After Berlusconi, what's Left?

There are plenty of good reasons to believe that the cities of Milan and Crewe have never been compared in any sort of way. There is objectively little that one of the world capitals of football and fashion and a small railway town in Cheshire have in common. Yet the defeat that Silvio Berlusconi has just suffered in the second round of his own city’s local elections—which was lost to the left for the first time since he entered politics—could be as significant for his government as the 2008 Crewe and Nantwich by-election was for Gordon Brown’s Labour party. For the 74 year-old tycoon who has dominated the Italian political scene since 1994, the endgame could really be in sight.

The comparison with Crewe is not just for the size of the swing. The disastrous campaign the Italian centre-right orchestrated in the run-up to the Milan vote was the mirror image of the much mocked attempt by the Labour party to scaremonger Cheshire electors by bringing in top-hat dressed campaigners to mimic the Conservative candidate. As I was strolling through the streets in Milan last Thursday, a shabby guy in his early thirties, wearing distinctively scruffy clothes, approached me to ask me to vote for the candidate from the centre-left. “Milan will become like Amsterdam,” he announced, “my Roma relatives and I will be ruling the city.” This might have been his genuine belief, but, in all likelihood, he was part of a group of actors spotted in various parts of the city in the days preceding the election. Their role—as in the case of the toffs sent around Crewe and Nantwich—was allegedly to stir up fear among the Milanese electorate.

Just like in Crewe and Nantwich, this negative campaign backfired. Giuliano Pisapia, a soft-spoken lawyer from the left, beat the incumbent major, Letizia Moratti, by ten percentage points. This victory was matched by other equally surprising ones elsewhere. In the city of Naples a former prosecutor, Luigi De Magistris, trounced by 30 percentage points the centre-right candidate, running an effective campaign on the need to restore the rule of law in a city which is as tainted by crime as it is by rubbish. The capital of Sardinia, Cagliari, and the northeastern city of Trieste, both heartlands of the right, also chose to pick a major from the left. The centre-right, which had tried to call the results of the first round a "draw," had to admit its comprehensive defeat. “We drew 4-0,” was the sarcastic comment by Pierluigi Bersani, the leader of the main opposition party, the Democratic Party (PD).

The real question commentators are now asking is whether the vote will have an immediate impact on the government. Berlusconi put on a brave face, making it clear that “it is not yet time for my funeral.” His aim is to go ahead with government action, making some robust changes to its economic policy, which has so far been managed by the fiscally conservative minister of finance, Giulio Tremonti. Yet any attempt to move towards a more profligate fiscal stance will face the opposition of the EU, which is keen to avoid the sovereign debt crisis reaching its fourth largest economy. Furthermore, these local elections have shown that Italian voters are finding it increasingly hard to believe in Berlusconi’s promises. The trouncing of the centre-right candidate in Naples, a city which Berlusconi promised to clean a few times too many, is particularly indicative in this respect.

The wind of change blowing throughout Italy is likely to lead to a defeat of the centre-right in the next general election. However, it is still unclear whether the centre-left will be able to put together a credible alternative. Despite its leader’s bravado, three of the most stunning victories of this round—Cagliari, Naples and Milan—were achieved by candidates who did not come from the PD and who had defeated PD candidates in the primaries or in the first round of the vote. Having failed to renovate its upper echelon, the PD will be forced to support a prime ministerial candidate coming from one of its more extremist allies. As the recent round of local elections has shown this needs not to be, electorally, a losing strategy. Whether it can also be transformed into a good solution for the country is something the left has yet to prove.