Silvio Berlusconi is the contemporary Count Ugolino of Italian politics, lost power, closed in the tower of his thoughts "the Knight has devoured his children, including Angelino Alfano and is starting to lead the center-right towards defeat". Word of Angelo Panebianco, political scientist, columnist, professor of comparative international systems at the University of Bologna and columnist for Corriere della Sera.
“I think it will take an entire legislature for this political part, the centre-right, to rethink and redefine itself. Five years of government by the left, unless the byzantinisms of the electoral law produce an unmanageable situation the day after the elections. In any case, the country lost the opportunity for a global renewal with Renzi's defeat in the primaries”. Liberalism? "In Italy he is only partisan, he always liberalizes in the electoral pool of his opponents".
These are in summary the themes of a FIRSTonline chat with the attentive observer of national politics.
FIRSTonline – Professor Panebianco why can't liberalism become the political compass of the centre-right?
Liberal culture has always been a minority in Italy. After the Second World War the country was dominated by two parties, the DC and the PCI, both distant from liberal ideas. The liberals gathered in small minority parties, the Pli or the Pri, made up of 3 cats plus 3 cats. In Italy, more than a contrast between liberals and social democrats, there is the division between North and South, never recomposed in 150 years, and that between State and Church. These are fractures that transversely crack all the political parties in the field. Where is liberalism? The left has been dominated for 50 years by the communist party and we realize it even today. The PCI has always tried to destroy everything that sat on its right, such as craxismo and its liberal demands and Matteo Renzi and his desire for renewal.
FIRSTonline – Huge things have happened since the days of the DC-PCI: the fall of the Berlin Wall, the end of the USSR, tangentopoli, the season of new party names and new alliances…
Sure, and in 94 something new appeared on the scene: Silvio Berlusconi. The situation was similar to today's, the Pd or Pds as it was called then, seemed destined to win the elections with the secretary Achille Occhetto, but Berlusconi blocked his way. In two and two fours he invented a party based on Publitalia, cleared the MSI by saying that he would vote for Fini in the elections for mayor of Rome and succeeded in the enterprise of allying himself in the North with the League and in the South with the MSI. It was a revolution founded on one man. Today, with his charisma collapsed, even the center-right is disappearing.
FIRSTonline – Is this due to the lack of a hegemonic and shared culture within the same alignment?
Berlusconi wanted to bring a liberal wind to the government: he wanted to rebel against the oppressive presence of the state in the economy, to curb the communist and Catholic cultures. But his team was not liberal and he too, after all, was above all a Lombard entrepreneur. His culture was and is that of "doing", far from rhetoric and speeches and the lack of a clear horizon, of shared cultures, has always simmered under the ashes.
FIRSTonline – So are those who say that the center-right has to ask itself above all about this in order to understand the reasons for its own crisis and find the way forward for its future right?
The problem is that Italy, not the centre-right or the centre-left, is a conservative country. Everyone, left and right, wants to maintain the status quo, including self-styled innovators. No one fully clarifies what innovation means, only Renzi, in this sense, had a little courage. In Italy we invented "partisan liberalism", everyone innovates in the field of the others, on the left we aim to hit the electorate on the right and vice versa, without looking too closely at the overall idea of society that we want to define and doing everything roughly and rather badly.
FIRSTonline – If Italy is a conservative country why does everyone work so hard to appear "reformist"?
There is also a great deal of terminological confusion. Reformism is something that belongs to the culture of the left and derives from the strategy to conquer power, gradual and non-revolutionary. Today we talk about it because the culture of the left largely dominates the language, but we don't quite understand what it means and what lies behind the "reformist" label.
FIRSTonline – This language problem is very interesting and hides something deeper. In the words of King Peter of Leonce and Lena of Buchner "I have the categories in a frightening mess and there are two more buttons attached ... in short, my whole system is ruined". Namely: the cultural and political boundaries that separate left and right are quite jagged. Is it possible to imagine a liberal centre-right and a social democratic centre-left? Doesn't Bersani make sheets his flag?
I think Giavazzi and Alesina are right, liberalism could be left-wing if the left managed to be innovators, but in this regard everything we have said so far is valid. Bersani is the liberal partisan I mentioned earlier, he strikes those who don't vote for him. In fact, however, the Democratic Party is biased towards the CGIL which is one of the most conservative forces there are. On the other hand, there is great confusion about terminology. Italy is the only country where, to define the same thing, two different terms are used such as liberalism and liberalism, claiming to attribute to these two words two alleged visions of the world, one political and the other economic. they are the same thing. In the confused but plastered panorama, I believe Matteo Renzi represented a hope. Center-right voters, as we have seen, did not go en masse to vote for him. Yet Renzi did very well, if you think about the context in which he had to fight. If he had won, all Italian politics would have changed and the left would have suffered a real jolt. Consequently, even the opposing side should have questioned itself. This was not the case and we therefore have to deal with the history that we find ourselves living.
FIRST online. Where can the center-right start from?
Only since Berlusconi's departure from the scene. Italy votes mainly for the centre-right, but in this area someone capable of interpreting the political needs of this electorate should emerge. For now, nothing is visible and the centre-left seems destined to win. Certainly in the middle there is the electoral law and the match of the President of the Republic, an event of great importance ... but this is another story and we can only write about it later.
