Participation And/or Non-Participation of Social Movement Actors in Institutional Politics? The Case of Squatted Social Centers in 2018 Italian Political Elections.

Non-conventional participation in social movements has often been motivated by disillusionment and disaffection for the traditional and conventional forms of political participation. However, studies and research since the 1970s have shown that non-conventional and conventional forms of participation can be complementary and non-exclusive. This is not valid for everyone. In fact, among the social movement actors - groups and organizations - the most radical ones, as the autonomists and anarchists, have usually rejected traditional forms of participation, such as voting, and preferred non-conventional and disruptive ones such as direct actions. Within the radical sectors of the social movements, the squatted social centers have always presented themselves as places and free spaces in which to participate directly, without delegating to other groups, parties and institutions. In fact, squatted social centers are simultaneously urban protest actors, ‘political contentious places’ and ‘liberated spaces’, that is empty and unused large buildings squatted by groups of radical left activists to self-manage social and countercultural activities, opposed to the logic of market and to public authorities. If the social centers, on the one side, have always encouraged direct, unconventional and disruptive participation, on the other, they have always strongly criticized involvement in state institutions, national and local, refusing usually to be part of it. Also for this reason, the initiative of a social center in Italy (ex OPG – Je so’ pazzo) to setting up a new list to be presented in the 2018 political elections – Potere al Popolo (Power to the People) - together with other social centers, radical left parties and movements groups, has aroused more or less clamour and criticism from the other social centers. Is it consistent to squatting a social center and at the same time run for election? Are they mutually exclusive choices or can they be complementary? In this paper, I focus on the motivations and goals of this type of social movement actors, the squatted social centers, which make different choices in relation to the institutional politics, participating or not in national elections. By means of empirical research, I will perform a comparative analysis of two squatted social centres in the same city (Catania in Sicily), which have made a different choice related to participation in political elections. The first and oldest (CSO Liotru) has confirmed the “traditional” abstentionist choice of Italian social centers in the national political elections (in the past only someone had participated in some local elections). The most recent (CPO Colapesce) has instead joined the electoral project mentioned above participating and campaigning for it. Based on participant observation, document and media analysis, and interviews to key-informants, the paper aims at investigating the reasons for these very different strategic (and/or tactic) choices, and the factors that determined them, both internal ones – like disaffection, alienation or rational decisions – and external ones, such as the constraints and opportunities of the political system.