Italy’s newly re-elected president Giorgio Napolitano enters the Quirinale palace. REUTERS/Max Rossi
When Giorgio Napolitano was sworn in for an unprecedented second term as Italy’s president on Monday, the insurgency of comedian Beppe Grillo was momentarily swept under the rug. The nation’s established political parties — and not Grillo’s Five Star Movement, which vaulted to 25 percent of the popular vote in February’s parliamentary elections — got their choice to lead the third-largest economy in the eurozone out of extended political deadlock. If the Italian electorate had sent a message with its emphatic rejection of austerity and the status quo, said message was evidently not heard in Rome.
But the unity of all the major parties besides Five Star around Napolitano is a bit misleading. For one, the Democratic Party (PD) that until this week was led by Pier Luigi Bersani is in a state of chaos. PD and the broader center-left coalition are undergoing a public dose of catharsis reflecting widespread frustration at Bersani’s failure to capitalize on a favorable political environment as their candidate for prime minister this winter. He’s out, and until the center-left has a new leader, its ability to form a government will remain fundamentally compromised.
When the re-elected 87-year-old Napolitano addressed lawmakers, he chided them for excessive partisanship and called for the sort of broad-based electoral and economic reforms that Mario Monti, the outgoing technocrat prime minister, had advocated during his own short, doomed campaign. So even if the Five Star Movement and Silvio Berlusconi’s center-right coalition won votes by playing the populism card and railing against Monti’s austerity regime, the balance of power in Rome remains very much in favor of the E.U. consensus — albeit with some of tweaks around the edges that reformers in Five Star might ultimately appreciate.
The big question in all this is where, ideologically, what we have been calling the center-left will land after this period of soul-searching. Will its leaders countenance the idea of a grand coalition with Berlusconi and the right to block the Five Star Movement from entering government? Bersani would not, but his potential successor in centrist Florence Mayor Matteo Renzi could well. Some polls show Berlusconi and the right riding high, which means avoiding a quick vote is the smart strategy for the left as it licks its wounds. Of course, if Napolitano’s demand that this set of politicians put aside their grievances and form a cabinet is met with further failure, he has the power, as a re-elected president, to dissolve parliament and call a snap election at will. Either way, the Five Star Movement couldn’t have written the story any better: their own grassroots movement’s triumph in a national democratic contest is causing established party powerbrokers to close ranks around a veteran politician of the old school. Whether the awkward, behind-the-scenes jockeying by elites provides fuel for Grillo’s uprising remains to be seen, but it’s a testament to the potency of his message that traditional enemies on the left and right of Italian politics are being unified by the threat.
