Can the left respond to new cleavages in Italy?

Abstract

ABSTRACT Over the last forty years, there has been a mounting societal shift towards post-materialist values in all countries adhering to the democratic tradition. This has fuelled demand for increasingly personalized content, reflected in political and electoral preferences that, shaped by new agencies of socialization, have gradually distanced themselves from former loyalties. The political supply has been reorganized as a result. The old mass parties have morphed into the so-called catch all party and the more recent variations of the professional-electoral party, forced to drum up votes however it can, chiefly by concocting new issues to compensate for the weakening of traditional subcultures and the fact that the social groups and classes that were the mainstay of twentieth-century parties have now exited the scene. In Italy, this process has led to a political system that is – to say the least – fragmented and unstable. Taken as a whole, the Italian left is even harder pressed than other European lefts, though they too have shown themselves incapable in recent years of sensing the changing pulse and adapting to the new milieu and how it will affect the left’s legacy in terms of the industrial conflict between capital and labour. This is a cleavage that has marked the platforms of liberal-democratic political systems and the form that parties accordingly take even more than it has affected their value content. The Italian left’s perennially upwelling legacy has thus prevented it from retooling for a changing society and formulating policies that can build a solid voter base by interpreting the expectations of the more moderate portions of the electorate who, though sceptical about the centre-right coalition, harbour even greater doubts concerning the centre-left’s ability to actually govern.