Intra- and Inter-alliance Relations after the 2004 European and Provincial Elections

Abstract

The European elections of 12 and 13 June 2004, and the simultaneous partial local elections, were of great significance for Italy’s national-level politics. For all that European and sub-national elections are quite different from national ones, the European elections were a nationwide test, of a sort, of the relative electoral appeal of the government and opposition. More importantly, both levels of elections had a powerful impact on the evolution of relations within the House of Freedoms and between the opposition parties. Within the government majority, the European elections saw Prime Minister Berlusconi’s party, Forza Italia, weaken markedly, thus reinforcing the aspirations of the prime minister’s most reluctant allies, the National Alliance (AN) and the Union of Christian Democrats and Center Democrats (UDC), to force a rewrite of the government program and, in the most ambitious (and unstated) of hypotheses, to put an end to the prime-ministerial aspect of Berlusconi’s government—perhaps even to Berlusconi’s leadership itself.