Political Parties and Local Conflicts: No TAV Movement and Political Parties Interaction

Protest campaigns against large-scale public works provide interesting chances to analyse both the relationship between political parties and the grassroots movements and the interaction between local branches of political parties and their central structure. Local party members frequently have to deal with two different dimensions, respectively referring, on the one hand, to their party membership and, on the other hand, to their role of representation of the local communities which are directly affected by the works and their potential impacts. The paper considers the case of the new international high-speed railway Turin-Lyon (TAV) in Susa Valley. It points out both the different steps of the link between the NO-TAV movement and the political parties and the problematic relationship between the locally elected politicians (strongly opposing the Tav) and national leaders of their party (strongly supporting the Tav). The diachronic description of movement behaviours toward political parties show different strategies: from claims of political representation to the use of abstention in case of lack of political offer, to the sanction through a “protest vote”, up to the creation of independent representations at the administrative level. The in-depth analysis focuses, in particular, on the study of the interaction between the movement and the political parties and on the different strategies adopted in Susa Valley on the occasion of the 2009 municipal election, the 2010 regional one and the forthcoming 2013 national one. The findings point out that the territorial dimension is particularly relevant. At the local level, indeed, both an important mutual learning regarding tools and repertories of actions and a sort of hybridization between these two actors might be observed (even with significant differences among the political parties), while at the regional and national levels, the relationship seems to remain complex and conflicting.