Italy at the turn of the 21st century

Emergence of the “second republic”

The fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 ended the Cold War pattern that had marked Italian politics since the 1940s. Meanwhile, in the wake of growing economic prosperity and the challenges of globalization, most Italians had come to resent the corrupt and costly system of patronage and the large state economic sector that hampered Italy’s competitiveness and tarnished its political culture. With the bankruptcy of Cold War ideologies and partitocrazia, the party system itself began to appear outdated, politicians experimented with new forms of organization and communication, and shifting alliances replaced the solid blocs of the Cold War world.

The end of the Cold War had an immediate impact on Italy’s two biggest parties. Ongoing scandals and the loss of anticommunist appeal brought a further decline in the popularity of the Christian Democrats, who won only 29.7 percent of the vote in the 1992 elections. Under its new leader, Achille Occhetto, the Communist Party adopted a more moderate program and, in 1991, even took a new name: the Democratic Party of the Left (Partito Democratico della Sinistra; PDS). In the same year, a small group of die-hard Communists split off to form the Communist Refoundation Party (Partito della Rifondazione Comunista; PRC), which became one of the more important small parties, gaining about 5 percent of the vote in the national elections of 1994 and 1996. The collapse of communism in eastern Europe after 1989 undermined the communist subculture in Italy, and the PDS vote declined further to 16.1 percent in the 1992 elections. Nonetheless, the PDS remained the most important centre-left party.

Public protests against political corruption had little effect until 1992, when investigating magistrates in Milan began uncovering a series of bribery scandals. The city soon became known as “Bribesville” (Tangentopoli), and under “Operation Clean Hands” many leading politicians, civil servants, and prominent businessmen were arrested and imprisoned. Nearly all of Italy’s political parties were involved, but the Christian Democrats and the Socialists were the heart of the system. Craxi, the former prime minister, was eventually convicted on multiple charges and escaped imprisonment only by fleeing to Tunisia, where he died in 2000. By mid-1993 more than 200 deputies were under investigation, as were several former ministers, in a series of televised and closely followed trials. Protests about irregularities in the investigations fell on deaf ears at first but gradually began to pick up support.

Apart from the PDS, whose role in the corruption was limited, the main political parties dissolved in disgrace in 1993 and 1994, some to reappear under new names and with new leaders. The Christian Democrats became the Italian Popular Party (Partito Popolare Italiano; PPI), although some former Christian Democrats left the party to form several smaller Catholic-inspired political groupings. Members of the neofascist MSI (which had remained largely outside of the system of corruption) formed the new National Alliance (Alleanza Nazionale; AN). The Socialists, so important to the political system since the 1960s, became irrelevant. It was an extraordinary, unprecedented reshaping of an entire political system.

In 1993 voters approved several referenda, later ratified by parliament, to alter the electoral law so that thenceforth three-fourths of deputies and senators would be elected from single-member constituencies rather than proportionally. Socialist Prime Minister Giuliano Amato (1992–93), whose government had been rocked by the corruption scandal, resigned shortly after the passage of the referendum, and President Scalfaro asked Carlo Azeglio Ciampi to step in and form a government to implement the electoral reforms and stabilize the economy. The collapse of the existing party system and national elections under the new law the following year marked the end of partitocrazia and the beginning of a new political order.