Il rombo dei cannoni? Immigration and the centre-right in Italy1

1. Thanks to Federica Bicchi, Tony Messina, Luca Verzichelli and referees for help and comments. The usual disclaimer applies.

Abstract

This contribution analyses immigration policy during the five years of centre-right government in Italy 2001–06 led by Silvio Berlusconi and his Forza Italia party. It analyses the immigration discourse of the four main centre-right parties and the negotiations surrounding the landmark Bossi–Fini immigration law. It shows that, despite harsh and illiberal rhetoric, there were unprecedented increases in Italy's legally resident foreign population between 2001 and 2006. This contribution demonstrates how, why and when party system and governmental variables intervened in the relationship between policy ‘inputs’ and ‘outputs’ to generate outcomes that did not correspond with some of the harsher contributions to public debate, particularly those by the regional-populist Lega Nord party. Beyond the specificities of the Italian case, this contribution shows that apparent contradictions, paradoxes and ambiguities can actually be functional elements of immigration politics (and of thorny social and political issues, more generally) and that supposed policy failings need to be related to the political processes that generate them and to the pay-offs to political actors that occur within these processes, that may not be negative.

Keywords:

• Alleanza Nazionale
• centre-right
• coalition politics
• Forza Italia
• immigration
• Lega Nord

Notes

1. Thanks to Federica Bicchi, Tony Messina, Luca Verzichelli and referees for help and comments. The usual disclaimer applies.

2. Or put another way that draws more directly from the literature on coalition government in Europe, the piece is interested in both the ‘courtship’ and ‘marriage’ stage of the coalition process (Müller and Strøm 2000).

3. The election to the Chamber of Deputies was fought on the basis of an electoral system that allocated 75 per cent of seats on a single-member plurality basis with a further 25 per cent allocated through a proportional representation top-up with a 4 per cent national threshold.