Since the autumn of 2014, elections and referendums in the heartlands of Western capitalism have brought a series of shocks to the established political order. A vote on Scottish independence left the uk intact after near-panic in ruling circles during the final weeks of the campaign, but was followed by a clean sweep for the Scottish National Party in the subsequent general election. Syriza’s accession to power in January 2015 resulted in months of high drama for the Eurozone before its leaders capitulated to pressure from the Troika. In 2016, Britain voted to leave the European Union, confounding all predictions, while Donald Trump turned his campaign for the world’s highest political office from joke to fait accompli in the space of a few turbulent months. Each of these outcomes had its own specific features and political inflections, carelessly subsumed by many under the rubric of ‘populism’, an alarming threat to the good sense of the liberal centre. Newspaper columnists have been left to wonder where the next surprise will come from, as national elections in France, Germany and the Netherlands loom on the horizon.

Italy’s contribution to this cycle of upsets came with the constitutional referendum of December 2016, when a decisive ‘No’ vote of 59 per cent triggered the fall of Matteo Renzi, erstwhile champion of ‘reform’ and darling of the Anglophone media. In a state of shock, he told intimates: ‘I did not think they hated me so much.’footnote¹ Yet there was no mystery in the result, which had much less to do with the spectre of a ‘populist and far-right wave’ conjured up by the international media than with a backlash against Giorgio Napolitano’s authoritarian blueprint for the ‘stabilization’ of Italy, and the record of Renzi’s aggressively neoliberal government.footnote² The outcome was a product of Renzi’s immediate social and economic legislation; decades-long attempts to erode the democratic content of the Italian constitution; and the convergence of a range of different political forces, each with their own reasons for opposing the Prime Minister’s scheme, in a landslide No.footnote³

In the wake of his defeat Renzi, a former boy-scout, turned to Baden-Powell for his motto, claiming his aim had been: ‘Leave it better than you found it.’ His government had fought ‘the good fight’, but failed to win over enough Italians to the cause. Nonetheless, he insisted, the country was in far better shape than when he became Prime Minister: his much-needed labour law had created 600,000 new jobs; Italian growth rates had recovered from -2 to +1 per cent; exports had risen and the deficit fallen.footnote⁴ Renzi had set out to make Italy more ‘governable’, in a context of economic crisis and eu-mandated austerity, by transforming its political institutions and their relationship with civil society. There were three main planks to his strategy: side-lining the trade unions—or ‘the disintermediation of intermediate bodies’, as the Prime Minister preferred to put it—repression and ‘proactive decisionism’. As Renzi explained in a Florentine speech in October 2014, if the unions insisted on challenging their ‘disintermediation’, blunt coercion could be deployed to bring them into line. The third concept, ‘proactive decisionism’, referred to Renzi’s use of enabling acts. Article 76 of the Italian Constitution allows parliament to delegate its authority over individual laws to the executive, as long as the principles underpinning the law are set out clearly in advance. Renzi linked all of his major reforms—public-administration overhaul, education, labour laws—to a vote of confidence in himself. Once the enabling acts had been approved by Parliament, he would announce the reforms in triumph to the Italian public before his government had even brought the relevant legislation forward.

The shambles concealed by this sleight-of-hand was soon uncovered. In November 2016, the Constitutional Court struck out the bulk of Renzi’s public-administration reform and directed Parliament to revise the law upon which it was based. The ‘Buona Scuola’ education reform also proved to be a fiasco. In essence, it sought to empower school principals, especially in terms of labour relations, while linking teachers’ salaries to performance benchmarks and introducing compulsory, unpaid internships for students, giving the curriculum a more vocational slant. The reality of ‘Buona Scuola’ proved to be administrative chaos, already in evidence at the beginning of the school year in September 2016, as the reform had been hastily imposed on the education system without adequate preparation.footnote⁵

Meanwhile, Renzi’s labour law epitomized his government’s propensity for prestidigitation. It had abolished Article 18 of the Statuto dei Lavoratori, which prevented employers from firing a worker without due cause—something Berlusconi had been unable to achieve. The new Act promoted the casualization of labour in the name of ‘flexicurity’, while granting short-term fiscal subsidies to companies that created permanent jobs. When employment data for 2015 suggested that 600,000 new jobs had been created that year—including 190,000 permanent ones—Renzi claimed vindication. But as the economist Marta Fana has shown, this apparent triumph stemmed from a sugar high induced by tax reliefs.footnote⁶ Employers had simply hired the workers they would need for 2016 ahead of schedule in order to qualify for the government’s handouts, especially in the South; but the surge in employment did not correspond to any growth in gdp.footnote⁷ Moreover, thanks to the repeal of Article 18, companies could employ workers on permanent contracts with every intention of letting them go once the fiscal subsidy had expired. During the first ten months of 2016, lay-offs duly increased by 3.4 per cent.footnote⁸ The creation of new, permanent jobs in 2016 was almost entirely cancelled out by the elimination of other such posts, leaving an overall increase of barely 60,000. The job figures were also inflated by a scheme introduced by the 2013–14 Letta government, whereby firms could buy vouchers at tobacco shops to pay employees without contract. The use of these vouchers soared by 67 per cent in 2015, with another 32 per cent hike in the first ten months of 2016. These precarious posts accounted for many of the jobs created under Renzi.

The glaring contrast between Renzi’s bombastic claims and the real state of the country led his supporters in the media—La Repubblica first and foremost, but also Corriere della Sera, La Stampa, Il Sole 24 Ore—to modify their rhetoric in the lead up to the referendum. The optimistic arrogance with which they had begun the year gave way to crude scaremongering, invoking the spectre of the Five Stars Movement coming to power, a possible break with the eu, financial instability and the collapse of Italy’s banking system. Similar tropes had already been mobilized, to little effect, in Greece’s Ochi referendum and the Brexit vote. Renzi also engaged in some theatrical skirmishes with eu officials over Italy’s debt burden, bank bailouts and the refugee crisis in the Mediterranean, but had little to show for his efforts against a backdrop of growing (and well-justified) Euroscepticism, in a country that had once been fervently ‘Europeanist’.

Renzi had been obliged to call a referendum on his constitutional reform—originally the brainchild of President Napolitano—after failing to secure the necessary two-thirds majority in Parliament. Its underlying political logic is spelled out in Aggiornare la Costituzione, a book jointly authored by historian Guido Crainz and jurist Carlo Fusaro with the aim, as their title puts it, of ‘modernizing the constitution’.footnote⁹ Modernization, as they make clear, involves eliminating residual elements resulting from the strength of the left parties, the Communists and Socialists, in the Constituent Assembly of 1946–48. The Italian Constitution comprises an opening section of twelve articles, codifying ‘Fundamental Rights’, followed by Part One, enumerating the rights and duties of citizens, and Part Two, outlining the institutional framework of the Republic. Crainz argues that, while the balance of forces in the post-war Constituent Assembly had left a positive imprint on Part One, helping to transform post-fascist Italy into a more democratic society, the institutional design of Part Two had been warped by the (understandable) anxieties of Alcide De Gasperi’s Christian Democrats, when confronted with the strength of Italian Communism.footnote¹⁰ The dc leader had insisted upon a panoply of institutional safeguards to limit executive power, notably a Constitutional Court, a Superior Council of Magistracy, regional autonomy, and forms of direct democracy such as the referendum, as well as the rejection of presidentialism in favour of weak governments and the centrality of Parliament. Alongside the Chamber of Deputies, a Senate elected by voters over the age of 25 was invested with the same powers and prerogatives as the lower house—a form of ‘perfect bicameralism’, conceived as a block on the pci and its Socialist allies.footnote¹¹ But with the pci’s Historic Compromise, ‘perfect bicameralism’ became an unnecessary obstacle. Aggiornare la Costituzione identifies the Senate as a major source of institutional trouble from the 1970s, as it slowed down legislative processes and—together with the proportional electoral system—contributed to political instability and weak governments.