Populist Success in a Hung Parliament: The 2018 General Election in Italy

ABSTRACT

The 2018 Italian general elections were a crucial test to assess the resilience of mainstream parties vis-à-vis the challenge provided by populist forces and the stabilisation of the tripolar party system emerged in 2013. The article analyses the outcome of the election, whose most remarkable result was the unprecedented success of two populist parties, the M5S and the Lega, by focusing on key aspects such as the new electoral system, the coalition-building process, the electoral campaign, the evolution of the Italian party system, and the analysis of vote shifts between parties.

KEYWORDS:

• Party system change
• parliamentary elections
• populist parties
• mixed-member electoral system
• Lega
• M5S
• Five Star Movement

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. Intended as the signature achievement of the Renzi government, the constitutional reform sought to drastically reduce the powers of the Senate across most policy areas, transforming it into an indirectly elected body representing the local and regional authorities and consequently ending the symmetrical bicameralism that is so characteristic of the Italian political system.

2. Had Parliament not passed the new electoral law, the 2018 Italian elections would have ended up being held under two different electoral systems, each resulting from a separate ruling by the Constitutional Court: the system for election to the Senate being based on the old Calderoli Law (in place until the 2013 election), as amended by Constitutional Court ruling no. 1/2014, and the system for the Chamber of Deputies being based on the Italicum Law (introduced in 2015 only for this parliamentary branch in anticipation of the change in the parliamentary structure provided for by the constitutional reform) as subsequently amended by Constitutional Court ruling no. 35/2017.

3. In the case of a coalition of parties supporting an SMD candidate, a vote for that candidate extends pro-quota to all the party lists belonging to the coalition, i.e., proportionally to the total votes each party list receives in that district.

4. For each coalition, only those lists that have obtained at least three per cent of the vote take part in the internal distribution of seats.

5. Only in the Aosta Valley did the Lega support its own candidates for both Senate and Chamber of Deputies, opposing the candidates of the rest of the centre-right coalition.

6. Matteo Salvini, a long-term militant and prominent political figure of the Northern League, became the federal secretary of the party in December 2013.

7. In the media, all centre-left SMD candidates were portrayed as PD candidates, given the dominant role of the PD within the coalition.

8. Davide Casaleggio is the son of Gianroberto Casaleggio, the web entrepreneur who founded the M5S with Beppe Grillo in 2009. When the father died in 2016, the son became the head of Casaleggio Associati, the web company running the internet website of the Movement, and a crucial figure within the M5S organisation.

9. Luigi Di Maio was a MP for the M5S elected in 2013. He served as the vice-President of the Chamber during the 2013–2018 legislature. Since September 2017, he has been the formal political leader of the M5S, following his victory in the online primaries.

10. Positional issues are those on which political actors and voters hold different positions (level of taxes vs. level of welfare services). On the contrary, valence issues are those on which, by definition, all parties and voters agree (e.g., the fight against corruption or protection from terrorism). See Stokes (1963).

11. We have collected and coded tweets by all parties and party leaders during the two months before the March 4 election. This was done as part of an international comparative research project. These findings place Italy in an intermediate position (De Sio & Paparo 2018): positional issues are much more salient than in the UK and France, but less so than in the Netherlands. The Italian results appear very similar to the Austrian and German.

12. The only exception was the face-to-face encounter between the Lega leader Salvini, and Laura Boldrini, incumbent President of the Chamber of Deputies and a prominent figure in the LEU, during the current affairs talk-show ‘Otto e Mezzo’ on 13 February.

13. The sole exception being that of the M5S, once again concluding its electoral campaign in Rome’s Piazza del Popolo, on 2 March; however, the square was not as full as it had been five years earlier.

14. It includes valid votes in the Aosta Valley’s SMD (1 seat at stake in each chamber).

15. For an analysis of the M5S’s success in the 2013 general election, see Maggini and De Lucia (2014).

16. The Red Zone is made up of Emilia-Romagna, Tuscany, Marche, and Umbria. For a thorough examination of the characteristics of the ‘red’ sub-culture and of the electoral behaviour of voters in those regions, see Diamanti (2009) and De Sio (2011).

17. Lazio, Abruzzo, Molise, Campania, Apulia, Basilicata, Calabria, Sicily, and Sardinia are included in the South.

18. The North consists of the following regions: Aosta Valley, Piedmont, Lombardy, Trentino-South Tyrol, Veneto, Friuli-Venezia Giulia, and Liguria.

19. It should be noted that in 2013, Berlusconi’s party was called the Popolo della Libertà (PDL, People of Freedom). The party changed its name after a split in the centre. Similarly, the PD suffered a split on the left.

20. The estimates have been produced using the Goodman model (Goodman 1953) on polling-station data (Schadee & Corbetta 1984).

21. To calculate the index we followed the ‘aggregation method’ (Casal Bértoa, Deegan-Krause & Haughton 2017) originally devised by Bartolini & Mair (1990). It considers parties resulting from splits and mergers in continuity with their predecessors, thus reducing the potential pool of new parties to those political formations that are ‘start-up organisations’ (Emanuele & Chiaramonte 2016). In the case of the 2018 elections, according to the criteria used, the two most relevant differences from 2013 have been the disappearance of SC and Fare per fermare il decline (Act to Stop the Decline) and the emergence of + Europa. All other new labels have been considered in continuity with some pre-existing party: LEU is in continuity with Sinistra, Ecologia e Libertà (SEL, Left Ecology and Freedom) and the PD; NCI-UDC is in continuity with the PDL and UDC; Potere al Popolo (Power to the People) is in continuity with Rivoluzione Civica (Civic Revolution).

22. Indeed, all the necessary requirements for party system de-institutionalisation—instability and unpredictability recurring over time (Chiaramonte & Emanuele 2017)—seem to be met.

23. The index is derived from the Gini coefficient, applied to the variation in the distribution of party support across territorial units. It ranges from 0 to 1 (the latter representing a case of perfect nationalisation, meaning that each party received the same share of votes in all territorial units).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Alessandro Chiaramonte

Alessandro Chiaramonte is a Professor of Political Science at the University of Florence. He is a founding member of CISE (Italian Centre for Electoral Studies) and author or editor of several books on elections, electoral systems and Italian politics. His articles have appeared in West European Politics, Party Politics, South European Society and Politics as well as the main Italian Political Science journals.

Vincenzo Emanuele

Vincenzo Emanuele is an Assistant Professor in Political Science at LUISS Guido Carli in Rome. His research, focusing mainly on elections and party system change, has appeared – among others – in Comparative Political Studies, Party Politics and Regional and Federal Studies. His monograph, Cleavages, institutions, and competition. Understanding vote nationalisation in Western Europe (1965–2015) has been published by Rowman&Littlefield/ECPR Press.

Nicola Maggini

Nicola Maggini is a Research Fellow at the University of Florence and a member of CISE (Italian Centre for Electoral Studies). He has published in Italian and international journals and is the author of Young People’s Voting Behaviour in Europe (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016). His main research interests are socio-political attitudes, electoral systems, voting behaviour and party competition in comparative perspective.

Aldo Paparo

Aldo Paparo is a Post-Doctoral Fellow in Political Science at LUISS Guido Carli in Rome, and Fellow at CISE – Centro Italiano Studi Elettorali (Italian Centre for Electoral Studies). His main areas of interest are electoral systems, political systems and electoral behaviour. He has co-edited numerous volumes of the CISE Dossier series, and published in Quaderni dell’Osservatorio Elettorale, Contemporary Italian Politics, Monkey Cage blog – among others.