Prodi's Narrow Victory and Italian Politics: One Year on

Abstract

The general election of April 2006 marked a further milestone, and possibly a turning point, in the recent trajectory of Italian politics. Unexpectedly narrow, the election outcome brought to government a coalition which, in the immediate aftermath of the campaign, appeared to face one of two possibilities: that either it would find the very precariousness of its position to be, paradoxically, its strength, giving it a degree of cohesion it might otherwise not have had, or that it would succumb to opposition attempts to exploit the divisions in its ranks and therefore fail to last for any length of time. Early indications pointed in both directions. In the second place, if the immediate consequence of the outcome appeared to be a strengthening of the position of Berlusconi (since he had been expected to lose by a wide margin and had instead apparently staged a dramatic comeback) then the 2006 defeat appeared to create the need for a redefinition of the Casa delle libertà, with a reduction in the role of Berlusconi himself and a new prime-ministerial candidate. Third, in bringing about the second alternation in government since the party-system upheavals of the early 1990s, the outcome appeared to represent the consolidation of a bi-polar party system based on fragmented coalitions. However, precisely because of the system's fragmentation and the seeming precariousness of the in-coming government's position, there appeared to be room for considerable doubt about the likely direction of future party-system developments. In short, if the election appeared to represent the confirmation of past trends, in other respects it looked as though it might also represent the start of a new period of uncertainty in Italian politics.