The Italian centre left – otherwise known as the Ulivo or Olive Tree coalition, which consists of nine centre and left parties – has recently held a primary election to decide on its prime-ministerial candidate for the 2006 general election. The result was viewed as a resounding success by the coalition. The 4,300,000 people who voted was much larger than had been expected and the result was clear cut: with Romano Prodi, a progressive centrist without a natural party base, receiving 74.1 per cent of the vote. His closest contender of the five candidates who stood was Fausto Bertinotti, the leader of the unreconstructed communist party, who received only 14.7 per cent.
The election provided a further boost to the Ulivo’s poll ratings, which are now anything between seven and 10 per cent above its centre-right coalition rival, the House of Freedoms, currently in government under the leadership of Silvio Berlusconi. The primary election, therefore, has confirmed both Prodi’s undisputed leadership of the Ulivo and the coalition’s likely electoral success in April 2006. The current government is viewed as having failed to meet the expectations generated by its 2001 victory, and bent on serving the personal (judicial, media and electoral) interests of Berlusconi rather than the broader interests of the country.
Yet, if the above scenario suggests a united centre left marching to electoral victory over a weakened and divided centre right, it needs to be tempered by reference to the problems which Prodi must now try and tackle before the general election. Three such problems stand out.
First, the primary election barely touched on programmatic issues, because this would have exposed the longstanding divisions existing within the coalition, which have been visible in the years of opposition. Underlying these divisions is a fundamental cleavage between a centrist liberal wing of the coalition and a traditional left. Prodi, in the coming period, has to design a manifesto that will be acceptable to all the parties in the coalition, which includes socialists, Left Democrats, communists, former Christian Democrats and Greens. Thus far, there is little agreement on anything beyond the idea of reversing some of Berlusconi’s more controversial legislation, and that is insufficient to make a reformist government.
Second, the Ulivo has to decide whether or not it will present a single list to voters and whether it will then sit as a single parliamentary group. The primary election would suggest that this is an inevitable course of action. Yet, the issue remains highly controversial, because the evidence indicates that, in key parts of the country, parties are likely to do better when they stand under their own individual labels. Consequently, while the leaders of the two parties which constitute the main axis of the coalition (the Margherita and the Left Democrats) seem agreed that this is what should occur, it is contested by others, and this raises the question of how far the alliance can and should stretch towards both the centre and the left.
Third, underlying both of the above issues is the more fundamental matter of the future of the Ulivo itself. For while the primary election has provided the Ulivo with a much-needed boost, through confirmation of its leader, it has also signaled to the more committed ‘ulivisti’ (believers in the Ulivo) that it is time to push the coalition towards its destiny as a new single political party, which will once-and-for-all bring together the two principal reformist currents in Italian politics: the social reformist (as represented in the Left Democrats) and the catholic reformist (as represented in the Margherita). The question is whether the leaderships of these two parties can overcome their parties’ internal divisions and whether, with Prodi, they have the courage to go ahead in the knowledge that not all the parties in the coalition will follow.
Certainly, for the Left Democrats, such a move would crystallize the existence of ‘two lefts’ in Italian politics, and provide Bertinotti’s Communist Refoundation (which would refuse to dissolve itself) with more ‘space’ to occupy to the left of any new Democratic party. For this reason, while the primary election has generated new optimism and expectations among many on the centre left, the very debate it is generating is exposing the depth of divisions existing in the coalition, and raising the stakes for Prodi as leader. If the Ulivo is to have a future as a single party of democratic reformists, nothing short of a resounding electoral victory next April will do.