By Gianfranco Pasquino
During Italy’s 2006 elections, the two televised duels between incumbent Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi and challenger Romano Prodi—a bizarre repeat of the 1996 confrontation—did not give any significant place either to foreign policy issues or, strange as it may seem, to the controversies over the war in Iraq. For Italian election-watchers, this came as no surprise: Italian national elections are not fought on foreign policy issues. And foreign policy issues do not determine the outcome of Italian national elections.
In 2001, just before the elections, pollsters asked 4,372 Italians: “What are the most important problems to be solved in Italy today?” Almost nobody mentioned issues such as Italy’s foreign policy problems or Italy’s European stands, according to D. Campus in The Italian General Election of 2001. Instead, the two most important problems were crime, cited by almost 30 percent, and unemployment, 28.8 percent.
Again, foreign policy issues did not appear at all in another major panel report by Italian National Elections Studies. However, in this case, it is interesting to note not so much that 1.7 percent of the interviewed signaled that Italy’s stand in Europe was important for them, but that there existed a clear partisan cleavage on this issue. To be precise, 72 percent of those interested in that issue declared they were voters for the center-left coalition, while only 16 percent were center-right voters. These data point to a clear and lasting difference between the two electorates.
Overall, Italian attitudes toward foreign policy issues had not fundamentally changed when the 2006 elections took place—again, the major studies conducted on the political issues affecting the vote found essentially no trace of foreign policy (which is why the important book edited by P. Mancini, Prodi’s Marathon and Berlusconi’s Sprint, contains not a single reference to foreign policy). Some passing references to the war in Iraq were made by the mass media reporting on the electoral campaign.
Pulling Out the Troops
Though the issue of the Iraq War was highly divisive—because the center-right government led by Berlusconi from the beginning had thrown its entire support to President Bush’s decision to invade that country, and the center-left had adamantly opposed it—the quasi total lack of electoral confrontations concerning the war and its impact on Italy meant two things. On the one hand, Berlusconi feared that by reaffirming his support for the war he might lose votes; on the other hand, Prodi thought there were no votes to be gained by overstressing a noninterventionist policy. In fact, the policy positions of the two coalitions had been and had remained crystal-clear from the launching of the war.
Having made the point that, contrary to the Italian left and several sectors of the Catholic community, he was a faithful and staunch U.S. ally, Berlusconi was given the high honor of addressing a joint session of the U.S. Congress in February 2006, right at the beginning of the Italian electoral campaign. Not known for his foreign policy interest and knowledge, Prodi projected a relatively low profile, preferring to take pride in his achievements, namely the enlargement of the European Union and his just-completed term as president of the European Commission. Curiously, the center-right chose not to dwell on the achievements and drawbacks of Prodi’s performance in Brussels. On the whole, in anticipation of the fact that it soon might be called to govern, the center-left took two precise positions: First, quick withdrawal of the Italian troops from the highly unpopular and wrong war in Iraq, but second, continuation of the Italian presence in Afghanistan for humanitarian purposes.
The most important differences—not just of opinions but of policies, occasionally true divergences—have been cutting through Prodi’s coalition. The extreme left, that is, the Communist Refoundation, the Greens and the Italian Communists (the latter deliberately characterized themselves as a single-issue, “Stop the War” party, but without much success; their share of the vote remained a meager 2.3 percent), opposed any kind of international activities implying the likelihood of military actions.
As a matter of fact, the issue of Italian participation in military operations and/or in humanitarian interventions always had been divisive for the center-left, but in the late 1990s the center-left government led by Italian Foreign Minister Massimo D’Alema was highly supportive of all activities designed to bring a cease-fire in the former Yugoslavia. Within the center-left, there have been two positions. The majority position was articulated by Democracy Is Freedom-Daisy party, mostly former Christian Democrats, and the majority of the Left Democrats, rationally inclined to have Italy play the role of a country capable of fulfilling her international and European obligations—preferably in the absence of a common European policy, under the NATO umbrella. On the other side, some sectors of the Left Democrats, the Greens, the Communist Refoundation and the Italian Communists, plus several extreme-left extraparliamentary fringes, always declared themselves against the war, as their slogan went: “Without if and without but” (“Senza se e senza ma”). In the end, they often appeared satisfied with the amount of political visibility, not necessarily translated into electoral gains, that their quasi-pacifist statements acquired for them.
Italy and the EU
Although the issue has not been explored in depth, it was on the attitude to be taken toward the EU that the distances between the governing center-right and the center-left, then in the opposition, were greater. However, on this issue too there were significant intra-coalition cleavages. The Northern League expressed the most critical and often scornful position, almost arguing that the EU is just a super-state controlled by the communists and the Masons. Berlusconi himself, minister of foreign affairs for more than one year, could not hide his deep resentment of the frequent, though often well-deserved, criticisms coming from the European Commission and addressed against his government’s economic and judicial policies. The European Parliament went so far as to reject the nomination of one of his ministers to the office of European commissioner. Paradoxically, the minister belonged to the former Christian Democrats, in the past fervent supporters of European political unification.
In any case, what Berlusconi achieved in his five-year governmental term was essentially to make Italians look at the EU in a less favorable light. His exhibited disdain, lack of trust and indifference could not of course earn him any policy or political influence on European matters. On all issues dividing the Europeans (oops, “old Europeans”) from U.S. policymakers, Berlusconi was quick to support the views of the George W. Bush administration and happy if he could do so by also enlisting Tony Blair or traveling on the coattails of the British prime minister. As for the center-left, some of its extreme-left partners have not abandoned the idea that the EU is a capitalist edifice and that its benefits are distributed in a highly unequal manner. Old stereotypes persist within the same old pool of voters. However, the majority of the center-left has been faithfully representing the views of what remains a sizable majority of Italian voters, that is, Italy receives many political and social advantages by being a reliable EU member-state. For its part, the EU sets standards that Italian governments ought to achieve and makes rules that ought to be abided by.
Despite occasional irruptions into the policy debate, the issue of international terrorism was not a factor affecting Italian attitudes or voting behavior. This does not mean at all that once more the two coalitions were not holding clearly distinct views on the subject, often projected onto the issue of immigration. They were, but the issue was quickly translated into a domestic policy problem with few international appendices. The center-right took up the banner of the “Christian roots” of the EU, to be inserted into the preamble of the European Constitution. The center-left tried not to appear soft on international terrorism and on religious, essentially Muslim, fundamentalism. Once more, however, the two alignments were quite solid in their respective beliefs, and there were no votes to be gained by either of them. All this might go a long way toward explaining the tiny margin of votes (24,500) by which the center-left won the elections for the House of Deputies as well as the fact that in the Senate the center-left enjoys a majority of just one vote.
All this said, what seems not to be very important for the electorate at large represents the true Achilles’ heel of the governing majority. Since April 2006, the center-left and D’Alema have kept their word, withdrawing rapidly, but without fanfare, the Italian troops from Iraq. Not only are Italian soldiers still operating in the service of humanitarian purposes in Afghanistan, but Italy has become a major player in the attempt to prevent any further confrontation in Lebanon between Hezbollah and Israel. When it comes to any Italian military involvement, within the center-left governing coalition, significant tensions surface, persist and threaten to bring Prodi’s government to an early end. Still, it remains quite unlikely that the next electoral campaign will find foreign policy issues among the paramount factors affecting Italian electoral behavior.
On balance, it seems justifiable to say that in the 2006 elections, foreign policy issues did not bring any additional vote to either coalition and did not deprive them of any potential vote. Those issues were not—and, for better or worse, are unlikely to become—a factor in national elections.
Gianfranco Pasquino is adjunct professor of political science at the Bologna Center and professor of political science at the University of Bologna. He attended the Bologna Center in 1965–66, graduating from SAIS in 1967. |
