It seems paradoxical to say that Romano Prodi put a brave face on his coalition’s electoral victory in the Italian general election in April, but it reflects an underlying sentiment in Italy that the manner of his winning may prove to be as damaging to the centre left in the long-term as a straightforward electoral defeat would have been. This is not to deny the (belated) jubilation of the centre left at ousting Silvio Berlusconi from office. But the very narrow margin of Prodi’s victory carries with it implications and uncertainties which the coalition would be unwise to overlook.
The election outcome was the closest in Italian history. Prodi’s centre left Union obtained 49.8 per cent of the vote and Berlusconi’s centre-right House of Freedoms 49.8 per cent, with less than 25,000 votes separating the two coalitions. While in the Chamber of Deputies (due to the electoral system giving a premium to the winning party) Prodi ended up with a comfortable majority (348 seats to the centre right’s 281), its majority in the Senate (where the premium is activated on a regional basis) is a mere two (158 to 156 seats).
Moreover, Italy’s parliamentary system, often dubbed ‘genuine bicameralism’ because of the similarity in powers and privileges of the two chambers, makes a slender majority in the upper house a more significant problem for a governing coalition than in some other European countries. This raises questions about the ability of Prodi to govern for a full term and introduce sorely needed reforms to deal with a host of serious problems relating to economic competitiveness, low productivity, unemployment, labour market flexibility, immigration, pensions, regional underdevelopment, and judicial and institutional reform.
Confronting this scale of problems requires, ideally, a government with a clear mandate. Yet, while technically the mandate is not in doubt, politically it is more questionable. This is not just a matter of Berlusconi refusing to acknowledge defeat and proposing a German-style ‘grand coalition’. Even without these efforts to undermine Prodi’s right to govern, the election result reveals a nation, in the daily La Repubblica’s words, ‘split in two’. Whether the election was a referendum on Berlusconi (as many argued) or whether it was a measure of confidence in Prodi’s Union, the centre left cannot claim an unequivocal victory on either count. Berlusconi’s coalition was only defeated by the narrowest of margins and Forza Italia (his own creation) remains the largest political party in Italy, with over 23.71 per cent of the vote.
Furthermore, in the economically productive north of the country, the centre-left coalition was soundly defeated, failing to secure majorities in key regions such as Lombardy, Piedmont, Fruili-Venezia Guilia and the Veneto. Berlusconi will not, therefore, be exiting the political scene. On the contrary, he has already indicated that his coalition will enact a full-frontal assault on the government, using every political and technical means of paralysing legislative action and bringing the government down within a short period.
Can the Prodi government withstand such an assault and actually govern? The key issue will be the unity of his coalition, on which history is instructive: his last experience as prime minister, from 1996 to 1998, came to an abrupt end when his government was brought down by the withdrawal of support of the unreconstructed communist party, Communist Refoundation, on whose votes he depended. The composition of the Union has not changed much from those days.
The election campaign’s emphasis on the two coalition leaders (in two ‘head-to-head’ televised debates) gave the misleading impression of a struggle between two coalitions, each united and coherent in their policies and programme of reform. The reality is that Prodi, who has no power base himself in a political party, has to secure unity from a range of parties, stretching from the centre to the far left. These include principally the Democrats of the Left (17.5 per cent of the vote and 62 seats in the Senate), the Daisy (10.73 per cent, 39 seats), Communist Refoundation (7.37 per cent, 27 seats), the Greens and Communists in alliance (4.17 per cent, 11 seats), Antonio Di Pietro’s Italy of Values (2.89 per cent, four seats), the Socialists and Radicals in alliance (2.49 per cent, zero seats), and the Union for a Democratic Republic (Udeur) (1.4 per cent, three seats).
The key to the success of the coalition will lie in the relationship between the (centrist) Daisy, the Democrats of the Left (a party which houses both centrists and more traditional leftists) and Communist Refoundation, whose 27 seats in the Senate will act as a significant bargaining counter. This bargaining began immediately after the election, concerning which parties should hold the influential presidencies of the two chambers. The leader of Communist Refoundation, Fausto Bertinotti, made it clear that his party expects a full share of the spoils of power.
Bertinotti also indicated that he expects the Union to respect its electoral programme. However, this probably raises more questions than it answers. With so many political parties, Italian elections are notorious for avoiding detailed discussion about policies, and this one proved to be no exception. Apart from some cardinal points such as Italian withdrawal from Iraq, the Union’s programme was rather generic, papering over a fundamental cleavage between a more centrist liberal wing of the coalition and a more traditional left. The real test of the Union’s unity, therefore, will be when it attempts to devise policies on critical issues, such as labour market reform and reduction of the public deficit. Shortly after the election, for example, tensions in the coalition surfaced over the call on Prodi by the left-wing trade union CGIL to abolish the Biagi Law, which was passed by the Berlusconi government to achieve greater labour-market flexibility.
Nevertheless, despite his tiny majority in the Senate, there are three elements which make Prodi’s position potentially stronger than in 1998. The first is his undisputed leadership of the coalition, since he was elected in a primary election held last autumn in which he received a resounding 74.1 per cent of the vote (to Bertinotti’s 14.7 per cent). The second concerns history and lesson learning, insofar as the collapse of the Prodi government in 1998 has been a source of deep regret across the centre left and viewed as a main cause of Berlusconi’s 2001 victory. This time, moreover, Communist Refoundation should be a more integral component of the coalition, with a greater stake for the party in the government’s survival.
The final element is the dire state of the Italian economy, and therefore the urgent need for reform. Under intense competition from China in its small and medium enterprise sector (the backbone of the economy), unable to devalue its currency as in the past, and burdened by restrictive labour market and regulative practices, Italy is experiencing serious economic decline, and some economists are even predicting the country’s possible future exit from the euro unless structural reform is commenced now. With this shadow hanging over the political class, it is therefore possible that an alliance between a former Christian Democrat – Prodi – and a self-confessed Communist – Bertinotti – can hold together. Times change: in the 1970s such an alliance was called a ‘grand coalition’; today, it is dubbed by the opposition as the ‘left in power’.