Italy Approaches Its Own Choice Between Liberalism and Populism

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Matteo Renzi speaks in Florence on Friday. Sunday’s vote on Renzi’s proposed referendums could bring about a rearrangement of the country’s political terrain.Matteo Renzi speaks in Florence on Friday. Sunday’s vote on Renzi’s proposed referendums could bring about a rearrangement of the country’s political terrain. Credit Photograph by Chris Ratcliffe / Bloomberg / Getty

A few weeks ago, Italy’s Prime Minister, Matteo Renzi, delivered a rousing speech in Treviso, a small business hub in the north of the country. “If you want this country to change—not for me, not for you, but for the sake of our children—if you want it to have a simpler system, stand by me, because I can’t make it alone,” he told the crowd that had assembled in an auditorium. “The world needs Italy. I don’t want a country that is a museum but one that is a laboratory. One we can be proud of.”

Renzi has spent much of the summer and fall making similar speeches around the country, trying to rally support for a series of major reforms that he has proposed for Italy’s constitution, aimed at easing the country’s pernicious cycle of political gridlock and instability. On Sunday, Italians will vote in a referendum on those reforms. A “Yes” vote would be a major win for Renzi and his brand of liberal politics. But a “No” vote might mean the end of his political career—Renzi has pledged to step down if the referendum fails—and could bring about a rearrangement of the country’s political terrain.

The proposed reforms would make two important changes. First, they would dramatically restrict the power and size of the upper house of Italy’s national legislature, the Senate, and transfer most legislative authority to the lower house, the Chamber of Deputies. (Currently, Italy’s idiosyncratic “perfect bicameralism” means that proposed laws can live in purgatory for years, ping-ponging between the two chambers.) Second, the reforms would increase the power of the central government over the country’s regional governments. Combined, these two changes would give the party in power at the national level almost complete discretion to conceive of and enact legislative measures.

The need for change is clear. Italy’s income and G.D.P. per capita are both lower than they were a decade ago; the country’s youth-unemployment rate is one of the worst in Europe, and its public debt is second only to that of Greece. “All the issues that made Italy vulnerable at the height of the eurozone debt crisis are still there. If anything, they have become more severe,” Federico Santi, an analyst at Eurasia Group, told me recently. Renzi and his supporters hope that the reforms they’re proposing, by making the government more efficient, will allow them to finally address some of these problems.

But a victory for the “No” vote on Sunday would likely lead to the collapse of Renzi’s government, even if he doesn’t resign, and usher in a period of deep uncertainty for Italy. If snap elections were held in the wake of a “No” vote, many believe that they would benefit the increasingly popular Five Star Movement, a populist, Eurosceptic, and politically amorphous party led by the comedian Beppe Grillo. In Italy’s most recent election, in 2013, Grillo’s party won a quarter of the votes. Some analysts fear that a suddenly empowered Five Star Movement could potentially lead Italy to exit the eurozone, or perhaps the European Union altogether—a possibility referred to by the ghastly portmanteau “Quitaly.”

It is not just Renzi’s populist rivals who oppose the referendum. “It’s one group of élites fighting against another group of élites, with a populist third way that has aligned with the ‘No’ vote for reasons of its own,” Erik Jones, a professor of European studies at Johns Hopkins, told me this week. Jones pointed out that four former Italian Prime Ministers have come out on the “No” side, ranging from Massimo D’Alema, on the left, to the centrist Mario Monti and the right-wing Silvio Berlusconi. Jones believes that “No” voters won’t simply be voting against Renzi and his government, as some observers have suggested. Instead, he said, Italians have legitimate concerns about the fundamental political ramifications of the reforms. “If you dig into people’s attitudes, which we’ve done through a series of different public-opinion polls, what you find is that there is a very deep, principled commitment to having inclusive government, even at the expense of decisive government,” he said.

Indeed, some believe that passing the reforms could actually make Italy more susceptible to the forces that Renzi is trying to keep at bay. The Economist recent warned that the proposals, by consolidating power at the national level, risked setting the stage for “an elected strongman” in Italy. A country once governed by Mussolini and Berlusconi, the magazine wrote, “is worryingly vulnerable to populism.”

If the Five Star Movement were only interested in gaining and wielding power, why has it so vigorously opposed the reforms? According to Jones, the party is, in fact, pursuing a much broader long-term strategy. “They want to get rid of the whole ruling political class,” he said. “In order to do that, they believe they have to demonstrate, as often as possible, the incompetence of the political class, among all the different political parties. In causing the referendum to fail, they will delegitimize Renzi’s Democratic Party. If there’s turmoil that follows, that suits their agenda as well.”

Regardless of Sunday’s outcome, the Five Star Movement seems poised to perform very well in Italy’s next election, whether it is held in 2018, as scheduled, or earlier. This year, the party won two major mayoral races, in Turin and Rome. According to polls, Italians have just as much faith in Five Star’s ability to govern as they do in the current ruling party. That does not bode well for establishment parties of any ilk. If Five Star can be patient, and avoid scandal while it learns to govern locally, it is likely to face weak coalitions on both the right and the left in upcoming elections. “They will become the largest political party,” Jones said. “Much more important, they will force all the other élites to form a large cross-party coalition to hold them out of government, and that’s the easiest way to delegitimize the political class: to get them to form a common front against the people.” In that regard, Grillo has compared his party’s rise to Donald Trump’s success in the U.S., saying, “We’ll win the general election, and they’ll continue to wonder: How do they do it?”

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