’s dubious financial practices followed thick and fast, highlighting the webs of corruption and ties to organised crime that had built up under Bossi’s leadership. Indeed, it was a case starkly reminiscent of those that had felled the parties of the First Republic. The regional government in Lombardy – a key leghista heartland – itself came under investigation for ties to ’Ndrangheta, the Calabrian Mafia, and by early April, the leadership crisis had become unmanageable. As the prosecutors closed in, Bossi was forced to abandon the role he had held for over two decades. Amid a string of resignations, Maroni became new party secretary, promising a clean-up operation in Lega Nord ranks as well as a bid to assume the same powers that Bossi had enjoyed, maintaining its hierarchical structure. Yet it was a young cadre in the affections of both men – Matteo Salvini – who took over the leadership of the Lega Lombarda, vowing to shake off the figures who had dragged its name through the mud.
This was not the end of the Lega Nord’s crisis – indeed, in the February 2013 general election, it hit a fresh low. Even faced with Mario Monti’s unpopular technocratic government, supported by both the Democrats and Forza Italia, the Lega was unable to turn attention away from its own internal woes. Having lost two-thirds of its members since 2010, the Lega Nord took just 4.3 per cent of the vote, or half its 2008 score. This was, in political terms, a historic nadir. Back in 2001, the Lega Nord had shed even more votes after its series of U-turns on the independence question. Yet then it had been saved by the wider context of right-wing advance, allowing it again to play a kingmaker role in forming the subsequent centre-right government. The 2013 defeat offered no such consolation, as the Lega slumped into near-irrelevance while the M5S soared to first place. The message that ‘the politicians in Rome’ were all the same was now being championed by a newer force – and directed against the Lega itself.
Two decades after the corrupt PSI man Mario Chiesa’s bid to flush his payload, the forces that had broken up the First Republic were being eaten by their own revolution. The accusations even struck at Antonio di Pietro, the protagonist of Clean Hands and leader of the small centre-left party Italia dei Valori (Italy of Values; IdV). On 28 October 2012, he was targeted by RAI’s Report, an investigative current affairs programme that emerged during the wave of judicial populism. Di Pietro was accused of keeping €50 million of electoral expenses under own family’s control, while building up a real-estate empire supposedly including fifty-six properties. Faced with scandalised editorials, Di Pietro strongly denied the allegations of impropriety and even brought a successful libel action against the producers. But, as he put it immediately after the accusations were aired, IdV had ‘died on Sunday night’s Report’. The new era in Italian public life had personalised everything – and for someone who claimed to stand only for anti-corruption, it was political death to see one’s claim to clean hands tarnished.
IdV was, indeed, destroyed: even after removing Di Pietro, it lost all its seats in the February 2013 general election. The setbacks for the Lega Nord were not quite so bad, for it did at least retain its northern fortresses – thus surviving the departure of its own founder-leader. Following the election, Bossi’s successor Maroni departed the front line of national politics to focus on his role as president of the Lombardy region. With the leghisti now able to count on only one in twenty-five voters nationally, the contest to succeed him might have looked like rather a footnote. Yet Matteo Salvini’s victory in the internal ballot – thumping the disgraced Bossi by more than a four-to-one margin – would prove decisive amid the turmoil that followed. In August 2013, Berlusconi was finally sentenced for a fraud conviction, with no further recourse to appeal. Where the Lega founder had burned out his political capital, the billionaire tycoon was formally banned from holding public office. Rising to the Lega leadership as the men who built the Second Republic reached their downfall, Salvini promised a further revolution on the right – one fit for a new age in Italian politics.
The weakened ties between voters, parties, and institutions aren’t just an Italian phenomenon. Political scientists such as Peter Mair have spoken of the historic decline of mass parties across the West in recent decades.1 Arising around the turn of the twentieth century, these parties based themselves on local associational activity and an engaged community of militants, in contrast to the elite parliamentary factions more typical of the nineteenth century. Yet their ‘dense’ democratic structures, bound to the day-to-day activism of their cadres and mass membership, have increasingly given way to technocratic ‘cartel parties’, which base their power on their control of institutional resources and professionalised marketing operations. This has driven the process known as Pasokification, in which parties which allow their social roots to wither over decades then fall victim to abrupt electoral wipeouts. The phenomenon is named after Greece’s PASOK, whose role in a series of austerity and grand-coalition governments saw its support collapse from 44 per cent in 2009 to under 5 per cent in 2015; in the crisis period its malaise has also spread to historic parties like France’s Parti Socialiste and, somewhat more gradually, Germany’s Social Democratic Party. Yet, already in the early 1990s, the fall of Italy’s First Republic provided a test run of what politics looks like when mass parties are removed from the scene.
Конец ознакомительного фрагмента.
