Twenty-First Century Populism: The Spectre of Western European ...

Italy 87
magistrates revealed the extent and depth of corrupt networks in public
bodies for which the parties − principally those in government, but also
those in opposition − were responsible, the psychological gap between the
citizens and political elites, which had lain smouldering beneath the surface
of this clientelistic system, transformed into a shout of protest which found
a willing audience amongst populist political entrepreneurs mainly of the
Right, but also of the Left.
In addition to the antiparty reaction which followed the Tangentopoli
scandals, various other factors contributed to the explosion of populist protest
in Italy. First of all, even if surveys demonstrated that dissatisfaction
with the political class and the party-politicization of institutions was
present throughout the country, it encountered a populist response predominantly
in the North, i.e. in those regions in which, according to
Putnam and others (Putnam, 1993), the social capital of civic spirit was
strongest. We are not, therefore, dealing with a simple explosion of anger
deriving from cultural backwardness and/or an inability to adapt to modernization.
Rather, it is important to put events within their broader political
context. With the fall of the Berlin wall, the anti-communist glue that
for almost forty years had ensured a solid relative majority for the Christian
Democrats suddenly dissolved, and a part of the northern electorate which
had always voted for it became available once more. Moreover, these voters
were unhappy with welfare policies which were blamed for a high tax take,
a marked increase in bureaucracy and what was perceived as an imbalance
in favour of an inefficient and unproductive South (Huysseune, 2006).
Casting central government and the despised ‘politicians in Rome’ as robbing
the public purse − summed up in the slogan ‘Thieving Rome’ (Roma
ladrona) − and proposing federalism as a panacea for the North’s ills, the
Lega reopened a centre-periphery cleavage which the formation of the unitary
state had never completely sealed. By combining emphasis on the
‘Northern Question’ (Bull and Gilbert, 2001; Gold, 2003) with the classic
populist strategy of blaming the political and economic elites, it thus demonstrated
how Italian political culture was much more fragmented and
contradictory than suggested by conventional accounts (Diamanti, 1996).
The rapid success of the Lega between 1989 and 1992 is partly due to these
essential characteristics, but can be further explained in the light of other
structural factors:
(a) the decline in the attraction of ideology following the end of the clash
between the capitalist West and the socialist East, which diminished
the capacity of the existing parties to mobilize, and so put millions of
disillusioned voters onto the electoral market;
(b) the progressive secularization of society, as demonstrated by the crises
of traditional Catholic associationalism, which weakened the links
between church institutions and public opinion in areas like the Veneto