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What is in a Name? Primary Elections, Italian Style

i-Italy Gothic One

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The PD is the direct product of the entry onto the Italian stage of a new political figure of such weight and influence that, as we noted, all the political furniture has been re-arranged. I’m not referring to either Silvio Berlusconi or Walter Veltroni, but to someone much more important: the floating voter.

The floating voter, an insignificant midget of a fellow before the 1990s, has arisen so dramatically that he has triggered the creation of a new Italian political phenomenon: the party as a giant electoral machine. The first was Forza Italia! In fact, at the beginning, that’s about all FI was. Next has come the Partito democratico, admittedly much different from Berlusconi’s initial network of soccer supporters, but even more distant from the old parties of the post-war Republic. The two new parties have in common the prey that is in their gun sights: the floating voter.

To understand this new prey, we’ll start with what came before.
It was, if memory serves, the early 1980s. In the headquarters of the Republican Party (PRI) on Piazza Sant’ Eustachio, down back of the Roman Pantheon, the faithful and their guests were celebrating. Spadolini was there, wreathed in smiles, and Visentini. Spumante was opened and panini brought in from the bar across the piazza. Hugs and handshakes all around. The Republicans were celebrating an electoral gain of .2 percent. Not two percent --- two-tenths of one percent. It was probably too small a gain to add any parliamentary seats; it might gain them a slightly better ministerial portfolio if they joined the next government. (Of the pentapartito, the five parties in the “governing area”, the Republicans were usually the most difficult, the last to agree to join a new coalition.) The portfolio would be granted because their miniscule gain constituted, in those days, what passed for “momentum.”

This celebration of such a miniscule gain, a celebration whose counterpart could not be found in other Western countries, was the product of the correspondingly miniscule number of “floating voters” in Italy. Floating voters are those who have not, at the beginning of an electoral campaign, already firmly made up their minds. They are the voters whose votes are genuinely available to the blandishments of the campaign. They make actual decisions. From the late 1940s to some time around 1990, the number of floating voters in Italy was so small that bad weather in the Red Belt, or the canceling of one train bringing workers from the north to the south to vote (as required by law) could sway an election.

The American experience of political parties is entirely different. American parties are mere skeletons that take on serious flesh only close to elections. The parties contribute little money and few workers to the campaigns of candidates. The candidates at all but the lowest levels, these days, are usually not chosen by the party officials; they have won a primary. Consequently, the politician owes little to the party, and the party can expect little in the way of loyalty or discipline in the House, Senate, or state legislature.

The party in postwar Italy was so different from this that the two beasts should not have the same name. We will use some future columns to describe the grand old Italian clans, behemoths that wrapped their members in a life-long embrace that monopolized a members’ reading, socializing, even vacationing, shared the spoils politics (both between parties and within parties) according to precise formulae, and were as much a part of one’s vital statistics as age and birthplace. They “fought” elections with the most modest of either fears or hopes, because almost all of the electorate was, in fact, frozen.

If, then, most of the voters were not truly “available” to trawling politicos, what was the real meaning of an electoral campaign? We’ll examine that strange dance next time.