First They Took Rome. David Broder

was not the end of the Lega Nord’s crisis – indeed, in the February 2013 general election, it hit a fresh low. Even faced with Mario Monti’s unpopular technocratic government, supported by both the Democrats and Forza Italia, the Lega was unable to turn attention away from its own internal woes. Having lost two-thirds of its members since 2010, the Lega Nord took just 4.3 per cent of the vote, or half its 2008 score. This was, in political terms, a historic nadir. Back in 2001, the Lega Nord had shed even more votes after its series of U-turns on the independence question. Yet then it had been saved by the wider context of right-wing advance, allowing it again to play a kingmaker role in forming the subsequent centre-right government. The 2013 defeat offered no such consolation, as the Lega slumped into near-irrelevance while the M5S soared to first place. The message that ‘the politicians in Rome’ were all the same was now being championed by a newer force – and directed against the Lega itself.

      Two decades after the corrupt PSI man Mario Chiesa’s bid to flush his payload, the forces that had broken up the First Republic were being eaten by their own revolution. The accusations even struck at Antonio di Pietro, the protagonist of Clean Hands and leader of the small centre-left party Italia dei Valori (Italy of Values; IdV). On 28 October 2012, he was targeted by RAI’s Report, an investigative current affairs programme that emerged during the wave of judicial populism. Di Pietro was accused of keeping €50 million of electoral expenses under own family’s control, while building up a real-estate empire supposedly including fifty-six properties. Faced with scandalised editorials, Di Pietro strongly denied the allegations of impropriety and even brought a successful libel action against the producers. But, as he put it immediately after the accusations were aired, IdV had ‘died on Sunday night’s Report’. The new era in Italian public life had personalised everything – and for someone who claimed to stand only for anti-corruption, it was political death to see one’s claim to clean hands tarnished.

      IdV was, indeed, destroyed: even after removing Di Pietro, it lost all its seats in the February 2013 general election. The setbacks for the Lega Nord were not quite so bad, for it did at least retain its northern fortresses – thus surviving the departure of its own founder-leader. Following the election, Bossi’s successor Maroni departed the front line of national politics to focus on his role as president of the Lombardy region. With the leghisti now able to count on only one in twenty-five voters nationally, the contest to succeed him might have looked like rather a footnote. Yet Matteo Salvini’s victory in the internal ballot – thumping the disgraced Bossi by more than a four-to-one margin – would prove decisive amid the turmoil that followed. In August 2013, Berlusconi was finally sentenced for a fraud conviction, with no further recourse to appeal. Where the Lega founder had burned out his political capital, the billionaire tycoon was formally banned from holding public office. Rising to the Lega leadership as the men who built the Second Republic reached their downfall, Salvini promised a further revolution on the right – one fit for a new age in Italian politics.

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       ‘Say Something Left-wing!’

      The weakened ties between voters, parties, and institutions aren’t just an Italian phenomenon. Political scientists such as Peter Mair have spoken of the historic decline of mass parties across the West in recent decades.¹ Arising around the turn of the twentieth century, these parties based themselves on local associational activity and an engaged community of militants, in contrast to the elite parliamentary factions more typical of the nineteenth century. Yet their ‘dense’ democratic structures, bound to the day-to-day activism of their cadres and mass membership, have increasingly given way to technocratic ‘cartel parties’, which base their power on their control of institutional resources and professionalised marketing operations. This has driven the process known as Pasokification, in which parties which allow their social roots to wither over decades then fall victim to abrupt electoral wipeouts. The phenomenon is named after Greece’s PASOK, whose role in a series of austerity and grand-coalition governments saw its support collapse from 44 per cent in 2009 to under 5 per cent in 2015; in the crisis period its malaise has also spread to historic parties like France’s Parti Socialiste and, somewhat more gradually, Germany’s Social Democratic Party. Yet, already in the early 1990s, the fall of Italy’s First Republic provided a test run of what politics looks like when mass parties are removed from the scene.