The lipstick walks
What Draghi’s departure means for Italian politics
Plan A for this three-parter on Italy’s long crisis was to save the worst till last. But the collapse of Mario Draghi’s concert-grand coalition this week and the calling of a pivotal election for 25 September meant Italian politics had to jump the queue.
Nothing in its short life became the Draghi administration like the leaving it – 17 months of tactical calculation dressed up as idealistic policy difference, political cowardice and venality compressed into a seven-day highlight reel.
As a clearly exasperated Draghi admitted to the senate on Thursday, his reforming government has said a lot but done precious little. The most serious cabinet rows over changes to the judicial system, the land registry, and competition for bathing concessions and taxi drivers were over decisions in principle. Implementing legislation is still needed if the Italian state is to qualify for the next €40 billion of post-pandemic recovery funds from the EU.
Being seen to concede to these reforms against their will and leaving the drafting of the 2023 budget to a caretaker administration suited two of Draghi’s coalition partners just fine. The Movimento 5 Stelle (M5S) and Matteo Salvini’s Lega – the left/right double-act of crowd-pleasers who opened this legislature together – now get to tack away from their 2021-22 records in government and remind voters of their 2018-19 “success stories”. Together with the third coalition defector – Silvio Berlusconi’s shrunken Forza Italia – these parties didn’t even have the stones to join the opposition against their own coalition in a vote of confidence.
When Giuseppe Conte, the leader imposed on the M5S last August by its founder Beppe Grillo, instructed his senators to absent themselves during a vote of confidence attached to a government inflation-relief bill, it was meant to be a stroke of genius. The movement was hopping mad over the bill’s inclusion of an option to build a waste incinerator in Rome. But, since they weren’t hopping quite enough to sink the government and put at risk their parliamentary pensions, they wouldn’t vote against the bill – just be terribly busy somewhere else. All of them.
The problem with this ruse was that Draghi was looking for any excuse to walk. He hadn’t signed up to this nonsense. When he accepted the premiership in February 2021, he’d assumed he would swap it for the much more relaxed presidency a year later. Instead, the former central banker had been left babysitting a seven-party coalition with more than its fair share of brats. And, with an election looming in mid-2023, they were getting worse: trying their hand at freelance diplomacy with the Russian president, backing taxi drivers’ protests against their own competition bill, and lobbying for fiscal loosening beyond Draghi’s already generous stimulus. When Conte – followed by Salvini and Berlusconi – called Draghi’s bluff, the prime minister quit. After six miserable months, the lipstick skipped away from the pig.
Four wasted years
Competition is stiff but the 2018-22 legislature is up there with the worst periods of modern Italian politics. Believe me, I’m aware I’m writing these words in the UK in the summer of 2022 but, more even than the Berlusconi years, post-2018 Italian politics have been fundamentally unserious at a time of unprecedented challenge for European democracies.
There are plenty of guilty men but this abysmal legislature has been shaped by the M5S – a firework that lit up the Italian sky with its 33% national vote in 2018 but (predictably) crashed to earth soon after and faces oblivion after September. Often described in the press as “anti-establishment” or “populist”, the M5S is much more than that. It’s a phenomenon that is truly unique to Italy.
Founded in 2009 as a primal scream against a huge, greedy and corrupt political class (la Casta)1, the movement’s rapid growth owed everything to the loud- and foul-mouthed charisma of Grillo and the organisational and IT skills of Gianroberto Casaleggio. Reserving their greatest hatred for the two big establishment parties – Forza on the right and the Partito Democratico (PD) on the left – M5S activists developed an eclectic belief system. This combined enthusiasm for information technology and conspiracy theories, opposition to any large infrastructure project (especially tunnels, how they hated those things), localism – all the way down to local currencies - and lightly held euroscepticism.
When victory started to look possible in 2018, Grillo promoted a few of his more photogenic tie-wearers like Luigi Di Maio and gave them the green light to develop a policy or two beyond opposing tunnels and vaccinations. Since universal basic income was all the rage thanks to Rutger Bregman2, Di Maio and friends chose that one and found a couple of Italian academics in Mississippi and Pretoria to work up a plan for citizenship income (RDC).
Inevitably for a movement of political virgins founded on just being Contro!3 and subject to Maoist internal organisation, its propulsion into government was a disaster. The Grillini would have been bad enough on their own but, in coalition with a Salvini intoxicated by self-promotion and with his entourage of anti-euro advisors, the M5S lost what little way it had.
The M5S and the Lega found common cause in their loathing of the Casta they had become and testing of the tolerance of the EU, France, Germany and the markets. Their political cultures were radically different. As a rule, M5S activists came from left-wing alternative environments, their elected officials were novices and their base vote was in the south where a basic income sounded just lovely. Lega militants, by contrast, were northern petit bourgeois, their officials experienced in city, regional and national government (under Berlusconi) and their expanding base conservative, nationalist and anti-welfare.
Chalk and cheese, they chose to trade signature policies. The M5S would get the RDC (but not universal and designed to incentivise work) if the Lega got its own welfare bung (Quota 100) - an early-retirement window for northerners who had left education early and worked in strenuous professions. That was the plan anyway. Three years on, we now know the RDC has done little to turn welfare into work. Of those who started receiving the benefit in 2019, 70% were still on it at the end of last year, with most of these long-term recipients single and southern. Even as poverty alleviation, the RDC is failing the Heineken test as total recipients fall two million short of the number estimated to be living in poverty. The record of Quota 100 is even worse. Instead of older manual workers, civil servants account for the largest single take up at 37% and, instead of older women whose contribution years are often interrupted, it was men who benefited most.
Nevertheless, the cost of these bumper-sticker policies forced the government into a confrontation with the European Commission and the Eurogroup - the political wing of the bond market - and, after some premature celebrations, they lost. Obviously. Savings were found elsewhere, the budget deficit was restored to a downtrend, and the M5S discovered to its shock that Salvini’s anti-immigration populism was more effective with the public than their anti-growth version.
Even before Salvini got high on his own supply and tried to sink the coalition from the beach in that innocent pre-Covid summer, the M5S was splintering on a weekly basis. Some were discovering they were Leghista all along, more that they were lefties who were too cool for the PD, and all of them that they liked their parliamentary salary and benefits and wanted more than anything to make it to September 2022 when they qualified for their pensions.
In this context, the M5S’s dumping of the good-time Lega for the frumpy but secure PD shouldn’t have shocked the old-time Grillini. What was bizarre was the spectacle of Grillo himself turning into a conservative figure calling for government continuity and a realignment of the centre-left into a big PD-M5S tent.
By the time the pandemic struck, the new centre-left coalition had done little except shrink parliament. It had, however, thrown up that second most destructive force in the 2018-22 legislature: Matteo Renzi. Having started out as Italy’s Tony Blair, Renzi decided it was much more fun being Petyr Baelish. He talked Salvini into quitting the Conte government then stiffed him by match-making a deal between the M5S and the PD he used to lead. Then, once he’d hooked them up, he trooped his Blairite faction out of the PD into his new Italia Viva vehicle and bitched about the match. While he took allies with him, Renzi made a point of leaving termites within the PD in the hope of pulling the strings in two parties. But even two was not enough for Littlefinger, who is never happier than when he is gaming a presidential vote, lending his senators’ votes to the right to kill a PD-sponsored anti-homophobia bill, or propping up the right’s candidate for governor of Sicily. What would the Maestro do next, everyone asked (in his dreams)?
Renzi credits himself with the manoeuvres that replaced Conte with Draghi in 2021. The respite offered by lipstick government could have been used productively. The formation of a giant coalition including everyone except Giorgia Meloni’s conservative-nativist Fratelli d’Italia (FdI) could have provided the time and space for the longed-cherished creation of a broad centrist alliance built around Italia Viva, Carlo Calenda’s Azione, Emma Bonino’s Più Europa, and various defectors from the Forza left. Unfortunately, palace intrigue was all Renzi had. His endless and ideologically incontinent plotting has made him anathema even in the liberal centre. With an election fast-approaching, Calenda – formerly a close Renzi ally burned too many times – looks as though he would rather take his 5% national vote to the PD and trade it for seats before the filing deadline in mid-August.
Exactly how this centre develops between now and August will be determinative when it comes to election day. Berlusconi’s swerve back to Meloni and Salvini and away from Draghism has already caused defections, including big ministerial names Mariastella Gelmini, Renato Brunetta and Mara Carfagna. According to the Istituto Piepoli, a broad centrist alliance could win 15% of the national vote and deprive the right of its victory.
Right turn
Since his removal from office in 2011 and electoral defeat in 2013, Berlusconi and his closest allies have been on a journey that came close to ditching their national-conservative allies in the Lega and the FdI for a new centre-right coalition. The wandering ended this week and Berlusconi took his depleted forces back to the right. As long as he can contain the defections, this improves the right’s electoral prospects significantly. But the old man needn’t kid himself that he will be the dominant partner in a national-conservative government. Neither should Salvini. Right-wing voters have rewarded oppositionism, with half of Meloni’s support since the 2019 European Parliament election coming from Lega voters disappointed by Salvini in office.
A Meloni cabinet would contain plenty of Lega and Forza figures but the tone and policy direction would be more socially conservative and perhaps even more fiscally disciplined than Salvini, who once headed a regional-communist faction inside the Lega. And it shows. Unlike Salvini, Meloni has been unswerving in her support for Ukraine. She doesn’t share the both-sides-ism of Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán but she likes his natalist policies, his public opposition to western "gender insanity” and creating a hostile environment to deter immigration.
After watching Salvini stumble through 2018-19, Meloni gives every sign of being more careful in public discussions of the euro and budgetary intentions. But that doesn’t apply to her allies. Just one day into the campaign and Berlusconi has promised a minimum monthly pension of €1,000 – a pledge that would cost €11 billion. And he’s the “responsible moderate”. Wait for Salvini and the eurosceptics to start talking between now and September.
A new government will have no time to play games since €40 billion of EU funds is at stake immediately and, after that, another €120 billion is on the table. It will depend on the goodwill of northern creditors and the European Central Bank to keep providing support as post-pandemic growth fades and the government restarts the clock stopped in the spring of 2020 but with public debt worth 150% of the economy. Support will no longer be nodded through. I’m not sure anyone in Rome realises that yet.
Part 1: The sweet life sours.
Part 3: Gradually then suddenly.
In 2007, journalist Gian Antonio Stella and Sergio Rizzo co-wrote La Casta: How Italian politicians have become untouchable and launched a national meme.
Utopia for Realists: And How We Can Get There, 2017