ABSTRACT
The financial and sovereign debt crises that swept throughout (Southern) Europe had many victims. Bankers did not always suffer. But there is no doubt that savers, homeowners, enterprises and laid-off workers were badly affected. National governments meanwhile were trapped in a two-level game between the need to maintain electoral support but also to impose dramatic cuts in state expenditures requested by supranational institutions – the IMF, ECB and EU. Indeed, the onset of the economic crisis and its further unfolding have led to the defeats of several incumbent governments and/or the resignation of executives (Bellucci et al., 2012). Italy was no exception. On 12 November 2011, Italian premier Silvio Berlusconi
stepped down; ironically, it was immediately after having won a parliamentary vote on an austerity budget. He had headed the Italian government for almost a decade.1
After over a year of rule by a subsequent “technical government” led by Mario Monti, a professor of economics and former EU commissioner to the internal market and competition who was backed by a large coalition of all major parties, the 2013 elections resulted in heavy vote losses for both the right-wing People of Freedom (PoF)
