Multiple Populisms: Italy as Democracy’s Mirror 2019027912, 2019027913, 9780815361718, 9781351115742

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Multiple Populisms

This book provides a comprehensive interpretation of the multiple manifestations of populism using Italy, the only country amongst consolidated constitutional democracies in which populist political forces have been in government on various occasions since the early 1990s, as the starting point and benchmark. Populism is a complex, multi-faceted political phenomenon which redefines many of the essential characteristics of democracy; participation, representation, and political conflict. This book considers contemporary versions of populism that pose a real challenge to representative and constitutional democracy. Contributors provide an integrative interpretation of populism and analyse its principal historical, social, and politico-legal variables to provide a multidimensional reflection on the concept of populism, comprehensive analysis of the populist phenomenon, and a theoretical and comparative perspective on the diverse political experiences of populism. Based on conceptual and interdisciplinary reflections from expert authors, this book will be of great interest to scholars and post-graduate students of cultural studies, European studies, political sociology, political science, comparative politics, political philosophy, and political theory with an interest in a comparative and interdisciplinary theory of populism and its manifestations. Paul Blokker is Associate Professor in political sociology at the Department of Sociology and Business Law, University of Bologna, Italy. He is also research fellow at the Institute of Sociological Studies, Charles University Prague, Czechia. Manuel Anselmi is currently Researcher at Unitelma Sapienza of Rome, as well as Affiliate Researcher at King’s College in London and a member of the Centre for Conflict and Participation Studies of LUISS in Rome.

Multiple Populisms

Italy as Democracy’s Mirror Edited by Paul Blokker and Manuel Anselmi

First published 2020 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2020 selection and editorial matter, Paul Blokker and Manuel Anselmi; individual chapters, the contributors The right of Paul Blokker and Manuel Anselmi to be identified as the authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Blokker, Paul, editor. | Anselmi, Manuel, editor. Title: Multiple populisms : Italy as democracy’s mirror / edited by Paul Blokker and Manuel Anselmi. Description: Abingdon, Oxon ; New York, NY : Routledge, 2020. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2019027912 (print) | LCCN 2019027913 (ebook) | ISBN 9780815361718 (hardback) | ISBN 9781351115742 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Populism—Italy. | Political parties—Italy. | Italy—Politics and government—1994–2018. | Italy—Politics and government—2018– Classification: LCC JN5452 .M85 2020 (print) | LCC JN5452 (ebook) | DDC 320.56/620945—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019027912 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019027913 ISBN: 978-0-815-36171-8 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-351-11574-2 (ebk) Typeset in Times New Roman by Apex CoVantage, LLC

Contents

List of figuresvii List of tablesviii List of contributorsix Prefacexv CARLOS DE LA TORRE



Introduction: Multiple populisms. Italy as democracy’s mirror

1

PAUL BLOKKER AND MANUEL ANSELMI

PART I

Which people for what form of democracy?15   1 The construction of the people

17

VALENTINA PAZÉ

  2 Neo-populism and the subversion of democratic quality

31

LEONARDO MORLINO AND FRANCESCO RANIOLO

  3 Depoliticization, anti-politics and the moral people

49

FABIO DE NARDIS

PART II

Populism and the transformation of parties

65

  4 Anti-party-ism as a structural component of Italian democracy

67

NADIA URBINATI

  5 “Particracy”: The pre-populist critique of parties and its implications DAVID RAGAZZONI

86

vi  Contents   6 Populist anti-party parties

106

LORENZO VIVIANI

PART III

Populism and the transformation of the public sphere125   7 Technopopulism and direct representation

127

EMILIANA DE BLASIO AND MICHELE SORICE

  8 Intellectuals and cultural populism

148

MASSIMILIANO PANARARI

  9 Penal populism in the multi-populist context of Italy

164

STEFANO ANASTASÌA AND MANUEL ANSELMI

PART IV

Populism and the transformation of politics

179

10 Citizen democracy: New politics in new participation models

181

MARCO DAMIANI

11 The populist assault on the constitution

196

PAUL BLOKKER

12 Four Italian populisms

216

CECILIA BIANCALANA



Conclusion: the Italian populist challenge in comparative perspective

242

OSCAR MAZZOLENI

Index

249

Figures

7.1 People’s answer to the crisis of party-based representation 7.2 Post-representative politics 7.3 The relationships among technocracy, populism, and the forms of digital democracy 7.4 The transformation of representation and the new Italian populisms

131 132 137 141

Tables

2.1 2.2 2.3 7.1 10.1

Dissatisfaction as the intermediate variable and reactions A few recurrent patterns of qualities subversion Types of neo-populism and their features and empirical cases Populist communication logic and online opportunity structures Forms of political participation in the populist parties and movements

35 41 46 133 185

Contributors

The editors Manuel Anselmi is currently Researcher at Unitelma Sapienza of Rome, as well as Affiliate Researcher at King’s College in London and a member of the Centre for Conflict and Participation Studies of LUISS in Rome. He mainly deals with Latin American populisms and the theory of populism. In the past, he studied the ideology system in Venezuela. Recently, he published Populism. An Introduction, Routledge 2017 and has collaborated on the Handbook of Global Populism, edited by Carlos de la Torre, Routledge 2018. Paul Blokker is Associate Professor in political sociology at the Department of Sociology and Business Law, University of Bologna, Italy. He is also research fellow at the Institute of Sociological Studies, Charles University Prague, Czechia. His research focusses on the sociology of constitutions, constitutional politics, democratic participation, and populism. Amongst his recent and forthcoming publications are: fc, ‘Political and Constitutional Imaginaries’, in: S. Adams and J. Smith (eds), Social Imaginaries: Critical Interventions in a Paradigm-in-the-Making, Rowman and Littlefield; 2019, ‘Populism as a constitutional project’, International Journal of Constitutional Law 17/2; fc, ‘Constitutionalism, judicialization, and human rights in the integration of European society’, in: Johann Arnason (ed.), European Integration: Historical Trajectories, Geopolitical Contexts, Edinburgh University Press; ‘Varieties of Populist Constitutionalism: The Transnational Dimension’, in: special issue on ‘Populist Constitutionalism: Varieties, Complexities, and Contradictions’, edited by Paul Blokker, Bojan Bugaric, and Gábor Halmai, German Law Journal, 20/3, 2019; Sociological Constitutionalism (edited with Chris Thornhill), 2017, Cambridge University Press, and Constitutional Acceleration within the European Union and Beyond (ed.), 2017, Routledge.

The contributors Stefano Anastasìa is Professor of Philosophy and Sociology of Law and Human Rights at the University of Perugia. He is also ombudsperson of people deprived

x  Contributors of liberty in the Lazio and Umbria Regions, Italy. He is the author of L’appello ai diritti. Diritti e ordinamenti nella modernità e dopo (2008), Metamorfosi penitenziarie. Carcere, pena e mutamento sociale (2012), Abolire il carcere. Una ragionevole proposta per la sicurezza dei cittadini, with L. Manconi, V. Calderone, and F. Resta (2015), and Populismo penale. Una prospettiva italiana, with M. Anselmi and D. Falcinelli (2015). Cecilia Biancalana is a researcher at the University of Lausanne. She is currently working on a project on right-wing populist discourse in European cross-­border areas. Her research focuses on party change, populism, and the relationship between the Internet and politics. Emiliana De Blasio teaches open government, media sociology, and gender politics at Luiss University, where she also coordinates an observatory on open government and political participation. Her research focusses on open government, politics and digital technology, the emergence of the platformstate, democratic participation (and in particular the youths’ participation), and populisms. Amongst her recent and forthcoming publications are: fc, e-Democracy; fc, The Platform State; Il governo online, Carocci 2019, The rise of populist parties in Italy: Techno-populism between neo-liberalism and direct democracy (with M. Sorice), in Hidalgo-Tenorio, Benítez-Castro and De Cesare (Eds.), Populist Discourse. Critical Approaches to Contemporary Politics, Routledge, London, 2019; Open Government und Demokratie. Zwischen Effizienz und Partizipation (with M. Sorice), in Schünemann and Kneuer (eds.),  E-Government und Netzpolitik im europäischen Vergleich, Nomos, Baden-Baden, 2018; Populismi e democrazia digitale, in Anselmi, Blokker, and Urbinati, Populismo di lotta e di governo. Milano, 2018; Populisms among technology, e-democracy and the depoliticisation process, in Revista Internacional de Sociología,  76(4):e109, 2018; Implementing open government: a qualitative comparative analysis of digital platforms in France, Italy and United Kingdom, in Quality & Quantity, 2018. Marco Damiani is Assistant Professor in political sociology at the Department of Political Science of the University of Perugia. He is currently studying European political parties through a comparative approach. In particular, his research deals with the Left and the radical Left parties in Western Europe and the European populist parties. The most recent publications include: ‘The European Radical Left. Transformation and Political Changement’, in J. Ibrahim and J.M. Roberts (eds.), in Contemporary Left-Wing Activism, Vol. I (Routledge, 2019); ‘Radical Left-wing Populism and Democracy in Europe’, in C. de la Torre (eds.), Global Populism (Routledge, 2018); La sinistra radicale in Europa. Italia, Spagna, Francia, Germania (Donzelli, 2016). ‘From the Communist Party to the Front de gauche. The French radical left from 1989 to 2014’ (with M. De Luca), in ‘Communist and Post-Communist studies’ (2016); ‘New Left in the European Democracies:

Contributors xi The case of German Radical Left’ (with L. Viviani), in ‘Partecipazione e conflitto’ (2015). Oscar Mazzoleni is professor of political science and the director of the Research Observatory for Regional Politics at the University of Lausanne. His main research interests include party politics, regionalism, nationalism, and populism. He has been visiting professor and research fellow at the Universities of Geneva, Paris-Sorbonne 1, Science-Po Paris, Salzburg and Torino, and EUI. His research has been published in several peer-reviewed journals as Perspectives on European Politics and Society, Revue française de science politique, Government and Opposition, Party Politics, Swiss Political Science Review, Comparative European Politics, Contemporary Italian Politics, and Populism amongst others. He is a co-editor of Political Populism. A Handbook (Nomos/ Bloombury 2017, with R. Heinisch and C. Holz-Bacha) and of three recent comparative books: Understanding Populist Party Organisation. The Radical Right in Western Europe (Palgrave 2016, with R. Heinisch), Regionalist Parties in Western Europe. Dimensions of Success (Routledge 2017, with S. Mueller), The People and the Nation. Populism and Ethno-Territorial Politics in Europe (Routledge 2019, with R. Heinisch and E. Massetti). Leonardo Morlino is Professor of Political Science and Director of the International Research Center on Democracies and Democratizations at LUISS, Rome. He was president of the International Political Science Association (IPSA) (2009–12). He is the author of more than 40 books and more than 200 journal essays and book chapters published in English, French, German, Spanish, Hungarian, Chinese, Mongolian, and Japanese. His most recent books include: The Impact of Economic Crisis on South European Democracies (Palgrave, 2017), The Quality of Democracy in Latina America (IDEA, 2016), Changes for Democracy (Oxford UP, 2011), Democracias y Democratizaciones (CIS, 2008); Democratization and the European Union: Comparing Central and Eastern European Post-Communist Countries (Routledge 2010, with W. Sadurski), International Actors, Democratization and the Rule of Law: Anchoring Democracy? (Routledge 2008, with A. Magen). He was also one of the three editors of the International Encyclopedia of Political Science (8 vol., Sage Publications, 2011), which won the Honorable Mention of Dartmouth Medal for reference publishing in all domains of knowledge. Morlino is a specialist in comparative politics with expertise on Southern Europe, Eastern Europe, and Latin America and a focus on the phenomenon of democratization. He is currently directing new research project about the political consequences of the 2008–14 economic crisis on the six largest ­European democracies. Fabio de Nardis is Associate Professor of political sociology at the University of Salento, where he is also a research affiliate at the Centre for Conflict and

xii  Contributors Participation Studies (CCPS) and chairperson of the undergraduate and graduate program in sociology. He is an Editor in Chief of the Scopus and Wos Journal Partecipazione e Conflitto (Participation and Conflict), his studies focus on political participation, social movements, populism, and democracy. Among his recent and forthcoming publications are: Understanding Politics and Society, Palgrave MacMillan (2019); ‘Neoliberalismo, despolitización y movimientos sociales en las (post)democracias contemporáneas’, (in Spanish) Universidad de Córdoba (2019); ‘Italian Politics between Multipopulism and Depoliticization’ (with M. Anselmi), Revista Internacional de Sociología (2018); Political Sociology, (in Italian) McGraw-Hill (2013); Comparative Sociology, (in Italian) Franco Angeli (2011). Massimiliano Panarari teaches Campaigning and Organization of Consensus at the Department of Political Sciences, Luiss University, Rome; and History of Journalism at the Department of Political and Social Sciences, Bocconi University, Milan, Italy. His research focuses on the sociology of mass media and communication, popular culture, history of ideas, and populism. He is a regular commentator in the Italian newspaper La Stampa and the Italian weekly Il Venerdì di Repubblica. He is also a consultant in political strategy, public communication, and political marketing. Amongst his recent books: Uno non vale uno. Democrazia diretta e altri miti d’oggi (Marsilio, 2018); Poteri e informazione (Le Monnier, 2017). Valentina Pazé is Associate Professor in political philosophy at the Department of Culture, Politics, and Society, University of Torino. She is also member of the teaching staff of the international Master ‘Global Rule of Law and Constitutional Democracy’, University of Genova. Her research focusses on ancient and modern theories of democracy and rights, populism, and multiculturalism. Amongst her recent and forthcoming publications are: fc, Torino: ‘The School of Thought of Norberto Bobbio’, in Encyclopedia of the Philosophy of Law and Social Philosophy, edited by M.N.S. Sellers and S. Kirste, Springer; Cittadini senza politica. Politica senza cittadini, EGA, Torino 2016; In nome del popolo. Il potere democratico, Laterza, Roma-Bari 2011 (Spanish translation Madrid 2013). David Ragazzoni is a PhD candidate in political theory at Columbia University, where his work sits at the intersection of the history of political thought, political history, and democratic theory. He is writing a dissertation on the ancestry of parties and the fear of factions in Renaissance political and constitutional thought and the implications of such theories and practices for contemporary debates on parties, democracy, and representation. He was trained at Scuola Normale Superiore and Scuola Superiore Sant’Anna in Pisa and in 2018 was awarded the National Scientific Qualification as Associate Professor in the two fields of political philosophy and history of philosophy by the Italian Ministry of University, Education, and Research. His recent

Contributors xiii work includes the book La vera Seconda Repubblica. La genealogia e la macchina (with Nadia Urbinati, 2016), the monograph Il Leviatano democratico. Parlamento, partiti e capi tra Weber e Kelsen (2016), and several essays and book chapters, including ‘Political Compromise in Party Democracy. An Overlooked Puzzle in Kelsen’s Democratic Theory’ (2017), ‘Giuseppe Mazzini’s Democratic Theory of Nations’ (2018), ‘Silvio Spaventa and Marco Minghetti on Party Government’ (2019), and ‘The Populist Leader’s Two Bodies: Bobbio, Berlusconi, and the Factionalization of Party Democracy’ (forthcoming). Francesco Raniolo is Professor in political science at the University of Calabria, Italy, where he is also director of the Department of Political and Social Sciences. His main research interests include party politics, political participation, and quality of democracy. Amongst his recent publications are: La partecipazione politica, 2007, il Mulino; I partiti politici, 2013, Laterza; La qualità della democrazia in Italia, 2013, il Mulino (edited with Leonardo Morlino and Daniela Piana); Manuale di Scienza Politica, 2017, il Mulino (with Giliberto Capano, Simona Piattoni, and Luca Verzichelli); Limiti e sfide della rappresentanza politica, 2017, F. Angeli (edited with Davide G. Bianchi); The impact of the economic crises on South European Democracies, 2017, Palgrave (with Leonardo Morlino); Come la crisi economica cambia la democrazia, 2018, il Mulino (with Leonardo Morlino). Michele Sorice is Full Professor in democratic innovations and of political sociology at Luiss University, where he also coordinates the Centre for Conflict and Participation Studies. His research focusses on democratic innovations and the transformations of democracy, democratic participation, political parties and social movements, political communication, and populisms. Amongst his recent publications are: Partecipazione democratica. Teorie e problem, Mondadori, Milano 2019; The rise of populist parties in Italy: Techno-­ populism between neo-liberalism and direct democracy (with E. De Blasio), in Hidalgo-Tenorio, Benítez-Castro and De Cesare (Eds.) Populist discourse. Critical Approaches to Contemporary Politics, Routledge, London, 2019; Sociology of the media, in Ryan (Ed.) Core Concepts in Sociology. Wiley Blackwell, Hoboken, 2019; Open Government und Demokratie. Zwischen Effizienz und Partizipation (with E. De Blasio), in Schünemann and Kneuer Government und Netzpolitik im europäischen Vergleich, Nomos, (eds.),  E-­ Baden-Baden, 2018; Populismi e partecipazione politica, in Anselmi, Blokker, and Urbinati, Populismo di lotta e di governo. Milano, 2018; Populisms among technology, e-democracy and the depoliticisation process, in Revista Internacional de Sociología, 76(4):e109, 2018. Carlos de la Torre is professor of sociology at the University of Kentucky and Emeritus Professor at FLACSO-Ecuador. He has a Ph.D. from the New School for Social Research. He has been a fellow at the Simon Guggenheim

xiv  Contributors Foundation and the Woodrow Wilson Center for Scholars. His most recent books are The Routledge Handbook of Global Populism (2019), Populisms: A Quick Immersion (2019), The Promise and Perils of Populism (2015), Latin American Populism of the Twenty First Century, co-edited with Cynthia Arnson (2013), and Populist Seduction in Latin America (second edition 2010). Lorenzo Viviani is Associate Professor of political sociology at the Department of Political Sciences, University of Pisa. His research interests include political parties, leadership, charisma, and populism. Nadia Urbinati teaches political theory at Columbia University. Among her more recent books are: Democracy Disfigures: Opinion, Truth and the People (Harvard University Press 2014) and Me the People: How Populism Transforms Democracy (Harvard University Press 2019).

Preface

The volume Multiple Populisms. Italy as Democracy’s Mirror develops Tarchi’s perception that Italy is a laboratory of populisms. As Cecilia Biancalana – in her final, overview chapter of the volume – shows, until now Italian populism has had four major manifestations: Bossi’s and Salvini’s Lega (Nord) (Northern League), Berlusconi’s Forza Italia (Go Italy), the Movimento 5 Stelle (Five Star Movement) and, in certain respects, even Renzi’s Partito Democratico (Democratic Party). Serial populism emerged in Italy since the collapse of the First Republic in 1992. Silvio Berlusconi created what the editors of this volume call a “grammar of populism” that was adopted by a wide array of parties from the right to the left and beyond right and left. The different chapters in the book illustrate how Italian politics became populist, hyper-personalized, and anti-party. In their introduction, Paul Blokker and Manuel Anselmi show a critical stance towards the three main approaches to populism, which focus on: (a) ideational concepts, (b) conceptions of political strategy, and (c) Laclau’s discourse analysis. They argue convincingly that the complexity of populism cannot be reduced to a few definitional lines that could potentially travel to other time periods or geographical areas. Instead of a reductionist understanding, the authors propose a multi-faceted conceptualization of populism. They argue for the need to “reconstruct populism on the basis of themes such as disintermediation, depoliticization, the personalization of politics, the transformation of democracy and of parties, anti-politics, penal and constitutional populism, and the haze that constitutes the mystique of the people in the strategy of populist politicization”. Exploring these themes of populism allows for a comparison of different crises of political representation in Italy (the main focus on the book), but by implication also with other geographical contexts, not least the Americas. Left radical populists in Latin America emerged in a context of the crises of all institutions of democracy and of the failures of neoliberal reforms. Hugo Chávez, Evo Morales, and Rafael Correa were elected with the mission to refound all political institutions, to get rid of neoliberalism by putting the state at the centre of economic development, and to create new constitutions. Latin American left populists were successful in abandoning neoliberal orthodoxy, and when the prices of oil and minerals were high, they were able to reduce poverty. Yet in all these nations, there were processes of slow democratic erosion due to how these leaders concentrated

xvi  Preface power in their hands, controlled the judiciary, and aimed to dominate civil society and the public sphere by curtailing the rights to self-expression and association. In Italy and other consolidated Western European democracies, ideological mass parties have been in crises for some time, but people continued to trust democratic institutions. Instead of killing democracy slowly, a new type of populist democracy emerged. This form of populist democracy is different from the liberal-constitutional model and is based on personalization, depoliticization, and disintermediation. As some contributors to this volume show, Italian democracy has been drastically simplified and has become polarized (Pazé), and rather than leading to improvement or the deepening of democracy, it was subverted (Morlino and Raniolo) or disfigured (Urbinati). The United States under Trump illustrates a different path to populists gaining political power. Instead of creating an anti-party movement, Trump took over the Republican Party. This was possible because the Republican Party increasingly became a movement-party of Christian fundamentalists, libertarians, and white nationalist movements. Whereas party elites were challenged from the right and the left, the two-party system absorbed challengers. The debate in the U.S. is whether or not institutions could contain Trump’s autocratic impulses and on whether he has damaged the formal and informal rules of the game that allowed party elites to compete as adversaries and not as enemies. If Italy is to serve as an example, its serial populism so far has not destroyed liberal political institutions. Yet Victor Orbán in Hungary led a process of democratic erosion of a parliamentary democracy, and some scholars characterize his regime as competitive authoritarian. It is an open question if Trump’s America would remain democratic or could evolve towards hybridism and autocracy. This volume shows how populism is reconfiguring key categories of democratic theory. Paul Blokker argues that “the promotion of majoritarianism constitutes the populists’ main relation to the constitution, that populists portray an instrumentalist, political, and ad hoc relation to the law, and that populists are deeply skeptical with regard to the formalistic, positivistic approach to the law in liberal constitutionalism”. Manuel Anselmi and Stefano Anastasìa argue that populism has depoliticized politics and professional politicians while politicizing the system of justice. Nadia Urbinati shows how anti-partyism has a long genealogy in Italian politics rooted in the desire to make the people “the only ruling party”. David Ragazzoni sustains that “odium partium in Italy predated party democracy”. Populists, as Marco Damiani argues, promote alternative forms of participation. Emiliana De Blasio and Michele Sorice explore the importance of platform parties or digital parties in new forms of political parties based on “ ‘hyper-representation’, which includes ‘direct’ and ‘personal’ relations with the populist leader through digital media”. Massimiliano Panarari shows the roles intellectuals play in populist movements, “as ‘intellectuals of the common people’ and as ‘supplementary officials’ of populist leaders, parties, and movements”. Could these new forms of political participation that are critical to parties and mediated representation foster better forms of democracy, or, on the contrary, do

Preface xvii they lead to processes of democratic disfigurement? For some contributors of this volume, populism is indeed a threat to democracy; others, however, point to the ambiguities of populism as attempts of democratic innovation that pose serious challenges not only to liberal constitutional democracy but to democracy tout court. This book compares a wide range of populist cases in one country. Biancalana uses four dimensions to compare populisms: the leader and its style, the definition of the people and its enemies, the political organization, and their idea of democracy. Despite similarities, these types of populism are different, and scholars instead of analyzing populism in the singular should study variations and how different types could lead to democratic erosion or not. For example, ethnic constructions of the poor people and of its enemies as racialized others that are intrinsically different and antagonistic to the culture, race, and religion are a threat to democracy and could morph into varieties of neo-fascism. Differently, socioeconomic and political constructions of the people against oligarchic elites could, in contrast, lead to processes of inclusion and democratization. Yet when a leader claims to be the embodiment of the truthful people understood as those excluded, it leads to authoritarian attempts of a leader to claim to be the people’s avatar. This group of interdisciplinary scholars does not demonize populism as pathological. The populist and other critiques to the malfunctioning of democratic participation and representation are taken seriously and debated. Yet differently from scholars inspired by Ernesto Laclau, the contributors to Multiple Populisms do not accept at face value the populist solution to built left-wing variants to stop the right. It seems that populism is in Italy to stay, and it won’t fade soon. Therefore, it is important to understand the type of democracy that it promotes to normatively evaluate its consequences for projects to deepen and strengthening democracy. Carlos de la Torre

Introduction Multiple populisms. Italy as democracy’s mirror Paul Blokker and Manuel Anselmi

Populism, rather than a pathological phenomenon, consists in a complex, multifaceted condition, which involves the redefinition of some of the essential characteristics of democracy, such as participation, representation, and political conflict. Existing theoretical proposals put emphasis on ‘thin’ definitions, emphasizing essential aspects of the phenomenon, but, in this, remain partial in the attempt to create a clear and distinctive concept. In this way, the capacity to grasp the complexity of populism is compromised, as is its historical-conceptual dimension, which resists generalizations and instead requires in-depth comparative attention. The objective of the edited volume is to contribute to a comprehensive and alternative interpretation of populism, by means of a philosophical-political and socio-political analysis of a distinctive context of reference, that of Italy, labelled a ‘laboratory of populism’ by one prominent observer (Tarchi 2015). In the volume, Italy’s multiple populisms are not so much the subject of a historical reconstruction of diverse forms of populism; rather, the volume is based on conceptual and interdisciplinary reflections by scholars from various disciplinary backgrounds on some of the major tendencies present in this country. The volume’s advantages are the comprehensive identification, on the one hand, of specific qualities of the populist phenomenon (regarding, for instance, relations to political parties, the law, representation, and the public sphere), while, on the other, it contributes to a theoretically grounded and comparative analytical perspective, evermore necessary in the light of the global diffusion of highly diverse political experiences with populism.

1  Background, context and objectives In recent years, scholarly attention for populism has increased exponentially, producing a variety of hermeneutic approaches and numerous empirical case studies. The growing debate on this theme has been fed by the global emergence of populist phenomena, equally present in both ‘new’ and in ‘established’ or ‘consolidated’ democracies. This topicality of populism as a political phenomenon, and its presence in a variety of highly diverse political contexts, makes the usage of the term not easily reducible to specific disciplines, rendering its comprehension more complex. One limit of the existing literature stems from the absence

2  Paul Blokker and Manuel Anselmi of a constructive dialogue between different analytical perspectives, in order to enhance the possibility of confronting the ambiguity of the concept. Often used by journalists in a polemical way, or as a weapon against those who oppose the established powers, the category of ‘populism’ has become in all respects representative of a specific mode of interpreting democracy. Populism shows a profound correlation between the functioning of democracy and the forms of social expression of popular sovereignty in the context of representative and constitutional government. The emergence and development of populism involves changes in the social bases of democracy, the crisis of representation, the disintermediation of relational processes between citizens and politics, the distrust towards and challenges of liberal democracy; it is a symptom of liberal democracy in terms of lack of balance between the procedural and the ideal component. Populism, rather than a pathological phenomenon, appears to be a multi-faceted condition, which involves the redefinition of some of the essential characteristics of democracy, such as participation, representation and political conflict. Populism remains within the parameters of representative democracy but puts into discussion some of the fundamentals of liberal democracy, amongst which the party-dimension of elite formation, elite power, but also the pluralist nature of political conflict (those conditions that are at the core of what Bernard Manin has called ‘party democracy’). Populism is composed of an appeal to the people and an opposition to the elected establishment, putting into relief a tendency towards the depoliticization of conflict in the name of the construction of a people as an imagined community and as morally virtuous in contrast to the corrupt elite. The fact that populism produces its own elite does not diminish the significance of its critique of the elitism of representative democracy. So far, the main theoretical approaches have tried to explain populism in an ‘essentialist mode’, attempting to fit it into a distinctive label or in a comprehensive concept. For some, populism is about a special form of ‘thin ideology’, grounded in the dualism between the morality of the people and against the immorality of the elite (Mudde); for others it is about a form of construction of the collective subject by means of an ideological or discursive capacity of a collective political actor, who is able to form a hegemonic unity between diverse social parts or classes (Laclau); for yet others, it concerns a set of strategies for the rapid conquest of power from the part of leaders, outside of the cursus honorum as established by traditional parties (Weyland). These theoretical proposals have contributed to shedding light on some essential aspects of the phenomenon but remain partial because they tend to simplify and reduce the complexity of the populist phenomenon in the attempt to create a clear and distinctive concept. In this way, the capacity to grasp the complexity of populism is compromised, as is the historical-conceptual dimension which resists generalizations and instead requires an in-depth comparative attention. The populism that is increasingly dominant on the contemporary global scene constitutes a real challenge to democracy in one of its most successful modern forms, representative and constitutional democracy. The approaches mentioned

Introduction  3 above are not sufficiently attentive to this institutional aspect, that is, the polemical relation of populism with representative and constitutional institutions. In addition, they pay insufficient attention to the relation between the transformation of party democracy, the conflictive pluralism of parties and ideologies and the reconfiguration of politics and its actors in democracies increasingly defined by the personalization of politics, facilitated by the massive employment of the mass media in the construction of consensus. In the empty space left behind by party representation, populism operates as an entrepreneur of disenchantment and distrust vis-à-vis the political main-stream, in particular in a phase of economic and financial crisis and globalization, in which a large part of the middle classes finds itself in a condition of perceived risk of loss of status. Starting from such considerations, the objective of this volume is to contribute to an integrative interpretation of populism (and in this sense an alternative interpretation), in order to ameliorate the understanding of the phenomenon, by means of an internal analysis of a distinctive context of reference, so as to be able to subsequently put into relief the various internal social dynamics. Inspired by an efficacious expression of Laclau, the objective is to delineate the populist configuration in a multi-dimensional form that is specific to populism and to analyze populism according to its principal historical and social variables. This proposal has as an advantage the identification, on the one hand, of specific qualities of the populist phenomenon, while, on the other, the facilitation of a theoretical and comparative analytical perspective, evermore necessary given the global diffusion of diverse political experiences within the populist phenomenon, but anyhow ascribing to the same political category. The volume Multiple Populisms sets out to analyze the complex case study of Italian democracy, in an interdisciplinary and conceptual manner, in the period that starts with the end of the so-called First Republic (ca. 1992) until today, that is to say the decline of the republic of the parties (a fundamental point of reference, not only for Italian populism). Indeed, regarding the various scenarios of populism that are present today, Italy represents a unique case and constitutes a privileged observatory for the study of this phenomenon. First, it is the most significant example of a political system in which a real populist turn has taken place. With the emergence of Silvio Berlusconi on the political scene, a populist grammar has established itself on the national level, to which also other political forces have adapted themselves, some existing (the Northern League) and others newly established (the Five Star Movement, the Democratic Party led by Matteo Renzi). The end of mass parties has signalled the beginning of populist parties. Second, because with the end of the First Republic, characterized by the centrality of political society (Farneti), based on hypermediation and on parties, a contrasting period has commenced, in general referred to as the Second Republic, in which the political sphere is characterized by ‘anti-politics’, in which the process of the selection of political personnel increasingly includes civil society actors (entrepreneurs and professionals) and where the participation and modalities of communication are direct and disintermediated. Populism has, therefore, imposed itself as, to use an oxymoron, a form of ‘direct representation’ or the

4  Paul Blokker and Manuel Anselmi representation that the leader and the people construct directly, without the mediation of parties, creating new parties or transforming existing ones so as to better allow for a direct form of representation. Populist parties are personal parties, parties of the leader. Third, Italy is a case of great interest, since, with the turn towards a post-party democracy, the Italian political system has distinguished itself by means of a marked and generalized personalism, which characterizes the entire political spectrum. These factors taken together show how Italy is the only country amongst consolidated constitutional democracies in which various populist political forces co-habit simultaneously, in contrast to other similar institutional contexts where predominant populist forces prevail in opposition to non-populist political forces. In Italy, populism is the hegemonic form of democratic politics itself, a type of political being that is adaptable and that supersedes Manin’s ‘audience democracy’. Contemporary Italy is an eloquent example of post-representative democracy. To study Italy means therefore to study a paradigmatic case, which contains and unifies the multi-faceted characteristics of the populist phenomenon in the space of a singular national experience. Italy can be used as a model of benchmarking for potential comparisons between singular national cases. Italy can be considered a ‘cradle’ of populists of diverse nature, of the new right, of the new left, the ‘pure’ populism of the Five Star Movement, the populism of reflexive civil society, the presence of a soft, governmental or institutional populism (the Renzi government, 2014–16) and a long-term experience with populism in government (in its latest version, an uneasy ‘cohabitation’ between two highly diverse populist parties in the ‘yellow-green’ coalition). In this regard, Italy will not so much figure as the subject of a comprehensive historical reconstruction of diverse forms of populism in this volume; rather, the volume starts with philosophical-political and socio-political reflections on a number of significant tendencies – such as depoliticization, anti-politics, antipartyism, legal resentment, and techno-populism  – present in this country. The volume, in this, hints at an analysis of different and possible developments of the populist phenomenon. The theoretical analysis allows us to reconstruct populism on the basis of themes such as disintermediation, depoliticization, the personalization of politics, the transformation of democracy and of parties, anti-politics, penal and constitutional populism, and the haze that constitutes the mystique of the people in the strategy of populist politicization. Therefore, the volume does not so much propose an analysis of political Italy but rather of Italy as a starting point for a multi-faceted reflection on the concept of populism, facilitated further by means of a comprehensive analysis of four prominent case studies in the final chapter of the volume, highly useful as analytical material for potential comparisons with other political systems in Europe and beyond.

2  Overview of the volume The book is divided into four parts. In the first part, general theoretical questions regarding the relationship between the people, democracy, politics, and the

Introduction 5 economy are discussed. The contributions engage with the profound changes that affect current modern democracies, and of which populism is both an outcome and a cause. The various contributions show how populism is significantly reconfiguring not only the fundamental structures of democracy but also key categories of democratic theory, such as representation, legitimacy, participation and popular sovereignty. Valentina Pazé analyzes the different notions of the people that are at the heart of populist discourse, using a genealogical approach. Pazé begins her discussion by revisiting a passage of Book IV of Aristotle’s Politics, from which she derives elements for a stipulative redefinition of the notion of the people. Aristotle identifies a particular form of democracy in which ‘the masses are sovereign, not the law’ and the demos acts as ‘one’ and is the ‘master of everything’, apart from when it is stirred up by demagogues, who are the ‘masters – in turn – of popular opinion’. While the direct and emotional relation between the leader and ‘his/her’ people, imagined as a compact and homogeneous mass, represents the heart of populism, in the modern epoch the figure of the people takes on different guises: the sovereign people, the people as class, the people as nation, the people as public. In the second part of the chapter, Pazé discusses a number of key passages in Italian history on the basis of the aforementioned categories. The choice of the Founding Fathers to opt for an almost ‘pure’ form of parliamentarism and for a proportional electoral system gave the early Republic strong antidotes to populism. With the majoritarian turn in the early 1990s, the conditions for a form of ‘immediate’ democracy, or ‘direct’ form of democracy, have however been created, which has led to a drastic simplification and polarization of the political field. It is only then that the political game shifts terrain, also in Italy, towards populism, with leaders that appeal to ‘peoples’ variously characterized in a key of anti-politics, ethno-nationalism or that of a television audience. In the second chapter, Leonardo Morlino and Francesco Raniolo situate the discussion of populism within core debates of democratic theory and comparative politics, in particular that of the ‘quality of democracy’. The populist challenge puts democratic regimes under strong pressure, and in their contribution, Morlino and Raniolo engage with the complexity and multiple impacts of this populist challenge. The authors claim that the challenge touches all the main dimensions of democratic quality, even if not all the relevant dimensions – including the rule of law, electoral accountability, participation and competition – are involved in the same way and with the same intensity. The outcome of the populist challenge may clearly result in a subversion of democratic quality rather than the improvement or deepening of democracy. As Morlino and Raniolo argue, a meaningful perspective in the analysis of the qualities of democracy, above all a more realistic one, is to look at all the recurrent ways in which elites and citizens consciously or otherwise try to subvert those qualities for their political, partisan or private purposes. Morlino and Raniolo in particular discuss the dimensions of participation and competition in contemporary ‘radicalized democracies’. One distinctive problem in terms of democratic quality that emerges is that of representation. Populism entails the weakening of representation with regard to two main traditional channels of

6  Paul Blokker and Manuel Anselmi representation: the electoral and the functional channels. Due to the contemporary, deep crisis of representation both of classical political parties and of intermediate actors, such as interest groups, Morlino and Raniolo suggest that we need to shift our attention to a third ‘channel of representation’, that is, that of social and protest movements. What particularly matters, according to Morlino and Raniolo, are two polar models, an open and inclusive one and a closed and exclusive one, which reshape the distinction between leftist and rightist populist movements. In the third chapter, Fabio de Nardis problematizes the connection between anti-politics and the process of depoliticization. De Nardis understands depoliticization as a phenomenon that is closely related to neo-liberalism and considers how the phenomenon influences decision-making processes in the West in general and in Italy in particular. Neo-liberalism applied to government practices manifests itself as a form of depoliticization and produces repercussions on the relationship between political classes and civil society. In this context, de Nardis claims, the arenas of political representation are emptied of meaning in favour of post-democratic decision-making practices. The latter become manifest in a form of crisis in the role of parliaments and in the strengthening of governments, in particular in their new role as promoters of the interests of large international political, economic and financial organizations. Significant from the perspective of populism is that a depoliticized politics no longer needs popular participation, in that the decision-making process tends to be transformed into the ratification of decisions taken outside the places of representation. As a result, anti-politics becomes the dominant social sentiment, and civil society perceives itself as increasingly distant from politics and democratic institutions. De Nardis argues that neoliberalism has had a significant influence on decision-making processes in Italy, in particular from the Tangentopoli crisis of the early 1990s onwards. He claims that Italy is the only country in Europe that has tried to escape from various economic crises through a form of populism of technocrats. Populist forces react to the neoliberal political projects that stimulate depoliticization from above, by offering a sovereignist stance from below, thereby, however, further contributing to a process of de-democratization. The second part stresses the significance of anti-partyism in Italy’s ‘particracy’ or republic of the parties; a phenomenon present in Italian politics even before the affirmation of representative, parliamentary democracy. The central role of political parties in Italian democracy is addressed, but equally their always already fragile position, which has eroded in a particularly dramatic manner in the early 1990s. With the collapse of the ‘First Republic’, dramatic changes in the party system occurred, including a dramatic delegitimization of the traditional parties, exploited shrewdly by emerging populist parties, re-aligning with the anti-partyist tradition. Nadia Urbinati argues that anti-partyism is a seminal component of the populist critique of the political establishment. Yet anti-partyism as such is not a populist construction, as it emerged historically along with representative government. Urbinati shows how anti-partyism was competing with ‘particracy’ at the origins of the Italian democratic republic, and she reconstructs the anti-party arguments and proposals that lie at the roots of Italian democracy, emphasizing how

Introduction  7 anti-partyism manifested itself in a particularly clear manner in the years of the making of the 1948 democratic constitution. As Urbinati argues, the historical trajectory shows how today’s anti-party populism is deeply embedded in Italian democracy. Anti-partyism consists of a distinctive interpretation of democracy, which can take more individualist-liberal forms as well as more organic or corporate ones. Anti-partyist views imagine democracy in a depoliticized manner, in which conflict is deflated and partisanship less prominent. Anti-partyism is then not merely about a critique on ‘particracy’, and its malfunctioning – corrupt parties that fail to promote the common good – but it equally points to an alternative vision, intrinsic in democracy, rooted in a desire to make the ‘people’ the only ruling party. As Urbinati masterfully shows, anti-partyism in Italy has been part and parcel of the processes of democratization, while party democracy emerged as only a ‘second best’ and always struggled to gain and achieve full legitimacy. David Ragazzoni expands on Urbinati’s account of the role of anti-partyism in Italian democracy. Ragazzoni claims that ordinarily, anti-partyism is understood as a symptom of ‘senile’ representative democracies, on the grounds of two assumptions. First, political parties are assumed to be constitutive of ‘healthy’ representative democracies and valued as both necessary and legitimate. Second, anti-partyism is interpreted as a primary signal of degeneration. Supposedly, according to mainstream accounts, anti-partyism underpins the endogenous mutation of representative government from ‘party’ to ‘audience’ democracy, and supposedly constitutes the pinnacle of the crumbling legitimacy of parties as the quintessential form of political agency. Ragazzoni claims that the Italian case unveils a different story. On his account, following Urbinati, party democracy in Italy was born as a second-best form of democracy and never achieved full legitimacy. The repulsion of parties – or odium partium – fueled political debates since the very dawn of Italian democracy, before its Constituent Assembly was elected, and it revamped among the Constituents (especially the liberals and the monarchists), before the democratic Constitution was enacted. It started as a minority position in the mid-1940s/1950s but progressively spread across the entire political spectrum and reached its peak with ‘Tangentopoli’ (Bribesville) in the early 1990s, when new political actors from the right to the left (most distinctively Silvio Berlusconi) rejected the primacy of the party as the main form of political agency. In other words, odium partium in Italy predated party democracy. On Ragazzoni’s account, the life and times of Italian anti-partyism are complicated and more intriguing than a story of the decline of representative democracy. The Italian case in this may represent one that can potentially contribute to ongoing debates on party democracy and its transformations. In his contribution, Lorenzo Viviani discusses the phenomenon of anti-­ partyism in the context of contemporary populism. In his case the emphasis is on the transformation of Italian party structures due to populist and plebiscitarian forces, emphasizing in particular the transformation of political identities. Viviani argues that in advanced democracies, populism emerges not only due to distinctive tendencies of a socio-economic nature but also results from a failure of the traditional political elites. The elite’s loss of legitimacy is in itself not the result

8  Paul Blokker and Manuel Anselmi of populism, but, to the contrary, the delegitimization of traditional elites rather creates the opportunity for populist mobilization. Due to the disputed nature of the traditional political class, different forms of anti-politics may emerge, taking the form of an oppositional sentiment on the level of the masses. This popular sentiment may either manifest itself as apathy or detachment or take the form of active anti-politics. In Viviani’s view, the relationship between anti-politics and populism represents a series of contradictions, in relation to the degree of radicalism in the dispute against incumbent political representation. In his view, it would be misleading to conflate anti-politics with populism, and it would be equally be misleading to conflate populist democracy with all forms of critique on the existing democratic political system. According to Viviani, it is representative democracy itself that makes populism’s political-electoral rise and manifestation possible. This is particularly evident in Italy, as the phenomenology of anti-party populist parties in this country is, more than elsewhere, influenced by the complex dynamics of social, cultural and political change. The third part deals with the impact of populism on the wider spheres of (civil) society, including public opinion and the media, the cultural sphere and intellectual activity and issues of justice and crime. The various contributions show that populism cannot be reduced to a political phenomenon but needs to be understood and analyzed in its interrelation to a series of profound changes in society, in its social fabric, shifting political cultures and polarized mentalities. Emiliana De Blasio and Michele Sorice focus on new technologies and digital media and particularly investigate relations between populism and the usage of new technologies, including with regard to E-democracy. De Blasio and Sorice explore the phenomenon of techno-populism, in which forms of ‘direct representation’ through digital platforms play a highly important role. Their analysis underlines the complexity of the relation between populism and technocratic forms of governance, in that populism is not merely the exact opposite of technocratic rule (as seems the case of populist attacks on independent institutions), but in distinctive manifestations takes on a positive relation with technocracy, as in techno-populism. The depoliticizing tendencies are evident in both manifestations, that is, while technocracy maintains that there is only one correct, expertbased policy solution, populism endorses a singular genuine will of the people as the basis of decision-making. In this, De Blasio and Sorice explore the importance of ‘platform parties’ or ‘digital parties’, a new form of political party. The characteristics of this type of party include new organizational methods following a ‘net logic’ and the frequent usage of participatory platforms. Platform parties are clearly born from within a participatory logic, but often lead to what De Blasio and Sorice call a form of ‘hyper-representation’, which includes ‘direct’ and ‘personal’ relations with the populist leader through digital media. A clear example of this is the Rousseau platform of the Italian Five Star Movement, a pioneer of a techno-populism. The focus of Massimiliano Panarari’s chapter is cultural populism, and in particular the role of intellectuals and so-called ‘symbolic analysts’. In the Italian ‘populist turn’, the figure of the intellectual is clearly one of the preferred scapegoats

Introduction 9 and critical targets of populist parties, a figure reproduced by both left-wing and right-wing forces. At the same time, a distinctive type of ­intellectual – what Panarari calls ‘symbolic analysts’ – plays a significant role in the construction of the ideological and rhetorical discourse of populism. Panarari proposes to analyze the relation between populism and intellectuals on two levels: (1) the dimension of anti-intellectualism as a pillar of populism and (2) a number of distinctive ‘case histories’ of populistic storytelling – including anti-elitism (the struggle against the establishment or ‘casta’) and ‘sovranismo’ (a new form of economic and political nationalism, in opposition to globalization and the European Union). The analysis of such populist stories provides intriguing insights into how intellectuals play a major role – despite the anti-intellectual rhetoric – in populist movements, in forms that Panarari defines as ‘intellectuals of the common people’ and as ‘­supplementary officials’ of populist leaders, parties and movements. The chapter of Manuel Anselmi and Stefano Anastasìa engages with the phenomenon of ‘penal populism’. Anselmi and Anastasìa show how the emergence of populism in the last three decades has involved different dimensions of penal populism, understood as the usage (and abuse) of criminal law by populists, but equally by non-populist parties. In Anselmi and Anastasia’s view, penal populism has deeply altered the relation between politics and the justice system in Italy and has been used by ruling political forces of different ideological orientations. They claim that the populist turn in the Italian system has not only deeply transformed the political system and structures but equally affected civil society and public opinion, in this creating new arrangements of entire spheres of the social and political system in Italy. Political populism in particular has depoliticized the sphere of classical politics and professional politicians. At the same time, however, it has politicized realms that were not political in an excessive way before, such as those of civil society and the justice system, transferring the logic and needs of political consensus building to those areas. The fourth and final part deals with the transformation of politics. In recent decades, an undeniable trend towards participatory forms of democracy has become visible. The democratic imaginary has more prominently shifted towards a more literalistic understanding of the ideas of democracy and popular sovereignty as the rule of the demos and the will of the people. As a result, ‘experimentation’ with diverse forms of direct and participatory democracy has become a prominent dimension in democratic politics. In the European context, this participatory and popular dimension is equally visible with regard to understandings of the very framework of democratic politics, that is, the democratic constitution. In this regard, the ‘popular turn’ in democracy is not limited to calls for increased popular participation in ‘normal politics’ but includes ‘constitutional politics’. Populists attempt to reimagine the idea of constitutionalism in calls for a redefinition of ideas of popular sovereignty, majoritarianism and the rule of law. The Italian case is once again of great relevance in that the ‘season of constitutional reform’ that started in the early 1990s coincided with the emergence of populist parties that mobilized the people against the existing institutions and led to a series of attempts at comprehensively changing the Italian Constitution.

10  Paul Blokker and Manuel Anselmi Marco Damiani’s chapter is focused on the renewal of modes of political participation and to ways of building consensus as engaged in by populist parties and movements. The ostensible aims of such parties is to narrow the widening gap between citizens and the political elite. As Damiani argues, the populist phenomenon is rooted in a widespread public dissatisfaction towards the diverse manifestations of ‘politics as usual’, and hence, almost by definition populism shows forms of affinity with participatory and direct-democratic instruments. Damiani explores how populist movements use the tools of direct, deliberative and participatory democracy in a variety of ways. Populist political actors use a direct plea to citizens in order to shape a transformative project and, in this, build on an artificial, broadly construed and disarticulated people, which is able to hold together citizens of a range of social categories, cultural heritage, professional experience and profoundly different economic conditions. Damiani proposes a comparative interpretation based on a dual level of classification: on the one hand, a partition related to the tools used by the populist parties (referendum, inclusive candidate and leader selections, participatory budgets, online consultations, etc.) and on the other, a distinction made in relation to the political-institutional level of the application of such instruments (local, national or supranational). Damiani explores the different modes through which the main Italian populist parties use such political options and analyzes which differences are observable between the various forms of usage by populists. Paul Blokker’s chapter discusses the relation between populism and constitutionalism. He argues that populism is widely understood as a disruptive phenomenon, contesting constitutional rules, the rule of law and the separation of powers. The chapter aims to contribute to the conceptualization of the populist phenomenon in relation to modern constitutionalism, not least in order to be able to detect and analyze populist practices in relation to constitutional reform. The chapter brings out not only the disruptive dimension of populism and its reactionary nature (with regard to liberal constitutionalism), but equally highlights the alternative approach to constitutionalism populism represents. Blokker ‘deconstructs’ populism in its relation to constitutionalism, in arguing that the promotion of majoritarianism constitutes the populists’ main relation to the constitution, while populists portray an instrumentalist, political and ad hoc relation to the law, and, finally, that populists are deeply skeptical with regard to the formalistic, positivistic approach to the law in liberal constitutionalism. Subsequently, Blokker explores populist tendencies in the relation to constitutionalism in the context of the Italian ‘season of constitutional reform’ (which started in the early 1990s). The analysis focusses on Berlusconi’s and Renzi’s attempts at reform in 2005–6 and 2014–16, respectively, and analyzes both the modes and procedures of the two reform processes, as well as the substance of these reforms, in terms of issues related to strong leadership, the reduction of checks and balances, and the simplification of politics. The final chapter of the volume, by Cecilia Biancalana, has a different nature from the other chapters in that it gives an extensive overview of the rise of populist parties in Italy by carefully and extensively describing the main manifestations of

Introduction 11 populism. As Biancalana argues, Italy has frequently been considered a breeding ground for populism, in this earning the title of ‘laboratory of populism’ (Tarchi 2015), and due to the co-existence of different types and forms of populism, Italy can be considered a privileged observatory for its study. Her chapter provides an in-depth analysis of four prominent cases of populist parties, movements and leaders, cases that represent the most relevant experiences within the Italian political system during the so-called ‘Second Republic’: Bossi’s and Salvini’s Lega (Nord) (Northern League), Berlusconi’s Forza Italia (Go Italy), the Movimento 5 Stelle (Five Star Movement) and Renzi’s Partito Democratico (Democratic Party). Biancalana, after having outlined the origins, history and electoral successes of each of the four political parties, analyzes the four cases in relation to four distinct dimensions (the leader and its style, the definition of the people and its enemies, political organization, and the idea of democracy). She explores whether each of these cases can be considered to constitute a sort of ‘ideal type’ of Italian populism. Biancalana’s aim is to explore each case in its complexity and relate this complexity to the different phases of development of the Italian party and institutional system. The volume closes with the concluding remarks of Oscar Mazzoleni, who reflects on comparative lessons and future research objectives.

3  Final remarks As a whole, the volume aims to contribute to a historically sensitive, interdisciplinary and multi-faceted approach to the phenomenon of populism, with as a key objective the analysis of the significant and rather dramatic shifts in the operation of democratic politics and political institutions, as well as in the political imaginary that grounds political interaction and institutions in deep-seated forms of meaning-giving and legitimation. As emerges from the first part of the volume, the figure of the ‘people’ has returned as a prominent point of reference for political mobilization and creation of political subjects, frequently by means of a conflation of the ‘people-as-a-part’ and the ‘people-as-whole’. The latter – to construct a ‘People-as-One’ (Lefort 1986) – is an attempt to reduce the uncertainty of modernity by representing the people as a totality, denying its intrinsic quality of manifest plurality and denying the plurality of ways in which the people can be conceptualized (cf. Brubaker 2017). In most cases, such attempts at mobilization and totalization involve the counterposing of the ‘people’ to incumbent elites or the establishment, and in some cases even to the foundations of the institutional constellation of representative democracy as such. In political terms, this manifests itself in tendencies of polarization and, even more importantly, of radicalization of political positions and the extremization of political discourses. The latter dimension of radicalization has been frequently related to the ‘movement’ and ‘bottom-up’ stage of populist protest movements, in which widespread discontent is mobilized against existing institutions, but the entry of populists in government does not necessarily lead to moderation and a comprehensive deradicalization of positions (as the Italian case but also the experiences with populist governments in East-Central Europe show).

12  Paul Blokker and Manuel Anselmi Populism is importantly a reactionary phenomenon, in the general sense of forming a critical reaction to liberal, representative democracy, and in the specific sense of constituting a strong political reaction to a deep tendency towards depoliticization in contemporary politics of the last decades. Depoliticization expresses and justifies itself in views in which the economy becomes naturalized and policy decisions are supposedly the outcome of higher, scientific knowledge. Such a technocratic turn in politics is met by an anti-politics turn in society, as citizens feel progressively alienated from institutionalized and formalized politics. Populists, however, do not merely claim to reduce alienation by means of a repoliticization of politics, understood in terms of reconnecting citizens with politics (symbolically or otherwise). They radicalize the ‘popularization’ of politics by offering singular solutions justified by reference to an absolute truth, either that of the singular will of the people, or, as in cases of techno-populism, grounded in the scientific and digital forms of identification of that popular will (cf. Bickerton and Invernizzi Accetti 2018), taking the form of non-mediated, direct ways of participation. While on the one hand, then, populist anti-establishment views frequently include anti-technocratic and anti-intellectualist positions, and societies appear in a process of realignment with regard to distinctions between scientific, expert-based knowledge and popular knowledge, on the other, such a realignment is in itself strongly influenced, or even ‘orchestrated’, by populist intellectual ­entrepreneurs – the ‘intellectual of the common people’ – who construct alleged popular knowledge in a top-down fashion and in relation to precise political projects. A key dimension of populist political projects is the rebalancing of the relation between politics and society, as well as between politics and law. Regarding the former, politics and society, this frequently takes the form of an ‘extreme majoritarianism’ (Urbinati 2014), in which the attempt is to turn the political majority into a permanent majority, which in itself means the conflation of society as a whole and the populist leader as its incarnation. Regarding the latter, politics and law, populism often displays a strongly instrumentalist approach to the law, in which liberal constitutionalism is criticized for its juridifying and depoliticizing characteristics, and populists claim to return the law to its proper place, that is, as an instrument for the realization of the will of the majority. The populist view of law comes equally through in penal populism, in which the law is instrumentalized in order to build up political consensus, in a ‘populist use of criminal law’. The relation between society and political institutions remains a deeply fragile dimension of modern, representative democracy. Distrust of institutions or elites and societal alienation are intrinsic possibilities in modern democracy due to the emergence of partisan forms of mobilization (as in political parties), and the distance between society and politics that inevitably results from the institutionalization, formalization and professionalization of politics. In important ways, modern democracy has seen the ‘naturalization’ of representative, party democracy (cf. Rosanvallon 2009), represented as the only viable manifestation of modern democracy and articulated in a mainstream acceptance of a minimalist understanding of democracy. In a similar manner, the idea of ‘constitutional democracy’

Introduction  13 has become naturalized, in the understanding of constitutional democracy as made up of a unique institutional constellation of higher law (constitutions and bills of rights), independent institutions (apex courts) and constitutional guardianship. What is lost in such reductionist understandings, though, is the multiplicity of understandings of democracy (historically) available even in established democracies and the essential contestability of any institutionalized form of democracy. The Italian case shows that such institutional fragility and contestability are situated at the heart of the modern democratic project itself, and populism is in many ways one manifestation – in multiple expressions – of that very contestability.

References Bickerton, Christopher. J. and Carlo Invernizzi Accetti (2018), ‘Techno-populism’ as a new party family: the case of the Five Star Movement and Podemos’, Contemporary Italian Politics, 10(2), pp. 132–150. Brubaker, Rogers (2017), ‘Why populism?’, Theory and Society, 46, pp. 357–385. Lefort, Claude (1986), The Political Forms of Modern Society, Cambridge, England: ­Polity Press. Rosanvallon, Pierre (2009), ‘Democratic universalism as a historical problem’, Constellations, 16(4), pp. 539–549. Tarchi, Marco (2015), Italia populista: dal qualunquismo a Beppe Grillo, Bologna: Il Mulino. Urbinati, Nadia (2014), Democracy Disfigured, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Part I

Which people for what form of democracy?

1 The construction of the people Valentina Pazé

1  Togliatti a populist? In one widespread view, Italy gave populism fertile ground to take root and flourish at the time of the Second Republic, starting from the 1990s (Mény and Surel 2000; Taguieff 2002; Revelli 2017). And yet, not all of the scholars who have dealt with the issue share this view. In his groundbreaking work on “populist reason”, Ernesto Laclau proposed a different interpretation, which sees the Communist Party guided by Togliatti as the paradigmatic example of a “populist” political force (Laclau 2005). Following the Second World War, Togliatti found himself heading a workers’ party in a country that, especially in the South, was still largely made up of peasant farmers. For his ability to tie “communist” as a signifier to a wide range of democratic, rather than specifically workerist, demands, thus creating “a unity – a ­homogeneity – out of an irreducible heterogeneity” (Laclau 2005, 182), Togliatti should be considered an authentically populist leader. The same cannot be said of Silvio Berlusconi, whose followers were not a true “people” but a passive and acritical television audience (Laclau 2005, 191; Baldassari and Melegari 2012, 12–13). In the case of Berlusconi and Berlusconism, then, what was lacking was that active element of mobilization from below, without which we cannot speak of populism but, at most, of demagogy. More generally, though he devotes a certain amount of attention to the Northern League, Laclau accuses the Italy of the nineties and thereafter of having a “very limited ability to organize social forces in various sectors on a populist basis” (Baldassari and Melegari 2012, 14). This judgement is at odds with the view we took as our starting point – and indeed is diametrically opposed to it – viz., that Italy is a prime vantage point for studying populism from the nineties onwards, with the rise to power of Silvio Berlusconi, who “when called upon by the head of state to form a government [. . .], issued a communiqué of only a few lines in which he stressed, for the first time in the history of the Italian Republic that he, as if he were an American or French president, had been invested with power by the will of the people” (Meny and Surel 2004, 14).1 Such discordant interpretations evidently arise from different ways of using words and the concepts associated with them. There can be no populism without a people, as Laclau invites us to bear in mind. But what, exactly, is the people of

18  Valentina Pazé populism? What distinguishes it from the people of democracy and, more specifically, the people of representative and constitutional democracy, who, as Article 1 of the Italian Constitution states, exercise sovereignty “in the manner and within the limits laid down by this Constitution”? In the chapter, I will attempt to answer these questions, starting from a brief history of the concept of the people. With one caveat, which, though in many ways obvious, should nevertheless be expressed: “people” is an abstract term, with no clear, single referent. A collective subject called the “people”, as distinct from the individuals that make it up, does not exist, except in our discourses (Bobbio 1999, 332). In a way, moreover, the relationship between the people and populism echoes what has been said of the nexus of nation and nationalism: nations are “imagined” or “invented” by nationalists (Anderson 1986; Hobsbawm and Ranger 1983), just as peoples are “constructed” or “invented” by populists (Laclau 2005; Morgan 1988).2 And in any case, even democracy cannot do without the people as the ultimate source of legitimate power. What we must do, then, is go back to the origins and investigate the function that the notion of the people fulfills in democratic theory and then ask whether there is a specific populist understanding of this notion and what form such an understanding might take.

2  Aristotle and “demagogic democracy” Discussions of the nexus between the people, democracy and populism have often preferred to stress the Roman heritage rather than the Greek one. Nevertheless, if our primary aim is to investigate the role of the people in democracy, it is hard not to start from the experiences of the society that invented, and for the first time experimented with, democracy as a form of government and perhaps also – as we will see – something bearing a close resemblance to what today we mean by “populism”. In ancient Greece, the word demos, in the singular, had two main meanings that were not always clearly distinguishable (Finley 1973; Hansen 1991). On the one hand, it meant all the citizens of a polis who held political rights: in Athens between the fifth and fourth centuries, all free and native-born adult males. On the other hand, however, it was also used less broadly, to mean – usually with negative connotations – not the citizen body as a whole, but its humbler members: the peasants, the sailors, the manual laborers in general.3 This explains the fact that Aristotle was able to define democracy not so much as government “of the many” but as government “of the poor”. And also that one of the recurrent criticisms that aristocrats have launched against this form of government complains of its “partisan” nature: the demos – consisting of the majority of the poor (meaning the coarse, the uneducated, the wastrels) – who hold sway over the minority of the “best” (the aristoi), exercising their tyrannical domination. Conversely, the (few) passages in Greek literature that voice a favorable view of democracy generally use the term demos in a more inclusive sense. As the Syracusian Athenagoras argues: “It will be said, perhaps, that democracy is neither wise nor equitable, but that the holders of property are also the best fitted to rule. I say, on the contrary, first, that the word ‘demos,’ or people, includes the whole state, oligarchy only a part”.4

The construction of the people 19 The fact that the demos, even when it is only a part (the “poor”), tends to represent itself as the whole raises legitimate concerns among its adversaries. But what triggers the greatest fear and alarm is the fact that the demos often appears to “act as a whole”: a faceless, compact mass, with no internal distinctions, in which individual differences disappear and everyone conforms to the will of the majority. We need look no farther than Thucydides’ description of the expedition to Sicily, decided through acclamation by an assembly drugged by Alcibiades’ fiery words, which quash all hopes for debate and prevent the unconvinced from voicing their misgivings. “With this enthusiasm of the majority – writes Thucydides – the few that liked it not, feared to appear unpatriotic by holding up their hands against it, and so kept quiet”.5 The theme of the people’s manipulability by able demagogues, in assemblies or in courts, is at the center of the worries of all critics of democracy, beginning with Plato. More interesting from our standpoint, however, is the tack taken by Aristotle, who, less biased against democracy than his mentor, distinguishes between several forms that the “government by the demos” can take. In Book IV of the Politics in particular, he identifies five different types of democracy, the last of which – “demagogic democracy” – has many points in common with tyranny.6 Aristotle’s “demagogic democracy” has three essential features. The first is that in this form, “not the law, but the multitude, have the supreme power”. The ancient principle of the primacy of the nomoi (the fundamental laws) over the psephismata (the decrees of the popular assembly), forcefully reaffirmed after the oligarchical revolution of 404,7 is turned on its head here, and the people, utterly unchecked, make arbitrary and unreasonable decisions. Aristotle’s backdrop here is the memory of the years of “radical democracy”, when the demos was responsible for choices that were not only unjust but were also foolish, such as the death sentence passed on the generals who had commanded the shipwrecked fleet in the Arginusae islands, which violated the law against collective punishments. Second, in demagogic democracy the demos presents itself, and governs – as a “whole”. Aristotle writes that “the people” becomes a monarch, and “the many” have power in their hands “not as individuals, but collectively”. The point is clarified with a reference to the second book of the Iliad, where Agamemnon, wishing to put his warriors to the test, leads them to believe that the siege of Troy has ended. The soldiers are then transformed into a mob, displaying all the crowd traits that were later to be studied by the social psychologists of the nineteenth century: an unruly and irrational throng moving like a single mindless beast, overwhelming everything in its path. The description of this hysterical mass, incapable of heeding Achilles’ words, follows that of the calm and orderly discussion that took place in the council of the aristoi. Aristotle remarks that when Homer says ‘it is not good to have a rule of many”, it is not clear whether he means a rule where people act as a mass or “the rule of many individuals”. What is clear, however, is Aristotle’s opinion of the dynamics of assemblies, which bring the people to the level of the crazed mob described in the Iliad. Lastly, the fifth type of democracy described by Aristotle in the Politics is that brought about by demagogues, who spring up when the people no longer hold the

20  Valentina Pazé laws supreme. For Aristotle – as for Aristophanes, Plato and a lengthy tradition – the demagogue is essentially a “flatterer”. Indifferent to the truth, he tells the citizens what they want to hear, cajoling them and arousing their basest instincts. In doing so, he presents himself as “one of them”, a “man of the people”, in how he dresses and holds himself and in his speech, always direct and colloquial, often coarse and vulgar.8 A peculiar sort of vicious circle – as Aristotle points out – is set up between the people and demagogues. On the one hand, the demagogues “grow great, because the people have all things in their hands”, and on the other, they “hold in their hands the votes of the people, who are too ready to listen to them”. In this sense, the rhetorical arts mastered by demagogues can be described as a form of psychagogy: the art of guiding people from within, penetrating into their psyche.9 As a result, the flow of power is reversed, no longer rising from the base but moving downwards from the top, because – appearances notwithstanding – it is the leader who drags the masses after him with the persuasive force of his discourse, not the other way around. At this point, we can readily see what Aristotle means when he notes that this form of democracy can be compared to tyranny. Supremacy of the demos over the law; a holistic conception of the people as an undifferentiated “whole”; a direct emotional relationship between the leader and the masses, fueled by a spirit of retaliation against the aristocratic minority: the parallels are not hard to perceive between Aristotle’s description of “demagogic democracy” and what is commonly meant by “populism” today (Mény and Surel 2000; Weyland 2001; Taggart 2000, 2002; Pasquino 2008; Urbinati 2013). Without wanting to push the parallels too far, we can nevertheless say that ever since its origins, democracy has been dogged by an ominous shadow (Canovan 1999, 2002): a regime in which the people – but in fact only a portion of the people – claims to be everything and to have the last word on everything, exerting a “tyrannical” domination over the minorities.10

3  Reinventions of the people in the modern age The idea that the people is the original source of legitimate power was handed down from the Greeks to the Roman world where, well beyond the Republican period, the law continued to be seen – in Gaius’s definition – as “what the people orders and has established”. Even the absolute power of the Roman emperors is justified on the basis of the lex whereby the princeps receives the whole of the people’s imperium and potestas (McIlwain 1947, 48). During the Middle Ages and the early modern period, the nature and limits of this granting of power were to become the crux of the debate between absolutists and constitutionalists. The supporters of absolute monarchy interpreted the lex regia de imperio in terms of traslatio, i.e., a definitive and unconditional transfer of sovereignty to the king. The theorists of constitutionalism, like Bracton and, later, the Monarchomachs, maintained that this transfer is conditional, interpreting it as a concessio, dependent on whether the princeps fulfills his duty to rule justly. The people invoked as “the source of all legitimate government, even that by emperors and kings” (Canovan 2005, 15) includes everyone who lives in a certain

The construction of the people 21 country and is subject to its laws. In the France of the Ancien Regime, for example, the people is the set of the three estates that, taken together, form the “body of the nation”, governed by the crowned head. And yet the term peuple and its derogatory version, populace, are also used to denote a specific fraction of society, the Third Estate or, in some contexts, its poorest and most destitute members, despised and feared because of their subversive potential (Ruocco 2011). In England and the rest of Europe too, the politico-legal notion of the “people-as-awhole”, taken as the basis of legitimate power, coexists and is at times confused with the more sociological “people-as-a-part”, meaning the humbler levels of society (the “common people”) (Canovan 2005). The appeal to the people takes on new meaning in the age of revolutions, starting from England’s “great rebellion”, when the mobilization of those on the lowest rung of society by a Parliament that was still monopolized by the well-off classes took place “in the name of the people”. Attention has been drawn to the “fictional” and “ideological” character of the notion of popular sovereignty which, in replacing the older formula of the “divine right of the king”, ends by “providing the few [the gentlemen sitting in the Long Parliament, who represent a tiny minority of society] with justification for their government of the many, and reconciling the many to that government” (Morgan 1988, 38). What is certain is that the idea of the people became a powerful draw for the poorest and most downtrodden layers of society, who identified with it and took action accordingly, raising authentically democratic demands such as those of the Levellers in England, followed by those of the more radical wing of the American and French revolutionaries. Here as elsewhere, the idea of the “people-as-a-whole” intersects and overlaps with that of the “people-as-a-part”: the representatives of the Third Estate, realizing that they were “everything” but counted for nothing – that they were the “complete nation” that works and produces to maintain a privileged caste – joined together to form the National Assembly to defend the true general interest (Sieyès 1970). The people who occupies center stage in the age of revolutions is the constituent people (the “We the people” of the US Constitution, the “nation” of Sieyès), who rebels against kings turned tyrant and calls for the political order to be re-erected on new foundations, writing a constitution. In fact, the right to resist tyrants had already been claimed in the Middle Ages and during the wars of religion, in particular by the Monarchomachs. But the people that the latter invoked was still conceived in holistic terms, as a single collective subject, a “body” or universitas, capable of acting only via its “natural representatives” (the “lower magistrates”, generally of noble birth, or the Estates-General, where the majority of the population was not represented) (Clerici 2011, 64). At the end of the eighteenth century, by contrast, the “Copernican revolution of modernity” inaugurated by Hobbes and by the modern concept of natural law had been largely assimilated, at least in intellectual circles. From this standpoint, the only legitimate power is that based on the consent of a plurality of free and equal individuals, not of an imaginary “people” that pre-exists the State. In this connection, Hobbes makes a fundamental distinction between multitudo and populus: the latter being the outcome of the contractual artifice and not a given datum to be used as a starting point (Hobbes 1998). Though

22  Valentina Pazé the “bottom-up” justification of political power goes hand in hand with breaking down the people into its elementary atoms – individuals, regarded as vested with natural rights – the revolutionary rhetoric prefers to simplify, taking an essentially dichotomous approach based on setting the “new” against the “old”: the people, as a single unanimous political subject, against the guardians of the old order. Nevertheless, the revolutionaries themselves – starting with Sieyès – began to take note of the difference between the “constituent” and the “constituted” states; the people in whose name the Constitution was proclaimed and the flesh-andblood citizens whose right to participate in making collective decisions through the election of representatives must – to some degree – be recognized. This distinction is especially relevant when, with the extension of suffrage, the representative state evolves democratically. The sovereignty of the people, then, translates into vesting all citizens (i.e., all male citizens, as was long the case) with political rights. This does not only mean being able to participate in defining the “general will” by voting; it also entails the right to organize in parties, leagues, unions, to defend one’s own interests and promote a certain model of society. Once the “party democracy” model (Manin 1997) had come to dominate in the course of the twentieth century, the dichotomous attitudes of the revolutionary periods were obsolete. Politics has ceased being a question of head-on clashes between the people and the privileged classes but is a competition between parties, the expression of a plurality of “parts”, which are no longer perceived as “factions” destructive of the social body (Sartori 1976). Apart from the hopes entertained by the revolutionary parties, which were to fade as parliamentary democracy became stronger, organized politics no longer aimed at seizing power in order to install a new order but at the gradual transformation of society, if necessary, by entering into alliances and compromises with other parties. All of this takes place within a framework of accepted constitutional rules, which circumscribe the scope of political decisions, thus ensuring that fundamental human rights cannot be infringed even by the sovereign people itself.11 If we return now to the distinctive characteristics of Aristotle’s “demagogic democracy”, we realize that this model and the model of representative constitutional democracy that gained ground in the twentieth century are poles apart. The latter model, in fact, is based on (a) the relativization of the democratic principle, as aptly expressed by the wording of Article 1 of the Italian Constitution: “Sovereignty belongs to the people, who exercise it in the form and within the limits laid down by this Constitution”; (b) participation in political decision-making, not by a compact and undifferentiated collective entity, but by citizens organized in parties, unions, associations and the like, each of which represents a part rather than the “whole” of society; (c) the “absence of leadership” or, at least, leadership by a large number of individuals who sit in parliament, giving visibility and voice to a plurality of ideological and political outlooks (Kelsen 2013). This representative and constitutional conception of “party democracy” is challenged by the recurrent “populist” waves that since the end of the nineteenth century have swept through democratic or democratizing regimes in many latitudes (Taggart 2002; Mair 2002).

The construction of the people  23

4  The people of populism If the space of party democracy is pluralistic, that of populist democracy is fundamentally dichotomous (Mair 2002; Panizza 2005; Mudde and Kaltwasser 2012). This is clear from an analysis of the work of Laclau, a scholar who deserves attention for his efforts to bring populism into the mainstream, shake off the general discredit surrounding it and endow it with full theoretical dignity. What does Laclau mean by populism? Not an ideology or a worldview; not a particular type of political movement or regime, but the logic that oversees the formation of collective subjects. In a certain sense, it is the logic that guides politics itself, or at least democratic politics, rooted in the active participation of the “popular” classes (the “people-as-a-part”, made up of the outcasts, the marginalized, the underdogs). Distancing himself from all of the various conceptions stemming in one way or another from the idea that the social has primacy over the political, Laclau argues for the politically – and discursively – “constructed” character of all collective identities. And he goes so far as to maintain, turning one of Marx’s celebrated dicta inside out, that “the political is, in some sense, the anatomy of the social world” (Laclau 2005, 154).12 There can be no peoples, nations – or even classes – apart from their invariably contingent “political articulation”. The same is true of democratic representation: it is the act of representing that gives shape to forms of collective will that did not exist before, giving unity and coherence to claims that would otherwise be destined to remain fragmented and scattered. How does the political construction of the people take place? While Morgan, in his book on the English revolution, argued for the “invention” of the people from above, as a means of enabling an elite to retain their grip on power (Morgan 1988), Laclau reconstructs the process whereby a plurality of “democratic demands” put forward by the more menial segments of society crystalize around an “empty signifier” of some kind. Laclau uses this expression to mean a name that, while continuing to denote something partial (“workers”, “freedom”, “Nelson Mandela”), comes to symbolize all the claims of a “people” opposed to that which is other than itself: the establishment, the representatives of the status quo. To be able to speak of true populism, it is necessary that an “antagonistic frontier” be drawn that divides the social field in two, separating the power elite from the “people” (always in quotes in Laclau’s writings): “a partial component which nevertheless aspires to be conceived as the only legitimate totality” (Laclau 2005, 81).13 A further aspect emphasized by Laclau is the strong bond between the members of the “people”, held together by the affective investment in a common aim: the ideals of the group, certainly, but often also the leader who embodies them and can himself take on the function of an empty signifier.14 In Laclau, there is thus a distinct tendency to see politics – and democracy – in dichotomous terms, as the clash between a “people” and a “non-people”: the underdogs on one side, and the custodians of an order founded in privilege on the other. As we have seen, however, this binary opposition is very much at odds with the modern concept of representative democracy. While it can convey the intensity of revolutionary mobilization, it is ill-suited to gaining an understanding

24  Valentina Pazé of the ordinary democratic conflicts between collective subjects who identify with a set of shared rules (Monod 2012, 250–253). As has been noted, there is a basic ambiguity underlying how Laclau sees the “people”: at times as the “constituent” people in the modern concept of natural law, at times as “a collective subject competing on the playing field defined by the State-form” (Preterossi 2015, 121). Hence the problematic relationship that the Argentine scholar – and populism in general – entertains with the paradigm of representative constitutional democracy. On a scene imbued with the euphoria of revolutionary politics, there is little room left for conflict between different collective subjects other than the people and the elites. This is an unexpected outcome for a thinker who in earlier work had insisted on the need to preserve the “plural”, as well as “radical”, character of democracy (Laclau and Mouffe 2001, 184). Reducing politics to a struggle for power, and maintaining that the “people” and its enemies will forever be antagonists, Laclau also seems to rule out any possibility that conflict can debouch in a Kelsenian pursuit of compromise between forces that represent “partisan” interests and opinions but make no claim to being conceived as the “only legitimate totality”. Responding to the charge that he had over-simplified the political space, reducing it to a sharp dichotomy between two opposing poles, Laclau argued that “this logic of simplification” is “the very condition of political action” (Laclau 2005, 18). This argument is interesting for what it suggests about the relationship between populism and different models of democracy. The dichotomous division of political space is typical of the “majoritarian” (Lijphart 1999) or “immediate” (Duverger 1961) forms of democracy, based on the formally, or substantially, direct election of the head of the executive. These forms are thus primarily the presidential and semi-presidential systems, in which the political battle culminates in an electoral face-off between two leaders, nowadays chiefly fought out in front of the television cameras. Is it a coincidence that America – the continent of populism – is also the home of presidentialism?15 And that the populist wave has surged through Europe precisely in a period when many parliamentary systems were “presidentializing” (Poguntke and Webb 2005)? Without going so far as to say that there is a deterministic connection, there can be no doubt that the simplifying logic of populism, based on drawing a sharp line between “us” and “them” and on the direct relationship between the leader and the masses, is particularly suited to presidential systems. This is the institutional model that provides the backdrop for Laclau’s thinking when he discusses Latin American populism but also when he reflects on Europe, maintaining for instance that the lack of “relatively stable symbols” in the French Fourth Republic made it impossible for the populist logic to take root, as it was then able to do thanks to De Gaulle (Laclau 2005, 171).

5  “People” and “peoples” in Italy’s First and Second Republic We will now return to Italian politics and the interpretation Laclau offers of it. Even if we accept his categories, the argument that populism’s heyday dates to the period after the Second World War, and specifically to the golden years of the Italian Communist Party led by Togliatti, is far from convincing.

The construction of the people 25 In the aftermath of fascism, the drafters of the Italian constitution opted for a virtually pure form of parliamentarianism, based on the centrality of the legislative assembly and the indirect designation of the government, linked to the two chambers by a relationship of confidence. Though they did not include it in the constitution, the drafters also chose a proportional electoral system, almost entirely without correctives, to ensure that parliament is as representative as possible. In a system of this kind, patterned after a “consensual” and “mediated” model of democracy (Lijphart 1999; Duverger 1961), the unity of the people is asserted on a purely legal  – and hence artificial  – level, whereas the people in actual fact is dissolved in the plurality of political forces, which organize the public and mobilize it around different interests and visions of the world. This institutional framework, designed by the drafters of the constitution to avert the risk of a return to the plebiscitary practices of the fascist period, encouraged the parties to seek dialog and compromise with the other political forces, both in parliament and in society. The Christian Democrats, after triumphing in the 1948 elections, lost ground in the subsequent years. They were thus forced to forge alliances and were only able to form coalition governments, at times with the right, at times with the left. This was also a consequence of the failed attempt to bend the rules in favor of majority government through the so-called legge truffa or “swindle law” (which called for assigning two thirds of the seats in parliament to the party that gained 50% of the vote). For its part, Togliatti’s Communist Party had abandoned its revolutionary aspirations ever since the “Salerno turning-point”, accepting the rules of parliamentary democracy. Indeed, for years it would be parliamentary democracy’s most solid bulwark against the right’s rapt fascination with presidentialism and the recurrent attempts at subversion that have punctuated the history of the Republic (Ginsborg 1989). But the point that probably deserves the most attention is that in the years of Italy’s so called First Republic, the political struggle does not (with the exception of a few marginal episodes16) take the form of a confrontation between the “people” and the elites. Rather, it is a competition between a plurality of collective subjects, all or almost all of whom have “popular” roots of some sort or another: we refer in particular to the Italian Communist Party and the Christian Democrats, both mass parties with millions of registered members and many collateral organizations engaging in cultural, labor-related and recreational activities. The axis around which the political struggle rotates is that of right versus left – spawned by the French Revolution – and not the populist conflict between “high and low”, typical of the “infantile” or “senile” phases of democracy (Revelli 2017). However unrelenting the political struggle may have been, the expectations long remained those of a Kelsenian pursuit of compromise between political subjects who acknowledge each other as legitimate adversaries rather than as Schmittian “enemies” or, in Laclau’s language, as “parts” that lay claim to being “the only legitimate totality”. In the Nineties, the situation changed radically as the First Republic’s political parties imploded under the weight of scandals and judicial investigations. As the old ideological beacons dimmed in Italy and elsewhere (with the fall of

26  Valentina Pazé the Berlin Wall, for instance) and social inequality and insecurity increased as a result of neoliberal policies, class identities weakened and party membership and activism waned. The demos was “undone”, disintegrating into a multitude of individuals who are for the most part isolated, self-interested and depoliticized, a far cry from the ideal type of democratic citizen (Brown 2015). And yet, paradoxically, “the undoing, and the downfall, of the modern sovereign people coincides with the proliferation of populisms of various sorts, each speaking in the name of its own people” (Dominjianni 2017, 89). A prominent example is that of the “people of Padania” evoked by Umberto Bossi’s Northern League and then reinvented by Salvini as a people-nation beleaguered by an overbearing European Union and beset by immigrant hordes washing up on the peninsula’s shores. Another example is the television people following Berlusconi, the “paradigmatic figure in the passage from representative democracy to the democracy of the public, and from traditional leadership to personalized leadership” (Dominjianni 2017, 93). A more recent addition is the “angry” people of the Five Star Movement”, “neither of the right nor of the left”, unified by indignation against the corrupt political class, the national and transnational “powers that be” and the EU technocrats at their service, without forgetting the short-lived people that Matteo Renzi hoped to enlist in his attempt to build a centrist “party of the nation”, which was to have been catalyzed by the rhetoric of “demolish” the old guard – until the Five Stars came along. How should we interpret this spate of new “peoples”, which is taking place precisely at a time when politics is retreating before the dictatorship of finance, when the room afforded to democratic participation and discussion is shrinking, when social “demobilization” is spreading? In a setting that has been variously described as “elective autocracy” (Bovero 2000), “post-democracy” (Crouch 2004), “democracy without the demos” (Mair 2013)? Though they rise from the ashes of the old parties, in the void of representation these left behind, the new political subjects who have espoused populism can hardly be regarded as their predecessors’ functional equivalents. More virtual than real, more a media phenomenon than physically present in society, they are not comparable in size to the mass parties of the twentieth century (take, for instance, the over two million registered members of the Italian Communist Party in the 1950s). Above all, the function they appear to fulfil is in many ways the exact opposite of the classic “political integration of the masses”, viz., stirring up mistrust and anger against the “system” and its rules. Regarding the “people” of the Five Star Movement in particular, it has been noted that it cannot be said to have a defined identity. Very much a “catch-all movement”, it has been able to use generic anti-establishment dog whistles to bring together “the activist trying to stop the high speed railway and the disaffected member of the Northern League, the anarchist and the fascist, the center-left voter and his center-right counterpart”. All subjects who, “if they were together in the same real space (such as a public meeting or debate), would start quarrelling with each other; in a virtual dimension, however, they find their own niche, without infringing on their neighbor’s” (Dal Lago 2013, 36). And in any case, the

The construction of the people  27 indignation that these “peoples” harbor is certainly real and palpable, directed not only against a frankly indefensible political class, but against everything that smacks of “First Republic”. It is thus directed against the mediation and political counterweights typical of representative democracy: the labor unions, the parties, the independent media, the intellectual critics (Urbinati 2015). And, in particular, against the model of parliamentary democracy designed by the 1948 constitution, under attack since the electoral reforms of the nineties (which introduced a predominately majoritarian system without the necessary correctives) and in 2000 (the infamous “Calderoli Act”, later struck down by the court as unconstitutional). While this model was openly opposed by Berlusconi and Renzi, who promoted constitutional reform projects of a similar stamp when they were in power, it was misunderstood by the Five Stars, who despite their lip service to the Constitution in fact adhere to a model of democracy that, more than direct or indirect, could be referred to as “live”, in the broadcasting sense (Urbinati 2013): it leap-frogs over any kind of mediation, demonizes compromise and belittles the role of the representative assemblies by proclaiming parliament’s subordination to the will of a mythical “people of the network”. Nevertheless, after the failure of the constitutional reform and the defeat of Italicum, the electoral law backed by Renzi, which would have handed immense power to the winner of the national run-off, the return to a predominately proportional electoral law without the bonus seats awarded to the largest party that had skewed the preceding legislatures put the Five Star Movement, which had emerged from the 2018 elections as the largest party, in front of the inevitability of a coalition government. Though the 5SM had declared that they would never stoop to doing a deal with any of their rivals, the Movement’s leaders were forced to enter into a “governing contract” with Salvini’s Northern League after another potential ally, the Democratic Party, pulled out of the talks. It is too soon to pass judgement on what many have seen as an unnatural fusion between the League’s prevailingly “identity” populism and the Five Stars’ “protest” populism (Taguieff 2002). But there is very little doubt concerning the nature of this odd espousal. In the wake of the new government’s birth, the most telling expression of what the change meant in the victors’ eyes came from the ineffable Nicola Morra, a prominent Five Star politician; “the parties look after the interests of a few, while we’re the totality”.17 There could have been no better way to convey the typically populist idea of the people-as-a-part that claims to be the whole, assigning itself exclusive moral representation and asserting that it alone is reasonable (Müller 2016).

Notes 1 On Berlusconi’s “mediatic” populism, see also Taguieff (2002), Zanatta (2004), Tarchi (2015), Dominjianni (2017), Anselmi (2017), Revelli (2017). 2 I will not dwell on the difference between “construction” and “invention” of the people, as advanced by the theories developed by Laclau (2005) and Morgan (1988), respectively. What is of interest here is simply to draw attention to the conventional nature of any abstract term.

28  Valentina Pazé The same polarity is found in the two Latin terms populus and plebs. Thucydides, The Peloponnesian War, VI, 39.1. Ivi: VI, 24.4. Politica 1292 a. I have already discussed this passage in Pazé (2013). On the distinction between nomoi and psephismata and on the primacy of the laws over decrees, the fundamental text is Hansen (1991). 8 Take, for instance, Aristotle’s depiction of Cleon, who “was the first to use unseemly shouting and coarse abuse on the Bema, and to harangue the people with his cloak girt up short around him, whereas all his predecessors had spoken decently and in order” (Aristotle, The Athenian Constitution, XXVIII, 3). Aristotle’s characterization of the demagogue as a “flatterer of the people” is found in Politics, V, 1313b. 9 The term “psychagogia” was coined by Plato: see Plato, Phaedrus 261a, 271 c–d. 10 The theme of the “tyranny” of the people crops up with a certain frequency in the writings of democracy’s opponents, referring at times to Athens’ domination over the empire’s subjects, at others to the dictatorship of the poor over the rich. See Kallet (2003) and Pazé (2011). 11 I will not enter here into the differences between the different models of constitutionalism that have arisen in continental Europe and the common law countries. 12 These ideas were to a large extent anticipated in the book written together with Chantal Mouffe, the first edition of which came out in 1985 (Laclau and Mouffe 2001). 13 “In order to have the ‘people’ of populism, we need [. . .] a plebs who claims to be the only legitimate populus – that is, a partiality which wants to function as the totality of the community” (ibidem). 14 Here, the starting point of Laclau’s analysis is the theory of the social bond as a libidinal bond developed by Freud in Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego. 15 Referring to the USA, M. Canovan argues that populism, as “a kind of ‘catch-all’ politics that sets out to appeal to the people as a whole”, “forms one aspect of the political mainstream” (Canovan 2005, 77). This can be readily extended to Latin America. Likewise, Taggart notes that “It is hard to understand politics in the United States without having some sense of populism. It is impossible to understand populism without having a sense of the populism in the USA” (Taggart 2000, 25). 16 Take, for instance, the ephemeral success of the “Fronte dell’uomo qualunque” or Common Man’s Front, founded by Guglielmo Giannini (see Tarchi 2015). 17 Ora lo stato siamo noi. A Roma la festa della repubblica grillina, “Il Manifesto”, June 3, 2018.

3 4 5 6 7

References Anderson, B. (1986), Imagined Communities. Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, London, Verso. Anselmi, M. (2017), Populismo. Teorie e problemi, Milano, Mondadori. Baldassari, M., Melegari, D. (eds.) (2012), Logica e strategia del popolo. Intervista a Ernesto Laclau, in Populismo e democrazia radicale, Verona, Ombre corte, pp. 11–34. Bobbio, N. (1999), Teoria generale della politica, edited by M. Bovero, Torino, Einaudi. Bovero, M. (2000), Contro il governo dei peggiori. Una grammatica della democrazia, Roma-Bari, Laterza. Brown, W. (2015), Undoing the Demos. Neoliberalism’s Stealth Revolution, New York, Zone Books. Canovan, M. (1999), Trust the People! Populism and the Two Faces of Democracy, Political Studies 47, 1, pp. 2–16. Canovan, M. (2002), Taking Politics to the People: Populism as the Ideology of Democracy, in Democracies and the Populist Challenge, edited by Y. Mény, Y. Surel, New York, Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 25–44.

The construction of the people 29 Canovan, M. (2005), The People, Cambridge, UK, Polity Press. Clerici, A. (2011), La dialettica parte/tutto nelle teorie della sovranità popolare dei monarcomaques, in Il governo del popolo, edited by G. Ruocco, L. Scucimarra, Roma, Viella, pp. 47–71. Crouch, C. (2004), Post-Democracy, Malden, MA, Polity. Dal Lago, A. (2013), Clic! Grillo, Casaleggio e la demagogia elettronica, Napoli, Cronopio. Dominjianni, I. (2017), Fare e disfare il popolo. Un ipotesi sul caso italiano, Teoria politica, n.s., Annali VII, pp. 87–109. Duverger, M. (1961), La VIe Rèpublique et le Régime présidentiel, Paris, Fayard. Finley, M. (1973), Democracy Ancient and Modern, New Brunswick, NJ, Rutgers University Press. Ginsborg, P. (1989), Storia d’Italia dal dopoguerra ad oggi. Società e politica 1943–1988, Torino, Einaudi. Hansen, M.H. (1991), The Athenian Democracy in the Age of Demosthenes: Structure, Principles, and Ideology, Cambridge, MA, Blackwell. Hobsbawm, E., Ranger, T. (eds.) (1983), The Invention of Tradition, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press. Hobbes, T. (1998), De cive (1642), Cambridge-New York, Cambridge University Press. Kallet, L. (2003), Demos Tyrannos: Wealth, Power and Economic Patronage in Ancient Greece, in Popular Tyranny, Sovereignty and Its Discontents, edited by K. Morgan, Austin, University of Texas Press, pp. 117–153. Kelsen, H. (2013), The Essence and Value of Democracy, translated by B. Graf, Lanham, MD, Rowman & Littlefield. Laclau, E. (2005), On Populist Reason, London, Verso. Laclau, E., Mouffe, C. (2001), Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics, second edition, London-New York, Verso. Lijphart, A. (1999), Patterns of Democracy. Government Forms and Performance in Thirty-Six Countries, New Haven, CT-London, Yale University Press. Mair, P. (2002), Populist Democracy vs Party Democracy, in Democracies and the Populist Challenge, edited by Y. Mény, Y. Surel, New York, Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 81–98. Mair, P. (2013), Ruling the Void. The Hollowing-Out of Western Democracy, London, Verso. Manin, B. (1997), The Principles of Representative Government, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press. McIlwain, C.H. (1947), Constitutionalism: Ancient and Modern, New York, Cornell University Press. Mény, Y., Surel, Y. (2000), Par le people, pour le people. Le populisme et les démocraties, Paris, Fayard. Meny, Y., Surel, Y. (2004), Introduzione, in Populismo e democrazia, Bologna, Il Mulino. Monod, J.-C. (2012), Qu’est-ce qu’un chef en dèmocratie? Politique du charisme, Paris, Éditions du Seuil. Morgan, E.S. (1988), Inventing the People. The Rise of Popular Sovereignty in England and America, New York-London, W.W. Norton & Company. Mudde, C., Kaltwasser, C.R. (eds.) (2012), Populism and (Liberal) Democracy: A Framework for Analysis, in Populism in Europe and the Americas: Threat or Corrective for Democracy? New York, Cambridge University Press. Müller, J.-W. (2016), What Is Populism? Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania Press. Panizza, F. (ed.) (2005), Introduction. Populism and the Mirror of Democracy, in Populism and the Mirror of Democracy, London, Verso. Pasquino, G. (2008), Populism and Democracy, in Twenty-First Century Populism, edited by D. Albertazzi, D. McDonnell, New York, Palgrave MacMillan, pp. 15–29.

30  Valentina Pazé Pazé, V. (2011), In nome del popolo. Il problema democratico, Roma-Bari, Laterza. Pazé, V. (2013), La demagogia ieri e oggi, Meridiana 77, pp. 67–81. Poguntke, T., Webb, P. (eds.) (2005), The Presidentialization of Politics. A Comparative Study of Modern Democracies, Oxford, Oxford University Press. Preterossi, G. (2015), Ciò che resta della democrazia, Roma-Bari, Laterza. Revelli, M. (2017), Populismo 2.0, Torino, Einaudi. Ruocco, G. (2011), Pensare il popolo nella Francia dell’ancien règime, in Il governo del popolo, edited by G. Ruocco, L. Scucimarra, Roma, Viella, pp. 3–46. Sartori, G. (1976), Parties and Party Systems, New York, Cambridge University Press. Sieyès, E.J. (1970), Qu’est-ce que le Tiers Etat (1789); edition critique par Roberto Zapperi, Geneve, Droz. Taggart, P. (2000), Populism, Buckingham, Open University Press. Taggart, P. (2002), Populism and the Pathology of Representative Politics, in Democracies and the Populist Challenge, edited by Y. Mény, Y. Surel, London, Palgrave, pp. 62–80. Taguieff, P.A. (2002), L’illusion populiste. De l’archaique au médiatique, Paris, Berg International. Tarchi, M. (2015), Italia populista. Dal qualunquismo a Beppe Grillo, Bologna, il Mulino. Urbinati, N. (2013), Democrazia in diretta. Le nuove sfide della rappresentanza, Milano, Feltrinelli. Urbinati, N. (2015), A Revolt Against Intermediary Bodies, Constellations 22, pp. 477–486. Weyland, K. (2001), Clarifying a Contested Concept: Populism in the Study of Latin American Politics, Comparative Politics 34, 1, pp. 1–22. Zanatta, L. (2004), Il populismo come concetto e categoria storiografica, in Il mondo visto dall’Italia, edited by A. Giovagnoli, G. Del Zanna, Milano, Guerini e Associati, pp. 195–207.

2 Neo-populism and the subversion of democratic quality Leonardo Morlino and Francesco Raniolo

1  Traveling in time We agree with the coordinators of this project, according to whom “Populism, rather than a pathological phenomenon, consists in a complex, multi-faceted condition, which involves the redefinition of some of the essential characteristics of democracy, such as participation, representation, and political conflict” (see the Introduction to this book). In a nutshell, the category of populism has shown a high ability to travel through time (from the nineteenth century to the twenty-first century), space (from the United States to Russia and France in the nineteenth century to Latin America and Asia and finally to today’s Europe), political ideologies (there was a left-wing and libertarian populism and a rightist and xenophobic populism, and recently a post-ideological populism), and finally through different political purposes (populism as a weapon of opposition movements and as an instrument of government). To summarize the extensive literature on populism here would be out of place, if not pointless (see e.g. Canovan 1981; Hermet 2001; Mény and Surel 2002; Kriesi 2014; Tarchi 2015; Müller 2017; Mudde and Rovira Kaltwasser 2017, and others). In Morlino and Raniolo (2017, 77), we identified some salient aspects of the concept that can be useful in defining populist parties o political movements, and more specifically the ‘new radical protest parties.’ Those salient aspects include social and economic situation; culture and cognitive aspects; organization and mobilization; and political strategies (id.: 77–78). Here, it is enough to recall that ‘populism’ is a term that can be adopted for notions with a different level of abstraction: it characterizes the political style of a leader (cultural and e strategic aspects), a specific agent (political party or movement), and lastly, a type of political regime (be it authoritarian or a low quality democracy).1 In this chapter, we are going to focus on this last issue by analysing populism from within the perspective of the quality of democracy (Morlino 2011). The populist challenge puts democratic regimes under pressure. It intertwines and overlaps with other critical factors, both external (economic crises, international crises, migratory flows) and internal factors (corruption, decline of the traditional channels of representation, lack of alternation, and dissatisfaction with the activities of governments). Moreover, in this kind of analysis, it is necessary to consider not only political-institutional factors but also social transformations, as for

32  Leonardo Morlino and Francesco Raniolo example the presence of structural problems (youth unemployment or the heterogeneity of the political community) and the growth of social inequality. In this context, the impact of the populist challenge is multifaceted. It extends over all the main dimensions of democratic quality – even if not all the relevant dimensions and their sub-dimensions are involved in the same way and with the same intensity. The outcome of the populist challenge can be a subversion of democratic quality rather than the improvement or deepening of democracy. Hence, a meaningful perspective in the analysis of qualities, above all a realistic one, is to look at all the recurrent ways in which elites and citizens consciously or otherwise try to subvert those qualities for their political or private purposes. A closer look at the concrete problems of implementation of qualities should be complemented by an awareness of some of the opposing forces that have recently received attention in numerous papers and studies (see Urbinati 2014; Morlino and Raniolo 2017; Mounk 2018; and see others in the next section).

2  Populism and democracy The problem of the relationship between populism and democracy essentially arises with what John Dunn (2006) calls “the second coming” of democracy, that is, with the ‘democracy of the moderns’. As long as we are in the world of Greek direct and assembly democracy, the problem of the relationship between the two notions did not exist. First, the term ‘populism’ is much more recent and is born out of the complex social and political transformations that characterized Tsarist Russia of the late nineteenth century as well as the United States roughly during the same period of time. Second, the democracy of the ancients is tendentially unstable and prey of extremism and riots of the poor and popular classes. It is no coincidence that from Aristotle’s time to the American Founding Fathers, and even beyond, the term had a bad reputation, denoting a corrupt form of government, also called by Polybius “ochlocracy” (see Sartori 1987). With the formation and establishment of representative democracy, the institutions and the procedures that distinguish it  – elections, electoral campaigns, referendums, parties, leaders, etc. – the challenge of populism emerges and is inserted in the ontological hiatus that is created between represented electors and their representatives (Rosanvallon 2008; Manin 1997). In this way, populism becomes the signal that democracy has betrayed the premise and promise inherent in its name: “government of the people.” With the liberal revolutions that characterize Europe and America between the end of the seventeenth (Glorious Revolution) and the end of the eighteenth century (French Revolution), a new type of political regime is affirmed that is certainly democratic, but it is also and perhaps above all liberal-­constitutional and representative. As Robert Dahl (1966) would have pointed out, mass democracy (or, rather, polyarchy) was established on the basis of three milestones: incorporation, or participation of the popular classes (and women), who were previously excluded from citizenship; representation, when the right to organize in parties and unions was granted; the legitimacy of opposition to the

Neo-populism and democratic quality  33 government.2 Subsequently, Dahl (1971) narrowed mass democracy down to two sub-­processes (incorporation/participation and liberalization/competition), which are the real “engines” of democracy. However, among the constitutive principles of this new type of regime, a structural tension exists and is probably unsolvable and, even more, subject to a recurrent overheating (see Eisenstadt 1999; Mény and Surel 2002) between participation and constitutional rules, government of the majority and guarantees of minorities, represented people and representatives, people and elites. The two-dimensional model by Dahl, as it is known, has also been applied in a dynamic (historical-longitudinal) perspective to identify the paths that lead to stable mass democracies3: liberalization earlier and participation later. Recently, Fareed Zakaria (2003) strongly reiterated the causal direction from constitutionalism  – but he also adds capitalism and the market  – to democracy. However, such a developmental sequence may also be reversed or interrupted and consequently, the issue of the tension between the constitutional and participatory (popular) faces of democracy reappears. Populist democracy would, therefore, be characterized by the weakening of the liberal-constitutional component in favor of the participatory or electoral one.4 Accordingly, some authors claim that populist democracy would overlap with illiberal democracy (Zakaria 2003; Mounk 2018). Mounk (id.) is not able to escape from this ambiguity, which is compounded by some confusion in conceptualization. This author sees two twists in the internal equilibria of a liberal democracy: the one resulting from “democracy without rights”, which brings about illiberal democracies, and precisely the development of populism, and that of “rights without democracy”, which does not refer to the “competitive oligarchies” of Dahl and related historical examples, but concerns the key role that technocracies can achieve and the relevant domain of non-­majoritarian decisions. This type of regime is labeled by Mounk as “antidemocratic liberalism.” The limit of such analyses and similar ones starting from Dahl’s theoretical proposal is that, by focusing on two dimensions only (one of them, the constitutional one, being often not clearly identified), superficial if not impressionistic analyses are carried out. At best, these analyses capture some “negative” contextual conditions of populist pressures in a democratic regime – and if taken to the extreme, they can become characteristic of a hybrid or authoritarian regime (Morlino 2011; Linz 2006). Such conditions include non-compliance with the rule of law (corruption, electoral fraud); non-protection of rights, unbalanced inter-institutional relationships. But they say little or nothing about the “positive” characteristics of populism, which are the four components we mentioned above: situational, cultural, organizational, and strategic (see par. 1). We believe that an analysis of populism – or rather of the challenges it poses to democracy  – that would better capture the reality and be heuristically more effective may come from the perspective of the quality of democracy. In fact, as we will see, if we accept that the quality of a democracy can be analysed in terms of procedures, results and contents, and the related components, the impact of populism becomes more evident.

34  Leonardo Morlino and Francesco Raniolo

3 The quality of the democracy: what is it and how does it work? Briefly recalling what we have already discussed in other works (see esp. Morlino 2011, ch. 7), the analysis of the quality of a democracy has to start from an explicit definition of quality. When we consider this aspect further, we can see three meanings of quality: 1. quality is defined by the established procedural aspects associated with a product; a ‘quality’ product is the result of an exact controlled process carried out according to precise recurring methods and timing – here the emphasis is on the procedure; 2. quality consists in the structural characteristics of a product, be it the design, materials, or functioning of the good or other details that it features – here, the emphasis is on the content; 3. the quality of a product or service is indirectly derived from the satisfaction expressed by the customers, by their repeated request for the same product or service, regardless of either how it is produced or what the actual contents are or how the consumer goes about acquiring the product or service – according to this meaning, the quality is simply based on result (Morlino 2011, 194). Moreover, if a quality democracy is ‘a stable institutional structure that realizes the liberty and equality of citizens through the legitimate and correct functioning of its institutions and mechanisms,’ it is also a broadly legitimated regime that satisfies citizens (quality as result); one in which the citizens, associations, and communities of which it is composed enjoy liberty and equality (quality as content); and one in which the citizens themselves have the power to check and evaluate whether the government pursues the objectives of liberty and equality according to the rule of law (quality as procedure). With these basic definitions, we can spell out eight possible dimensions or specific qualities in terms of which democracies might vary and which should be taken into consideration. The first five are procedural dimensions. Although they are also relevant to the content, these dimensions mainly concern rules. The first procedural quality is the rule of law. The second and third procedural qualities regard the two forms of accountability (electoral and inter-institutional). The fourth and fifth are the classic dimensions of participation and competition, which, however, have a special theoretical status (see below). The sixth and seventh are substantive in nature: full respect for rights, which are expanded through the achievement of a range of freedoms; and the progressive implementation of greater social and economic equality. The final eighth dimension concerns the responsiveness or correspondence of the system to the needs of citizens, and civil society in general (see Table 2.1). Here, we are not going to analyse the different dimensions regarding the quality of democracy (see Morlino 2011, ch. 7 and 8). We rather focus on the two procedural dimensions that are very relevant for every democracy, that is, participation and competition. The other dimensions will remain in the background and we refer to them only when strictly necessary. To be adequately focused, this analysis makes three assumptions explicit. The first one comes from one of the main empirical results of empirical comparative analysis on democratic quality in contemporary democracy. We refer to the mechanism of mutual convergence. This is an internal, core mechanism that works in

Neo-populism and democratic quality  35 Table 2.1  Dissatisfaction as the intermediate variable and reactions Globalization

Economic crisis

Immigration

Dissatisfaction

White racism Nationalism Anti-immigration Policies of exclusion & reactions of excluded Environmental negationism Anti-liberalism in economy Growing role of economic élites Success of protest, anti-establishment party Overpromising Policy radicalization Media manipulation in shaping of opinions Irresponsible party politics Radicalized participation Deeper political conflicts Decisional inefficacy

strengthening or weakening the different eight qualities (rule of law, electoral accountability, inter-institutional accountability, participation, competition, freedom, equality, responsiveness). For clarity’s sake, based on a large body of literature, we accept that all the analysed qualities are ultimately related to economic aspects, the organization and activism of civil society, cultural legacies, or other factors (see Morlino 2011, ch. 9). In other words, we affirm the possibility that our analysis may have been examining spurious correlations and that the actual explanations are elsewhere. But even if we accept this point, that mechanism – which powerfully emerges especially in the explicit and implicit role of opposition (see Morlino 2011, ch. 8), in the connection between freedom and equality and in the relationship with procedural qualities – still exists and supports the deepening of democracy or explains its worsening in a more in-depth manner. In a nutshell, the core of the mechanism can be traced within all the procedures that characterize democracy and influence the contents. What this analysis seems to reveal is that ultimately a democracy, possibly a consolidated one, acquires its own inner logic that strongly connects procedural aspects and substantive ones with regard to contents and results. There are no doubts that constraints, contingencies, specific action can obscure, distort, or weaken that mechanism. But when a number of cases are considered, the key aspect of interrelatedness comes out, and it is not even difficult to be understood. For instance, when there is a freedom guaranteed by effective laws and mechanisms of even only partial control of elected people are in place, the thrust for more freedom and requests for equality emerge more clearly, but with limited effective results, in a context of widespread economic crisis. Moreover, we can accept that despite its salience, such a mechanism can also be reinforced by incentives and undermined by a number of different constraints that can only be explored much more in depth through a specific qualitative analysis. In this vein, the analysis of institutional arrangements in specific countries may be expected to play an

36  Leonardo Morlino and Francesco Raniolo important role in creating those incentives or constraints. As a result of what we have just stated and within the perspective of our analysis here, a key consequence of this assumption is that the worsening of one quality affects all others. Another empirical result of the comparative analysis of democratic quality (see Morlino 2011, ch. 8; Morlino and Raniolo 2017, ch. 5) that can be taken as a second assumption for our analysis is: protest, especially if not violent although radical, brings an improvement of responsiveness, which is among the qualities that is more weakly related to all other, or even of equality. This can be easily explained: if there is no alternative to democracy, that is, if there no possibility of a coup d’état with military intervention or another way to subvert the existing political order, the most obvious reaction of elected democratic authorities is to meet the needs of protesting people. Alternatively, the growth of opposition and the change of government once there are new elections is the price to be paid. And if the incumbent government is not willing to be responsive, those new elections may bring newly elected politicians who won the competition precisely on this matter. In a different historical perspective, Rosanvallon’s argument (see e.g. 2016) coincides with this conclusion when explaining the reformism of the early to mid-twentieth century as a result of a fear of turmoil and even of revolution. The relationship between protest and responsiveness requires, however, two clarifications. From the input side, protest, which reflects structural changes, such as globalization, immigration, and even a protracted economic crisis, is the result of a growing dissatisfaction of voters. On the demand side, this set of attitudes will bring about consequent behaviors, such as abstention, protest, unconventional participation, the punishment of traditional political parties. On the supply side, it brings about several other aspects of populist politics (which Table 2.1 summarizes in the third column). From the output perspective, if the thrust for responsiveness is translated into a policy of over-promising and distributive policies, which can hardly be implemented or, if realized, counterproductive effects will manifest themselves in the medium to long term, it is probable that eventually we have a new wave of disappointment and consequent dissatisfaction (Hirschman 1982). The third assumption concerns the ‘catalysing effect.’ This mechanism allows us to explain the impact of the crisis on the quality of democracy (Morlino and Raniolo 2017, ch. 2). That is, contrary to the classic Schumpeterian hypothesis in economics that crises bring about innovative destruction, we hypothesize that in politics, an economic crisis magnifies and accelerates latent or less latent trends and factors already present within the political system. Like all other mechanisms, the catalyzing effect brings recurrent links and connections (see Morlino 2011, 19–21), in this case among previously existing background conditions that are present within the political system. From this perspective, the economic crisis magnified latent trends that were already present within the party systems and in the patterns of relationships between citizens and institutions while at the same time it affected the capacity of crisis management and the gap between responsiveness and electoral accountability (see Mair 2009). For example, to better trace the catalyzation, we can look at the democracies of Southern Europe, where we have identified three patterns of change which concern the channels of political

Neo-populism and democratic quality  37 expression (Morlino and Raniolo 2017, ch. 3). These are three different patterns, which are very much consistent with the different political traditions of each country. The first one is alienation and continuity. Our best-matching case is Portugal. Where there is an economic crisis, already existing citizen alienation and dissatisfaction become even stronger, but also, because of a lack of credible political alternatives compounded by a widespread passive political culture, citizens choose to distance themselves even more from political participation. The net effect of such non-behaviour strengthens the traditional parties. The second, more obvious and traditional pattern is mobilization and stabilization of movements. This is the case in Greece and Spain, where dissatisfaction was translated into non-conventional participation and protest with a difference in terms of degree between Spain and a more radical and active Greece. The third pattern, which is again very much characterized by a strong path dependency from an institutional perspective, is immediate party stabilization of dissatisfaction without the intermediate step of social movements. In the Italian case, the strong partisan tradition complemented by historical dissatisfaction, a sort of anticipated reaction mechanism, immediately translated into a protest party (the Five Star Movement).

4  How populism subverts democratic quality If we start with the rule of law, first and foremost, a rigorous application of laws, or, in certain cases, the relationships with an only apparently efficient bureaucracy can have particularly negative consequences for the most socially weak and vulnerable members of society (O’Donnell 1999, 312–313). Then there is the possible use of the law as a genuine ‘political weapon’ (Maravall 2002). Here, we see a persistent and diffuse temptation for politicians to use the law against their adversaries if, for example, the opposition is condemned to remain so for a long time and has no chance of electoral victory in the near future. Politicians are also tempted to use judicial acts to reinforce their own position against the opposition. In other cases, when there is collusion among politicians, the judges themselves, with the support of the media, are tempted to turn to the judiciary in retaliation for certain political decisions that they consider unacceptable. On a different level, there is also a growing tendency among individual citizens or economic groups to resort to the law to assert their own interests. Some scholars note this phenomenon as a ‘juridification’ of contemporary democracy (see, for example, Guarnieri and Pederzoli 1997). Finally, and not altogether different, is the popular and diffuse cultural attitude that interprets the law as a severe impediment to realizing one’s own interests that should be circumvented in any way possible. This attitude, which is common in various countries throughout the world from Southern Europe to Latin America, Eastern Europe, and also Asian democratic countries, extends from the popular to the entrepreneurial classes. The Italian saying “fatta la legge, trovato l’inganno,” which suggests that fraud goes hand in hand with the law, seems particularly apt in this respect. From a point of view that is even closer to the theme of this chapter, we could also look at a particular political use of the rule of law. The reference here is at the adoption, implementation, or

38  Leonardo Morlino and Francesco Raniolo non-implementation of rules and the media visibility of the trials, depending on the attitudes, or perhaps better on the diffused emotions, of public opinion. A relevant example can be so-called ‘populist reformism,’ when reforms are carried out not so much for their functional effectiveness, but for getting consensus or, worse, for concealing the real decision-making processes (Edelman 1976). Müller (2017) also reminds us that governing populists (especially if in a context of illiberal democracy or hybrid regime) often develop clientelism and intolerance towards opponents. Regarding electoral accountability, given the well-known opacity of political processes and their complexity which renders information, justification, and evaluation more difficult, politicians have ample opportunity to manipulate their contexts in such a way as to absolve themselves of any concrete responsibility. Accountability frequently becomes a catchphrase more connected to the image of a politician than to any decisions he or she may have taken or the results he or she might have produced. Negative outcomes are easily justified by making reference to unforeseen events, or by taking advantage of a favourable press to influence public opinion. At the same time, good results, obtained sometimes at the cost of sacrifices by the governed, might result in negative or punitive judgments for the governor at the time of the next elections. The very action, often ideological and instrumental, of parties or other components of the political opposition, or even of media actors that are in a position to conduct public processes, sometimes on inconsistent grounds, reconfirms the difficulty of implementing genuine electoral accountability. The lack of clear distinctions between incumbent leaders and party leaders  – the head of government often also controls the parties  – means that parties, be they of the opposition or of the majority, are hindered in carrying out their role as watchdogs for their constituents. At the parliamentary level, party discipline is considered more important than accountability towards the electors and, in practice, the parliamentary majority supports the government without controlling it. Furthermore, there should also be a clear distinction between the responsible leader, either of the government or of the opposition and the intermediate layers of party actors that range from militants to sympathizers. These latter should trigger a bottom-up process that gives direction to how parties should control the government or organize their opposition. Recent studies on party organization in many advanced democracies (Katz and Mair 1995) indicate an opposite trend, however, characterized by strong, oligarchic leaders who act in collusion (instead of in competition) with other parties. The most extreme scenario relating to this phenomenon is that parties, supported by public financing, effectively form ‘cartels’ (see also Ignazi 2017). Citizens in European countries encounter further difficulties in ensuring electoral accountability because of the existence of the supra-national dimension created by the European Union. The most fitting example of how governments in these countries avoid accountability is the well-known tactic of ‘blame shifting.’ Here, the political responsibility for every unpopular decision taken by the government is shifted from the national to the European level, even if they concern clear-cut issues such as streamlining national administrations or reorganizing state

Neo-populism and democratic quality  39 finances to meet large national deficits. Governments or national politicians justify actions resulting in widespread public opposition by claiming that their hands were forced by opposing coalitions in the Council of Ministers of the European Union or in the European Council of prime ministers and chiefs of state, or by votes in the European Parliament. From this point of view, populist democracies present a peculiar ambivalence and a double distortion. On the one hand, the same rhetoric of the people versus élites, us versus them, constitute a formidable psychological mechanism to help mobilize the base (when populist parties are in opposition) or to escape from responsibility for political failures (when they are in government). The “conspiratorial” political culture that often feeds these strategies makes the process of having responsibilities impossible (Müller 2017). On the other hand, there is the second distortion: the direct and immediate exposure of the leaders, in a context of decline of intermediate structures, also increases their personal vulnerability, but also the systemic risks. Populist leaders are particularly exposed to cycles of disappointment (Hirschman 1982) when their overpromoted electoral commitments turn out to be inevitably unattainable. As Maravall (1997) has already discussed, there are many ways in which government leaders can avoid electoral accountability. At the same time, the absence or extreme weakness of inter-institutional accountability leaves electoral accountability as the only instrument for guaranteeing this dimension of quality democracy. The chances to exercise electoral accountability, however, are only periodic, and in some cases, citizens must wait several years before the next elections. The result is that we obtain a ‘delegative democracy’ (see O’Donnell 1994 and above) – a democracy of poor quality in which the citizen casts his/her vote and is subsequently ignored until the next election. Citizens are left without any means of controlling corruption and bad government, and there are no other institutions really capable of guaranteeing inter-institutional accountability. Parties and populist leaders, on their part introduce distortions in inter-institutional relations almost “naturally.” Their “proximity to the people” (Müller 2017) makes them unsuitable to any form of institutional mediation and action of guarantee institutions (central banks, constitutional courts, heads of state), except when they see a convergence of even occasional interests. The prejudice towards and the delegitimization of any non-elective (or non-majoritarian) institution add elements of radicalization to the functioning of representative democracies, often processes that are magnified when populist parties are in government (Campus 2006). Participation can be subverted and constrained in a variety of subtle and overt ways in democracies around the world. With the growth of citizen dissatisfaction (Putnam and Pharr 2000), passivism, indifference, alienation, and a consequent sharp decline of participation, especially the conventional one, are a key challenge to the development of specifically some qualities (see above). The subversion of the meaning and consequence of participation can be seen when it is no longer spontaneous, voluntary, free, to become steered by a different sort of elites (see also Riesman et al. 1961). A key role in this can be played by television and so-called audience democracy (see Manin 1997), which form the main context of that pseudo-participation. In the democracy Manin analyses, there is a close

40  Leonardo Morlino and Francesco Raniolo connection between the decline of traditional parties, the mediatization of politics and its personalization. In a sense, it could also be possible to emphasize the development of a “plebiscite-electoral channel” of representation (Morlino and Raniolo 2017, 87), which is focused on communication and on the direct identification between leaders and voters, more and more mediated by television and new digital technologies. More in general, resentment and diffidence of electors can unfold, on the one hand into nonconventional mobilization, and on the other hand, into democracy of leader (Calise 2015). Moreover, the attempt to secure controlled participation that may just take the form of obedient support for government actions from above comes from the authoritarian or non-democratic traditions of the country. That is, there is an effort to get people to participate, but only with behaviours that support the incumbent authorities. Other forms of participation are discouraged, and this is not difficult in social and political contexts with a poor tradition of active, autonomous civil society. Participation compounded by various forms of violence is also a subverted way of ‘taking part’ in politics. As suggested by Dahl some years ago (1971), a key, necessary, definitional element of democracy is a firm commitment to ‘the peaceful solution of conflicts.’ Consequently, the use of violent means twists and distorts the very working of every democracy. There are also a few recurrent patterns of subverting competition. The first one is the attempt to exclude competition in some area where the effective working of competition is supposed to have relevant consequences, for example, by making a pact between two parties participating in an election or by agreeing to exclude a priori a political actor, person or group from fair participation in an election. Second, a distortion of competition can be the end result of improperly implemented rules on the regulation of electoral campaigns and financial support for parties. A third, recurrent way of distorting competition is in obfuscating the program and/ or policy differences among parties or party coalitions. Collusive pacts between government and opposition as well as cartelization can also be recalled. Especially in hybrid regimes, competition can be seriously subverted if leaders and parties are able to arbitrarily control the implementation of rules, especially the electoral ones, or are able to constrain pluralism of information. Finally, within our democracies, political competition is becoming more radicalized5 as the distance among the main parties is growing, together with a deeper perceived cleavage between us and them, people and elite. The deepening of the populist cleavage has obvious consequences for the processes of exclusionary mobilization and the perception of citizens. The capillary diffusion of digital ICTs, above all social technologies, also favors the radicalization of political communication, hate speech, virtual violence, a violence that often turns into reality. Thus, the use of violence is another way of subverting competition among political actors. Without going into details, the recurrent ways of subverting freedom and equality are basically two. The first concerns the proliferation of the formal acknowledgment of rights without taking care of implementation and the second the acknowledgment of social rights without effective allocation of costs with the result of not implementing them. Responsiveness can also be subverted mainly

Neo-populism and democratic quality  41 Table 2.2  A few recurrent patterns of qualities subversion Rule of law

Accountabilities

Participation

Competition

Freedom & equality Responsiveness

Law as a political weapon Law as a tool to carry out economic interests Law as a set of rules to circumvent Stress and play on the limits in rule implementation Strongly majoritarian institutional design (low competition) Weak parties, party discipline in oligarchic parties Salience of image and manipulative role of information Blame-shift toward the supranational level Actions from above to induce participation or to discourage it Manipulation of information for passivism or controlled participation Push for radical and/or violent participation Push for selective group participation Pacts to avoid or curb competition, also between incumbent authorities and opposition Making ineffective electoral laws Non-differentiated political programmes Proliferation of formal acknowledgement of rights without taking care of implementation Acknowledgement of social rights without allocation of costs Manipulative role of elites and of information

through the action of political elites who intervene in the provision of information, which is at the root of the formation of responsiveness perceptions. From this perspective, the economic crisis magnified latent trends that were already present within the party systems and in the patterns of relationships between citizens and institutions while at the same time it affected the capacity of crisis management and the gap between responsiveness and electoral accountability (see Mair 2009). The spread of “irresponsible” leaders and elites, who choose to emphasize the responsiveness of their political action rather than responsibility for strategic reasons, constitutes a subversion and a risk for representative democracies. At this stage, it is useful to sum up this discussion on subversion in Table 2.2, and the major dangers of subversion of responsiveness can immediately be singled out. This figure indirectly suggests how one might define a democracy with lesser or without qualities, that is, a democratic regime where subversion is frequently practiced, even up to the point of creating problems of delegitimization and eventually related problems of consolidation. Table 2.2 already gives the main pattern of subversion.

5  Toward radicalized democracies6 Let us now look at the dimensions of participation and competition again (themselves related to the channels of expression and representation). Table 2.2 sums up some of the main expected consequences. A few others could be singled out. But when addressing the related questions, we realize that behind the difficulties

42  Leonardo Morlino and Francesco Raniolo of accountability or competition or participation and the difficulties with freedom and equality, there is not only the economic crisis, the globalization, or the reactions to immigration (see Table 2.1), but there is also a profound evolution/ transformation of the very bases of representation, of which changes in procedural qualities such as electoral accountability, inter-institutional accountability, political participation, and competition are the most relevant manifestations. In the context of the contemporary transformations of our democracies, including the most full-fledged ones, it is the subsequent features which are most relevant for accountability. With a specific focus on the relationships between electors and elected, we ought to consider: •

• •

electoral campaigns based on prospective voting in order to avoid the assessment of past accomplishments of previous incumbent authorities, which in this way are able to avoid punishment for their poor performance and limited responsiveness; the manipulation of news, today known as the diffusion of fake news, in order to shape public opinion and again to avoid being assessed negatively; if competition is considered, then overpromising during the electoral campaign may change the voting choice and consequently falsify the choice of the elector for a party list rather than for another party or leader.

Even the balance between institutions is reshaped by populist tendencies. As mentioned above (see sect. 2), this is perhaps the most conspicuous aspect that led to the talk of “illiberal democracies” and, in fact, to consider this label as superimposable over that of “populist democracies” (Mounk 2018). In particular, the reference is to the weakening of the constitutional pillar (or of control) in favor of that of participation (or consensus). In other words, in their functioning, populist democracies tend to emphasize a hyper-majoritarian logic, which has as a consequence the downsizing and undermining of the role of institutions of guarantee, such as first of all the Constitutional Court, the central banks or even the governmental institutions of the European Union. This shift in constitutional balances, however, does not bring a parliamentarization of the form of government, as might seem obvious. There is rather an internal polarization between majority and opposition inside the parliaments. The latter, the opposition, is seriously limited as an expression of the old elites, while the former is fully identified with the government and its leader. In short, populist democracy resembles more and more the “delegated democracy” (to the populist leader) conceptualized by O’Donnell (1994) with reference to Latin America.7 Populist tendencies have an impact on the two closely interwoven dimensions of participation and competition, that is, on the quality of political representation. Let us remind ourselves that representation is acting in the interest of the represented in a manner that is responsive to them (Pitkin 1967, 207), and accordingly, let us take into consideration the three channels of representation: through parties and party systems, interest groups and related associations, and social movements

Neo-populism and democratic quality  43 (Morlino and Raniolo 2017). We can immediately see that in several countries (in those cases in which there is room for moderation) the first two channels of representation have become institutionally weaker and weaker, while the third, characterized by radicalization, may still be very much alive despite instability. If we try to detect the main changes in those channels, a few features may be singled out. a  Parties and party systems If, although briefly, we scrutinize this channel, we can immediately see how the crisis of parties and party organization is profound even in the countries that had a strong party tradition as well as a party government. See, for example, the transformations of the party system in one of the most solid and stable cases, the German one. Of course, to account for this phenomenon, we can recall factors that are so well known to the extent to be taken for granted, such as the end of identifying ideologies that gave motivation for participation and identification; high social fragmentation, as a consequence of both globalization and industrial technological changes; the mediatization in shaping opinions and rendering party organizations much less relevant with regard to consensus formation. And of course, to all this, we should add the phenomena we mentioned above, such as the protracted economic crisis, especially in Europe, and new episodes of the economic crisis in other areas of the world, Latin America included. Available empirical research shows the inadequacy or impossibility of parties to structure the political along the lines of precise cleavages, as was traditionally done with the traditional class cleavage, the centre/periphery cleavage, and so on, in Europe for example. From this perspective, in democracies all over the world, the only structuring cleavage is the one of pro-/anti-establishment, that is characteristic of protest parties. Recently, Philippe C. Schmitter (2019, 2) has suggested that populism could be “the product of a failure of the existing system of political parties to provide credible representation for neglected groups of citizens in what are otherwise real-existing democracies.” Changes in some areas and the additional weakening in others, regarding both parties’ dividing and unifying roles along conflictual lines, undermines the position of parties even more and weakens the entire channel, where only leaders and the personalization of politics tend to stand out. All these more or less profound changes in the mentioned basic dimensions have a strong impact, especially on participation. For example, the participation rate and party activism are declining or display changing characteristics in several countries, while at the same time, the decline of electoral participation or low political participation become the dominant pattern. However, we can see a relevant impact also on competition, which unavoidably becomes more and more radicalized. b  Interest groups and related associations In his Politics in Hard Times: Comparative Responses to International Economic Crises (1986), Peter Gourevitch shows how a number of Western European

44  Leonardo Morlino and Francesco Raniolo countries were able to overcome the crisis and start a new path of economic growth through different neo-corporatist arrangements. This has been one of the key aspects that was missing in the crises of the last years, in different areas of the world. If we consider the countries that are members of the European Union, and especially the nineteen countries of the euro area, it has to be acknowledged that key decisions in the political economy are made not by the prime minister or cabinet of each country, but are the result of a decisional process that takes place within the European Council, with the European Commission, the European Central Bank, and the European Parliament directly or indirectly involved. In other words, the role of interest groups has been strongly undermined. In other areas, for example in Latin America, despite the resilient role of the United States, there is a stronger economic sovereignty, but no tradition of tripartite agreements, compounded by the weakness of entrepreneurial associations and of trade unions. Thus, this particular autonomy is not enough to give a relevant political role to this channel of representation, if not in informal ways through hidden corrupt practices, which are not relevant in terms of effective representation with a minimally democratic and transparent meaning. Again, if we think in terms of the impact on participation, or more precisely elite participation, all this means the stimulation of involvement of tiny elite groups, above all in informal ways, or a small incumbent elite, in any case with the total or almost total exclusion of trade unions, elite, and followers. c  Social movements Social movements constitute the only channel left in terms of a strong impact on participation, that is, the unconventional, non-institutionalized form, and on political competition that may become more and more radicalized. Here, we may find different data regarding different countries with relevant traditions in both Europe and Latin America. Also in this case, we may observe a number of paradoxical results. In fact, we may observe the radicalization of social movements, but equally of widespread radicalization within the other channels. Three kinds of radicalization can be spelled out: 1 2 3

active protest, expressed through participation in social movements and voting for protest parties, where radicality is able to grow and become stabilized; passive detachment from previous identification, which implies no participation in voting, but participation may be re-activated through movements; alienation, characterized by profound detachment, despising of politics as a whole and which may even have the paradoxical result of the strengthening of traditional actors if complemented by some extent of traditional voting participation (see Portugal during the 2008–14 economic crisis for the failure of protest parties).

In this analysis, we cannot ignore the classical process of stabilization and consequent institutionalization of social movements that may become parties or be absorbed by already existing parties. From this perspective, if we accept that

Neo-populism and democratic quality  45 parties are no longer an organized structure of representation but only “a team of men seeking to control the governing apparatus by gaining office in a duly constituted election” (Downs 1957, 25), we may also realize that there is a further ironic aspect. In several democracies, parties are in reality only a party elite or party leaders, who are strongly resilient in their role of intermediaries between public institutions and civil society, emphasizing the key, unavoidable role of parties within electoral democracies. In particular, the more common and meaningful way to subvert different qualities of democracy all at the same time is exactly populism. Here, we stress the aspects that are more relevant from the perspective of channels of representation: •

• • •

cleavage gaps become confused and blurred, and a strong and emotional direct relationship emerges between the population mass and the populist charismatic leader who pretends to embody the People, and whose ideas and feelings are supposed to correspond to the People without any mediation of representative democracy, which has in fact faded away; the existence of only one working, aggregating cleavage, the cleavage regarding the already-mentioned pro- and anti-establishment positions: populism is strongly opposed to the establishment and to the alleged treachery of the elites. the anti-establishment divide separates the ‘virtues of the people’ from the ‘corrupt elite’; populist leaders dismiss the “pseudo-democratic” classical management of the political agenda by professing that they are able to keep their promises overnight.

Thus, we could add that populism entails the weakening of representation along the two first traditional channels: the electoral and the functional one. We may sum up a number of crucial aspects on the basis of the four definitional features, as elaborated in Table 2.3. There are two possible polar models, the open and inclusive one and the closed and exclusive one (see also Morlino and Vittori 2019), which reshape the distinction between new leftist and new rightist populist parties, with much less emphasis on the traditional political space. In fact, despite the basic changes in democratic politics since at least the fall of the Berlin Wall (in 1989), the left-right cleavage is not an empty category and still seems able to shape – symbolically and organizationally – political competition inside European democracies. This is even more the case during an economic crisis (Morlino and Raniolo 2017). Moreover, other cleavages emerge and intertwine with the previous one so that the “space of identification” of political parties, to quote Sartori (1976, 328 ff.), is more articulate and complex and the “space of competition” becomes more uncertain and even ambiguous. More precisely, some conflicts are triggered by the reactivation of earlier cleavages, such as the centre-versus-periphery one and that of religion versus secularism; others are more recent, such as materialism versus post-materialism and, even more, relevant today, pro-EU versus anti-EU. Among more recent additional cleavages, the one dividing between the winners and the losers of globalization (see Kriesi et al. 2012), and the related cleavage of inclusion/openness vs. exclusion/closeness,8 are the most relevant for our analysis. The salience of this cleavage has been growing during the economic crisis, as

46  Leonardo Morlino and Francesco Raniolo Table 2.3  Types of neo-populism and their features and empirical cases Components of the definition

Open or inclusive populism (new left-populist parties)

Closed or exclusive populism (new right-populist parties)

Situational

- crisis of representative institutions - economic crisis and its consequences - economic denationalization

Cultural/cognitive

- people-class - community of citizenship - anti-politics - participatory democracy - network - cosmopolitan/social protection - defence of welfare state - reaction to neoliberal economic reform - soft Euroscepticism - pro-immigration - availability to ally

- crisis of representative institutions - economic crisis and its consequences - cultural/political denationalization - people-nation - community of faith - anti-élite - leader democracy - hierarchy - protectionism/ nationalism

Organization/ mobilization Strategic politics/ policy

- defence of nation-state - reaction to neoliberal economic reform - hard Euroscepticism - anti-immigration - non-availability to ally

it structured the new protest parties and at the same time influences the public and decisional agenda of incumbent parties and leaders.

Notes 1  We agree with the analysis of Ionescu and Gellner (1969), for whom the following features of populism should be included: • • • •

it is moralistic rather than programmatic; it is generally loosely organized and ill-disciplined, a movement rather than a party; it is anti-intellectual; it is, first of all, a polemical style of political communication that places emphasis on the alleged will of the “True People” and defends a culture of decency against a culture of irresponsibility. This is perhaps the reason why it increasingly permeates the behavior of politicians and the political stage of the old democracies; • in populism, there is a strong personalization reinforced by the mediatization of politics.

2 See also Rokkan (1975) for a macro-theoretical view, which is different from and at the same time convergent with the one by Dahl. 3 Being within the mainstream liberal tradition (see Sartori 1992; Salvadori 2016), this approach recalls how the liberal-constitutional state (early XIX century) comes first vis-à-vis the liberal-democratic state (up until World War I) and which precedes the democratic-liberal state (after World War II). 4 Already for Dahl, there is a problem of equilibrium between the two dimensions of polyarchy as the historical processes that lead to their implementation are contextual (in the Dahl scheme, this was the so-called “third way,” for example that of post-1789 France), and this results in a structurally unstable regime (see also Huntington 1968).

Neo-populism and democratic quality  47 5 We do prefer to distinguish between polarization, as the aggregation of party competition around poles, and radicalization which refers to the growth of distance among the actors on policy issues and the extremization of style and discourse of political competition. See also the special issue of The ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science on Polarizing Polities: A Global Threat to Democracy (see McCoy and Somer 2019). 6 We discussed some features of radicalized democracies in Morlino and Raniolo (2018, Conclusions). 7 Here, we can find some feature of the well-known ‘totalitarian democracy’ developed by Talmon (1952; see also Eisenstadt 1999). 8 We take it for granted that the inclusion/exclusion cleavage affects both domestic and international politics. Appropriate examples include the opening of European borders to immigration or the reactions to fight terrorism.

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48  Leonardo Morlino and Francesco Raniolo Manin, B. (1997), The Principles of Representative Government, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Maravall, J.M. (1997), Surviving Accountability, Jean Monnet Chair Papers, European University Institute, Florence. Maravall, J.M. (2002), The Rule of Law as a Political Weapon, in J.M. Maravall and A. Przeworski (eds.), Democracy and the Rule of Law, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, pp. 261–301. McCoy, J. and Somer, M. (2019), Toward a Theory of Pernicious Polarization and How It Harms Democracies: Comparative Evidence and Possible Remedies, Annals, American Academy of Political and Social Science. DOI: 10.1177/ooo2716218818782. Mény, Y. and Surel, Y. (2002), Democracies and the Populist Challenge, Palgrave, London. Morlino, L. (2011), Changes for Democracy. Actors, Structures, Processes, Oxford University Press, Oxford. Morlino, L. and Raniolo, F. (2017), The Impact of the Economic Crisis on South European Democracies, Palgrave, London. Morlino, L. and Raniolo, F. (2018), Come la crisi economica cambia la democrazia, il Mulino, Bologna. Morlino, L. and Vittori, D. (2019), Are There Dangerous Populisms for European Democracies? In Daniele Albertazzi and Davide Vampa (eds.), Actions and Reactions – ­Populism and New Patterns of Political Competition in Western Europe, Routledge, London. Mounk, Y. (2018), Popolo Vs. democrazia, Feltrinelli, Milano. Mudde, C. and Rovira Kaltwasser, C. (2017), Populism. A Very Short Introduction, Oxford University Press, Oxford. Müller, J.-W. (2017), Cos’è il populismo? Università Bocconi Editori, Milano. O’Donnell, G. (1994), Delegative Democracy, Journal of Democracy, 5(1): 55–69. O’Donnell, G. (1999), Counterpoint: Selected Essays on Authoritarianism and Democratization, Indiana University of Notre Dame Press, Notre Dame. Pitkin, H.F. (1967), The Concept of Representation, University of California Press, Berkeley. Putnam, R.D. and Pharr, S. (2000), Disaffected Democracies: What’s Troubling the Trilateral Countries? Princeton University Press, Princeton. Riesman, D., Glazer, N. and Denney, R. (1961), The Lonely Crowd. A Study of the Changing American Character, Yale University Press, New Haven, CT. Rokkan, S. (1975), I voti contano e le risorse decidono, Rivista Italiana di Scienza Politica, 5(1): 167–176. Rosanvallon, P. (2008), Counter-Democracy: Politics in an Age of Distrust, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Salvadori, M. (2016), Democrazia. Storia di un’idea tra mito e realtà, Donzelli, Roma. Sartori, G. (1976), Parties and Party System, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Sartori, G. (1987), The Theory of Democracy Revisited, Chatham House Publishers, Chatham. Sartori, G. (1992), Democrazia, in Enciclopedia delle Scienze Sociali, Treccani, Torino. Schmitter, P.C. (2019), The Vices and Virtues of ‘Populism’, European University Institute, Florence. Talmon, J.L. (1952), The Origins of Totalitarian Democracy, Secker & Warburg, London. Tarchi, M. (2015), L’Italia populista, Il Mulino, Bologna. Urbinati, N. (2014), La democrazia sfigurata, Feltrinelli, Milano. Zakaria, F. (2003), The Future of Freedom, Norton, New York.

3 Depoliticization, anti-politics and the moral people Fabio de Nardis

1 Introduction In this chapter, I will problematize the connection between anti-politics and the process of depoliticization understood as the way in which neo-liberalism influences decision-making processes in the West in general and in Italy in particular. Neo-liberalism – applied to government practices in the form of depoliticization (de Nardis 2017) – evidently produces repercussions for the relationship between political classes and civil society. As we shall see, in a context of neoliberal depoliticization, the arenas of political representation are emptied of meaning in favour of post-democratic decision-making practices (Crouch 2004), which take the form of a crisis in the role of parliaments and lead to the strengthening of governments in their new role as bearers of the interests of large international political, economic and financial organizations. In this context, a number of the basic foundations of liberal democracies are being questioned. We know that liberal democracies are essentially electoral democracies, in the sense that they conceive of political participation above all in its conventional forms, mediated by political parties, and capable therefore of politically representing the interests expressed in societies prone to conflict. But a depoliticized politics no longer needs popular participation, to the extent that the decision-making process tends to be transformed into the ratification of decisions taken outside the places of representation. Indeed, in this new framework, conflict, participation, mass political organizations weigh down the decision-making process. Big mass parties are no longer useful and give way to charismatic political leaders capable of catalyzing consensus, through light post-ideological electoral organizations, which aim to become the political reference points of the real decision-makers who are outside the national parliament and, often, even outside the country itself. This process has a strong impact on the relationship, already tending to conflict, between political classes and civil society. Anti-politics, understood as a social sentiment, always latent, but which becomes manifest in particular periods of social and political crisis, becomes the dominant element in the sector of public opinion that perceives itself as increasingly distant from politics and democratic institutions. As we will see in the next paragraph, the concept of anti-politics

50  Fabio de Nardis is generally associated with protest phenomena against professional parties and politicians. The term is in itself ambiguous and difficult to describe. According to Schedler (1996, 1997), there are two great anti-political families: the first concerns a feeling of generalized hostility towards politics and aims to ‘dethrone’ it; the second concerns a feeling of anger towards a certain kind of politics and a consequent desire to ‘colonize’ it. What unites these two anti-political families is perhaps the simplistic logic that distinguishes them. In fact, anti-politics tends to be expressed in a generalized criticism that does not problematize and does not make distinctions. Politics tout court or the political class are equally subject to the same feeling of hostility and rejection. This sentiment can result in indifference and participatory backlash or in protest, giving rise to forms of mobilization and, sometimes, to political parties that present themselves as the actors of change. From this point of view, John Street (2002) distinguishes between ‘active anti-politics’, ‘passive anti-politics’ and ‘indifferent anti-politics’: in the first case, he refers to the conscious opposition to some aspects of politics and not to politics as a whole; in the second case, he refers to those forms of political cynicism that consciously manifest themselves through a low level of participation and public commitment; finally, in the third case he refers to the feeling of absolute irrelevance attributed to politics by the citizens, which results in a general lack of interest in anything that is public. As we will see, anti-politics can take place at the mass level or at the elite level (Mete 2005). The three types identified by Street are clearly placed at a mass level, indicating a general feeling of hostility towards politics or to some of its aspects. But anti-politics can also be an instrument for figures who exploit the discontent of the masses to gain affirmation as the leaders of a new direction and the interpreters of a ‘moral society’ as opposed to corrupt and inadequate politics. In this sense, although analytically distinct, mass anti-politics and elite anti-politics are generally connected. In any case, when the anti-political critique becomes a rhetorical tool of the ruling groups, generally constituting a critique of party politics and the professional political class, it results in the birth of new parties and political subjects, the so-called ‘anti-political-establishment-parties’ (Schedler 1996), which aim to be recognized as the only interpreters of anti-system protest. The emergence of these forces is inevitably connected to the phenomenon of populism that presupposes a capacity for mobilizing the masses through the appeal of a charismatic leadership. As we have tried to explain elsewhere (Anselmi and de Nardis 2018), populism is in fact one of the fundamental components of the new post-democracies. It is the product of the crisis of liberal democracy, challenged by the dynamics of trans-nationalization of economic, political and social processes that have contributed, alongside the crisis of the old philosophies of history, to the weakening of national political institutions, reducing the capacity of the state’s political classes to interpret the stratification of interests within rapidly changing societies. Almost everywhere in the West, and perhaps even more forcefully in Italy, the political classes have found a way out of the crisis by relying, sometimes even through specific measures (electoral laws), on a radical

Depoliticization and the moral people 51 personalization of politics that, while on the one hand is not to be confused with populism, on the other, is undoubtedly a strong premise for it. This is because there is no populist phenomenon that does not rely on the ability of a charismatic leader to convey, through specific rhetorical methods, the populist message. In the following paragraphs, I will describe both the concepts of anti-politics and of depoliticization and, finally, conclude with some brief reflections on the Italian case.

2  Anti-politics and anti-party sentiment Faced with the progressive establishment of democracy on a global scale, we are witnessing a proportional spread of radical disaffection towards politics and its main actors (see also Lorenzo Viviani in this volume). We could say that liberal democracy and its rules no longer appeal, even if they are not explicitly questioned. This is the so-called paradox of the ‘critical citizen’ (Norris 1999), who, while not questioning the democratic nature of the political system, develops negative judgements on the work of political elites, parties and representative institutions. In general, the concept of anti-politics can be defined as the subjective sentiment of ineffectiveness, cynicism and lack of trust in the political process, politicians and democratic institutions, but it does not challenge the foundations of the political regime (Torcal and Montero 2006, 6). This concept, on the one hand, refers to a set of attitudes of distrust towards politics resulting in political disengagement; on the other, it is based on the awareness of the poor responsiveness of the political authorities, resulting in disaffection with the institutions. Sometimes anti-politics becomes a rhetorical tool used by the elites, but in this case it assumes traits that are different from the feeling of aversion to politics on the part of ordinary people. On the analytical level, it is therefore necessary to distinguish between anti-politics ‘from below’ and anti-politics ‘from above’. When we talk about anti-politics from below, we must distinguish between ‘active’ antipolitics and ‘passive’ anti-politics. The first case refers to those citizens who have a critical attitude towards the political class but believe, participate and are interested in politics; the second case refers instead to those citizens who feel disgust with politics and therefore activate mechanisms of reflux and abstention from any form of socio-political interest and participation. When we talk about anti-politics from above the discourse is more complex. It can be differentiated between forms of anti-politics ‘internal’ or ‘external’ to the political sphere (Mete 2010, 40). Internal anti-politics is that which comes from political elites and is generally expressed in the rhetoric of populist leaders who often present themselves as outsiders to politics and build their political communication on antagonism towards professional politicians. This rhetoric is clearly instrumental and aimed at gaining support, leveraging the anti-political sentiment expressed by the masses. They aim at replacing the old political class as authentic representatives of popular needs and of a society that assumes the traits of a ‘moral’ civil society as opposed to an ‘amoral’ political society. Anti-politics from above, external to the political sphere, is different. In this case, politics is attacked

52  Fabio de Nardis by non-political actors aiming at a reduction of the areas of intervention by the political class in favour of other areas, like the technical, economic and sometimes religious ones. These figures act following a subversive logic with respect to the parameters of representative democracy. They challenge the historical role of politics to produce forms of social regulation. When even political actors are subordinates to this rhetoric, as we will see, depoliticization emerges. To analyze the form of anti-politics from above and external to the political sphere, which is the one more connected to the logic of depoliticization, it may be useful to return to the two variants proposed by Schedler that we have already mentioned in the introductory paragraphs (Schedler 1997). He makes a distinction between two forms of anti-politics: (1) the demand to banish and dethrone politics; (2) the demand to conquer and colonize politics. In the first case, politics is represented as impotent, and the empty space left free by politics can be occupied by other spheres (economy, free market, technology). Collective action itself loses its meaning as does the need for an autonomous sphere of politics. In the second case, politics retains its importance, but the individuals who legitimately exercise power adopt, de facto, rules external to political sphere. Paradoxically, the anti-political rhetoric used by the populist leaders aims at a renewal of politics, bringing it back into its sphere. In contrast, the actors of the technical and economic world, who are dominant in the epoch of depoliticization, deny the logic and autonomy of (representative) politics. A fundamental component of the more general anti-political sentiment is determined by the criticism of political parties or anti-party sentiment according to which, in general, parties are represented as closed organizations in which private interests prevail over public ones. For several years in Europe, and in Italy in particular, the crisis of legitimization of political parties has been recognized empirically, although this does not translate into a greater weakness of political parties, which everywhere retain the monopoly of representation. Instead it leads to a crisis of some classic functions of the parties, more directly related to the relationship with citizens (representation of interests and political participation). When we speak of anti-party sentiment within the more general concept of anti-politics, we refer to the set of attitudes of aversion towards political parties. More precisely, it refers to “unfavourable orientations towards political parties among intellectuals or political elites and the general public. Parties are seen as self-interested, eternally squabbling instead of striving for the common good” (Poguntke 1996, 319–320). As in the case of anti-politics, the anti-party sentiment can also be ‘from above’ or ‘from below’. In the first case, it is expressed by the social and political elites; in the second case, it is expressed by the masses (Poguntke and Scarrow 1996, 257). When we talk about anti-partyism from above, we can produce a further distinction based on the goals of the actors involved. On the one hand, there are actors who use an anti-party rhetoric, without however challenging the political party as an institution; on the other, there are actors who instead use an anti-party rhetoric because they challenge the very role of political parties in democracy. In the first case, we can speak of ‘instrumental’ or ‘reactive’ anti-partyism which is

Depoliticization and the moral people  53 not a threat to democracy but rather to the parties currently in power. This form of anti-party sentiment is usually expressed by populist leaders who wish to replace the old elites with new parties and political actors; in the second case, we speak instead of ‘cultural’ or ‘anti-system’ anti-partyism, generally expressed by non-political actors like intellectuals, economic and technical elites who, opposing the parties tout court, in fact contest the very foundations of representative democracy (Torcal et al. 2002). As we shall see, the actors of this second type are the protagonists of neoliberal rhetoric, which is the ideological foundation of the depoliticization processes.

3  Depoliticization in the West Depoliticization concerns the ways neoliberalism acts on the systems of government in contemporary democracies and takes the form of a series of changes in the ways power is exercised. With it, the decision-making process is effectively stripped of its eminently political character (Burnham 2001, 2017; d’Albergo and Moini 2017; de Nardis 2017; Foster et al. 2014; Hay 2014; Flinders and Wood 2014; Fawcett and Marsh 2014). Political actors are therefore less responsible for the choices that influence the regulation of society. In this context, economic and cultural processes acquire the characteristics of necessity or even inevitability. Depoliticization is affirmed in various ways. In the European context, for example, ‘governmental’, ‘discursive’ and ‘social’ depoliticization (Hay 2007) are particularly observable. Governmental depoliticization has in itself different faces related to the dimension of the polity (Jessop 2014) and to the relations between government and governance. It consists of moving decision-making from elective arenas to locations outside the places of representation and therefore presented as neutral (Flinders 2008): central banks, independent regulatory authorities, agencies of various types (Burnham 1999; Hay 2007; Kettel 2008), privatized public-service companies (Flinders and Buller 2006a, 2006b). These shifts reveal depoliticization as one of the effects of meta-governance, which re-regulates governance (Jessop 2011; Fawcett and Marsh 2014). Another shift in power, implemented through decisions by governments and national parliaments, benefits actors on a higher scale, such as the (intergovernmental) bodies and procedures of the European Union (e.g. the Fiscal Compact) and the so-called troika (the European Council, the European Commission and the European Central Bank) and produces various forms of compliance with international agreements and standards, whose enforcement is passed to technical figures and instruments. Some examples are the obligation for EU governments to have public finance decisions approved by the Commission in its dual technical and political capacity before presenting them to parliaments; the conditionalities of IMF and WB, the constraints coming from the WTO agreements (Flinders and Buller 2006b), as well as from other sources of legal regulation deriving from bi-lateral or multi-lateral forms of international agreement, often implemented through expertise (Huggins 2015); the imposition of Good Governance regulatory

54  Fabio de Nardis models in the countries of the East-European transition to enhance technocratic fine-tuning; the sanctions indirectly imposed by rating agencies and operators of global financial speculation in relation to public finance policies. All of these shifts concentrate powers outside state politics and also urge a de-empowerment of the political actors (Burnham 2001; Kettel 2008; Wood and Flinders 2014). Another facet of government depoliticization is the adoption of meta-decisions that make it impossible to take others later, tying political decision-makers’ hands (Flinders and Buller 2006a). An example is the constitutionalization of the obligation to balance the budget that depoliticizes national economic policy, whose task is reduced to monitoring and adjusting the process with measures upholding pre-established standards. Technicalization is also an important part of government depoliticization, with the assignment of regulatory effects and allocation of funding to evaluation technologies (de Leonardis 2013; Giancola 2015) or technical procedures to support political decisions that make the decisions evidence-based and removed from social ideologies and pressures, such as Regulatory Impact Analysis, mandatory in Italy for every law, or the data-driven decision, based on the idea that those who make decisions in the public sphere cannot ignore the movement (datadriven innovation) underway in the commercial sector (Bove 2014). Technology, falsely presented as neutral, becomes the new neoliberal philosophy and ‘technicians’ become the protagonists, sometimes called on to play roles of ‘depoliticized politics’ directly, as in governments of national unity legitimized in the name of exceptional emergency situations. In such cases, representation and approval are not relevant, but what counts for supranational markets and institutions are professional skills and reliability. Discursive depoliticization instead has one fundamental outcome (Flinders and Buller 2006a): the convergence of preferences towards a single cognitive construction of reality (frame for public actions). It is no coincidence that the prevailing paradigm in the liberal-type political economy has been narrated in the form of a ‘single mindset’, manifesting a clear cultural hegemony of transnationalized and finance-driven capitalism. Public policies become obligatory responses, and there is a lack of rational alternatives to the limits on development created by prior responses (such as the Keynesian compromise), which had previously enabled conflicts to be placated and some social contradictions to be absorbed. Especially in Europe, the tarnishing of the values and programmatic differentiations between right and left is evidence of this type of depoliticization. The ideological convergence is also aided by the communication of imagery and powerful knowledge brands (influence of pre-rational emotional states involving individuals, political decision-makers and epistemic communities on the acceptance or rejection of a policy idea) and of seductiveness, i.e. a specific normative force that is exercised in indicating what to aspire to and how (Jessop 2009; Sum and Jessop 2013). These are forms of communication and construction of meanings based on appeals or slogans (Wood 2015) that refer to a presumed (good) common sense imbued with moral or ethical values. Consensus is thus mobilized around assumptions whose social acceptability cannot be questioned and thus legitimize

Depoliticization and the moral people 55 unquestionable paradigms. The prevailing ones highlight various aspects of the primacy of regulation through the market as, for example, everything that is narrated as efficient, flexible, innovative and smart. These calls can guide, legitimate and incentivize both public actions and individual and social behaviour. This also applies to what is described as unacceptable and the object of stigma, primarily everything that is public (debt, spending, administration).

4  Depoliticized politics In the neoliberal era, the contradictions of regulation become simple policy problems based on predefined processes managed by experts (Swyngedouw 2011; Wilson and Swyngedouw 2014). Actions are addressed through the construction of horizons of meaning presented in the form of ‘public truth’ by non-political actors (Jessop 2014, 2011). The emerging actors of depoliticization are not only creators and disseminators of expert knowledge (gurus, technicians of international organizations, think tanks, consultants). We also find the ultimate beneficiaries of these transformations, that is, those who are favourably placed in the current distribution asymmetries, especially companies (Hay 2014, 302). These take advantage directly of a specific social depoliticization (Flinders and Wood 2014) and a redefinition of the border between the political and the non-political (Jessop 2014, 217). It consists in transferring the power to address issues of collective interest to the private spheres of the market. This shift reduces not only the public budget but also the political potential of social questions and conflicts (especially those claiming rights), labelled as traditionalist, antiquated, ideological or fundamentalist (Swyngedouw 2011), through a reframing of the items at stake in terms of issues that can be solved through innovation. Economic actors have always been concerned with influencing the decisions on which the characteristics of their environment depend – the extra-economic conditions of accumulation. This is the reason that the practices of conciliation, lobbying, campaigning and funding for politics have been widely analyzed by sociology and political science, which have theorized – even with normative intentions – first neocorporatism and, in a second instance, the notion of governance. The season of “governance” was launched at the same time as a re-orientation of public policies to the market and saw the formal inclusion of companies in cooperative processes and public–private partnerships (Willems et al. 2017). The latter have produced both business-friendly regulations and isomorphism of depoliticized public action with the market and its actors. This practice is generally wellperceived if the focus is on the local scale. The representation of cities as actors endowed with a collective decision system – of common or perceived interests as such, of integration mechanisms, of an internal and external representation of the collective subject and of the capacity for innovation, operationally translated into a normative frame underpinning the reforms of metropolitan governance – is modelled on the business model. The city of strategic planning is looking for vision and leadership capable of cost–benefit calculations, evaluating risks and opportunities, strengths and weaknesses, and orienting itself to competition and partnership.

56  Fabio de Nardis In constructing cities as an environment and a strategic player in the context of globalization and the crisis, therefore, cognitive and normative models are produced by applied knowledge and skills, especially in companies. Market-oriented policy tools since the 1990s – city marketing, branding, strategic planning, etc. – have been more recently updated through the reference to imaginations of entrepreneurial origin, which are already making the metamorphosis from innovative ideas of rupture to models in the initial phase of institutionalization. Think of the Smart City paradigm; the Economy of Functionality or Service, which aims at replacing the sale of goods by the sale of their use, such as car sharing; in some ways also to the narratives and practices of Social Investment, Social Entrepreneurship and Social Innovation (Dey and Steyaert 2010; Whitfield 2012). These models – at the same time economic, cultural and political – are implemented through relationships between society, market and politics that go beyond the old public governance. Companies, including ‘social’ companies, seek and nurture new markets and secure them through relationships with local companies and governments. In this way, they seek to guide collective action by means of a specific ideational capacity. The pro-business regulations are aimed at acquiring consent and legitimacy, presenting themselves as capable of defining patented solutions through the market and technologies for collective problems (environment, quality of life, economic development, participation, mobility, social inclusion, etc.). These are placed within broader systems of meaning, often designed by world-renowned gurus and transferred to transnational (not only) ITC companies, adapted to local markets, recognized and institutionalized by transnational and national policies. The connotations of inevitability and naturalization of these technical solutions lie in their being manifestly rational and preferable to ineffective models and sources of waste and malaise, both individual and collective. Messages are transmitted through seductive representations of a desirable society (intelligent, sustainable, supportive, happy). The hegemonic functionality of these imaginations is expressed in a form of preference shaping in which the interests of the business, or the organization of community action in the form of a business, allow the achievement of general environmental and social objectives, sometimes presented in the form of the common good or general interest of the community. In this way, it is possible to bring back, within the horizons of the market, the reformulation of rights that once formed the object of conflicting claims. The frame tends to overlap and mutually reinforce itself with that of the level of European integration: issues of collective interest are (re-)defined as factors of productivity, competitiveness and social cohesion, and resilience in crisis. The list of areas affected by this form of privatized government would be long: education and skilled labour, safety, environmental and quality of life, health, heritage and cultural vitality of places are, for example, reclassified as assets that bring competitive advantages. Reducing complexity through these images constitutes an original mediation between general and private interests, citizenship and profits. In this way, the depoliticization of government is fueled by new forms of politicization of the market players, who present themselves as capable of solving social problems,

Depoliticization and the moral people  57 or by making sure that those who want to tackle social problems take the form and culture of a market player. Assuming responsibility for producing and above all conceiving these forms of regulation and/or intervention, companies become politicized, since they play a role not only in the support of politics but also in its substitution. For example, in the Smart City, companies provide not only ways to establish how to deal with individual and collective needs but also managerial models of strategic management to coordinate the optimization of local resources and the allocation of community funds. Both are typically political functions that are however privatized, basically not unlike other contemporary approaches and practices, such as the self-regulation of companies, the production of soft law, corporate social responsibility and corporate citizenship (Matten and Moon 2013). With depoliticization, the functions and the space of politics do not disappear, but the processes of government become less transparent (Burnham 2017; Foster et al. 2014) and, at the same time, more rapid and less expensive for the elites. If science and technology say that there are no alternatives, it makes no sense to negotiate in parliaments and with organized interests, so there is a growing variety of issues removed from the risks of the assembly ballot and the electorate’s judgement. In this way, in the public sphere, the processes of depoliticization themselves are naturalized, presented by many institutional actors as partly inevitable and partly desirable forms of rationalization (Hay 2007; Flinders and Wood 2014), especially in times of crisis, since they are associated with the reduction of political conflictuality. Eliminating or reducing the political character of actions or affirming governance “in which political decisions are made without giving the impression of doing so” (de Leonardis 2013, 138) does not mean reducing regulatory needs but producing them in new ways. The effects of the actions do not cease to be political, since they consist of the selective allocation of material and immaterial values. Just considering these effects, we can attempt to formulate an answer to the question of why the contemporary forms of depoliticization have been successful. It would be difficult to understand why this is a dominant and culturally orthodox model today without relating it to the contextual neoliberalization and the hegemony created by the economic elites through the system of values and beliefs of the neoliberal paradigm (Foster et al. 2014). Depoliticization is in fact a result of a meta-governance coherent and functional to a political strategy (Jessop 2014). Market-oriented public action uses it “as a specific institutional and discursive resource” that allows to give the strategies of accumulation of wealth the form of a hegemonic political project (Moini 2015, 37). This happens above all in roll-out moments (Peck and Tickell 2002) and in the consolidation of neoliberalism, in which it is not a matter of cutting and dismantling the public sphere but of constructing or adapting the extra-economic conditions for accumulation (Jessop 2009; Burnham 1999). For example with innovation and competitiveness, but also with recipes for austerity. The “reduction of the political to the economic” (Swyngedouw 2011, 8), as well as favouring the functioning of markets, is a component of political rationality and neoliberal “governmentality” (Foster et  al. 2014). Depoliticization is

58  Fabio de Nardis useful for the elites but also finds consensus with the growing lack of interest, disaffection and popular mistrust of politicians (represented as privileged, incompetent, corrupt). In these transformations, there are obviously opportunities and risks. Should the social sciences contribute to the governance of the depoliticized systems that welcome the new forms of politicization of enterprises, or on the contrary should they highlight the contradictions and risks inherent in these prospects of privatization of the government? It is not surprising that the discussion on depoliticization frequently displays critical accents. The growing expropriation of democracy – provoked by the escalation of Good Governance, by the democracy of the stakeholders, by depoliticization or ‘post-politics’ – is often highlighted, especially when what is sometimes presented as an exception, due to crises and emergencies, becomes the rule.

5  Depoliticization and anti-politics in Italy The seventies are commonly regarded at the European and international level as the period of a paradigm shift in macro-economic policies. Almost everywhere, the Keynesian model entered a crisis, and there was the affirmation of the new neoliberal logic that, as we have seen, determined the processes of depoliticization. In Italy, this phenomenon began to become evident from the eighties onwards, when the entire institutional framework changed and state policies were reoriented towards the market. The entire rhetoric of the political classes was oriented towards the logic of a permanent fiscal consolidation policy, combined with a general policy program of privatization and liberalization. The slogan became ‘fiscal austerity’, which soon became a true macro-economy paradigm, radicalized in the third millennium with the constitutionalization of the Maastricht Treaty directives. In the late eighties, the Italian political system also underwent a radical transformation with the crisis of the two historical parties (PCI and DC) and the so-called transition from the ‘First’ to the ‘Second Republic’, which was completed in 1993 with the introduction of the majoritarian electoral system. This system consisted in the alternation governments made up of center-left and center-right coalitions but also witnessed the first technocratic governments. In those years, because of the enormous public debt, policies of austerity and fiscal restraints began to be promulgated in Italy. With the entry into the Eurozone, austerity policies became an institutional obligation imposed by external technocratic constraint. Because of the ideological and organizational crisis of the mass party, neoliberalism has acted strongly on decision-making processes, leading to radical forms of depoliticization at all institutional levels. Italy is the only country in Europe that, since the nineties, has tried to escape from the crises through a sort of populism of technicians. In various circumstances, governments were in fact chaired by economists (from Ciampi to Monti) culturally close to the European bureaucracy, justifying a crisis of legitimation of the political class. Even where governments were chaired by professional politicians, they did so by using populist rhetoric, often distancing themselves from their own parties (as in the case of

Depoliticization and the moral people 59 Matteo Renzi). This has meant that anti-politics became the main rhetorical tool of politics, especially when in the form of anti-party sentiment. We have seen that, when we talk about anti-partyism, we need to make an initial distinction between anti-partyism from below and anti-partyism from above, that is from the elites. In Italy, both forms of anti-partyism have a long tradition and manifested themselves since the post–Second World War period, having been sometimes the main ingredient of political action of some political parties, as was the case with the Fronte dell’Uomo Qualunque, founded in the immediate postwar period, or of the Radical Party in the seventies. A rise in anti-party rhetoric took place in the nineties when the old party structure dissolved, above all due to judicial inquiries. In that period, we witnessed the birth of the referendum movement of Mario Segni, who, through the referendum tool, aimed to build alternative social majorities to those established in the arenas of political representation. In this same period, Bossi’s Lega Nord and Silvio Berlusconi’s party obtained the first great electoral successes on the basis of their anti-party rhetoric (Bardi 1996; Diamanti 2004). The populist rhetoric of these new political movements was based essentially on a strong sentiment against classical political parties. Obviously, the anti-partyism of the elites in Italy was connected to a rampant antipolitics sentiment from below recorded by numerous empirical research studies, which showed that the Italians’ negative opinion of the political class had grown and was constant over time, becoming the secret of the recent electoral success of populist movements, such as the Five Star Movement and Matteo Salvini’s ‘new’ Lega (Mannheimer and Sani 2001; Mannheimer 2003; ITANES 2013, 2018; Anselmi and de Nardis 2018). In Italy, the political elites identified anti-party rhetoric as a way out of the crisis of the old party system, following in this an anti-political sentiment that, at the mass level, developed due to an objective crisis of institutional performance that since the eighties had led to a growth of public debt and to the many cases of corruption unveiled by the judiciary since the first half of the nineties. Moreover, the crisis of the long-standing ideological opposition determined by the dissolution of the two historical rival parties (Christian Democrats and the Communist Party) had further strengthened the feeling of separation of civil society from the political organizations. Since the nineties, researchers have identified several indicators of anti-party sentiment in Italy. Often, such sentiments are reflected in both the rhetoric of the elites and mass political attitudes. These indicators, used in numerous surveys, mainly concern the opinions of citizens towards parties, the rate of trust in political institutions and parties, and the social sharing of battles against public funding for parties considered to be corrupt and distant from people’s needs (Mete 2005). But let us get back to the general concept of anti-politics that contains a certain amount of anti-party sentiment. Previously, we have distinguished between active and passive anti-politics. The empirical research on Italy shows increasing levels of hostility towards politics especially since the eighties, when, not surprisingly, the political classes began to assume traits of depoliticization (Segatti 2006; Biorcio 2007). In those years, a progressive weakening of political participation

60  Fabio de Nardis by Italian citizens became visible, directly proportional to an increase in passive anti-politics (Mete 2010). Obviously, between 1991 and 1993, with the disintegration of the party system that had dominated the Italian political scene since the post-war period and with the explosion of judicial scandals (Tangentopoli), the degree of mistrust in the political class reached the highest levels ever seen, favouring the development of forms of penal populism (see Anselmi in this book), which is still at the basis of the consensus obtained today by some political movements, such as the Five Star Movement. As the empirical analyses show, between 1985 and the third millennium, Italians’ levels of disgust towards institutional politics increased dramatically (Mannheimer and Sani 2001; Mannheimer 2003). In the same years, alongside a steady decline in conventional forms of political participation, we witnessed an increase in forms of unconventional political participation generally supported by forms of active anti-politics, especially thanks to the birth of new social movements. From this point of view, depoliticization, anti-politics from above and antipolitics from below meet each other, producing a sort of anti-political spiral that conditions the functioning of the political system, producing the key players of Italian multi-populism (Anselmi and de Nardis 2018). Paradoxically, the presence of populist movements like the Five Star Movement and the Lega has produced a sort of reaction to depoliticization. Both movements claim the primacy of politics over markets and have very critical positions towards the European bureaucracy. When the institutional political class yields to neoliberal depoliticization, populist forces inevitably act as containers of sovereignty even when, as happens in Italy, such sovereignty is realized on the wave of a regressive cultural dynamics that risks accelerating the process of de-­ democratization to which Italy is subjected.

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62  Fabio de Nardis Kettel S. (2008), “Does Depoliticisation Work? Evidence from Britain’s Membership of the Exchange Rate Mechanism, 1990–92”, The British Journal of Politics & International Relations, 10(4): 630–648. Mannheimer R. (2003), Gli Italiani e la politica. 2002–2003 Consensi e delusioni, Milano: Bompiani. Mannheimer R. and G. Sani (2001), La conquista degli astenuti, Bologna: Il Mulino. Matten D. and J. Moon (2013), “Corporate Citizenship: Introducing Business as an Actor in Political Governance”, in D. Matten and J. Moon (eds.), Corporate Citizenship. The International Library of Critical Writings on Business and Management, Cheltenham: Edward Elgar. Mete V. (2005), “Cittadini contro i partiti. Antipartitismo e antipartitici in Italia”, Polena, 3: 9–36. Mete V. (2010), “Four Type of Anti-Politics: Insights from the Italian Case”, Modern Italy, 15(1): 37–61. Moini G. (2015), “Capire il neoliberismo: variegatura, egemonia e (de)politicizzazione”, in G. Moini (a cura di), Neoliberismi e azione pubblica: il caso italiano, Roma: Ediesse, pp. 17–50. Norris P. (ed.) (1999), Critical Citizens: Global Support for Democratic Governance, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Peck J. and A. Tickell (2002), “Neoliberalizing Space”, Antipode, 34(3): 380–404. Poguntke T. (1996), “Anti-Party Sentiment  – Conceptual Thoughts and Empirical Evidence: Explorations into a Minefield”, European Journal of Political Research, 29: 319–344. Poguntke T. and E.S. Scarrow (1996), “The Politics of Anti-Party Sentiment: Introduction”, European Journal of Political Research, 29: 257–262. Schedler A. (1996), “Anti-Political-Establishment-Parties”, Party Politics, 3: 291–312. Schedler A. (1997), “Introduction: Antipolitics  – Closing and Colonizing the Public Sphere”, in A. Schedler (ed.), The End of Politics? Explorations into Modern Antipolitics, Basingstoke: Macmillan, pp. 1–20. Segatti P. (2006), “Italy, Forty Years of Political Disaffection: A Longitudinal Exploration”, in M. Torcal and J. Montero (eds.), Political Disaffection in Contemporary Democracies: Social Capital, Institutions, and Politics, London and New York: Routledge, pp. 244–275. Street J. (2002), Cultures of Cynicism? Popular Television Drama and Antipolitics, paper presentato in occasione della XXIX ECPR Joint Session, Università di Torino, 22–27 marzo. Sum N.L. and B. Jessop (2013), Towards a Cultural Political Economy. Putting Culture in Its Place in Political Economy, Cheltenham, UK and Northampton, MA: Edward Elgar. Swyngedouw E. (2011), “Impossible ‘Sustainability’ and the Post-political Condition”, in R. Krueger and D. Gibbs (eds.), The Sustainable Development Paradox, New York: Guilford Press. Torcal M. and J.R. Montero (eds.) (2006), Political Disaffection in Contemporary Democracies: Social Capital, Institutions, and Politics, New York: Routledge. Torcal M., R. Gunther and J.R. Montero (2002), “Anti-Party Sentiments in Southern Europe”, in R. Gunther, J.R. Montero and J.J. Linz (eds.), Political Parties: Old Concepts and New Challenges, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Whitfield D. (2012), “UK Social Services: The Mutation of Privatisation” (www.europeanservices-strategy.org.uk/news/2012/uk-social-services-the-mutation-of-privatisati/uksocial-services-mutation-of-privatisation.pdf).

Depoliticization and the moral people  63 Willems T., W. Van Dooren and M. van den Hurk (2017), “PPP Policy, Depoliticisation, and Anti-politics”, Partecipazione e conflitto, 10(2): 448–471. Wilson J. and E. Swyngedouw (2014), “Seed of Dystopia: Post-Politics and the Return of the Political”, in J. Wilson and E. Swyngedouw (eds.), The Post-political and Its Discontents. Spaces of Depoliticisation. Spectres of Radical Politics, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Wood M. (2015), “Puzzling and Powering in Policy Paradigm Shifts: Politicization, Depoliticization and Social Learning”, Critical Policy Studies, 9(1): 2–21. Wood M. and M. Flinders (2014), “Rethinking Depoliticisation: Beyond the Governmental”, Policy and Politics, 42(2): 151–170.

Part II

Populism and the transformation of parties

4 Anti-party-ism as a structural component of Italian democracy Nadia Urbinati

Populist movements practice adversarial politics in view of forming a government that promises to administer the people’s true interests beyond partisan divisions. Populism in power looks like a post-partisan government that while claiming to serve the interests of the best part of society (“the people”) promises to never produce an establishment of professional politicians (Peruzzotti 2013; Canovan 1999; Mudde 2004; Urbinati 2018). This ambition speaks for its ambiguity: as a movement, populism arises as intense partisanship when rallying against existing parties, but its inner aspiration is toward incorporating the largest number of citizens to become the only-party-of-the-people and dwarf all other partisan affiliations and even party opposition. In her analysis of forms of anti-party-ism, Nancy Rosenblum demonstrates that no matter their professed animosity against parties, in effect old and new anti-party-ists are in all respect partisans; they are radical partisans of one and only one form of party though, the one that is capable of defeating the cacophony of parties and saving the only “good” party around (Rosenblum 2008, 43). How to evaluate anti-party-ism within representative government? As we shall see through the Italian case, anti-party-ists are, like all partisans, promoters of a view of democracy, not simply a reaction against partisan cacophony. Beneath Italian anti-party-isms, we will detect a liberal or individualistic vision of democratic society and an organic or corporate one. Both models will serve to illustrate the following thesis: populist hostility toward parties is embedded within democracy’s distress with parties in democracy; it is thus more than an oppositional show of muscles against the establishment and in this sense predates populism; it aims at promoting a kind of democracy that is capable of performing without parties because it governs a society that is depoliticized and its conflicts deflated; a society that is capable of a more genuine democracy because its politics is less partisan. When not merely a reaction against malfunctioning parties or an attitude that political parties in the opposition and social movements of protest usually also share  – in a word, when not merely a criticism of particracy – anti-party-ism prefigures an alternative model of democracy which is ingrained within democracy itself as a never-satisfied desire to make “the people” the only party. This utopia can be detected in the early stages of the construction of democracy, when the constituent power is still in the process of envisaging institutions

68  Nadia Urbinati and procedures. It may then reemerge in stabilized democratic governments, in conjunction with citizens’ distress with the party system. Italy’s republican history (from 1948 to 2018) encompasses and amplifies both cases, as it gave birth to strong forms of anti-party-ism already in the constitutional moment, after the collapse of the Fascist regime, and then again in other subsequent critical moments due first to the decline of ideological parties with the end of the Cold War (1989–1990) and then the sweeping away of the main traditional parties because they proved guilty of a huge system of corruption (1992–1994). The growth of several movements against parties in times of change and finally the spectacular success of the Five Star Movement (M5S) and the formation of a populist coalition government (June 1, 2018) are parts of the same history of representative democracy. How are we to make sense of the persistency of anti-party-ism – and populism as its most radical form – within representative government, which has been “created” by parties and is structurally based on parties (Schattschneider 2009 [1942], 1)? Contemporary scholars situate the populist phenomenon within Bernard Manini’s three-stage paradigm of representative government. They see it as a possible type of representative government in the age of party deconstruction, when the public reclaims its voice above and against partisan affiliations and moreover against parties that have meanwhile become less ideological and more interested in attracting the median voter and independent elector (Mair 2013). “The crucial fact is that, in audience democracy, the channels of public communication . . . are for the most part politically neutral, that is, non-partisan . . . It would appear, then, that today the perception of public issues and subjects (as distinct, to repeat, from judgements made about them) is more homogeneous and less dependent on partisan preferences than was the case under party democracy” (Manin 1997).1 Although analytically useful, Manin’s stage-type trajectory of representative government made of distinct and separated moments offers us a useful paradigm for assessing a tendency, but does not help us understand cases in which, like Italy, anti-party-ism and party-ism proceeded hand in hand since the beginning and actually competed in the making of representative government. The stage-type model is a good picture of the macro level of the institutional mechanism but silent on the inner tension toiling representative governments through all their stages: the fact that elections – the deus ex machina of this system – promote a circulation among the elite yet not of elites as they rely upon and produce professional politicians among whom only power circulates. The representative system lives of parties while simultaneously stirs popular despise of parties and the establishment parties produce. Anti-party-ism is hence representative government’s subterranean lymph with elections as its engine. Not by chance, as we shall see below, the anti-party forms that emerged in Italy’s early democratic stage tried to envisage a democratic order that would be representative without pivoting on elections. The anti-party lymph is rooted in the myth with which democracy was born and the representative system tried unsuccessfully to tame: the myth of the people as a community of ordinary folks, whose general interest was not divided according to partisan lines, a division that sets the battlefield of electoral competition. Neither the rule of alternation in government nor partisan pluralism that the electoral system

Anti-party-ism in Italian democracy  69 triggers have had the power of invalidating this myth, which is the dynamic explaining the karstic reappearances of populism’s anti-­establishmentarianism in representative democracy (Rosanvallon 2008, 43).2 This dynamic defies the conventional wisdom that anti-party-ism constitutes a symptom of “senility” of representative democracies and an open door to a populist turn (Revelli 2017). The Italian case is an eloquent example of the fact that the political practice in the age of democracy has generated and generates party-ism and anti-party-ism ceaselessly. It proves that this dynamic seems to be in effect the “spirit” of representative democracy (rather than its pathology) as a government that is based on elections and produces both partisan affiliations and parties and also a reaction against them. If, as scholars agree, populism consists in a frontal attack on party democracy, we can deem populism a byproduct of representative democracy and a permanent possibility within it. Italy is a litmus test of this generalization, and the recent success of populist movements can be seen as the outcome of a long-lasting process of party contestation and denial that began with the Republic itself. It began, as we shall see, in the Constitutional Assembly (1946–1948) and in effect before it, during the war of Resistance against Nazi-fascism. Anti-partyism lay at the very foundations of Italy’s party democracy. To outline briefly the main theme of this chapter, I would say that in Italy, party democracy was born as a second-best and never-achieved full and persistent legitimacy. We need not wait for the massive phenomenon of political corruption in the early 1990s and the ensuing reaction against parties among the general public to detect the hostility toward party politics and a populist attitude of the public. The reading I am proposing may seem counter-intuitive, because, as said, political theorists think that anti-party-ism is the symptom of the decay of party politics as a result of the factual display of its shortcomings and comes at the end of a prolonged hegemony of parties in representative democracy. Yet anti-party-ism has been a staple of Italian representative government since its very beginning; it runs throughout its entire political history, after its unification in 1861, to become more radical with the adoption of universal suffrage (of male citizens in 1911; of both genders in 1945; Lenci 2017). In Italy, despising parties was not a prerogative of recent decades nor it emerged abruptly as a watershed separating the age of “party democracy” from the age of “audience democracy”. The life and times of Italian anti-party-ism is persistent throughout its political history as a unified country and became more pronounced with the transition to democracy (see Capozzi 2009). In some critical moments, odium partium ended dramatically in regime change and the violent repression of party pluralism and freedom of association and dissent (fascist regime, 1922–1943); in the age of party democracy, however, it translated into a call for a unitary representation of ordinary citizens – the general public or the nation or la gente – beyond the ravenous appetite of partisan affiliations.

1  A long tradition of party criticism Italian democracy (which was proclaimed on December  22, 1947, with the approval of the Constitution of the Italian Republic by the Constituent Assembly

70  Nadia Urbinati and put to work on January 1, 1948) was made literally by two political actors: organized parties (post-fascist and anti-fascist parties) and anti-party movements. The former group was more representative and numerous, particularly in the Center-North. The latter group was less numerous and prominent essentially in the South. That division reemerged in the national elections of March 4, 2018, which showed a split peninsula, with the South mainly represented by the antiparty movement par excellence, the Five Star Movement, and the North anchored in parties (also nationalist and xenophobic ones like the League). Yet not all antiparty-isms were identical in character. It is possible to single out two broad anti-party arguments in Italian politics: a criticism of the mass party from a liberal perspective and a criticism of the mass party from the perspective of the unitary interest of the nation (as in fascism but also in depoliticized claims to do away with parties as in Uomo Qualunque and M5S). The former was (and is) physiological in party democracy – it belongs to a tradition that goes back to liberal theorists like Moises Ostrogorsky and critics of parties like Robert Michels among others: it assumes the party as a free association by which means citizens voice claims and try to pursue their interests by electing representatives and competing for the majority and is very skeptical of the democratic import of party organization. Issue parties and light parties would be, on this account, the only legitimate form of party. In Italy, this view went along with the detection of the pathology of the party infiltrating state bureaucracy and eroding the impartiality of the law and was prominent in the early stage of liberal parliamentarianism. Marco Minghetti, a prominent liberal leader, devoted in his 1881 book to the study of party intrusion in the judiciary and the administration and outlined legal strategies to contain the parties’ appetites, although he acknowledged that representative government could not function without parties.3 In the liberal view, parties were like a vice in the service of virtue. Benedetto Croce, Italy’s most renowned liberal philosopher, can be taken to be the best representative of the liberal mistrust toward political parties. After the Second World War (that is to say once fascism was defeated), Croce had not yet found the way of reconciling with parties and repeated almost verbatim the position already expressed by Bolingbroke and Hume in the eighteenth century: to be legitimate, agents’ parties had to coalesce in a “country party” above parties (Croce 1955, 5; see Sartori 1976, 37). Croce’s mistrust was traditional in the liberal age, after the unification of Italy, when the institutionalization of representative government showed the evil potential of particracy (Minghetti [1881] 1992). To Croce, time seemed to be frozen in that old liberal age, as he deemed the political party was a necessary moment in representative government only insofar as it was subjected to “reason” (or the supreme interest of the state as per Caspar Bluntschli).4 In his Elementi di politica, Croce detected two main arguments against the party: the first, that identified the party with factions or associations that were naturally inimical to the general interest (this was the classical argument put forth since the eighteenth century, which declined along with the functioning of representative government); the second, that fit modern democratized societies and that identified the party with a strategy

Anti-party-ism in Italian democracy  71 for domesticating individual energies and imposing obedience on both the elected and the electors. To the former, Croce commented, parties were synonymous with divisions and instability; to the latter, they were synonymous with induced apathy and conformism.5 Croce amended both of them and proposed his ethical conception of politics, which posed a hierarchy between society and the state: the former was the realm of parties because of the domain of interests and the latter embodied the law and represented the supreme reason of the state (and secured the wellbeing of the nation). Within Croce’s view, parties were legitimate and acceptable only if they remained in the domain of utility but were dangerous and illegitimate if and when they tried to occupy the state; parties were legitimate as machinery for selecting political personnel, not as organized partisanship managing the state. Croce’s attack on party politics (which he reiterated in the Constituent Assembly) became in effect a criticism of democracy as a regime that, since it was based on individual voters, made parties necessary to aggregate them. Croce restated the meaning of liberal representative government in the pre-fascist era, which was made of very selective system of voting right, parliamentary parties and a narrow upper-class of politicians (notabili). Anti-party-ism antedated fascism and had its early dramatic manifestation in fascism, which proposed itself as its radical cure by means of devising a monoparty regime and thus restituting harmony to the nation. Fascism was and still is a possible dramatic exit of non-party government: the most disrupting but not the only one. Historically, it succeeded in interrupting the transition from a liberal to a democratic government. The fascist regime reaffirmed and radicalized the hostility of the ethical life of the state toward a litigious society at the mercy of opposite interests, political parties and finally parliamentary government, which produced them. The collapse of fascism, in 1943, opened up a new, somehow contradictory, situation: the general opinion on political parties was still essentially the same as that before and during fascism, and it was negative; yet political parties were the forgers of democracy as the main protagonists in the fight against the Fascist regime and the making of the Republican Constitution. This contradiction, which the enthusiasm of the liberation from Nazi-fascism and the exercise of constituent power concealed for a while, reemerged as soon as democratic party politics became ordinary politics. The fight against fascism opened the door to mass parties, which were based on: (1) a strong organization that covered the entire country; (2) an ideological doctrine that identified and motivated their members; and (3) a hierarchic structure that distributed functions and responsibility within the party while controlling the elected in the Parliament. The paradox of mass parties was that while thanks to their pragmatic associations they were able to incorporate the citizens in the administration of the state, they showed to be an incurable pathology. Indeed, mass parties were not merely interest-based associations; they were communities of meanings, made of believers who identified through ideological doctrines in whose name they mobilized in view of shaping the entire society and the state, not simply administering it on the basis of a partisan interpretation of the general interest. A mass party was for its militants and leaders the superior good to realize,

72  Nadia Urbinati even beyond the state’s. The experience of a totalitarian mono-party-state was still underneath mass parties and was crucial in transforming pre-fascist liberal (à la Croce) skepticism of party government into radical anti-party-ism. Democracy and its large electoral participation did not therefore clean up that old stigma on parties; it transformed it into a criticism of representative democracy itself, which seemed unable to function without parties. This was the main issue in the wave of criticism upon which I shall concentrate in the next section of this chapter. If in a liberal, not yet democratic government the negative potential of the party could be contained thanks to a selective suffrage and a still-weak power of opinion (this was Croce’s perspective), the democratic transformation changed the character of the state’s institutions and parties: the latter competed for votes among millions of potential voters and considered the state’s institutions as instruments to gain in order to fulfill the parties’ plans and thus satisfy their electorate. The use of propaganda, which totalitarian regimes have abundantly refined, made democratic parties no longer purely parliamentary but socially embedded instead. As Simone Weil wrote in her On the Abolition of All Political Parties (1943), parties constructed programs and platforms that could attract electors not merely on pragmatic claims, issues or interests but on feelings and emotions inspiring identities pro and against; with mass parties, politics and the state became ­battlefield-like domains.6 Playing and fighting were different analogies – the former was apt to interests-based-parties, the latter was apt to machines-plus-ideology for winning against an equally organized adversaries. Contrary to nineteenth-century parliamentary parties, mass parties were not second best and could not be tamed because, as Weil explained, the impulse of expanding quantitatively in order to shape the political culture of society and become one thing with the state belonged to their very nature.7 This machinery was the target of anti-party-ism, which emerged vigorously along with mass democracy.

2  Born and raised against parties The years between September 8, 1943 (the day in which the Italian provisional government signed the armistice with the German troupes) and April  25, 1945 (the Liberation day of the cities in the Center-North, while the South was already liberated in 1944) marked a political–institutional split of the peninsula: the provisional government operated in the South, whose regions were liberated by the Allies, while the Center-Northern regions were technically stateless and their territories ruled by the Resistance forces as soon as they liberated them from NaziFascists occupant forces.8 The Center-North was the main theater of political parties’ action, military and civilian. Parties had acquired legitimacy first with their clandestine opposition (underground, in prison and in exile) during Benito Mussolini’s regime, but most of all with the open propaganda and the war of Resistance since the summer of 1943 and particularly with the armistice, when a portion of the peninsula turned suddenly into an occupied territory exposed to violence, persecution and the indiscriminate torturing of civilians, the members of the Resistance and their supporters. However, both the clandestine opposition

Anti-party-ism in Italian democracy  73 and the war of Resistance involved a minority of Italians, a fact that the anti-partyist propaganda stressed already in those early months of political liberty (Orsina 2002; Rossi 1955; Capozzi 2009, 43–67). Moreover, although political parties were the main protagonists of the anti-­ fascist fight in the Center-North, not all guerilla brigades were led by party commanders, although parties put a great effort into equipping all brigades with “political cadres”. Even though the conquest of political liberty through the Resistance and, ultimately, the making of a democratic Constitution, had been made possible thanks to political parties, these facts were not and would never be sufficient to make parties hegemonic and grant them full legitimacy. Even in the midst of the war of Resistance, the tension between self-organized brigades and brigades organized by and within parties was evident. Political parties, Claudio Pavone wrote in his Civil War: On the Morality of the Resistance (1991), represented a “process of politicization” within the military domain of partisan groups; thanks to parties, military anti-fascism was transformed into political anti-fascism and, in this sense, parties embodied the first nucleus of the constituent power. Historical studies have recorded the tension between partisan movements and parties and then between civilians and party members in the government of the liberated cities and the regions before and after 1945.9 In Center-North regions, two processes operated together in the final years of the war: the military liberation of the territories pursued by irregular armies of voluntary combatants and the civilian reconstruction of the basic conditions of public life and security in the liberated zones.10 In a split geo-political country, one part of the peninsula had to take care, literally, of its basic life, civil and military. The many descriptions of the condition of the population after the armistice, without a state and with former allies that had suddenly become enemies, can be rendered as a true bellum omnium contra omnes. “There was nothing; the constituted order did not exist anymore” (Pavone 2006, 20). After two decades of imposed obedience under the Fascist regime, nobody knew whom to obey, and in effect the lack of any institutional authority resulted in the usage of brute force as a way of obtaining obedience. Hence, Pavone wrote, the first conscious choice in that real state of nature was “disobedience en masse” to the existing local rulers, because they were at that point not rulers but impostors and the expression of crude force. The act of disobedience was the first act of political authority made by ordinary citizens, not yet or not necessarily enrolled in parties. Within that moral and social environment that was wholly based on personal engagement and free responsibility, the reconstruction of civilian authority started, and it relied upon the ethos of commonality and human solidarity, which sealed the foedus among peoples, families and villages (Pavone 2006, 28–29). “Partisan aggregation was facilitated by small local communities or a not hostile community-based local environment that recovered from within itself the ethical resources of solidarity and reciprocal respect” (Pavone 2006, 24). In that truly selfconstitutive moment, anti-fascist parties tried to put their mark and lead the administration of the free zones as soon as they were liberated from the German forces. The attempts to govern by the anti-fascist parties were neither easy nor always accepted. The myth of the Resistance as a phenomenon ruled by parties leading

74  Nadia Urbinati the masses was mostly constructed after 1945 by the very same political parties. Critics of that myth stressed very soon that “partitocrazia” was actually born along with militant anti-fascism, when parties monopolized participation inside of the resistance groups and immediately lobbied for positions in the provisional government, at the local and the national levels.11 History is thus less monochromatic than the myth of the victorious Resistance tried to devise; it shows a nuanced reality, in which parties had somehow to impose their hegemony over a population that was not made of partisan divides, although it was in need of administrative personnel. That was the Center-North. In the South, the situation was much clearer because the involvement of parties in the liberation had been simply nonexistent there, also because not needed. The South was liberated by the Allies with the support of “the crowd” or loosely organized citizens. Self-mobilized rebellion by men and women (and even children, as in Naples) rather than by organized military brigades marked the pristine democratic life in the South. While parties were identified with the liberation in the Center-North of the country, animosity against parties played a crucial role in the South, in a peculiar way: anti-party-ism did not play any active role in antifascism but oriented the general opinion in the aftermath of fascism, in the form of a general contestation against the “profiteering” new masters and their clienteles, the parties (Imbriani 1996, 28–29; Setta 1975, 1–50). The animosity against parties coincided in the South with what some US observers and Italian public authorities designated as “political volatility”, a strong sense of rejection against and mistrust of everything that came from political authorities, particularly if connected with parties.12 As the founding father of the most important post-fascist anti-party-ist movement, Guglielmo Giannini wrote in his book La Folla (“The Crowd”) in 1945, only “the crowd” can defeat dictatorial regimes because of its radical indifference and apathy towards the ruling class; apathy in everyday life was erosive of all forms of domination with no need of a militant resistance by parties, which was at any event the work of the few and thus never a true liberation from subjection but in effect a substitution of one subjection for another one.13 Neapolitan theater writer Giannini provided a description of “the crowd” that was like a picture of the kind of reaction against fascism in the South: “a peaceful and laborious majority, a Crowd, is an irresistible force that all [rulers] have to be prepared to face. Indeed, it is the Crowd that creates and destroys, that exalts and knocks down [governments]. On the surface easy to be dominated and ruled, the Crowd is instead always in charge of its will and its energies; and no hero or minority, no matter how intelligent, is capable of containing the impetus [of the Crowd] in decisive moments. [. . .] Always the Crowd was able to liberate itself from tyranny, and we cannot record of a tyrant who was not swept away by the Crowd [. . .] which may undergo [subjection] for years but its subjection is already a form of combat when connected to dissatisfaction, the only force that debilitates tyranny.”14

Anti-party-ism in Italian democracy  75 Anti-party-ism hence shaped the political opinion in the South already in the early 1940s, to increase progressively along with the political competition and the litigious character of the several coalition governments that took place in Rome just after the war. Anti-party-ism was a force of attraction for the citizens and the electors that relied upon a widespread distrust in both the defeated fascist mono-party regime and the newly emerging anti-fascist multiparty regime. As the title of an article Giannini wrote on September 12, 1945, a few months after the end of the war, recited, the new parties were ready for a “New March on Rome”. The weekly L’Uomo qualunque (Everyone man) that Giannini started publishing on December 27, 1944 (mostly with his own money), met with huge success, so much so that it soon became the object of censorship by the provisional government because of its attacks against the anti-fascist parties.15 The success of Giannini’s magazine convinced him to transform his opinion into a political movement, a quasi-party or the Fronte dell’Uomo qualunque (Uq), which participated in the first electoral competition like any other party (June 2, 1946) and obtained a good number of seats in the Constituent Assembly.16 Whether “the wind from the North” (as Pietro Nenni, the leader of the Socialist Party, defined the climate of the Resistance moment after April 25, 1945) brought party democracy to Italy, “the wind from the South” put up resistance against the establishment in the name of a non-party democracy – the latter would deeply mark the political life of the new democracy in the years to come (Imbriani 1996, 7). The political void left by fascism in the South was certainly an important reason of the success of the Uq along with the popular support of monarchy and the insufferableness toward the Northern anti-fascist leaders, who were perceived as new occupying forces. In addition, anti-party-ism was the measure of the distrust in partisan divides that elections provoked – in the South, the first electoral campaigns in liberated Italy were judged as a scandal in the face of the misery and the destruction brought by the war, a sign of cynicism and corruption by few leaders desirous of conquering clients and votes (Imbriani 1996, 37–41). In sum, with the collapse of fascism, the Italian political spectrum was split into two parts: the party side, which was the strongest and best organized (it included the Communist Party, the Democratic Christians, the Socialist Party, the Republican Party and the Party of Action) and the anti- or/and critical-of-party side, which was a weaker group and made up of essentially two components: the liberal party and the Everyman Front. The liberal party was older, and its more authoritative members, Croce among them, were somehow nostalgic of pre-fascism liberal parliamentarianism and in this sense inimical of mass parties rather than of parties per se, as we explained above. Very different was Giannini’s movement, which was post-fascist in all respects and more in tune with democracy (although many of its supporters were conservatives and even sympathetic to fascism), as Giannini himself argued in explaining his conflicting relationship with Croce and the old liberals, who refused to merge with the Everyman Front because they were in effect critical of democracy and devotees of an aristocratic view of politics that dovetailed better with a government of “notabili” elected according to a limited

76  Nadia Urbinati suffrage right. Of the two anti-party parties, thus, the Uq was democratic and postfascist, and its visions would have a successful future, although not immediately. The Uq did not live long (it disappeared after 1948), but the themes it threw on the floor in 1945 never disappeared. Those themes became part of the general opinion about parties throughout the ensuing decades and became hegemonic along with the erosion of the moral legitimacy of political parties. Once disbanded, most of Uq’s members and electors were absorbed by or converged toward the DC – whose more conservative branch would in the late 1950s sponsor a Gaullist anti-parliamentary reform of the Constitution, inspired by the anti-party plebiscitary program of the French President. Yet Giannini’s anti-party-ism was representative of widespread sentiments that were also shared by more libertarian and radical citizens, also from the left, who were no less critical of mass parties. We can quickly record Carlo Rosselli, the founder in Paris of the clandestine movement Giustizia e Libertà (Justice and Liberty); the members or sympathizers of the Partito d’Azione (a party born out of Giustizia e Libertà and which was made of liberal-socialists, republicans and liberals) like for instance Ernesto Rossi (the co-author in 1941 with Altiero Spinelli of the Manifesto of Ventotene for a European federation); the journalist Eugenio Scalfari (future founder of the newspaper La Repubblica); the writer Primo Levi, who complained in his novel The Watch about the corruption, laziness and incompetence of the political class produced by parties; and Ignazio Silone, in whose L’avventura di un povero cristiano, Fra Ludovico commented on Christ’s promise to his disciples that “when you are together I will be with you” in this way: “Perhaps he did not mean to say ‘I will be with you when you will be organized in a great organization with chiefs, vice-chiefs and auxiliaries of all sort” (Rossi 2016; see Capozzi 2009, 43–67; Cadeddu 2009, 49–84). Later, in the 1950s and moreover the 1960s, the anti-party-ism that Giannini had conjugated up with minimal state politics and libertarianism would inspire the Radical Party, which would become pivotal in sponsoring civil society’s associations and movements for civil rights, beginning with the referenda on the law regulating divorce in 1974, and then also against the public financial support to parties and electoral campaigns. In the years to follow, particularly after “tangentopoli” (bribeville), some of the leading ideas of Uq would inspire the Italia dei Valori, the party founded by Antonio Di Pietro, the former magistrate who contributed in uncovering and persecuting the bribery system in 1992. Yet reaction against parties was rooted well beyond the liberal criticism of mass parties (whether conservative or radical), and the last General Secretary of the PCI (the party that had contributed most to constructing party democracy and cultivating a noble view of party politics and party life), Achille Occhetto, thundered against partitocrazia (particracy) and opposed spontaneity to organization, devalued partisans and militants in favor of sympathizers and electors, civil movements in favor of organized parties. Later on, in 2008, the primary elections (open to non-party members), which the PD, the new center-left party (Partito Democratico) also adopted to nominate its secretary, would dissolve not only party organization but the very partisan spirit and the borders of the party, which

Anti-party-ism in Italian democracy  77 in the mind of the PD’s founder, Walter Veltroni, were to ideally make the party coincide with the Italian electorate itself. Finally, some of the themes originally raised by Giannini can be found in the program of the M5S, which is perhaps the most mature anti-party movement, structurally shaped to speak for “the citizens” not even “the people”, thus for “la gente” or “the crowd”. The difference between then and now – between 1948 and 2018 – is that anti-party-ism was then the name of a peripheral idea and movement, while it is now the style of politics and of thinking about politics that is somehow the common denominator of all parties (or what remains of them). We would say that today, Uomo qualunque è dovunque – ­everyman is everywhere. Seventy years of party democracy strengthened and diffused the popular sentiment against parties and the party form of political participation. Recent political elections (March 4, 2018) turned out to be a triumph of anti-party-ism, both in the style of the populist rhetoric that framed the electoral campaign beyond party divisions and in the explicit project of constructing a post-party democracy with the determinant help of the Internet and even the transformation of the Parliament through lottery (an idea that Giannini had already sponsored in 1945). The direct relation between the Parliament and the citizens, which the M5S wants to promote, is meant to put an end to party democracy and inaugurate digital democracy. The Internet is, according to Gianroberto Casaleggio the spiritual leader of the M5S, the revolutionary means that can actualize the dream of generations of anti-party-ism as it makes parties wholly obsolete (Casaleggio and Grillo 2011). The M5S has however an additional lymph, no less important than the Uq, although much less popular and more peripheral, also because this root never became a political movement with elected representatives. Antiparty-ism had another post-fascist lymph in the idealistic attempt by Adriano Olivetti to devise a democracy based on communitarian organizations, from local administrations up to the national representative assembly, which were structured so as to enable functioning without the need for parties. Writing a few years after the Italian Constitution was approved, and even though he was almost a contemporary of Giannini, Olivetti animated a communitarian and political cultural project that tried to combine technological innovation, meritocratic hierarchy and forms of direct democracy (Olivetti 2009, in a new edition edited by Davide Cadeddu; see also Cadeddu 2009). Olivetti was an industrialist and a visionary, the inspirer of the Ivrea firm of communication technology, a vanguard crucible of innovation in production and management that predated Apple and the Silicon Valley corporate self-managed model of governance. Olivetti, who created a publishing house which translated among others Weil’s Manifesto Against Parties, devised a sophisticated model of representative democracy without parties; not by chance, he came from the North, in particular a region, Piedmont, that was deeply involved in the war of Resistance and gave birth to several “republics” or selfgoverned cities just after the partisans had liberated them from the Nazi-Fascists. Whereas the disaggregated South was the realm of Giannini’s idealized “crowd” as the sovereign master of a government without parties and organized bodies, a deeply structured North with its embedded tradition of local self-government and

78  Nadia Urbinati autonomies was the realm of a communitarian and societal vision of democracy (see the classic study by Putnam 1993). Both of them, however, constituted an alternative to party democracy. Olivetti constructed the model of a self-governed society that was structured according to functions, competences and needs, thus managed by the citizens themselves according to their specialization and exigencies, through a non-party, representative system and a complex scheme of selections and then monitoring and controlling organs. Olivetti imagined “communities” that were a kind of federal self-managed wholes, in which the economy and politics were integrated, with a social practice that expunged individualism and for this reason did not need organized institutions like parties (in agreement with Ostrogorski, Michels and Weil, Olivetti thought that organized parties were necessary in atomistic and individualistic democracies shaped according to Rousseau’s model of popular sovereignty; see Canciani 2017; Cadeddu 2017). Olivetti devised experiments of communities, practiced and theorized a philosophy of subsidiarity and an ethics of responsible participation in the organization of the collective life, economic and political, and thought that democracy could sustain itself with representation and without parties. In the following two sections, I will explore the conception of a democracy without parties that these two early proposals, Giannini’s and Olivetti’s, envisaged, but with particular attention to the former one.17

3  Post-fascist anti-party-ism What gave political parties legitimacy in the people’s eyes was first their military proficiency in the midst of the fight against the Nazi-Fascists, and then their organizational ability to manage the regime transition in the years in which the Italian State was dismembered (1943–1946). The parties’ legitimacy did not come from democracy and ordinary politics. It developed from their rank-and-file military kind of organization that proved crucial in extraordinary times of a war. The organization of the mass party was tailored on a battle kind of confrontation and demanded discipline and hierarchy, devotion and faith, identification with the main tenets of the party with minor opposition (the “democratic centralism” of the Italian Communist Party was a perfect example of this war-like organization both in its earlier stage, when the party planned to lead the socialist revolution, and later on when it became involved in the war of Resistance). Those war-like qualities were no less important when the war was waged by means of elections, after 1945 and in the age of the Cold War. Yet whereas in the case of the real war, discipline did not really disturb and was actually judged vital, in the case of electoral campaigns, discipline became soon untenable, and in effect the main target of criticism of the political party, the sign of a proficiency whose goal was not the general interest but the party’s interest.18 One of the main anti-party-ist arguments by Giannini was that, in effect, the party served the interest of the “bosses and would-be bosses” who ruled over the ideological doctrine that all the members were to endorse when they chose to enroll in the party. Ideology served to justify both organization and discipline.

Anti-party-ism in Italian democracy  79 Without a doctrine, argued Weil in those very years, no mass party would be possible and no discipline and organization either (Weil hence traced the origins of mass parties back to the religious Counterreformation, the first case of mass mobilization based on a doctrine and its custodians, a rigid discipline that commanded absolute obedience was confirmed by instances of heresy, which were no less illiberal and intolerant than the dogma they opposed). Party discipline was vital in war; but it served also to produce and reproduce “la casta” and lead a defense against internal enemies: the critics. Based on this very analogy, Giannini proposed quite an interesting parallel between war, state and the party. These realities, he argued, have the friend/enemy logic in common as well as a hierarchy between insiders or the rulers (the casta made of “capi” or leaders) and outsiders or the private soldiers and regular militants. Concerning the state, Giannini denied, echoing Thomas Hobbes, any difference between regimes; no matter whether democratic or fascist, the state imposed its obedience – the same would do the party, which also could not tolerate disobedience although in a democratic society, it pretended to be a free association, open to freedom of ideas and free speech and the pledge to never use the coercive power of the state to repress dissenters. “The Party has its own ideas”, framed by a minority and to be endorsed by all the “members” – speaking of dissent is pointless, first because membership is voluntary so that it makes no sense to become a party member and then claim the right to dissent – not entering or exiting the party were the only two instances of freedom that a party entailed. Moreover, the party did not want to enroll all of the citizens, because it could be effective as a party provided it was an association of and by a minority – “the Chiefs, the Sub-chiefs and the Aspiring Chiefs and Subchiefs” – which Giannini named “upp” or uomini politici professionali (political professional men). Starting with the “clubs”, first in England in the seventeenth century and then in France during the revolution of 1789, the parties were born as associations of and for the few, special “places” whose entrance was selective and regulated, also when they became mass-parties in modern democratic societies. Giannini devised a phenomenology of the relationship between “the Crowd” and “the Party” that made them two opposite forms of making politics and being political – the Crowd did not ask for an entrance in the party because it did not have any interest in becoming “a part”, for the simple reason that it deemed politics a problem-solving technique rather than an ideological issue that commanded to side for or against and be made of “parts”. Moreover, if the Crowd entered a Party, the latter would become the Crowd and “its chiefs would form a party within the party, as it happened within totalitarian states” (Giannini [1945] 2002, 146). Thus the difference between party democracy and totalitarianism consisted not in the character of the party, which was identical, but in the number of parties that democracy made room for – the question is that, Giannini thought, plurality was not a mark of liberty for the citizens; many parties would mean many masters rather than no master. The difference between totalitarian and democratic states was that in the latter case, the Crowd remained outside the party, while in the former case the Crowd was the party, and at that point the Chiefs ruling the state had to become also the leader of a hyper-party (Bottai 1977).

80  Nadia Urbinati In both cases, there was no way out of the rule of the few. Hence, since they could not be avoided anyway, the only task would be containing the few. To Giannini, the attainment of this goal did not depend on politics but on scientific evolution. It was possible thanks to extra-institutional factors – more manageable in modern societies, as they were less in need of the state planning the life of its subjects and of a mandarin class of rulers and their auxiliaries. Modern society disposed of science, literacy and an autonomous civil society – in a word, of a widespread self-management culture. The solution to the rule of the few would come from a politics that relied less on the state (and its need of politicians) and that narrowed the state’s functions to simply administration of bureaucracy and justice, as per a minimalist vision that neo-liberals would sponsor. The project of getting rid of the party necessitated thus a large design and in effect a change in the conception and organization of government and politics. Giannini, who was familiar with the works of Leon Deguit and Harold Laski, thought that only an “administrative state” would neutralize the two sources of party competition and party establishment: namely, a sovereign (collective or single) and the state (which in order to fulfill the will of the sovereign had to be more than an administrator); a sovereign state needed to politicize the entire society by subjecting it to the stress of electoral campaigns for the selection of those who represented its will. In effect, a democracy without parties required a different kind of sovereignty and the state: a minimal organization of administration that did not have to implement any broad politics but simply rely upon some experts in charge of solving specific problems. Giannini thought that parties belonged to the past, as signs of a society that was still unprepared to solve many of its problems by itself. Literacy, scientific knowledge, technology and the diffusion of competences through large portions of the population would make the citizens better equipped to judge on competence and progressively to become more intolerant of party doctrines and ideologies, systems of ideas and organizations that belonged to a not-yet-modernized society, much like religion in comparison to science (Giannini [1945] 2002, 69–61). In a positivistic myth which also the fascist ideology had cultivated, Giannini thought that administration and control were the two functions that modern society needed, not parties and partisanships. But unlike previous totalitarians, he thought, democratically, that the fulfillment of those two governing functions would be better guaranteed by the method of lottery than that of elections. Choosing specific competences according to the needed functions to be dispatched would be the work of a meritocratic selection through examinations – ­ministries and public officers would be purely managers rather than party members appointed because their party won a majority of votes and in order to make the interest of their party first, a reason that was wholly external to the needs of the administration and the society. The role of the citizens would be that of monitoring, controlling and eventually expelling or punishing the administrators – a work of judgement rather than ideologies as with electoral campaigns (Giannini [1945] 2002, 169–72). If the state is simply the administrator of its community, much like an accountant of a family business or a condominium, then the goal of government would

Anti-party-ism in Italian democracy  81 predictably be that of making sure that the citizens could live their lives peacefully and securely and enjoy their rights to do as they pleased and to choose what they wanted. This would entail the rule of law, a magistracy autonomous from ideologies and the abolition of elections, which to Giannini represented a torment and a permanent war with no certainty whatsoever that the people would see their interests taken care of. Since parties were made of the few or by a small minority of the people, parties in government would, before anything else, try to satisfy their interests, which only very indirectly coincided with the interests of the Crowd and even with that of their own electors. Thus, since citizens could not get rid of the few because competence and diversity or division of labor were needed in modern society, the problem was “how not to give to the governing few the opportunity to become corrupt” – this entailed short tenures and moreover making the political work merely technical and managerial, thus unattractive and moreover a burden more than a pleasure (Giannini [1945] 2002, 198–99). Freeing the government from professional politicians meant also emancipating public opinion from the tyranny of partisan media. Accountants or ministers, Giannini argued, do not need propaganda because they do not compete on behalf of a party list in order to implement a party program but are selected because of their competence (or based on their CV, as the M5S does when chooses the candidates to be included in its lists), while those who have to control them need scrupulous information and a press that does its job well: by catching news and by making the government a permanent object of scrutiny, under the eyes of the Crowd. Here came Giannini’s most innovating proposal: replacing elections with lottery. If governors are simply administrators, the task of the citizens is controlling their deeds, and to this end, the best method for selection is lottery. Lottery depoliticizes selection while elections politicize it; the one is a denial of parties and partisanships, while the others live on parties and partisanships (Manin 1997, chap. 1). This was the most radical conclusion coming from Giannini’s liberal conception of politics, in effect the pillar of a consistent anti-party democracy. Giannini supported his theory with both historical and normative arguments. First, as we saw, the evolution of scientific knowledge and widespread education would make ideological divisions look like the remnants of a religious kind of politics, in which siding with or against resembled a violent battle based on prejudices and faiths rather than a search for the best decision-makers. As to the normative argument, Giannini claimed that the only way for a community to emancipate itself from the few was to make the work of the few purely administrative. Making politics a terrain of conquest, a domain of competition for the utilization of large resources would fatally make it a source of suffering for the largest part of the population (and certainly the opposition) – the war itself was a decision that the Crowd would hardly make, but the few would since they would risk almost nothing. Giannini’s linkage of partisan politics with bad decisions and moreover war and conflict was in tune with the progressive philosophy of the Enlightenment and authors like Condorcet who believed that scientific and technological evolution

82  Nadia Urbinati would be in the service of liberty and peace. A democracy without parties would thus truly be a self-government of the community. Without parties and without elections, Giannini thought, politics would be more beautiful “because the debate will not be polluted by the interests of the party or the party’s men who want to keep their seats in parliament since have no autonomous means of sustainment” (Giannini [1945] 2002, 198). Professional politicians would disappear with the substitution of elections with lottery. Perhaps an assembly made of lotted people would not be perfect, but after a few years its members would be replaced with others like them, who could amend previously made mistakes – in effect only a lotted assembly could be made guilty of mistakes. Indeed, it would be senseless to ascribe mistakes to an elected assembly, whose members are chosen not on the basis of their competence but their ideology, which is hard to be judged according to epistemic criteria. The opposite of a democracy based on a lotted selection was indeed party democracy or partitocrazia. This term, which was coined in the mid-1940s by Giuseppe Maranini, was meant to accuse political parties of appropriating state institutions at a time when party democracy had not even started to operate. Giannini’s book proposed a dual model of government: a legitimate one, based on selection by lottery, and an illegitimate one, that is, electoral democracy. Anti-party-ism was the theoretical frame within which particracy acquired its meaning, the mental horizon in which the latter found its natural lymph. In sum, a comprehensive research into the foundations of Italian party democracy shows that skepticism about, if not explicit repulsion of, parties was one of its congenital features.

4 Conclusion The renaissance of democracy after World War Two was in reaction to the oneparty regime and incubated hostility against mass parties, which were born historically with the fascist regime in order to stay, although now within a pluralistic environment and a constitutional order. Party pluralism was the democratic solution for neutralizing the potentiality of the one-party regime that mass parties anyhow incorporate. Hence as we have seen in this chapter, not all political leaders and scholars deemed party pluralism a truly satisfactory solution because it was too weak a dike to contain the tendency to an unlimited expansion which was endogenous to organized parties, even when operating in a competitive democracy. Large quantities (of votes) changed the nature of parties so that the latter could no longer be seen as a vice in the service of virtue or as second best as with the liberal state in the nineteenth century. Parties were needed in representative democracy. Yet they were a problem. Thus, more than simply a reaction to the parties’ malpractice, anti-party-ism inspired political projects for the solution of this problem – and to some radical minds, a democracy without parties and partisan subdivisions of the people. In this sense, I have argued in this chapter that antiparty-ism was like a permanent lymph in Italy’s representative government, the fertile terrain of a persistent anti-establishmentarianism.

Anti-party-ism in Italian democracy  83

Notes 1 A synthesis and overview of the “anti-party system” mode can be found in: Invernizzi Accetti and Bickerton (2016). 2 On the dilemma of “organization” in the opinion of (and in effect against) parties, see Panebianco (1982). 3 Minghetti’s book (see below) was republished in 1944 with the preface of a Socialist leader, and later president of the Italian Republic, Giuseppe Saragat. 4 For an overview over the visions of parties in the age after the Risorgimento until the collapse of the liberal regime, see Valitutti (1966). 5 Benedetto Croce’s depiction in his Elementi di Politica (Croce 1946, 38). 6 Weil (2013). Weil’s text was written in 1943 while she was in London and was published for the first time in the monthly journal La Table ronde (No. 26, February 1950). 7 See Fulco (2017). 8 Just after the fall of Mussolini’s regime, on July 25, 1943, President Roosevelt declared that “Fighting between the Germans, the Italian Army and the population will probably be a result of the fate of the German troops in Italy,” cited in Pavone (2006, 6). 9 A collection of documents on the self-governing liberated cities and villages in Northern Italy has been published by Legnani (1967) and Rotelli (1980), which reconstrucuted the tension between civilians and parties’ members in Tuscany. 10 Because of the collapse of the central state, after and as a result of the termination of the Fascist regime and the armistice signed by the provisional government, the citizens of the Northern regions were left to themselves, forced to take their destiny in their own hands and thus to protect their own lives and families and administer their cities and villages directly. 11 The debate on these themes, and particularly on the legitimacy of the Italian Constitution because “made by parties”, has been endless in Italy, although started acquiring a strong polemical style after and in coincidence with the decline of parties as a result of the scheme of corruption revealed in 1992. See, for instance, the dialogue on the role of the Resistance and particracy as a vice within it among Gian Enrico Rusconi and Renzo De Felice, published under the name of Rusconi with the title “8 settembre. Dalla Resistenza alla partitocrazia,” La Stampa 1 September  1993. Gian Enrico Rusconi, “L’ultimo azionismo,” Il Mulino 41, no. 4 (1992): 575–86; Rocco Buttiglione, “Ma dalla resistenza passiva è nata la coscienza civile,” Avvenire 8 October 1992 e Id., “Quella diversa Resistenza,” Il Tempo 15 October 1992. To both Rusconi and Buttiglione, Bobbio answered with his “Lettera sull’azionismo,” Il Mulino 41, no. 6 (1992): 1021–26. An important document of the polemic on the party-monopoly of anti-fascism is also in Bobbio and Pavone (2015) and Foa (2000, 55–56). 12 See the excellent dissertation by Douglass (1983, 3–4, 129–132); Imbriani (1996, 28–29). 13 Written between September 1943 and June 1944 and published in 1945. 14 Giannini, La Folla, p. 58 (my translation); for an informed biography, see Lomartire (2006). 15 The first issue sold 700.000 copies and was the most successful among the printed presses, enjoying the largest circulation of any Italian publication. A regular column in the magazine was the Aristophanes’ “The Wasps”, a collection of gossip against Italian politicians. 16 The party symbol was a man being squeezed in a vise. 17 For a parallel analysis of the two post-party democracy proposals, by Giannini and Olivetti, see Cadeddu (2009, 113–141). 18 See the debate on the crisis of parliamentarism in a conference held in Florence in 1966 and published in Piccardi et al. (1967).

84  Nadia Urbinati

References Bobbio, Norberto and Claudio Pavone (2015), Sulla guerra civile: La Resistenza a due voci, ed. David Bidussa, Turin: Bollati Boringhieri. Bottai, Giuseppe (1977), “Vent’anni di ‘critica fascista’,” (Primato, May  15, 1943), in Luisa Mangoni (ed.), ‘Primato’ 1940–1943, Bari: De Donato, pp. 425–439. Cadeddu, Davide (2009), Adriano Olivetti Politico, Rome: Edizione Storia e Letteratura, pp. 49–84. Cadeddu, Davide (2017), “Tra politica della cultura e critica della partitocrazia: ‘Comunità’ e le Edizioni di Comunità (1946–1960),” in Carmelo Calabrò and Mauro Lenci (eds.), La democrazia liberale e i suoi critici, Soveria Mannelli: Rubettino, pp. 217–227. Canciani, Domenico (2017), “La filosofa e l’industriale. Adriano Olivetti e Simone Weil,” in Fabio Amigoni and Fulvio Cesare Manara (eds.), Pensare il presente con Simone Weil, Turin: Effatà Editrice, pp. 187–212. Canovan, Margaret (1999), “ ‘Trust the People!’ Populism and the Two Faces of Democracy,” Political Studies 47, pp. 2–16. Capozzi, Eugenio (2009), Partitocrazia. Il “regime” italiano e I suoi critici, Napoli: Guida, pp. 1–19. Casaleggio, Roberto and Beppe Grillo (2011), Siamo in guerra: Per una nuova politica, Milan: Chiarelettere. Croce, Benedetto (1946), Elementi di Politica, second edition, Bari: Laterza. Croce, Benedetto (1955), “Il partito come Giudizio e come Pregiudizio,” in Benedetto Croce, Cultura e Vita Morale, Bari: Laterza, p. 5. Douglass, Charles Day (1983), The Shaping of Postwar Italian Politics: Italy 1945–1948, Department of History, University of Chicago, August 20 (Thesis No. T28368) pp. 3–4, 129–132. Foa, Vittorio (2000), Passaggi, Turin: Einaudi, pp. 55–56. Fulco, Rita (2017), “La radice titalitaria dei partiti politici. Simone Weil critical del collettivo,” in Fabio Amigoni and Fulvio C. Manara (eds.), Pensare il presente con Simone Weil, Bergamo: La Porta, pp. 213–234. Giannini, Guglielmo (2002), La Folla. Seimila anni di lotta contro la tirannide, versione ridotta con un dibattito di G. Orsina e V. Zanone, postfazione by S. Sette, Soveria Mannelli: Rubettino. Imbriani, Michele Angelo (1996), Vento del Sud: Moderati, Reazionati, Qualunquisti 1943–1948, Bologna: Il Mulino, pp. 28–29. Invernizzi Accetti, Carlo and Christopher Bickerton (2016), “Populism and Technocracy. Opposites or Complements?” Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy 20, pp. 186–206. Legnani, Massimo (1967), Politica e amministrazione nelle repubbliche partigiane, Milan: Istituto Nazionale per la Storia del Movimento di Liberazione. Lenci, Mauro (2017), “I moderati italiani e la critica della democrazia (1815–1861),” in Carmelo Calabrò and Mauro Lenci (eds.), La democrazia liberale e i suoi critici, Soveria Mannelli: Rubettino, pp. 37–51. Lomartire, Carlo Maria (2006), Il Qualunquista. Guglielmo Giannini e l’antipolitica, Milan: Mondadori. Mair, Peter (2013), Ruling the Void: The Hollowing of Western Democracy, London: Verso. Manin, Bernard (1997), The Principles of Representative Democracy, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 228–229. Minghetti, Marco (1992), I partiti politici e la ingerenza loro nella giustizia e nell’amministrazione (1881), Naples: Edizioni scientifiche italiane.

Anti-party-ism in Italian democracy  85 Mudde, Cas (2004), “The Populist Zeitgeist,” Government and Opposition 39, no. 3, pp. 541–563. Olivetti, Adriano (2009), Fini e fine della politica. Democracy without Political Parties (1945), in a new edition edited by Davide Cadeddu, Soveria Mannelli: Rubettino. Orsina, Giovanni (2002), “Le virtù liberali del qualunqsuismo,” in Guglielmo Giannini (ed.), La Folla. Seimila anni di lotta contro la tirannide, versione ridotta con un dibattito di G. Orsina e V. Zanone, postfazione by S. Sette, Soveria Mannelli: Rubettino, pp. 7–26. Panebianco, Angelo (1982), Modelli di partito. Organizzazione e potere nei partiti politici, Bologna: Il Mulino, pp. 23–56. Pavone, Claudio (2006), Una guerra civile. Saggio sulla moralità della Resistenza, Turin: Bollati Boringhieri, v. 1. Peruzzotti, Enrique (2013), “Populism in Democratic Times: Populism, Representative Democracy, and the Debate on Democratic Deepening,” in Carlos de la Torre and Cynthia J. Arnson (eds.), Latin American Populism in the Twenty-First Century, Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, pp. 70–71. Piccardi, Luigi, Norberto Bobbio and Ferrucci Parri (1967), La sinistra davanti alla crisi del Parlamento, Milano: Giuffrè, pp. 53–62. Putnam, Robert (1993), Making Democracy Work: Civic Traditions in Modern Italy, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Revelli, Marco (2017), Populismo 2.0, Turin: Einaudi. Rosanvallon, Pierre (2008), La légitimité démocratique. Impartialité, réflexivité, proximité, Paris: Seuil, p. 43. Rosenblum, Nancy (2008), On the Side of the Angels an Appreciation of Parties and Partisanship, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, p. 43. Rossi, Ernesto (1955), Il malgoverno, Bari: Laterza. Rossi, Ernesto (2016), Contro l’industria dei partiti, edited by Paolo Flores D’Arcais, Milano: Chiarelettere. Rotelli, Ettore (1980), La ricostruzione in Toscana dal CNL ai partiti politici, Bologna: Il Mulino. Sartori, Giovanni (1976), Parties and Party Systems: A Framework for Analysis, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, p. 37. Schattschneider, Elmer Eric (2009), Party Government (1942) with a new introduction by Sidney A. Pearson Jr., New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, p. 1. Setta, Sandro (1975), L’Uomo qualunque. 1944–1948, Roma-Bari: Laterza, pp. 1–50. Urbinati, Nadia (2018), “Antiestablishment and the Substitution of the Whole with One of Its Parts,” in Carlos de la Torre (ed.), Routledge Handbook of Global Populism, London: Routledge, pp. 77–97. Valitutti, Salvatore (1966), I partiti politici e la libertà, Rome: Armando editore. Weil, Simone (2013), On the Abolition of Parties, translated by Simone Leys, New York: New York Review of Books.

5 “Particracy” The pre-populist critique of parties and its implications* David Ragazzoni

1  Italian democracy and its constituent paradox Democratic theorists and political scientists agree on interpreting antipartyism as a symptom of senile representative democracies. This diagnosis rests on two main axioms. First, it is assumed that political parties are constitutive of healthy democracies and valued as both necessary (at electoral, organizational, and institutional levels) and legitimate (no longer identified with the carriers of factional stands). Second, it is believed that what triggers widespread public disaffection with parties is their degeneration, from “parties on the ground,” into “parties in central office”, no longer performing at once procedural and representative functions but merely exercising or pursuing power for the sake of their own survival. As a corollary, antipartyism purportedly underpins the decay of party democracy and supposedly constitutes the pinnacle of the crumbling legitimacy of parties as the quintessential form of political agency (e.g., Manin 1997; Mair 2002, 2013; Ignazi 2017). This chapter on the theories and practices of antipartyism in democratic Italy unveils a different story (see also Urbinati in this volume). Deep-seated hostility to parties has been a congenital feature of Italian democracy since its very beginning and has run consistently throughout its trajectory across the decades, from the mid-1940s up to the present (Lupo 2004). Antipartyism, rather than the appreciation of parties, is what gives cohesiveness to the history of Italy’s party democracy. According to the portrait of representative government and its principles painted by Manin, parliamentary democracy and party democracy overlap. They both presume that political parties have secured legitimacy in non-direct democracy and successfully emancipated themselves from a long history of despise and mistrust, in which they were identified with factions and the corrupting plague of private interests. Another defining contour of his painting is the idea that parliamentary democracy constitutes an endogenous mutation of representative government, from a stage when parties were networks of local notables (“liberal parliamentarism”) to a stage in which party machineries became a necessity for making both politics and institutions work (“party democracy”). Finally, the implication of Manin’s book is that antipartyism signals the twilight of the hegemony of

Particracy: The pre-populist critique  87 parties and marks the shift towards a new vision and practice of democracy, no longer based on intermediary political bodies and active participation but revolving around charismatic leaders, the expertise of spin doctors, and the primacy of the “audience”. The chapter demonstrates that the life and times of Italian antipartyism are more complicated than what Manin’s stadial theory suggests. Arguments about the bad scent of parties have not been a prerogative of the most recent decades of Italian politics, nor have they abruptly emerged and developed as a watershed between the fading age of “party democracy” and the rising era of “audience democracy.” Antipartyism fueled political debates since the very dawn of democratic Italy, before its Constituent Assembly was elected, and it revamped among the Constituents, before its Constitution was even enacted. “Partitocrazia” (particracy)1 was the term coined in the mid-1940s to reject political parties at a time when party democracy had not even started to operate.2 The first to question the legitimacy of political parties were the monarchists and the liberals from both the pre-Fascist age (e.g., the philosopher Benedetto Croce) and the new generation forged in the very years of the Resistance (e.g., Guglielmo Giannini and his “The Common Man’s Front”, 1944). Once Italy became a Republic through the popular referendum of June  1946, they were joined by intellectuals who championed scientific and industrial progress and thought it was possible to imagine “democracy without political parties” (e.g., Adriano Olivetti).3 Repulsion of parties was then evoked by post-Fascist nationalists and republicans, who profoundly admired Charles De Gaulle and called for a “new” Italian Republic along presidential rather than parliamentary lines (e.g., Randolfo Pacciardi’s New Republic and Giorgio Pisanò’s Second Republic). It was further employed by Catholic politicians who turned Gaullism into a political theology, urging a spiritual renovation of Italian politics through a charismatic, plebiscitary leader that would fight against the evils of liberal modernity (e.g., Gianni Baget Bozzo). Finally, rejection of parties was evoked and practiced by the neo-Fascist right, with its founder (Giorgio Almirante) fictitiously taking Italy’s parliamentary democracy and its party leaders to trial in his own political writings (Processo al Parlamento, 1969; Processo alla Repubblica, 1980). The arguments of the partisans of “particracy” reached their climax with “Tangentopoli” (Bribesville) in the early 1990s, when the major parties that had dominated Italian politics for the previous five decades imploded due to their pervasive corruption. On the tabula rasa of Italian party democracy, self-professed new actors from left to right, both individual and collective (most distinctively, Italy’s richest tycoon, Silvio Berlusconi), began writing a supposedly new chapter, building from scratch a party system allegedly untouched by corruption. However, the future they announced was intimately connected to the past they had promised to leave behind.4 The “personal parties” (Calise 2000) that flourished and soon multiplied in late 20th-century Italy inaugurated the crusade of civil society against party elites and began practicing democracy as a “direct representation” of the people through the persona of the leader, beyond and against organized parties (Urbinati 2015, 2019c). This was the time when Italy shifted most evidently from a “party republic”

88  David Ragazzoni (Scoppola 1997) to a “leader democracy” (Calise 2016) or – from the standpoint of the respective pathologies – from “particracy” to “leader-cracy” (Cotta 2015). In other words, antipartyism has always been the backbone of the Italian Republic – a (twisted) spine that has prevented it from walking straight and made its progression across the decades more hesitant and faltering than is usually understood. The first five decades in the history of Italian democracy (1946–1994) – from the election of its Constituent Assembly (1946) up through the implosion of its party system and the rise of Silvio Berlusconi (1992–1994) – can offer important resources to ongoing debates in contemporary political theory and science. From a relatively new angle, they shed light on the nature and implications of pre-populist antipartyism and its role in the erosion of party legitimacy within the broader process of “presidentialization” of parliamentary systems (Calise 2005; Poguntke and Webb 2005). Against conventional narratives and interpretations, they reveal that antipartyism and party democracy can march together in ways that remain largely unexplored.5 Finally, they allow us to better capture the divorce between “popular” and “constitutional” democracy (respectively, government by and government for the people) – two “pillars” of democratic political legitimacy that party democracy seeks to merge and that populisms tend to unglue (Mény and Surel 2002; Mair 2002, 2013).

2  Italy’s party democracy: not yet born, already on trial 2.1  The origins of “particracy” In the political history of modern Italy, “partitocrazia” was used for the first time on 12 February 1946. Its paternity belongs to Roberto Lucifero d’Aprigliano (1903– 1993),6 a liberal monarchic who employed it during the XXIII plenary session of the Kingdom of Italy’s National Council (Consulta)7 precisely to describe the effects of party-list proportional representation. However, he had previously used the same term in the last chapter of a short book he had published in 1944 on the philosophical and political implications of electoral systems – Introduzione alla libertà (“Introduction to Freedom”). These two expressions of his antipartyism – the one running through his political writings and the one fueling his political action – resorted to very similar arguments and were constitutive of the same intellectual project. As a political theorist, Lucifero attacked the “dishonest behavior of parties” as the outcome of the “increasing power of minorities” through the proportional system. It was this political “pandemic” that had caused “parties” to “replace men”, “partisan interests” to “eclipse national ones”, and the “game of alternation through conflictual opinions” to degenerate into “a war of particracies”, eventually setting the stage for the dictatorship of one party. “In Italy, France, and Germany alike” – he remarked in the very last pages of Introduzione alla libertà – “in every country with laws of proportional representation, no party was allowed to govern, but any party was allowed to prevent the others from governing”; “heterogenous political programs” and “implausible compromises”, equally springing from a “misunderstood form of collectivism”, had produced institutional anarchy, electoral apathy, and the decay of parliamentary institutions.

Particracy: The pre-populist critique  89 This critique echoed arguments he had already developed in his editorials on the leading monarchical journal Italia Nuova (“The New Italy”), where his target was the “esarchy” of the six-party, anti-Fascist umbrella organization known as National Liberation Committee (CLN). Implicitly revisiting the Aristotelian antithesis between the rule of law and the rule of men, Lucifero systematically pointed out the emergence of an unprecedented typology of kratos, revolving around the primacy of parties over human beings and curtailing the legitimacy of democratic institutions. Like Tocqueville, he believed that democracy could not be stopped but had to be tamed to channel party conflict, avoid its degeneration into factional strife, and enable stable governments. At this level, the connection between electoral laws and the practice of political liberty was key. “Men are what they are” and cannot change, he warned at the beginning of the third and last Part of Introduzione alla libertà. They “will always be power-thirsty, driven by their restless desire to dominate and oppress”, he wrote in a vaguely Machiavellian and Hobbesian language. They are and will always be “prone to pursue their particular interests as if they were a life necessity”, with no hesitation to resort to the medium of law to prevail over the rest of society. “Forcing men to be impartial” and “to be free”, as Lucifero put it in Rousseauian terms, should thus be the chief educational task of legislators (Lucifero 1944, 106, 160). In the concluding sections of the book (chapter XXI), he also developed a thorough critique of proportional representation in European contexts (introduced for the first time in Belgium in 1899), tracing a brief history of the emergence of parties in modern representative governments, outlining the deleterious effects of party discipline inside parliaments, and blaming “the tyranny of parties” for distorting the foundational political dualism between electors and elected. He drew on one recent case in Italian politics to epitomize the phenomenon of “partitocrazia”: Who, among Italians, does not remember the excessive power of the Secretary of the Popular Party? Without even being a member of the Parliament, he could maneuver, from his office, more than one hundred votes within the Chamber of Deputies, assembling and dissembling the various Ministries depending on whether they matched his personal beliefs, orchestrating the appointment or the dismissal of individual Ministers, imposing vetoes and specific conditions, in turn regulating or  – better said  – dysregulating the entire political and parliamentary life of the Nation. (Lucifero 1944, 148) For Lucifero, these were the pernicious, inevitable consequences of proportional representation through closed party lists. As he noted, implicitly drawing on Gaetano Mosca and his arguments about the “iron law of oligarchy”, it is a configuration of representative politics that ends up rewarding “the boldest and best organized minority” (Lucifero 1944, 158) and eventually sets the stage for mono-party dictatorships. Multi-party democracies remain vulnerable to totalitarian temptations whenever they heavily rely upon party machineries and their

90  David Ragazzoni leaders – that is, whenever they cease to be democracies and turn into electoral oligarchies ruled by parties. The paradox of party, parliamentary democracies is that the (fictional) prerogatives of the legislative become a mere façade for the (actual) extra-parliamentary power of party organizations.8 This was the conclusion that Lucifero reached in 1944, similarly to what Carl Schmitt had written in 1923 in his book The Crisis of Parliamentary Democracy. Two years later, Lucifero voiced similar concerns as a member of the National Council. His stands against parties and their despotic tendencies echoed arguments he had previously outlined, and yet his ideas acquired a whole new meaning. For the first time, the term partitocrazia was pronounced and debated inside the institutions of post-Fascist Italy. It no longer described a personal, private hostility to parties. It was now a new category in the grammar of politics to describe a distinctive kind of regime and, more specifically, a degeneration of representative democracy, a corrupted and malign form of government not dissimilar from the ones diagnosed by Plato, Aristotle, and Polybius in their typologies of constitutional regimes. In the discussion over the electoral law for the later Constituent Assembly, Lucifero once again distinguished between “two conceptions of the democratic life, one proceeding through men and the other unfolding through parties” (Consulta Nazionale – hereinafter CN – 15 February 1946, 713). They epitomized two ways of interpreting and practicing modern democracy that, on his account, were not mutually exclusive but “equally necessary” and thus had to be reconciled. When politics is left at the complete mercy of parties, without any monitoring mechanism, democracy is doomed to turn into “particracy” – a term, Lucifero reminded his fellow Constituents, that he had coined and been using “for a long time” and now defined as “a regime form where extra-state bureaucracies germinate within the state itself and enchain both the elector and the representative” (CN, 12 February  1946, 606). In line with his arguments from 1944, he identified the source of “particratic” democracies with a proportional system of political representation wherein electors can only either abstain or select one of the competing closed lists pre-arranged by party bureaucracies. Both in the XXII and XXV plenary assemblies of the Consulta, he described this configuration of representative politics as the primary reason for the “enslavement” of citizens and their elected officials to the caprice of parties.9 For Lucifero, modern democratic governments had to combine three equally crucial features: the need for electors to choose their individual candidates; their desire to see their own ideas represented and pursued at the institutional level; and, finally, the importance for a proportionate representation of such claims inside parliamentary institutions. More specifically, he suggested combining the “personal” factor  – that is, the vote for a specific candidate (typical of singlemember districts) – with the “ideological” and the “proportionate” components of electoral competition in party democracies  – that is, the vote for a specific party list – through a “multi-purpose law” that could cross-fertilize both systems (single-member districts and party lists; CN, 12 February 1946, 607; 15 February, 713–714). The mixed typology he envisioned, specifically designed to blend these “three requirements” of modern democratic politics (personal, ideological,

Particracy: The pre-populist critique 91 and proportionate representation) and thus envision a mixed regime tailored to modern times, consisted in a revision of the Hare system. Accordingly, extra votes for candidates who already reached the required quota would be transferred to the party list of the very same candidates rather than to the next-chosen candidate. In the National Assembly, Lucifero’s critiques and proposals fueled intense debate, especially among the members of the Socialist delegation. Lucio Mario Luzzatto firmly rejected the idea that “particracy” was necessarily antithetical to democracy.10 At the same time, he connected his quasi-Schumpeterian defense of parties to a broader understanding of democratic politics, based on a specific account of representation. It is worth quoting directly from his passionate response to Lucifero: It has been argued that two antithetical conceptions of politics exist – manmade and party-made politics, depending on whether politics is a matter of lobbies or ideas, of personal favors or genuine reforms. We believe that democracy rightly operates through parties and that an electoral system based on single-member constituencies, rather than the usually-blamed proportional system, has been the major weakness of our national politics, from the birth of the Italian state up through WWI and beyond – the breeding ground for the proliferation of the Fascist disease. (CN, pp. 697–698; my emphasis)11 While the elections of the members of the Constituent Assembly (2 June 1946) eventually employed a proportional system based on party lists (in partial continuity with the 1919 electoral law),12 the term “particracy” was destined to become more than what Lucifero himself had probably imagined. Soon after the birth of the Italian Republic, it progressively became part of ordinary language, entering the broader public sphere first through the editorials of socialist politician and journalist Arturo Labriola (1873–1959) and then evolving into a distinctive political paradigm in the writings of constitutional jurist Giuseppe Maranini (1902–1969). However, this proliferation of references to the term “particracy” did not make the notion itself any less elusive, even when it ceased to indicate a concern only of the Italian Founders and started circulating outside political institutions, among leading intellectuals. We need to wait until 1963 to find the first scholarly definition of “partitocrazia” and a systematic attempt to distinguish its various meanings in the work of leading political scientist Giovanni Sartori (Somogyi et al. 1963, 331–332).13 Before then, the various partisans of antipartyism in Italy resorted to the label of “particracy” (or “esecracy” or “party mania”14) to evoke a polemical target with no clearly defined identity. 2.2  Labriola, Maranini, and the critique of closed party lists Published on 24 July and 28 July 1946 – that is, less than two months after the institutional referendum through which Italians had opted for a democratic regime and elected the members of its Constituent Assembly (2 June) – two writings

92  David Ragazzoni by Arturo Labriola and Giuseppe Maranini exemplify two major tendencies in the early debates on “particracy”: their conceptual vagueness and their consistent attack on a parliamentary system where seats were proportionally allotted to closed party lists. A member of the Constituent Assembly himself through the National Democratic Union (a coalition of pre-Fascist liberal parties), Labriola wrote an editorial for the Rome daily newspaper Il Tempo explicitly titled “Partitocrazia”. Despite the title, the article never employed the term, nor did it unpack its meaning. Nevertheless, Labriola was firm in denouncing the implications of the phenomenon he meant to evoke. He described post-Fascist Italy as a putative democracy in which politics had been “kidnapped” by a narrow circle of party leaders, especially those affiliated with the three major Italian parties at the time (the Christian Democrats, the Socialists, and the Communists). For Labriola, their recent parliamentary alliance with the Republican Party in support of the executive led by Alcide De Gasperi (14 July 1946–28 July 1953) offered the most uncontroversial evidence of their cynicism, power lust, and readiness to betray ideas and values they would usually stand for in times of elections. No pursuit of the public interest but only the desire to instrumentally use state institutions for their private benefit was, on his view, the glue cementing party elites whose platforms were otherwise incompatible. Later that year, in the daily publication Rome (financed by former Fascist and then monarchist businessman Achille Lauro), Labriola once again attacked the oligarchic degeneration of Italian political parties. Parties – so his argument went – are self-proclaimed representatives of the society at large but, in truth, are merely vehicles for the interests of one portion of society against all others. Under the title of “Nomenclatura politica” (“Political Bureaucrats”, 2 November 1946), his article connected the plague of Italian politics to the “evil and deplorable proportional system” of 1919, unconditionally empowering party elites and exacerbating the transformation of parties into electoral machineries. Labriola’s critique revealed a nostalgia for the pre-democratic, late 19th-century age of liberal parliamentarism, when party politics was the prerogative of local notables and parliamentary parties consisted exclusively of eminent individuals. It was not by chance that, in 1945, he joined a composite group of liberals (from Croce and Luigi Einaudi to jurist Vittorio Emanuele Orlando) endorsing their manifesto for the League in defense of democratic liberties, which combined a powerful critique of the proportionate electoral law typical of the new democratic age with the celebration of the earlier majoritarian system based on single-member constituencies.15 In July 1946, Maranini wrote a long piece that is seldom mentioned and yet offers one of his earliest and most extensive analyses of the Italian party system after WWII. It was published on the Florentine periodical L’Arno four days after Labriola’s “Partitocrazia” and three years before Maranini’s famous lecture at the University of Florence (Parliamentary Government and Particracy). Its title was “The Totalitarianism of Parties”. The article described the “subversion of state authority and functions by mass parties” as a typically 20th-century problem that had produced the most disruptive consequences in post-Fascist Italy, where the

Particracy: The pre-populist critique  93 habit of local government and a system of mutual controls among powers had not developed. He claimed that “thrown out of the door, absolutism now triumphantly comes back from the window” (Maranini 1946, 91). The following passage best exemplifies his diagnosis of the “totalitarian disease of parties’ domination” poisoning Italian politics in the immediate aftermath of Fascism: In truth, our situation has improved only insofar as the hegemony of one party has been replaced by a plurality of parties that compete against each other, and thus mutually contain and eventually nullify their opposite greed. While allowing for a minimal degree of state autonomy (not yet its authority), this system provides citizens with a sort of no man’s land where, at their own risk, they can venture in search of freedom. However, totalitarianism has not been dismantled, but just fractioned. Parties still do everything: they distribute jobs and offices, they appoint parliamentarians, ministers, and ambassadors. Parties – that is, parties’ ruling committees – keep all the power for themselves. The people is called periodically to cast their ballot, but they are not allowed to choose which candidate to vote for; the most they can do is determine the proportion of the elected officials based on the lists that parties’ ruling committees propose. As you can tell, the people’s sovereignty is thus completely undermined; it survives, to a minimal extent, only where parties are democratically organized. Unfortunately, though, little to no democracy exists within parties; all of them tend to give all powers to a restricted number of party bureaucrats – a tendency that was a defining feature of Fascism and remains a staple of all sorts of totalitarianism. (Maranini 1946, 95; my emphasis) Maranini had denounced the degeneration of Italian representative government already in the late 1930s, describing the trajectory of the Italian state as a downward spiral leading to the hegemony of party assemblies and, eventually, to a mono-party regime (Maranini 1938). In 1946, however, he put his finger on the “particratic” tendencies of mass parties to shed light on their latent totalitarian potential and ensure that Italian history would never experience the brutality of party dictatorship again. It is worth underlining that Maranini’s critique of Italian parties did not entail the rejection of parties tout court. What he feared in the upcoming age of party democracy was their oligarchic involution  – in other words, the dissolution of the link between parties and democracy and the institutionalization of a political oligopoly dominated by party leaders and bureaucrats. He referenced the recent edition of Marco Minghetti’s classic (Parties and their Infiltration in the Judiciary and the Administration, 1881)16 to both retrieve the long-standing concern with parties’ voracious appetites in Italian political history and warn against the dangers of any vision of party politics along purely jurisprudential and formalistic lines. As a jurist, he believed that the relation between representative institutions and party organizations had to be addressed pragmatically and that, for this purpose, the promotion of intra-party democracy was key.

94  David Ragazzoni In the last sections of the article, Maranini unpacked his ideal type of parties as channels for civic participation and structures that would directly contribute to the development of a democratic public opinion. “Let us”, he wrote, “at once promote democracy within parties and enhance freedom within the state. Parties must be wide streams of public opinion, their primary and only function being the circulation, as wide as possible, of citizens’ ideas. This is, and always should be, their extraordinary, vital role”. Echoing Kant, he described the fight for party democracy and democracy within parties as a precondition for an enduring peace among free states no longer enslaved by “the feudalism of parties” (Maranini 1946, 97). 2.3  Bobbio and the quest for democracy inside parties Another vociferous advocate of the democratization of parties was Norberto Bobbio (1909–2004), the leading political and legal theorist of 20th-century Italy and one of its most distinguished intellectuals in the aftermath of WWII (Losano 2018; Pasquino 2019). On 7 April 1946 (i.e., two months before the first meeting of the Constituent Assembly), he participated in a conference organized by the Anglo-Italian Association. The lecture he gave – Political Parties in England (Bobbio 1996b) – was his first systematic attempt to theorize the role, nature, and possible degenerations of parties in a democratic system  – a concern with the present and future of post-Fascist Italian politics that would resonate widely in his work across the decades (Ragazzoni 2019). As his autobiography reveals, his considerations stemmed from the brief but intense study of British constitutional and parliamentary history and practice during his journey to England in the Fall of 1945: It was a journey – we read from his account in A Political Life – to explore a country considered to be the cradle of democracy, and one that had proved to be stronger than Hitler’s bombs. [. . .] The trip was conceived by its organizers, the British Council, as a kind of civic education course designed for people who had passed their formative years under a dictatorship. [. . .] the delegation was chosen on the basis of the model that had been used by the Committee of National Liberation. All the parties in the committee were ­represented. [. . .]17 In England, the cradle of parliamentarism, Bobbio saw something more than England itself. Like Tocqueville, he tried to study and understand the British system from a comparative angle, to draw lessons and insights that would offer a political compass for Italy to navigate the unknown waters of parliamentary democracy. And the main lesson he learnt was “the need for large democratically organized parties” that could provide “strong government without the dangers of dictatorship” (Bobbio 2002, 73). Bobbio understood that parties, parliamentarism, and the transformations of both in the age of mass democracy were equally important pieces of the same puzzle. Accordingly, any attempt to replicate the English experience in Continental

Particracy: The pre-populist critique 95 Europe, and specifically in Italy, would presuppose a thorough analysis of such changes across the decades, of what had triggered them and how they had affected the overall nature of British institutions. “The Parliament in England is no longer a sovereign assembly”, he warned his Italian audience. “This expression is just a cliché: the reality is quite different [. . .]. Parliament is now a debating Chamber. [. . .] in the current British parliamentary system, the parliament debates but does not decide. It debates questions, but it does not resolve them”. Bobbio drew attention to a radical change in the way the legislative, and political parties therein, worked in early 20th-century Britain. Unlike the “sovereignty of Parliament” theorized and championed by A. V. Dicey and Lawrence Lowell, it was now the sovereignty of the party in the Parliament, the new “focal point” of the English system. On Bobbio’s account, the unprecedented prerogative of the winning party inside the legislative marked the advent of a new constitutional model – a “multiparty state with the government chosen by the prime minister” and, de facto, a system closer to the presidential government of the US than to England’s tradition of pure parliamentarism (Bobbio 2002, 73–74). Towards the conclusion of his lecture, Bobbio argued that “organized parties are a typical creation of democracy” (implicitly reversing Eric Schattschneider’s famous statement that “political parties created democracy”). And yet he cautioned against parties that “betray their mother” and “rise up and revolt against the source of their generation”. In 1946, with the memories of the Fascist experience still vivid in his mind, he warned that “whenever the party becomes an end in itself, whenever democracy is instrumentally employed and exploited by the party  – any party  – then a democratic State inevitably turns into its opposite”. This danger, always latent when a “purely instrumental conception” of democracy is embraced, becomes the most real when parties are not internally democratic (Bobbio 1996b: 68–69). Bobbio’s caveat in 1946 echoed what he had already written in 1945, when he had distinguished between “partisan men” (uomini di parte) and “party men” (uomini di partito), between political intolerance and political coherence, between factionalism and the attempt to stay true to our own beliefs, and in turn outlined his ideal vision of democratic parties. Parties led by genuine “party partisans” – he argued in a concise editorial titled “Un nuovo partito?” (“A new party?”: Bobbio 1996a) – “promote, do not numb, civic awareness; raise doubts, do not impose pre-conceived truths; train citizens to be free, do not indoctrinate them as electors; teach to overcome ephemeral disagreements, do not reinforce them” (Ibid., p. 46). Most importantly, they never disregard those critics who voice their dissatisfaction with the party’s internal structure and organization, calling for a stronger intra-party democracy. Critiques of this kind, Bobbio cautioned, are usually the most evident symptom of a degeneration of parties – that is, of their failure to approximate the ideal-type of a party of non-partial partisans. On 2 June 1946 – i.e., seven weeks after Bobbio’s seminal lecture in Rome– Italian democracy was born. The Constituent Assembly gathered for the first time on 25 June, with the task of drafting the new Constitution (approved on 22 December 1947), and dissolved on 31 January 1948. Its plenary assemblies

96  David Ragazzoni addressed some of the most pressing concerns about the future political and institutional physiognomy of the Republic, with the fear of “particracy” resonating widely both in the debates among the Constituents18 and in several influential writings published at the turn of the decade (late 1940s-early 1950s).19

3  Antipartyism within party democracy 3.1  Bicameralism, Italian style In the second half of the 20th century, right after the enactment of Italy’s democratic Constitution, debates over the oligarchic degenerations of parties progressively merged with critiques of Italy’s parliamentary system.20 The partisans of antipartyism increasingly employed the argument of “particracy” to describe parliamentarism gone wrong – that is, a deteriorated form of representative democracy in which parties, far from exercising their institutional power responsibly and responsively, were primarily concerned with exploiting the institutional mechanics of Italian parliamentary democracy to play a game of mutual vetoes and thus keep the executive under their thumb. Dissatisfaction with the perfectly symmetrical configuration and functions of Italy’s bicameralism started emerging in the early 1950s and has ever since become one of the signature themes of its political life. The history of this dissatisfaction, which largely coincides with the history of Italian democracy itself, has undergone two major phases. In the first one (from the early 1950s until the early 1980s), the idea that particracy was a congenital disease of Italian bicameralism generated a plethora of analyses and debates by and among intellectuals, politicians, and scholars of various backgrounds (see, for instance, the essays in Piccardi et al. 1967 and in Terracini et al. 1968). For roughly thirty years, Italy’s parliamentary and party politics was a matter of discussion predominantly outside institutions and in the broader public sphere. In the second phase (from the early 1980s to the present), worries about parties cannibalizing democracy began to resonate widely – almost obsessively – among elected representatives and soon turned into a tentative institutional project. Ever since then, several (failed) attempts have been made to envision constitutional reforms that would constrain parties’ prerogatives inside the legislative, enable more stable governments, and eventually redesign the physiognomy of the Italian Republic. From the late 1960s onwards, the critique of particracy proceeded along two main lines. On the one hand, there was the urgency to enhance intra-party democracy to structurally adapt parties (especially the Italian Communist Party) to the logic of political pluralism and parliamentary politics. On the other, the idea emerged that the only antidote to the virus of particracy lay in a series of constitutional reforms, targeting the prerogatives of the Parliament (i.e., the most fertile soil for the proliferation of particratic tendencies) and strengthening the role of the executive and its leader. While the first, micro-level option emphasized the urgency to prevent particracy by reforming the internal organization of parties, the second, macro-level one insisted on eradicating particracy by reforming state institutions.

Particracy: The pre-populist critique  97 In both cases, deliberation was the matter of the debate. More deliberation inside parties was the goal to pursue for the advocates of intra-party democracy; less deliberation and more decision inside institutions was the aim of those who wanted to amend the Constitution. This second category of critics offered a diagnosis of the origins of particracy that echoed the one developed by Carl Schmitt in early 1920s Weimar. On their account, in fact, the problem was the centrality that parliamentary democracy ascribed to deliberation and compromise, significantly delaying the decision-making process and inevitably generating party tyranny. Both families of reformers embraced a comparative perspective. France (its Fifth Republic) and Germany (its Federal Republic) were the two scenarios that Italian scholars and political leaders turned to as a term of comparison and a paradigm to emulate. On the one hand, the constitutional transformation enacted by De Gaulle between 1958 and 1962 (with the Fifth Republic of France completing its shift from a parliamentary democracy to a “republican monarchy”: Duverger 1974) mesmerized the Francophile partisans of antipartyism (Quagliariello 2009), who theorized the president and the people as two sources of democratic authority that needed to be reconnected beyond, and even against, parties. The constitutional reform they invoked was meant to contain the deliberative moment of parliamentary democracy, expand the role of decision-making, and institutionalize a direct connection between citizens and the leader, bypassing the mediation of parties as much as possible. The more the claim for a Great Reform of the Constitution gained consensus, the more the attack against particracy became virulent. Party democracy (identified with the power of party oligarchies) was criticized in the name of more democracy, a request that de facto meant plebiscitary politics or “direct representation” of the people through their representative embodiment in the leader. On the other hand, those who suggested preventing “particracy” by reforming the internal organization of parties proposed Germany as a virtuous example. Two were the insights they distilled and recommended: a stronger executive within a federalist state and the constitutional regulation of political parties. Italian democracy lacked both these German features, and not fortuitously. In the Constituent Assembly, the question of whether the Constitution should envision some sort of state control over the internal life of parties had been an important matter of discussion. Jurist and Christian Democrat representative Costantino Mortati had originally recommended the following formulation for article 49 (concerning parties): “All citizens have the right to associate freely in political parties that conform to the democratic method in their internal organization and the activity they exercise to determine national policies” (emphasis added). However, this suggestion met with strong opposition by the Communists and the Socialists, who similarly worried that it would legitimize a dangerous form of interference, allowing the government to coerce and repress the oppositional parties with the pretext of democratizing their structure. The Constituents eventually refused to regulate the internal life of parties and opted for the following formulation (so different from art. 21 of the later Grundgesetz of the Federal Republic of

98  David Ragazzoni Germany): “All citizens have the right to freely associate in parties to contribute through democratic processes to determining national policies”. The other “original sin” of Italian democracy – i.e., an institutional configuration disproportionately prioritizing the legislative over the executive  – was not accidental, either. In the very aftermath of Fascism, it was the outcome of the “fear that a president directly elected by the people could become a dictator” (Jemolo 1979). However, Italy’s perfectly symmetrical bicameral system and the decision not to assign the prime minister a directive function as both the head of the executive and the leader of the parliamentary majority had generated a system that was naturally prone to “particracy”. This was the diagnosis of scholars and political representatives who criticized the horizontal (rather than vertical) and pluralistic (rather than monistic) structure of Italian parliamentary democracy for empowering parties to the point that they had become self-propelling machines. 3.2  Constitutional anxieties Neither of the two major parties in Italy – the Christian Democrats and the Communists – was willing to undertake the risky business of self-reform. The remedy for the impasse came from outside – i.e., from the leader of another party who managed to breathe new life into the project of a structural reform of the Italian system. Elected secretary of the Socialist Party in 1976, Bettino Craxi accomplished what seemed impossible to achieve: he unified his party against the chaos of internal factions without resorting to any rigid form of pluralism constraint. By doing so, he managed to cross-fertilize the best features of the two main forms of political party in post–WWII Italy – the “demo-liberal” model and the model of “democratic centralism”. At the same time, he embodied a plebiscitary solution (à la Weber) against both parliamentary stagnation and the bureaucratization of mass parties. In 1984, Craxi was acclaimed supreme leader by his party and given the legitimacy to crush all its fractions. As Bobbio would readily explain, acclamation entertains an ambiguous relation to democracy. It is not properly voting, as it does not create a situation of power ex novo but simply registers one that exists a priori. It differs from elections also because it erases the distinctiveness of individual preferences and both visually and vocally celebrates the unity of the political body under its representative leadership, beyond any form of political mediation (Bobbio 1984). Craxi’s new form of party – neither inherently pluralistic and litigious nor unified through a disciplined yet collectively ruled centralism – became the ideal vehicle for the project of a “Great Reform” of Italian democracy. Like a spectacular shift, this project generated a wide enthusiasm, mesmerizing the Socialist militants and sympathizers as well as their adversaries (Ignazi 1998, 347). The course of events confirms this reading. In 1979, Craxi launched the idea of a “Second Republic” (namely, presidentialization), and in 1984, he rapidly sealed this project with three winning moves: his own legitimation as the leader of the Socialist Party in the Congress that acclaimed him (11–13 May); a significant electoral advancement in the national elections (26 June); and, finally, his appointment as Prime Minister (4 August).

Particracy: The pre-populist critique 99 Within a few months, Craxi brought to conclusion a political campaign he had started on his party’s newspaper, Avanti!, publicly urging the overcoming of both parliamentary democracy and the hegemony of political parties over the legislative and the executive. Soon afterwards, the project of an institutional ­palingenesis – namely, a “New” or “Second” Republic – became increasingly popular and turned into an electoral program, first among a minority of parties and then across the entire political spectrum. Parties’ failure to correct themselves was what triggered and fueled their constitutional anxieties. From the early 1980s, parties projected their ambitions of self-reform onto the institutional framework of Italian democracy. From the Bozzi Commission of 1982–1985 to the De Mita-Iotti Commission of 1992–1994, from the Bicameral Commission (Bicamerale) of 1997–1999 to the more recent governmental attempts to amend the Constitution and strengthen the executive under Silvio Berlusconi (2004) and Matteo Renzi (2015), the past three decades in Italy’s political history have been an endless sequence of (failed) attempts to re-design the scaffolding of the Italian Republic (see Blokker in this volume).

4  From “We, the People” to “I, the People”21 This chapter has tried to challenge the conventional view of antipartyism as the distinctive feature of populist democracies. Against the traditional narrative equating the contestation of parties’ legitimacy with the nadir of the trajectory of party democracy, it has demonstrated that in Italy parties never achieved full legitimacy. Parties were key in conquering political liberty through the Resistance against mono-party totalitarianisms and, ultimately, in drafting a democratic Constitution in the aftermath of WWII (Bettinelli 1982; Pombeni 2016). At the level of regime transition (1943–146), they represented the “process of politicization” in the fight against Mussolini, marking the shift from military to political anti-fascism and embodying the first nucleus of constituent power of post-fascist Italy when the Italian state was dismembered (Pavone 2013). Italian democracy was party democracy not simply at the stage of its genesis and constitutional creation but also when it started to be fully operational. Far from replacing direct popular participation, parties were vehicles for participation and, thus, key engines for peacefully deploying political conflict and forging democratic leadership in a society that had no practice of self-government. As the leader of the Communist Party, Palmiro Togliatti, declared in his speech in the Constituent Assembly, political parties are “democracy that guarantees itself” (Dogliani 1997, 392). However, their contribution was not enough to grant them unquestioned respect and thus secure their place both in the “formal” and the “material” Constitution of the country (Mortati 1940). Skepticism, mistrust, and even horror of parties – a long-lived legacy inherited from both the republican tradition (with its 19thcentury worship of the State) and the liberal understanding of politics (with its individualistic vision of citizenship) – were part of the genetic makeup of Italy’s

100  David Ragazzoni party democracy, ingrained into its own physiognomy since its birth. When antipartyism vigorously erupted in the late 1980s, it was as if it had been smoldering under the ashes for decades. Though not exclusively Italian, the mixture between the recognition of parties’ necessity and the consistent rejection of their legitimacy has been particularly evident in Italy, shaping its political and institutional trajectory across the decades and resonating widely in the present. In contemporary Italian politics, populist leaders explicitly pride themselves on their populism, promising a form of representation that connects them to “the people” beyond and against the mediation of parties. And yet they voice their antipartyism through the medium of their own party. What they reject, in fact, is not the notion of the political party as a form of organized collective agency but the idea of a party system, wherein each party is one part of a broader Whole. Contemporary populist parties do not want to be parts of the Whole. They aspire to be the Whole. In doing so, they both appropriate and violate the logic of party democracy, rejecting the principles of legitimate opposition and rotation in office while hyper-politicizing the partisan nature of politics. In other words, they privilege the exclusionary over the participatory dimension of the very notion of a political “part”. No longer a process of unity making through equally legitimate parts, populist democracy becomes an act of unity claiming by one and only part. From “We, the People” to “I, the People”: this is the shift that populism operates within party democracy through the persona of the populist leader, with far-­reaching implications on the ideas of partisanship (from parties to factions), representation (from construction to embodiment), and popular sovereignty (from a diarchy of will and opinion unfolding through time to an ontology of the will alone in an eternal present through the obsession with opinion polls; Urbinati 2014, 2019a, 2019b). A study of Italy’s pre-populist antipartyism  – a project that this chapter has just outlined and that I  hope to pursue more extensively elsewhere  – suggests three conclusions that are particularly relevant for recent theorizations of populist antipartyism. First, it challenges the stadial vision of the life and times of representative government and its underlying assumption that antipartyism is a defining feature of its senile stage. Second, it shows that in modern representative government, the alternative to parliamentary democracy (based on pluralism and compromise) is inevitably plebiscitary democracy (based on consensus and plebiscites). Finally, it reveals that the critique of party politics within and without the legislative is often part and parcel of a broader institutional (re)vision, in the attempt to constrain parliamentary deliberation and empower the executive (and its leader) over the legislative (and its parties). However, criticizing parties does not necessarily mean erasing them from the geography of modern politics. Their failures do not automatically entail their obsolescence. As Bobbio suggest to contemporary readers and scholars, two are the antidotes to the pathological kratos of parties: unbounded leadership or intraparty democracy. While the former turns particracy into leader-cracy, the latter prevents the regression of parties into factions and eventually allows party democracy to reconcile the partisan and the participatory side of politics beyond populist and anti-pluralist temptations.

Particracy: The pre-populist critique 101

Notes * Previous drafts were presented at the Conference Democratic Theory Beyond Deliberation: New Approaches to Representative Democracy (University of Oxford, 22–23 June  2017); at the Early Career Workshop Parties, Partisanship, and the Constitution (University of Oxford, 14–15 March 2019); and at the Graduate Conference in Political Theory (University of Amsterdam, 23–24 May 2019). For their questions and comments, I thank Joseph Lacey, Lise Herman, Stuart White, Dario Castiglione, Lea Ypi; Udith Bhatia, Ewan Smith, Leah Trueblood, Nicholas Barber; Enzo Rossi. My gratitude also goes to Nadia Urbinati, David Hine, Joseph LaPalombara, and Bruno Perreau for their suggestions and conversations. 1 In the Anglophone literature, the term “partitocrazia” has been variously translated as particracy, partocracy, partitocracy, or partyocracy (see Calise 1994). Throughout the chapter I will consistently translate “partitocrazia” as particracy. 2 On the intellectual history of the term “partitocrazia”, see Griffo (2007), Capozzi (2009). It is worth noting that, sometimes, politicians and intellectuals also employed the neologisms “party-mania” and “esecracy” (the latter referring to the six major parties that, as an umbrella organization, coordinated the antifascist resistance, liberated Italy from the Germans, and governed the country until the first post-war political elections in 1946). Benedetto Croce coined the term “partitomania” to describe, in the LVIII Plenary Session of the Constituent Assembly (11 March 1947), the “distortion” of parties into an end in itself rather than a means to pursue a shared vision of the good. 3 Despite its visionary dimension, typical of Italian political reformism in the 1940s (e.g. the Ventotene Manifesto by Altiero Spinelli and Ernesto Rossi, envisioning a federation of European States in 1941), Olivetti tried to turn his political ideal into a reality. In 1947 he founded the “Community Movement” (Movimento Comunità), which allowed him to become an elected member of the Italian Parliament in 1958 but soon deconsolidated and eventually disappeared from the political landscape of Italian democracy after Olivetti’s sudden death in 1960. 4 It is worth recalling that Italy’s s.c. “Second Republic” (the political phase following the national judicial investigation of 1992–1994 known as “Mani Pulite”) witnessed the leadership, both institutional and political, of four men who had already been at the forefront of Italy’s political and institutional life in the previous decades (or during Italy’s s.c. “First Republic”): former Christian Democrat Oscar Luigi Scalfaro; former Socialist Giuliano Amato; former Communist Massimo D’Alema; and former Christian Democrat Romano Prodi. More recently, the election of former Communist Giorgio Napolitano as a two-time president of the Italian Republic (2006–2013 and 2013–2015: an absolute exception in the history of Italian democracy) confirmed the continuity between the pre-1994 and post-1994 phases of Italian politics. 5 Anglophone scholars who have written influentially about Italian democracy have left its constituent and congenital antipartyism relatively unexplored: see Spotts and Wieser (1986), LaPalombara (1987), Hine (1993), Putnam (1993), Furlong (1994), Samuels (2003). Furthermore, the Italian case has received little to no attention in the revived political theory literature on parties and partisanship (Rosenblum 2008; Muirhead 2014; White and Ypi 2016); for a partial exception, see Rosenbluth and Shapiro (2018). 6 Scholarly attention to Lucifero as the father of the term and concept of “partitocrazia” is quite recent. His name was absent from two classics in the Italian literature on the topic (Vinciguerra 1963; Valitutti 1966), while some works only referenced his speeches in the Constituent Assembly (e.g., Bettinelli 1982). Quagliariello (1997) was the first to credit Lucifero, rather than jurist Giuseppe Maranini (1950), for coining the term in his political writings. Since then, political historians have increasingly referenced the writings and ideas of Lucifero (e.g., Truffelli 2003, 132–133; Griffo 2007, 39–400; and especially Capozzi 2009, 43–53, 2016, 115–165). In the English literature on “partitocrazia”, see Cotta (2015, 41).

102  David Ragazzoni 7 The Consulta Nazionale was an unelected and provisional legislative assembly that operated for less than one year (5 April  1945–9 March  1946) and drafted both the law for the institutional referendum of 2 June  1946, through which Italy became a Republic, and the electoral law for the later Constituent Assembly (25 June 1946–31 January 1948). 8 A vigorous defense of proportional representation, in reaction to the arguments of Lucifero, was provided by Federico Squarzina. His book La rappresentanza proporzionale (1945) was released just a few months after Lucifero’s Introduzione alla libertà and revolved around the notion of “political distributive justice” (la giustizia distributiva politica). Cfr. Bettinelli (1982, 57, n. 5). 9 “Contrary to what is usually believed” – Lucifero declared the day when he pronounced the term “partitocrazia” for the first time – “I am a supporter and defender of the proportionate system, insofar as it offers antidotes to the well-known flaws of single-member districts” (CN, 12 February 1946, 607). 10 “It has been claimed that democracy should protect itself from ‘particracy’ as from its worst enemy. Particracy is a new term, and like all other neologisms it should be handled with suspicion. Novel words are usually created and employed for the sake of an emotional kind of politics, but we know [. . .] far too well that parties are the main instrument of democracy [. . .]. Parties channel and express popular will and enable citizens to choose, through their ballot, among different political programs. Without organized parties, without the intermediary role performed by parties, without candidates selected and supported by parties, no democracy can effectively work” (CN, 14 February 1946, 694, 697). 11 Luzzatto employed a photographic analogy to describe how he thought that a virtuous electoral law, specifically tailored to the needs of party democracy, ought to work (CN, 698). 12 However, the s.c. Hagenbach-Bischoff quota replaced the D’Hondt method for the allocation of seats. 13 Sartori outlined three distinct meanings of “particracy”: “electoral” (“the power of political party to impose pre-chosen candidates on the electorate”); “disciplinary” (“the party’s power of imposing its discipline on its parliamentary group”); and “integral” or “literal” (“the party’s power of absorbing the parliamentary personnel” and its tendency to control every level of the state machine). While the first two forms of particracy are physiological and intrinsic to party democracy, the third one is pathological: it signals the regression of parties (as “parts of the Whole”) into factions (as parts that aspire to become the Whole). On the difference between parties and factions, see also Sartori (1976, 24–27). 14 See supra, n. 2. 15 Fueling Labriola’s antipartyism was also his resentment against the post-Fascist party elites for having denied him a seat in the National Council – a decision he considered unacceptable given his own political, institutional, and intellectual credentials (partially eclipsed by the support he had given in 1935 to Mussolini’s military occupation of Ethiopia). 16 Minghetti’s seminal volume was republished in 1944 with a preface by Socialist and later president of the Italian Republic Giuseppe Saragat. It would later be reissued three times in the 1960s, when parties in Italy started promoting cultural and political debates about their own present and future. 17 The delegation consisted of 15 eminent personalities (“mostly legal experts, as they were more likely to understand democratic institutions”) and included ­constitutional experts Vezio Crisafulli and Gaspare Ambrosini (a Communist and a Christian ­Democrat, respectively) and civil law professor Filippo Vassalli (a liberal, and the chairman of the delegation). As Bobbio recalls: “We visited the headquarters of the two large political parties, the Conservatives and Labour, and met their party secretaries.

Particracy: The pre-populist critique  103

18

19

20 21

[We were] invited to the House of Commons where Winston Churchill sat, and to the House of Lords. They also took us to a by-election campaign” (Bobbio 2002, 72–73). In the Constituent Assembly, the term “partitocrazia” was explicitly employed by the following members: Benedetto Croce (11 March 1947); Guido Russo Perez (15 September); Tito Oro Nobili (9 October); Girolamo Bellavista (7 November); Giuseppe Candela (5 December); Roberto Lucifero (20 December). However, the nature and role of political parties was one of the most important, divisive, and recurring topics of discussion throughout the entire trajectory of the Assembly (Costantino Mortati and Lelio Basso above all). Among such writings, it is worth mentioning the debate between Benedetto Croce and Luigi Sturzo on the secret ballot for the members of the Senate (Sturzo 1948a, 1948b; Croce 1948; Sturzo 1948c, 1948d); Olivetti’s book on partyless democracy (1949; see Olivetti 2009 for its English translation); and the essays of Maranini from the early 1950s (later collected in Maranini 1958), especially Partitocrazia (1952), Il castello feudale (1955), Il regime dei partiti (1955), Ministri prigionieri (1955), and Stato e partiti (1955). A systematic account of both phases falls significantly beyond the scope and purpose of this chapter. See Urbinati and Ragazzoni (2016). I envisioned this formula before being told that the title of Urbinati’s new book had been changed into Me the People.

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104  David Ragazzoni Duverger, M. (1974). La Monarchie républicaine – ou comment les démocraties se donnent de rois, Paris, Robert Laffont. Furlong, P. (1994). Modern Italy: Representation and Reform, London-New York, Routledge. Griffo, M. (2007). Sull’origine della parola “partitocrazia”, L’Acropoli, 8(4), pp. 396–409. Hine, D. (1993). Governing Italy. The Politics of Bargained Pluralism, Oxford, Clarendon Press. Ignazi, P. (1998). Il polo escluso. Profilo storico del Movimento Sociale Italiano, Bologna, Il Mulino. Ignazi, P. (2017). Parties and Democracy. The Uneven Road to Party Legitimacy, OxfordNew York, Oxford University Press. Jemolo, A. C. (1979). Il Presidente prigioniero, La Stampa, 29 July. LaPalombara, J. (1987). Democracy, Italian Style, New Haven, CT, Yale University Press. Losano, M. G. (2018). Norberto Bobbio. Una biografia culturale, Roma, Carocci. Lucifero, R. (1944). Introduzione alla libertà (La legge elettorale), Roma, OET – Edizioni del Secolo. Lupo, S. (2004). Partito e antipartito. Una storia politica della prima Repubblica (1946– 78), Roma, Donzelli. Mair, P. (2002). Populist Democracy vs. Party Democracy, in Y. Mény, Y. Surel, (eds.), Democracies and the Populist Challenges, New York, Palgrave, pp. 81–98. Mair, P. (2013). Ruling the Void. The Hollowing of Western Democracy, London-New York, Verso. Manin, B. (1997). The Principles of Representative Democracy, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press. Maranini, G. (1938). Italia. Dallo Statuto di Carlo Alberto alle leggi costituzionali del Fascismo, in Comitato Internazionale di Scienze Storiche (ed.). La Costituzione degli Stati nell’età moderna. Saggi storico-giuridici, II, Firenze, Le Monnier, pp. 15–111. Maranini, G. (1946). Totalitarismo dei partiti, L’Arno, II, 28 July. Maranini, G. (1950). Governo parlamentare e partitocrazia: lezione inaugurale dell’anno accademico 1949–1950, Firenze, Editrice Universitaria. Maranini, G. (1958). Miti e realtà della democrazia, Milano, Edizioni di Comunità. Mény, Y., Surel, Y. (eds.) (2002). Democracies and the Populist Challenges, New York, Palgrave. Mortati, Costantino. (1940). La costituzione in senso materiale, Milano, Giuffrè. Muirhead, R. (2014). The Promise of Party in a Polarized Age, Cambridge, MA-London, Harvard University Press. Olivetti, A. (1949). Fini e fine della politica, Milano, Archetipografica. Olivetti, A. (2009). Democracy without Political Parties, edited by D. Cadeddu, Soveria Mannelli, Rubbettino (1951). Pasquino, G. (2019). Bobbio e Sartori: Capire e cambiare la politica, Milano, Egea. Pavone, C. (2013). A Civil War. A History of the Italian Resistance, London-New York, Verso. Piccardi, L., Bobbio, N., Parri, F. (1967). La sinistra davanti alla crisi del Parlamento, Milano, Giuffrè. Poguntke, T., Webb, P. (eds.) (2005). The Presidentialization of Politics: A Comparative Study of Modern Democracies, New York, Oxford University Press. Pombeni, P. (2016). La questione costituzionale in Italia, Bologna, Il Mulino. Putnam, R. D. (with Leonardi, R., Nanetti, R. Y) (1993). Making Democracy Work: Civic Traditions in Modern Italy, Princeton, NJ, Princeton University Press. Quagliariello, G. (1997). I liberali e l’idea di partito nella stagione costituente, in C. Franceschini, S. Guerrieri, G. Monina (eds.), Le idee costituzionali della Resistenza. Atti

Particracy: The pre-populist critique 105 del convegno di studi: Roma, 19–21 ottobre 1995, Roma, Istituto Poligrafico e Zecca dello Stato, pp. 278–279. Quagliariello, G. (2009). Gaullisme. Une classification impossible. Essai d’analyse comparée des drioites française et italienne, Parigi, L’Harmattan. Ragazzoni, D. (2019). The Populist Leader’s Two Bodies: Bobbio, Berlusconi, and the Factionalization of Party Democracy, Constellations (forthcoming). Rosenblum, N. (2008). On the Side of the Angels. An Appreciation of Parties and Partisanship, Princeton, NJ-Oxford, Princeton University Press. Rosenbluth, F. McCall, Shapiro, I. (2018). Responsible Parties: Saving Democracy from Itself, New Haven, CT, Yale University Press. Samuels, R. J. (2003). Machiavelli’s Children. Leaders and Their Legacies in Italy and Japan, Ithaca, NY-London, Cornell University Press. Sartori, Giovanni (1976). Parties and Party Systems. A Framework for Analysis, New York, Cambridge University Press. Scoppola, Pietro (1997). La repubblica dei partiti. Evoluzione e crisi di un sistema politico (1945–1996), Bologna, Il Mulino. Somogyi, S., Lotti, L., Predieri, A., Sartori, G. (1963). Il Parlamento italiano 1946–1963 – Una ricerca diretta da Giovanni Sartori, Napoli, Edizioni Scientifiche Italiane. Spotts, F., Wieser, T. (1986). Italy: A  Difficult Democracy. A  Survey of Italian Politics, Cambridge, UK, Cambridge University Press Sturzo, L. (1948a). Voto segreto e commissioni parlamentari, Il Popolo, June 4. Sturzo, L. (1948b). Astratto rigorismo o costume politico? Il Popolo, June 8. Sturzo, L. (1948c). Breve risposta a Benedetto Croce, Il Popolo, 10 June. Sturzo, L. (1948d). Partiti e partitocrazia, Il Popolo, 3 July. Terracini, U., Perna, E., Barca, L., Spagnoli, U., Ingrao, P. (eds.). (1968). La riforma dello Stato. Atti del Convegno promosso dall’Istituto Gramsci, Roma, Editori Riuniti. Truffelli, M. (2003). La “questione partito” dal Fascismo alla Repubblica. Culture politiche nella transizione, Roma, Studium. Urbinati, N. (2014). Democracy Disfigured: Opinion, Truth, and the People. CambridgeLondon, Harvard University Press. Urbinati, N. (2015). A  Revolt Against Intermediary Bodies, Constellations, 22(4), pp. 477–486. Urbinati, N. (2019a). Political Theory of Populism, Annual Review of Political Science, 22 (online first). Urbinati, N. (2019b). Antiestablishment and the Substitution of the Whole with One of Its Parts, in C. de la Torre (ed.)., Routledge Handbook of Global Populism, London-New York. Routledge, pp. 77–97. Urbinati, N. (2019c). Me the People: How Populism Transforms Democracy, Cambridge and London, Harvard University Press. Urbinati, N., Ragazzoni, D. (2016). La vera Seconda Repubblica. L’ideologia e la macchina, Milano, Cortina. Valitutti, S. (1966). I partiti politici e la libertà, Roma, Armando Armando. Vinciguerra, M. (1963). I partiti dallo Statuto Albertino alla partitocrazia, Bologna, Calderini. White, J., Ypi, L. (2016). The Meaning of Partisanship, Oxford-New York, Oxford University Press.

6 Populist anti-party parties Lorenzo Viviani

1  Introduction: one, none, or one thousand anti-party parties? When analysing political parties and democratic regimes, it is not uncommon to encounter the phenomenon of political parties or movements that oppose the political establishment. From time to time, such “anti-party parties oppose the political class as a whole, the institutional forms assumed by the representative system, or even democracy in its entirety (Dahl 1956; Meny and Surel 2000, 2002). Processes of democratisation tend to demonstrate significant tensions within democratic projects, particularly regarding the role of political parties, not least in terms of the distortive mechanisms of political representation the latter may introduce. Hostility towards parties originates in the very creation of political systems, democratic or otherwise. In the classical critique of political organisations (from Rome to the Middle Ages, from the debate over the birth of the United States to the transformation of liberal democracies), criticism regarding the disruptive nature of factions recurs (Manin 1997; Rosenblum 2008). In the case of the Italian political system in particular, anti-partyism manifests itself in multiple declinations, ranging from the origins of the political system, from the “Every Man Front” to the “deflagration” of the political system in the Nineties – with the birth of the Lega Nord, the entry into politics of Berlusconi, the flourishing of personalised leadership and local and national personal parties against and beyond parties – until the recent birth of the Five Star Movement, which in some ways is the archetypicalanti-party populist party (Lupo 2013; Tarchi 2015; see also the chapters by Urbinati and Ragazzoni in this volume). Anti-partyism belongs to the very history of democratisation and the different forms that democracy has assumed over time on the basis of its changing social bases. If, in fact, the possibility of giving life to political formations that present themselves at elections and compete freely for power and for the government represents a substantial part of the system of overcoming institutional thresholds for the formation of mass politics in Europe (Rokkan 1970), it is also true that within the phases of transforming political systems, certain conditions are created for the emergence, or re-emergence, of critics of the role of parties in political representation (Roberts 2015). We must also bear in mind that anti-partyism usually presents itself as an oxymoron, as it provides a means of protesting against political parties

Populist anti-party parties  107 by assuming the form of a party. Moreover, when an anti-party attitude towards mainstream political subjects begins to emerge, it starts from the same ambivalence as the anti-establishment concept, to which the difficulty of restricting the perimeters when introducing the perspective of populism is added (Taggart 2000; Taguieff 2002). In the transformation of contemporary advanced democracies, anti-partyism uses a framework of opportunities that we can trace back to three processes of political and social change. The first has its roots in the wear and tear and the subsequent overcoming of traditional cleavage politics, starting gradually from the birth of the New Left, the New Right, and the (neo-)populist parties (Betz 1994; Rydgren 2007; Bornschier 2010). The second is related to the process of personalisation of politics that frees the construction of political identities from belonging to pre-established social classes and that sets the theme of plebiscitarianism as an organisational form of politics and a way of overcoming party mediation (Körösényi and Pakulski 2012). The third process has its roots in the reactivation of a “discourse on democracy” that has never ceased, with the parties involved in the democratic conflict and debate over representation protesting in the name of the new cleavage politicised by populist entrepreneurs (Rosanvallon 2006; Urbinati 2018; Pappas 2019). In this study, I will focus on anti-partyism in its specific populist manifestation, examining whether and how much of a specific populist declination there is in anti-partyism. This approach differs from other critical perspectives that focus on the political party as a key element of democracy, in particular representative liberal democracy. Populism “is credited” as a phenomenon capable of exploiting the opportunities that stem from the widespread disenchantment with party politics while also striving to politically activate the protest against representative government. Populism, therefore, consists of a political fracture, or more specifically of a “set of beliefs about how democratic politics works and how it ought to work” (Kriesi 2017, 6). Populism avails itself of the societal changes related to advanced modernity as well as to processes of fragmentation of solidarity and political identities; but at its heart, it has a particular conception of politics, representation, and democracy (Hawkins and Rovira Kaltwasser 2019). The aim of this chapter is to differentiate populism from other forms of protest against the political class and mainstream parties, highlighting how the presence of an anti-establishment orientation is not in itself sufficient to be able to speak of a “populist challenge” unless we adopt this concept as an umbrella concept with a merely rhetorical-communicative phenomenology. If everything is populism, in fact, nothing is populism; that is, if the label is used as a synonym for dissatisfaction, distrust, disenchantment, and protest, a “conceptual stretching” occurs in which the ability to express the meaning of populism is lost because the term is extended to phenomena that are too different from each other (Sartori 1984). To avoid an anti-party populist nebula, we must analyse how populism constructs the people, engages in a distinctive type of political relations, and involves processes of legitimising power in relation to dynamics of anti-elitism and anti-pluralism. In this chapter, the focus is on the Italian case as a “promised land” of populism.

108  Lorenzo Viviani

2 Anti-partyism: new politics, the new radical right, and new populism The provisional nature of parties and the intrinsic lack of trust in their actions do not emerge in contemporary advanced democracies but are integral parts of the history of political regimes in their formation phase (Rosenblum 2008). The main indictments levelled at parties were, and are, their responsibilities for dividing the people, for fostering partisan interests, for not pursuing the common good, for occupying the public sphere, and for preventing the formation of a shared national political culture. At the same time, within the various forms assumed by antipartisanism, we can thus reconstruct multiple cultural roots and types (Daalder 1992, 2002), including the overall rejection of the political party as an instrument for citizen participation, the redundancy of the parties compared to other (direct) instruments of participation, a real rejection of parties as instruments and, finally, a selective rejection of existing parties, considered to be suspicious because of their political flaws and inability to grasp and represent the fractures in society. In the compromise of party democracy, the legitimacy of the unequal distribution of power was anchored to the parties’ ability not only to connect elites, membership, and voters from the procedural and electoral point of view but also to create a process of identity integration linking individuals and groups, parties and societies, the media, the collateral organisations, and the government. This balance was broken due to the decline of the social integration function of the parties, which is what caused the “crisis” of political representation that resulted in an increasing gap between political elites and individuals (Manin 1997, 232). This gap is due not only to economic issues but also to cultural variables that influence the challenge to representation based on depiction and delegation, in a context in which individualisation contributes to the delegitimisation of the collective conscience and exposes the individual to a perception of marginality with respect to political representation. On the one hand, there is the lack of possibility of voting for the future, for a society with which people can identify and which legitimises the unequal distribution of power between governors and governed. On the other hand, and at the same time, there is the affirmation of the processes of personalisation of politics and leadership, thus creating the conditions under which trust is now given to new political entrepreneurs, outsider leaders who become the main “confidants” of the masses, starting with their criticisms of the political system and its establishment (Tormey 2015, 131). Phenomena such as the surpassing of traditional cleavage politics, the centrality assumed by the mass media, the process of re-spatialisation of the places of power, the new forms of global governance, and the personalisation of politics and power all contribute to redefining democracy, and even before all this, politics itself contributes in regards to its meaning of conflict for power and the allocation of resources through the government (Körösényi and Pakulski 2012, 54). The disintermediation of the relationship between individuals and politics distinguishes the evolution of democracy itself, posing the question of representation, or rather sharpening a never-completely-suppressed tension between delegation

Populist anti-party parties 109 and representation (Pitkin 1967). The inability of governments to solve problems, the scandals that affect political elites, the tendency to cartelise parties (Katz and Mair 2018), and more generally the discrepancy among the “responsibility” of the parties faced with budget constraints, the European rules, the choices that are necessary for economic and political development, and the “responsiveness” towards the voters (Hawkins and Rovira Kaltwasser 2019, 8) constitute the social, political and institutional environment that favours the politicisation of anti-partyism. Anti-party sentiment can take different forms, such as abstention, distrust, detachment, and radical protest if it is not politically activated and remains latent at the electoral base level (Poguntke 1996, 323), but it is when “political entrepreneurs of anti-politics” emerge that the conditions are created for the birth of anti-establishment parties, anti-party parties, and populist parties. The reduced capacity of the cartel parties to maintain political, institutional, and government “dominion” has favoured the flourishing of a broad “galaxy” of parties from time to time defined as anti-political-establishment (Schedler 1996; Abedi 2002, 2004), populist protest parties (Taguieff 2002), anti-party parties (Mudde 1996), and “populist anti-party-system parties” (Katz and Mair 2009). These parties call for a re-examination of the classical concept of anti-system parties because they do not oppose the democratic system as a whole in the name of an ideology aimed at transforming institutions, authority, or the productive system (Sartori 1976); rather, they oppose the traditional party establishment. The politicisation of an anti-establishment orientation is based on a “storytelling” that does not foresee that orientation as being outside democratic institutions, to the extent that the role of challengers may also be adopted by parties within the sphere of government. In this way, strategies delegitimising the political class are activated. These strategies combine with the discontent of ordinary citizens, in the name of changing political personnel, demanding policies that make the accountability and effectiveness of government actions more democratic. Such an orientation distinguishes the “total rejection of politics” from anti-partyism as opposition to the political establishment (Barr 2009); in terms of Hirschman, that orientation does not take the form of a system exit but rather of a tension between voice and loyalty within the representative system. In other words, if democracy remains a value, the negative value is the political class and the modalities of representation adopted by the traditional political establishment. The anti-establishment formula, however, leaves open a series of ambiguities, particularly in relation to the phenomenon of populism. In particular, the problem that arises is the distinction between forms of political radicalism that stand in opposition, lamenting over the establishment and the development of a truly populist anti-partyism. By radicalism, we mean the development of an anti-partyism that stands side by side with the new right and new left’s progressive identity redefinition for parties, which can be combined with populism as an ideological addendum. This is a process that, in European societies and democracies, sees the succession of historical, socio-economic, and cultural stages, attributable to the dynamics of post-1968 New Politics, the development of a silent counterrevolution of the new right in the eighties, and finally the establishment of a New

110  Lorenzo Viviani Populism starting from the “Great economic and financial crisis” and from the impact of globalisation since 2008. Progressively, the plane of political conflict is undergoing a transformation that may go hand in hand with, but does not have its social and cultural roots in, populism. Within the dimension of political conflict, an anti-establishment plane becomes visible, which consists of the expression of a fracture between the New Left and the New Right, variously identified as an authoritarian–libertarian cleavage (Kitschelt 1995), an integration–demarcation cleavage (Kriesi et al. 2012), or as a cleavage between libertarian-egalitarians and community-traditionalists (Bornschier 2010). The same anti-establishment connotation cannot be levelled at populism because it connotes a wide range of different leaders and parties: leaders from mainstream parties, which employ a populist rhetoric against the ruling parties when in opposition; radical new left and new right parties, which do not operate as hosts of the populist ideology; and finally, a personalised leadership that opposes the establishment of their own party in the redistribution of power within the organisation. If, in fact, different forms of the populist phenomenon have been advanced on the basis of their ability to interbreed with existing political groups, specifically populist neo-liberalism, populist socialism, and nationalpopulism (Mudde 2007), the risk is to attribute to populism any reaction of distrust and hostility on the part of citizens towards politics, in the same way as any form of bad manners and political incorrectness in communicative rhetoric. Unlike simple anti-establishment politics, populism is a fleeting phenomenon in its definition, not so much in presenting a recurring conception of democracy and political representation but, in particular, in presenting the “politics of disintermediation” and the process of social and political construction of the representation of the “people”.

3  Populism versus party politics Populist parties and leaders do not constitute a political family with a Weltanschauung, shared and set in the perimeter of self-recognition, established by an ideology or a series of characterising policies. However, if it emerges from a merely nominalist dimension, populism represents a phenomenon that “operates” within a particular vision of politics, representation and democracy. In addition to the primitivism identified in the early reflections on the phenomenon (MacRae 1969, 162), populism  – even without assuming a meta-historical ontology  – is characterised by a vision of democracy that rejects the mediation of intermediate bodies in politics, and as such, it reawakens unresolved issues of representative democracy (Canovan 1999; 2002; Abts and Rummens 2007; Urbinati 2014). Populism feeds on and exploits the emergence of an economic crisis such as the Great Recession of 2008, using it as an opportunity, but it is also a phenomenon that can be affirmed following the perception of a loss of status and relative deprivation, a radical change in values, or a phase of particular “moral collapse” and increasing levels of corruption (or perception thereof ) (Moffitt 2016, 117). More generally, populism presents itself as one of the possible reactions to the crisis of

Populist anti-party parties 111 party democracy understood as a relationship structure between citizens and institutions and as a process of legitimising power. If the work of populism is to implement a strategy of politicisation in the mistrust of the political establishment, the “political nature” of this phenomenon has always been a controversial subject of analysis. Populism has been variously defined as an ideology, a thin ideology, a mentality, a discourse, a movement, a syndrome, a social identity, and a strategy (Rovira Kaltwasser et al. 2017). Without going back to the beginning of populism and including aspects that do not necessarily contradict the different perspectives on the phenomenon, some common characteristics can be highlighted, such as antagonism towards the mainstream players in liberal democracies, the politicisation of fear that replaces rational “political judgement”, the recourse to plebiscitarianism with respect to the mediation of intermediate bodies, a moralistic view of politics, the social construction of the idea of the people, the politicisation of resentment towards the unequal distribution of power, reconnected to a “conflict of status” between citizens and the political class (Molyneux and Osborne 2017). The phenomenology of populism, therefore, refers constantly to a hostility towards representative politics, with the rejection – selective or total – of parties, being the expression of a reference to the people not as a mere source of legitimising delegation but as a single and indivisible political player at the centre of the heartland, the imagined community that replaces the constituencies linked to conflicting interests and ideas, the sense of meaning of an organicism that does not accept conflicts except with those who are outside its own perimeter. Beyond the various possible variations, populism has two main recurring features: its appeal to the people and its opposition to the establishment (Mudde 2004; Mudde and Rovira Kaltwasser 2013). This minimum definition makes it possible to grasp what Mudde (2004) defines as the Zeitgeist of populism, even though its excessive simplification risks overlapping with different phenomena, some of which are not directly attributable to the genus of populism. In fact, populism does not resolve the dissatisfaction with traditional politics, it is not the only and possible interpreter, nor is it equivalent to anti-politics; but to characterise itself as such, it needs a moralist and Manichean “cosmology”, the identification of a people as a homogeneous and virtuous community and the representation of the elite as corrupt and self-referential (Hawkins and Rovira Kaltwasser 2019, 3–4). Compared to both protest parties, anti-party parties, anti-political establishment parties, and anti-austerity parties, populism makes the politics of distrust and the politics of disintermediation an instrumental feature in redefining the process of political representation differently from direct democracy, which implies a process of active citizenship participating in the public sphere. In the case of populism, what emerges as a characterising trait is what Taggart (2018, 81) defines as “unpolitics”, a conception that “rejects politics as a process of resolving conflicts”, i.e., sees in politics a potential for corruption, which deals not only in judicial terms but as a rejection of a dimension based on opposing interests, in which conspiracy and self-reference constitute the antithesis to the life of the good ordinary citizen. The meaning of unpolitics entails a difference both from the total rejection of politics as detachment – as apolitical – and from anti-politics

112  Lorenzo Viviani in the sense of a design for subversion of the political rules themselves, in the name of another institutional project. The populist is therefore a “reluctant politician” (Idem, 82–84), as is – usually – the silent majority who does not actively participate in decision-making processes but who can mobilise against politicians, denouncing their corruption, revealing their propensity for conspiracy, and assuming even a religious tendency in their relationship with their leaders and in the manner in which the people become sacred. Populism is therefore not just a reaffirmation of popular sovereignty stripped of corrupt elites but a deeper phenomenon that has to do with the claim not only of moral superiority but of being the only constituency, and therefore the only political party, “morally legitimised” to govern. The representation of the populists’ people is placed in that “social reconfiguration” of weak identities and fragmented social groups whose fiction is represented by the “personification of collectivity” and in the “recreation of One People” (Rosanvallon 2005, 324). The goal is the construction of a holistic vision of society, a “biological people” built politically through an identity that, to establish a recognisable perimeter, requires confrontation with an external enemy (de la Torre 2015, 5). A work of politicisation at the centre of which a direct relationship emerges between a leader and the people, in which the leader does not represent a reference social group but “creates the people of populism”, personifies their unity, and gives shape to a substance that does not have its own reality already developed in the social body (Moffitt 2016, 64; Pappas 2016, 3). The populist strategy cannot therefore be traced back to a simple mobilisation by a personalised leader; rather, it is the expression of a particular vision of democracy, the plebiscitary, populist democracy, in which the leader is the main player not in democracy without parties but in a democracy that recognises the moral legitimacy of only one side.

4  Populist plebiscitarianism and holistic anti-party parties It is the construction of a people according to a holistic vision that constitutes the distinction between populism and other forms that contest the political establishment. Such a construction differentiates the nature of opposition to representative democracy with respect to participatory, deliberative perspectives as well as the same personalisation of politics and the top echelons of leadership found in leader democracy (Körösényi and Pakulski 2012). The appeal to the populist people is not just the direct plebiscite call that replaces party government with government by leaders; it is a particular form of moralistic imagination of politics in which the people of reference are identified not as pars pro toto but as an organic unit that makes the majority the expression of the common good (Müller 2016, 98). Populism does not therefore present itself as a simple revolt against elites, which could be common to any form of conflict in democracy; it is anti-partyism and anti-pluralism in the sense of a process of re-elaborating the concept of the people as “the only legitimate party” for running government. As such, we can speak of a “holistic temptation” of the populists, where holism is understood as meaning the wish to assert the will of the majority, the people, without there being any

Populist anti-party parties  113 constraints on the recognition of its power of government with respect to the constitutional pillar, and above all without impediments, compromises, transactions, or limits imposed by the intermediation system, be it by parties, elites, or intellectuals, in the name of “direct representation” (Urbinati 2018, 80–81). Despite their position within the confines of democracy, albeit peripherally with the role and function of “inconvenient guest” (Arditi 2005), the populist protest in “constitutional democracy” that guarantees pluralism and protects minorities takes place on the basis of a principle that challenges the conception of power as an “empty” and “contestable” place, making it a place “occupied” by the people and the leader of the people, with a consequent problem of legitimisation for those competing elites aiming to conquer it (Abts and Rummens 2007, 414). The appeal to the people that derives from it does not end in the plebiscitary disintermediation that replaces party government with the government of the leader but represents a particular form of moralistic imagination of politics in which the people of reference are identified as pars pro toto, i.e., as an organic unit that makes the majority the depository of the common good (Urbinati 2018, 98). With reference to the unity and homogeneity of the people, populism takes the form of a particular vision of democracy, no longer in the liberal perspective of a balance between procedure and substance but as “democratic illiberalism”, an illiberal response to the shortcomings of liberal democracy (Krastev 2007; Pappas 2016). In fact, while emphasising the centrality of popular sovereignty, populist democracy expresses its opposition to the principles of liberalism by rejecting the checks and balances between the powers of the state to the benefit of executive power, by not protecting the rights of minorities with respect to the general will, by countering the constitutional constraints that limit the power of the majority and with sovereignty understood as a rejection of external constraints of an international nature. The claim to represent the people as a whole affects the very vision of the nature of the democratic conflict, introducing two discriminating elements for defining the populist nature of the processes of opposition to the establishment: anti-partyism, for the benefit of a disintermediation policy, and anti-pluralism, as a negative evaluation of the conflict between opposing interests. We are not only faced with a democracy that passes from the relevance of collective players to a direct relationship between voters and leaders with personalised parties but also with a particular declination of plebiscitarian democracy in which directism is functional in a democracy where conflict within the community (the people) is depoliticised while the strategy of taking the people as a perimeter to be protected against potential challenges is hyper-politicised. These challenges from outside may derive from powers of the establishment (Europe, banks, universities, bureaucracy, etc.) or result from “horizontal” danger, i.e., immigrants. Here, we are dealing with a sociological interpretation of political phenomena related to the transformation of democracies, assuming that populism has its distinctive feature in the perspective of plebiscitary, populist democracy in terms of developing a particular social representation of the people and of political conflict (Riker 1982; Peruzzotti 2013). Populist plebiscitarianism, however, gives rise to a new form of political representation, where the resemblance between the leader and the people

114  Lorenzo Viviani is sanctioned by the recognition that the leader himself is “one of us”, he thinks, moves, speaks, and has the same tastes and reactions as the common man. The bond of representation that is created is based on the symbolic projection of a closeness that does not require a real class resemblance, legitimising significant forms of socio-economic disparity, as in the case of a large number of workers in the American Rust Belt voting for Trump in the 2016 presidential election. The identification with the people is built starting from the common aversion to the elites, identified in places that are symbols of power (Washington, Brussels, Rome, the Palace, caste, universities, finance, major newspapers, etc.), from which leaders distance themselves through the use of “knowingly crude” language, exhibited by adopting linguistic codes and behaviour that mark the difference with respect to language and technocracy of the elite (Moffitt 2016, 44). Moreover, unlike what occurs in populism, in leader democracy, parties do not have the aim of constituting a vision of democracy; rather, parties are redefined as support for personalised leaders who compete for power, forming personalised links with voters. This particular aspect of populist democracy poses a problem by overlapping the concept of partyless democracy with that of populist democracy advanced by Mair (2000, 2002), in which a “non-partisan” leader, with a “non-partisan” programme, gives life to a “non-partisan” government in the interest of the people in its entirety (Mair 2002, 95–96). The construction of this interpretative framework has the objective of giving a populist slant to the action of a leader who radically transforms the reference party into a personalised one, from the point of view of its programmes and organisation. However, the interchangeability of populism with a democracy in which the leadership assumes ever greater powers tends to underestimate what is, in fact, a fundamental dimension of the different nature of the two phenomena, i.e., the legitimacy of parties in the democratic conflict. In other words, while plebiscitary, populist democracy can indeed be considered a vision of democracy with an illiberal slant that goes beyond the challenge to the traditional establishment of parties, leader democracy, on the other hand, can set new leaders against old oligarchies; it can introduce new ways of organising and new ways of distributing internal power and defining the functions that parties can and must play, but it does not position itself against or beyond parties as an instrument of procedural democracy.

5  Italy, the promised land of populism(-s)? The phenomenon of populism finds particularly fertile soil in the case of Italy, for structural reasons related to the historical events that have marked the formation of its political system and due to the effect of the traumatic decline of mass parties after 1989. In general, the temptation of populism appears to be a latent phenomenon in post-war Italy, emerging in that “parochial political culture” (Almond and Verba 1963) marked by political alienation, widespread political isolation and deep mistrust of institutions, where the government and politics became threatening and unpredictable forces rather than social institutions that people could have an effect on. However, this perspective does not allow us to adequately consider

Populist anti-party parties 115 the capacity of the mass parties in post-war Italy to achieve a balance between identifying activities and efficient activities (Pizzorno 1996, 175–176). A legitimate representation based on the capacity of the party to be an “end in itself”, capable of healing  – temporarily – the unequal distribution of power between the political class and electorate on the basis of the coagulating power of ideological affiliations. The populism of Giannini and the patronising populism of Achille Lauro did not deconstruct the party system, but it was when the process of the silent revolution began and conflicting post-materialist values were gradually assumed that the sacrosanct ideological affiliations to mass parties began to break down (Inglehart 2018). The season of (new) Italian populism opened with the collapse of the political system in the two years of Tangentopoli (1992–1993) and the season of the referendums in 1991 and 1993. A full-blown crisis in the traditional political system exploded due to corruption, but whose roots lies in the incapacity of the Italian political system to regenerate itself after the murder of Moro in 1978, in the deideologisation of the mainstream parties, in the emergence of personalised politics and leadership, particularly in the case of Craxi, in the growing role of the media in politics, and, in particular, in the impact of 1989 on the “thaw” of traditional cleavage politics with the end of the Cold War. In fact, that particular equilibrium that had allowed Italian parties to contain potentially disruptive challenges from new parties declined, as those parties lost their legitimacy due to the people no longer actively identifying with them. The so-called “Second Republic” is characterised by two phases of the flourishing of populism: the first between 1994 and 2008, particularly with Umberto Bossi’s Lega Nord and Silvio Berlusconi’s Forza Italia; the second began with the economic-financial crisis of 2008 and continued until the 2018 elections, during which the Lega was transformed by the secretary Matteo Salvini (2013), the Movimento 5 Stelle was born (2009), the Partito Democratico was transformed and suffered a crisis during Matteo Renzi’s term as secretary (2013–2018) and Italian Prime Ministership (2014–2016; Verbeek et al. 2018). If the root of populism in advanced democracies is due to the crisis of political representation in party democracy, the proliferation of Italian populism has been implemented through a varied political tender. In this sense, the challenge posed to the traditional political system by the Lega Nord and its leader Umberto Bossi lies within the silent counter-revolution of the new right (Ignazi 2018). Starting from the eighties, a form of re-politicisation of the fracture between the centre and the periphery took place, in which the autonomist and anti-state component was progressively linked to the populist construction of a people and a heartland, Padania, in opposition to Rome, the political and business centre that plagued the freedom of the North (Diamanti 1996; Biorcio 1997). If, in the case of Bossi’s Lega, we are faced with the populism of a new right with an ethno-regionalist character, in the case of Silvio Berlusconi and Forza Italia, the label of populism seems ambivalent, if not for the duration of his political leadership covering a period of twenty-five years (1994–2018) and holding Italy’s Prime Minister for four governments. Like Ross Perot in the United States, Stanislaw Tyminsky in Poland, and Bernard Tapie in France, the case of Berlusconi has been

116  Lorenzo Viviani interpreted in light of the category of tele-populism (Taguieff 2002), a vehicle and amplifier of populist rhetoric, capable elaborating and spreading symbolic codes that contrast and challenge traditional politics. Berlusconi was a leader who took his operational model from the organisational structure of his company, Fininvest, and based his political programme on the “charisma of his past as a successful entrepreneur”. He never institutionalised the party, so he was able to talk about Forza Italia as a “business firm model of party” (Hopkin and Paolucci 1999; Poli 2001). The populist nature of Berlusconi stands in contrast to traditional parties and emphasises his outsider role with respect to political elites and the financial establishment, as an “entrepreneur lent to politics”. If in his first phase as political leader Berlusconi radicalised and politicised a broad feeling of mistrust and detachment from the de-ideologised parties, in line with populist personalisation and the construction of a personal populist party, it should be borne in mind that his construction of the people is marked by an appeal to the “moderates”, repeatedly proposing the theme of anti-communism as the “enemy” against which the external perimeter of the people should be built. The political and judicial scandals, in addition to health problems, that overwhelmed Berlusconi put an end to the trajectory of his leadership, together with the fact that he had become politically “normalised” and was now “inside the institutions” and the experiences of government; thus, his anti-elitist power was defused (Ruzza and Fella 2009). Likewise, the illness and judicial scandals that have affected Umberto Bossi, his family, and the small group of Lega leaders (the “magic circle”), as well as the end of the polarisation between the centre and the periphery due to their long term in government, have also produced a crisis in the Lega, with the resignation of its founding leader, Bossi, after the collapse of the party in the 2013 elections (4.1% compared to 8.3% in 2008). The 2008 crisis provided further possibilities for changes in the political framework and created another structure for developing new populist political offerings. This crisis had a particular impact on the birth of new political parties of populist orientation in the democracies of Southern Europe, resulting in new populist left-wing parties, in particular Podemos in Spain and Syriza in Greece (Kriesi and Pappas 2015). With regard to these processes, Italy witnessed an increase in the number of political subjects linked to populism, albeit not in the context of “left-wing populism”, with three different cases: the Lega of Matteo Salvini; Matteo Renzi’s leadership of the PD; and the birth and evolution of the Five Star Movement. Matteo Salvini’s leadership, in particular, connotes the transformation of the populist ethno-regionalist Lega party into a new radical right-wing national populist party, in line with Marine Le Pen in France, Orbán in Hungary, and more generally with the national-populist leaders and parties of the Visegrád Group. Salvini’s Lega cut its links to the idea of Padania and presented itself as a national party by recruiting a political class in the southern regions, creating a sort of palingenesis compared to Bossi’s Lega that allowed it to become the Lega (no longer Lega Nord), the third Italian party (with 17.4% of votes) in the 2018 elections (Passarelli and Tuorto 2018). Salvini implemented a transformation through the repertoire of pitting friend against enemy when constructing the community

Populist anti-party parties  117 in the populist imagination, he appealed to “Italians First” with clear reference to Trump’s US election campaign and, once in government, he pitted the “people’s” consent against the limits imposed by institutional constraints in the relationship between politics and other powers. Renzi’s leadership, on the other hand, presents features similar to those described by Mair (2000, 2002) for Blair’s New Labour, as well as aspects similar to the “anti-populist populism” of Macron in France, starting from the personalisation of leadership, radical change in the organisational and planning structure of the political party and culture, and, finally, progressively overcoming the party as a place for political decision-making and responsibility. Moreover, Renzi’s leadership was characterised by some elements that recall the phenomenon discussed thus far, such as the appeal to the people; the evocation of the nation’s party; and the construction of a conflict between us and them, with “them” identified from time to time as the representatives of the party’s old ruling coalition, the “professors”, the opposers (the “owls”), the trade unions, the European bureaucracy, all with a single fate: rottamazione (scrapping). In the case of Blair, as well as Renzi and other parties and leaders of the mainstream left, it remains to be assessed how the existence of an “anti-establishment” discourse is actually attributable to the set of values and orientations towards politics and democracy of which populism is composed. The main objective that emerges in these types of leaders is in fact the struggle for internal power within their respective organisations, while government action does not deviate from mainstream economic policy, from the presence in supranational bodies (the European Union), and from agreements with other political subjects, following the path of real plebiscitarian leader democracy. Finally, however, there is the birth of the M5S, different with regard to the genetic moment and the development and politicisation of anti-party sentiment in the form of anti-caste fervour, as well as the development of the party/ movement in relation to the coalition government with the Lega following the 2018 elections. The M5S was not born from the political vacuum left by a specific traditional party but from dissatisfaction with the entire political class, exploiting in particular the austerity imposed by the “technical” Government of Monti in 2011, the great coalition between the mainstream parties, the electoral collapse of the centre-right and internal uncertainties and tension in the Partito Democratico; thus, in the 2013 elections, it became the first party in the Chamber of Deputies with 25.6%. Since the nascent statu phase, in which the main character was that of civic movement, the populist characterisation of the M5S derives from its anticaste appeal, with its mobilisation against the costs of politics, flanked by the request for direct democracy through referendums and instruments of participatory democracy and reference to recovering sovereignty of the common citizen (“one is worth one”) compared to the “Palace” of politics (Tronconi 2018). If M5S appears to be the party displaying the greatest “purity” of the phenomenon among all the populist parties (Tarchi 2015, 338), there are analyses that have called into question its presumed populist paradigmaticity due to M5S’s call for deliberative and participatory forms of democracy and at the same time its programmatic reference to the representation of concrete issues not politicised by other political

118  Lorenzo Viviani forces (Biorcio and Natale 2013). A civic-environmentalist position can be discerned in the origins of the M5S, from which the five stars that give the movement its name originate (public water, sustainable transport, sustainable development, connectivity, the environment); in this sense, it has shaped itself as a party that can be traced back to an evolution of the post-materialist left, and at the same time, the subsequent politicisation connotes the nature of a “catch-all anti-party party” and “post-modern and post-ideological (non) party” (Bordignon and Ceccarini 2015, 30, 43). It is a party that progressively assumes the profile of “polyvalent populism” (Pirro 2018), precisely because of its ability to combine many ideologies and social constituencies and its willingness to propose a government alliance after the 2018 elections in which the M5S capitalised on the opposition to antiestablishment parties, becoming the first party with 32.7%. M5S presents itself as “civic populism”, apparently, where the opposition to caste remains a constitutive element of the party/movement’s identity; it creates the tools for broadening its electoral consent from politics and anti-politics and by overcoming mediation by resorting to direct democratic practices via the web. In its various phases of transformation, the M5S assumes an identity and organisational polymorphism, taking on left-wing and right-wing orientations at the same time, combining with this a hydra leadership, a leadership composed at a background level by Casaleggio, a leading interpreter of the pars destruens, in order to appeal to the people against the elites, Grillo, a government and institutional “political leader”, Di Maio, and a populist movement leader, Di Battista, each with a function and an “audience” to address. Precisely because of its characteristics, M5S populism in power must resort to potentially catch-all measures in the exercise of government, with forms of patronage that go side by side with and legitimise the anti-elitist and anti-­ pluralist conception of an anti-party populist party.

6 Conclusions: towards a theoretical frame of anti-party parties and populism In advanced democracies, populism draws its lifeblood from the failure of traditional political elites and proliferates during the wait for new ones to emerge and to be institutionalised, politicising the latent fracture between the conceptions of politics, representation and democracy in a mix of political modernity and antimodernity (Hayward 1996, 20). If “all the democracies of the past and present are impure” compared to the ideal of the sovereign power of the “demos” (Meny and Surel 2000, 42–43), the populist’s protest against liberal democracy takes place on the basis of the progressive disappearance of democracy as an ideal project in favour of it being reduced to a procedure of regulating conflict, an expression of liberal constitutionalism. The dispute takes place because of the unfulfilled promises of democracy (Bobbio 1984); first, the persistent interests of multiple social groups in conflict in place of a “monistic” people and the failure to overcome the elites in representative democracy, made even more evident by the crisis of party democracy. In this sense, populism goes all the way back to reactive faith in politics, through a non-political conception of politics, a politics of disintermediation,

Populist anti-party parties 119 as well as the radicalisation of counter-democracy (Rosanvallon 2006; Taggart 2018), where the new bond of trust is built by initially denouncing the existing political class. However, populism does not aggregate and articulate social issues, it does not politicise constituencies that emerge from the redefinition of social fractures but poses a hyper-political challenge, making the representation of the people the reference point of a revolt that is both anti-elitist and anti-pluralist (Müller 2016; Urbinati 2014, 2018). Populist anti-partyism does not result in the moralism of “romantic primitivism” within the community; instead, it belongs to a strategy of politicisation carried out by new entrepreneurs of politics and for democracy “the militant use of the ideology of the people to overcome the pluralism of partisan visions and to create a unified opinion” (Urbinati 2014, 142). In this sense, populism seeks to create a “wedge” between the people and their enemies, in opposition to the elites in moral, social, and ethnic terms (Rosanvallon 2006). The identity of the people built by the populists does not take the form of a project for society or a reaction to forms of market regulation; it establishes itself in the direction of “segregation identity politics” (von Beyme 2019, 21). The same anti-establishment can in fact be applied to a wide range of different leaders and parties: leaders of mainstream parties, which employ populist rhetoric against the ruling parties when in opposition; new left and new right parties that do not necessarily have a populist nature; and finally, personalised leaderships that oppose the establishment of their own party in the redistribution of power within the organisation. What characterises populist anti-partyism is the vision of democracy it promotes and which relates to an illiberal vision of democracy (Krastev 2007; Pappas 2019), including a hostility towards the protection of minority rights and an unwillingness to recognise pluralism in political conflict. As for the phenomenology of anti-party populist parties in Italy, this is influenced more by the interaction among social, cultural, and political change than is the case in other political systems. The collapse of twentieth-century ideologies has freed a latent, but always present, orientation of distrust and disenchantment with regard to political power and elites, which has re-emerged under the various forms of populist personalisation in anti-party parties. The lack of re-politicisation of social fractures is reinforced by what Reynié (2013, 43–44) has defined as patrimonial populism, in which there is not only the juxtaposition between winners and losers of globalisation but the politicisation of a “double concern”. On the one hand, there is the relative deprivation, the incongruity of status and the fear of material “impoverishment”. On the other hand, there is the concern about an intangible loss linked to the disappearance of the “way of life” understood as a lifestyle in terms of culture, behaviour, consumption, habits, and values. The double convergence of these two sentiments largely involves the middle class, and the conditions are created to develop a populist view of democracy, where the perimeter of the people is defined in terms of the exclusion of its enemies, parties, elites, immigrants and the European Union. Thus, Italy fully satisfies the requirements for the creation of the social, cultural and economic conditions favourable to the emergence of a form of populism that gives shape to the imagined nationalpopulist community typical of Salvini’s Lega. This is not only identity populism

120  Lorenzo Viviani but also populism as an alternative expression of “a democratic society dominated by the triumph of a materialistic individualism”, the root of patrimonial populism (Reynié 2013, 43). This last perspective is substantiated in the distinct ideology of the M5S, combining individualism and communitarianism, social protection and state intervention, anti-institutionalism and the request for state welfare, and more generally by cultivating the defence of a lifestyle rather than a national community. Italian populism has implemented a multifaceted reinvention of populism as a hyper-politicisation of the people, defining its representation as an opposition to elite and to the caste, and as a form of internal depoliticisation, neutralising the expression of conflicting interests and ideas, the pillar of representative democracy. The various forms of populism currently in existence are collaborating in the government after the elections of 2018; they have overcome traditional cleavage politics, but we must consider if and how their distinct ideas of populist anti-party parties may coexist. Both populist parties endorse politicising strategies which appeal to the people, but their strategies are in potential conflict, most prominently so regarding policy choices.

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Part III

Populism and the transformation of the public sphere

7 Technopopulism and direct representation Emiliana De Blasio and Michele Sorice

1 Introduction At the beginning of the last decade, Andrew Chadwick (2003, 444) highlighted the existence of two fundamental dimensions of e-democracy: (a) the first constituting an instrument for the implementation of governmental and popular consultation processes, also including communicative forms with limited interactivity such as those typical of open government;1 (b) the second concerning deliberative practices. This latter dimension, in fact, is most frequently used as a practice of e-democracy, in this, at least in theory, providing added value in open government platforms. Communication technologies have historically been instruments of manipulation and control, constituting important instruments in the growth and diffusion of democratic participation processes. In recent years, the development of digital platforms has opened up new possibilities, both from a top-down perspective, as in the initiatives launched by public administrations to encourage greater citizen participation, and from a bottom-up one, such as with e-democracy experiences. From this second perspective, however, distinctive reorganisational experiences of the parties are equally relevant, such as those represented by the so-called “platform parties” that utilise digital participatory platforms and liquid democracy experiences as an organisational component as well as a policy-building tool. Deliberative approaches to democracy constitute a powerful lever to encourage citizen participation and their “speaking up”, whilst digital platforms may represent a driving force for a growth in citizens’ engagement and for the increase of the number of participants involved. It should nonetheless be noted that the emphasis on technology has often favoured two different but not opposing tendencies. One is a sort of technocentric optimism that frequently enhances the informative function of the participatory platforms. In this case, open government, for example, is often being utilised more for its guidance and promotional potential than for its possible democratising role, effectively reducing the possibility of meaningful civic input. In the second tendency, the emphasis is on online direct democracy, and in this, it has favoured processes of disintermediation (Ceccarini 2015; see also Damiani in this volume). In this, it is an expression of a lack of representation (as in the case of anti-party

128  Emiliana De Blasio and Michele Sorice tendencies), of requests for new modes of representation or even of the emergence of forms of hyper-representation, such as is the case in certain forms of populism (De Blasio and Sorice 2018a). A third trend also includes positions that uncritically exalt technology as an instrument of democratisation, as if its ability to “simplify” the vote would suffice to democratise democracy. Stefano Rodotà has lucidly clarified this by stating: Thus, a narrowed view of democracy would be welcomed, viewed not as a process of citizen participation but as merely a ratification procedure, like a perpetual game of yes and no, played by citizens who nonetheless remain extraneous to the preparatory phase of the decision, to the formulation of the questions they will be required to answer. Conceptual and political change is evident. Direct democracy becomes merely referendum democracy, with plebiscitary democracy appearing on the horizon instead (Rodotà 2013, 46; authors’ translation). In his analysis, Rodotà highlighted the need to consider the issue of citizens’ technological participation within a series of social and political relations. In other words, the various dimensions must not be considered as distinct variables (relationships between the public administration and citizens, forms of organisation and representation, modes of participation, decision-making procedures, forms of consultation, and so on), but as tesserae in a single mosaic that constitutes the organisation of democracy. Both the viewpoints of open government and the more complex stance of digital democracy or e-democracy should be collocated in this frame. In practice, however, beyond significant exceptions, open government platforms are mostly mere tools providing access to open data or spaces for georeferenced service delivery (De Blasio 2018). E-democracy platforms occasionally seem to be limited to offering technological solutions to the ratification of decision-making procedures2 or to merely presenting a symbolic form of direct representation – an oxymoron in conceptual terms which nevertheless constitutes one of the narrative mechanisms of contemporary populisms.

2 Hyper-representation, post-representative politics, and direct representation The theme of representation is traditionally connected to two poles of reference, one being the electoral dimension, the other that of participation. In reality, this connection is a relatively recent conceptual constraint with roots in the “democracy–elections” connection, a nonetheless ideological viewpoint. Bernard Manin (1995), for example, has shown how contemporary democratic governments are in reality the point of arrival, in the evolution of a political system which is conceived in such a way so as to mitigate the “subversive” effects of democracy. This trend is also present in the development of the “electoral method” in America. James Madison, for example, viewed democracy as “a show full of troubles and disputes”, destined for a swift and violent death (Madison 1787). The same term

Technopopulism and direct representation 129 “democracy” was used with suspicion; the conceptual overlap between “republican” and “democracy” choices represents a successful “storytelling” rather than a conscious choice made to empower the people. First James Madison and then Thomas Jefferson introduced a substantial rupture between the governed and governors, in that the latter should be able to represent the demands of all as a result of a sort of superiority, a kind of “natural aristocracy”, as Jefferson defined it (Dupuis-Déri 2013). The elective method, in other words, developed at the dawn of liberal “democracies” as a system used to control power by economic oligarchies, legitimised by the popular vote (van Reybrouck 2016). The key component of the elective method, in fact, was constituted by the recruitment of the political class. Indeed, for Jefferson and Madison, the active electorate was open to all, whilst the passive was reserved for the “meritorious”, a sort of “moral” élite that actually coincided with the political and economic ruling classes. Incidentally, it should be pointed out that the active electorate open to “all” obviously meant with the exception of slaves, people of colour, and women. The relationship between representation and democracy ought, hence, not to be taken for granted. Then again, the electoral method is affirmed in contraposition to democracy, whose distinctive character is identified precisely by the logic of participation. That said, it is equally true that the democracies that developed after the fall of fascism have restored – in their constitutions and political practices – the value of participation as a foundational element of the democratic method, even if the postwar democracies equally portray a trend of decline of the idea of popular sovereignty in terms of participation. In some cases, popular sovereignty has rather been interpreted as a lever for the promotion of substantive equality (Sorice 2019). The so-called “crisis of democracy” (which perhaps could be more accurately understood as a crisis of institutional representation) arises precisely within the short-circuit between the delegitimisation of representative institutions (intermediate bodies) and the individuals’ perception of the loss of that power that the mass parties seemed to guarantee in the past. In Italy, this phenomenon appears highly evident, as highlighted by numerous studies (Cerruto and Facello 2014; Ignazi 2018). By introducing the concept of partyless democracy, Peter Mair (2000) perfectly identified one of the critical elements of liberal democracies. The progressive erosion of the long-term identities on which the legitimacy of the parties was founded has also undermined the consolidated forms of political participation. The crisis of political parties obviously has many causes. Undoubtedly, one very important one is the redefinition of the fractures (cleavages) on which the traditional parties founded their own legitimation and collective identity. It is no coincidence that the rifts between “high/low” or “centre/periphery” are today more suited to explain new social conflicts. In Italy, this transformation has also manifested itself in political language. Expressions such as “we are neither right nor left” – repeatedly used by Beppe Grillo, one of the founders of the Five Star Movement – has been programmatically used to sanction the redefinition of new “cleavages”. It should be noted that the redefinition of

130  Emiliana De Blasio and Michele Sorice the cleavages also specifically leads to the crisis of legitimacy concerning traditional representation (which, to be sure, has traditionally been expressed in the electoral logic). The other major contributor – the global economic crisis – has functioned as an accelerator of the disanchoring (Morlino 1998; Morlino and Raniolo 2018) of the democratic structure. Even more, however, it has increased the popular perception of a progressive reduction in the spaces of political presence. The perception of a loss of “popular sovereignty”, deriving from the expropriation of the basic political choices by supranational economic-financial organisations, has accentuated the disconnect between parties and citizens, and, more generally, between citizens and politics. It is not by chance that the theme of popular sovereignty – instrumentally presented as “sovereignty”3 – has been stirred up by “Leave” advocates in the socalled Brexit referendum and, in various ways, by many of the leaders of the supposedly neopopulist parties.4 Also in Italy, the “sovereign” declination of the concept of sovereignty expressed by the Constitution represented one of the primary communication strategies on the agenda of the Lega (formerly Lega Nord, Northern League) as well as emerged in certain positions of the 5 Star Movement (M5S) on the economy and even in the “government contract” (the government pact signed by Lega and M5S after the 2018 political elections). It is in particular the shift from “government” to “governance” which accentuates the loss of centrality of citizens, whose power is limited to the management of significant, yet mostly local, issues, whilst strategic matters – also due to the loss of centrality of political parties – are firmly in the hands of technocracies and political-financial élites. In other words, we can decide on the colour of palisades around public gardens and perhaps the design of street lamps, but we have no power in decisions on military expenditure or the building of schools. We have even less power than before, indeed, ever since the “intermediate bodies” – who at least served the role of ideological mediation in this regard – lost their legitimacy.5 This process stimulates the emergence of public disaffection and social apathy (Hay 2007), as well as forms of “exiting”, such as the rejection of representation through parties, replaced by new forms of representation or by hypo- and hyperrepresentation phenomena. The shift towards governance involves a process of depoliticisation, a “bridging concept operating at the nexus between micro-trends (the disengagement of individual citizens), meso-level institutional mechanisms and reforms (modes of governance), and macro-level ideologies and dominant growth models” (Fawcett et al. 2017; see also de Nardis in this volume). The lack of trust in political and representative institutions generates three possible areas of response from citizens: (a) the first is social apathy, which manifests itself as a disinterest in politics, often accompanied by strongly anti-political sentiments; (b) the second is substantiated in the request for more specific control over representative institutions. This request is expressed in what Rosanvallon (2006) calls counter-democracy and evolves into a sort of systemic mistrust (sanctioning democracy), often finding in the appeal for direct democracy a solution for encouraging greater citizen participation; (c) the third area of response is the request for new forms of participation, ranging from active citizenship to the experiences represented by online platforms for democratic participation to different

Technopopulism and direct representation  131 forms of democratic innovation (collaborative governance, public debate, participatory budgets, territorial co-management, etc.). Figure 7.1 illustrates some of the possible outcomes of the crisis of representation for political parties (Sorice 2019). In the area of convergence between the emergence of anti-political attitudes and the affirmation of sanctioning democracy, privileged spaces for the legitimisation of new populisms open up. The storytelling, which uses direct democracy as an instrument for overcoming the crisis of representation, is also placed within such spaces: direct democracy is used here as a possible “participatory response” to the participation deficit of Western liberal democracies. In reality, however, it is mostly a tool for binary decisions and is part of the aggregative dimension of democracy (della Porta 2013), in a position that is clearly distinct from the various forms of participatory democracy that are (or should be) underlining the most advanced experiences of democratic innovation. The transformations of representation can further be studied in view of the emergence of post-representative politics (Keane 2013a; De Blasio and Sorice 2018a; Ceccarini and Diamanti 2018; Sorice 2018). From the perspective of new organisational forms, representative democracy seems to give way not only to counter-democratic demands but also to what Keane (2009) defines as monitory democracy. Monitoring is effectuated both through lobbying practices and by means of tools stemming from the tradition of deliberative democracy (Sorice 2014) – such as citizen juries, deliberative polls, citizen assemblies, online consultations, petitions  – and finally through monitoring and protection organisations/associations such as consumer movements or associations monitoring the respect of human rights. The Internet is a “place” that facilitates the emergence and grounding of these experiences, even if it is not the main source of activation of such practices. Indeed, the “monitorial citizen” (Schudson 1998) tends to substitute both the citizen-elector and even the citizen-critic (Norris 1999). In this new scenario, representative democracy – founded on a direct relationship between citizens and legislative assemblies  – gives way to post-representative

Space for legitimization of populisms

Social apathy

Indifference

An-polical behaviour

Claims for cizens’ stronger control on representave instuons

Counter democracy

Sanconing democracy

Direct democracy

Claims for new forms of polical parcipaon

Online plaorms for democrac parcipaon

Acve cizenship

Democrac innovaons

Figure 7.1  People’s answer to the crisis of party-based representation Source: Sorice (2019), with modifications

132  Emiliana De Blasio and Michele Sorice democracy (Keane 2013a), where citizens undergo forms of creative activism that are not always consistent with the traditions of political representation through party organisations. In essence, this does not mean that representation disappears – to the contrary, there is a greater demand for representation and new forms of social representativeness. These are exercised, however, outside the parties, at times occasionally or through temporary and issue-oriented organisations. In the scenario of post-representative democracy, processes of depoliticisation and new participation dynamics tend to be at odds or occasionally overlap. It is precisely the change in the political participation scenario that marks a cultural divide: from the vertical organisation of the old mass-integration parties (Viviani 2015) to the reticular logic of everyday activism, which can be intermittent and stable at the same time, strongly territorialised and culturally cosmopolitan. In this context, new forms of representation emerge. The first consists in occasional representation, linked to specific moments of mobilisation and exercised by various subjects, including populist parties. Occasional representation – like many forms of contemporary representation – unfurls from top to bottom. It regards the

Figure 7.2  Post-representative politics Source: Keane (2013b)

Technopopulism and direct representation  133 claim (Saward 2010) of some (individuals or collective) subjects to speak on behalf of others and to represent their interests, thus constituting themselves as representatives (Mastropaolo 2018). Occasional representation mainly serves the media and is thus potentially plural; moreover, it organises and structures temporary and unstable constituencies that are, by their very nature, extensive but disorganised and thus fundamentally innocuous with respect to the logic of “bargaining” with power. Occasional representation also feeds on disintermediation, guaranteed  – at least theoretically – by the media (and by social media in particular). It tends to transform itself into a kind of direct representation (seemingly an oxymoron), in which the subjects  – organised to varying extents  – become representatives of themselves, and, for practical reasons, delegate a leader (often the media) to become the depositary of representation (hyper-representative, specifically). Table 7.1 highlights the relationships between a populist communicative logic and the opportunities offered by the online media structure (such as, for example, social media). Social media are a privileged area in the definition of a “direct” and “personal” relationship between the populist leader (hyper-representative) and their audience – think of the daily messages (through Twitter and/or Facebook) of Matteo Salvini, leader of the Lega (League) – in which “simplified” messages (such as those on meals or a coffee he has consumed in a certain area of Italy) are joined by rhetorical devices operating for the engagement of the audience (emotionalisation). More generally, it ought to be considered how the populist rhetoric combines the processes of emotionalisation with strategies based on feelings of anger or indignation, often resulting from a perception (objective or otherwise) of “injustice”.6 Relevant, in this regard, is the famous slogan “Prima gli Italiani” (“Italians first”), very similar to slogans used elsewhere: “Prima i nostri” – “first our own people” – in Ticino or “England First” in the UK. Table 7.1  Populist communication logic and online opportunity structures Populist communication logic Content

Ideology

Online opportunity structures Popular sovereignty People-centrism

Messenger

Actors

Form

Style

Motives and aims

Strategy

Source: Engesser et al. (2017).

Anti-elitism Exclusion of “others” (Charismatic) leaders Simplification Emotionalization Negativity Power Legitimacy Mobilisation

Democratising potential Direct connections to the audiences Non-elite actors Homophily Personal connections to the audiences Attention economy Non-institutionalized masses

134  Emiliana De Blasio and Michele Sorice Alongside occasional representation, there are other forms operating: from hypo-representation exercised in a “minimal” way by associations (even temporary) and lobbies to intermittent representation connected with specific causes and, in turn, the result of the flakiness of newly arising constituencies taken over by new and differentiated “representatives”. In the crisis of organised political representation, one of the ideological characteristics of the neopopulist parties lies in the attempt to de-legitimise “traditional” representation, deeming such representation exhausted in the face of the possibilities offered by “bottom-up” participation, which, as seen, is resolved in forms of occasional representation. In this framework, the population is not considered as an aggregate of classes or social groups; instead it is understood as a homogeneous mass that opposes the “non-population” (cf. Anselmi 2017; see also Higgins 2017 and, in another perspective Moffit and Tormey 2014); the latter is obviously made up primarily by politicians, regardless of deployment and/or institutional position, and subsequently by subjects who – wrongly or rightly – are considered part of the system of power that the “non-population” exercises. The outcomes of the much-emphasised “bottom-up participation” converge not so much in the simple development of claims for representation (Saward 2010) but in the radical destructuring of that very same representation in favour of what can effectively be defined as direct representation and which is also configured as an expression of hyper-representation (where, as stated, the hyper-representative exercises the role of depositary for occasional representation). The exaltation of “bottom-up” participation is mostly manifest in (a) the emphasis placed on direct democracy; (b) the legitimisation of authoritarian leaderism, where the head of the people becomes the “supreme representative” of popular interests (the hyper-representative); (c) the phenomena of ethnotribalism, a tactical tool for building an “us” against a “them”, a tendency that exalts the identitary population against a non-population comprised of social minorities; and (d) the emergence of forms of occasional representation and/or direct representation. A variant of authoritarian leaderism is, rather, represented by politicians who defined themselves as “new”, while in reality yet actually constituting an example of “ ‘top-down populism’ or ‘governmental populism’ ” (Revelli 2017, 26). The rhetoric on direct democracy tends to re-establish an aggregative principle of democracy. It is not by chance that populist movements and parties tend to reject the logic of participatory democracy or the methods of deliberation. Rather than the continuous and responsible participation of all, they favour the episodic and decisive exercise of the referendum (being an instrument present in the institutional fabric of representative democracies). In place of the endogenous dimension (della Porta 2013) of the democratic processes, they prefer the exogenous that arises and is exhausted in the aggregative logic of the vote or plebiscite. Yet political participation makes sense “only if it leads to a redistribution of resources to the benefit of those who have less” (della Porta 2011, 54). It is no coincidence that both the scientific literature and the “militant” texts of the 1960s and 1970s considered participation as both a category of power servicing citizens and as a pedagogical tool. Indeed, Carole Pateman (1970, 42) wrote that “the main

Technopopulism and direct representation  135 role of participation is [. . .] that of education, in the broadest sense of the term, which includes both the psychological aspects and the acquisition of a practice in democratic capacities and procedures”. Political participation thus represents a component of social development, in the sense that it ought to constitute an instrument of empowerment for the most marginalised social groups (della Porta 2011). Participation, in other words, represents an instrument of emancipation, and the inclusion of ever-larger sections of the population can be an important element in achieving social justice. At the same time, political participation is closely linked to principles considered fundamental for modern democracies, such as equality, the right to inclusion, electoral accountability, and so on (cf. Morlino 2011). Hence, it is not the people’s participation that certain populisms pursue. The rhetoric of bottom-up participation hides the temptation of leaderism on the one hand and the push towards hyper-representation on the other. This emerged in a recent study (De Blasio and Sorice 2018a), in which four main types of populism were identified (techno-populism, neoliberal, social, and national populism) that showed a range of common characteristics. Among these was a reference to the value of direct democracy and the emergence of hyper-representation and/ or direct representation (albeit in varying forms). The (significant) exception was social (or democratic) populism, in which only areas of the radical left and antagonistic social movements are found. It is no coincidence that only the latter segment includes explicit references to participatory democracy, clearly identified as an alternative to liberal democracy and entirely distinct from direct democracy (on parties and movements against austerity, see della Porta et  al. 2017). It should also be noted that in this context, anti-establishment (and anti-liberal) rhetoric almost entirely replaces that of an anti-systemic rhetoric. Yet the radical left – especially in Europe – is characterised by a strong anti-establishment charge without necessarily being anti-systemic (Damiani 2017). The rhetoric of participation differs from the effective possibilities offered to citizens to be active participants in the proposals and protagonists of decisionmaking processes, the rhetoric that usually accompanies processes of depoliticisation. In the name of a (theoretically auspicious but in reality rarely practiced) “collaborative governance”, it is choices already made that are usually legitimised or that, in any case, do not necessarily result in deliberative processes. In other cases, the “participation” (in fact, the consultation) of citizens serves to ratify “inevitable” choices (with the result that faced with the inevitability of choices, citizens take refuge in apathy or anti-politics). There are obviously important exceptions, in which the forms of shared governance effectively constitute significant experiences of political participation and even incubators of popular democracy. What we want to emphasise here is that behind the slippage from “government” to “governance”, in many cases the results of depoliticization are hidden and that the usage of a participation rhetoric does not necessarily imply commitment to a more participative democracy. Consider how – in the post-political era (Wilson and Swyngedouw 2015) – the processes of re-politicisation are formed around varying outcomes, including (a) the narrative on “governability”, often used against representation (one might think of the proposals for institutional reform

136  Emiliana De Blasio and Michele Sorice in Italy and other countries in Europe);7 (b) populist experiences, which can thus be interpreted – especially in Italy – as a phenomenon of re-politicisation; and (c) those constituted by social movements (della Porta 2015), ranging from the most explorative forms of active citizenship (Moro 2013) and the numerous experiences of popular democracy (Baiocchi and Ganuza 2018). This latter outcome constitutes an “alternative” line of re-politicisation and represents, albeit fragmented, a counter-narrative to the dominant thought of new populisms.

3  Between efficiency and technological populism Amongst the four types of populism cited above, techno-populism represents an important emerging “innovation”. As stated by Müller (2017, 96), “technocracy holds that there is only one correct policy solution; populism holds that there is only one authentic will of the people.” As observed elsewhere (De Blasio and Sorice 2016), e-government/open government8 has often served the strategic goals of New Public Management: in fact, it envisages that the public sector is centred on customers (customer-driven); that the empowerment of citizens is real and coincides with that of companies and workers; and, finally, that the public sector is truly efficient (Teicher et al. 2002, 387). At the same time, the electronic government, activating a horizontal relationship between citizens within a top-down framework between institutions and “customers”, can favour the ideological transformation of the “public” (perceived as old) in the “efficiency-oriented” idea of the “State-company” (Crouch 2011; Sorice 2014). Hence, at this level, e-government becomes an instrument of legitimisation of the idea of “lightweight state”, so close to the more markedly neo-­liberal economic hypotheses.9 In other words, technologies become instruments for increasing the efficiency of the State. It is not surprising that this aspect was initially emphasised by numerous governments, hailing and publicising this increase in efficiency as a qualitative improvement in the provision of services offered to citizens. More recently, the emphasis of government information has been placed on increasing citizen participation, made possible by the new electronic governance tools. Beyond good intentions, in fact, even instances of democratic innovation – from online collaborative governance to participatory budgets – have represented, in some cases, instruments of legitimisation of the process of depoliticisation that has accompanied the rise of neoliberalism. The latter in reality favours the idea that online participation in governance processes could alleviate the sense of powerlessness of citizens expropriated from the possibility of being “counted” in strategic choices (those of government). In many cases, the emphasis of governments on the potential of online government (very often, in fact, declassified to simple online “governance”) represented a real “innovative” or “new” rhetoric – a form of government in the name of techno-optimist populism. It is in this context that the new tendencies of the phenomenon defined as technopopulism have developed (Deseriis 2017; Bickerton and Invernizzi Accetti 2017; De Blasio and Sorice 2018a). The debate on technopopulism sets out from the idea – supported by various commentators – that a new “cleavage” lies between

Technopopulism and direct representation  137 populism and technocracy (Freeland 2010). This is an interesting starting point, even if other perspectives of analysis are possible. In fact, numerous authors have preferred to study populism not as a response to technocracy but in its relations therewith and, furthermore, in the light of the conceptual opposition between technocracy and technolibertarianism. It is in this sense that we understand Müller’s (2017) statement that technocracy maintains that there is only one correct policy solution, whilst populism upholds that there is only a genuine will of the people. This means, in other words, that “both reject democratic debate and that can be interpreted as a result of the process of depoliticisation. That is to say, they are another aspect of the post-political era: an effect of depoliticisation and a new form of re-politicisation through technology” (De Blasio and Sorice 2018b, 2019a). Figure  7.3 graphically illustrates the outcomes of the opposition between technocracy and technolibertarianism, along with the relationship between

Technocracy

Populism Governmental populism

VS Direct democracy Techno-libertarianism

Online direct democracy

Open Government

E-democracy

Other polical tradions (environmentalism, post-marxism, etc.)

Figure 7.3  The relationships among technocracy, populism, and the forms of digital democracy Source: De Blasio (2018b)

138  Emiliana De Blasio and Michele Sorice technocracy and populism. Online direct democracy comes as a distinct and ideological element of technolibertarianism but also as a result of the union between populism and technology (De Blasio and Sorice 2018b).10 In this frame, it is also possible to put the emphasis used by Five-Star Movement’s leaders on the Rousseau platform11 as a tool to improve direct democracy, despite criticisms towards the platform having been expressed both by experts and by the Italian Authority for the protection of personal data and even by scientific researches (Mosca 2018). What’s more, if open government is both an outcome of the technocratic drive towards state efficiency and a technological “vision” for a greater role of citizens, it is also an ideological and cultural necessity of populists-in-government. As is evident, “far from being politically antithetical (or even corrective) to one another, populism and technocracy can be understood – and thus addressed – together, as a parallel expression of the same underlying set of phenomena” (Bickerton and Invernizzi Accetti 2017, 327). In this context, e-democracy is more marginal. In fact, it certainly stems from the technological push for an inclusive digital democracy whilst also being the result of other political-cultural traditions that have made of inclusiveness one of their points of reference.

4  Platform parties and social media There is no empirical confirmation of the hypothesis that the Internet has led to the emergence of demands and to the development of political movements with a non-leaderistic horizontal structure. In contrast, this hypothesis has frequently been contradicted by numerous studies. At least two assertions are often hastily assumed to be true: the first is that digital activism is the characterising factor of the new political movements, to the extent that it is believed that they would not have arisen without the availability of digital media. In fact, many studies have shown that movements with a strong online presence have at least as strong a presence offline (Kreiss 2012; della Porta and Rucht 2013). The second affirmation is that political movements are always horizontal, without a hierarchical structure or leader, as a result of the fact that they have borrowed from the structure of networks, not only in terms of the dynamics of transmitting messages but also in terms of the methods for adopting decisions. This aspect is refuted by the aforementioned research carried out by della Porta and Rucht (2013), which identified diversified forms of power and conflict also in global justice movements, as well as by Paolo Gerbaudo (2012), who spoke of a “choreography of assembly” in which the collective dimension of protest is organised and staged by activist élites. It can be thus said that the link between networks and the type of organisation of movements is much more controversial than appears to be assumed by cyberoptimistic analyses (De Blasio 2014), as attested by the significant independence of “bottom-up” initiatives compared to other political players – including international ones – and by the degree of democracy within political movements. Such clarifications are useful when recalling the scenario in which platform parties12 (De Blasio and Sorice 2018c) arise and develop. In fact, they can develop within a participatory logic. However, in many cases, they prove to be outcomes of phenomena of hyper-representation. In this case, the leader (the supreme representative

Technopopulism and direct representation  139 of “all the people”) creates a symbolic connection with the “super-population” (Gerbaudo 2018), that is in reality represented by those active in digital participatory platforms. It should be noted that an individualistic conception of participation is evoked here, whilst the emphasis on direct democracy in reality delegitimises any form of participatory democracy (Sorice 2018; De Blasio and Sorice 2019b). Platform parties can be an important tool for mobilisation as well as consist of an attempt to respond to a representation deficit. Yet they can also be considered as advanced experiences of technopopulism, also thanks to their structural ability to function as activators and communication terminals within the social media sphere.13 The social media deserve a separate discussion. Indeed, social media networks are not strictly democratic participatory platforms nor even online government/governance instruments. At the same time, however, they are widely utilised by movements, parties, and populist leaders (even if obviously not only by these actors). Table 7.1 illustrates the interplay between online platforms (such as social media in particular) and the communicative logic of populism. In the last two years, social media networks have mostly been studied in terms of their role as spreaders of “fake news” (rightly or wrongly considered as supporting the advance of populism) as well as for the surfacing of hate speech. Undoubtedly, the digital infrastructure favours the rapid diffusion of fake news in that it contributes to seeing impossible reports, unproven theories, imaginative suppositions, and lies passed off as incontrovertible truths, all “going viral”. Yet the problem lies in the structure of liberal democracies that are incapable of carrying out their process of maturation towards true equality and hence tend to be inevitably stuck into an intrinsically antidemocratic loop, as noted by Colin Crouch (2003). There is an economic problem – the unsustainability of the hyperliberal model of digital capitalism – representing the real cause of the problems of liberal democracies; there is a problem with the institutional relationship between the different players in our democracies, and, finally, there is the major problem of the degradation of professional skills in the information system (De Blasio 2017). In this context, social media play a non-secondary role in the legitimation, penetration, and diffusion of the “populist discourse”, even if they are not the activators of those processes; at the same time, however, these platforms can be “used” as propaganda instruments by populist leaders. The relationship between digital communication technologies and populism is extremely complex. It is structured across several levels, including that of a technological rhetoric, but equally relating to that of a multidimensional phenomenon such as technopopulism. It involves rhetoric on digital participatory platforms and the defacto reduction of the potentialities of e-democracy to a mere aggregative logic of online direct democracy. In this view, the participatory platforms – which have a great potential for democratising and increasing participatory democracy – can be an easy tool for cultivating populist style and discourse. In this setting, the platform parties  – of which the Five Star Movement was originally, at least in a partial sense, a manifestation  – represent an important research subject. The studies on platform parties are the result of long-term reflections on the transformation of the parties. From the classifications of Duverger (1951) to those of Kirchheimer (1966), to the fundamental work of Stein Rokkan (1970), and finally to the study of cartelisation processes (Katz and Mair 1995),

140  Emiliana De Blasio and Michele Sorice various analyses have assessed the organisational form of the so-called intermediate bodies. The development of personal, presidential, and liquid-presidential (Prospero 2012) parties and even the franchise-party (Bardi et  al. 2014) have marked the last decades, distinguished by the crisis of legitimacy of traditional parties. The rhetoric of participation has also accompanied the emergence of new organisational forms of politics: in many cases, however, participation has been replaced by “participationism”, a political rhetoric in which a generic “openness to society” became the distinctive characteristic. In these cases, the absence of an internal organisation based on a deliberative and participatory logic is evident.14 Very often, it was rather naïvely thought that in order to encourage participation and to increase the internal democracy of a party, it would suffice to enlarge the selectorate, being the union of subjects able to select a candidate (as in the case of primaries), or elect him/her (in the case of an electoral procedure). The selectorate goes from a maximum (when totally overlapping with the electorate) to a minimum (when concerning only an oligarch in power or even a single leader). The selectorate of “open” primaries is theoretically the entire electorate (in practice, however, it is vastly different). In an electoral system with blocked lists and without preferences, candidates are instead chosen by a small élite or a party leader. In fact, it is not sufficient to enlarge the selectorate, as is evident from the credibility (and sometimes even legitimacy) crisis that has struck the traditional parties – and often precisely those with more rooted popular traditions – in Western representative democracies within the last twenty years. One of the answers to the perceived deficit of representation through intermediate bodies – and to the correlated refusal of participation through exclusive electoral delegation – has in recent years come from the adoption of communication technologies, particularly those connected to the Internet and, more generally, to the opportunities offered by the development of democratic participation platforms (De Blasio 2018a). A  new form of party has thus developed, being defined as the platform party. This type of party finds new organisational methods in networks and in participatory platforms. Platform parties are born “within participatory logic; however, in many cases they prove to be outcomes of phenomena of hyper-representation and develop mechanisms of direct representation. In this case, the leader (the supreme representative of all the people) creates a symbolic connection with the super-population (Gerbaudo 2018; translated by the authors), that is, those active in digital platforms of participation.” The participation evoked in this type of party is of an individualistic kind, with emphasis on direct democracy. Moreover, often any form of participatory democracy is delegitimised. The platform party uses technology as an organisational means and as structural architecture. At the same time, it utilises participatory platforms as mobilisation tools, as spaces for policy-making (the presentation and discussion of proposals), and as places for decision-making (voting on proposals and programmatic decisions). In some cases, the platform party can also assume a stratarchical structure. One specific element in the Italian case lies in the substitution of the collective practice of participation with an individualistic conception, in which the direct elements are personal experience, the daily life dimension, and the intermittence of political action. Developing at this level is – taking up

Technopopulism and direct representation  141 Urbinati’s (2013, 2014) expression – what is defined as “direct representation”. This is rooted in hyper-representation, resulting from occasional forms of representation and presenting as a communicative strategy for the legitimisation of the leader. Figure 7.4 schematically illustrates this process which, however, is not to be understood in a linear manner.

Representaon through intermediary bodies (boom-up logic)

Crisis of instuonalised representaon

Multiplication of the forms of representation

Claims for representaon

Top-down logic (struggle to represent others)

Hyper-representaon

Role of the media (broadcasng media and social media)

Occasional representaon

Direct representaon

Italian populisms

Figure 7.4  The transformation of representation and the new Italian populisms

142  Emiliana De Blasio and Michele Sorice An important role in this process is played by the media (broadcasting and social) which, moreover, also John Keane had identified as the key elements of post-representative politics. The complex relations in Italy – among technopopulism, depoliticisation processes, instances of re-politicisation, and the emergence of original phenomena such as those related to direct representation  – provide us with an image of a country suspended between trends towards new forms of democracy and tendencies towards authoritarian involution.

Notes 1 The concept of open government  – often overlapping with that of e-government  – consists of three variables. The first one concerns the styles of public policies and regards transparency: specific dimensions are those of access to data (open data), the training of citizens in the use of access and control tools, and the monitoring of public policies. The second variable concerns direct action of citizens (participation), and it consists of three sub-dimensions: consultation, proposal (through deliberative public tables or other forms that allow for civic proposals), and the sharing of public policies that, therefore, become collective assets. Finally, the third variable concerns the forms of collaboration among citizens, institutions and companies; at this level, the forms of partnership between public institutions, companies, and groups (more or less organised) of citizens represent a strategic element. However, an intimately connected dimension of collaboration is that of accountability, which favors mutual listening of citizens and institutions and allows for the activation of forms of collaboration (see Wirtz and Birkmeyer 2015; De Blasio 2018a; an introduction in: www.opengovern ment.org.uk/about/). 2 From a theoretical point of view, democratic participatory platforms should possess certain and specific characteristics. These can be summarised as being: (1) Inclusion – the ability to give voice to all citizens without any form of discrimination; (2) Openness – such platforms are an extraordinary repository of information and knowledge that can be made available to all; (3) Security and Confidentiality – the platforms must guarantee security whilst also providing tools for participation that protect confidentiality, in guaranteeing the privacy and transparency of the deliberative processes; (4) Responsiveness – e-democracy as a social practice must succeed in allowing institutions to listen to citizens, their responses, and the possibility for all social players to enter into an interactive relationship; (5) Deliberation – the platforms must be able to allow real deliberative processes to be undertaken in order to guarantee that people have the possibility to activate forms of endogenous consensus building. Cf. De Blasio (2018). 3 Of note is that the concept of popular sovereignty concerns the ability of the people to decide upon their own future, it being no coincidence that it is explicitly referred to and enshrined also in the Italian Constitution. Sovereignism, rather, concerns the “State” (being the government apparatus) having control over basic political choices. Simplified, it can be said that popular sovereignty concerns participation, whilst sovereignty replaces international oligarchies with internal ones. 4 In many cases, the rhetoric concerning the sovereign is flanked by that against “­immigrant-invaders”. These are two different discourses that also present varying cultural backgrounds, welded together by another example of the peculiarity of contemporary populisms. 5 The process of personalisation and the growing role of the super-leader have accentuated this trend. Also, the former leader of the Democratic Party (Matteo Renzi) has been using many times an anti-party rhetoric, clearly evident in the campaign for the Constitutional referendum of 2016. It is significant that the new leader (2019) of the

Technopopulism and direct representation  143

6 7

8 9

10 11

12

Democratic Party, Nicola Zingaretti, has used the metaphor of the “party as a collective we” to confirm his opposition to the excess of personalisation. An analysis of how “tweets” and “Facebook posts” can determine engagement mechanisms, in the research Mapping Italian News (https://elezioni2018.news/blog/report). Alongside the (varyingly successful) attempts to reform functional constitutions on the basis of neoliberal ideology, even more aggressive trends have emerged regarding the transformation of constitutions by populist parties in power. Today, this phenomenon is called “populist constitutionalism” (Blokker 2018a, 2018b; see also Blokker 2018c). Although there are some theoretical differences between e-government and open government, the two concepts are often used interchangeably, especially by public administrations. In a hyper-optimistic view, however, it is precisely the network that, adopting a holistic and transformative perspective, would be able to counter the fragmented vision of New Public Management (Dunleavy et al. 2005). “The new media upend the trend of New Public Management to fragment public services as they encourage a holistic approach to the policy agenda, connecting the policies together and reconstituting the unity of various components” (Roberts 2014, 77). It is useful to highlight that the re-politicisation of technocracies constitutes one of the key elements that characterizes the shift from government to governance (De Blasio and Sorice 2018b). “Rousseau” is the name (inspired by Jean-Jacques Rousseau) of the digital platform of the Five Star Movement. As the 5SM itself states: Rousseau is the direct democracy platform of the 5 Star MoVement. Its objectives are the management of the 5 Star MoVement in its various electoral components (Italian and European Parliaments, regional and municipal councils) and the participation of members in the life of the 5 Star MoVement, through, for example, the drafting of laws and the vote for the choice of electoral lists or the settlement of positions within the 5 Star MoVement” (translated by the authors) (https://rousseau.movimento5stelle.it/rousseau.php). Previously, the Airesis platform had been used by the meetups in the start-up phase of the Five Star Movement. Airesis is a platform on free software (while Rousseau is based on proprietary software) and defines itself as “social network for e-democracy” (see: www. airesis.eu/edemocracy?l=it-IT) [Links retrieved on April 2019]. One of the responses to the crisis of “institutional” representation (through intermediate bodies) has come in recent years from the adoption of communication technologies, in particular those connected to the Internet and, more generally, to the opportunities offered by the development of platforms for democratic participation. A new party form was developed, which has been called the platform (or digital) party. This type of party finds new organisational methods in the net-logic and in the participation platforms. Platform parties are born within participatory logic; however, in many cases they are revealed as results of the hyper-representation phenomena. In this case, the leader (supreme representative of “all the people”) creates a symbolic connection with the “super-people”, represented by the individuals active in digital participation platforms. The participation evoked in this type of party is individualistic; the emphasis on direct democracy, however, often delegitimises any other form of participatory democracy. There are obviously many types of platform party, and they are affected by national peculiarities and electoral systems. In essence, the platform party uses technology as an organisational mode and as a structural architecture; at the same time, it uses digital participation platforms as mobilisation tools, as spaces for policy-making (the presentation and discussion of proposals), and as places for decision-making (voting on proposals and policy decisions). In some cases, the platform party can also take on a stratarchical structure. Finally, the collective conception of participation, as theoretically conceived in the mass party, is replaced by an individualistic conception, in which personal experience, the dimension of everyday life, and the intermittency

144  Emiliana De Blasio and Michele Sorice of political action constitute the specific elements (see Gerbaudo 2019; De Blasio and Sorice 2018c; Sorice 2019). 13 As is known, the formal public sphere does not exhaust the plurality of public spaces that are “open” and/or legitimised by the media and, in particular, by digital media. In fact, public spaces include those that can be defined as the “peripheral territories” of civil society. It is in these territories that specific issues can arise and develop, sometimes divergent from the dominant social and political cultures. 14 In this context, also the use of primary elections (whether they are held diffused throughout the territory or online is of no importance) responds to a rhetoric of participation but often ends up being merely an instrument of legitimisation of the élite party. In this context, citizens’ accentuation of the refusal or mistrust towards politics and, in particular, the parties are not surprising.

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8 Intellectuals and cultural populism Massimiliano Panarari

1  Some preliminary (and problematic) defining issues In the “populist turn” currently taking place in Italy – a process which is ongoing and essentially dates to the mid-1990s – populist political organizations have taken the figure of the intellectual as one of their preferred targets of critique. Furthermore, in general and increasingly so, as further evidence of this shift, the intellectual has also become a target for other parties as well, parties which cannot be considered fully or totally a part of this trend (Anselmi 2017; Anselmi, ­Blokker, Urbinati 2018). Anti-intellectualism and the “distrust of intellectuals” (Tarchi 2018) mark one of the essential foundations of the long-term political narratives and practices of populism. In the same way, the “anti-intellectual” stance – together with the “anti-system”, “anti-state” and “anti-party” ones – constitutes an essential rhetoric of populism (Sorice 2012). This rhetoric is directed against a range of types and social categories; alongside the intellectual strictly speaking (although this subject comprises multiple and plural definitions), there are also, as Michele Sorice notes, the professor lato sensu, adopters of advanced technologies (or of innovative social visions), and the world of public employees. As Jürgen Habermas pointed out, populism likewise discredits and rejects instrumental rationality, instead preferring to prioritize daily and direct experiences of the “life world” (Habermas 1987), the kind of experience that characterizes “ordinary people” and is, therefore, antithetical to the sophisticated and contrived existence of intellectuals. Populist and neo-populist movements and parties are therefore largely and “structurally” hostile and adverse to intellectuals, as noted in one of the first significant works on the subject by Margaret Canovan – an author who, by her own explicit admission, was certainly not wholly averse to populist tendencies (Canovan 1981). Traditionally, then, intellectuals have been the frequent recipients and exemplary scapegoats of populist rhetoric and narratives (with right-wing populisms clearly taking the lead in this sense), since the origins of this political phenomenon and across its multiple and varying national manifestations and cultural articulations. At the same time, however, the work of constructing and developing a new populist ideological discourse (as in the transition-reformulation from twentieth-century

Intellectuals and cultural populism  149 nationalism to the sovereignism of the 2000s) has been carried out in large part by a significant and highly differentiated group of symbolic analysts along with a set of cultural-labor professionals with specialist knowledge and disciplinary skills. These ranks have been composed of various types: public intellectuals, academic intellectuals, columnists, pundits and journalists, talk show and television program opinion leaders, and, especially, social figures stemming from the professionalized field of political communication, and, finally, the channels of communication more closely connected to digital propaganda (including various social media influencers). Such intellectuals have likewise been central in setting up the framing that populist parties deploy and use, as well as in shaping the climate of opinion and the redefinition of the public sphere in a manner that is more favorable to them, towards the increasing emotionalization of public life and ever-greater indisputable centrality of emotionality in politics (Richards 2007). This trend unquestionably penalizes and relegates to a secondary place the type of rational argumentation which is considered the attribute par excellence of debates among ideas and political cultures in the liberal-democratic public space (Colombo and Gili 2012). Moreover, this shift towards emotionality equally exasperates and amplifies the process through which contemporary representative political systems mutate into “plebiscite democracies” (Green 2011) that redefine this Weberian category in postmodern terms. This multiform category of public intellectual can therefore be considered central to the construction of a populist public sphere characterized by specific and unprecedented traits, evermore homophilic and tribal. Populist formations can be classified as mass parties in the absence of masses, with a decision-making nucleus located at the junction of leaders and the professionals assisting them; a situation which, as Bernard Manin has noted, characterizes political organizations in the age of audience democracy (Manin 1997). These professionals, the bearers of “technical” knowledge and with various functional specializations, are actually intellectual figures; they are the “technical intellectuals” that populist formations find useful in that they represent the evolution of the “professionalelectoral parties” (Panebianco 1982) of the past, albeit in this case with “antiparty” connotations. In this chapter, therefore, I seek to outline the category of “intellectual populism”, a category that marks one of the structural and most fundamental cleavages running through populism in all its various forms. I thus hypothesize that, in line with the elite versus popular or establishment versus anti-­ establishment lines of disagreement that occupy such a significant place in the “winners versus losers of globalization” public debate, Italian populism proposes a further distinction: namely, it distinguishes between intellectuals seen as components of the establishment and dominant groups (figures which are subject to not only criticism but even denigration and a relentless campaign of delegitimization) and those who could be defined as “intellectuals of the common people”. With very few exceptions, these latter are not, for obvious reasons, presented as intellectual, and they can be considered as highly instrumental. They are such for all intents and purposes, however, in that they fully correspond to many of the classifications and taxonomies used to define the intellectual. Specifically, some display the traits of the aspiring or effective leaders of “holistic engineering” (in this case,

150  Massimiliano Panarari as an operation of building a certain sentiment and opinion climate rather than a new societal paradigm) that Karl Popper attributed to certain types of intellectuals in his famous 1945 book The Open Society and Its Enemies. And it cannot be denied, in this vein, that the exponents of intellectual populism are developing a theoretical and communication-based view that is opposed and antithetical to the idea of an open society in Italy as well. In the chapter, I set out to examine and analyze intellectual populism on two levels: the general level of anti-intellectualism as a pillar of the discursive and communicative repertoire of populism and the level of a sequence of case studies of instances of storytelling, invented and managed by ordinary people’s intellectuals in their role as the “complementary officers” of populist leaders, parties and movements. These two aspects coexist within the communication and political platforms of populist parties themselves. This coexistence might appear to represent a paradox, but ultimately it is more apparent than real. Another paradox can be seen in the fact that the important role played by ordinary people’s intellectuals coexists with the narrative – which these intellectuals themselves nurture (and which, in Marxian terms, could be considered an interested and instrumental variant of “false consciousness”) – that competence must be transformed into a highly relative notion in the name of non-hierarchical horizontalization, itself redefined according to certain codes deriving from postmodern culture (Nichols 2017). And, therefore, for Italian populism in the 2010s, the category of anti-intellectualism ends up manifesting a considerable ambiguity, that same ambiguity which is one of the most explicit, shared traits of what some scholars have described, despite its multiplicity of forms and experiences, as global populism (de la Torre 2018).

2 Genealogies of populist anti-intellectualism in Italian political history As a large body of literature has demonstrated, the inherent ambiguity of the relationship between the figure of the intellectual and populist movements lies at the very roots of the two original manifestations of this tendency: Russian and American populism (Palano 2017). In fact, both of these featured key figures belonging to the highest and most educated social classes (nourished by suggestions and ideas stemming from romanticism and socialism, in the case of Russian populism) and included leaders and influential personalities with backgrounds in the intellectual paradigm (especially in the US case). Populist movements are thus often steeped in anti-modern currents of thought (even though, throughout their history, they have increasingly used the communication and technological tools made available by modernity) while, especially at the beginning, being animated by intellectuals who renounce their own social backgrounds, instead claiming an unmediated and “mythical” relationship with the people generated – through mythopoeia – by their own work of representation (Pombeni 2004). Throughout this history, the Italian context has shown itself naturally inclined to function as a “laboratory” (Zanatta 2013; Tarchi 2018) for multiple forms of

Intellectuals and cultural populism 151 populism and continuous innovation in core elements comprising this political family, operating practically uninterruptedly since the unification of the nation in 1861. As a matter of fact, there is a fissure which, revisited and updated over time, has served as the Leitmotiv of waves of populist political discourse in Italy. The long-standing character of this fissure can be seen in the ruling classes’ total neglect of and even distaste for the “social question” (recall Camillo Benso, the Count of Cavour, convinced that, although the living and employment conditions the working classes needed improving in some way, they ought to remain in a condition of political subordination [Salvadori 2011]) as well as the dichotomous distinction between “real country” and “legal country” famously introduced by the liberal politician and scholar of economics and law Stefano Jacini in his 1879 essay I conservatori e l’evoluzione naturale dei partiti politici in Italia (Romanelli 1990). In this formula, intellectuals and journalists clearly fell within the “legal ­country”, perceived as excessively out of touch with the large majority of the “real country” (poor and characterized by soaring illiteracy rates). In relation to this point, it must be noted that the Italian press has been perpetually characterized as an elitist vocation and indeed, until the advent of the fascist regime, it operated as an instrument of political communication aimed almost exclusively at the various segments of the Italian ruling classes (Murialdi 1996). Nineteenth-century Italy, in both its pre-unification phase and the complicated years of forming and constructing the national state, was home to a healthy thread of literary populism (Asor Rosa 1965), and populist elements and motifs appeared in various books and authors of post-unification literature as well. The body of work known as “parliamentary novels” can be seen as an example. This thread of literature was animated in particular by “ex-believers” in Risorgimento uprisings as an occasion for palingenesis and the profound renewal of civil life, or by parliamentarians from the ranks of Mazzini and Garibaldi supporters or the Radicals, as well as adherents of the historical far-Left. These novels used a narrative form to transpose the dissatisfaction and unease of these disaffected writers with the direction unification had taken, often choosing stories of public malfeasance, corruption and scandals as emblems of how their original ideals had been betrayed and their hopes dashed. Similarly, it was groups of intellectuals who developed the anti-­parliamentarian doctrines, a stance identifying the essential dimension of all the “populist” tendencies between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and even until after the Second World War. In many ways, anti-parliamentarianism can be seen to emerge from the same sources as populism in that Parliament represents the arena in which parties and factions are legitimized, that is, representatives of the same actors who refuse to see themselves as part of the collective popular identity and nation as an organic (and organicist) community. Another shared fountainhead is that of antiparty-oriented populist political organizations of the kind that began to bloom and become increasingly pervasive in political systems and public discourse in Italy and Europe from the 1990s onward. On the twentieth anniversary of fascist populist rule, we also saw the meteoric rise and fall of a movement that inherited many sympathizers (and a certain number

152  Massimiliano Panarari of lesser-known political staff) from the fascist regime, namely the “Fronte liberale democratico dell’Uomo Qualunque” (FUQ or Common Man’s Front; see also Urbinati in this volume). Despite the brevity of its electoral trajectory, this party is considered by some scholars to represent the “prototype of European populism” (Tarchi 2018). Its (confused) political doctrine and “commonist” party-movement form (indeed, FUQ can be considered one of the first examples of an anti-party party in twentieth-century Italian politics) stemmed from the weekly publication L’Uomo qualunque. Launched on 27 December 1944 by the playwright, director and journalist Guglielmo Giannini (1891–1960), this magazine was destined in its brief cycle of publication to reach a circulation of just under one million copies. Giannini also wrote an influential book called La Folla (written between 1943 and 1944 and published in 1946, with impressive sales numbers). FUQ was therefore founded by an intellectual and represented a populist-type political movement (the first of Italy’s post-war period) that was born out of a printed channel of communication. It also made the most of the additional communicative resources offered by a daily newspaper – Il Buonsenso (from 1945 onward) – and a multifaceted system of publications. This system, which included periodicals such as Politeama (equally short-lived), L’Europeo qualunque, La Donna moderna and a substantial network of local papers, was organized through a well-defined strategy of differentiating among recipients and addressing specific target audiences. Giannini represents an illustrative example of the constitutively ambivalent and ambiguous trajectory of the populist intellectual leader: a theorist of the ideology of the common man who rejected political party elites with “anthropological” ferocity, at the same time he also played a non-secondary role in the film industry (that is, the industry of the imaginary that prevailed in those decades of the twentieth century). Giannini was a prominent critic during the silent film era, and he worked in abridging and adapting US films as well as heading the magazine Kines. One of his main fields of interest and work was the mystery genre, an expression of mass culture destined to reach a vast public in the twentieth century. His career thus illustrates one of the fundamental elements – both necessary and constraining – that began to distinguish populism once it had entered the century of cultural consumption (the twentieth century), that is, the ability to tune into the most widespread of pop cultural trends. This isomorphism can be seen in a particularly exemplary and striking way in the tendency of various forms of Italian neo-populism (beginning unquestionably with Berlusconi) to assume the formats and programs of the commercial neo-television that developed in the 1980s. In the same way, this seminal form of populist political organization also began to revolve around the linguistic dimension in the way it carried out an ad litteram re-semanticization of words and was always on the lookout for catchy slogans and communicative formulas – such as Giannini’s dubbing of “il Fronte dell’Uomo qualunque” as “PDQCNVPARLSDN”, “Partito Di Quelli Che Non Vogliono Più Avere Rotte Le Scatole Da Nessuno” (or the “Party of Those Who No longer Want to Be Hassled By Anyone”), in May 1945. As part of this dimension we must also include the linguistic sphere of scatology, derision and insult. These were part of a discursive strategy which, while not exclusive to the common-man movement,

Intellectuals and cultural populism  153 was certainly widely adopted by it. There was also the iconographic sphere, consisting, above all, in the frequent use of vignettes and satirical images appearing in the FUQ media outlets. This thread of textual and visual derision was based on denigrating opponents through nicknames and ridicule and aimed at delegitimizing political adversaries (for instance, the PCI was called the “Partito Concimista Italiano” or “Italian Concimist [fertilizers’] Party”, the Christian Democrats became “demofradici cristiani” or “Christian demo-sodden/putrid” party and the leader of the Action Party, Ferruccio Parri, was pejoratively renamed “Fessuccio Parri”, from “fesso” meaning idiot and prat. Such political communication typically required the involvement and contribution of symbolic analysts, and we can trace a line of continuity from comedian and filmmaker Giannini to theatrical and television comedian Beppe Grillo, with Grillo applying the methodology and canons of stand-up comedy to political oratory. At the same time, the Fronte qualunquista was an example of an antiparty party that programmatically refused the label and name of party and set itself the goal of defending the “ordinary and common people”, that is, those who had worked in public agencies and state administrations during the fascist regime, people who found themselves the object of ethical execration and moral condemnation by various intellectuals, mainly from the left. Indeed, it is worth noting that intellectuals have performed a role of service to, and even sometimes directly management of, politics throughout the Italian leftist thought of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, up to the 1980s and Italy’s headlong entry into the era of the postmodern condition. Similarly, intellectuals proved central to the events of liberalism and political-democratic Catholicism throughout the country’s history following Unification. All of the political cultures involved in establishing the constitutional pact of 1947–1948 thus granted intellectuals a significant position in their histories, for various reasons. Likewise, politician-intellectuals (figures who were highly cultured on an individual level, especially in the humanistic and juridical disciplines, or were actually themselves academics) have played leading roles in various important passages in the history of the “Republic of the parties” (Scoppola 1997), that is, the structure of the Italian political system based on the legacy of the model of a party that socially integrates the masses. In the aftermath of the systemic crisis caused by the Mani pulite judicial inquiries, we find another example of intellectuals attempting to launch an operation of political culture. This project was staunchly supported by the presidency of the Republic held by Carlo Azeglio Ciampi (from 1999 to 2006), former governor of the Bank of Italy and an important grand commis fed by the ideas of the Action Party and Gobetti’s thought. The intention was to develop a series of political narratives with the power to stitch back together the collective fabric of a torn country (torn by the lengthy post-Tangentopoli crisis and the “low-intensity civil war” between Berlusconi supporters and his opponents) centered on notions of civil religion and patriotism constitutional. This campaign did not manage to achieve much in the way of results, however, and it was not really able to extend beyond an exclusively cultural sphere (De Luna 2013; Ginsborg 2006; Revelli 2015).

154  Massimiliano Panarari These narratives failed to engage the majority of voters because they displayed an “intellectualist” bent in some senses, and this came up against the authentic cultural hegemony achieved by the neo-television model that transferred the techniques of “semiological guerrilla warfare” to the small screen with an eye to increasing audience shares and commercial and advertising visibility (Eco 2018). When Silvio Berlusconi “entered the field” in 1994 with his new political formation Forza Italia, at once a “personal party” (Calise 2000) and marketing-oriented party (Lees-Marshment 2003), his campaigning benefited greatly from the communicative resources his television stations represented. Indeed, they proposed a “vision of the world” and paradigm of politainment with the power to support the programmatic platform of this neo-conservative and postmodern Italian right which was anti-communist but also, in some ways, already post-ideological and certainly postmodern. Neotelevision programming replaced the top-down pedagogical paradigm of “paleotelevisione” (according to Umberto Eco’s definition) with a cultural (and subcultural) influence that was decidedly softer but even more pervasive. It reflected the social and existential models and consumption styles characteristic of neoliberalism and was based on conveying the content and images of the mass-cult genre – “giving the public what it wants”, as Dwight Macdonald (Macdonald 1962) pointed out as early as the beginning of the 1960s. At the same time, it had its roots in the underlying message that politics were irrelevant in the modern, E ­ nlightenment-derived project that had now come to an end. The “cathodic pluralism” of the previous decade not only represented a proliferation of channels which enabled commercial considerations to make their way into radio-television and broadcasting spheres, thereby breaking the monopoly of the RAI; it also became the vector of a push towards “dionysism” (Maffesoli 1982) in keeping with the “libidinal capitalism” (Stiegler 2008) and hyper-consumption characterizing post-1980s society. At the same time, it became a vehicle for highly pronounced processes of “secularization” and “disenchantment” with politics in Italy, a country which until then had been marked by strong ideology and high rates of political mobilization and electoral participation. Commercial television, based on the economic logic of selling commercials and, therefore, intent on maximizing viewership, was the object of a very lively debate involving various – both left-wing and Catholic – intellectuals, the latter dubbed “cattocomunisti” by their opponents in this political clash; intellectuals who had inherited the distrust and phobia of technology that a certain slice of Christianity and a certain component of Italian Marxism had in common. In Berlusconism (Ignazi 2014), the Italian approach to “telepopulism” (Taguieff 2002) is thus articulated as a hybridization between populism and the communicative resources provided by video politics (Sartori 2000). This is the phase of the “telegenic demagogue”, as Pierre-André Taguieff defined it, the culmination of the intersection of a personalization of politics and a process rendering politics more media-oriented and -dependent, based in particular on the centrality of the image and vision of the leader’s body. Indeed, as Giovanni Sartori has written, “video-politics is transforming politics into the broader context of a video-power that transforms the homo sapiens produced by written culture into ‘uomo oculare’ ” (Sartori 1995, p. 417).

Intellectuals and cultural populism 155 The telepopulism introduced in the Berlusconi era can therefore be considered the precursor of webpopulism and “digital populism” (Dal Lago 2017), especially in terms of the two-fold and ambivalent character of its leader’s self-presentation: as leader and “savior of the homeland” while, at the same time, also a figure who resembles the audience of democracy made up by viewers and who places himself on the same level as citizen-voters. The logic of disintermediation, one of the “ontological” foundations of the internet as a medium, proves quite consistent with the move to insert viewers into the script and action of “neotelevision” (Freccero 2013) and “transtelevision” (Vagni 2017) programs modeled after reality TV (the first example of which is Grande Fratello, aired for the first time in 2000 on Channel 5, part of the Mediaset holding company owned by Berlusconi, and inspired by its Dutch counterpart Big Brother). The mechanism of mass self-communication and “spectator activation” fostered by these broadcasts in the post-broadcast era has naturally evolved and further intensified its dynamics in social media (Boccia Artieri 2016). This aspect makes the positioning of webpopulist leaders somewhat different from that of their predecessors (telepopulist leaders) in that it forces them to engage with an audience whose opinion is much more changeable and interactive than that of television viewers, immersed as such audiences are in the logic of permanent polling (De Blasio 2012) that distinguishes social networks. This is why webpopulist leaders operating within a media system dominated by patterns of disintermediation and horizontalization are obliged to further emphasize their traits as celebrity politicians (Van Zoonen 2004) and pop politicians (Mazzoleni and Sfardini 2009), traits generated by the cross-pollination between a political class in search of popularity and the media logic (and actual ideology) of entertainment prevailing in commercial television and printed soft media devoted to gossip (Marletti 2010). In the Italy of the 1990s, therefore, Berlusconism has channeled and amplified the populist vein of anti-intellectualism while simultaneously making extensive use of symbolic analysts with robust (and, at times, decidedly sophisticated) cultural backgrounds to construct what – to draw on the category developed by Antonio Gramsci  – can be considered subcultural hegemony (Panarari 2010). During Silvio Berlusconi’s presidency of the Council of Ministers in the 2000s (2001–2006 and 2008–2011), the weeklies and glossy news magazines headed by Alfonso Signorini (Panarari 2009) contributed very significantly to the redefinition of Berlusconi’s image, simultaneously glamorous and pop, as a sovereign (and his family as a reigning dynasty) in the conviction that, even in today’s faded and disoriented post-democracies, “fairy tales of kings” still elicit a great deal of fondness (and, therefore, political consensus as well). Signorini was the director of the popular weekly magazines Chi and Tv Sorrisi e canzoni, hardcopy soft news media outlets with a very wide circulation, dedicated to gossip about VIPs and TV programs; he was also the “opinionist” (a role that consists in the reinvention of the editorialist-pundit in the logic of a pop-oriented standards-lowering and dumbing down) brought in to comment on the contestants and the personal affairs of show business personalities in the TV program Grande Fratello.

156  Massimiliano Panarari On the occasion of the two most prominent sexual scandals involving Berlusconi while he was prime minister – the Noemi Letizia (2009) and Ruby Rubacuori (2010) affairs – Signorini engaged in authentic propaganda, fully comparable to a campaign of crisis management by activating a whole series of “(communicative) weapons of mass distraction”. Having completed the process of inserting the politician into the logic of show business and entertainment society, widespread popular interest in gossip about the “rich and famous” and celebrities has also provided a significant component of the grammar and language (as well as the horizon of meaning) that the symbolic analysts of populism draw on. For instance, two infotainment (and politainment) shows, both of which have secured very large audiences over time, served to significantly influence public debate, above all by deploying sensationalism and giustizialismo (“justicialism”, that is to say, invoking the guilt of politicians in ideological and aprioristic terms) and by denouncing episodes of corruption that also involved politicians (Barile 2019). These are the “satirical newscast” Striscia la notizia, created in 1988 by Antonio Ricci (an avid reader of the writings of Guy Debord in his youth, and who should be considered another key intellectual figure of Berlusconism), and Le Iene (which went on air in 1997). Both television programs have contributed directly to fostering, and are perfectly in line with, the climate of anti-politics that has spread throughout Italy in the post-Tangentopoli period. The approach behind this pair of programs involves overturning the critical and deconsecratory aims of situational thinking (Perniola 2005) and applying the principles of deconstructing entertainment society to the task of building a climate of public opinion in favor of a specific political project and ideological proposal, namely that of Berlusconism (Panarari 2010; Perniola 2011) and, subsequently, of the Movimento 5 Stelle (Santoro 2012; Biorcio and Natale 2013; Ponte di Pino 2014). Indeed, it is worth recalling that it was Ricci who wrote the scripts for various theatrical performances and television shows put on by Beppe Grillo, the co-founder (together with Gianroberto Casaleggio) of M5S, the party which represents the pioneering and most experimental example of digital populism in Italy. In Italy, these media and TV outlets have given rise to the phenomenon of “partisan gossip” (Mazzoni and Ciaglia 2015), a form of gossip that takes on a logic of politicization and becomes an instrument of political communication (as well as, in some cases, the blackmail of opponents). This form of gossip is also transformed into one of the components of ideology – that is, the “interpretative filter that tends to adapt reality to a partial gaze, to bend it to the logical schema of reference and, ultimately, to manipulate it (Sorice 2014) – to thus become one of the professional tools the ordinary people’s intellectual uses in the service of populist leaders.

3 Populisms and intellectuals, dangerous relationships and elective affinities: cultural populism One of the distinguishing tasks listed by Tony Judt as being performed by intellectuals in the twentieth century is that of constructing “great truths” (deriving from ideologies) which teleologically entail ultimate goals (Judt 2012). That is, “great

Intellectuals and cultural populism  157 stories” (Lyotard 1979), to borrow the famous phrase coined by Jean-François Lyotard in declaring them eclipsed by postmodernity. Those grand narratives (or metanarratives) that the French philosopher (Lyotard 1971) had begun to deconstruct at the beginning of the ’70s by introducing the idea of a “figure”, full of archetypal, libidinal and unconscious meanings, that disrupted the conviction that there existed shared foundations underlying our ways of living and thinking, legitimized by enlightened rationality; this same figure, he argued, had generated the modern project and the categories of the bourgeois public opinion and public sphere (Habermas 1962). The Lyotardian “matrix figure”, for whom the pursuit and realization of singular desire are the very reason for being, replaced the Cartesian subject and enlightened and liberal individuals, as actors in the processes of modernity. This figure was also the bearer of a new culture of “mass narcissism” (Lasch 1979), which plays an important role in creating the climate of opinion and in building the electoral consensus of populisms. Such narcissism has a twofold character: that of the frustrated or failed personal expectations that fuel the pre-political sentiments of resentment and bitterness on one hand and of the hyper-individualization and tribalization of public debate, filled up increasingly extensively and thoroughly with filtered bubbles and echo chambers, on the other. The postmodern condition is thus presented as a radical break from the era generated by the Enlightenment, an epoch marked by the processes of rationalization and secularization, as identified by Max Weber and subsequent social theory. The stage of Western history that followed the end of the 1970s was pervaded by the crisis of reason, the crisis of “logocentrism” (to adopt the formulation of Lyotard and the French post-structuralist thought of that period) and the explosion of “linguistic games”. Postmodernism, characterized by disenchantment and the impossibility of relying on systems of reference and horizons of sensible meaning, reveals itself to be devoid of method and freed of traditions; it becomes a eulogy to fragmentation and fragmentedness. As such, it is, eminently, a “strategy” that forces us to make incessant choices in a decontextualized situation (Franzini 2018). And it finds fulfillment in the increasingly quantitatively and qualitatively intense flows of mass media, destined in the following decades to undergo an evermore marked technological evolution and acceleration. The cultural scenario generated by postmodernism thus leads to a reformulation of public discourse in which linguistic exchange, which is also “symbolic exchange” in the sense suggested by Jean Baudrillard, takes center stage. Such exchange revolves around excess, consumption and surplus, all manifestations of non-rational behavior and conduct (Baudrillard 1976). Within this space, irony – which Richard Rorty described as “liberal”, irenic, a guarantee of pluralism and tolerance (Rorty 1989) – finds space and comes to coexist alongside paralogy, with its resulting inconsistency in statements and the destructuring of argumentative logic. This creates a series of windows of opportunity for populist leaders and parties to spread their propaganda, propaganda which in many respects takes the shape of “magical thinking” (Panarari 2018). Literary critic Ihab Hassan documented and extolled this prevailing form of linguistic exchange, exerting an influence on Lyotard’s work and interpreting this historical shift through a series of paradoxical dichotomous and antithetical

158  Massimiliano Panarari couplings: paradox as the profound (or, rather, “light”) essence of the postmodern condition and its cultural expressions (Hassan 1971). Within nineteenth- and twentieth-century circuits of political representation, the primary function of intellectuals in the public sphere, just as in intermediate bodies and agents, consisted in producing ideology and political culture. There is a significant paradox in the fact that, in many respects, symbolic analysts in the postmodernized social and cultural landscape tend to resemble quite closely the paradigm of the organic intellectual and hardly at all that of the traditional intellectual (according to Antonio Gramsci’s distinction). A telling example is the case of Signorini, the journalist (and former high school teacher with a solid background in university-level classical literature), an “organic intellectual” serving Berlusconism, and specialist in online political communication (and former University lecturer in philosophy) Luca Morisi, working for Matteo Salvini’s Lega Nord sovereignism. Another case in point, if not to say exemplar of the trajectories of Italian populism, is the journalist and university lecturer Paolo Del Debbio. He was one of the early founders of Forza Italia in 1994 and later became a talk show host on the Mediaset networks on shows such as Secondo voi (2004–2010), Quinta Colonna (2012–2018), and Dritto e rovescio (launched in 2019) that have been presented as an opportunity for the “people” to speak out and be heard without filters or mediators, and have contributed markedly to fostering a favorable climate for populist parties. An additional example is historian and journalist Gennaro Sangiuliano, who was appointed director of Tg2 (the RAI 2 newscast) in 2018. Sangiuliano’s political background lies in the neo-fascist right wing of the Italian Social Movement (MSI) party, and he is a professed admirer of the kind of illiberal regime represented by Vladimir Putin’s Russia; today, he is a leading participant in the circles of intellectual populism surrounding the Lega Nord. And, finally, there is the TV intellectual Carlo Freccero (former director of various Mediaset and RAI channels, university lecturer in communication sciences and the author of introductions to the Italian translations of Debord’s texts) who theorized transforming RAI 2 – having returned as director in 2019 – into a sort of sovereignist “collective intellectual”, closely aligned with the Movimento 5 Stelle and Lega Nord government. This trend has gradually taken hold in conjunction with profound shifts in the field of progressive politics, where the eclipse of the public intellectual model adjoined and intersected with the irreversible decline of the organic intellectual ideal-type, according to the practices of Left-wing political organizations (­ Diamanti and Lazar 2018). In the West, the landscape of electoral campaigns is currently dominated by the “opinion climate paradigm” (Grossi 2009; Natale 2009) that is profoundly reworking the grids and cognitive frameworks of recipients’ (citizen-voters’) “perceived credibility”, but also that “projected” by the issuers of political communication (the leadership). It is here that the process of replacing the mediatic construction of public opinion with the manufacturing of an opinion climate  – centered on the cultural frame of the social figure of “ordinary people” – has reached its peak. This re-orientation in progress has been effectively deployed by the ideological and rhetorical-narrative platforms of populist communication from leaders, structured parties and fluid or intermittent movements.

Intellectuals and cultural populism 159 In this age of a populist turn, therefore, we find a peculiar cultural populism fed by the activities and thinking of groups of symbolic analysts who must, for all intents and purposes, be considered populist intellectuals. Their fundamental mission, moreover, is to construct discursive and narrative strategies, and to create – through storytelling – a “new narrative order” (Salmon 2007), one which often goes hand in hand with a more or less direct work of media management on their part. They are tasked with building what, drawing on Benedict Anderson and his studies on nationalism (Anderson 1983), can be considered “imagined communities” to be offered up for sale on the political market, communities which today are currently both instantaneous and intermittent. These figures are also called on to define the words and syntactic rules of a distinctly simplified neolanguage that fits perfectly into the flows of communication and, especially, those of mass self-­ communication. The simplism of this neolanguage, “fully comprehensible” to the “people”, is systematically held up in opposition to the “excessively complicated language” of intellectuals. Splitting and dividing the public sphere, while also resetting, in contrast to the mainstream media, the agenda of public debate: one of the further tasks carried out by populist intellectuals is thus the production of conspiracy theories and alternative accounts of events (what President Donald Trump’s advisor Kellyanne Conway called “alt-fact” or alternative facts) that give rise to a cacophony of voices and deafening background noise. The aim, it would seem, is to intervene in the perception of individuals to destabilize the shared reality that is essential for the functioning of institutions in a liberal democracy and constitutional state. In so doing, multiple fields of public discourse are created but without any communication or mutual exchange among them, with citizen-voters rigidly distributed into such fields and, therefore, deeply divided from each other. Various thinkers associated with the label of postmodernism and proponents of theses and philosophies inspired by relativism have made a substantial contribution, albeit in a divergent ways, to fostering this process of transforming the public sphere and public opinion into this archipelago deprived of common infrastructure or linkages (Kakutani 2018). Indeed, populist intellectuals have appropriated the legacy of postmodernism and relativism for purely propagandistic and political ends, often distorting its meaning and intentions in doing so. A legacy of which, often distorting its sign and intentions, the populist intellectuals have appropriated themselves with a purely propagandistic and political objective. Another of their functions involves constructing the image of the populist leader in a lens deriving from the schemes and patterns of the Hollywood star system (Codeluppi 2017), in keeping with processes of “peoplisation” (Ventura 2019) and the communicative facilitation of politicians as celebrities.

4 Conclusion Political populisms display a strong, or rather constitutive, dose of ambivalence (and ambiguity) that is clearly manifested in the dimension of cultural populism. In Italy in the twentieth century, expressions of populism have cast the intellectual

160  Massimiliano Panarari as a distant and often enemy figure and, therefore, as the ideal target for their polemics. On one hand, because of their distinctive traits, intellectuals seem to generate a large difference and distance between themselves and the common people: intellectuals are identified as an ideal-typical incarnation of the ruling classes, the bearers of social privileges, as well as attitudes, behavior and ways of expressing themselves that are distinct from those that prevail among the vast majority of the population. And, therefore, intellectuals display all the negative characteristics of “distinction” – in the sense coined by Pierre Bourdieu, that is, taste as a construction deriving from one’s social position (Bourdieu 1983) and, on the other hand, because of the way that populist narratives automatically categorize (and thereby delegitimize) intellectuals as belonging to the political Left and to liberalism. This rhetorical-discursive strategy is based on an ideological operation (in this case, by bringing together “rhetoric” and “ideology”, two of the three levels of analysis that Kenneth Minogue deployed in relation to populism; Minogue 1969) that overlooks the actual content or orientation of the questions and arguments in question. Instead, it generalizes and lumps together, thereby extending the category of hostile intellectuals to include all mainstream media and legacy media journalists as well, especially those who work for liberal and liberal-democratic media outlets (usually defined by historians of Italian journalism as the “bourgeois press”; Bergamini 2006). Like a common thread, anti-intellectualism has invariably woven its way through all the proto-populist and, later, straightforwardly populist tendencies and strands of contemporary Italian political history. Certain constants have systematically re-appeared in these currents, including the centrality and innovative use of communication, creative and polemical language (and frequently using the above-mentioned novel forms of “neo-language”), and the apologia and hagiography of ordinary people (the “people”) as the fruit of deliberate acts of theorization and discursive constructionism, all thanks to the analytical labor and reasoning of a series of symbolic analysts. These underlying characteristics have been transferred to the various formulas of populism that have proliferated since Italy entered the postmodern era. And with the sole exception of the reflexive populism of civil society – that of contesting the official leftist parties (especially left-wing Democrats) as manifested in the “girotondi” and “popolo viola” protests (Ginsborg 2010; Tarchi 2018) – all the other forms immediately preceding and following have, in fact, expressed their suspicion of intellectuals. This is the case of the new right-wing populism and “pure” populism of the Movimento 5 Stelle; the same was also true, however, of the soft populism of the government embodied by prime minister Matteo Renzi (2014–2016), leader of the Democratic Party, whose storytelling applied derogatory labels to intellectuals considered adversaries, calling them “professoroni” (overblown academics) and “owls” (that is, birds of ill omen; Ventura 2015). At the same time, however, because of the fundamental ambiguity identified in this chapter, there is also a late-modern intellectual populism in which the model of “ordinary people’s intellectual” plays a key role. This common-man’s

Intellectuals and cultural populism  161 intellectual is therefore an essentially functional figure, a “supplementary official”, serving populist and neo-populist leaders and parties whose essential task ultimately consists in producing communicative acts aimed at provoking political enthrallment in order to build electoral consensus (Lipovetsky 2019). A case in point are the anti-intellectual opinion campaigns of a far-right website closely allied with Italy’s populist executive branch, with the semantically telling name “L’Intellettuale dissidente” (www.lintellettualedissidente.it). Anti-intellectualism forms therefore an intrinsic part of the paradoxes and ambiguities of Italian postmodern populisms.

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9 Penal populism in the multi-populist context of Italy Stefano Anastasìa and Manuel Anselmi

1 Introduction In this chapter, we will illustrate how almost three decades of neo-populism have triggered several dynamics of penal populism, altering the relationship between politics and the justice system in this country. In particular, we will analyze the laws that have been produced in the last few years by ruling political forces of different ideological orientations on issues such as immigration, urban security and road checks. We will stress how the idea of justice that underpins these laws could be attributed more to reasons of political consensus than to a rational approach to the problems at stake. Furthermore, we will show that these actions promote a mindset aiming at changing the orientations of the civil society, shared values and the common sense, in a new perspective detached from the rule of law and based on irrational and emotional aspects, aptly defined “punitive society”. We believe that the neo-populist turn in the Italian system has not only deeply transformed the political system and structures but also civil society and public opinion, creating new arrangements of entire spheres of the social and political system in Italy. Considered a consensual drift, political populism has depoliticized the sphere of classic politics and professional politicians; however, it has politicized that were not political in an excessive way realms, such as those of civil society and the justice system, transferring the logic and needs of political consensus to these areas. Without going as far as claiming an exceptionality of the Italian case, we are aware that, in the panorama of populism studies, Italy represents a clear paradigmatic example (Tarchi 2015; Biorcio 2010), in the same way as the Latin American subcontinent does, for different reasons. In the scientific literature on populism, Italy represents one of the most representative and interesting cases due to the alternation and co-existence of various populist political forces, which are the joint result of a strong de-politicization of the political sphere and a hyper-politicization of other spheres such as civil society and the justice system. For the purposes of this analysis, we will start with a critical examination of the concept of “penal populism”, aware of the epistemological and definitional limits

Penal populism in Italy  165 of this new category, which is difficult to describe, and through an approach aimed at, on the one hand, linking this phenomenon to the political context in which it is inserted and on the other, at illustrating the more profound crisis of the rule of law in representative democratic systems (see also Blokker in this volume). Our objective is therefore to redefine the concept of penal populism as the “populist use of criminal law”.1

2  The emergence of penal populism on the side of its effects In penal and criminological literature, penal populism emerged in the mid-1990s as an interpretative category of the transformations that were taking place in the political choices regarding criminalization in Western countries. From the 1970s onwards, in the Unites States of America, and later in Europe and other big Commonwealth countries with a Western socio-juridical tradition, the number of convicts in the population started to increase without a direct correlation to trends in indicators of crime (Anastasìa 2012). This is the effect of what sociology-oriented criminology calls the social construction of deviance in criminalization processes. In just a few years, the percentage of convicts in the population in most European countries doubled, whereas in the USA it increased by sevenfold. The widespread use of instruments of pre- or post-trial probation was not very effective, proving the so-called “net widening effect” true, identified by Thomas Blomberg back in 1980. The return to the use of prisons on a vast scale, together with the diffusion of new forms of institutional social control of a coercive type, in conditions of deprivation of freedom (such as in detention centres for foreigners) or on the territory (as in the case of alternatives to prison, increasingly monitored electronically and remotely), gave rise to a vast literature.2 Due to scientific inconsistency and naturalistic explanations, according to which the trend of punitive indicators corresponded to that of criminality, scientific literature shifted towards the identification of the causes of this phenomenon, identified in the interaction among spheres of social action that have indirect effects on the functioning of the criminal system: the demographic-economic circuit and the discursive elaboration of public decisions on the primary and secondary choices of criminalization. The former category includes studies of the political economy of punishment, of a Marxist tradition, which links the trend in punishment indicators with the economic cycle and the management of the labour force. The latter category includes “culturalist” studies, which are more attentive to the evolution of the sensitivities and demand for social control widespread in society. Both approaches inevitably identify political-institutional actors as the play-makers of the normative translation and the more or less consistent implementation of choices of criminalization. In this framework, on a parallel track to the one thoroughly examined by the sociology of punishment and social control, a line of studies has emerged which has delved into the changes in punitive vocabulary and the impact on the latter of transformations in public and political communication.

166  Stefano Anastasìa and Manuel Anselmi In a collective work dedicated to the politics of criminal enforcement, Anthony Bottoms (1995) for the first time linked the adjective “populist” to the noun “punitiveness”, a term that is not easily translatable and could be positioned between the propensity to punish and the effectiveness of criminal enforcement. In 2003, a comparative research by Julian V. Roberts, Loretta J. Stalans, David Indermaur and Mike Hough was published, which was dedicated to penal populism and public opinion in five legal systems of the Anglo-Saxon tradition (USA, Great Britain, Canada, Australia and New Zealand). The authors share a definition of penal populism as the pursuit of a framework of penal policies “to win votes rather than to reduce crime rates or to promote justice” (Roberts et al. 2003, 5). This definition is similar to the one later proposed by Luigi Ferrajoli (2018), according to which “penal populism” can be interpreted as “any strategy in terms of security aimed at demagogically obtaining popular consensus by responding to fear generated by street crime, through a circumstantial use of criminal law which is at the same time strongly repressive and against civil liberties, and inefficient as far as its proposed preventative objectives are concerned”.

3  Penal populism: a new definition There is objectively a definitional problem, one that does not relate to the substance of the phenomenon but rather to the explanatory clarity of the combination of terms in the notion of “penal populism”. Whereas with the term “populism” we qualify the ideology of a political movement, its “penal” qualification should correspond to a populist political movement whose main political programme is the achievement of justice through punishment and sanctions, which would be absurd even in the worst dystopian world. Criminal law and its use are indeed contents with a high symbolic value; however, they remain instruments, not objectives, of any idea of justice. For all these reasons, it is not plausible to think of a specific penal-populist ideology, as if the society of punishment or the good of the highest possible legally inflicted suffering was a stand-alone idea for a just society and the common good. If, on the other hand, law and criminal justice are instruments used to obtain and consolidate popular consensus, as it emerges in most definitions described above, it is more correct to talk about a populist use of the law and criminal justice by political and institutional actors, thus expanding our gaze beyond parties and political movements that define themselves or are qualified as “populist” on the basis of a general way of understanding political representation. The populist use of the law and criminal justice is frequently ascribed to so-called populist movements due to the specific capacity of criminal law to be interpreted in an antagonistic manner, against the “enemies” of the people; however, it can also be implemented by “traditional” political actors, or even institutional actors who, within the dynamics between powers, find themselves in a situation of carrying out a political and therefore a general role, which is not limited to the exercise of a specific power in a specific circumstance.

Penal populism in Italy  167 The wide notion of a “populist use of the law and criminal justice” allows us to understand the extent and specificities of the object of our study far beyond their affiliation to parties, movements or leaderships that are called or self-proclaimed populist. The interpretative grid of the populist uses of law and criminal justice that we have developed around the following elements: • • • •

The actors of the populist use of the law and criminal justice; The targets of their initiative; The legal and cultural instruments used; The social functions fulfilled by the diverse experiences of the populist use of the law and criminal justice.

All the actors of the populist use of the law and criminal justice are “political” actors, as they wish to produce effects in the decision-making and public communication spheres through their action and the recourse to symbolic and practical resources of the law and criminal justice. However, for a careful understanding of the actors who populate the public scene, we must distinguish at least between the political actors stricto sensu and institutional actors who carry out a political action that transcends their own official functions. Among the political actors stricto sensu there are certainly the parties, movements and leaderships that – for ideology, strategy or rhetoric – define themselves or are qualified as “populist”, be they in government or in opposition. However, also featured in the same category are those single-issue movements that consider punitive claims towards their political or social adversaries, or the behaviour they blame, a critical element in the pursuit of their own political proposal. Finally, the category also includes those means of information that turn the dynamic between demand and offer of criminal justice into a component of their editorial marketing strategies to the point that they try to influence it. In the populist use of the law and criminal justice the target is critical. It is not the punishment per se that motivates the actors but rather the identification of the ‘other’ in contrast to the people, as its enemy, against whom to address the tools of the law and criminal justice. Rhetorically, the populist use of the law and criminal justice has two potential and separate targets: upwards, towards the elites that prevent people from exercising fully their own democratic prerogatives; downwards, towards those who are strangers to the community because of their origin, lifestyle or subjective condition. Obviously, according to populist standards, both targets are strangers to the popular community in whose name the actors of the populist use of the law and criminal justice mobilize: they represent “them” as opposed to “us”. The instruments used by the populist use of criminal justice are both specifically legal and more widely cultural. John Pratt, in his conceptual systemization of the phenomenon of penal populism (2007), identified three cultural instruments through which the populist use of the law and criminal justice is socially legitimized: the communicative

168  Stefano Anastasìa and Manuel Anselmi glamourization of crime, the absence of statistics from the public debate and the assertion of the paradigm of the victim. The glamourization of crime is the simple consequence of the development of mass media and their interactive capacities applied to the criminological passion which makes crime, and evil more generally, a particularly interesting theme in literature, as well as in information and the news. In his work, Pratt showed the change in the representation of crime in the English national media system through the emerging of TV programmes based on the spectacularization of real facts, where the audience is involved in the attempt at resolving the cases. This change can be transposed to other linguistic and cultural areas, also thanks to the power of international oligopolies in TV production, which creates a standardization of television offerings worldwide. This glamourization of real crime is accompanied by a proliferation of criminological dramas, under the guise of national and international TV series, and especially by the relevance of crime news in the information circuit, which makes crime and danger ubiquitous in the life experience of TV users, with macroscopic effects recorded in all sociological surveys on the perception of insecurity and risks of victimization. The social construction of subjective insecurity as fear of becoming a victim of crime, if not as perception of already being one, represents a critical element of the populist use of the law and criminal justice, which is supported by the delegitimization of any real data relating to the actual conditions of risk of being exposed to criminal phenomena. This is what Pratt called the de-statisticalization of the crime scene and Garland (2004, 258–261) defined “decline of expert competence” in the criminological field. As Manuel Anselmi (2015, 18) wrote, the de-statisticalization shows the rhetorical nature of populism in the criminal field: “the arguments that animate the civil debate on legal and criminal matters always need to be subordinated to a logic of consensus and to the achievement of the aim of persuading the adversary, in this case the citizens”. The third cultural element present in the populist use of the law and criminal justice is the recourse to the flag of the victims against the real or potential perpetrators of the offense to the community. “The victim movement became increasingly identified with the ‘punitive populism’ exercised by political and media forces that exploit (and seek to enhance) a free-floating ‘fear of crime’, and a perceived need to protect ‘the vulnerable’ from ‘the dangerous’ ” (Sebba and ­Berenblum 2013, 12). Juridically, the instrument of rediscovering the victim is, according to Pratt, one of the founding elements of penal populism: the spread of forms of reparative justice, where perpetrator and victim are placed one in front of the other in a mediation attempt that can also include direct reparative actions by the perpetrator of the crime towards the victim. These cultural instruments, which impact directly on the sphere of public opinion and its demand for quantity and quality of punishment, add to the strictly legal instruments of the populist use of the law and criminal justice. An already-rich literature has documented the constant elements of criminal policies adopted in Western countries in the last decades, configuring a model of criminal law and

Penal populism in Italy  169 institutional social control attributable to the populist action of political actors in competition among themselves. We can follow their traces in a toolkit articulated along three areas of intervention: •

• • •

The idea of prevention/punishment of deviance as a moment of turf war and with no distinction as far as the severity of the facts is concerned, their offensiveness and even their formal acknowledgement as criminally relevant. These events are qualified as “emergencies”, from the war on crime to the war on drugs, from the war on terror to zero tolerance towards forms of social irregularity. The tendency to maximize the punishment through a general increase of punishment limits, the recrudescence of how recidivism is disciplined  – up to prefiguring a special criminal law for each kind of perpetrator. and, finally, the rediscovery of capital punishment (from death penalty to life sentences). The renewed rigidity of punishment during the enforcement process, in the name of the so-called “certainty of punishment”, interpreted as its intangibility and execution “without discounts”.

Finally, in relation to the motivation of the actors of the populist use of the law and criminal justice, distinct functions can be identified. As we have mentioned, the actors of the populist use of the law and criminal justice are all, in general terms, political actors; however, they can have very different political projects, both for ideological reasons and for the political and institutional function they hold. For the political actors stricto sensu, the political use of the law and criminal justice will be determined by their political role in government or opposition. If they are in government, the actors of the political use of the law and criminal justice will consider it an element of stabilizing consensus and the power relationships within political institutions. On the contrary, if they are in opposition, the actors of the political use of the law and criminal justice will use it in a perspective of change of the political equilibrium, in the search for a popular legitimization of their political proposal. Even actors whom we have defined as “institutional” can use these dynamics when they play their role in a logic of consensus for the exercise of their functions in a present or future perspective. In this case, those who hold institutional functions can resort to a populist use of criminal justice not only because of their ­political-ideological orientation but also to strengthen their own role and functions in the eyes of public opinion and within the dynamics between powers, to capitalize the resources connected to their role in the perspective of a change of function.3

4  On the populist use of the law and criminal justice Based on the interpretative grid proposed, the populist use of the criminal law, far from being the prerogative of one side or having a specific political direction, can be both “right” and “left”, both “progressive” and “conservative”, depending

170  Stefano Anastasìa and Manuel Anselmi on the target towards which it is directed and the functions it aims to perform. The populist use of criminal justice which targets the elites that the actor wants to oppose directly can be considered “left wing”, whereas the one directed against marginal subjects identified as symbolic replacements of those internal or extraterritorial “strong powers” who prevent the exercise of the popular will within the confines of the national community are considered “right wing”. In the same way, the populist use of criminal justice aimed at a change in the existing power relations is considered “progressive”, whereas the one used by those who hold political or institutional roles with the aim of stabilizing a determined power arrangement is considered “conservative”. With a return to a claimed political use of criminal justice and the explicit abandonment of the criminal law of the fact, in favour of a new criminal law of the perpetrator, the fundamental principles of penal civil liberties of the liberal tradition, which now seem mere obstacles to the realization of popular justice, disappear. Such an idea of criminal justice contradicts the development, albeit contradictory, of centuries of legal evolution and risks perpetuating the deficit in criminal law as a memento for all the atrocities perpetrated in its name.4 However, penal guaranties will not save itself by pulling itself up from its hair, like Baron Münchhausen. A new path must be found, which renovates its motivation and predictions. A path that deals non (only) with the protection of the person under investigation, the defendant, and the convicted in the criminal system, according to a logic of legitimization internal to the criminal justice system, but (also) with the role of penal guaranties in the equilibrium of the political and democratic system. In this respect, whereas the abuse of the law and criminal justice can favour the pursuit of populist political programmes based on the exclusion and criminalization of the adversary, penal guaranties can play an additional public role, beyond the confines of the courts: a function of ecology of politics, which, freed from the burden of the identification of criminal responsibility of social discontent, can make the conflicts of interest and values that determine it transparent, which otherwise are clumsily concealed in the search for a scapegoat. Obviously this is not easy; however, when that social discontent which is the leverage for populist proposals is real, only a step backward by criminal law, insured by rigorous respect for the principles of the rule of law, can make the power dynamics that it conceals, and that cannot be identified in legal proceedings, intelligible. We will now illustrate how political populism has progressively transformed the Italian public sphere and generated forms of penal populism in terms of a demo-consensual drift of democracy. Specifically, we will analyze three chosen cases: vehicular homicide, urban security and the migratory issue.

5  Italian multipopulism Generally, as often happens in Latin America, a populist movement emerges in a context where there is a minority against a majority of non-populist forces, according to a typically anti-system configuration, and for which the opponents of populism are easily ascribable to the establishment. The populist forces in fact

Penal populism in Italy  171 reiterate their difference against a system and other political forces, which are then considered by the populists themselves as an expression of the elite. If this can be found in many famous cases of classical populism and neopopulism from Peron to Chávez, from Haider to Correa, this is not the case with Italian neopopulism. Italy is one of the few political contexts in which more cases of neopopulism have occurred, moreover in competition with each other (Anselmi 2017; Anselmi and de Nardis 2018) to the point of distorting the whole political sphere in this sense and also social fields. In fact, what has happened in Italy for more than twenty years has been a neo-populist turning point that has affected both the parties that have played a governing role and those that have played an opposition role. The different Italian movements and parties are for the most part different forms and variants of the populist modality in terms of style, ideology and strategy. In particular, it is possible to speak of a veritable populist turn in Italian politics that has also promoted a populist mentality widespread in the public sphere (Tarchi 2015). From a historiographical point of view, it is possible to identify this passage of the way of doing politics in the transition from the so-called First Republic to the Second Republic (Urbinati and Ragazzoni 2016). Between 1990 and 1994, Italy suffered an extraordinary crisis of the ten-year party system of the First Republic, based on a very complex system of political mediation, made up of trade unions, territorial rooting, strong ideologies and a multiplicity of representation systems. After the Second World War in Italy a strong political society had emerged (Farneti 1971) which clearly distinguished itself from civil society. Accelerating this crisis were the numerous corruption scandals, known as Tangentopoli. Not only was the liquidation of that party system, but it also determined the end of that way of doing politics, of that ideological system and of those forms of political participation. The distortion generated a form of crisis of political foundations and a relative void that laid the foundations for new forms of politics based on disintermediation, on personalization and on new ideological forms, not linked to historical doctrines such as socialism or communism, but linked to more tactical visions (Passarelli Tuorto 2018). The Italian multipopulism was determined with the emergence of the ethnoregionalist movement of the first Northern League in the 1980s, which was characterized by a northern claim, above all in terms of economic claim, an adversity towards the central and national state system. Subsequently, in 1994, there was the descent into the field of Silvio Berlusconi and the formation of Forza Italia, which constituted the first form of telepopulism (Taguieff 2006). During the 2000s the Purple People movement established itself, led by comedian Beppe Grillo and with a marked anti-Berlusconian orientation, which in 2009 turned into the Five Star Movement, a movement that has made direct online participation and forms of communication on the Internet a characteristic of identity, to the point of being called a webpopulism. Even the experience of Matteo Renzi’s leadership in the Party, which began with the victory of the 2013 national primaries and ended with first his resignation as prime minister in December 2016 and then as party secretary in December 2017, is characterized by a populist fort from tall and of

172  Stefano Anastasìa and Manuel Anselmi institutional matrix, despite being born to oppose the populisms. Finally the transformation of the Northern League in the last six years, with the new leadership of Matteo Salvini, who became secretary in 2013, who transformed a movement and a party of ethnoregionalist inspiration into a right-wing nationalist and populist party, on the example of Le Pen in France. With the new League, Salvini was able to replace anti-macro-sentimental feelings with anti-immigrant sentiments, promoting xenophobic campaigns and promoting security and repressive visions. For the purposes of our discussion, it is interesting to note how the Italian neopopulistic shift has led to the advancement of very different and qualitatively different movements (populist ethnoregionalism, telepopulism, webpopulism) which, however, had a common and fundamental element: presenting themselves as belonging to civil society. Despite the differences in content, all the leaders of these populist forces presented themselves with a strong anti-political connotation or however in opposition to classical politics, favoring a tendency of public opinion. The transition to the Second Republic and to the current policy has in fact meant the loss of the classical configuration of political society, where civil society was very distinct, subordinated and distant from the political sphere in favor of a civil society with a pre-eminently political function and a sphere negativized and condemned politics. As already noted (Anselmi and de Nardis 2018), with the consolidation of Italian multipopulism, the functional politicization of civil society and the nonpolitical spheres of society have also been associated with a depoliticization of the classical political sphere. In the light of this double movement, the strong political conditioning and the extension of political consensus logic to non-political areas such as justice must therefore be considered. The removal of classical political problems, such as the difference between right and left or the opposition between social classes, has favored a perspective based on issues such as the security of citizens and the defense of the citizen of any form of threat, but above all in irrational terms and of perceived fears. The increase in the phenomena of penal populism, of which some emblematic cases will now be illustrated more specifically, has therefore been favored by the demo-consensual drift resulting from the neopopulist turning point of the Italian political system. It is no coincidence that recourse to increasingly frequent forms of populist use of criminal law have been recorded since the crisis of the so-called First Republic, from the first law-and-order campaign, for the criminalization of drug use, promoted by the first personalist leader of the Republican Italy, Bettino Craxi, in the aftermath of exclusion from the government and in an attempt to resume a central role in the country’s agenda setting. Then followed the corruption investigations that accompanied the change of political system between 1992 and 1994 and the affirmation since the nineties of the centrality of the theme of security and its intertwining with that of immigration.

6  The migratory issue In 2009, the Berlusconi government, with Roberto Maroni as Interior Minister, introduced Law n.94/2009, which sanctions the behaviour of the foreigner who

Penal populism in Italy  173 enters or remains on the national territory in violation of the norms that rule. It was a law that aimed to regulate the entrance and stay in Italy of citizens from countries outside the European Union. It established a crime whose sanction is a fine ranging from 5,000 to 10,000 euros. This criminal offence immediately showed a substantial inconsistency: is it meaningful to sentence to a monetary sanction a person who is an illegal foreigner without a permit of stay, and who, as such, cannot open a bank account or hold real and personal properties but, above all, arrives in a condition of poverty. This person would not have any asset that could be seized. Therefore, this law immediately proved inefficient both from this point of view and a more general one of deterrence, as an individual who has experienced far more serious risks to their safety is unlikely to fear a monetary sanction. In the following years there have been various proposals aimed at depenalizing this offense, due to several critiques by jurists of the whole structure of these provisions. The most important critique, from the point of view of the penal populist logic, was the one that equated the condition of a migrant to a crime or a threat. The condition of a migrant is instead a humanitarian one which would need support according to the universal principles of human rights. It is not only a criminalization but rather a proper transformation of a specifically difficult human condition into a condition of hostility. The foreigner becomes an enemy, a threat. As Pepino stated, “the migrant becomes a crime” in a logic which also shows many traits of unconstitutionality (Pepino 2009). The crime of illegal immigration, albeit of an administrative nature, and although the previous law n.189/2002 (the so-called Bossi-Fini) already provided for similar measures, has validated and reinforced a series of provisions such as rejection, expulsion and detention for administrative reasons. Both the Berlusconi government and the following ones were able to strengthen the system of detention and identification centres which were instituted in 1998 by the immigration law Turco-Napolitano (art. 12 of Law 40/1998), such as the Temporary Reception Centres, later renamed CIE (Identification and Expulsion Centres) by the BossiFini Law (L 189/2002), and recently C.P.R (Detention Center for Repatriation) by the Minniti-Orlando Law (L 46/2017). These are all detention structures where foreign citizens lacking a regular permit of stay are imprisoned, whom the Senator Carofiglio defined, with a remarkable polemical connotation, “administrative prisons”.

7 The crime of vehicular homicide and prevention based on fear The crime of vehicular homicide was introduced in Italy by Law n. 41 of 23 March 2016. Matteo Renzi was then Prime Minister, Marco Minniti was Interior Minister and Fabrizio del Rio was Minister for Transport. It was a law proposal that followed a citizens’ initiative which had been promoted since 2010, during the Monti government, although this issue had been debated for a long time. From the very beginning, on the one hand, this law gained strong popular approval, on the other, it was the target of important criticism by jurists, exactly

174  Stefano Anastasìa and Manuel Anselmi because it responded to the logic of political consensus. The new law aimed to increase sanctions for those who cause damage using a means of transport, providing for a drastic increase in punishment, which includes an eighteen-year sentence in case the victim dies and a suspension of the driving license for up to fifteen years. The previous norms provided for a maximum of fifteen years only in the case of hit and run as an aggravating circumstance. The law of vehicular homicide was strongly supported by several media campaigns, which, for a very long time, insisted on the inefficiency of the existing punitive arrangements. In the discourse that aimed at promoting this law, the stress on the impunity for those who caused road accidents was central, alongside the scarce protection for road victims. Above all, this proposal was based on an increasingly widespread need for a system of exemplary sanctions, which could work as a deterrent (Forti 2000). As has been noted by more attentive critics, however, the arguments in support of vehicular homicide alter criminal law in two directions: on one side, they suggest that the perpetrator of the unintentional crime is a special type of delinquent and therefore introduce a criterion of differentiation between a common citizen and a delinquent type; on the other, the symbolic nature of the criminal norm is exaggerated for the purposes of satisfying a widespread perception in public opinion. This law, which moves to the criminal sphere procedures that used to be part of the administrative one, promotes a vision of prevention and control based on fear (Roiati 2016), stressing once again a general punitive notion of society.

8  Urban security and perception of security Through the publication of Law n. 48/2017, “Urgent provisions on matters of urban security”, again during the Renzi government, the concept of urban security became a central element in the Italian public debate and law. It consists of a series of provisions aimed at combating local criminal and illegal phenomena, such as drug dealing, prostitution, and other behaviours. In the text of the law, urban security is defined as the public good that refers to cities’ liveability and decorum, to be achieved also through regeneration interventions, which include city planning, social and cultural actions, as well as the restoration of degraded areas and sites, the elimination of factors of marginality and social exclusion, prevention of criminality, in particular of a predatory type, promotion of a culture of respect for legality, and the achievement of higher levels of social cohesion and civil coexistence. (art. 4) Aiming at a local territorial control, the normative arrangement of these dispositions relies on a key figure, the mayor, who, from an administrative actor, turns into somebody who is increasingly involved in the repression and prevention of matters

Penal populism in Italy  175 of a criminal nature. In this case as well, a typical trait of penal populism emerges, which is the transformation of administrative functions and measures into penal ones. The political motivations behind these measures appeared clear in the government’s report to the law decree: to reassure citizens on the state’s commitment to territorial control, to improve the perception of security and to reassure the civil community. It is interesting to note how, in his report’s logical-argumentative premise, the minister pointed to multiethnic society, stating that “The new society, now mainly multiethnic, needs . . .” This implicit passage revealed a negativization of multiethnic society as a cause of disorder, insecurity, lack of control and therefore a criminogenic condition that needed to be repressed. The reference to the perception of security, on the other hand, was more explicit, and it then became one of the ideological and doctrinaire traits of Minister Minniti, a trait that would be later shared by other political forces. In this perspective, the perception of security becomes a juridical good worthy of protection, considered part of an alleged right to security (Cornelli 2008). From an analytical point of view, this is however an idea which tends to institutionalize the non-objective dimension of insecurity in favour of a perceptive, subjective and symbolic one, based on threats and fears, thus validating those dynamics of de-statisticalization typical of penal populism and consigning it to a purely political debate, conditioned by needs of political consensus. Urban security therefore becomes a conceptual device aimed at satisfying a social need of security, with a strong evocative and ideological power, which however at the scientific and analytical level shows all its vagueness and inconsistency. It also produces contradictions and confusion at the normative level, above all the confusion between roles and functions that were properly defined in the pre-existing Italian normative system. By mixing issues of neglect and social marginality with normal provisions on crime control, urban security appears as one of those legal concepts that Massimo Pavarini used to define as “catch-all” (Pavarini 1997). These concepts can be understood more at the level of the impact on public opinion rather than in terms of consistency with the assumptions of criminal law and the institutional system.

9  Populism’s punitive and non-universal society The law on illegal immigration, the vehicular homicide law and the law on so-called urban security clearly show that in Italy, at least in the last decade, there has been a tendency to elaborate new legislation on matters of criminal law which focuses on strengthening repressive actions in a strongly symbolic and punitive way. A new intention of the legislators has emerged: they are now moved by a need to communicate a crackdown action or the strengthening of punishment, dictated by an alleged inefficiency of the pre-existing legislative arrangement. These laws are born out of a need to produce a specific type of effect in society, to respond to emotional needs and media-induced urgencies. The stress on the perception of security, and therefore on alleged insecurity, with increasingly minimum reference to objective reality, shows the rhetorical nature of these interventions.

176  Stefano Anastasìa and Manuel Anselmi The main argument used is always collective reassurance; however, the real aim is to use new criminal norms that can generate and maintain a political consensus. The society that is aimed at is a punitive society in which the concept of fear is critical both as a premise and a deterring element. It is a politics of criminal law that is founded on a negative and punitive exemplarity, where there is no room for the defence of civil liberties, social inclusion and positive prevention of crime based on a progressive transformation of society. As has been written (Donini 2007), it is a general approach to criminal law close to the criminal law of the enemy. The deviant actors and those who contravene a norm become irredeemable subjects who need to be controlled and repressed as internal enemies. This is, in our opinion, the most important element that conceptually links penal populism to political populism: a polarizing scheme in which an element of society is negativized to the benefit of a complementary part, one’s “own” one, which is considered positive. Manichaeism, a typical trait of populism, which recalls Schmitt’s friend–enemy juxtaposition, implies two social effects that are highly beneficial in terms of creating political consensus; however, at the same time, they are depriving the law of power and damaging it in terms of its procedural aspects and its basic guarantees. The first effect is the impossibility of any mediation between the two sides, as the one that considers the other one negative and the enemy (specifically the dominant punitive common sense against delinquents or those allegedly so) does not leave any possibility of mediation and understanding, always adopting an antagonistic and repressive modality. There is therefore an implicit authoritarianism, which moves in a direction opposite of the defence of civil liberties, the rehabilitation of the perpetrator and the most classic principles of criminal law. The second effect is the specificity or – even better – the non-universalism of these penal conceptions, which, by pointing to an inherently antagonistic and delinquent subjectivity, similar to the positivistic logic of the “delinquent type”, establish a superior criminal law based on class and endowed with better guarantees and an inferior criminal law with fewer guarantees and protections.

Notes 1 This chapter is the development of a reflection begun with the following article: S. Anastasìa, “L’uso populista della giustizia e del diritto penale”, in  Ragion pratica, n. 52, giugno 2019, 197–215. In the context of collective work, chapters 2, 3, 4 are by Stefano Anastasia; chapters 5, 6, 7 and 8 by Manuel Anselmi; introduction and chapter 9 are by both. 2 See, for example, the critique by Wacquant (2013) of Garland (2001) on the use of the terms “mass imprisonment” and “mass incarceration”, according to whom the use of “mass” evokes an extensive dimension of incarceration that does not take into account its intensive dimension, that is the selectivity of the criminal repression system, to the detriment of an ethnically and socially identified minority, more aptly defined – in his opinion – as “hyper-incarceration”. 3 Think, in particular, of the role played by public prosecutors in a legal system like the one in the USA and the political relevance of the exercise of their function. For these

Penal populism in Italy  177 reasons they are considered key positions in the dynamic of power and political representation, to which they frequently accede thanks to the position held and on the basis of their political use of their functions. 4 “The history of punishment is certainly more horrendous and infamous for humanity than the history of crime . . . it is not exaggerated to state that all the punishments imposed in history have produced for the human species a cost of blood, lives and mortifications incomparably superior to that produced by all crimes” (Ferrajoli 2018, 382).

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178  Stefano Anastasìa and Manuel Anselmi Tarchi, M. (2015), Italia populista. Dal qualunquismo a Beppe Grillo, Bologna, il Mulino. Urbinati, N., Ragazzoni, D. (2016), La vera seconda Cortina Raffaello Repubblica. L’ideologia e la macchina, Milano, Cortina Raffaello. Wacquant, L. (2013), Iperincarcerazione. Neoliberismo e criminalizzazione della povertà negli Stati Uniti, Verona, Ombre corte.

Part IV

Populism and the transformation of politics

10 Citizen democracy New politics in new participation models Marco Damiani

1  Introduction: democracy is participation In contemporary history, “participation” and “democracy” always proceed hand in hand, so much so that the institution of the one cannot exclude deployment of the other. In particular the quality of democracy and the various models of democratic regimes depend on forms of political participation. According to Maurizio Cotta (1979) and Albert Hirschman (1982), the word “participate” indicates two fundamental meanings in its political and common use: (1) to participate, as in to take part in, a specific act, or process of a political character in a broad sense; (2) to participate, intended as to be part of, an organism, a group, a community or a political institution. In the first sense, participation means the act of sharing a collective action together with a plurality of operating actors: one participates because one feels part of and one “consents” to the action of the others. In its second sense, in contrast, participation expresses the direct belonging of the single members to the whole. In this case, one participates by virtue of not only taking part but also of being part, and therefore of feeling part of a set of people with whom one believes to be sharing a certain vision of the world. It is in this sense that in democratic regimes forms of participation end up constituting the legitimizing principle of the decisions that are made. Participating implies the possibility of choosing one’s own behaviour and the avoidance of being passively subjected to choices made from above. Political participation may be considered both an ancient and a recent phenomenon. It is ancient in the sense that it can be traced back, in different forms and organizations, to the oldest of human communities. At the same time, however, political participation is also a sign of modern times in as much as it is closely connected to the changes of the human communities it concerns. As regards its diverse forms of manifestation, participation is characterized by (at least) two essential functions that are only counter-posed in appearance. These are the “instrumental” and the “expressive” or “symbolic” functions (Pizzorno 1993; Elster 1997; Della Porta et al. 2000). In the “instrumental” sense the individuals are considered nothing more than rational actors, bearers of preferences and specific interests: their actions and the attempt of conditioning exerted towards the governing bodies are oriented

182  Marco Damiani exclusively to safeguarding particular advantages, both material and idealistic. In this regard the modes of political action can be various: from the direct involvement of the individuals inside the policy-making to the attempt to interfere with the decisions adopted by the ruling class or the electoral choice of political positions. The idea is that those who do not take part in the participative phase, actually display great indifference regarding the protection of their personal interests (March and Olsen 1989). The “expressive” (or “symbolic”) form of political participation is rather different, intended as an end in itself. In this case, participation is not only a means of achieving other aims, be they of prescriptive nature or a set of values, relative to the protection of particular interests, to the selection of a political class, but also the instrument by which one can educate citizens who are active in public circles, towards a strong civicness, intended as a high sense of civic responsibility. In this light, political commitment contributes to educating people to a greater consciousness not only of their rights but also of their relative duties (Ferrara 2000; Pettit 1997; Viroli 1999). One learns to participate only by participating, so that the pedagogical role of participation contributes to developing a higher degree of civic awareness and renewed forms of political and social mobilisation (Elster 1997). Moreover, every diverse form of participation is characterized by having two different objectives. The first, addressed within the system, promotes the integration of those involved. The second, external to the system itself, aims at distributing particular advantages to various actors within the group. Each different meaning of the term “participation”, despite being sufficient to develop a functional ideal-typical model for theoretical analysis, cannot be considered thorough as an empirical explanation, as each participative phenomenon is made up of many different features at the same time (Raniolo 2002). With the end of the “Short Twentieth Century” (Hobsbawm 1994) and with the crisis of ideologies and the loss of strong social roots in political parties, democratic regimes recorded a profound crisis of representation that is also expressed in terms of a crisis in traditional political participation. All this regards the progressive decrease in the rulers’ capacity in providing answers to questions and problems and also the abandonment of the res publica on behalf of the European citizens, being unsatisfied and discouraged by the degree of political effectiveness shown by the institutional regimes (Della Porta 2001; Meny 2005). In view of such considerations, in the following pages, I will focus on the renewed forms of political participation and on the ways to build consensus used by the new parties and social movements in order to narrow the widening gap between electoral citizen and political elite. In particular, the aim is that of reflecting on the case of Italy, taken as a benchmark to empirically verify the considerations put forward in literature.

2  Transformations: political participation in the populist era Here, I will observe, describe, and investigate renewed ways of political participation as engaged in by populist parties and movements.1 The populist phenomenon, as described in this volume, acquires different meanings and nuances that are

Citizen democracy  183 rooted in the dissatisfaction of the public opinion towards the diverse manifestations of “politics as usual” (Kaltwasser et al. 2017; de la Torre 2018). From this point of view, Putnam’s description of citizens as “solitary bowlers” with few social ties, Skocpol’s portrait of leading civic organizations as “body-less heads” and Crouch’s analysis on the downward trend of “Post Democracy” are only some of the most important considerations advanced at the dusk of the golden age, of the forms of liberal and representative democracy (Putnam 2000; Skocpol 2003; Crouch 2004). Within this context, many populist experiences, intended as political platforms interested in institutionalizing the people’s resentment towards the governing elite, gained increasing relevance. Focusing on the Italian case, in the following pages the aim is to describe the tools of political participation used by the main contemporary populist parties at a national level. In fact, in the years in which “The End of History” (Fukuyama 1992) is announced throughout the world, intended as the inevitable victory of the capitalist democracies over every other form of political regime, Europe and Italy underwent a profound transformation of their democratic regimes and a substantial reconsideration of the participative tools that characterized the previous political phase. It is no coincidence that between the 20th and 21st centuries the success of the governance model rose, conceived as a bottom-up political scheme that implies the re-balance of the relationship between public and private, in substitution of the top-down government model prevalent in the public sector. Although conceived as a tool of democratic broadening of the decision-making process (Segatori 2011), governance, together with its myth of “governability”, responds to the neoliberal logics of reducing the political sphere to the economical, determining the weakening of the role formerly attributed to the legislative assemblies. “Governability” thus becomes the key word that allows re-politicization in the post-politics era, in juxtaposition to which – in the name of change regarding the choices of the establishment – the populist movements succeeded in strengthening and imposing their own political grammar. The shift from government to governance makes the role of the electoral citizen less important, where his/her decisional influence risks being reduced to the management of micro issues, that in the majority of the cases regard the local area of interest, expropriating their governing of the macro political sphere, that remains in the hands of small oligarchies mainly belonging to the spheres of economics and politics. In other words, according to Michele Sorice (2019, 134): “we can decide the colour of public garden’s fences and maybe the style of the street lights, but we have no power in choices regarding buying weapons or building schools: we have even less power than before, since the intermediate bodies that used to have some function in ideological mediation have lost their legitimacy”. When not relapsing into social apathy, the process of reconfiguration that leads to the international governance regime often goes together with a diffuse political disaffection, which in turn can originate forms of “exit” that can become a refusal of traditional liberal representation. This can create the conditions for generating new tools capable of allowing  – in a different way compared to the past  – the incorporation of the “people’s” voice in policy-making. In a transformed political

184  Marco Damiani context, the forms of participation undergo a radical change (Viviani 2017, 2018). Besides the traditional tools that characterized the political participation of the 20th century some new ones have now been added, reflecting the direct expression of the renewed political framework. The gens, increasingly free from bonds with social groups with which their collective destiny used to be inextricably linked in the past (family, lineage, village, religion, social class), starts to claim new institutions of participation with the goal of facilitating the pursuit of concrete instances of economic, social and political demand. The participation tools that arise are totally coherent with the renewed democratic governing scheme, representing a critique towards the classical models of representative democracy, and they also introduce the season of “new politics” (Dalton 1988). In the light of such considerations, I will now describe the new forms of political participation realized by the main so-called populist forces in order to thence discuss their main features. In this chapter, I have purposely avoided any discussion of the typical tools of political communication (already discussed in this volume by De Blasio and Sorice) used to organize a broader “bottom-up” involvement and a virtual participation in policy-making with the possibilities provided by technology and computer applications. In the following pages I will hence focus on the proposal of an ideal-typical tri-partition that is able to merge the devices of political participation in the age of full-blown populism. Such classification relies on three different categories of analysis: (1) participation intended as “Mobilization of Consensus”; (2) participation intended as “Consensual Participation”; and (3) participation intended as “Protest Reaction”. By Mobilization of Consensus, I  mean all those forms of participation that imply the mobilization of those with membership, or part of them, exclusively oriented towards the predetermination of consensus towards a specific political option. This category includes participation tools, which I will present in the following paragraph, aimed at the internal mobilization of members of specific political organizations. In Consensual Participation, on the other hand, the mobilization is broader, it regards the members of parties and movements, but normally it extends to a politically contiguous portion of citizens, not necessarily members of any political group. Also in this case the tools that are included in this category will be analyzed later. Lastly, the Protest Reactions are a different case to the street demonstrations as historically conceived by the non-populist parties. In this case, we are facing organized forms of protest, where the participants are of different social backgrounds, with different cultural levels, different lifestyles and different global views. These people share, according to Laclau (2005) the same starting condition, linked to the inability of the ruling class to defend their interests or to answer to their various problems, requirements and needs. The popular demands coming from these people make possible the building of a new “people” compared to the historical experiences of the protest movements (made up of people characterized by a high degree of homogeneity within the economic transformation processes). All this originates new forms of social claims that I  will soon cover in depth.

Citizen democracy  185 The impression is that the forms of participation through the traditional institutions experimented in mass democracy regimes, with organized parties strongly rooted in the territory, a broad pool of members and militants characterized by sharing rigid and predetermined ideological ideas have been mainly exhausted. This gave space to another way to search for consensus, in parties and movements of a different political nature, with a different organizational model, values and identity to the parties of 20th-century tradition.2 Due to the lack of a social class, in the traditional sense, in a regime of individualization and social fragmentation, the forms of participation in the “new politics” aim at creating modes of consensus in profoundly different cultural, political and institutional conditions to the past.

3  The instruments: towards a new ideal-typical model Following the changed starting conditions, the objective in this work is to build an ideal-typical model that can again include all the forms of political participation adopted by the populist parties and social movements during the years overlapping the 20th and 21st centuries (Table 10.1). The variables considered, that allow reaching the specified objective, correspond to two different dimensions of political behaviour. On the one hand, the attention is drawn towards the different aspects of post-ideological participation, i.e. the different forms of mobilization for consensus, consensual participation and protest reactions. On the other hand, I intend to refer to the level of political expression, by examining dimensions at a local and subnational, or national and supranational level. By intersecting these variables, I will identify and define a set of participative tools, typical of populist parties and movements of every order, degree and political colour. Most of the tools displayed in Table 10.1 are not exclusive to populist movements. These tools are also used by other non-populist political organizations (Boatright 2018). However, the specific (often combined) use by populist groups and parties ascribes an original connotation to such devices, which I intend to assess more in depth. Let’s now examine Table 10.1. The first line represents the different types of primary elections, intended as forms of participation included in the Mobilization of Consensus category and organized on both a local and subnational and a national and supranational level. The primary elections can present different connotations,

Table 10.1  Forms of political participation in the populist parties and movements Local and Subnational Level

National and Supranational Level

Mobilization of Consensus Consensual Participation

Primary elections Inclusive practices

Protest Reactions

Community protests

Primary elections Referendum and consultations Global protests

Source: our elaboration

186  Marco Damiani such as being “leader selections” or “candidate selections” (Rahat and Hazan 2001). In the first case, the leader of a political organization will be elected. In the second case, the choice will be for the most adequate candidate to run for specific monocratic institutional positions. Both figures in the political organization based on mass party models used to be selected through the traditional tools of politics. With the traditional parties’ crisis, the selection mechanisms for the leadership and the top roles of the ruling class take place through very different devices compared to the past. The use of primary elections starts from here, founded on the legitimization of the internal electoral process, to be used every time that the most important roles within the party or the institutions are to be selected. In most cases, the members of a determined political force are entitled to form the active electorate and in this way decide to entrust the shaping of its internal consensus to the democratic electoral process. With the leader selections the winning candidate will have a direct investiture that defines his/her position of influence within the party, becoming a primus super pares able to exert strong personal power. Likewise, with the candidate selections, the candidates to the main monocratic roles are identified through an electoral investiture that comes before the institutional one. The tools linked to “Consensual participation” differ from the others. These are tools with a high degree of political inclusion, with which the stakeholders (also in this case the focus is not on the citizen-electorate as rights holders, but rather on citizen-customers with specific interests) state their opinion on some of the issues that are considered strategic to the government of that political community. If in mass society, the models of consensual political participation were built upon the use of intermediate bodies that were able to mediate individual and collective interests with particular effectiveness, in a post-ideological era, the tools of consensual participation mostly become instruments capable of activating a part of stakeholders around an interest, frequently meant as a single issue, which represents a broader portion of political interest. In this context, the inclusive practices include the different forms of the so-called deliberative and participative democracy (Ackerman 2001). These modes of participation use very precise tools such as participatory budgeting (Boaventura de Sousa 1998; Rocke 2014), deliberative polling (Fishkin and Farrar 2005) and Deliberation Day (Ackerman and Fishkin 2002). These are all systems that try to involve individual citizens in policy making, in the attempt to balance the defence of predetermined interests by the government elite of every colour, order and degree. This same use is also attributed to referendums and consultations requested and organized for specific issues that regard well-defined matters. Both referendums and consultations can be internal or external to the party. In any case, in both inclusive practices and the possibility to call for referendums and consultations, the ratio is always the same: a direct appeal to the people to make decisions on all those choices of which the effects will concern them directly. The last type of participation tool included in Table 10.1 is that of “Protest reactions”, intended as particular forms of participation recorded in many European countries at local, national and supranational levels. It is an unprecedented mode of political participation, for all the reasons discussed in the previous paragraph,

Citizen democracy  187 and is not comparable to the protest reactions recorded during the 20th century. At a local level, community protests focus on the defence of the territory and of specific political communities. These are demonstrations that arise from the effects of the NIMBY (not in my back yard) syndrome or from some other comparable phenomenon. Such protests can also happen through violent actions (sabotage, road blocks, pickets, public disorder) or through non-violent demonstrations, whereby the strength of the argument is expressed by peaceful protests organized in the street, with the objective of building an atmosphere of favourable opinion towards the invoked change. Similar features also characterize global protests. In this case, the protest often has an important outcome, aimed at bringing to light politically relevant issues regarding the national or international political sphere, using methods that can be violent or non-violent depending on the case. A specific example of global protests is the Gilets jaunes (or Yellow Vests movement), which flared up on the streets in France between the end of 2018 and the beginning of 2019. This movement, without a defined organization, without a strong coordination and without a formalized leadership, made up of people with very different expectations, instances, claims, demands and needs from one another, represents social groups which do not necessarily have any degree of economic, cultural or professional homogeneity. Apart from the political issues, in methodological terms, for this form of participation, the key issue is direct democracy, conceived as a tool capable of overcoming the traditional mediation that every representative democracy entrusts to a class of political professionals, expression of the internal balance of the party system. From this point of view, the Yellow Vest movement can be compared to the Spanish indignados (or Anti-austerity movement in Spain), that in May 2011 showed very similar features to the French movement. Essentially, I feel it is safe to state that in both the Spanish and the French cases, we are facing new social movements, which are particularly complex to analyze because they are very stratified and, for this reason, very different from those of the past. These new modes of protest reactions, that can start at national and international levels but, as we shall see in the next paragraph, also comprise cases of subnational protest, can be incubators of a “statu nascenti” (nascent state) (Alberoni 1977), capable of contributing to the ex-novo foundation of new parties. Or they can strengthen the reasons of one or more existing populist political actors, which in the French case can be identified in the Front National and/or in France Insoumise and in the Spanish case Podemos or Ciudadanos.

4 The Italian case: the participation instruments of the populist parties So far, the European framework has been discussed. Now I will turn to the Italian case. The new generation of populist parties and movements in Italy engage in several ways with new participation tools. In this case, too, Italy is, in a certain sense, exemplary because of the availability of a large number of case studies of different political colour, which use different participative tools. In the following

188  Marco Damiani pages, I will try to display the Italian experience, taking into account a variety of populist parties (Tarchi 2014). Our attention is in particular focused on the Lega (formerly Lega Nord), the Movimento 5 Stelle, Forza Italia and Fratelli d’Italia as cases of populism. In addition, I will pay attention to the Partito Democratico under Matteo Renzi’s guidance (elected as National Secretary in December 2013, a position he kept until February 2017), that despite being in the centre-left area takes the form of an “anti-party party” (to further explore this category, see the contribution in this volume by Lorenzo Viviani) for the features found in the style and the political strategy of his national leadership (Bordigno 2014). Among all the parties mentioned, I will bring forth some examples related to the use of the participation tools described so far. Let us start with primary elections. The Partito Democratico (PD) added primary elections to its statute as a means of selecting its ruling class. As from 2007, however, the primary elections became an example followed by many parties, including those of a populist nature. Meanwhile, as regards the PD, by forcing some of the statutory rules, Matteo Renzi participated in the candidate selections of 2013 (with Pierluigi Bersani as National Secretary), endorsing himself as a political innovator against the old ruling class (Marinelli 2017).3 From that moment on, Renzi used primary elections several times as a referendum in his favour but also with the aim of trying to define a broader “people” compared to that of the “traditional” left. The aim was to start a new political project, with a new leader and a new political leadership (Damiani and Mazzoni 2017; Segatori 2018). In this distinctive period, Renzi was the protagonist of a conflict within the party, which acquired the nature of a generational clash, with the leader fomenting the battle for “scrapping” the “caste” of party leaders (Rizzo and Stella 2007), believing that younger people have a higher aptitude to political renewal.4 A few years after the experiments in the PD, the Lega (in 2013) organized its first leader selection. The challengers to the Federal Secretariat were Umberto Bossi, the prominent leader, who fell in disgrace after the judicial inquiries on corruption inside the party, and Matteo Salvini (challenger and important figure of the new political generation, at the time already a member of the Italian parliament). In the Lega’s first experience with primary elections, the right to vote was given only to members. Nearly ten thousand voters chose Matteo Salvini as party leader, with 82% of consensus, ending the secessionist nature of the party (or federalist according to the national political phases) and introducing the birth of a very different national party from the past (Passarelli and Tuorto 2018). A few years later, in 2017, the Lega announced another round of leader selection. In this case, the outgoing secretary was Giovanni Fava, endorsed by Umberto Bossi, stemming from groups endorsing independence and opposed to Salvini. However, also on that occasion the eight thousand voting members (in this case, everybody who could demonstrate 12 months of membership had the right to vote) confirmed Salvini for the leadership of the Federal Secretariat. In 2014, it was the turn of Fratelli d’Italia to announce primary elections. The pretext was the separation of the party from the Popolo delle libertà (established by Berlusconi in 2007), which previously had announced but then cancelled

Citizen democracy  189 leader selection for the whole centre-right group. Conversely, Fratelli d’Italia (that also chose its name in the same consultation) distanced itself from its allies and announced its own leader selection process aiming at electing the president of the new political party together with the “great electors” that would animate the national founding congress. Around 250,000 voters participated in those elections. In full respect of the internal rules, every citizen resident in Italy was admitted to the vote. Giorgia Meloni, the sole candidate, was elected president. Lastly, the Movimento 5 Stelle, as following from its political nature and from its role of “mouthpiece” of all Italian “citizens”, uses this type of participative tool widely, even though with some anomalies. The expressed intention is to survey its “people” on the preferred direction of its policies. For the “five starred”, the first experience which fits the instrument of primaries was organized in 2017. In the run-up to the national elections of the following year, the Movimento 5 Stelle organized its first primary election, with the ambition of selecting both the functions of leader and of candidate for premiership. On that occasion, the single candidate Luigi Di Maio was elected with the double role of political leader and candidate for prime minister. According to the “platform party” model (Gerbaudo 2018), the elections took place exclusively on the Rousseau platform (the digital platform of the Movement), and everyone that had been a member at least six months before the election was eligible to vote (see also de Blasio and Sorice in this volume). The electorate that participated in the elections counted 37,000 voters. Besides this experience, the Movimento 5 Stelle uses primary elections very frequently. For each election round, the Movement organizes primary elections in order to identify the candidates for its electoral roll in the competitions at different institutional levels, both local and national. Therefore, in 2012 (on that occasion together with the Partito Democratico), the M5S organized its first “parliamentary” elections with the intention of designating the candidates for the upcoming national general elections (the first elections in which the Movement participated with its own logo and name). The same experience was repeated in 2017, before the elections of 2018 that brought Italy to renovate its parliamentary institutions. The last experience of the original implementation of primary elections by M5S is an instrument called “quirinaria” (the term comes from “Quirinale”, which is the Residence building of the Head of State). In this case, the objective was to identify, together with the members, the candidate that the “five-starred” members of the parliament and of the senate were going to vote in the presidential nominations. In this regard, the only prior experience recorded was in 2013 (but was not repeated in 2015, on occasion of the election of Sergio Mattarella as the12th Head of State). In that occasion, the closed list of candidates was drafted by the combined assembly of the Movement’s Members of Parliament. At the end of the elections, more than 48,000 voters favourably identified Milena Gabanelli, investigative journalist of a famous television program broadcast on the third channel of the national television RAI. The second place went to Gino Strada, president of Emergency. The third was Stefano Rodotà, representative of the Italian left, former vice president of the Chamber of Deputies and former president of the personal data protection Authority. After the waiver of Milena Gabanelli and Gino Strada,

190  Marco Damiani Rodotà accepted the appointment and was voted in Parliament by every member of the Movimento 5 Stelle. In that occasion, Giorgio Napolitano was elected for the second time running (for the first time in the history of the Republic). The experiences described are the main ones regarding primary elections carried out by major Italian populist parties and with regard to consensual participation (Table 10.1). Other interesting experiences can however be identified, as the number of cases of resorting to referendums and consultations by the same parties is plentiful. In the following, I will only report the most important examples. Let us start with the Lega. During its first years of institutional life, the Lega Nord actively endorsed claims of self-government for Padania (an artificially defined territorial entity corresponding to the northern regions, north of the river Po). In September  1996, Umberto Bossi went so far as to propose the Declaration of Independence of Padania as a starting point in a process of nation building aimed at the constitution of the hypothetical Repubblica Federale Padana. In relation to this, in May 1997 the party organized a referendum for independence, submitting to the electors the following enquiry: “Do you want Padania to become an independent and sovereign Federal Republic?”. Nearly five million people attended the vote with a consensus close to 97% of the votes. On the same occasion, the president of the provisional government of the Federal Republic of Padania was voted for, together with six draft laws of popular initiative, to be presented to the Italian Parliament.5 The experience with direct democracy did not end here, however. Years later, in October 2017, the Lega announced a new referendum. This time, it was a consultative referendum organized by the presidents of the regions ruled by the Lega, in order to ask the citizens of Lombardia and Veneto on their agreement to negotiate for a greater independence with the central government, regarding distinctive matters of current legislation, besides others of exclusive competence of the state. An option which is, as a matter of fact, already foreseen by the Constitution. The same Constitution, does not, however, allow the possibility to hold a referendum, considering the latter, if at all, an “initiative of the Region in question, after consultation with the local authorities”, which should however be turned into a national law, which in turn is to be approved by an absolute majority of the members of Parliament. The Lega’s referendum of 2017 (just as the one in 1996), did not and could not have had any formal legal effect. At the same time, however, it was – in merit and method – symbolically used in exclusive favour of the organizing party and its leader (in pectore). Another referendum experience of the Lega occurred in 2018. On that occasion, a referendum – with different modes and timing – was announced in order to submit the ratification of the government “contract” to rule the country together to party members. The referendum was organized together with its new government ally M5S. The Lega announced a form of consultation open to everyone, members and non-members, carried out in various Italian squares with the use of traditional gazebos, set up with the presence of an informal electoral office, appointed in order to collect and count the votes expressed on ballot papers. In the same days and for the same reason, also the Movimento 5 Stelle referred the same question to all its members on the Rousseau platform, that is, to ask

Citizen democracy 191 their opinion of the government “contract” they had just drawn up with the Lega and Salvini. In both cases, the majority of the active electorate expressed its consensus, giving birth to the first “five-starred” government. On the Movimento 5 Stelle’s part, however, the use of consultation tools related to a method of direct democracy (one vote each) constitutes the fundamental element of the Movement, which allows it to differentiate itself in the eyes of national public opinion, asking the full reinstatement of the principle of popular sovereignty, that was, according to its main leaders, ruined by the mechanisms of the contemporary democracies. The novelty compared to the traditional parties is that the M5S wishes to give back power to the people, not through the mechanisms of representative democracy but by the constant use of the mechanisms provided by direct democracy, together with the systematic use of deliberative and participative democracy tools, as well as the means provided by digital and electronic democracy. In a seamless relation with its political goal, that is, to try to strengthen the bond between electors and their spokespersons, the Movement sustains an overcoming of the prohibition of the binding mandate, laid down by the Italian Constitution and a fundamental part of all forms of representative democracy. On the basis of such beliefs, the recourse to its people’s voice is rather frequent and comes about with a variety of tools, in most cases structured through the computer platform that the Movement provides and manages in order not to lose contact with its basis of members and militants. Among the experiences recorded, besides the one already reported leading to the ratification of the government “contract”, it is hence appropriate to mention a second consultation. The latter was aimed at identifying the European Parliamentarian group to endorse in the European Parliament. A consultative referendum that at the end of the process brought about the M5S decision was not without internal controversies, not least due to the alliance with EFD (Europe of Freedom and Democracy Group), guided by Nigel Farage. The list of internal consultation on political issues of high symbolic value and considered important for the party’s life, and on which the Movement asks its member’s opinion, is too long to be analyzed. Here, I will just consider how the consultations – far from always being a means of pacific expression of internal consensus – can culminate in creating a conflict between the highest spheres of the Movement and its militant base. This is the case, for example, in 2015, when Beppe Grillo, who had already articulated his agreement with a strict reaction to the crime of clandestine immigration, was not supported by the online voting. Grillo, in turn, decided to encharge the M5S MPs to adopt the opposite position. These are potential risks (infrequent, to tell the truth), which the Movement however decided to take, in order to remain in direct contact with its “people”. Let me return to the ideal-typical model, that is, the use of tools that guarantee choices with a high degree of political inclusion (Table 10.1), upon which the final outcome in the decision process depends. These are experiments in deliberative and participative democracy which aim at reducing the distance between governors and the governed, which are applied at a local level and also used – although less frequently by those mentioned so far – by populist parties and others (Floridia 2013). In this respect, the most important experiences in Italy, amongst the forces

192  Marco Damiani which may be defined as populist, were promoted by the Movement, which often adopts such tools whilst mistakenly considering them as of a direct democratic nature. The most important case is that of Parma in 2013, when a M5S candidate Pizzarotti was the mayor. Pizzarotti submitted a new statute which allowed for the expression of a high number of citizen requests (through a participatory process), subsequently to be approved by the Municipal Council. Finally, the dimension of Protest Reactions (Table  10.1) relates in Italy particularly to the so-called No-Tav movement. This was a protest movement, which from the early 90s onwards began a strong protest against the construction of a high-speed railway (known as TAV) in the Val di Susa (in Piemonte), part of a new railway line connecting Turin with Lyon in France. The No-Tav movement claimed it was fighting in defence of common goods, safeguarding public expenditure in favour of the entire local community, which would see its landscape become disfigured and faced an increase in health risks due to the uranium deposits in the mountains where the tunnel was to be drilled. In contrast, the reasons given by those supporting the project, which had been democratically approved, included the claims that Italy should not remain isolated and that there would be high costs involved in abandoning the project. What interests us here, however, is that those saying “no” to the project are a movement which contains people of all walks of life and of different social class, gender, age, education and political conviction. All they have in common is their opposition to the TAV Turin-Lyon project. In this case, the movement can truly be identified as a Community Protest against the national political system, as it is the expression of a reaction against a decision which was not shared by the local community.

5 Conclusions By using the framework and classification of the forms of political participation – forms utilized (also) by Italian populist parties in the 20th and 21st centuries – I have identified a strong tendency towards a social hyper-representation of the “people” (De Blasio and Sorice 2018). The forms of political organization described consciously attempt to interpret the people in a wider form, asserting the wish to return power to the people’s hands. From this perspective, participation loses its character of collective action, ceases to be “a set of actions made by citizens that try to influence the political decisions” (Morlino et  al. 2017, 203) in order to become a form of individual action expressed in the binary dimension of the vote (in favour or against; Sorice 2019). The risk is that one type of relation between the leadership and its base predominates, in that, in the absence of a predetermined structure in which an endogenous political process may unfold, “Bonaparte-like” forms of expression become privileged. This is in sharp contrast to the building up and structuring of an articulated political idea, as a result of public conflict, discussion and debate. While in “old politics” the goal was to build up a plurality of interests within a common political platform founded on the formalization of collective interests, in “new politics” resorting to participation risks taking on (whatever tools are used) an aura of legitimizing

Citizen democracy  193 decisions that have already been made by the base. What I have just described perfectly illustrates one of the paradoxes of contemporary forms of participation, made possible by the development of depoliticization processes founded on the exaltation of participation from below and shared by minimalistic models of political governance.

Notes 1 For a complete review of populism, see Anselmi (2018). 2 Within an international debate dedicated to the analysis of the democratic crisis, intended as a crisis of political representation and participation, Paolo Graziano (2018) reflects on the neo-populist parties as new tools for a renewed social and political framework. 3 Besides Matteo Renzi, also Pierluigi Bersani (as National Secretary, according to the statute, the natural pretendent to the candidate selections of that year), Nichi Vendola, Laura Puppato and Bruno Tabacci participated in the primary elections. Bersani won and was elected P.M. candidate for the centre-left. 4 For first steps towards the study of primary elections in Italy, see Valbruzzi (2005), Venturino (2017) and De Luca (2018). 5 After those facts, in October  1997, the Lega organized and implemented effectively the first elections for a shadow parliament that should have represented the interests of Padania.

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11 The populist assault on the constitution Paul Blokker

Populism is widely imagined and analyzed as a sceptical force in constitutional democracy. Populism is understood as a disruptive phenomenon, contesting constitutional rules, the rule of law, and the separation of powers. The chapter contributes to the conceptualization and analysis of the populist phenomenon in relation to modern constitutionalism. The intention is to bring out not only the disruptive dimension of populism1 and its reactionary nature (with regard to liberal constitutionalism) but equally to highlight the alternative approach to constitutionalism populism represents. This alternative approach reveals a shift in political and constitutional imaginaries in modern society, away from the idea of the law as an order- and stability-producing device, towards an idea of the law as a means of vindication and redemption. Populism is discussed as a force that is sceptical towards the liberal, modern presuppositions of neutrality and formalism, legality, and the idea of the rule of law. Populism not only undermines liberal constitutionalism but also claims to promote an alternative version of constitutionalism, manifested in increasingly frequent attempts to gain hold of state power and implement constitutional projects (Müller 2016; Urbinati 2014). In this, it can be argued that populist constitutionalism re-opens constitutionalism up to constituent power and rejects any strong distinction between the instituting and the instituted in liberal constitutionalism. The chapter seeks to ‘deconstruct’ populism in its relation to constitutionalism. In the first part, the chapter discusses a distinct number of interrelated and legally relevant dimensions of populism. First, it argues that the promotion of majoritarianism constitutes the populists’ main relation to the constitution. The united People, in the form of a political expression of a substantive and durable majority, is the main inspiration for populist democracy, in strong contrast to the liberal ideas of inclusive consensus, pluralism, interest representation, and minority protection. Second, populists portray an instrumentalist, political, and ad hoc relation to the law. Third, populist constitutionalism is deeply sceptical with regard to the formalistic, positivistic approach to the law in liberal constitutionalism. In the second part of the chapter, populist tendencies in the relation to constitutionalism will be explored in the context of the Italian ‘season of constitutional reform’ (which started in the early 1990s). The analysis will regard the constitutional politics, and modes and procedures, of two reform processes in

The populist assault on the constitution  197 particular (Berlusconi’s and Renzi’s attempts at reform in 2005–6 and 2014–16 respectively) as well as the terms of the substance of reforms, regarding issues of strong leadership, the reduction of checks and balances, and the simplification of politics. Three dimensions in the two constitutional reform processes will be highlighted: a partisan/majoritarian dimension, an emphasis on instrumentalism, and a sceptical view towards liberal understandings of the law. In the concluding remarks, similar dimensions will be briefly explored in relation to the current populist government of the Lega and the Movimento Cinque Stelle (M5S or ‘Five Star Movement’).

1  A theory of populist constitutionalism A key but much neglected instrument of the populist political programme is the constitution. The populist approach to constitutions ought to be, however, analyzed extensively, as it frequently forms an integral part of populist projects. What is more, a distinctive populist legal mindset equally affects political forces which are not nominally populist but pursue reforms which reflect populist concerns of the popular will, majoritarianism, and decisionism. Populist approaches to constitutionalism ought to be understood in their distinctive engagement with legal or liberal constitutionalism. Populists share with other approaches critical to liberalism a number of points of critique to liberal understandings of constitutionalism and the rule of law. Populists criticize liberalism’s tendency to depoliticization and to distancing and potentially alienating citizens from the institutions. Populists further claim that an emphasis on legal rationality, the neutrality of the state, and formal-legal proceduralism tends to weaken the polity due to its lacking potentiality in terms of symbolic, sentimental, and collective engagement. Populist constitutionalism endorses, in this, a programme that promises to reduce the distance between ordinary citizens and the institutions (see also Anastasìa and Anselmi in this volume). Populists want to directly link the people to the institutions and to re-enchant democracy, to make it meaningful to its citizens. An important thrust in populist constitutionalism is the claim to directly represent the people and to overcome the significant constraints to popular rule that they observe in liberal or legal constitutionalism, constraints that are inter alia related to the entrenchment of norms, judicial independence and activism, and the closed nature of the legal system. To explore the distinctive nature of populist constitutionalism in a more detailed fashion, I will focus here on three critical components of the populist constitutional approach.2 These components can be understood as distinctive parts of the populist critique on liberal or legal constitutionalism. First, the populist project is based on an extreme form of majoritarianism, which is the way in which populists imagine their project politically. Second, the populists’ practical approach to the law is based on instrumentalism, which mobilizes the law in the name of a collectivist project. Third, the populist attitude towards the law, or its main prescriptive and evaluative judgements of the law, consists of a critical, emotional stance, or what I call ‘legal resentment’.

198  Paul Blokker Majoritarianism Populists imagine political power as the expression of the will of a cohesive, unitary majority that coincides with the popular will. Political government hence means to govern in the name of the majority. Populism in power takes the form of a political project that wants to radically change the rules of the game so as to correct alleged past wrongdoings to the People and to realize a more intimate relation between political institutions and larger society. Populists approach the majority as a durable and pre-political entity and equate it with a material, social unity. In right-wing, conservative populism this tends to take the form of an authentic people or the nation (Blokker 2005). This is in sharp contrast to the liberal understanding of the majority in procedural terms. In liberalism, the majority is a constructed and always again reconstructed set of political forces, which represents social interests. Populists deny conflict within society, or they understand conflict as an inherently problematic phenomenon rather than as a legitimate expression of different viewpoints and interests. The populists understand the majority as pars-pro-toto, that is, the political majority that sustains the populist party or movement is taken to represent the whole of the people and does not allow for internal differences. This understanding of the majority – not as politically or procedurally constructed but rather as socially given  – results in a denial of the distinction between ordinary politics (in which conflicts between different social forces play out) and foundational or constitutional politics (in which the rules of the game are fixed). The majoritarian thrust in populism also means that the populist project finds its main legitimatory basis in popular legitimacy, produced through the identification and mobilization of the ‘true majority’ of the People, at the detriment of forms of both normative and procedural legitimacy. Populism also claims to find its legitimatory basis in sociological legitimacy, that is, in the views of power held by members of society, but does this in a highly particularized way, denying the plurality of views that any society harbours. For populists, the only subject that deserves representation is a unified people, which is equated with the ‘good’ majority, those that are part of a cultural community of belonging with distinctive traditions and understandings of the good life. For this reason, there is no need for a higher law that mediates between and integrates different social forces that compete for political power nor for the limitation of political power through forms of the separation of powers. The populists in this become a post-democratic force, in that they claim to overcome the conflictive nature of democratic society. There is a tendency to ‘embed’ the populist party itself into the state institutions, by means of entrenching the political power of the populists, in the name of its promotion of the ‘real people’, and against divisive forces. Instrumentalism The practical approach of populists to the law is an instrumental one, which mobilizes the law in the name of a collectivist project. There is a tendency in populist

The populist assault on the constitution 199 constitutionalism to collapse the distinction between ordinary and constitutional politics. In Ackermanian terms, this means that there is a permanent mobilization of constitutional norms and constitutional issues in daily politics. This mobilization is not driven by popular mobilization from below but rather by populist elite entrepreneurship from above. In the political practice of populists – in their ‘occupation of the state’ (Müller 2016; Urbinati 2014) – one can detect a specific, instrumentalist approach3 to constitution making and constitutional revision. The populist constitutional attitude can be understood as the result of populism’s overall negative evaluation of liberal constitutionalism, and it manifests itself in the downplaying of the constitution’s status as a rigid, higher law (a cornerstone of liberal or legal constitutionalism). A  number of dimensions deserve specific attention with regard to populists’ instrumental approach to constitutions (Landau 2018). An important dimension of the populists’ instrumentalist approach is the frequency of constitutional interventions. Populists tend to engage on a frequent basis with constitutional revision, not least because they understand the existing order as tainted with legacies from the past (e.g., for instance, as facilitating ‘partitocracy’) and as an order which can be at best considered a ‘façade democracy’ which protects elite interests rather the interests of the people. From a liberal or legal perspective, populist constitutionalism threatens the rule of law and heightens the arbitrary nature of the political regime. This means three things: that rulers become less accountable due to the absence of institutional control (for instance, by reducing powers of constitutional courts), law making becomes increasingly unpredictable and in-transparent for wider society (by, for instance, frequent usage of decree laws), and it becomes more difficult for citizens to contest the law and to voice their concerns and interests regarding new legislation (Krygier 2016; Palombella 2017). The frequent legal interventions of populists are for a significant part informed by what Nadia Urbinati has called an extreme majoritarianism (Urbinati 2014), that is, an attempt to turn the majority into a permanent majority. The majority is not anymore mutable and temporary but needs, through legal interventions, to be consolidated into a durable power basis. The populist majority-government tends to take on the role of constituent power in order to liberate the people from the constraints of the liberal, rule-of-law regime. This form of constitutional executivism tends to be uni-vocal, partisan, and monistic and therefore to violate any idea of inclusive, consensual or broad-based constituent power (Scheuerman 2002). Legal resentment The populist attitude towards the law is a critical attitude that could be labelled legal scepticism or ‘legal resentment’, a critical, emotional stance towards liberal and legal constitutionalism, and the latter’s alleged juridification, depoliticization, and rationalization of society (Blokker 2013). Legal resentment is a crucial dimension of populist constitutional programmes and comes forth out of a distinctive populist reading of liberal constitutionalism. The populist approach regards liberal constitutionalism as both a mindset and a practice. The latter could be

200  Paul Blokker aptly described as the post–Second World War ‘default design choice for political systems across Europe and North America’, in the form of a constitutionalism that ‘typically hinges on a written constitution that includes an enumeration of individual rights, the existence of rights-based judicial review, a heightened threshold for constitutional amendment, a commitment to periodic democratic elections, and a commitment to the rule of law’ (Ginsburg et al. 2018). Different populists share a critical, resentful attitude towards the liberal understanding of the rule of law. The populists’ critical attitude towards the liberal understanding of the law includes a critical evaluation of the idea of the law as non-political and neutral. Populists – much like Carl Schmitt (Böckenförde 1997) – criticize what is perceived as a strong separation between law on the one hand and politics and morality on the other, in liberal constitutionalism. The populist understanding of the law denies its closed, self-sufficient and self-­ referential nature and emphasizes the ultimately always already political nature of the law. Hence, the law in the populist view becomes inseparable from extralegal sources, such as political power and the societal community, and is in this repoliticized. As such, for populists the law always needs to be the expression of the ‘national interest’. Liberal individualism promotes a view of the demos as the basis of the democratic polity, which is rejected by populists, in order to be replaced by a collectivist view which emphasizes the belonging of the individual to a larger community, the ethnos. The function of the law changes in this perspective from one emphasizing constraints and rights (and the protection of vulnerable minorities) to one underlining duties and a distinctive cultural and sometimes religious ethos. In the populist understanding of the law, the law becomes particularized or privatized and geared towards the community rather than being a universal force protecting potentially any individual. In the populist view, constraints and rights become in some ways superfluous, as the law, as an expression of the populist rulers, is always already promoting the best interests of those belonging to the nation. The liberal idea of the law can, in this, be understood as an obstacle to achieve collective goals. In sum, populists argue that the understanding of the rule of law as a neutral, universalistic, internationally embedded framework of the decision-making process undermines a polity’s potential to promote the ‘national interest’ and to thrive in international competition. The law cannot in and by itself constitute the legitimacy and strong basis for a political community; it is rather the other way around: the law needs to be the expression of the political will of such a community. What is more, mere legality is too fragile to contribute to the resoluteness that is necessary to deal with political conflicts and crises that affect the collectivity. The populist mindset towards the law, as containing a number of distinctive dimensions as discussed above, can be found in different constitutional reform projects, as have been frequently proposed in post-1990 Italy. This period is of great significance for Italian constitutionalism, as it can be argued that the 1948 constitutional compromise began increasingly losing its hold on Italian politics

The populist assault on the constitution 201 and society, due to the disappearance of many of the original political forces behind it, the inclusion of sceptical and (at least previously) anti-systemic forces into the political mainstream. Below, I will consider two of the most significant constitutional reform projects in Italy in this period of intense political change and will attempt to show that a certain populist-constitutional mindset has diffused throughout the political spectrum.

2  The Italian ‘Season of Constitutional Reform’ Before the early 1990s, the 1948 Constitution had not been the object of any comprehensive attempt at reform. Already in the mid-1970s, extensive debate on constitutional reform emerged, but this was largely of a scholarly nature (Urbinati and Ragazzoni 2016). Only in the 1990s, actual political projects of constitutional revision were undertaken (Groppi 2013, 213–214). The various reform projects have their roots in a deep crisis of the democratic system, that particularly came to culmination with the major political rupture of the early 1990s, widely referred to as Tangentopoli (‘bribe city’). The subsequently unfolding ‘season of constitutional reform’ consisted of more or less permanent political attention to the theme of constitutional reform, and the regular set-up of political reform projects: two bicameral commissions in 1993 and 1997 respectively, comprehensive reforms followed by constitutional referenda in 2001, 2006, and 2016 (with different outcomes). The focus here is on two reform projects, undertaken by the Berlusconi government in 2004–6 and the Renzi government in 2014–16, respectively. Both of these stand out in a populist dimension to the reform process as well as the substance of the reforms and display a form of continuity in the attitude towards the Constitution, even if initiated by parties on opposite sides of the political spectrum. The discussion will highlight a majoritarian logic to both projects, which sheds light on important dimensions in the relation between populist understandings of public law and constitutional reform. In the constitutional narrative in both reform projects, a number of key populist elements are evident (cf. Prospero 2007, 84–85). As argued by the Italian scholar Michele Prospero (here referring in particular to the center-right reform), [a]n inclination to emphasize the image of a leader as supreme embodiment of an uncontrolled power has diffused in the Italy of the 1990s, in the aftermath of traumatic events which have undermined the historical subjects of mediation (parties and the parliament). The last fifteen years of the Italian republic are in reality to a large extent years of triumphing populism and of the erosion of spaces of representation. (Prospero 2007, 13) The argument below is hence that the ‘years of triumphing populism’ have continued until the present, attesting to a certain ‘settling’ or institutionalization of a populist mindset with regard to constitutional reform.

202  Paul Blokker 2.1  The constitutional reform project of the center-right (2004–6) The center-right profited from an electoral victory in 2001 to pursue its own constitutional project, not least endorsed by the Lega Nord. The latter made its constitutional demands  – strengthening the legislative powers of the regions  – the condition for its participation in the governmental coalition (Pinelli 2006, 337). The constitutional reform project – in the recent tradition of the idea of a ‘Grande Riforma’ or roots-and-branch reform (Bull and Pasquino 2007, 3) – included parliamentary control over regional laws, a strengthening of the role of the prime minister, and the introduction of a Senate based on regional constituencies (Pinelli 2006, 337). The constitutional bill that was adopted by the center-right coalition was judged very negatively by the political opposition, by legal scholars as well as by societal institutions such as trade unions. In the last debate on the reform project in the Senate, held on 16 November 2005, the parliamentarian Luigi Marino of the Communist Party stated that ‘these modifications to the second part of the Constitution upset the principles of equality and of universality of the fundamental law of the State, they change the equilibrium of powers and therefore the functioning of democracy. They are the result of a divisory logic within the forces of the center-right’. The political scientist Giovanni Sartori commented on the constitutional reform project as follows: The constitution defines the rules of politics and of the wielding of power. Badly designed rules, which do not function, create a country that does not function. Rules that limit power only little and badly so are rules that lead to the abuse of power. What is more, constitutions last; and if they are constitutions it is a benefit that they last. But they also last because they are difficult to change. Which means that if we create a bad constitution the risk is that we will need to keep it. (Sartori 2006) As the center-right did not manage to mobilize a sufficiently large majority, a referendum was held on the constitutional bill in 2006. The extensive reform project of the center-right (see, for a concise discussion, Lippolis 2014) was ultimately rejected in a popular referendum held on 25 and 26 June  2006. The outcome involved a large number of voters (53,7% of the Italian electorate voted), who voted decisively against the reform project (61,3%). 2.1.1 Majoritarianism The project for constitutional reform of the Berlusconi government formed a reaction to the first significant constitutional reform since 1948, implemented by the center-left at the end of the 1990s and subsequently confirmed in a popular referendum in 2001. According to the center-right political forces, the 2001 reform had broken with the consensual tradition in Italian politics, as reflected in the 1948 Constitution, and formed a partisan project. The center-right claimed that the

The populist assault on the constitution  203 center-left had used an ‘illegitimate majority to change the Constitution’ (Schifani, Senato della Repubblica, 16–11–2005, 39). It is in fact undeniable that the post-1990 ‘season of constitutional reform’ is increasingly characterized by a partisan approach, most clearly from the failure of the Bicamerale of 1997 onwards, in which the consensualist basis of the constitutional compromise of 1948 is left behind (cf. Prospero 2007, 127). Constitution making is understood as the prerogative of the incumbent government and majority, without a need to involve the opposition. As Prospero argues, the government becomes the ‘depository of the power of constitutional revision’ (Prospero 2007, 127). Constituent power, rather than being the power of the multitude (Loughlin 2004, ch. 6), becomes the power of the majority. In the case of the Berlusconi reform in 2004–6, it is fair to speak of an executive-driven project promoted by the governmental majority to pursue its own interests. The process of constitutional reform was hence strongly driven by majoritarian logic. The reform project itself was a governmental initiative, while the substance of the reforms reflected in particular the objectives of Forza Italia and the Lega Nord (even if parts of the reform had been widely debated also in the 1990s, such as the matter of bicameralism; see Fusaro 2015). What is conspicuous in the reform of the Berlusconi government is the sheer number of articles of the constitution the reform touches upon (57 out of 139, see Prospero 2007, 128). A  significant source of tensions was hence whether such a large-scale revision is legitimate, that is, whether it can be promoted in a purely partisan manner, without involving opposition. A  large-scale revision entails the ‘re-awakening’ of constituent power, and without the direct involvement of the opposition in the actual writing of the reform, the project needed other ways of enhancing a more generalized legitimacy (and hence the great importance put on a confirmatory referendum which would bestow popular legitimacy on the project). A majoritarian thrust could equally be detected in the novel usage of the amendment rule of the Italian Constitution (art. 138), initiated by the center-right. The rule stipulates, in case of the lack of a two-thirds majority in both parliamentary houses after a dual reading, that a popular referendum may be called for. The latter was originally meant to provide an instrument for the opposition to oppose constitutional reform in case of a lack of consensus (as indicated by a lack of supermajority in favour of the reforms). This was how the first constitutional referendum, held in 2001, was activated. The Berlusconi government, however, turned the logic of the amendment rule upside down by equally calling for a referendum in the guise of government majority.4 In this manner (as was equally to occur with the constitutional referendum in 2016), the popular referendum obtained a plebiscitarian nature, confirming the will of the majority (Prospero 2007). But it is not only in the process of constitutional reform and the forces involved that we can detect a majoritarian thrust. It was equally present in the substance of the reforms. A key dimension was the strengthening of the role of the prime minister (some speak of ‘absolute premiership’, cf. Fusaro 2015, 493–4), at the expense of both the president of the republic and of Parliament. The proposal was to ‘designate the prime minister from the part of the electorate’, in the form

204  Paul Blokker of a kind of ‘immediate democracy’ (Urbinati and Ragazzoni 2016, 159–160). In this view, the prime minister was to be directly indicated by the people and is strictly linked to, or embodies, the political majority. The proposition reflected both a form of personalization of political power and a populist, direct form of leadership. The distinctive view of democracy emphasized the need for a powerful leader, in political terms understood as a prime minister who was to be directly chosen by the citizens and who was to have key decision-making prerogatives. In the debate on the 2005 reforms, Senator Schifani (Forza Italia) put it as follows: I believe that with today’s vote Italy will not lose, but all those Italians will win, [those] who honestly believe in and want the amelioration and speeding up of decisional processes of the institutions; who want that laws are made more quickly, who want the governments and Premier voted for by the people [and] are not substituted by other majorities and other men; who want in substance a modernized [. . .] Italy and want the reduction of the costs of politics. (Senato della Repubblica, 16–11–2005, 35) 2.1.2 Instrumentalism In general, the season of constitutional reform that started in the early 1990s is characterized by a weakening of the distinction between constitutional politics and normal politics (cf. Ackerman 1991). In particular the center-right political formations that came to dominate politics in the 25 years after Tangentopoli are characterized by an absence of relation with the 1948 constitutional compromise. Whereas that compromise was still somehow carried forward by the center-left coalitions, the center-right had no relations to it, either because of its Fascist legacy (Alleanza Nazionale) or because of the only recent formation of the parties (Forza Italia and Lega Nord). This implied that these parties were rather indifferent to the 1948 Constitution and were ready to change parts of the constitution which did not correspond to their political objectives (Pinelli 2006, 336). In itself, the ‘constitutional acceleration’ or the frequent attempts to change the constitution that emerged in the 1990s indicate the emergence of a more instrumental view across the political spectrum. In the 2006 reform, this instrumental, ‘ordinary politics dimension’ is perhaps best indicated by the large amount of norms (57 of 139) the reform proposed to change, as well as in the clear partisan nature of the key dimensions of the reform (‘devolution’ and a strong premiership). The idea of the constitution as a widely endorsed higher framework for Italian politics was yielding to a partisan approach which sees the constitution as an instrument to be manipulated for party purposes (Prospero 2007). The center-right discourse articulated a comprehensive critique of the 1948 Constitution and the ‘First Republic’ as being responsible for the ingovernabilità that allegedly defined the post-1948 period. The 1948 Constitution was in this criticized for its institutionalization of a party-based, pluralistic, and representative system. A key justification for the comprehensive reforms of the Second Part of the Italian Constitution provided by the center-right was the designation of the

The populist assault on the constitution 205 1948 Constitution as obsolete and in dire need of modernization. For instance, in the parliamentary debate in November 2005, when the extensive reform package of the center-right was adopted, senator Salvatore Lauro of Forza Italia stated that the reform will contribute to move away from a ‘defeated Italy, divided by hate, poverty, in ragged clothes’ towards a ‘modern Italy, strong, respected, rich, and finally more free’ (Senato della Repubblica, 16–11–2005, 5). Indeed, Lauro was content to ‘contribute to the modification of the Constitution in order to bring it into alignment with the necessities and culture of our times’. 2.1.3  Legal resentment A significant dimension of Berlusconi’s constitutional reform, and of his attitude towards judicial institutions in general (see Dallara 2015), can be related to an attitude of legal resentment. According to Michele Taruffo, Berlusconi displayed an ‘orientation which could be defined as postmodern because of its decisive aversion vis-à-vis the intrinsic systemic rationality of “legal modernism” ’ (Taruffo 1998, 902). In Berlusconi’s view of the law, ‘legal norms do not derive their existence and validity from the fact that they have been approved with the necessary procedures by the institutions of legislative power’. Rather, for Berlusconi, the idea of the separation of powers seems to be ‘tainted by a positivistic formalism which is obsolete by now and is not anymore acceptable’ (Taruffo 1998, 902). Berlusconi’s theory of the law regards those norms that his electorate desires (902). Luigi Ferrajoli makes similar observations with regard to Berlusconi’s perception of the law: But the Berlusconian ideology is not limited to an affirmation of the primacy of economics over politics, reduced to a serving role with respect to the private interests of the leader. Its inevitable corollary is the intolerance of juridical limits and constraints and forms of judicial control, identified as undue obstacles to private autonomy and to political sovereignty. Therefore, the central question in Italian politics has been for more than a decade the relation between politics and law, even more so than that between politics and the economy: whether the political powers of the new governors would need to be subjected to the law – to the constitution and even more to penal law  – or whether the ‘democratic’ legitimation which the governors enjoy renders them beyond the law. (Ferrajoli 2003, 26) Ferrajoli touches here upon the essence of what I intend with ‘legal resentment’, that is, a view in which the liberal understanding of the rule of law and constitutionalism are presented as deeply problematic. Ferrajoli goes on: The conflict between politics and law which has been at the core of the institutional question for years is essentially about these two theses: between the principles of the Rechtsstaat, according to which the incumbent rulers have to

206  Paul Blokker be subjects to the law, and the pretence of their impunity, or, in other words, the claim of a neo-absolutism of the majority as much as that of the market. The electoral success of Berlusconi signals clearly that the first of these two theses, the one which defines the ‘Rechtsstaat’, has been surpassed, in the common sense produced and interpreted by Berlusconi, by the second. (Ferrajoli 2003, 26) The core of the center-right approach to the law was hence based on a distinctive idea of democracy, and of the relation between the principle of popular legitimation and the principle of legality, that is, the ‘conviction that political power, which results from elections, is immune to control by jurisdiction; the one who wins the elections can do whatever he/she wants, even if it is on an illegal basis’ (Zanchetta 2003, 1065). This view of the law was prominent in the center-right’s constitutional reform project. A major objective of the reforms was to reduce constraints on the exercise of executive leadership, which should not be obstructed by institutional processes that ‘slow down’ the decision-making process (cf. Prospero 2007, 133). The core dimension of ‘garantismo’ of the 1948 Italian Constitution is replaced by a concentration of political power in the government and in particular in the new figure of prime minister. As Elisabetta Wolff notes, ‘[c]onstitutional scholars noted that the reform would have made way for a sort of “absolute premiership” or “Prime Ministerial dictatorship” as opposed to the system of “checks and balances” (bilancia di poteri)’ (Wolff 2012, 4). 2.2  The constitutional reform project of the center-left (2014–2016) The ultimate failure of the Berlusconi reform did not mean that the idea of a profound revision of the Italian Constitution was abandoned. In its wake, a series of new attempts are undertaken, with as the most significant one the attempt by the center-left government of Matteo Renzi in 2014–2016. In a period of renewed political turmoil, not least resulting from the European financial and economic crisis, but equally being the result of unresolved, lingering political problems (including the delegitimation of political parties, rampant absenteeism in elections, the lack of emergence of clear majorities in elections), the idea of a ‘Grande Riforma’ was once again pursued, this time driven forward by the center-left government. In February 2014, Matteo Renzi replaced prime minister Enrico Letta and formed a new, center-left government. Key dimensions of the governmental agenda of the government of Renzi were constitutional reforms and a change of the electoral law. 2.2.1 Majoritarianism In March 2014, Matteo Renzi and the new Minister for constitutional reform, Maria Elena Boschi, presented a new constitutional reform proposal. The constitutional reform project was a governmental initiative (as had been the case in the Berlusconi

The populist assault on the constitution  207 reform), and took the form of a governmental ‘disegno di legge’ (the Ddl Boschi). Renzi’s reform was embedded in the so-called ‘patto del Nazareno’, stipulated between Renzi and Berlusconi on a number of reforms in early 2014, including electoral and constitutional reform. The pact did not involve any of the opposition parties nor those of the governing coalition. Formally, however, the constitutional reform project was endorsed by a political majority of the PD, the center-right party Nuovo Centro Destra and some smaller parties, but without support of the largest opposition parties, in particular the M5S and later also Forza Italia, which broke with the Patto del Nazareno in early 2015. In general, the involvement of the opposition was minimal in the process of constitutional reform (Volpi 2016, 121), while the logic of reform pursued by the government was a clearly bipolar one, dividing the political and social landscape between ‘good Italians’ (in favour of reform) and ‘bad Italians’ (the ‘criticasters’, ‘conservatives’). As argued by Ida Dominijanni, there was a strong redemptive and Manichean claim in the constitutional reform project, that is, the reformers were going to ‘save’ Italy and the Italians,5 while the forces who opposed the reform supposedly attempted to push Italy into crisis and disaster (Dominijanni 2016, 8). The Renzi reform was characterized by an absence of public debate and a general insensibility to dissenting, critical views. This is not only clear in the way in which opposing views were rebutted (as forms of sabotage), but equally in the manner in which internal critique, within the center-left itself, was being stifled and a strict party discipline imposed (Prospero 2016, 151). In the process of constitutional reform, the popular referendum which was to confirm the reform (as mentioned, originally understood as an instrument for the opposition to oppose changes to the constitution), became a vehicle for the government to identify its popular legitimacy in the form of a plebiscite, while bypassing any parliamentary and societal dissent. The reform process could hence be qualified as a reform by ‘colpi di maggioranza’ (‘blows by the majority’), as further confirmed in the popular referendum organized at the end of the reform trajectory. As was the case with Berlusconi’s reform, the popular referendum, held on 4 December 2016, was initiated by the Government itself, qua majority, in accordance with a by-nowconsolidated majoritarian tradition in Italian politics. In terms of substance of the reform, the Ddl Boschi focussed in particular on the reform of the bicameral system (most importantly the Senate); a reduction of the number of parliamentarians, and a revision of Title V regarding relations between the State and the regions. The overhaul of the Senate, the most contentious part of the reform, involved its radical transformation, from an ‘identical twin’ of the Chamber of Deputies into a semi-federal, regional chamber (Urbinati and Ragazzoni 2016, 172–173). The new Senate was to lose many of its prerogatives, including the power to unseat governments through the vote of no confidence, while retaining a voice in constitutional matters.6 De facto, the proposition to radically change the nature of the Senate pointed to a democratic design in which counterbalances, the separation of powers, and popular sovereignty diminish, while the powers of the executive increase.7 The original bicameral set-up

208  Paul Blokker was inspired by a ‘guarantist’ logic, in which the two chambers, supported by a proportional system, functioned as an instrument of control and ‘cooling off’ of the political process (Prospero 2016, 154). In the Renzi reform, the bicameral setup was displayed in a very different, populist manner, that is, its cumbersome procedures were identified as an obstacle to the lean type of efficient governance needed in modern, globalized societies. The objective of the Renzi reform was in this not dissimilar to that of the Berlusconi reform of 2005. The emphasis was on lean institutions and a strong leader and government, this time combined with a centralizing move. One of the implications of the reform of the Senate, in the name of governability, was the weakening of the parliament in relation to the government. In the reform, the latter was particularly strengthened by way of the position of its leader, that is, Renzi’s reform (even if in a less explicit manner than was the case in the Berlusconi reform) formed an attempt to strengthen the relation between the leader and the people, by means of a directly elected ‘prime minister’, enhancing the latter’s ‘popular legitimacy’ (Volpi 2016, 124). The prime minister became the key political institution in Renzi’s reform, in a system with only one real parliamentary chamber, an electoral law (Italicum) that allowed for a direct relation between the prime minister/the government and the electorate (rather than being produced by parliament), while the President of the Republic’s role in government formation was reduced to a formality (Volpi 2016, 136). As argued by Volpi, the prime minister would become the ‘Sindaco d’Italia’ (the ‘mayor of Italy’), ‘directly elected by the people and in practice unreplaceable’ (Volpi 2016, 137). 2.2.2 Instrumentalism The constitutional reform importantly involved the attempt to re-legitimize the political institutions. Much of the exercise corresponded to popular (and populist) calls for political change and the reduction in the costs of politics (the radical reform of the Senate, the abolition of the provinces) and the supposed increase in the efficiency of governance. Constitutional reform became in this an instrument for purely political objectives. The objective of reform was neither the maintenance of the constitution, correcting malfunctioning norms, nor that of founding a polity anew, in a revolutionary sense. Rather, constitutional reform became a partisan instrument, which borrowed a revolutionary grammar of ‘epochal change’ in a reform that allegedly had been awaited ‘for 70 years’, while in reality pursuing much more modest and partisan objectives. The affirmation by minister Boschi of a reform that the Italians ‘had been awaiting for 70 years’ perhaps best conveys the instrumentalist approach to the Italian Constitution. When Boschi pronounced these words, technically, 70  years would have indicated a period that started three years before the actual adoption of the Italian Constitution in 1948. But what is more important is that the observation indicates a rather deep disqualification or delegitimation of the 1948 Constitution as such, which was apparently already obsolete at the moment of adoption, indicating an ‘original defect’ (Dominijanni 2016, 7–8).

The populist assault on the constitution 209 From this instrumental perspective, there is hence no need to regard the 1948 Constitution as a foundational document which reflects a broad societal consensus and inhabits a spirit of guarantee of the institutions and of (minority) inclusion. Instead, there is no particular normativity attributed to the Constitution, which becomes an object of competition in the game of Italian politics (Prospero 2016, 159). Since the 1990s, not least due to an extensive and continuous campaign by the political right (cf. Dominijanni 2016), the idea has taken hold that the 1948 Constitution cannot (anymore) be understood as up to date with regard to the governing institutions as well as with regard to definitions of contemporary democracy. A representative of the center-left in the parliamentary Commission for Constitutional Affairs, Emanuele Fiano, stated for instance: The decades succeeding the constituent assembly [of 1948], our decades, the decades of our generations, [lasting] until today, have demonstrated the need for an adaptation of the mechanism of institutional functioning, of its revision in the view of an ever increasing efficiency of democracy, [a democracy] which asks to be efficient, as a democracy incapable of providing adequate replies in a relevant and fast time frame belies a relevant part of its objectives. (Camera, 16–12–2014, 74) The Constitution was hence not perceived as a set of higher-order guarantees to limit and channel politics but rather as a set of obstructions for governments to produce the ‘outcome’ that citizens expect and request. This image of democratic politics grounded in output-oriented legitimacy understands the essence of politics to be one based on the ‘delivery of the goods’, not one of channeling conflict and ensuring the inclusion of a plurality of different viewpoints. 2.2.3  Legal resentment The attitude towards the law that emerges from the Renzi reform is one that continues those forms of legal scepticism or resentment already revealed in earlier instances of reform. The latter include most notably the Berlusconi reform, even if in the Renzi reform legal resentment takes less aggressive forms. The Renzi reform challenged the legal or normative constitutionalism (‘costituzionalismo garantista’) of the Italian post-1948 order (Prospero 2016, 154), as the argument was that the existing rules and checks and balances were too rigid in times of rapid societal change. As Emanuele Fiano argued in the lower house during debates on the reform, ‘[democracy’s] values are still the right ones, but in a world that is changing at a speed that is so much faster than that of politics and to which our societies need to adapt continuously in order to keep up, democracy seems slow, bureaucratic, and weak’ (emphasis added). ‘If we really believe, as I believe and we believe, in democracy, as a whole of rules which guarantee the liberty of all citizens, it is time to ameliorate it, to render it faster and stronger. It is time for reforms’ (Camera, 16–12–2014, 76).

210  Paul Blokker The constitutional revisionism since the 1990s identifies in the 1948 Constitution the responsibility for the malfunctioning of democracy and government (Ferrajoli 2016, 15). The main purpose of the constitutional reforms is hence to clear the way of governmental decision-making, putting at the heart of the democratic regime the necessity of rapid decision-making of the executive rather than the necessity of inclusionary and pluralistic deliberation (cf. Urbinati and ­Ragazzoni 2016). In the words of senator Russo: Let us say that the great value of the 1948 Constitution today can be found, in my view, in particular in the first part, that of the principles. Because I count myself amongst those that, even if having a great respect for the Constitution, find that the second part today shows the signs of time. And even already at the time [of adoption], if one reads the papers of the constituents, it emphasizes that the Constitution was a child of a distinctive historical context and hence contained in itself already a number of problems, as in the organization of a perfect bicameralism and a certain weakness of the executive. (Russo, interview with author on 12 February 2014 at the Italian Senate) The perception that the Constitution forms an obstacle to effective government is even more pronounced in Renzi’s introductory speech to the reform, in the Senate on 8 April 2014: The chronic weakness of the executives in the implementation of the governmental programme, the slowness and the complex nature of legislative processes, the excessive usage  – in quantity and heterogeneity of the substance – of decrees of urgency and the emergence of the usage of the vote of confidence for maxi-amendments, the change in sources of law and the growing normative entropy, the difficulty in implementation of a smooth legislative process and the too frequently instable and confused, heightened conflictuality between different levels of government: these are only some of the symptoms of the pathology that affects the Italian institutional system for years now and the removal of which needs profound interventions of reform. (Renzi, 8–04–2014; emphasis added)

3  Concluding remarks: the populists in power (again) Neither the center-right nor the center-left attempt at comprehensively changing the Italian Constitution has been successful. This is not to say, however, that the attempts have not had any durable consequences for the Italian democratic system and in particular for Italian political and legal culture (cf. Pasquino 2018.) One clear result of the entire ‘season of constitutional reform’ is the idea that it is the constitutional order that prevents Italian democracy from operating properly. In the case of the current populist coalition of the Five Star Movement (M5S) and the Lega (Nord) – in government since the summer of 2018 – the issue of constitutional reform is once again part of the political agenda, even if the two

The populist assault on the constitution 211 parties wisely avoid a ‘Grande Riforma’ of the comprehensive kind as attempted in the projects of Berlusconi and Renzi. In the case of both the M5S and the Lega, the populist dimension plays a significant role, even if their approaches to constitutional reform are only partially overlapping. The Lega takes a clearly right-wing or even radical right-wing approach to the Constitution, emphasizing in particular a ‘law and order’ dimension. For instance, in its electoral programme of 2018, the Lega’s populist approach to the law becomes evident. In the chapter on ‘Autonomy and Institutional Reforms’, the Lega argued that ‘[d]emocracy means government of the people’. This ‘sovereignty of the people’ is however, according to the Lega, compromised by a series of factors, including a ‘certain model of Europe, based on technocrats who frequently impose their decisions on member states’, ‘international institutions such as the UN and the WTO’, and the ‘tendency of judges to substitute for legislators’ (Lega 2018, 20). According to the Lega, it is necessary to create a ‘new equilibrium between [political] powers and to strengthen the institutions of direct democracy, understood as a correction to the possible distortions of representative democracy’. Similar to the tendencies in both the Berlusconi and Renzi reforms, the Lega proposes an institutional reform to strengthen executive power: ‘A strong head of the executive is necessary, chosen directly by the people’ (2018, 21). This executivist view of democracy has been invoked most clearly by the undersecretary Giorgetti, who stated in September 2018 that constitutional reforms are necessary to avoid the danger of a ‘strongman’ coming to power. According to Giorgetti, ‘Parliament does not count at all anymore, because it is not anymore appreciated by citizens, who [merely] perceive it as a place [representing] the inconclusiveness of politics’ (Repubblica 21/09/2018). He went on, ‘[i]f we continue to defend the fetish of representative democracy, we are not doing any good to democracy as such’. The Lega’s political agenda contains clearly all three dimensions of the populist engagement with constitutions: the exaltation of the majority,8 understood as the ordinary Italian people;9 the prioritization of (national) politics over the law;10 and the resentment towards legal obstacles obstructing decision-making.11 In the case of the M5S, the populist approach is different, and in distinct dimensions of its legal perspective, rather unique (cf. Corso forthcoming). As argued by Lucia Corso, the M5S follows a highly distinctive path amongst parties that are considered populist, in that it strongly favours a legalistic approach towards justice, including with regard to the Constitution. This became clear in the M5S’s strong siding against the Renzi reform in 2014–16 but also comes through in its self-positioning in the current government. The M5S follows a form of legalformalist and technocratic governance, with a clear objective to reduce the status of intermediary institutions and to construct direct relations between the citizens and political decision-making, in particular by means of democracy (referenda, popular initiatives and e-democratic channels). Rather than legal resentment – in terms of legalism forming an undue constraint on the execution of the popular will – in the M5S’s perception, a form of fetishism of legal rules and the Constitution in combination with the usage of digital technology is the best way of

212  Paul Blokker serving the popular will, unhindered by filters of intermediary actors and institutions. The constitutional reform directly instigated by the M5S is one that was already proposed during the Renzi reform and pushes for the enhancement of direct democratic instruments and the elimination of a quorum. In general, then, there appears to be a less instrumentalist approach towards the Constitution in the M5S’s populism. Equally, the M5S seems not to engage in legal resentment, that is, a rejection of liberal understandings of the rule of law, but rather follows a form of technocratic, legal pragmatism: ‘if a law is good, we vote for it, if it is bad, we do not vote for it’ (cited in Bickerton and Invernizzi Accetti 2018, 10). With regard to the political development of populist attitudes to constitutional law, Italy can be regarded as both a front-runner in Europe and as a distinctive version of a wider contemporary trend. The latter is particularly evident in cases such as Hungary, Poland, and Romania, in which partisan politics dramatically reshape constitutional orders, but is equally present in Western European societies. We seem to be witnessing a shift in constitutional imaginary, away from the legalist domination of the post–WWII period, towards a majoritarian, decisionist, and instrumental understanding of constitutions.

Notes 1 The focus in this chapter is on populism of a right-wing, conservative nature, which in the Italian case has been promoted by center-right forces but of which distinctive dimensions have become equally part of the political project of nominally left-wing forces. 2 Here, I focus on the mode of government, the legal-practical approach, and the attitude towards of the law of populists. I have more extensively elaborated these dimensions – with an additional dimension of justification in the form of popular sovereignty – in: Blokker (2019). 3 The term ‘instrumentalism’ is used here in a (pejorative) sense akin to the one expressed by the Venice Commission, in its opinion on the fourth amendment of the Hungarian Fundamental Law, see Venice Commission (2013), Opinion on the Fourth Amendment to the Fundamental Law of Hungary, CDLAD(2013)012, Strasbourg, Council of Europe, 17 June  2013, www.venice.coe.int/webforms/documents/?pdf=CDLAD%282013%29012-e. The Commission argued that ‘[f]requent constitutional amendments are a worrying sign of an instrumental attitude towards the constitution as is the resort to the exceptional two-thirds majority in constitution-making without a genuine effort to form a wide political consensus and without proper public debates’ (2013, 30). The Commission decries the frequent and in-transparent nature of reforms and the abuse of the majority-position of the government. 4 Four other requests had been presented by oppositional forces. 5 Despite its claim to represent the ‘ordinary people’, the position of the political majority and its search for popular legitimacy were compromised by the fact, as frequently argued by the parliamentary and societal opposition, that the majority behind the reform could be understood as an ‘illegitimate’ one. This was due to the fact that the electoral law in vigour (the so-called Porcellum) created an artificial majority by means of an electoral premium (identified as unconstitutional by the Constitutional Court in January 2014). What is clear is that the majority behind the reform was relatively small and fragile (Volpi 2016, 121). As Ferrajoli argues, the majority of the government consisted in 25% of the votes, which corresponds to 15% of the electorate, which was however transformed in an absolute majority by means of the electoral law and its majority premium (Ferrajoli 2016, 18).

The populist assault on the constitution  213 6 A further, highly significant part of the reforms, even if formally not part of the Constitution, was electoral reform. In 2014, the Constitutional Court had struck down two parts of the (then) existing electoral law (referred to as the Porcellum): closed-list voting and the majority premium. The new law adopted in May 2015, the Italicum, did not, however, fully eliminate doubts concerning constitutionality, as raised by the Court. 7 The reform was significantly criticized, also by opponents within the Democratic Party (PD), inter alia for compromising the democratic and representative quality of the Italian parliament by eliminating the direct election of senators. For extensive discussions of the substance of the reform, see, e.g., Ceccanti (2016); Fusaro (2015, 2016); Pasquino (2015); Urbinati and Ragazzoni (2016). 8 The extreme majoritarian understanding of the role of the leader is frequently expressed by the leader of the Lega, Salvini, when he claims that his policies are ‘supported by 99% of the Italians’. 9 As Salvini commented, with regard to a manifestation of the opposition in Milan in March 2019 (including representatives of both political and civil society) against his restrictive laws against migration, he will not ‘change his ideas’, as ‘Italians have given [t]heir message to the government with their vote, restating their faith in me, in the Lega and in the government’, see www.tgcom24.mediaset.it/politica/manifestazionemilano-salvini-vado-avanti-e-non-cambio-idea-_3194821-201902a.shtml. 10 In its political programme, the Lega argues against lawmaking by judges, but it also proposes a ‘renationalization’ of legal sovereignty. In its programme, the Lega argues against the primacy of the European Court of Justice and claims that the ‘jurisprudence of the [Italian] Constitutional Court needs to prevail over that of the European Court’ (2018, 21). 11 This dimension also includes that of a critique of liberal human rights discourse in its ‘multicultural dimensions’. As for instance emerged in the parliamentary debate on the legislative proposal on ius soli in 2017, initiated by the center-left Partito Democratico, the Lega argued against the ‘facilitation of multiculturalism by law’ (Bulli 2018, 19).

References Documents Resoconto sommario e stenografico, 900, mercoledì 16 novembre, 2005, Senato della Repubblica. Resoconto stenografico, 350, seduta di martedì 16 dicembre, 2014, Camera dei deputati.

Scholarly works Ackerman, Bruce (1991), We the People. Volume I: Foundations, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Bickerton, C. J. and Invernizzi Accetti, C. (2018), ‘Techno-populism’ as a new party family: The case of the Five Star Movement and Podemos’, Contemporary Italian Politics, 10(2), 132–150. Blokker, Paul (2019), ‘Populism as a constitutional project’, International Journal of Constitutional Law, 17(2). Blokker, Paul (2013), New Democracies in Crisis? A Comparative Constitutional Study of the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, Romania and Slovakia, Routledge. Blokker, Paul (2005), ‘Populist nationalism, anti-Europeanism, postnationalism, and the East-West distinction’, German Law Journal, 6, 371.

214  Paul Blokker Böckenförde, Ernst-Wolfgang (1997), ‘The concept of the political: a key to understanding Carl Schmitt’s constitutional theory’, The Canadian Journal of Law and Jurisprudence, 10(1), 5. Bull, Martin and Gianfranco Pasquino (2007), ‘A long quest in vain: Institutional reforms in Italy’, West European Politics, 30(4), 670–691. Bulli, G. (2018), ‘The populist representation of the people in the Italian ius soli political debate’, in: Gregor Fitzi, Juergen Mackert, Bryan S. Turner (eds), Populism and the Crisis of Democracy: Volume 3: Migration, Gender and Religion, Routledge. Ceccanti, Stefano (2016), La transizione è (quasi) finita: Come risolvere nel 2016 i problemi aperti 70 anni prima. Verso il referendum costituzionale, G Giappichelli Editore. Corso, Lucia (forthcoming), ‘When anti-politics becomes political: what can the Italian Five Star Movement tell us about the relationship between populism and legality’, in: European Constitutional Law Review. Dallara, C. (2015), ‘Powerful resistance against a long-running personal crusade: the impact of Silvio Berlusconi on the Italian judicial system’, Modern Italy, 20(1), 59–76. Dominijanni, I. (2016), ‘La deriva della politica costituzionale’, Democrazia e diritto, 2, 7–13. Ferrajoli, Luigi (2003), ‘Il berlusconismo e l’appropriazione della sfera pubblica. Un nuovo caso italiano’, Democrazia e diritto, 1, 21–35. Ferrajoli, Luigi (2016), ‘Dal bicameralismo perfetto al monocameralismo imperfetto’, Democrazia e diritto, 2, 15–24. Fusaro, Carlo (2015), ‘Per una storia delle riforme istituzionali (1948–2015)’, Rivista Trimestrale di diritto pubblico, 2, 431–555. Fusaro, Carlo (2016), ‘La ragioni della riforma costituzionale. Una guida’. Available at: www.carlofusaro.it/materiali/Guida%20ragionata%2015052016.pdf (accessed on 18 January 2017). Ginsburg, Tom, Aziz Z. Huq, and Mila Versteeg (2018), ‘The coming demise of liberal constitutionalism’, University of Chicago Law Review, 85, 239. Groppi, Tania (2013), ‘Constitutional revision in Italy: a marginal instrument for constitutional change’, in: X. Contiades (ed.), Engineering Constitutional Change. A Comparative Perspective on Europe, Canada, and the USA, Routledge, 203–228. Krygier, Martin (2016), ‘The rule of law: pasts, presents, and two possible futures’, Annual Review of Law and Social Science, 12, 199. Landau, David (2018), ‘Populist constitutions’, University of Chicago Law Review, 85, 521. Lauro, Salvatore (2005), Senato della Repubblica, 16-11-2005. Lega (2018), Elezioni 2018 Programma di governo. Lippolis, V. (2014), ‘Le riforme istituzionali: Trent’anni di sterili tentativi parlamentari e di modifiche della legislazione elettorale’, Federalismi, 5, 1–23. Loughlin, Martin (2004), The Idea of Public Law, Oxford University Press. Müller, Jan-Werner (2016), What Is Populism? University of Pennsylvania Press. Palombella, Gianluigi (2017), ‘Illiberal, democratic and non-arbitrary?’, Hague Journal on the Rule of Law, 1. Pasquino, G. (2018), ‘The disappearance of political cultures in Italy’, South European Society and Politics, 23(1), 133–146. Pasquino, Gianfranco (2015), Cittadini senza scettro: le riforme sbagliate, EGEA. Pinelli, Cesare (2006), ‘The 1948 Italian constitution and the 2006 referendum: food for thought’, European Constitutional Law Review, 2(3), 329–340. Prospero, Michele (2007), La Costituzione tra populismo e leaderismo. FrancoAngeli. Prospero, Michele (2016), ‘Una democrazia minore’, Democrazia e diritto, 2, 148–164. Urbinati, Nadia and David Ragazzoni (2016), La vera Seconda Repubblica. L’ideologia e la macchina. Milano: Raffaello Cortina Editore.

The populist assault on the constitution 215 Russo, Francesco (2014), interview with Paul Blokker, 12–2–2014, Italian Senate. Sartori, Giovanni (2006), ‘Se cambiare è peggiorare’, Corriere della sera, 21 May 2006. Scheuerman, William E. (2002), ‘Constitutionalism in an Age of Speed’, Constitutional Commentary, 19, 353, 383. Taruffo, Michele (1998), ‘Berlusconi teorico del diritto, della giustizia, e d’altro’, Il Mulino, 5, 901–912. Urbinati, Nadia (2014), Democracy Disfigured. Harvard University Press. Venice Commission (2013), Opinion on the Fourth Amendment to the Fundamental Law of Hungary, CDLAD(2013)012, Strasbourg, Council of Europe, 17 June  2013. www. venice.coe.int/webforms/documents/?pdf=CDL-AD%282013%29012-e Volpi, Mauro 2016, ‘Riforma Renzi e Riforma Berlusconi: così lontane . . . così vicine’, Democrazia e diritto, 2, 119–138. Wolff, Elisabetta (2012), ‘Berlusconi’s Attempt to Reform the Italian Constitution. Rehearsal of New (Post-modern) Authoritarian Politics or Same Old Habit?’, paper presented in the Paper prepared for the conference ‘Silvio Berlusconi and Post-modern Politics’, University of Birmingham, 14 December 2012. Zanchetta, Pier Luigi (2003), ‘Il governo Berlusconi, il sistema costituzionale, la giustizia (Lo studio del fenomeno in quattro raccolte di saggi)’, Questione giustizia, 5, 1053–1067.

12 Four Italian populisms Cecilia Biancalana

1 Introduction Italy has always been considered a breeding ground for the study of populism, earning the title “laboratory of populism” (Tarchi 2015). Due to the co-existence of different types and forms of populism, it can be considered a privileged observatory for the study of this phenomenon. The aim of this chapter is to provide an in-depth analysis of four cases of populist parties, movements and leaders, cases that represent the most relevant experiences within the Italian political system during the so-called “Second Republic”: Bossi’s and Salvini’s Lega (Nord, or Northern League), Berlusconi’s Forza Italia (Go Italy), the Movimento 5 Stelle (Five Star Movement) and Renzi’s Partito Democratico (Democratic Party). The chapter will be structured as follows. After having outlined the origins, history and electoral successes of each actor, I will analyse the cases in relation to four different dimensions and ask whether each one can constitute a sort of “idealtype” of Italian populism. Taking into account the four different dimensions of analysis (the leader and their style, the definition of the people and its enemies, the organisation, the idea of democracy), my aim is not to reduce the complexity of the populist phenomenon. On the contrary, I will take a look at each case in a comprehensive manner, including in relation to the different phases of development of the Italian party and institutional system.

2 The Lega (Nord): from ethno-regionalism to national-populism History and evolution The Lega Nord – from December 2017 onwards known simply as Lega – is the most long-lived party in the Italian political system, as well as the first interpreter of populism in the transition from the First to the Second Republic. In 1989, the Lega Nord unified the action of a series of local autonomist groups that had developed in the regions of Northern Italy (especially Veneto and Lombardy) in the preceding years. Officially founded in 1991, the party immediately obtained success at the national level (for example, in the 1992 general elections, where it achieved

Four Italian populisms  217 8% of the vote) as well as at the local level (in various administrative elections, including the one for mayor of Milan). The Lega Nord was the first protagonist in the transition from the so-called First to the Second Republic in Italy. In a context marked by the destabilisation of the party system and the end of international bipolarism, the Lega Nord appeared as a cross-cutting party, characterised by antiparty protest and the mobilisation of cleavages that would have been unusual in the political competition of the post-war period, such as the one between centre and periphery. Therefore, the Lega did not mobilise a class fracture, or a religious one, as used to be the case for the First Republic parties, but rather a territorial one (Tarchi 2015). Indeed, in the first phase of its existence, the Lega Nord could be assimilated to ethno-regionalist and autonomist parties (McDonnell 2006; Bulli and Tronconi 2011), emphasising the historical, cultural and linguistic specificities of the territories where it was rooted. Its objective was to achieve more autonomy for those regions (autonomy that over time will be interpreted as federalism, independentism, secession or devolution – see Diamanti 1996; Biorcio 2010) with the aim of improving the socio-economic status of the local population. This phase is well exemplified by the demand for (and the proclamation of, however fundamentally symbolic) a “secession” of the communities of the productive North  – the socalled Padania  – from the rest of Italy. In this phase, the community that was mobilised in the populist scheme of the Lega Nord was therefore the local one: the local territory was considered at the same time a source of identity and the seat of interests that are different and antagonistic to those existing outside the community (including, but not exclusively, economic interests; Tarchi 2015). To this dimension, which can be assimilated to what Taguieff defined as “identity” populism, another one can be added from the very beginning, which brings it closer to a form of “protest” populism (Taguieff 2002). In the Lega Nord, there has always been a strong component of anti-party protest and a sound critique to central political institutions, seen as incapable of defending the interests of territorial communities (Biorcio 2010). This, however, did not prevent the Lega Nord from aspiring to and obtaining, government positions in the central institutions (Albertazzi and McDonnell 2015). This happened on four occasions since its foundation: in 1994; from 2001 to 2006 and from 2008 to 2012, in coalition with Berlusconi, and since 2018, in coalition with the Movimento 5 Stelle. The Lega Nord evolved over time and adapted its claims to a changed context, alternating phases of stronger and weaker electoral success, but eventually managing to widen its consensus beyond the confines of the North. The Lega’s claims have always been characterised by the will to protect the community of belonging – as variously defined – both from internal and external threats. Over time this community has widened to the point that it now coincides with the whole national territory. The latter change in the definition of the community of belonging corresponded to the election of Matteo Salvini (b. 1973) as party secretary in 2013. Salvini is the third Secretary General of the Lega Nord. The first secretary, who held power for 20 years, was Umberto Bossi (b. 1941), a charismatic leader and founder of the Lega. Following a series of scandals (concerning the undue

218  Cecilia Biancalana appropriations of party funds) which involved him and his family, he resigned from the role of federal secretary, retaining however that of president for life. For a short period he was succeeded by Roberto Maroni (b. 1955) and then by Matteo Salvini since 2013. Salvini’s leadership presents some common traits as Bossi’s; however, during Salvini’s time in office, the Lega has experienced significant transformations (Passarelli and Tuorto 2018). The party symbol and slogan have changed: the word “Nord” disappeared, and the slogan switched from “North first” to “Italians first”, meaning that the community that the Lega aspires to defend is no longer the local but rather the national one (Albertazzi et al. 2018). At the same time, an issue that was already present in the Lega’s agenda since the early 2000s, namely the fight against immigration, has become prominent. Furthermore, Salvini has forged links with parties of the populist right, like the Front National, with which he shares a form of euro-scepticism and hostility towards the common European currency. The electoral success in the 2018 general elections, where the Lega ran in coalition with Forza Italia and Fratelli d’Italia, testifies to the success of this operation. The Lega was the most voted party in the coalition (17%) and abandoned its partners to form a government alliance with the Movimento 5 Stelle in what has been termed the “Government of Change” (Vampa 2018). Although this is the fourth experience in government for the Lega, the party once again managed to position itself as a political outsider, in opposition to traditional parties. The style of the leader The Lega Nord, in its history, experienced two changes in leadership. Of its three leaders, two (Bossi and Salvini) present the traits of populist leaders. Umberto Bossi’s style had all the characteristics of populist leaders. He embodied the Lega for 20 years, presenting himself as the true interpreter of common people’s needs. Bossi’s style was, primarily, a simple style that aimed at bringing the leader closer to the people. This was clearly visible in both the leader’s language and his appearance: Bossi’s language was that of the people, simple and simplified; he said things “as people would say them”, both from a style and content point of view. Bossi’s language often made use of dialect in order to build the identity of a true local community, which could unite people beyond ideologies. The use of dialect not only served to build the community’s identity, but it also brought the leader close to the people. This type of language was also functional in stressing the specificities of the Lega and its difference to the traditional politics and politicians. For this reason, as for many other populist leaders, Bossi’s language aimed to break consolidated communicative codes, for example through the use of bad language (Tarchi 2015). As far as content is concerned, Bossi’s rhetoric was inspired by common sense: it proposed simple solutions to complex problems, solutions that even common people would be able to suggest. Also from the point of view of the leader’s persona, for example his way of dressing, Bossi’s style was immediate and informal. The leader’s white vests were a symbol of authenticity and simplicity: the leader

Four Italian populisms 219 did not only speak like the people but also dressed like common people. Bossi rejected the conventions of professional politics and was thus perceived as “one of us” (Biorcio 2010). As we will see later, this direct and informal style added to the supremacy of the leader in the party organisation. Bossi was, for 20 years, the mentor and founder of the Lega Nord, a truly charismatic leader. However, the “imagined community” (Anderson 1983) of the Lega Nord, the Padania, is clearly not characterised by cultural or linguistic traits that spontaneously constitute forms of identification. This community was created through a process of “invention of tradition” (Hobsbawm and Ranger 1983), and represents a mainly symbolic community. The community was constructed through a mythology made up of symbols and conventions (for example, Pontida), through which popular traditions and symbols of the past were reproduced for the purposes of identification. The leader was at the centre of this symbolic production, was part of it, and embodied it. Bossi’s 20-year leadership even survived the illness that hit him in 2004, but not a series a scandals that forced him in 2012, after 20 years, to abandon the role of federal secretary (Bossi however remained president for life). In 2012, Roberto Maroni, a long-time party chief whose style was however very different from Bossi’s, lacking his “charismatic” traits, was elected as federal secretary. Maroni’s leadership was short-lived, and in 2013, Matteo Salvini got elected through internal primaries. Salvini is similar to Bossi in some traits: he presents himself as a man of the people, who says things as they are and values common sense (the “buonsenso”; see Passarelli and Tuorto 2018). Like Bossi, he uses his clothing to communicate closeness to the people and informality, in opposition to traditional politicians (Salvini uses tracksuit tops instead of vests). Like Bossi, he uses a plain and provocative language and proposes simple solutions to complex problems (for example, the image of bulldozers to get rid of the Roma people’s camps, Pucciarelli 2016). Therefore, although Salvini does not have the charisma of the founder, there are elements of personalisation of his leadership and a strong identification of voters and militants with his figure, which has also been built by means of the possibilities offered by new technologies, such as social networks sites (Bobba 2018). The people and the enemies of the people Populism, as frequently argued, is based on the Manichean counter-position between the people and the enemies of the people. The people is seen as a homogenous and virtuous entity, in juxtaposition to the immorality of the enemies. With regard to the people mobilised by the Lega Nord, its definition of the people has evolved over time from a people mainly characterised on local territorial bases (the Padania people or the people of the North), to a people organised on a national base (the Italian people). In the first phase, the people mobilised by the Lega Nord related to what Mény and Surel (2000) defined as the “people nation”; however, the concept of “nation” was adopted in a restricted way, as a smaller portion of the entire national community (the region, the Padania nation). Starting with Matteo

220  Cecilia Biancalana Salvini’s leadership, the Lega has aimed at mobilising the whole Italian people (see the change in name and slogan, Passarelli and Tuorto 2018). Nevertheless, the dynamics of the populist scheme remained the same (Albertazzi et al. 2018). Initially, the people of the Lega Nord was constituted by the inhabitants of the most industrially advanced areas of the country, who were forced to redistribute their wealth with the idle South. The people was, then, a productive people, made up of workers, small virtuous businessmen, used to the labour and sweat of hard work. This people faced many enemies. Firstly, the central state and the parties (“Thieving Rome” was a famous slogan of that period). The former exploited the industriousness and productivity of the North, draining resources to the South; the latter were incapable of solving people’s problems and appeared weak in the face of strong powers, hostage to the interests of the “big” players (the European Union, big industry). These “big” players represented the second enemy of the people: the European Union, the financial world, big industry, the banks: “strong powers” that crushed the small ones (the small entrepreneurs, the workers) (Tarchi 2015). Finally, a third enemy is made up of “the others”: initially, the target of the Lega Nord were southern workers from Southern Italy who had migrated to the North. Over time, the Lega has mobilised the resentment towards foreign migrants (initially those from Eastern Europe then from Africa). The immigrants are seen as bearers of a culture which is different from that of the local community (especially, after 2001, the Islamic religion has become the symbol of diversity) and represent unequal competition for local workers. Furthermore, immigrants are perceived as responsible for increased insecurity and criminality, phenomena that are often amplified, if not created, by media coverage (Biorcio 2010). In more general terms, we can say that globalisation, as it is perceived as the cradle of an “open society” (Perrineau 2000), is the enemy of the Lega Nord. Both in its ethno-regionalist interpretation and in its later nationalist evolution, the Lega Nord can be defined as the defender of a “closed” society. Initially, it was closed towards the other parts of Italy, especially a South considered as a parasite of the rich North; subsequently, the community corresponded to national boundaries and the discourse of the Lega has become similar to that of nationalist and extreme right parties. The Lega, therefore, positions itself as the representative of those who have been defined as the “losers of modernisation” (Betz 1994). The organisation The Lega Nord, although it presents some of the traits of mass parties (such as its organisational charter, the statute, the territorial organisational structures; see Passarelli and Tuorto 2012), is a highly centralised party that can be ascribed to the category of “leader’s parties”. Despite having a complex organisational apparatus, made up of regional and provincial offices, territorial branches, members, a trade union, related associations, a press agency and a newspaper, according to Tarchi (2015), the Lega cannot be included in the category of “mass bureaucratic parties”. On the contrary, the Lega represents a “leader’s party”, both on paper and in

Four Italian populisms 221 its practices. The Lega, at least during Bossi’s leadership, was a very centralised party, where internal hierarchies and decision-making processes were often informal and dependent on the will of the leader and founder. We have seen that the territory is the “foundational myth” of the party and its source of identification. One can therefore wonder whether this is mirrored in the party’s organisation. The participation of the local members is in fact developed, in terms of an extended network of local branches and territorial offices. However, according to Tarchi (2015), the Lega does not aim at a constant and widespread militant participation of its followers. Biorcio (2010) also stated that the Lega aims, above all, at a strengthening of its mandate, rather than at an actual widening of the citizens’ direct participation. The Lega does not aim at stimulating citizen participation, but rather at obtaining consensus and support for the mobilisations and campaigns that the party is involved in. In this respect, Albertazzi (2016), in relation to Bossi’s Lega, observes that by asking representatives to keep constantly in touch with the territories, and by organising activities and events, the Lega Nord was able to secure a strong commitment to the party’s objectives by its activists, shaping group identities and creating strong emotional bonds with members. Finally, Passarelli and Tuorto (2018) argue that, under Salvini’s leadership, the party has been further verticalised, with a progressive loss of relevance of the party on the ground. If one of the traits of populism is making politics the expression of the “general will” of the people (Mudde 2004), in the Lega Nord this does not happen through its members’ (or citizens’) participation in the decision-making process. On the contrary, the general will of the people is personified by the charismatic leader, who is an immediate conduit of the popular will. The militants’ participation only serves as a means of identification, not as a decision-making one. The vision of democracy Over the years, the Lega has promoted closeness and proximity  – both physical and symbolic – between politics and territory (Le Bart and Lefebvre 2005). Physical proximity is created, as we have seen, through militant action on the territory. Symbolic proximity, on the contrary, is created through identification with a leader who presents himself and is perceived as close to people’s needs and expectations. Consistent with the populist scheme, in this way the Lega promotes the direct expression of the popular will. The popular will, as linked to the territory, must be respected and transformed into political action. During the first decade of the 2000s, due to both its “nationalisation” following its experience in government and the global economic crisis that changed the definition of centre and periphery, reducing the sovereign powers of states and the importance of territory, it has been noted (Diamanti 2013) that the Lega was struggling to play the role of interpreter of the territorial cleavage as it did in the past. However, we can say that the territorial cleavage is still active, albeit partially redefined. Following the economic crisis, and with the deepening of the globalisation process, the centre–periphery fracture has widened, with Italy perceived

222  Cecilia Biancalana as a periphery of a centre that is identified with the European Union. Under Salvini’s leadership, the Lega no longer positions itself as the exclusive representative of the interests of the North. The centre–periphery cleavage, albeit changed, is however still mobilised, although no longer as an opposition between the local territory and the central state (Albertazzi et al. 2018). The Lega now manages to mobilise the sentiment of exclusion of the whole national community instead of the local one. The direct representation of the local territory has been transformed into a direct representation of the national territory. The national-populism of the Lega The Lega (Nord)’s populism can be defined as “national-populism”. Its main trait is the defence of the national community, of its interests and its integrity from external enemies and threats – defined in various ways. This scheme was present when the “nation” was the local, regional or imagined one (the Padania), but it is especially present in current times, now that the nation coincides with the Italian one. When Bossi’s leadership came to an end, Passarelli and Tuorto (2012) observed a progressive rapprochement of the Lega Nord to extreme right neopopulist parties, and this tendency has been confirmed with Salvini in office (Passarelli and Tuorto 2018). However, coming back to Mény and Surel’s definition of the people mobilised by populists, the Lega does not only stress the peoplenation (although this people is the prevalent one in the discourse of the Lega). As we have seen, it is also the people-class (the “small” versus the “big” ones, in economic terms) that is mobilised, and especially the “sovereign” people, through the claim of a popular sovereignty that needs to be re-established. The Lega mixes different types of populism, and this can explain its longevity.

3  Silvio Berlusconi’s audience democracy History and evolution Silvio Berlusconi (b. 1936) is the undisputable protagonist of the Second Republic in Italy. His entrance into politics transformed a political system that had already been shaken by the magistrates’ investigations (dubbed “Clean Hands”), which marked the ending of post-war Italy’s main parties. It is in this exceptional situation of crisis that Berlusconi’s political project – Forza Italia – took shape. The history of Forza Italia is strictly linked to that of its founder, Berlusconi, and his personal and private vicissitudes. For the first time in the history of the Italian republic, a new type of leadership emerged (Bordignon 2013), as well as a new type of party (Calise 2010), both founded on the leader’s persona. It was a post-ideological leadership (which positioned itself beyond traditional ideologies) and an anti-political (Campus 2006) or apolitical one, which stated the supremacy of different logics (such as entrepreneurship and business) over the typically political ones. Furthermore, as far as the type of party was concerned, Forza Italia was, as we will see, the prototype of the “personal party” (Raniolo 2006).

Four Italian populisms  223 Berlusconi’s populism has been defined as “tele-populism” (Taguieff 2002). Berlusconi was an outsider of politics who used television (he is the owner of private TV stations) to address his appeal to the people: a people made up of “common people” – in opposition to professional politicians and parties who had characterised the First Republic – of which Berlusconi proclaimed himself the true interpreter. Berlusconi was not a professional politician; he was a businessman who stated he joined politics not to pursue his own personal interests but rather to put himself at the country’s service. In December  1993, without any earlier political experience and without the support of pre-existing political groups, only with that of his businesses and research from opinion polls institutes, he founded a party (Forza Italia) and took part in the general elections of March 1994. With the end of the Christian Democrats’ experience, the Italian conservative and moderate area found itself orphaned of political references (Grilli di Cortona 2007). Berlusconi managed to exploit this window of opportunity and the climate of anti-politics, which had emerged after the collapse of the so-called First Republic and was favourable to the emerging of populist parties and leaders. In the 1994 general elections, Forza Italia, which had only been founded a few months earlier, obtained 21% of the votes and became the biggest party (a result that would be overtaken only by the Movimento 5 Stelle in the 2013 elections). Berlusconi formed a government in alliance with the Lega Nord and Alleanza Nazionale, becoming prime minister. However, this first experience in government only lasted for a few months due to the Lega Nord withdrawing from the governing coalition. Berlusconi became head of the government on two other occasions: from 2001 to 2006 and from 2008 to 2011, always in coalition with other right or centre-right parties, where Forza Italia was the dominant component. As already mentioned, given that Forza Italia and its political action closely identified with its leader, over the years, Berlusconi’s private vicissitudes and political ones inextricably mingled. Scandals, trials and other personal vicissitudes of the leader marked the Italian political panorama and contributed to a strong polarisation of political life. In the 2009–2013 period, Forza Italia joined the Popolo delle Libertà (PdL), a party formed by Forza Italia, Alleanza Nazionale and other minor parties, however still headed prominently by Berlusconi. During the 2013–2018 legislative term, the PdL initially took part in a multi-party government with the Democratic Party but soon abandoned the coalition. In 2013, Berlusconi was interdicted as senator following a sentence for fiscal fraud and was barred from public office until 2018. In the 2018 elections, the reconstituted Forza Italia (still without Berlusconi as a candidate) joined the centre-right coalition and for the first time lost its hegemony, to the benefit of the Lega headed by Matteo Salvini (Vampa 2018). The style of the leader If one of the characteristics of populism is a leader who positions himself in direct connection with the people, there is no doubt that Berlusconi’s style falls within the populist category. Not only did Berlusconi use television to create a direct connection and communication with the electorate, what was established was a

224  Cecilia Biancalana true process of identification with the leader. As mentioned above, Berlusconi did not present himself to the electorate as a professional politician. On the contrary, he emphasised two apparently contradictory traits that, however, are linked to each other: on the one hand, his skills as a successful businessman and manager; on the other, him being a common man, a “self-made” man, managing to build a vast economic empire from scratch. If, on the one hand, Berlusconi’s image could not be more distant from the man of the street, on the other, in the narrative of his story, Berlusconi tried to appear as closely as possible to the common citizen (Tarchi 2015). An Italian Story was the title of the pamphlet which contained the leader’s biography and which was sent by mail to millions of voters on the eve of the 2001 elections. The title already suggested that the aim was to generalise Berlusconi’s story, which could potentially become the story of any Italian who was willing to work hard. Furthermore, a fundamental trait of Berlusconi’s leadership style was the use of personal, private and intimate aspects. This, as noted by Mazzoleni and Sfardini (2009), was part of a more general process of popularisation of politics: politics gets closer to citizens, becomes “popular”, and this also happens through the narration of the most intimate aspects of the leader’s biography and persona. Through this strategy the electorate can identify with the leader (who is “one of us”), who however is endowed with exceptional characteristics when compared to the common man. The leader is at the same time close and different (an example of this strategy is the self-identification of Berlusconi as “workman president” during the 2001 electoral campaign). As I have mentioned, the medium used to create a direct contact between the leader and the people was television. Berlusconi was the owner of private television channels and an attentive connoisseur of the rules of commercial marketing; for instance, the speech that he used to “enter the field” in 1994 was televised by his channels. His communicative style was based on simplicity: from a formal point of view, the stylistic features of TV communication are used to convey a message that is simple and easily understandable by the electorate. From a content point of view, given his entrepreneurial skills and experiences, the government of the country was assimilated by Berlusconi to the management of a business or a family. The political and party logics, described as inefficient, were juxtaposed to this modality of management of the public realm (Tarchi 2015). Berlusconi, in his speech, also made ample use of football metaphors, both due to the huge popularity of this sport and because he himself was the president of a football team. As in the case of other populist leaders, the language and attitudes that are unusual in the political realm (such as the jokes and the gaffes during important institutional occasions) were used by Berlusconi to underline the difference with the political and party élite. The people and the enemies of the people Berlusconi’s perspective was a catch-all one: the people Berlusconi appealed to was the Italian people, a united Italy, the real country, made up of honest citizens

Four Italian populisms 225 and workers, whose common sense he praised. This unity could be hinted at from the name of the party, Forza Italia, and by the officially chosen colour, blue. The colour referred to the national football team, and even the name of the party reminded citizens of the cheers that supporters of the national team chant to their players. They were non-divisive symbols, which tended to assimilate and favour the identification of all Italian citizens. There are two main enemies that can be identified in Berlusconi’s populist scheme (see Tarchi 2015). One is represented by parties and professional politicians. Berlusconi’s attitude has been defined as hypo-political: starting with the fall of the First Republic, Italy experienced a sort of idealisation of civil society, which Berlusconi embodied perfectly. As a consequence, other and different logics were considered preferable to the political one. Parties and professional politicians were seen as animated not by a genuine interest in the country but rather by particularist logics and interests; furthermore, politics was seen as inefficient, compared to the logic of business and commercial companies, considered more efficient. It was especially the parties on the left, defined by Berlusconi as “communists”, to be identified as enemies of the people. Finally, although Berlusconi owed his success, or at least the opening of a political opportunity, to the judicial investigations that brought about the fall of the First Republic, the magistrates were also seen as enemies. They were perceived as a non-elected body, without any popular legitimacy, which interfered with political and governmental action (in particular through unjust legal proceedings against the leader). Against these enemies, Berlusconi proposed a profound renovation of politics, both in terms of the people involved in it (who needed to be outsiders of politics) and in terms of modalities of action, oriented towards the efficiency that is typical of entrepreneurs. There was therefore a supremacy of the private over the public. The “private” was interpreted in two different yet linked ways. Firstly, as we have seen, there was a relevance of the private as the personal: the leader’s persona and everything that surrounded it became central to political life; secondly, the private was seen as the superiority of business and enterprise logics over political and party ones. The organisation Among Forza Italia’s most interesting traits is certainly its organisation. When it was founded, Forza Italia was nothing more than an electoral committee at the leader’s service (Maraffi 1995). Like many other populist parties, Berlusconi rejected the label of party, to which he preferred that of movement (Poli 2001). As mentioned, Berlusconi entered politics without the support of existing political groups. Forza Italia was a party characterised by flexible and light structures, made up of, at least in the first phase, employees from Berlusconi’s companies. It was a very different model to that of classical mass parties, where the militants’ base disappeared in favour of the creation of a restricted highly professionalised central nucleus, in charge of communication and marketing activities, and a direct relationship between the leader and the electorate, built through television.

226  Cecilia Biancalana Forza Italia’s party model has been defined as “personal party” (Calise 2010) or even “business party” (Hopkin and Paolucci 1999) or “plastic party”. All these definitions accentuate the personalised aspect, the preponderance of the leader and his private resources to the detriment of the classical party organisation. In the “personal party” the leader comes before the party, not vice versa: the leader is fundamental both in the communication and the party’s internal decisions. Although over the years Forza Italia has acquired a structure that is more similar to a party (a model which has been compared to a “franchise party” – see Paolucci 1999; Poli 2001), it is however a highly vertical and centralised structure, where internal democracy is not the norm and the leader and founder holds huge power. Studies have demonstrated (McDonnell 2013) that the characteristics of the “personal party” were also present in the second political project headed by Berlusconi in the period 2009–2013, the Popolo delle Libertà. The vision of democracy As far as the vision of democracy is concerned, populists position themselves as the interpreters of a “true” democracy, where popular sovereignty is truly respected. This typical scheme of populism was interpreted by Berlusconi in a peculiar manner. In his vision of democracy, as is the case for many other populist leaders and parties, the issue of immediacy, that is the creation of a direct link between the popular will and political action, without any political, procedural and organisational mediations, is critical. In Berlusconi’s case, the role of polls held particular importance, as through opinion polls it is possible to take an unmediated snapshot of popular will. According to Berlusconi’s vision, the sovereignty of public opinion, measured through the polls and of which he presented himself as the most authentic interpreter, should be unlimited. This gives way to a majoritarian and plebiscitarian view of democracy (Tarchi 2015). Even in this case, there is no desire for a stronger citizens’ direct participation. The link with the leader occurs through the tool of the polls and/or through communication mediated by TV. It is interesting, in this respect, to mention the “contract” signed with Italians on live TV, before the 2001 elections, where Berlusconi put on paper his government commitments and swore not to run for office again in case he would not achieve them. In this sense, Berlusconi’s vision of democracy can be assimilated to the “audience democracy” (Manin 1995), of which he definitely represented the main interpreter in the Italian scenario. Berlusconi’s tele-populism Taguieff (2002) defines tele-populism as a form of populism adapted to the needs of television: the appeal to the people benefits from the leader’s media resources and telegenic skills. The systematic resort to television gives rise to a new type of demagogy (see also Sartori 1997). Therefore, Berlusconi and Forza Italia can certainly be ascribed to this category. Berlusconi is a leader external to traditional politics, who idolises civil society

Four Italian populisms  227 and juxtaposes it to a political class seen as corrupt and incapable of defending people’s interests. Berlusconi’s entrance into politics brought deep innovations to Italian society and politics, to the point that it can be said that he moulded it for the whole of the Second Republic (Orsina 2013). With the arrival of Berlusconi, Italian democracy increasingly resembled what Bernard Manin defined as “audience democracy”: a democracy in which parties give way to the leaders and in which public opinion responds, as an audience, to the stimuli that, each time, are proposed by the leaders (and that, each time, are measured through polls). This direct link with public opinion prefigures the online direct democracy of the M5S, although the two logics are partially different: while the logic of television is a broadcast one, the Internet logic tends to fragment the audience. However, as we shall see, both can favour plebiscitarian forms. Finally, this model of personal and personalised leadership will be followed and “imitated” by other leaders and parties in the Italian political system, for example by Matteo Renzi.

4  From the web to government: the Movimento 5 Stelle History and evolution The Movimento 5 Stelle (M5S) is the latest addition to the populist phenomena in the Italian political system, and for this reason it has been defined as the latecomer of Italian populisms (Chiapponi 2017). The M5S was officially founded in October 2009. However, in order to analyse its history and evolution, we should start in 2005. That year, Beppe Grillo (b. 1948), a very famous comedian and showman, who had been active on television since the end of the 1970s, opened a website, “Beppe Grillo’s Blog”. Later reconstructions (Ceri and Veltri 2017) tell us that already at that time Grillo was being advised by Gianroberto Casaleggio (b. 1954), a businessman who owned the company Casaleggio Associati, specialised in network strategies, and who managed Grillo’s blog from the start. Grillo’s blog positioned itself not only as a counter-information tool on themes such as environmentalism and the fight of political corruption (themes which will later become critical for the M5S) but also as an instrument of physical aggregation and citizens’ active participation. Grillo asked his followers to meet locally, using the Meet-up platform. This way, groups of citizens, linked only by their receptiveness to the themes raised by Grillo, started to in local settings, initially with the sole aim of carrying out activities of “civic activism”, that is, pressure and control on governments from the outside (for the reconstruction of some local cases, see Biorcio 2015; Biancalana 2019; De Rosa and Quattromani 2019). From the start, therefore, the M5S combined online mobilisation on the web with the offline version, in local contexts and in the squares. In 2007 and 2008, two big street demonstrations were organised, the “V-days”, dedicated to gathering signatures for a popular legislative initiative that would block the eligibility to parliament for convicted people, fix a limit of two terms in office for parliamentarians, and abolish public financing for publishing as well as the professional category of journalists. So we can see that from the very start, typical traits of populist

228  Cecilia Biancalana phenomena emerged – such as the importance of the leader’s figure, the aversion towards the political class and journalists, both seen as useless intermediaries – but also some specific traits of the M5S, such as the importance of the Internet. As mentioned, the M5S was officially founded in 2009. It was a top-down foundation, and the analysis of party documents (Vignati 2015) indicates that the fate of the party was strictly linked to the leader, who was the owner of the symbol, which was granted from time to time to the lists and candidates who wanted to take part in the election with the M5S. The M5S rejected the label of party, defining itself as Movement or Non-party, and presented a different organisational structure from traditional parties, which combined the typical horizontal structure of social movements with a strong centralisation. This form of organisation has been ascribed by some scholar to the “movement-party” category (Ceccarini and Bordignon 2016). Despite rejecting the party category, from 2010 the M5S took part in local and regional electoral competitions, with increasing success, managing to elect representatives to local assemblies. It was the 2013 general elections – held after two years of a multi-party government, a technical government supported by both the right (PdL) and the left (PD) – which marked the M5S’s great success. In a climate characterised by economic crisis and delegitimisation of the parties, a political actor made up of common citizens – as opposed to professional politicians – who are chosen by citizens via online elections, and which presented itself as the voice of the citizens’ protest against the politicians’ “caste”, managed to obtain 25% of the votes and over 150 parliamentarians, breaking the bipolar dynamic that had characterised the so-called Second Republic (ITANES 2013). If, initially, the M5S voters were coming from protest and anti-establishment parties, from 2013 onwards they have come in a cross-cutting way from all political areas, including abstention (Colloca and Marangoni 2017). The M5S itself can also be defined as cross-cutting. This political actor, in addition to rejecting the label of party, also rejects being positioned on the left–right axis, maintaining it is “beyond” these categories: the M5S, as we shall see, politicises a different cleavage, one which opposes the citizens to the “caste”. In 2013, the M5S became an indispensable actor in forming a government majority, but it decided not to ally with other political forces and to remain in opposition. After swinging electoral results, particularly scarce at the local level, where the M5S does not present a territorial rooting similar to that of other parties, in the 2018 general elections it obtained 32% of the votes, an increase of almost two million votes in comparison to the previous elections, becoming the first Italian party and entering government in coalition with Salvini’s Lega (Biancalana and Colloca 2018). In its brief history, the Movimento 5 Stelle has changed, however maintaining some elements of continuity (Tronconi 2018). On the one hand, it kept some of its protest and anti-party promises; on the other, it has managed to reconfigure itself as a governing actor. This has been facilitated also by some important organisational changes, especially the change in leadership from Beppe Grillo to Luigi di Maio (b. 1986), a young representative of the M5S.

Four Italian populisms 229 The style of the leader If a trait of the populist phenomenon is the presence of a leader who positions himself in direct connection with the people, Beppe Grillo certainly embodied this role. From an organisational point of view, especially in the period between the founding of the Movement and 2017, Grillo was the owner of the symbol and held strong formal and informal powers. From a communication point of view, from the foundation to 2013, Grillo was the only known face of the Movement. As anticipated, the Movimento 5 Stelle is made up of common citizens, who volunteer themselves to politics for a fixed term (a maximum of two terms). The Movement’s candidates and elected members are thus unknown, both at the local and the national level. Although Grillo maintained he was only a “megaphone”, his leadership, at least in a first moment, was indisputable at all levels. Although, as we have seen, a diarchy ruled the M5S (the most relevant choices were also taken by Gianroberto Casaleggio), Grillo was the public face of the party. The 2013 electoral campaign, for example, was marked by the dates of the Tsunami Tour (Barbieri 2014; Cosenza 2013): a series of rallies/shows by Beppe Grillo, held in the squares of over 70 Italian cities. Grillo’s style was characterised by aggressiveness, swearing and provocation, as well as aversion to traditional media. For instance, during the 2013 electoral campaign, Grillo never gave television interviews. On the one hand, this was attributable to his aversion towards journalists, who, like politicians, were accused by the Movement of being part of the “caste”. On the other, this decision did not preclude the media coverage of Grillo’s rallies. They can in fact be considered as a sort of “media events” (Dayan and Katz 1994): events created (also) with the aim of obtaining wider media coverage. In the words of Cosenza (2013), the more Grillo attacked the media, the more he was broadcast on them. This is a dynamic typical of populist parties (Mazzoleni et al. 2003; Mazzoleni 2008). The Movimento 5 Stelle, despite the strong relevance of Grillo’s figure, initially opposed any form of personalisation: the rhetoric of the Movement states that inside the M5S there are no leaders and “one equals one”. However, from 2013 onwards, some parliamentarians have acquired visibility, starting to erode Grillo’s media-wise and organisational hegemony. Despite an initial ban on participating in television programmes, M5S representatives are now regular participants. The most visible is Luigi di Maio, a young parliamentarian who in 2017 got elected through an online vote as candidate for prime minister for the 2018 elections. Di Maio’s style, tranquil and government-oriented, cannot be more different to Grillo’s. Although, according to organisational documents, Grillo remains guarantor of the Movement for an indefinite period of time, the role of “political leader” is now played by Luigi Di Maio. Furthermore, following the death of Gianroberto Casaleggio, his role has been passed on to his son Davide (b. 1976), who is acquiring an increasingly relevant role inside the Movement as manager of the online participation platform Rousseau (see also the chapters by de Blasio and Sorice and by Damiani in this volume). Therefore,

230  Cecilia Biancalana the M5S seems to have succeeded in what represents a very difficult task for many populist parties: the emancipation of the party’s fate from that of the founder and the establishment of more widespread forms of leadership. The people and the enemies of the people Despite the more moderate tones, the M5S still presents, consistently with its populist nature (it is a form of “pure populism” according to Tarchi), a Manichean vision of politics, which is based on the opposition between the people and the enemies of the people. In this case, the people and the enemies of the people are represented by citizens and parties, respectively. The M5S, in the context of a perceived lack of renovation in the Italian political class, was born out of a strong anti-party base; it actually emerged as the negation of parties and out of the realisation of their uselessness. Its objective was to bring common citizens inside the institutions: citizens who would be able to defend other citizens’ interests better than professional politicians, who on the other hand would be more interested in defending specific interests and maintaining the status quo. Furthermore, the M5S stated that, once they had reached a 100% of the votes, the Movement would not be needed anymore, as at that stage citizens would be in power and popular sovereignty would be re-established. The “citizens” (the people) are therefore seen as bearers of positive traits (honesty); on the other hand, the “parties” (the enemies) are characterised by completely negative traits. The M5S seems to embody what Taguieff (2002) defines as “protest populism”. Protest populism, which is based on a vision of the people as demos, mobilises the people towards the critique or denunciation of the élite in power, whether they be political, administrative, economic or cultural. This anti-elitism cannot be separated from a statement of faith in the people, defined as the whole of common citizens. This form of populism can be described as hyper-­ democratism which achieves the image of the active citizen and remains diffident towards representation mechanisms as they would devoid it of its power and initiatives. (Taguieff 2002, 222) Although M5S’s populism is mainly based on the demos, within it there are also traits of the mobilisation of the ethnos (see Tarchi 2015). An aversion towards migratory flows has been present in the M5S’s rhetoric since 2006  – although probably more in the leaders’ discourse than in the opinions and attitudes of the base. This has become more apparent in the more recent period, with their experience in government in coalition with the Lega. The people mobilised by Grillo is made up of Italian citizens, and parties are seen as responsible for the failures in managing migration.

Four Italian populisms  231 The organisation From an organisational point of view the M5S combines horizontality and verticality, an emphasis on the citizens’ direct participation together with the importance of the leader. A fundamental trait of the M5S’s organisational architecture is the Internet, which, according to the M5S’s rhetoric, should favour the direct link between citizens and power. According to the M5S’s vision, this link, which would re-establish popular sovereignty, can be achieved in two ways: through the entry of common citizens into the institutions; and through the control the citizens outside of the institutions can exert on those who are inside them. This control should take place both through institutional instruments (such as the consultative referendum without a quorum and the imperative mandate, both part of the M5S’s promises), but especially through the Internet (see De Blasio and Sorice in this volume). The M5S does not have a party structure similar to that of other parties (Vignati 2015; Passarelli et al. 2017; Biancalana and Piccio 2017). According to official documents, at least in a first phase, the M5S was made up only by the leader, the elected members and those registered on the online platform: the Internet served as a link between these three actors. Indeed, the organisational core of the M5S is the online platform Rousseau, which would allow for a direct link between citizens and power. The platform, managed by the son of Gianroberto Casaleggio, Davide, allows those who are registered to vote for the candidacies, decide on electoral programmes and comment on the laws that the parliamentarians present in the assemblies (Deseriis 2017). The M5S’s use of Internet is however highly centralised, as members can only respond to predetermined questions and ratify choices that, in reality, have already been made (Mosca 2018). Over the years, the light structure of the M5S has become more complex, and intermediate bodies have emerged. The 2017 statute provides the M5S with a quasi-party form, with recognised procedures and bodies, although it retains a strong centralisation. The vision of democracy According to Mudde (2004), populists believe politics should be the expression of the “general will” of the people. In this respect, this scholar traces a marked demarcation line between the 1968 movements and the so-called New Left on the one hand and the current radical right parties on the other, both considered populist. While the former believed that the popular will would be implemented through an increased participation in the political process, for the latter it is important that the people’s requests are implemented, without them necessarily taking part in politics. If in the first case, the popular will is transformed into political action through citizens’ deliberation and involvement in the decisionmaking process, in the second case it is enough for the leader to interpret and embody  – and know – the desires and needs of the people, bringing them to

232  Cecilia Biancalana the political arena. These are two opposing views, which derive from the connection to two “people” who are in turn different: one is educated, progressive and with a high perception of its own political power; the other is conservative, respectful of the law and dedicated to work  – the so-called “silent majority” which does not aspire to speak up. If the former, in order to see the “popular will” implemented, ask for “more participation and less leadership”, the latter wants, conversely, “more leadership and less participation”. For this reason, according to Mudde, the current populists do not favour any form of participatory democracy, focusing on the output – more than the input – of the democratic process. This would appear in contradiction with what has been said of the M5S as a populist political actor. In the Movimento 5 Stelle, the rhetoric of the people opposed to the political élite marries with a discourse which values citizens’ direct participation to the decision-making process: the M5S therefore seems to focus on the input of the democratic process. Although it cannot be defined as an anti-system actor, as it moves from within the system in order to change it, we can say that the aim of the M5S is to eliminate representation and replace it with forms of “direct democracy”. Indeed, in the rhetoric of the M5S we find the will to eliminate all forms of intermediation in order to allow citizens to participate directly in the democratic process. The M5S’s vision of democracy is therefore that of disintermediation, that is the creation of a direct and unmediated link between citizens and power. However, “disintermediation” is not a simple removal of intermediation but rather its replacement and transformation (Biancalana 2018). The attempts by the M5S at eliminating any form of intermediation have resulted in the emergence of new forms of mediation: that of the leader and that taking place on the Internet. Web populism The M5S is characterised by apparently contradictory traits, like horizontality and verticality, which make its analysis difficult. Although the use of the Internet, as we have seen, is not the only trait of the M5S, it is certainly one of the most conspicuous ones. We can define this case as the “ideal-type” of web populism (Corbetta 2013). The Internet is not only the organisational pillar of the M5S; it is above all a medium through which the disintermediation of representation should concretise, at least at a rhetorical level. According to the cyber-optimistic rhetoric (Mosca et al. 2015) of the M5S, the Internet would allow for the removal of all the obstacles and forms of mediation between citizens and power, in a sort of direct democracy 2.0. The Internet is therefore an instrument that seems to suit populism’s aversion towards mediation. But the new forms of intermediation that happen on the Internet can end up being less transparent and democratic of those that used to take place within the traditional parties. The case of the M5S shows a plebiscitary use of the Net, which is used to maintain control of the organisation.

Four Italian populisms  233

5  Renzi and the populist “contagion” History and evolution In the case of Matteo Renzi (b. 1975), the populist style was adopted by a traditional politician; he “borrows heavily from the repertoire of populism, its common places and its lexicon” (Tarchi 2015, 369–370) and brings it inside the institutions. Indeed, Renzi presented himself, despite his profile as a professional politician, as an outsider; his populist challenge was directed against the establishment, defined as both the ruling class in his own party and, more generally, the political and economic élite, perceived as responsible for the crisis of the country. Renzi’s political career started at the local level, the first territorial level in Italy to be characterised by presidentialism (Calise 2005), due to the direct election, from the early 1990s onwards, of mayors, provincial presidents and regional governors. After an experience as provincial secretary, in 2004 Renzi got elected president of the province of Florence. In 2008, he positioned himself as an outsider at the primaries for the position of mayor of the city of Florence. Breaking with the local and national establishment of his party, the Democratic Party (Natale and Fasano 2017), he won the primaries and became mayor of the city. But Renzi’s real challenge to the party started in 2010. That year he organised a convention in Florence, the so-called “Leopolda”, where he proposed his idea of the “scrapping” (rottamazione) of the old party’s political class, in the name of a generational renovation. In this phase, Renzi was seen as a “foreign body” (Vicentini 2015) by the establishment of the party, not only because of his request of internal change but also due to his opening to the centrist electorate and his impatience towards intermediate bodies such as trade unions. In 2012, the challenge to the party’s ruling class became explicit during the primaries for candidate for prime minister for the 2013 general elections. According to the party’s statute, only the secretary, who at the time was Pierluigi Bersani, is entitled to take part; however, Renzi asked for and obtained an exception from the rules so that he could take part in the primaries. During the electoral campaign, Renzi again positioned himself as an outsider and a challenger. The issue at stake was renovation, and Renzi and Bersani manifestly embodied two different generations but also two different ideas of party and politics, Renzi being more oriented towards leadership and personalisation, Bersani being more anchored to a traditional vision of the party. Renzi obtained 36% of the votes in the first round, but in the second one he only got 39% and was defeated by Bersani. Following the 2013 elections, the defeat of the Democratic Party and the attempted failure to form a ruling majority and elect the president of the republic, Bersani resigned and new primaries for the party secretary were scheduled for the following December. The election for the Democratic Party’s secretary happens in two rounds: one election among the members limits the number of candidates to three, who are then voted on by the electorate. In the first phase, Renzi obtained 45% of the votes, in the second one 67%, an indication that his leadership came more from outside the party than within it, as a consequence of

234  Cecilia Biancalana his catch-all approach and his will to talk to all Italians, not only to those within the centre-left area. In February 2014, strengthened by the popular legitimisation of the primaries, Renzi proposed to the national directorate of the party to withdraw support to the government led by Enrico Letta (who was also a member of the Democratic Party) and became prime minister of the multi-party government formed after the 2013 elections. The European elections, held in May 2014, certified the very high approval rate among citizens towards the new prime minister, Matteo Renzi, despite his election not being the result of the popular vote. The Democratic Party obtained its highest result ever, 40.8% of the votes. Abstention was, however, high. The pillars of Renzi’s government (February 2014–December 2016) were institutional reforms, and those of the public administration and of labour laws (Salvati 2016). The policy style of the Renzi government has been defined as “founded on leadership” and was characterised by “the choice of using controversies against some actors and practices that would pose an obstacle to ‘doing’; the constant dissemination, even through social media, of messages, commitments, deadlines, achieved results; the use of experts/technocrats loyal to the premier, coming from universities and businesses” (La Spina 2016, 31). The issue of institutional reforms was certainly the most relevant. The Renzi government was the promoter of a constitutional reform project whose main objective was to restructure parliament through a series of changes that would do away with symmetrical bicameralism (a term used to describe a system with two chambers which have the same powers and the same functions). In combination with the new electoral law, the so-called Italicum, the reforms would have had a significant impact on Italian institutional arrangements and on the mechanics of the whole political system, producing a clear shift towards a majoritarian democracy. (Ceccarini and Bordignon 2017, 281) In December 2016, a constitutional referendum was called for to approve the reform. The strong personalisation that characterised Renzi’s leadership in this case proved to be a double-edge sword. The referendum became a vote “on Renzi” and his government. 60% of citizens voted against the reform (Pritoni et al. 2017). Following this defeat, Renzi resigned as prime minister and secretary of the party. In February 2017, he ran again for the role of secretary of the Democratic Party, winning the primaries (Sandri and Seddone 2018). However, the reassertion of his outsider and “scrapping” narrative did not convince the electorate, and in the 2018 elections the PD obtained its worst result ever (19%; Rombi and Venturino 2018). The style of the leader Although his political career, despite the opposite rhetoric, does not resemble that of the classical populist leader (although he declares to be an outsider, Renzi is a

Four Italian populisms  235 professional politician), Renzi’s style can be assimilated to that of populist leaders, and some have even compared him to Silvio Berlusconi (Bordignon 2014). In the first place, it is the mechanism of the Democratic Party’s primaries, where both voters and members can participate, that provided the basis for his personalised leadership, endowing him with both a direct and an external legitimacy. This possibility, however, had been exploited less by other party leaders, who had favoured a more collegial leadership. On the contrary, Renzi’s leadership was highly personalised and was perfectly suitable to the media, both the traditional and the new ones. “His informal style and frank, popular language, combined with a taste for direct confrontation with his adversaries, correspond perfectly to the rules of tele-politics: simplification, dramatisation and personalisation” (Bordignon 2014, 13). A number of elements of Renzi’s communicative style, consistent with the populist style, can be identified. The first element is his positioning as leader-outsider, stranger to the logics of the politique politicienne. In this case however, Renzi did not present himself as an outsider in relation to politics tout court but rather in relation to the ruling class and his party’s dynamics. With his cursus honorum and his experience in the local administration, he tried to stress the difference with the PD’s national ruling class. From the point of view of communication and language, Renzi’s language was simple, popular and feeling oriented. The simplicity of the language is one of the traits of the populist style, which corresponds to the vision of politics as a simple thing, complicated on purpose by the élite in power in order to deny people their sovereignty. Renzi’s language “is a language intended to show the leaders’ matterof-factness, abandoning the formal (and self-referential) code of politics in order to address ordinary citizens directly” (Bordignon 2014, 15). Consistently with the impatience of populists towards mediation and procedures, Renzi’s leadership, both inside the party and in government, appeared characterised by elements of quickness and decisiveness (Salvati 2016), in juxtaposition with the slowness of party and institutional procedures. Finally, Renzi made clever use of the media, both television (Damiani and Mazzoni 2017) and new media (Seddone and Venturino 2015), with the aim of establishing a direct and immediate contact with citizens. The people and the enemies of the people Renzi’s rhetoric is Manichean and polarising and tends to create a representation of two opposing camps. It is therefore interesting to analyse the dichotomies through which his discourse is articulated. The main dichotomy through which Renzi’s populist discourse is articulated is the one that opposes old and new. This fracture can be found in both phases of his political journey: the one preceding his participation in government, when his polemical targets were found within his own party, and the one following his election as prime minister. In the first phase, which lasted until 2014, the fracture between old and new was mainly internal to the party. The negative pole, the “old”, was represented by the party’s ruling

236  Cecilia Biancalana class, whereas the positive pole, the “new”, was represented by a new generation of administrators, especially at the local level. It is a phase that was characterised by the will to “scrap” the old political class, and the fracture was mainly a generational one. When Renzi became prime minister and entered government, this generational fracture widened, and the dichotomy was articulated according to the dyads past/ continuity versus change/innovation. In this phase, the enemies were identified with the old parties, the élites, the intermediate bodies (for example, the trade unions) and bureaucracy; these actors were seen as responsible for the situation of crisis that characterised Italy and the lack of change. The identification of the “enemy” thus moved from the establishment of (his own) party to the political, economic and financial class. In both cases, Renzi channelled the anti-party and anti-establishment sentiment, long present in the Italian political system, in a framework of Manichean opposition between “us” (the common citizens but also those administrators who are sensitive to the needs of the people) and “them” (the corrupted élite) typical of the populist scheme (Bordignon 2014). The (partial) novelty of Renzi’s rhetoric was the insertion of this discourse into a structured and moderate party, such as the Democratic Party, and within the institutions. The organisation Matteo Renzi’s leadership must be understood from the perspective of the organisation of his party: the Democratic Party. The Democratic Party was founded in 2007 due to the merging of two parties (La Margherita and Democratici di Sinistra), heirs of the two most important Italian mass parties: the Italian Communist Party and the Christian Democrats (Bordandini et al. 2008). The PD’s party model has been defined as an “open party” (Vassallo and Passarelli 2016). The founding elements of the party model are the direct election of its secretary by the electorate (not only by members) and the overlap between the positions of party secretary and the candidate for prime minister. It is therefore a party which endorses an open, inclusive form of decision-making process, and which has been designed with a strong and recognised leadership, an element that was lacking in the Italian left in the earlier decades. It is a leadership that is suitable for competing in the majoritarian and bipolar context of the Second Republic. As mentioned above, however, it seems as if the potentialities of this model (external consensus, direct legitimisation, personalisation) were fully exploited only by Renzi. On the other hand, it must be stressed that the Democratic Party, despite the new traits of Renzi’s personalised leadership, remains structured as a traditional or mainstream party. According to Bobba and Seddone (2016), the PD is a personalised party (where there is a strong emphasis on the leader in the external communication of the party), yet not a personal one (characterised by a strong centralisation of the decision-making process in the hands of the leader, as it happens traditionally in populist parties). The PD, amongst the Italian political

Four Italian populisms  237 parties, has the highest degree of internal structuring. Whereas the primaries accentuate the personal relationship between the leader and the electorate as well as the search for external consensus, potentially favouring the emergence of plebiscitary dynamics, the intermediate bodies balance the power of the leader, who exercises that role for a fixed term. The vision of democracy As far as Renzi’s vision of democracy is concerned, two aspects can be identified: a formal one and a substantial one. In terms of form  – the democratic procedures and the decision-making ­process  – Renzi’s leadership was characterised by immediateness and speed. Renzi favoured “quick decision making, which bypasses the intermediation of parties and unions” (Bordignon 2014, 8). Quickness – which can be considered a category of legitimisation of power in the modern era (Cuono 2016) – was a trait of both his political career and his style in government. The myth of quickness overlaps with that of efficiency and quickness of decision and government action is linked to efficacy and simplicity. According to Hermet (2013), populism’s relationship to time is one of simultaneity, in opposition to the normal timing of politics. Populist timing is characterised by an instant response to problems and aspirations that, however, no government action could resolve or fulfil immediately. The relationship to political time represents, according to the French scholar, the very distinctive nucleus of populism. This immediate timing, which is at the same time anti-political and dreamlike and which ignores the need to “give time to time”, characterises populism in an exclusive and unique way. It is this element that differentiates it from democracy, which, on the other hand, can be identified with procedures that are based on management of conflict over time. Going back to Mudde’s (2004) distinction between populisms that are oriented by either the inputs or outputs of the democratic process, Renzi’s vision of democracy is certainly output-oriented. The general will of the people must be achieved, quickly and efficiently, through a strong executive. These ideas could also be found in the content of the constitutional reform project proposed by the Renzi government and subjected to a constitutional referendum in December 2016. The second aspect relates to substance and can be inferred by the content of the institutional reforms proposed by Renzi, where a vision of a majoritarian democracy that tends to presidentialism emerges. The content of the reform could be summarised in four points (Ceccarini and Bordignon 2017): the re-organisation of the state’s territorial structure, in the direction of redefining the relationship between centre and periphery to the benefit of the centre; the abolition of the so-called “perfect bicameralism”, with the aim of streamlining and expediting decision-making processes; the strengthening of the executive to the detriment of the legislative; an electoral law with a majority premium which could guarantee governability. It is a vision of democracy based on the majoritarian principle,

238  Cecilia Biancalana and a victory of the Yes at the referendum would have led to a presidentialisation of the Italian political system: a democracy with a strong executive, directly linked to the citizens’ electoral preferences. Institutional populism Renzi’s case shows how the populist style has also “infected” traditional and ruling political actors. In the context of a crisis of parties and representation, especially following the 2013 elections, Renzi re-elaborated some traits of the populist phenomenon from the point of view of an institutional and governmental actor. Although acting within a traditional party and the limits of democracy’s procedures, Renzi presented himself as external and as juxtaposed to his own party’s élite, as well as to the economic and political class that had ruled the country in the last few decades, thus channelling the anti-party sentiment typical of the Second Republic. Renzi’s leadership has been defined as personalised, post-ideological and catch-all: a very different profile from the leaders of the Italian left during the Second Republic. Renzi proposed a direct relationship with citizens, both as party secretary and as prime minister, and made use of the possibilities of immediacy provided by both old and new media. The mechanism of the primaries, present in the PD’s party model, favours this type of leadership and relationship with the citizens. Nevertheless, Renzi acted within a structured party, which cannot be defined as “personal”. Renzi’s vision of democracy was a majoritarian and executivist one. The direct relationship between power and citizens, typical of the populist phenomenon, is based on the role of the leader who, through a quick and efficient decision-making process, implements the popular will of the citizens. However, the figure of Renzi as a leader-outsider, who criticised the establishment while being part of it, did not survive his experience in government, and the proposal of institutional reform, which would have represented the synthesis of his own vision of democracy and politics, was rejected, significantly, through a referendum.

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Conclusion The Italian populist challenge in comparative perspective Oscar Mazzoleni

This timely book highlights a series of crucial global challenges that current democracies are facing: declining party-based representation, the rise of protest movements and of post-representative politics, growing anti-party sentiments, the turn toward personalization and mediatization in political communication and mobilization, anti-intellectualism, and the weakening of the rule of law. All of these issues embody challenges that are shaping the functioning of current democracies and how those democracies are conceived. In the light of these various tendencies, the chapters gathered in this book provide evidence for the Italian case. Of course, in all democratic regimes, including those in the so-called ‘First World,’ it is possible to find signs of the ‘crisis’ of democracy and the rising populist challenge. However, these signs do not necessarily have the same weight and configuration in other European countries as they do in the Italian case. Questions arise, therefore, as to how the Italian experience helps us to understand similar trends elsewhere and how the specific framing allowed in this book might fit within this scope. In this final chapter, we will highlight some original advances in studying populism provided by this book; subsequently, we will underline the relevance of the selected country and the way in which the Italian case is analyzed; and finally, we will develop a number of research questions on the basis of which a future comparative agenda for European democracies might be developed.

Beyond shortcomings in the understanding of populism The main outcome of the book is to connect a number of different challenges manifest in Italian democracy by means of the label of populism. In using this label, the book provides an original perspective, making it possible to focus on a vast set of issues. In so doing, the book is able to overcome a number of shortcomings that frequently affect the literature on populism. The first temptation in the scholarship on populism is to assume that all political contention within democratic regimes is ipso facto a populist phenomenon. This risk is tied to the increasing interest in populism in recent years but is also connected with a series of analytical frames, such as the one proposed by Ernesto Laclau, who argues that the populist logic reflects politics tout court. The critical appraisal in Valentina Pazé’s chapter highlights the difficulty in applying the

Conclusion  243 label of populism to the Italian communist leadership in the 1950s, as suggested by Laclau, in order to distinguish that experience from the challenges arising in recent decades. Other authors state in an equally clear manner that the Italian populist challenge breaks with the legacy of the traditional mass party rooted in the First Republic (see the chapters by Ragazzoni and Urbinati). The second shortcoming in current scholarship is to reduce the analytical use of populism to a specific and exclusive area, such as political ideology, with the underlying assumption that a unique and parsimonious definition would be preferable. Thus, for some scholars, multiple definitions of populism would reduce the explanatory strength of this notion. In contrast, this book adopts a variety of different definitions of populism which appear not to be mutually exclusive. This makes it possible to grasp a configuration of issues – such as anti-party attitudes, the ideological features of opponent parties, forms of mobilization beyond traditional parties, repertoires of protest and styles of communication depending on new technological tools, and shifting judicial and constitutional rules  – which express the populist challenge in a variety of different ways. The third shortcoming of the literature on populism that this book wants to overcome is the predominant focus on populism as exclusively a contest of power, that is, against ‘the establishment,’ neglecting or underestimating institutionalized forms of populism that can also shape power and institutions. Particularly in political science, the main focus is on party-based populism. Although current research questions are not only related to elections but to some extent also address issues of policy-making, populist challenges are also linked to administrative and judicial issues, under the form of penal populism (see the chapter by Anastasia and Anselmi), or as an alternative to liberal constitutionalism (see the chapter by Blokker). In a similar vein, populism has often been considered in its politicalinstitutional dimension, avoiding any attention toward socio-cultural aspects. However, populism can also be cultural, taking the form of an anti-intellectual rhetoric, with intellectuals displayed as the ‘bad elites’ against whom populists mobilize. At the same time, ‘symbolic analysts’ can transform themselves into populist leaders (as is the case with Beppe Grillo and Matteo Salvini) or play an active role in spreading populist opinions within cultural networks, as well as within both the new and traditional media (see the chapter by Panarari). Multifaceted populism reflects a multidimensional definition of democracy and of its actors, structures, and processes. If populism is not circumscribed to electoral dimensions, it is because democracy covers relevant aspects beyond elections. In this book, democracy, and more precisely liberal democracy, entails rules for checks and balances, accountability, values, and civil society. Emphasizing various definitions of populism, the book shows the relevance of practices, discourses, and institutions. Accordingly, some authors focus on rising anti-­establishment, anti-party parties (see the chapter by Viviani) or on the populist logic of communication (see the chapter by De Blasio and Sorice), while others address issues related to the political regime, regarding representation and accountability (see the chapter by Morlino and Raniolo) and the populists’ ambitions to become “the only-party-of-the people” when in power (see the chapter by Urbinati).

244  Oscar Mazzoleni Moreover, a multidisciplinary perspective equally emerges as a consequence of a multifaceted approach to populism. Sociologists, empirical and theoreticallyoriented political scientists, historians of ideas, and specialists in communication studies are all involved in this book. This enhances the capacity to grasp populism as a multifaceted phenomenon. Each discipline is relevant, but each offers only a partial contribution to the understanding of the complexity of the populist phenomenon. Of course, this choice is not without obstacles. Each discipline refers not only to a body of knowledge but also to distinctive practices, norms, and tools by which knowledge is acquired. The social and political sciences have the strongest inclination to sub-specialization in their histories. The topic of populism is also currently being emphasized by individual (sub)disciplines within their own journals and book series, embedded in a disciplinary autism. Interdisciplinary perspectives are usually avoided, albeit rhetorically well regarded. Moreover, some disciplines are less sensitive than others to historical and comparative perspectives. The book attests to the fact that the recourse to different disciplines may be useful for understanding populism in its multiple forms.

The Italian case in perspective When addressing questions about the evolution of democracy, including its ‘quality’ (see the chapter by Morlino and Raniolo) and the populist challenge, the choice of the Italian case is far from a random selection. From a political point of view, several scholars in France, Germany, and above all the UK have often been attracted to a number of the peculiarities of this country (see, for example, Briquet 2007; Köppl 2007; Newell and Bull 2005). There are two dominant perspectives in political sciences. In the first, the emphasis is on a number of so-called ‘anomalies,’ such as low levels of political trust, corruption, the presence of strong mass parties, and a huge instability of government, as well as a strong economic divide between the northern regions and the south of the country. Although considering Italy as an ‘anomaly’ is also a controversial issue (Anderson 2011, 278ff), because the rhetoric of unicity occurs everywhere, this view does highlight some civic and political traits that are apparently specific in comparison with other European democracies, and especially so with regard to the postwar decades. In the same vein, the collapse of the Italian party system at the beginning of the 1990s and the disappearance of all of the founders of the postwar democratic Republic – the Christian Democratic Party, the Communist Party and the Socialist Party – clearly represented an exceptional case at the time. This also concerns new forms of political organization, such as Forza Italia and the Five-Star Movement in the 1990s and 2000s (see the chapters by Biancalana and Damiani). In a second perspective, Italian politics has also been assumed to be a ‘laboratory’ that would be able to ‘precede’ trends occurring elsewhere. One of the most important examples here is the fascist regime built in the 1920s, in view of the subsequent development of a number of anti-democratic regimes elsewhere in Western Europe, such as in Germany, Spain, and Portugal. Of course, one might worry about the real extent of those peculiarities and

Conclusion  245 whether these really contain a form of temporal primacy vis-à-vis other contexts, as each country is always atypical and has its own historical path. Each democratic regime is different. However, under the common pressure of globalization and Europeanization, widespread citizen dissatisfaction, higher voter volatility, financial crisis, and austerity policies, one might ask if some of the Italian anomalies are less peculiar than in the past and if some features are indeed able to highlight European trends.

A European research agenda If one takes the wager of this book and the issues emphasized seriously, it is very important to develop a comparative perspective. The strength of the book is not only that it provides a large range of empirical evidence but also that it offers original research questions and conceptual tools. Even if the chapters are heterogeneous and from different points of view, almost all discuss distinctive evidence about specific aspects of the Italian case and articulate such evidence in the light of a general conceptualization of Italian politics and of wider trends in current democratic regimes. Inspired by such findings and conceptualizations, one may formulate a new research agenda in European populist studies with regard to, amongst others, the following topics: •

•

Between depoliticization, participation and representation. It seems reasonable to argue that successful populist challenges are both the consequence and the result of the transformation of linkages between citizens and representative democracy. Different forms of ‘depoliticization’ (Wood and Flinders 2014), also molded by neoliberalism, might play a crucial role as a condition of populist success (see the chapters by de Nardis, and De Blasio and Sorice), but is likely to be tied to negative judgments of politics and politicians with historical roots (Clarke et  al. 2018). Generally speaking, low trust toward political institutions and parties is a relevant window of opportunity for populist entrepreneurs. At the same time, a relatively small number of studies is devoted to the consequences of enduring populist success in terms of turnout, beliefs in politics, the rising legitimacy of direct democracy, and the implications in terms of social capital and associative belonging (however, see Castanho Silva 2017; Boeri et  al. 2018). In this vein, in-depth qualitative analyses of the impact of populism would be very useful, also in terms of linkages with advanced approaches toward electoral democracy (e.g. Achen and Bartels 2016). In-between populism. Multi-populism equally signifies competition and cooperation among different populist parties within the same party system. After the Italian national elections in 2018, a coalition government was built on the basis of two populist parties. Although peculiar to the Italian case, this configuration also tends to arise in other European contexts (Albertazzi and Vampa, forthcoming). The question arises as to how different populist parties and movements interact within the same context. This equally means that it is

246  Oscar Mazzoleni

•

•

•

•

necessary to address the question of diversity in terms of ideological orientations, which is a controversial aspect in the analysis of populism. To what extent are right-wing and left-wing populists similar as well as diverse? This is a question that needs to cope with the ideological frames and consequently the differentiated logics by which the ‘true people’ and their ‘enemies’ are rhetorically built and used in political strategies, both within and among democratic regimes (see the chapter by Pazé). Communicating populism. One of the crucial issues in populist challenges is represented by the interplay between traditional and online media, party politics, leadership communication, and the citizens’ role in these processes. Scholarship has to recognize that avoiding these aspects is simply impossible if one wants to understand the current forms of populist ‘style’ and their conditions of success in a comprehensive way (e.g. Moffitt 2016). Among the research questions related to this field, in which the Italian case is often recognized as a country that has preceded European trends, the diffusion of ‘techno-populism’ across Europe is a crucial one (Bickerton and Invernizzi Accetti 2018), as are the strategies and use of traditional and social media by populist parties and movements (Pajnik and Sauer 2018). Between activists and builders of support. The literature on populist parties and movements has often addressed the question of how activists matter in party success (e.g. Art 2011). However, a large and variate set of figures, including intellectuals, journalists, social-network influencers (see the chapter by Panarari), and other public actors, might shape opinion in favor of populist messages and actors. Moreover, usually-not-public actors, such as bureaucrats and judges, for example, might play a role as direct supporters or indirect representatives of a ‘gray zone.’ Relatively little research has been done in this direction, even though this dimension may be of great relevance in the consolidation of populist power. In this sense, all specialists in the areas of communication and public administration represent both a polemical target for populists and a field of populist conquest. The tension between party legacies and anti-party-ism. Although Italy embodies a peculiar case (see, for instance, Lupo 2013), in which, after the breakdown of a strong mass-party system, original patterns in anti-party organization have manifested themselves, ‘anti-party-ism’ might also be observed in very different contexts. Anti-party ideas have historical roots in many Western democracies (Scarrow 2002), and anti-party populist parties have emerged in several contexts in recent decades in both Germany and Poland (De Petris and Pogunkte 2015). This issue is also related to populism in its guise as an attack on party democracy (Urbinati) and the rise of ‘populist democracy,’ that is, what Peter Mair (2002) refers to as a “partyless democracy.” Rethinking institutional change in the context of the populist challenge. The literature on Western European populist parties tends to frame political parties in government with similar conceptual tools as those used for the analysis of opposition parties. When the populist challenge is articulated by outsiders or niche parties, the research agenda tends to be obviously limited to the

Conclusion  247

•

sphere of ‘politics’ (e.g. campaigns and elections) and to some issues related to policy-making. However, once populist parties enter government with a dominant and enduring role, the research agenda should include different forms of conceptualization and methods, for instance, in relation to comparative historical and institutional approaches (Mahoney and Thelen 2010). It is important to consider the questions of how populists use and shape institutional change toward authoritarian and technocratic patterns more seriously, learning from experiences derived from other continents, where populism-ingovernment represents a historical legacy (Brinks et al. 2004). In this sense, departing from the Italian case, where populist representatives have been members of national governments since 1994 (Campus 2007; see also Biorcio 2015), it would be useful to emphasize the necessity to adopt a broader focus on in-depth comparisons among Central-Eastern European countries (such as Poland and Hungary), as well as Latin and North American cases (Herman and Muldoon 2019). The rule of the people against the rule of law. While one of the emerging issues in populist scholarship is the extent to which the populist challenge is a threat for liberal democratic regimes and constitutions, populist movements claim the primacy of politics over different spheres, including the economy and justice. In Italy, political struggles around the shifting relation between justice, politics, and constitutional change (from ‘Mani Pulite’ till the 2016 constitutional reform and beyond) suggest the need for developing a broader comparative perspective for understanding the impact of populism on the rule of law and the division of powers in Europe and elsewhere. It also shows the limits of studying populism only from an actor-centered perspective within political competition (parties, movements. and top leaders) and the need to address the relevance of structures, rules, and processes in different social and political spheres.

Admittedly, the Italian case has frequently been considered from the perspective of the populist challenge. By drawing on the originality of the Italian case, however, this book simultaneously endorses an additional and promising objective: while it addresses questions about a single case study, that is the Italian democratic regime, it equally delineates, more or less explicitly, paths for a new research agenda that is able to contribute to the reassessment of populist challenges in Europe by linking these with globally relevant democratic issues.

References Achen, Christopher H., Larry M. Bartels. 2016. Democracy for Realists. Why Elections Do Not Produce Responsive Government. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press. Albertazzi, Daniele, Davide Vampa (eds.). forthcoming. Actions and Reactions. Populism and New Patterns of Political Competition in Western Europe. London: Routledge. Anderson, Perry. 2011. The New Old World. London and New York: Verso.

248  Oscar Mazzoleni Art, David. 2001. Inside the Radical Right. The Development of Anti-Immigrant Parties in Western Europe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bickerton, Christopher J., Carlo Invernizzi Accetti. 2018. “ ‘Techno-populism’ as a New Party Family: The Case of the Five Star Movement and Podemos”, Contemporary Italian Politics 10(2): 132–150. Biorcio, Roberto. 2015. Il populismo nella politica italiana. Da Bossi a Berlusconi, da Grillo a Renzi. Milano: Mimesis. Boeri, Tito, Prachi Mishra, Chris Papageorgiou, Antonio Spilimbergo. 2018. Populism and Civil Society, IMF Working Papers. Brinks, Daniel, Marcelo Leiras, Scott Mainwaring, eds. 2004. Reflections on Uneven Democracies: The Legacy of Guillermo O'Donnell. Baltimore: Hopkins University Press. Briquet, Jean-Louis. 2007. Mafia, justice et politique en Italie: L'affaire Andreotti dans la crise de la République (1992–2004). Paris: Karthala. Campus, Donatella. 2007. L'antipolitica al governo. De Gaulle, Reagan, Berlusconi. Bologna: Il Mulino. Castanho Silva, Bruno. 2017. Contemporary Populism: Actors, Causes, and Consequences Across 28 Democracies, PhD Thesis, Central European University. Clarke, Nick, Will Jennings, Jonathan Moss, Gerry Stoker. 2018. The Good Politician: Folk Theories, Political Interaction, and the Rise of Anti-Politics. Oxford: Oxford University Press. De Petris, Andrea, Thomaseds Pogunkte, eds. 2015. Anti-Party Parties in Germany and Italy. Protest Movement and Parliamentary Democracy. Rome: Luiss University Press. Herman, Esther Lise, Muldoon James, eds. 2019. Trumping the Mainstream: The Conquest of Democratic Politics by the Populist Radical Right. London and New York: Routledge. Köppl Stefan. 2007. Das politische System Italiens. Eine Einführung. Wiesbaden: VS Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften. Lupo, Salvatore. 2013. Antipartiti. Il mito della nuova politica nella storia della Repubblica (prima, seconda e terza). Roma: Donzelli. Mahoney, James, Kathleen Thelen, eds. 2010. Explaining Institutional Change: Ambiguity, Agency and Power. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Mair, Peter. 2002. “Populist Democracy vs Party Democracy”, in Yves Mény and Yves Surel, eds. Democracies and the Populist Challenge. New York: Palgrave, 81–98. Moffitt, Benjamin. 2016. The Global Rise of Populism. Performance, Political Style, and Representation. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Newell, James, Martin Bull. 2005. Italian Politics: Adjustment Under Duress. London: Polity Press. Pajnik, Moica, Birgit Sauer. 2018. Populism and the Web. Communicative Practices of Parties and Movement in Europe. London and New York: Routledge. Scarrow, Susan, eds. 2002. Perspectives on Political Parties: Classic Readings. London: Palgrave-Macmillan. Wood, Matt, Matthew Flinders. 2014. “Rethinking Depoliticisation: Beyond the Governmental”, Policy & Politics 42(2): 151–70.

Index

accountability 5, 34 – 36, 38 – 39, 135 anti-elitism 9, 107, 133, 230 anti-establishment 12, 26, 35, 43, 45, 69, 82, 107, 109 – 110, 117, 199, 135, 228, 236, 243 anti-intellectualism 9, 148, 150, 155, 160 – 161, 242 anti-partyism xvi, 6 – 7, 52 – 53, 59, 69, 106, 107, 109, 112 – 113, 119 anti-party parties 76, 106, 109, 111, 119 – 120 anti-politics xv, 3, 4, 5, 6, 8, 46, 49 – 52, 59 – 60, 109, 111, 118, 135, 156, 223; active anti-politics 8 arbitrary nature 199 Aristotle 5, 18 – 20, 22, 28, 32, 90 audience democracy 4, 7, 39, 68 – 69, 87, 149, 222, 226 – 227 Berlusconi, Silvio 11, 17, 25 – 28, 59, 87 – 88, 99, 106, 115 – 116, 152 – 156, 158, 171 – 173, 188, 197, 201 – 209, 211, 216 – 217, 222 – 227, 235 Bossi, Umberto xv, 11, 26, 59, 115 – 116, 173, 188, 190, 216 – 222, 235 Casaleggio, Gianroberto 77, 118, 156, 227, 229, 231 civic populism 118 cleavage 40, 43, 45, 47, 107, 108, 110, 118, 120, 129 – 130, 136, 149, 217, 221 – 222, 228 common people 21, 149, 153, 160, 218, 219, 223 community protests 185, 187 competition 5, 22, 25, 33 – 36, 38, 40 – 47, 55, 68, 75, 80 – 81, 90, 169, 171, 200, 209, 217, 220, 228, 245, 247 consensual participation 184 – 186, 190

constituent power 67, 71, 73, 99, 196, 199, 203 constitutionalism 9, 10, 20, 33, 205; legal 209; liberal 10, 12, 118, 196, 243; models of 28; modern 10, 196; populist 143, 196, 197 – 201 constitutional reform 9, 10, 27, 96 – 97, 196 – 197, 201 – 208, 210 – 212, 234, 237, 247 consultations 10, 131, 185 – 186, 190 – 191 cultural hegemony 54, 154 – 155 cultural populism 156, 159 decisionism 197 democracy: communitarian 78; constitutional democracy i, xvii, 2, 12, 18, 22, 24, 88, 113, 196; deliberative 131; demagogic democracy 18 – 20, 22; participatory 9, 10, 46, 117, 131, 134 – 135, 139 – 140, 143, 232 demos 5, 9, 18 – 20, 26, 118, 200, 230 depoliticization xv, xvi, 2, 4, 6, 12, 49, 51 – 60, 135, 172, 193, 197, 199, 245 Di Maio, Luigi 118, 189, 228 – 229 direct democracy 77, 86, 111, 117, 127 – 128, 130 – 131, 134 – 140, 143, 187, 190 – 191, 211, 227, 232, 245 disintermediation xv – xvi, 2, 4, 108, 110 – 111, 113, 118, 127, 133, 155, 171, 232 dissatisfaction 10, 31, 35 – 37, 39, 74, 95 – 96, 107, 111, 117, 151, 183 economic crisis 35 – 37, 41 – 46, 110, 130, 206, 221, 228 elitism 2 emotionalization 133, 149 Enlightenment 81, 154, 157 ethno-nationalism 5

250 Index ethno-regionalism 115 – 116, 171 – 172, 216 – 217, 220 ethnos 200, 230 ethnotribalism 134 First Republic xv, 3, 6, 25, 27, 101, 171 – 172, 204, 217, 223, 225, 243 Five Star Movement xv, 3, 4, 8, 11, 26 – 27, 37, 59, 60, 68, 70, 106, 129, 138 – 139, 143, 171, 197, 210, 216, 244 Forza Italia xv, 11, 115 – 116, 154, 158, 171, 188, 203 – 205, 207, 216, 218, 222 – 223, 225 – 226, 244 Fratelli d’Italia 188 – 189, 218 garantismo 206 giustizialismo 156 global protests 185, 187 governance 8, 53, 55 – 58, 77, 108, 130 – 131, 135 – 136, 143, 183, 193, 208, 211 government i, 2, 4, 6, 7, 11, 17 – 21, 25, 27, 31 – 33, 34, 36, 38 – 43, 49, 53 – 54, 56 – 58, 67 – 73, 75, 77, 80 – 83, 86, 88 – 90, 92 – 97, 99, 100, 106 – 109, 112 – 120, 127 – 128, 130, 134 – 139, 142 – 143, 158, 160, 167, 169, 172 – 175, 183, 186, 190 – 191, 197 – 198, 199, 201 – 203, 204, 206 – 213, 217 – 218, 221, 223 – 224, 226, 227 – 230, 234 – 238, 244 – 247 “Government of Change” 218 Grande Riforma 202, 206, 211 Grillo, Beppe 118, 129, 153, 156, 171, 191, 227 – 230, 243 Hobbes, Thomas 21, 79, 89 illiberal democracy 33, 38, 42, 113 – 114, 119, 158 imaginary(ies) 9, 11, 21, 152, 196, 212 immigration 35 – 36, 42, 46 – 47, 164, 172 – 173, 175, 191, 218 inclusive practices 185 – 186 ingovernabilitá 204 instrumentalism 197, 198, 204, 208, 212 intellectuals xvi, 8 – 9, 12, 27, 52 – 53, 87, 91, 94, 96, 101, 113, 148 – 154, 156, 158 – 161, 243, 246; of common people xvi, 9, 149 interest groups 6, 42 – 44 internet 77, 131, 138, 140, 143, 155, 171, 227 – 228, 231 – 232

Laclau, Ernesto xv, xvii, 2 – 3, 17 – 18, 23 – 25, 27 – 28, 184, 242 – 243 leader selection 10, 186, 188 – 189 leadership 10, 22, 26, 50, 55, 98 – 101, 106, 108, 110, 112, 114 – 119, 158, 167, 171, 172, 186 – 188, 192, 197, 204, 206, 218 – 222, 224, 227 – 230, 232 – 238, 243, 246 Lega (Nord) xv, 59, 60, 106, 115 – 117, 119, 130, 133, 158, 188, 190 – 191, 193, 197, 202 – 204, 210 – 211, 213, 216 – 222, 223, 228, 230 legal resentment 4, 197, 199, 205, 209, 211 – 212 legitimacy 5, 7, 32, 56, 69, 72 – 73, 76, 78, 83, 86 – 89, 98 – 100, 108, 112, 114 – 115, 129, 130, 133, 140, 183, 198, 200, 203, 207 – 209, 212, 225, 235, 245 liberal democracy 2, 33, 50, 51, 107, 113, 118, 135, 159, 243 majoritarian democracy 234, 237 majoritarianism xvi, 9, 10, 196, 197 – 199, 202, 206; extreme 12, 199 Meloni, Giorgia 189 metanarrative 157 mobilization 8, 11, 12, 17, 21, 23, 26, 31, 37, 40, 46, 50, 79, 154, 184, 185, 198, 217, 242, 243 Movimento 5 Stelle xv, 11, 115, 156, 158, 160, 188, 189 – 191, 216 – 218, 223, 227 – 229, 232 Müller, Jan-Werner 38, 136, 137 multitude 19, 26, 203 narratives 56, 88, 99, 128, 135 – 136, 148, 150, 151, 153 – 154, 158 – 160, 201, 234 nation xv, 5, 18, 21, 23, 26, 46, 69 – 71, 89, 117, 151, 190, 198, 200, 219, 222 nationalism 5, 9, 18, 35, 46, 148, 159 neolanguage 159 neoliberalism xv, 6, 53, 57, 58, 136, 154, 245 neotelevision 154 – 155 neutrality 196, 197 new radical right 108, 116 ordinary people 51, 148, 150, 156, 158, 160, 212 participation xvi, 5, 9, 10, 22, 34, 35, 39, 41, 44, 127 – 128, 134 – 135, 140, 143, 181, 182 – 188 participatory platform 8, 127, 139, 140, 142

Index  251 Partito Democratico xv, 11, 76, 115, 117, 188 – 189, 213, 216 party system xvi, 6, 36, 41, 42, 43, 59, 60, 68, 87, 88, 92, 100, 109, 115, 171, 187, 217, 244, 245, 246 patrimonial populism 119, 120 penal populism 9, 12, 60, 164 – 173, 175, 176, 243 people: as-a-part 11, 21, 23, 27; as-a-whole xvi, 21; constituent people 21, 24; constructions of xvii, 2, 23, 27; people of the network 27 personalisation 107, 108, 112, 116, 117, 119, 142, 219, 229, 233 – 236 personal party 154, 222, 226 platform parties xvi, 8, 127, 138 – 140, 143 plebiscitarianism 107, 111 – 113 pluralism 3, 40, 68 – 69, 82, 96, 98, 100, 113, 119, 154, 157, 196 polarization 5, 11, 42, 47 politainment 154, 156 political communication 40, 46, 51, 149, 151, 153, 156, 158, 165, 184, 242 political participation xvi, 10, 37, 42, 43, 49, 52, 59, 60, 77, 129, 132, 134 – 135, 171, 181 – 185, 186, 192 populist democracy xvi, 8, 23, 33, 42, 100, 112 – 114, 196, 246 populist intellectuals 159 populist leaders xvi, 8, 9, 12, 17, 39, 42, 45, 51 – 53, 100, 116, 133, 139, 150, 155 – 157, 159, 161, 218, 224, 226, 234 – 235, 243 populus 21, 28 post-democratic 6, 49, 198 postmodernism 157, 159 postmodernity 157 post-representative politics 128, 131 – 132, 142, 242 Pratt, John 167 – 168 presidentialism 24 – 25, 233, 237 primaries 140, 171, 189, 219, 233 – 235, 238 primary elections 76, 144, 185 – 186, 188 – 190, 193 proceduralism 197 protest party 31, 37 protest reactions 184 – 187, 192 public discourse 151, 157, 159 public intellectual 149, 158 public sphere xvi, 1, 54, 57, 91, 96, 108, 111, 144, 149, 157 – 159, 170 – 171 punishment 19, 36, 42, 165 – 166, 168 – 169, 174 – 175, 177

quality of democracy 5, 31, 33 – 34, 36 radical democracy 19 radicalization 11, 35, 39 – 40, 43 – 44, 47 referendum 10, 59, 87, 91, 102, 128, 130, 134, 142, 185, 188, 190 – 191, 202 – 203, 207, 231, 234, 237, 238 Renzi, Matteo xv, 3, 4, 10 – 11, 26 – 27, 59, 99, 115 – 117, 142, 160, 171, 173 – 174, 188, 193, 197, 201, 206 – 212, 216, 227, 233 – 238 representation: crisis of 2, 6, 131, 182; direct 3, 8, 87, 97, 113, 127 – 129, 131, 133 – 135, 137, 139 – 142, 222; forms of 128, 130, 132, 141; institutional 129; political xv, 6, 8, 42, 49, 59, 90, 106, 108, 110 – 111, 115, 132, 134, 158, 166, 177, 193; social 113 responsiveness 34 – 36, 40 – 42, 51, 109, 142 revolution 19, 21 – 25, 32, 36, 78 – 79, 109, 115 rule of law 5, 9, 10, 33 – 35, 37, 41, 81, 89, 164 – 165, 170, 196 – 197, 199 – 200, 205, 212, 242, 247 Salvini, Matteo xv, 11, 26 – 27, 59, 115 – 116, 119, 133, 158, 172, 188, 191, 213, 216 – 223, 228, 238, 243 Second Republic 3, 11, 17, 24, 58, 87, 98 – 99, 101, 115, 171 – 172, 216 – 217, 222, 227 – 228, 236, 238 selection 3; leader 10, 186, 188 – 189, 193; representatives 80, 81 – 82, 182 self-government 77, 82, 99, 190 sensationalism 156 Sieyès, Abbé 21 – 22 social movements 37, 42, 44, 60, 67, 135 – 136, 182, 185, 187, 228 sovereignism 142, 148, 158 symbolic analyst 8, 153, 155 – 156, 158 – 160, 243 Tangentopoli 6, 7, 60, 76, 87, 115, 153, 156, 171, 201, 204 technicalization 54 technopopulism 136, 139, 142 telepopulism 154 – 155, 171 – 172 Togliatti, Palmiro 17, 24, 99 Urbinati, Nadia xvi, 6 – 7, 101, 103, 199 webpopulism 155, 171 – 172