NEW elections in Italy are scheduled for September 25. The “stabilisation” government of former European Central Bank boss Mario Draghi finally fell apart. 

Its notional “national unity” character did not survive the departure of the populist Movimento Cinque Stelle (M5S) and the right-wing Lega and Forza Italia formations.

With its fragile parliamentary majority gone and with only the Partito Democratico (PD) and its right-wing breakaway Italia Viva and left-wing split Articolo Uno still standing and with M5S split with one faction remaining aligned with Draghi’s austerity economic regime, the game was up.

The proposal to abandon M5S’s centrepiece policy of a guaranteed income for the most impoverished part of its electoral base and a squabble over an incinerator in Rome added to the disunity and thus the government lost even the veneer of credibility that is required to satisfy the constitutional niceties.

There is a strong chance that Draghi government will be replaced by a new right-wing administration comprised of an ascendant Fratelli d’Italia, a somewhat diminished Lega and Berlusconi’s Forza Italia in a newly constituted assembly of the most reactionary elements in Italian politics. 

Fratelli d’Italia, led by Giorgia Meloni, is the latest iteration of Italy’s persistent fascist tendency and has grown as Matteo Salvini’s Lega has declined.

Now has begun the routine discussion in which the “centre left” offers advice to Italy’s disaggregated left centred on the twin concepts of the “useful vote” and the “least worst option.”

Sound familiar?

A key element in the right-wing electoral pitch — a proposal to elect the president of the republic by popular vote — has provided some diversion.

Forza Italia’s 84-year-old leader Silvio Berlusconi said the 81-year-old president Sergio Mattarella would have to quit if direct election of the head of state by the Italian people, or “presidentialism,” were to be implemented.

The parties of Draghi’s project obsess over constitutional solutions to the problem of a growing right wing, with its undeniably populist voting bloc, rather than address the fundamental problems which PD’s willing accommodation with big capital and the EU Establishment has entailed.

They have revived, for this electoral period only, a rhetorical attachment to the anti-fascist unity that — grounded in the Resistance and liberation — gave birth to a constitution that states: “Italy is a democratic republic founded on labour. Sovereignty belongs to the people and is exercised by the people…”

The political problem around which debate circles is the actual governmental record of the PD which is now dramatised by its refusal to reach a compromise with M5S which might offer a credible obstacle to a government of the right.

Norma Rangeri, editor of Il Manifesto, put the question directly: “Many uncertain and bewildered left-wing voters, alerted by the risk of an avalanche victory for the right, instead of witnessing the composition of the necessary alliances, saw, in the space of a few days, the sinking of the only ‘campo largo’ really able to stand up to the invincible three-pointed army of Meloni, Salvini and Berlusconi.”

She went on to argue that this “cannot be explained or understood by the majority of voters” and that the response to this “is a testimony of anger and disorientation, for the behaviour and choices of a political force, such as the Democratic Party, which is not only responsible for a centrist social and political drift, but now also for a forecast (according to the institutes of research) of electoral catastrophe.”

“Drift” is perhaps a too charitable way of categorising the PD’s willing adherence to neoliberalism’s tripod of austerity economics, imperial war and EU economic integration. 

Its deference to Draghi, the man who personifies these tendencies, is a mark of the party’s rupture with the founding values of the republic.

A contrary argument to Rangeri’s pessimism of the will came — again in the pages of Il Manifesto — from the interesting political theorist Salvatore Cingari: “With the elections now close, a new political formation can’t come from anywhere else than from an unabashed critique of the politics of the PD and the centre-left in recent decades.”

A substantial tranche of political and public opinion broadly agrees with this as a starting point. But the usual confusion exists on the left about the way forward.

A word of warning. Tracking the contortions of the Italian left is a specialist activity in which a moment’s inattention leaves one disorientated.

Articolo Uno, a kind of “old comrades” club of the PD “left,” still circles around PD. A Popular Union coalition was created shortly before the elections were called, bringing together the deputies of the Manifesta grouping of M5S dissidents, Potere al Popolo and Rifondazione Comunista with former Naples mayor Luigi De Magistris and his Dema group.

Like the Italian Communist Party (PCI) — which is running under its own name and with the traditional hammer and sickle — the Unione Popolare is out on the streets collecting the signatures they need to register for the elections.

Meanwhile the problems inherent in assembling the multi-faceted body of anti-EU sentiment into a coherent electoral force has caused the perennially fractious Partito Comunista (PC), with its one deputy, a refugee from M5S, suffering yet another schism after its leader Marco Rizzo aligned with the Italy Sovereign and Popular coalition. His Milan federation “expelled” him and was itself expelled.

Alternative, a fragment of M5S, has finally abandoned plans to run with the Italexit movement due to the presence of fascist elements in lists of proposed candidates.

This highlights the confused context in which anti-EU sentiment is fused with anti-Draghi opinion but ranges across the entire spectrum of politics. Sound familiar?

Cingari theorises the problem thus: “Continuing the centre-left’s neoliberal policies means favouring right-wing populism. This is also because the widening inequality and the abandonment of the less affluent classes until it’s hard for them to even survive doesn’t just block their full enjoyment of political and civil rights, but also encourages the growth of widespread sentiments of intolerance, xenophobia and selfishness, which spread whenever the possibility of cultivating post-material values fades away.”

We must be careful in seeking absolute parallels but, in the context of Boris Johnson’s defenestration and Liz Truss’s public opinion lead over Keir Starmer, Cingari’s thrust against “perpetuating the mistake of the reflexive anti-Berlusconi middle class, which rejected boorishness and hedonism, but failed to reject inequality and exploitation” seems apposite.

Where a real gulf exists between an entitled and complacent middle class and the vast class of working people who confront deep economic and social problems in an unyielding environment the centre cannot hold.

In Britain’s current wage struggles we see — concurrent with the explosive entry into public discourse of a distinctively proletarian voice articulated by outstanding communicators like the leaders of the rail and communications unions — just how Britain’s political culture can be transformed when masses of people begin to take action.

The trajectory described by the PD — from the tradition of a Communist Party rooted in working-class militancy and the traditions of the Resistance to the party of capitalist rationalisation — is different from that of Britain’s Labour Party, although the present-day continuities are alarming.

Labour’s more robust institutional links with the basic organisations of its working-class base continue to offer more prospects for its rehabilitation as a party of working-class power.

But for the PD to perform such a volta faccia seems beyond imagination. Hence the problem is theorised as the imperative to devise an electoral challenge from the left.

Preventing the irruption of new political forces into the Labour Party such as those that placed Jeremy Corbyn at its head is the main aim of the Starmer leadership and explains why he offers so little in the way of policies that might disturb the dreams of Britain’s distinctive ruling class of bosses, bankers, media barons and state bureaucrats. Or enthuse working people.

Where Britain’s political system — first past-the-post voting and two major electoral coalitions — forecloses most prospects of a parliamentary majority committed to radical change, Italy’s ever-shifting shoals of opportunist factions chasing fractional proportions of votes performs the same function.

Thus Italy’s capitalist state — which Gramsci saw as being comprised of two overlapping spheres; “political society” (in which force rules) and a “civil society” (where consent is secured) — today secures a precarious stability by diffusing the influence of the popular masses from government.

In both states much of the working class abstains. In the PD, even more than present-day Labour, the working class is vastly under-represented in membership, activist base and leadership.

This new stage of capitalist crisis which we are now entering — where we all face the prospects of war arising from imperial adventures on Russia’s borders and China’s shores — threatens an economic crisis that is destroying the basis of political consent.

With Britain outside the EU and the major actors in the Brussels bureaucracy happy enough with the deal they reached, Britain has a freedom to innovate, if it so willed, a transformative government. But with Starmer the alternative, who needs a Draghi?

Inside the EU, Italy’s governing class is government principally consumed with anxieties over how to spend the post-pandemic handout.

Wall Street Italia put the question with great brutality: “The economic situation in Italy, at least from the point of view of public accounts, does not allow for any derogation. Whoever wins the elections will be forced to follow the dictates of the ECB to the letter.”

“In short, the next few months risk being very hot, with political parties ready to promise anything to win the elections, but in reality totally bound by internal accounts and European interference that will prevent them from satisfying them.”

Nick Wright blogs at 21centurymanifesto.wordpress.com.