ABSTRACT
Introduction The Italian party system has long been characterised by high levels of political fragmentation and instability (La Palombara 1989). This period of great instability reached its peak and came to an end in the early 1990s, when the old power system of the parties collapsed following a series of nationwide corruption scandals and judicial investigations (Bardi and Morlino 1994; Bardi 2002). During the rest of the 1990s, Italian politics experienced a systemic change. A new electoral law, the creation of new political actors and the strategic use of political communication began to sweep aside the old party system and to create a new basis for the internal organisation of political parties, much more centred around the leaders than the parties’ traditional bureaucratic structure. The emergence of new organisational structures also produced the inevitable changes in terms of internal relations within political parties, of the role played by leaders and consequently of the formal procedures for their selection. One immediate upshot was that scholars and political commentators generally acknowledged the distinction between the First and the Second Italian Republics. The First Republic (1946-93) featured a proportional electoral system, large and heavily bureaucratised mass parties, a polarised and multi-party system, extremely low electoral volatility and lack of alternation in government. In contrast, the Second Republic – inaugurated with the 1994 parliamentary election – has been characterised by two separate and mixed electoral systems, personalised parties united in pre-electoral coalitions, exceptionally high electoral volatility, and government alternation in all six elections held between 1994 and 2013. Taking into account the huge differences in these two political and electoral scenarios, in this chapter we focus on the parties of the Second Republic. However, the scope of our analysis is limited by two traits of the Italian parties that have emerged in recent years: a general lack of consolidation in party organisation and the persistent fragmentation of the party system. Thus, we have chosen to select the most prominent cases from a large number of parties undergoing a continuous and sometimes chaotic process of merging and splitting. To do so, we focus on the 2008-13 legislature, when only five parties entered parliament.1 The winning coalition was formed by the rightist Popolo delle Libertà
(PDL) and Lega Nord (LN); the main opposition parties were the leftist Democratic Party (PD) and Italia dei Valori (IDV); finally, a separate parliamentary opposition is represented by the Unione dei Democratici Cristiani (UDC), a tiny centrist party composed of former Christian Democrat politicians. One more cautionary remark is necessary here: only LN and IDV have been consistent in maintaining their ‘brand’ names, while other parties have evolved through different organisations, sometimes preserving rules and party oligarchy but occasionally reshaping their names and often modifying their ideological and cultural roots (i.e. Alleanza Nazionale (AN) and Forza Italia (FI), merged into a new party in 2008). To take account of these major changes, we also examine seven predecessors of the five current parties. The time period under scrutiny begins in 1989, and ends immediately before the 2013 parliamentary elections. Ostensibly, the party leadership selections held in this period manifested two different trends. The main leftist parties – except for the IDV – evolved first from the traditional congress of delegates inherited from their predecessors, to closed primaries, and then to open primaries. In this transition, the opening up of the parties was initially put into practice through informal and ill-defined practices. But recently, the PD has approved statutes and rules in which the democratisation of the leadership selection process is clearly stated.2 The story of the rightist parties is entirely different, since any regulations continue to be extremely loose, the selection of leaders is still decidedly informal, and the coronation of ‘founding fathers’ is a recurrent theme. However, the forthcoming termination of the political careers of leaders such as Silvio Berlusconi and Umberto Bossi is going to dramatically change what have been their personal parties, though it is not easy to say what is going to happen thereafter. Several rightist politicians are pointing to primary elections as the new tool to be adopted for the renewal of their parties. If this change does come about, a ‘contagion from the left’ will pave the way for a new era in Italian politics.3
