The Arborium of Italian Party Politics (October 1995)
This is part one of a three part series on the political situation in Italy.
If you want to understand politics in Italy these days, you’d better have a sound knowledge of trees. Since the advent of Tangentopoli and Mani Pulite (Pay-off City and the Clean Hands Trials), the corruption scandals and trials that implicated politicians, government officials, and industrialists, the word party in the context of politics has become a dirty word. Replacing the prohibitive word, party, are a number of substitute appellations such as pole, league, alliance, or coalition.
Besides these common names, almost every new political organization has a nickname such as La Quercia, the diminutive given to one of Italy’s political associations, taken from it’s symbol, an oak tree. This new organization has its roots, of course, in one of the former parties. And when there is enough dissent among the members of the new organization, some members branch off and form limbs of their own until their following is great enough to become one of the growing number of bushes.
This is no spoof. This is exactly the kind of terminology one hears every day in Italian political circles. This speaking in arboricultural metaphors might seem amusing, at times even witty and poetic, were it not for the never ending confusion it causes in the general public. It also defeats the desire expressed by the voters of Italy in a referendum held two years ago to change the political system in its entirety.
All of this name changing actually began before Tangentopoli and before the word party became taboo. In a moment of opportunism after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the former Italian Communist Party decided to rename itself PDS, the Democratic Party of the Left, the very idea of communism having lost all popularity and the word itself having become somewhat of an anachronism.
The demonization of the word "party" was the direct result of the Tangentopoli scandels. At the beginning of the Clean Hands trials, the Socialists were the only party iplicated in the scandels. However, as the trial progressed, it became clear that every party without exception was concerned, the extent of each party’s engagement being directly proportionate to its political power.
As the universality of the corruption became evident, and as the most important members of these parties were arrested, put on trial, and in some cases imprisoned, the atmosphere was ripe for the referendum which Italians hoped would transform their political system.
In March 1993, the Italians went to the urns and voted favorably on a referendum which would give them more direct participation in the vote, allow for the transformation from a proportionate system to a majority system, and permit the direct election of city mayor candidates.
One of the aspirations of those elections was to encourage the birth of a bi-partisan system, similar to that of the United States, where the winners of the elections run the country for the given period of time until the next elections. This way of doing things is in total contrast to the proportionate system, where winners and losers divide the power between them according to the number of votes.
During the year following the referendum, the members of the old parties began forming the new groups mentioned above: poles, leagues, limbs, bushes, you name it. Instead of the anticipated reduction in the number of political associations, their number actually increased.
This taste for ramification and grafting seen in the infinite multiplication of political groups and subsequent alliances among those groups has obviously breached the faith of what Italians had hoped for in those election results.
October 1995
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