The big news out of Italy last weekend was the vicious assault on Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi in Milan. The attack overshadowed the birth of a new center-left alliance determined to give Italians an alternative both to Berlusconi and a left mired in stale, social democratic dogma.
The launch of the Alleanza L’Italia (Alliance for Italy) in Parma over the weekend effectively dissolved the brief union of the two major opposition parties: the Democrats of the Left (the main social-democratic party) and the smaller, centrist Margherita (which in Italian means a daisy, not a drink). The two merged into the Democratic Party in 2007 in a bid to unify Italy’s fractious center-left.
But it was an unhappy marriage. The Democrats suffered a string of electoral defeats and leadership changes. Moderates chafed at the doctrinal rigidity of the dominant social democratic faction, which they believe has helped to polarize society while convincing many middle-class voters that progressives aren’t capable of governing. “We want to redress the balance toward the center,” explained Francesco Rutelli, the former Margherita chief and mayor of Rome who is the moving spirit behind the Alleanza. What Italy needs, he said, is a new center-left governing platform grounded in the values of “freedom, economic innovation and social cohesion.” (Full disclosure: I attended the Parma meeting as a guest of the Alleanza).
What apparently triggered the divorce was the Democrats’ decision to join the Socialist caucus in the European parliament. “Socialist parties in Europe are being defeated everywhere,” noted another key Alleanza leader, Gianni Vernetti. He’s right. In the 2009 European elections, center right parties led in 21 out of 27 European Union countries. In what many observers are calling the “European paradox,” the global financial crisis has given no boost to social democratic parties, despite their traditional skepticism toward free market economics.
One reason is that Europe’s center-right parties long ago made peace with the “social market,” which they promise to manage more efficiently. European social democrats, meanwhile, often seem more interested in defending the welfare state status quo than in modernizing their economies and politics.
Alleanza’s organizers repeatedly stressed the link between Italy’s political polarization and its economic stagnation. They promised pragmatic reforms intended to spur economic innovation and growth. And they framed their appeals to groups that have been cool to the center-left – small business operators, entrepreneurs and especially young voters, whose economic prospects are especially bleak.
The Alleanza also seems determined to break with the quasi-pacifist stance of many on the European left. Vernetti, deputy foreign minister in the last center-left government, emphasized Italy’s responsibility to contribute to security in an interdependent world. He urged progressives to rise above partisanship and approve the government’s request for funds to send 1,000 more troops to Afghanistan.
Seen from one perspective, the Alleanza’s birth marks yet another rupture in Italy’s fissiparous center-left. But from another vantage point – the need for Italian progressives to fashion a credible governing agenda for reform and renewal, to forge a new political center — it is a promising development indeed.
