The Left’s victory in the Italian general election on the 21 April is likely to have a large impact on popular consciousness. It has revived a sense of collective hope and once more made concrete that fading but never totally obliterated belief that change is possible. This is the Italian Left’s first electoral victory this century, and in this sense marks a watershed. It is quite possible, as was the case with the victory of Mitterand and the French Socialists in 1981, that the momentum of the Left’s advance will not be long maintained, that disillusion will follow, that the reforms achieved under the Prodi government may be fewer, less important, less effective or less lasting than its supporters imagine in the aftermath of Berlusconi’s defeat. But it would be quite wrong to write it off in advance as a mere alternation of office-holders. At the very least, the 1992–94 assault on the Mafia can be resumed and the utter degradation of civil society in southern Italy brought under some control. With the Right in disarray, the Left has won time and space to develop its own solutions to the Italian crisis.

Italy’s new electoral system somewhat exaggerated the Left’s achievement, since the Ulivo (the Olive Tree or centre-left alliance) plus Rifondazione Comunista (which had an electoral agreement with Ulivo) received only 43.3 per cent of the total vote, ahead of the right-wing alliance by a whisker—the Polo (or Pole of Liberty, the Berlusconi-Fini axis) received 42.1 per cent of the vote. If the results of the first-past-the-post elections are taken into account then the Left’s lead was a little larger, and so the overall results give the Ulivo 284 seats in the Chamber of Deputies, Rifondazione 35 seats, The Lega Nord 59 seats and the Polo 246 seats.footnote1 Since Berlusconi was enthusiastic about the non-proportional aspects of the new electoral system, he is in no position to complain. The Left has been given a chance because Berlusconi’s project came apart. It was scuppered, first by the defection of the Lega Nord, and then, in these elections, by the Lega’s strong performance with 10.1 per cent of the vote—nearly 2 per cent ahead of its performance in 1994, and without the benefit of electoral allies. Following the March 1994 elections, Berlusconi refused to meet the federalist demands of the Lega, partly because of his Faustian pact with the ultra-centralist Alleanza Nazionale; this led to the downfall of his government after only eight months. The decision of Umberto Bossi, the leader of the Lega, to break with Berlusconi showed a political courage and attachment to principle that partially atone for his earlier deal with the Right. It seems that many supporters of the Lega were alarmed by the sinister and corrupt features of a government in which the neo-fascist Gianfranco Fini gained respectability and Berlusconi could protect his media interests. The Berlusconi government bungled attempts to reform the pensions system and became the target of popular demonstrations, thus further fraying the allegiance of his allies.

The Right’s erratic record cost it business support. It is clear that the openly anti-Maastricht stance of the Alleanza Nazionale (an) frightened the markets. Even at the start of the election campaign, Berlusconi’s record of proven financial irresponsibility in government, as well as in his own business dealings, were hardly reassuring to the majority of European capitalists. (Murdoch, with his stake in Berlusconi’s Mediaset, is a case apart). The decision of Mediobanca veteran Maccanico to throw in his lot with Prodi and the Popolari, and of the outgoing Prime Minister, Lamberto Dini, to mount his own independent appeal to the moderate Europhile bourgeoisie, increased Berlusconi’s isolation. The latter’s intemperate attacks on fiat, Pirelli, Mediobanca and the poteri forti (‘strong powers’) as a whole—not just his personal enemies at Olivetti—left big business with the impression that, for all its vaunted neoliberalism, Forza Italia was becoming a mere adjunct of Fini, who, on appropriate occasions, will indulge in crowd-pleasing attacks on the financial establishment. Similarly, sections of the Lombard and Venetian industrial petty bourgeoisie, who in 1994 had backed Berlusconi as a more respectable neo-liberal alternative to the plebeian Bossi, now felt that Bossi was their best defence against Fini’s anti-European and south-ern-orientated project. Whilst the prosperous, northern petty bourgeoisie which believed it had a future in the European Union looked one way, the more archaic, crisis-ridden sectors of the same class looked the other. Fini’s gains in the north doubtless came in large part from the small shopkeepers, now for the first time in post-war Italian history faced with the kind of competition from out-of-town supermarkets and discount warehouses that their British equivalents had experienced years before. Such petty-bourgeois desperation fuelled the most notorious episode in the whole campaign, the barracking of Prodi by Torinese shopkeepers in March, even if hard-core an veterans instigated it.