Alarms against signs of democratic backsliding and the resilience of Italian democracy

Italy has often been considered a fragile polity, displaying low levels of societal trust and governmental effectiveness. If the rise of fascism, in 1922, marked the beginning of the reversal of the first wave of democratization (Huntington 1993), for Giovanni Sartori (1976) Italy was fragile mainly because of its ‘polarized pluralism’, with the strongest Communist party (the PCI) and the strongest neo-fascist party (the MSI) in Western Europe. In 1994, when Silvio Berlusconi became the leader of a coalition which included the MSI (as well as Umberto Bossi’s Northern League), many alarms emerged not just about the country becoming a laboratory of populism, but about the fate of democracy as a whole. To be sure, other prominent theorists of democracy considered the survival of Italian democracy in this period as a sign of its consolidated nature (Diamond 1999). Today, Italy is the only West European country whose main party – the Brothers of Italy, led by Giorgia Meloni – is commonly classified as a radical right populist party, which, despite its moderation in government, does not shy away from its post-fascist roots (Baldini et al. 2022). Against this background, the paper at analyzes the many alarms that have been sounded for Italian democracy, especially over the last three decades. I link them to two other Italian peculiarities. First, the unparalleled high number of (often unsuccessful) institutional reforms (Bedock 2017), that were met with frequent alarms against executive aggrandizement. Second, and related, the particularly polarized nature of the public sphere (Mancini 2013), with vocal and influential public intellectuals, especially alarmed by a possible return of fascism. While in his 30 years in politics Berlusconi was certainly able to protect his media and financial empire, Italy so far appears to be a case of ‘false positive’. Building on a recent contribution (Baldini 2023) where I argue that Meloni has indulged in some illiberal practices, without activating any authoritarian dynamic, and adopting the framework of Tomini et al. (2023), I analyse also the current proposal for the introduction of the direct election of the Prime minister, which is attracting considerable concern. References Baldini, G. (2023) From ‘anomaly’ to ‘laboratory’? Fratelli d’Italia, illiberalism and the study of right-wing parties in Western Europe (under review) Baldini, G. Tronconi, F. e Angelucci, D. (2022). “Yet Another Populist Party? Understanding the Rise of Brothers of Italy.” South European Society & Politics: (3) 1–21. Bedock, C. (2017). Reforming democracy: institutional engineering in Western Europe. Oxford University Press. Diamond, L. (1999). Developing democracy: Toward consolidation. JHU press. Huntington, S. P. (1993). The third wave: Democratization in the late twentieth century University of Oklahoma press. Mancini, P. (2013). The Italian public sphere: a case of dramatized polarization. Journal of Modern Italian Studies, 18(3), 335-347. Sartori, G. (1976) Parties and Party Systems, Cambridge, CUP. Tomini, L., Gibril, S., & Bochev, V. (2023). Standing up against autocratization across political regimes: a comparative analysis of resistance actors and strategies. Democratization, 30(1), 119-138.