As regular readers of the journal will know, the second issue each year is given over to the English-language translations of the pieces appearing in the latest edition of Politica in Italia: I fatti dell’anno e le interpretatzioni. Published by il Mulino with the sponsorship of the Istituto Cattaneo and the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS) of the Johns Hopkins University, the series has now been running for 38 years making it a valuable resource for contemporary historians as well as for comparative political scientists looking for authoritative analyses of the Italian case. As the journal’s editors, Maurizio Carbone and I are very grateful to this year’s guest editors, Catherine Moury and Andrea Pritoni, and to their contributors for all the hard work they have put into producing what is another splendid edition.
As Moury and Pritoni imply in their introductory article and as is highlighted elsewhere in the special issue, we shall have to await the results of the 2024 European Parliament (EP) elections before we can appreciate the ‘full’ significance of some of the events of 2023. This is certainly the case, for example, with regard to the impact of the death of Silvio Berlusconi on the party he founded, Forza Italia (on which see the article by Baldini and Ventura in this issue). It is also true with regard to the security of the position of Elly Schlein, elected as leader of the Partito Democratico (Democratic Party, PD) ‘against the wishes’ of the party membership on 26 February 2023 (as discussed by Bordandini et al., and by Donà in their contributions). As a ‘second-order national election’ (Reif and Schmitt Citation1980), the EP contest in June will also, inevitably, have a significant impact on internal equilibria within the governing coalition.
At the time of writing, League leader, Matteo Salvini, was struggling to remain in command of a party languishing in the opinion polls and was consequently looking to win back as many as possible of the voters who had deserted him for Giorgia Meloni’s party following the League’s high point of 34% at the European elections of 2019. He had therefore sought to distinguish himself from the Premier on a number of fronts including a third mandate for regional presidents (which would deflect the threat to his own position from the popular Luca Zaia, twice League president of the Veneto region), the Russian elections and support for the war in Ukraine (on which public opinion was divided). Given the domestic and international constraints on the actions and narratives of Meloni as Prime Minister, Salvini was looking to carve out space for himself on the far right as a leader with a clear sovereigntist, anti-immigrant, climate-sceptic profile, alongside Marine Le Pen, Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) and other members of the European, Identity and Democracy (ID) party. The proportional electoral system would inevitably raise the public profile of party divisions and Salvini was concerned above all to avoid being overtaken in the vote by Forza Italia (FI) and so relegated to third place among the governing parties. Such an outcome, of inestimable symbolic importance, would massively weaken his hold on the League, reduce his party’s weight within the governing coalition and, if accompanied by the predicted success of far-right parties elsewhere in Europe, significantly undermine his influence within ID. At the ID rally, ‘The wind of change’, held in Rome on 23 March, therefore, Salvini sought to embarrass FI by attacking Ursula von der Leyen, European People’s Party (EPP) candidate for Commission president, for environmental policies damaging to farmers and the automobile industry and for weakness in the face of mass migration. He got Marine Le Pen to embarrass Meloni by demanding that she came out clearly in opposition to von der Leyen’s candidacy.
FI spokespersons, meanwhile, were in a buoyant mood. Fears that the passing of their founder the previous June would lead to their rapid demise had not as yet been realized. The June elections would, as mentioned, have much to say about the party’s continuing viability. However, in the meantime, its popular support remained steady, just behind the League; its leader, Antonio Tajani, was able to rely on the continuing financial support of the Berlusconi family, and in regional elections held in Abruzzo on 10 March it had come from behind to outdistance the League by a country mile, taking nearly twice as many votes. In the immediate aftermath of the elections, therefore, in an interview with Corriere della Sera,Footnote1 Tajani was able to make a credible pitch for his party. He was, he intimated, seeking to occupy the political space between Meloni and Schlein, aiming to benefit from the absence of a strong centrist force among the parties of opposition. He was offering voters the opportunity to choose a party, which, as an EPP member, would barring some major upset, almost certainly be part of the majority on which the identity of the future Commission president would depend – a party, therefore, that might have a determining influence on the future direction of EU policy and on Italy’s role in Europe.
Meloni’s party, finally, was anticipating a level of support that reflected its status as the country’s largest, one that would therefore represent a massive improvement on its 2019 performance. This would allow Meloni to consolidate her hold on the European Conservatives and Reformists (ECR) and thus, potentially, to advance her ambition of bringing to an end the long-standing coalition between the forces of mainstream centre-left and centre-right at European level and so shift the centre of gravity of European politics decisively towards the right.
What seemed certain was that the elections would indeed mark a sharp rightward turn. According to a forecast made available by the European Council on Foreign Relations (ECFR)Footnote2 almost half the seats would be held by parties outside the centre-left/centre-right ‘grand coalition’ of the Progressive Alliance of Socialists and Democrats (S&D), Renew Europe (RE) and the EPP. Together, the EPP, ECR and MEPs of the radical right appeared to be within striking distance of a majority for the first time. What was less certain was the likely impact of all of this on the fortunes of Meloni and her ambition of an alternative to the ‘grand coalition’, excluding S&D. Though majority coalitions to the right of S&D and even to the right of RE seemed mathematically possible according to the forecast, their feasibility in practice was an entirely different matter – diminished, in essence, by the varying affiliations of the national delegations of which they were composed. For example, if PPE leader, Manfred Weber, wanted an understanding with ECR leader, Meloni, then it appeared that he would either have to persuade the Prime Minister to distance herself from the Polish Law and Justice Party (PiS) or risk defection by Polish EPP members led by Donald Tusk. For reasons of domestic politics, the latter would not work with PiS under any circumstances. If Meloni was interested in getting the EPP and ID to work together, then she would either have to persuade the latter to distance itself from Marine Le Pen and AfD or risk the defection of FI, whose leader, moreover, was her foreign secretary. And so on and so forth. Moreover, coalitions in the EP are not the result of formal agreements, nor are they enduring, but rather winning coalitions emerge from the autonomous decisions of the parliamentary groups and vary from issue to issue.
Still, looking at the winning coalitions that have tended to form around different policy issues in the 2019–24 EP, and taking account of the likely/possible changes in numbers of votes commanded by each parliamentary group, suggests that in a number of areas where reforms were passed with narrow majorities, similar reforms will no longer be possible. The most significant of these areas according to the authors of the ECFR forecast is likely to be environmental policy with the shift to the right in the new parliament suggesting that an ‘anti-climate policy action’ coalition will probably dominate.
This, then, is yet a fourth area in which events of the year gone by may come to be seen in a different light once the results of the EP elections are known. As the authors of the ECFR forecast point out, the EP elections will inevitably have a significant impact on the internal politics of member states even if they do not affect the shape of member-state governments. As Pizzimenti points out in his contribution to this issue, the Meloni government has so far been critical of EU directives and regulations in the area of the environment. Therefore, if as the ECFR suggests, EP coalition patterns change radically as a result of the June elections, and if, as polls are predicting, the Meloni government’s position is sustained by the elections, then it is reasonable to expect its approach to environmental policy if anything to be reinforced in the months ahead.
Interpretations of historical events are inevitably always provisional and liable to change. As ever, we shall await with great interest the publication of next year’s contributions to Politica in Italia so that we can see, in light of the outcome of the EP elections and other developments in 2024, the extent to which the interpretations in this year’s special issue can be confirmed or are in need of revision.
Notes
1. ‘Tajani: «C’è spazio per noi tra FdI e Pd. Aperti ad altre forze di centro»’, Corriere della Sera, 12 March 2024, https://www.corriere.it/politica/24_marzo_12/tajani-c-spazio-noi-fdi-pd-aperti-ad-altre-forze-centro-4619abe0-dfdf-11ee-80e9-75a3581b16b6.shtml?refresh_ce
2. ‘A sharp right turn: A forecast for the 2024 European Parliament elections’, European Council on Foreign Relations, 23 January 2024, https://ecfr.eu/publication/a-sharp-right-turn-a-forecast-for-the-2024-european-parliament-elections/#a-wake-up-call