by MARIA GIOVANNA SESSA & GIACOMO RICCIO
On 20-21 September, Italians voted in a constitutional referendum to reduce the country’s parliament by roughly a third of its size. The amendments were approved by just under 70 per cent of voters, who were persuaded by the prospect of cost-savings and added efficiency.
Although the referendum counted on the support of the main governing and opposition parties, the Five Star Movement (Movimento 5 Stelle – M5S) claimed the result as a victory. Yet, such optimism could not be extended to the elections that seven Italian regions held at the same time. The two votes constitute an interesting benchmark to assess the performance of the Five Star Movement, halfway through its second experience of government.
From rising star to shooting star
The “valence populism” of the M5S allows it to focus on consensus-gathering non-positional issues, a category into which the constitutional referendum certainly falls, given it was politicised as the first of many reforms aimed at bureaucratic pruning and conveyed through a direct democracy mechanism. Although the simplification of political issues to a yes-or-no response from the public has proven successful for the party, the results of the more deliberative regional vote (where they failed to win any of the seven contests) unveiled its weaknesses.
Since winning the most votes of any party in the 2018 general election, the anti-system M5S has moved from a position of refusing to compromise with other parties (an impossible deed within Italy’s proportional electoral system) to accepting an issue-by-issue collaboration with third players. This led to a first cabinet in coalition with the League, which was followed by a second coalition with its ‘foe turned friend’, the Democratic Party.
The party is currently torn between two competing strategies. On the one hand, it has frequently acted like a movement by embarking on single-issue crusades. Yet, as a member of government, it now has an obligation to take positions on a complete set of policy-issues, leading to confrontation – though the party has always rejected factionalism. Of late, the historical motto “uno vale uno” (one is worth one) has begun to sound more like the systematic silencing of a healthy internal debate, rather than an egalitarian chant.
Weak local foundations
Including elections held in January, the M5S has now experienced an electoral debacle across nine Italian regions this year, underlining its weak territorial foundations. This was evident in the latest ballot, where incumbent actors with a strong local presence were rewarded: Vincenzo De Luca in Campania and Michele Emiliano in Apulia for the Democratic Party, Giovanni Toti in Liguria and Luca Zaia in Veneto for the centre-right.
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