movement founded just three years previously became the biggest party in the Chamber of Deputies. The Lega Nord’s venom against the ex-Communist centre-left complemented its war on the bankrupt traditional right, whose MPs it now unseated across the upper part of Italy. Identifying its own electoral offensive with the magistrates’ exposal of a vast web of bribes and kickbacks, the northern-chauvinist party promised to impose its radical agenda on a new populist administration.
This isn’t a description of Matteo Salvini’s breakthrough in 2018, but of a political revolution that took place a quarter century previously. In the 1994 general election, Umberto Bossi’s Lega Nord – an alliance of six regional leagues that formed a single force at the end of the 1980s – elected more MPs than any other party, taking 117 seats in the 630-member Chamber of Deputies. Based on 8.5 per cent of the vote, the Lega Nord’s tally owed to the geographical concentration of its support – and despite its seat numbers, it entered government as a junior partner in Silvio Berlusconi’s coalition. Yet its anti-political sentiment had attracted broad-based support in Italian society, as it united a populist deprecation of political elites with the free-marketeer call for a Thatcherite revolution in Italy. Bossi’s party portrayed itself as the voice of the productive, modern North in rebellion against ‘thieving Rome’ and the ‘lazy, corrupt South’.
By 2018, the Lega was a rather different beast – it had become an all-Italian nationalist party, indeed a nationwide challenge to Berlusconi. Yet its success under Salvini’s leadership would have been impossible without the fortresses it built in the 1990s. In the 2018 general election, when 50 per cent of all votes went to either the Movimento Cinque Stelle (Five Star Movement; M5S) or the Lega, this was widely characterised in terms of the death of the traditional parties. Even taken together, the centre-left Democrats and Berlusconi’s Forza Italia had totalled just 33 per cent of the vote – M5S leader Luigi di Maio could declare the demise of the ‘Second Republic’ dominated by these forces. Yet a look at the events of 1994 exposes the shallow roots of these ‘established’ parties – and a longer period of volatility that allowed the populist right to begin its rise. The 2018 general election is easily presented as a unique moment of turmoil, given that 65.9 per cent of incumbent MPs either quit or lost their seats. Yet this was in fact slightly less than the legislative turnover witnessed in 1994 (where 66.8 per cent of MPs were ejected), and similar to that seen in the last contest in 2013 (65.5 per cent).1
When we understand this longer period of upheaval we also begin to doubt the suggestion that the M5S–Lega pact sealed in June 2018 represented Europe’s ‘first all-populist government’.2 For the anti-political sentiment that is today spreading across the West emerged in Italy not only at the moment of Trump and Brexit, but a quarter century previously. Already back then Italy had seen the destruction of the ‘First Republic’ that had taken form after World War II, a republic whose parties – the Christian-Democrats (DC), Socialists (PSI) and Communists (PCI) – each reached the end of their respective histories between 1991 and 1994. These parties’ disappearance decisively cut the ground from underneath the Italian political system – and prepared the way for its reconstitution on new and less stable bases.
Indeed, if after the M5S’s success in the March 2018 general election Di Maio claimed that citizen power had triumphed over ‘establishment’ parties like the Democratic Party (PD) and Forza Italia, the forces thus swept aside were in fact ephemeral products of the last couple of decades. If in the 1990s these parties reproduced a classic binary between centre-left and centre-right, they also reflected the post-modern times that followed the end of the Cold War, with the demise of the long-prevalent Communist and Catholic political families. These new forces’ life has, instead, been marked by radical shifts in the political landscape, from Italy’s integration into a new European order to the decline of the labour movement and the hollowing out of the old mass-membership parties. Faced with a seemingly perpetual crisis, a series of saviours have emerged promising to stabilise the state again, from Silvio Berlusconi to former central bankers and even Matteo Renzi. In this sense, Matteo Salvini’s Lega is just the latest force that promises to restore order in place of chaos.
The end of the First Republic was no single event – and was shaped by the frailties that had long built up in the Christian-Democratic-dominated state that emerged from World War II. The death of this order in the early 1990s married such developments as the Communist Party’s self-dissolution, the felling of the Socialists and Christian Democrats by anti-corruption magistrates, the acceleration of European integration, and the rise of Berlusconism. But as the old party containers collapsed, the Italian political system would have to be founded on new bases – and the forms it took showed just how far the ties between parties and society had weakened. This laid the basis for a new series of political forces – including a radicalised right, breaking from the Christian-Democratic past.
With the death of the forces that had dominated public life since 1945, mass-membership parties gave way to a series of ‘saviour’ figures from outside the world of politics, as judges, technocrats, and TV performers all promised to drain the swamp of corruption in Rome. The death of the First Republic was not an edifying spectacle – but it certainly was a spectacle. This was visible right from the opening act of its demise, the ‘Clean Hands’ trials that began in 1992. Exposing the web of kickbacks and embezzlement that had built up under the ancien régime, the trials turned the investigating judges into celebrities, as their cross-examination of leading politicians was beamed into Italians’ living rooms. Yet the effect was to feed a deep popular cynicism in political action itself.
Clean Hands began in 1992 not because of some sudden spike in corruption, so much as the destabilisation of Italian politics at the end of the Cold War. This largely owed to the dissolution of the Communist PCI in 1991, a development that had, at first, promised to lower the stakes of political combat. The perceived threat from the Communists – Italy’s second-most-powerful party – had long favoured elite connivance, serving both as an enemy to unite against and a reason for the other parties and their media outriders not to delve too deeply into each other’s affairs. However, the disappearance of this Communist bogeyman undermined the historic solidarity between Italian elites and parties like the Catholic DC and the soft-left PSI, which immediately came under intense scrutiny. But if the PCI’s historic rivals now felt freer to start throwing mud at one another, this did not leave public life any cleaner. Rather, the destruction of the old mass parties opened the way to forces that even more blatantly conflated public and private interests.
This was epitomised by media tycoon Silvio Berlusconi, who entered the political stage in 1994. His project was to recreate the Right around his own person, while also exploiting the wider atmosphere of deregulation and liberalisation. He galvanized his base with vehement attacks on ‘Reds’ and ‘communists’ – the centre-left in turn denounced Berlusconi’s vulgar personal conduct and debasement of public life. Yet many of their ideological assumptions were surprisingly similar. In 1991, the Communist Party had, as if apologetically, changed its name to Democratic Party of the Left; the former adepts of Lenin and Antonio Gramsci soon styled themselves not as partisans of labour but as the aspiring managers of a lean, clean, and pro-business institutional machine. It would in coming years repeatedly lend its parliamentary support to technocratic administrations, even appointing unelected central bank administrators as ministers in its own governments. Under the powerful influence of the Communist and Socialist left, the Constitution promulgated in 1947 had declared Italy a ‘democratic republic founded on labour’ – putting an at least rhetorical emphasis on the interests of working people. In its liberalised, 1990s form, the centre-left instead altered the Constitution to entrench balanced budgets and sobriety in the public accounts.
The First Republic had been no golden age, and its ignominious downfall was no conspiracy. As journalist Marco Travaglio summarily put it, the trials which exposed Bribesville took place ‘because there had been a lot of bribes’. Yet, as Eric Hobsbawm said of the dissolution of the Communist Party, the effect of breaking up the mass parties was in many ways to ‘throw out the baby and keep the bath-water’,3 replacing corruption-ridden parties with personalised forces whose internal
