Explaining Failure: the Highs and Lows of Sardinian Nationalism

Abstract

Most analyses of nationalist and regionalist parties focus on cases of ‘success’—with the usual suspects of the Scottish National Party, Parti Québécois and Convergència i Unió dominating the field. Yet, by exploring the performance of only a select group of most-similar cases, it is difficult to distinguish what the conditions for success—and failure—in regional mobilization are. This contribution focuses on the rise and fall of the Sardinian Party of Action (Partito Sardo d'Azione), the oldest nationalist party in Italy. It explores the decisions that the party has made in response to multi-dimensional competition in a multi-level polity, and identifies which factors have led to its continuing electoral and political weakness. These include the party's ideological incoherence, its failure to compete successfully with nationalist competitors and regional branches of state-wide parties, the bipolarization of the party system, its erratic choices of coalition partners, and its limited adaptation to multi-level politics.

Keywords:

• Sardinia
• nationalism
• ideology
• political parties

Acknowledgements

The author is indebted to Dr Ilenia Ruggiu for her insightful comments on this research, assistance in contacting Sardinian political parties, and her warm welcome to the island. Thanks also to the Faculty of Law at the Università di Cagliari for hosting the author as a visiting fellow in May 2005 and October 2008. Finally, the generous support provided for this research by the Economic and Social Research Council (PTA-026-27-1484) and the Leverhulme Trust (ref: 7/SRF/2007/0208) is acknowledged.

Notes

Although there was strong regionalist feeling everywhere in Italy, other autonomist movements were not established until after the Second World War, in Valle d'Aosta, Piedmont, Friuli-Venezia Giulia, Venetia and Trentino-Alto Adige (South Tyrol).

From 1718 until 1847, Sardinia had its own separate Kingdom, which was ruled by the House of Savoy. Although the island's autonomy was compromised during the ‘political fusion’ between Sardinia and the mainland territories in 1847 (Mattone, 1982: 20), Sardinia played an instrumental role in creating the new Italian nation-state in 1861, providing a king to stand as a figurehead of a united Italy, Vittorio Emmanuele II.

In addition to the four nationalist parties already discussed, there are also another two right-wing nationalist parties in Sardinia: Fortza Paris, which allies itself with the centre-right in elections, and Unione dei Sardi (UDS), headed by ex-President of Sardinia and Leader of the Sardinian DC, Mario Floris. However, these parties are too small, and have too insignificant an impact on Sardinian politics, to merit examination here.

Interview with the author, Cagliari, 23 May 2005.

Interview with the author, 20 May 2005.

Although the Italian DC was later reluctant to give more powers to the Communist-controlled regional governments of the central Italian ‘red belt’ (Clark, 1984), in principle the party supported a type of administrative decentralization.

“Che Cosa non e la regione”, in Riscossa 28 August 1944, cited in Clark (1989: 423).

Interview with Giorgio La Spisa, Vice-President of Forza Italia Sarda, 23 May 2005.