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

Italy 85
the People’s Party in Denmark, the Lijst Pim Fortuyn in the Netherlands or
the Front National in France. The most important of these, the Lega Nord,
reached its peak with 10.2 percent of the vote in the 1996 general election,
before declining to 3.9 percent in 2001, the year in which the party, allied
with the centre-right House of Freedoms (Casa delle Libertà − CDL) coalition,
took its place in government with three senior ministers (the party leader
Umberto Bossi at Institutional Reform; Roberto Maroni at Welfare, and
Roberto Castelli at Justice) and a number of junior posts. To understand this
apparent contradiction of a ‘populist’ government without a strong movement
backing it, we need to examine the specific nature that this phenomenon
has assumed in Italy (Tarchi, 2002; 2003).
Whether, like Cas Mudde (2004), we consider populism as an ideology based
on the conviction that society is divided between the ‘pure’ common people
and the corrupt holders of power, or whether we consider it rather as a mentality,
a forma mentis, connected to a vision of social order based upon a belief in
the innate virtue and primacy of ‘the people’ as the legitimating source of all
political and governmental action (Tarchi, 2004), it is clear that populism may
take on highly different forms and levels of intensity depending on:
(a) the different meanings attached to the notion of ‘the people’;
(b) the structural circumstances in which it occurs;
(c) the characteristics of its agents.
In particular, populism can inspire structured and lasting mass mobilization,
led by a political leadership with a highly coherent programme; or it
can translate into a largely improvised style that ‘tends to bring together
different symbolic materials and to root itself in multiple ideological locations,
taking on the political guise of that area which welcomes it’, and
which appears as a ‘collection of rhetoric put into action through the symbolic
exploitation of particular social representations’ (Taguieff, 2002: 80).
These two modes of expression of the populist mentality may present themselves
together in a single subject or they may develop separately. The unique
character of the Italian case lies in the simultaneous and vigorous development
of both dimensions by two markedly distinct groups: the first by the
Lega Nord, the second above all by Silvio Berlusconi, but also by other political
actors. This latter group includes Marco Pannella’s Partito Radicale, the
left protest movement of the Girotondi [lit. ‘ring-a-ring-o’-roses’ groups], La
Rete of former Palermo mayor Leoluca Orlando and Italia dei Valori, the party
founded by ex-magistrate Antonio di Pietro, who became the face of the battle
against political corruption in the First Republic.
However, whilst the Lega has based its appeal on a notion of the people as
both ethnos and demos, and thus interlinked its denunciation of the political
system with references to ethno-cultural and territorial identities (Schmidtke,
1996; Biorcio, 1997), the other political entrepreneurs of Italian populism