Polarisation in Southern Europe: Elites, Party Conflicts and Negative Partisanship

ABSTRACT

The article complements our collection of studies of politics in polarised Southern Europe by offering a cross-regional comparison. Following a brief excursion into how polarisation in Southern Europe has been addressed in the existing literature, the focus zooms in on three country case studies. After showing the differential evolution of polarisation in Italy, Greece and Spain over recent decades, the story is brought up to date with an examination of the specific ways in which polarisation played out in the 2019 election cycle. marked by the Catalan conflict in Spain, the Macedonian name question in Greece and the polarising role of Matteo Salvini in Italy. The article concludes with comparative insights into the current polarisation drives in the three countries.

KEYWORDS:

• Affective polarisation
• ideological polarisation
• territorial polarisation
• Italy
• Greece
• Spain
• leader polarisation
• policy polarisation

In the last few years, it was clear to anyone living in Spain, Italy or Greece that their country was facing an issue of polarisation. Deep antagonism moved the political party leaders against each other, hindered parliamentary and government cooperation, and triggered a cascade effect of harsh divisions among opinion- and news- makers. These conflicts were replicated among partisans and those citizens who had chosen to become ‘followers’ of the party leaders on social media.

However, international attention was more focused on events taking place in other parts of the world, notably the breach between Remainers and Leavers in the UK following the 2016 Brexit referendum or the highly divisive US election which led to the polarising presidency of Donald Trump. These occurrences seemed to show that the times of compromise and super-majorities were over at different latitudes.

It was this political climate which gave birth to this volume on polarisation in Italy, Spain and Greece. We decided to investigate the features of the political divisions that made front-page news each day in Southern Europe, aiming to shine a spotlight on shared similarities and specific differences linked to endogenous factors. Our aim was to explore the extent of polarisation as well as its causes, characteristics and consequences. Our specific focus was 2019, a year during which these three political systems faced multiple elections at different levels. European Parliament, regional and local elections were held in all three countries. In addition, Greece and Spain held national parliamentary contests – in Spain’s case, twice. Last but certainly not least, the year saw the formation of new governments in all three cases.

The year 2019 offered an advantageous viewpoint for the analysis for two reasons. First, the packed voting calendar was a crucial opportunity to assess polarisation at the mass level, checking whether parties were attracting voters towards extreme positions. As suggested by Bischof & Wagner, elections can ‘place radical stances at the centre of the political debate and provide legitimacy to them’; furthermore, elections, campaigns and referendums are all newsworthy events that ‘have a focusing impact, perhaps leading voters to update their views more than after other, more subtle shifts’ (Bischof & Wagner 2019, p. 890). In divided political systems, elections can become a festival of polarisation.

Second, the processes of government dissolution and formation revealed a lot about elite polarisation. On the one hand, the crises faced by the Italian, Spanish and Greek cabinets during 2019 exposed the rising distances separating parties, both inside governments and parliaments. On the other hand, the government formation processes in Italy and Spain were characterised by a number of unique events, uncharted outcomes and repeat elections: that is, indicators of the ‘government epidemic’ syndrome we had identified in Southern Europe after the eurozone crisis (Bosco & Verney 2016). Above all, the processes of government investiture, crisis and recomposition highlighted the polarising strategies chosen by some parties in a context of party fragmentation and electoral volatility.

What do these events tell us about the state of polarisation in Southern Europe? We summoned a group of experienced scholars to investigate the dimensions and features of polarisation in their own countries. Considering the lack of comparative studies about the current wave of intense political divisions, we asked our contributors to offer evidence based on ‘descriptive arguments’ (Gerring 2012) and, consequently, to use the methodology they considered the most suitable.¹ According to Gerring, ‘if an evidence-gathering mission is conceptualised as descriptive rather than causal (which is to say, no single causal theory guides the research), it is more likely to produce a broad range of evidence that will be applicable to a broad range of questions, both descriptive and causal’ (2012, p. 734). Despite theoretical autonomy, our contributors have addressed a few shared questions concerning trends in polarisation, the contexts that have nourished it and the main polarising actors in each country.

The resulting articles fall into two categories. Using South European case studies, the articles in the first group highlight multiple aspects of the polarisation phenomenon: leader polarisation, policy polarisation, affective polarisation, the role of polarisation in electoral realignment and polarisation around an emotionally charged ‘national issue’. Meanwhile, the second group of papers offers in-depth studies of how polarisation played out in each national set of electoral contests.

The aim of the present article is to complement the detailed country case studies presented in the volume with a cross-regional comparison, where we take stock of the similarities and differences which have emerged. In the next section we present a brief recognition of how polarisation has been studied with relationship to Southern Europe. This is followed by a section showing that the current wave of polarisation is not a new phenomenon in Italy, Spain and Greece, but builds on past experiences in each country. We then highlight the main aspects which have emerged from the empirical studies of polarisation in the three polities. The last section pulls together the main comparative findings.

What polarisation in Southern Europe? A brief tour of the literature

Today publications on polarisation mainly reflect research on or inspired by the US case. A long tradition of studies on the polarisation of American voters and parties has produced a massive number of publications and multifaceted theoretical approaches (for a review see, among others, Campbell 2016; Hetherington 2009; Layman, Carsey & Horowitz 2006; McCarty 2019). However, for much of the 20th century, the United States was characterised by political consensus. Until the mid-1960s, the electorate was largely centrist and non-ideological, while the Democratic and Republican parties overlapped to the point that in 1950 the famous APSA Schattschneider report on political parties articulated the need for more distinct and polarised party platforms (Campbell 2016, pp. 41–48). It was only from the late 1960s that polarisation began to increase.

Today, while there is agreement on the high level of polarisation exhibited by the elites, the level of polarisation among the American public is not the subject of consensus. On the one hand, scholars like Fiorina claim that the American mass public has remained centrist and moderate, while, on the other, authors like Abramowitz argue that ideological polarisation has increased among the electorate as well as among the party elites and that the more engaged and informed citizens are, the more polarised they become. (Οn the debate see Abramowitz & Saunders 2008; Campbell 2016; Fiorina, Abrams & Pope 2006; Fiorina 2017; McCarty 2019).

While comparative research can benefit from the conclusions of the American school, it is important to stress that the South European perspective on polarisation is necessarily distinct. While in the US, only two parties are represented in the legislature, in Europe multi-party systems are the norm. This implies making specific methodological choices to measure polarisation. Meanwhile, constant changes in the number of parties and their competitive strategies add further challenges to the question of how to study polarisation (Reiljan 2020).

Equally important is the long tradition of strong ideological divergence that characterises Southern Europe at both the mass and elite levels. To limit our attention to the three countries which are the object of this work, it is worth recalling the harsh polarisation that characterised the Spanish Second Republic (1931–1936) and the following, devastating, civil war; the Greek civil war in the 1940s and the polarising and centrifugal logic of the post-war parliamentary regime (1946–1967) that followed it; as well as the Second World War partisan warfare in Italy (1943–1945) and the extreme polarised pluralism of the post-war republic (Bruneau et al. 2001). In other words, polarisation, based on the ideological distance along the left-right continuum, between parties and among voters, is part of the South European tradition.

The lesson of Sartori

To understand the evolution of polarisation research in Southern Europe, we now turn to the studies which have focused on one or more of its cases. In the early 1980s, Sani and Sartori concluded their essay on polarisation, fragmentation and competition by stating that ‘the best single explanatory variable for stable versus unstable, functioning versus non-functioning, successful versus immobile, and easy versus difficult democracy, is polarisation’ (Sani & Sartori 1983, p. 337). In the category of unsuccessful and problematic democracies, Sartori included two South European cases – the Spanish Second Republic and the Italian political system after 1948 – alongside the Weimar Republic, France during the Fourth Republic, and Chile before the 1973 coup d’état (Sartori 2005, pp. 137–154).

Together with the number of parties, polarisation was one of the two criteria envisaged by the author to build up his famous typology of party systems (Sartori 2005). Polarisation was defined as an ideological distance measured, at the mass level, on the left-right continuum, that is a ten-point scale ranging from 1 (extreme left) to 10 (extreme right). Sartori first used the presence of sizeable anti-system parties (whose messages aim to undermine the legitimacy of the political systems they oppose) as an indicator of systemic ideological distance.² Later on, when survey data from the Eight-nation study and the Eurobarometers became available, he switched to quantitative polarisation measures.

The subsequent index of party system ideological polarisation thus measured the distance between the relevant parties occupying the extremes of a left-right continuum. Such an index was calculated using the mean self-locations of the partisans of the most extreme political partiers (Sartori 1982, 253ss).³ Along these lines, Dalton (2008) later developed his famous polarisation index, which employs voter perceptions to measure the relative position of each party along the left-right scale, weighted by the parties’ vote shares. Most of the current analyses of polarisation use Dalton’s index or revised versions of it.

In the mid-1970s, Sartori’s index showed Italy with a very high level of polarisation (0.64) and Spain (0.47) also as a polarised European polity, mid-way between Italy and the Netherlands, the UK or Belgium (all between 0.30 and 0.33) (Sartori 1982, p. 261). Later on, Sartori’s index was used to show that in 1983 and 1993, South European countries were still among the most polarised countries in Europe (0.56 and 0.60, respectively, in Italy; 0.52 in both years in Spain; 0.67 and 0.57 in Greece) (Lanza & Memoli 2017, pp. 202–203). Relatively high levels of polarisation, complemented with frequent up and downs, were also found for this period by Schmitt and Freire in their comparison between Eastern and Western European countries (Schmitt & Freire 2012; see also Freire 2006).

What these measures showed, in other words, was the large ideological distance existing in party systems characterised, on the one hand, by the presence of communist or post-communist parties, and on the other by post-authoritarian parties that had not yet passed through a governing experience.⁴ Once the anti-system parties of left and right declined in support or experienced a process of adaptation that transformed them into fully democratic competitors, the situation changed.⁵

More recently, three different, but at times overlapping, research strands have seen Southern Europe back on the radar of polarisation studies.

Pernicious polarisation

The first line of research focuses on the negative role played by polarisation for the fate of democracy worldwide (see, among others, Carothers & O’Donohue 2019; Svolik 2019). The project led by McCoy and Somer (2018, 2019a) has, in particular, focused on the forms of polarisation that may lead to consequences such as political gridlock, democratic erosion or even democratic collapse. Based on evidence from a wide range of cases, including the US, Turkey, Venezuela, Hungary and Poland among others, McCoy and Somer have coined the concept of ‘pernicious polarisation’ to define severe polarisation that ‘divides societies into “Us vs. Them” camps, based on a single dimension of difference that overshadows all others’ (McCoy & Somer 2019b, p. 235). Where pernicious polarisation takes root, a chain of causal mechanisms unfolds that may lead to dire consequences for democratic polities.

This type of political and societal polarisation is not based on the ideological distance between parties, voters or leaders, because it is argued that in contemporary divisive democracies there are several important cleavages that can’t be gauged with the classical left-right scale (McCoy, Rahman & Somer 2018). Furthermore, the division of the electorate into two antagonistic camps, internally united and externally separated by a predominant cleavage, implies the use of a relational concept, taking account of both loyalty towards the ‘Us’ in-group and hostility towards the ‘Them’ out-group. Consequently, both measures of support and rejection for political parties are combined to assess the strength of polarisation (Lauka, McCoy & Firat 2018). While the project includes a Greek case study (Andreadis & Stavrakakis 2019), the South European country that best fits the pernicious variant of polarisation is undoubtedly Erdogan’s Turkey (Somer 2019; Aydın-Düzgit 2019; Aydın-Düzgit & Balta 2019; Verney, Bosco & Aydın-Düzgit 2019).

Affective polarisation

Affective polarisation is the second strand of recent research to include Southern Europe. Originally forged for the study of the US case, this concept takes account of the emotional reaction (affect) of party supporters to partisan divisions.⁶ In a two-party system like the US, affective polarisation results from the interaction of two simple elements: how strongly partisans despise the opposing party (the out-party) and how intensely they cherish their own (the in-party). Connection to the preferred political force and antagonism towards the opponent are measured, at the mass level, through ‘feeling’ thermometer ratings included in a number of national and cross-national surveys.

In their ground-breaking work, Iyengar, Sood and Lelkes (2012, p. 407) show ‘that Democrats and Republicans not only increasingly dislike the opposing party, but also impute negative traits to the rank-and-file of the out-party’. The net effect is a situation where party supporters display intense dislike and animosity towards the opposite party and its partisans. According to Reiljan, in systems where politicians are responsive to their electoral constituencies, like in the US, affective polarisation contributes to reinforce elite conflicts and the widespread use of harsh rhetoric (Reiljan 2020, p. 379). For its features, affective polarisation is a relevant dimension of ‘pernicious polarisation’ (McCoy, Rahman & Somer 2018, p. 19), but it can be present in less severe cases as well. How much this partisan animosity is linked to ideological divisions is a matter of contention and two contrasting perspectives have been developed: either defending the existence of some type of relationship between affective and ideological polarisation (Rogowski & Sutherland 2016; Wagner 2021; Webster & Abramowitz 2017) especially in the European cases (Reiljan 2020, pp. 381–383) – or else supporting the lack of it (Iyengar, Sood & Lelkes 2012).

The comparative study of affective polarisation in multiparty systems is still in its early days (Boxell, Gentzkow & Shapiro 2020; Harteveld 2019; Gidron, Adams & Horne 2020; Lauka, McCoy & Firat 2018; Reiljan 2020; Reiljan & Ryan 2021). However, it is an interesting and promising perspective for analysing developments in Southern Europe. Overcoming the methodological problems connected with the existence of more than two parties, the Index of Affective Polarisation built by Reiljan on survey and electoral data⁷ allowed the author to assess the levels of affective polarisation in 23 European countries. The data show that high polarisation is not a prerogative of the United States. Instead, much higher affective polarisation is also a feature of several European political systems. Interestingly, Southern Europe (which in this study consisted of Greece, Spain and Portugal in selected elections)⁸ emerges as one of the European regions with the highest scores of affective polarisation and is characterised by a strict relationship between ideological and affective polarisation as well (Reiljan 2020, p. 388).

Likewise, Gidron, Adams and Horne (2020), who document cross-national affective polarisation in 20 Western countries over the period 1996–2017, find extremely high levels of polarisation in Spain, Greece and Portugal.⁹ Their comparative analysis, in particular, highlights that among the cases under examination, Greece and Spain show maximum levels of out-party dislike combined with low in-party liking (Gidron, Adams & Horne 2020, pp. 23–26). Among the causes that explain the intensification of affective polarisation within the political systems, the authors stress the role played by elite conflict over cultural issues. In their words ‘the politics of ‘who we are’ appears more emotionally polarising than the politics of ‘who gets what’ (Gidron, Adams & Horne 2020, p. 64). As we shall see in the fourth section, rival parties clashing over questions related to national identity are not only a feature of American affective mass polarisation, but have also characterised Spain and Greece in the recent past and present. Finally, Gidron, Adams and Horn’s cross-national study also shows a significant relationship between affective polarisation and unemployment. This variable is particularly important in Greece and Spain, which in the decade 2011–2020 constantly registered the highest percentage of unemployed in the whole European Union. Unfortunately, the analyses leave out the Italian case and do not include the most recent elections in Greece and Spain.

The economic crisis and polarisation

The third strand of polarisation research that has brought Southern Europe to the fore concerns the studies of the transformation of European democracies and party systems after the beginning of the Great Recession. For instance, in their comparative analysis of party system change, Hutter and Kriesi (2019, p. 361) argue that polarisation increased in all the European macro-regions – Southern, North-Western and Central-Eastern – during the recession, while Hübscher, Sattler and Wagner (2020) find a strong correlation between austerity, polarisation and the increase in the number of parties.

The link between the economic crisis and polarisation, however, has been especially highlighted by Morlino, who prefers to distinguish between polarisation and radicalisation. For Morlino, the former ‘takes place through aggregation around two poles (or coalitions), which are not necessarily radical (as was the case for many decades in the UK), while the radicalisation of political issues results in a distancing among policy proposals and disappearance of moderate positions’ (Morlino 2020, p. 125). South European political systems have become radicalised democracies due to the new protest parties, which grew electorally by channelling the social discontent generated by the economic crisis (Morlino & Raniolo 2017).

In his recent, extensive, analysis of how the Great Recession has affected the fundamental values of freedom and equality in a number of European countries, Morlino has built on his previous study by showing that Italy, Spain and Greece are examples of ‘protest democracy’, a pattern of democratic regimes characterised, among other features, by high polarisation, radicalisation, and different types of revendicative protest (Morlino 2020, pp. 225–226, 228, 238). United by the importance attributed to equality values, these polities all present protest parties that have joined the government in recent years. The important point to stress, however, is that protest democracies risk political decisional stalemates because ‘no effective, durable agreement can be found … if polarisation and radicalisation are not reduced’ (Morlino 2020, p. 244). As different research perspectives have stressed the emergence and rise of polarisation in Southern Europe, it is time to turn to our case studies.

At the core of past polarisation: elite-driven animosity and conflict

The high polarisation levels found by our contributors in the 2019–2020 period rest on past experiences, which need to be briefly recalled in order to provide a deeper understanding of the present.

Italy: from polarised pluralism to leader polarisation

The Italian political system is accustomed to polarisation. The first Republic (1948–1992), magisterially outlined by Sartori (2005) as a case of extreme and polarised pluralism, was characterised by large ideological distance and a high number of parties, with a relevant role played by two parties placed on the extremes of the right-left continuum: the post-fascist MSI (Movimento Sociale Italiano – Italian Social Movement) and the PCI (Partito Comunista Italiano – Italian Communist Party). The existence of a deep anti-communist cleavage, helped the DC (Democrazia Cristiana - Christian Democratic Party) play a government role continuously from 1948 to 1993 and to hold the premiership for most of that time.¹⁰ Between 1992 and 1994 the consequences of the collapse of the communist regimes in Eastern Europe, impacting on the PCI; the ‘Mani Pulite’ (‘Clean Hands’) judicial inquiries into political corruption and the relations between mafia and politics; as well as the new electoral laws approved in 1993, all contributed to change the party system radically, opening the way for the rise of new political parties (Cotta & Verzichelli 2007).

The decision of media entrepreneur Silvio Berlusconi in the mid-1990s to found his own party (Forza Italia – Italy go!) and to lead the centre-right, together with the partially majoritarian electoral law, reshaped the Italian party system favouring a model of competition distinguished by polarised bipolarism, where the two poles were formed by coalitions of parties. As is well known, Berlusconi presided over four governments between 1994 and 2011 and this long phase was characterised by polarised relations between, on the one side, Forza Italia, Berlusconi and his supporters, and on the other, the opposition parties and the judiciary.

Berlusconi has been a highly polarising figure: he not only re-politicised the anti-communist cleavage, traditionally used by the DC in its fight against the PCI (Bosco 2001), but also presented himself as the front-man of civil society against the old and corrupted partitocracy. Furthermore, when public prosecutors started to investigate his affairs, Berlusconi added the judiciary to the list of his main political targets. Both in government and in opposition, he used a ‘gladiatorial’ style of confrontation which served to keep his followers permanently mobilised against the centre-left parties (Donovan 2015) and the so called ‘red judges’ (toghe rosse), who were accused of being part of the leftist opposition (Dallara 2015).

In 2006, Berlusconi took polarisation up a notch. Forza Italia did not accept the defeat it had suffered in the legislative election and accused the new Prodi government of illegitimacy. The whole legislature (2006–2008) was thus characterised by a permanently hostile and confrontational opposition (Donovan 2008). Overheated quarrels between government and opposition then continued when Berlusconi returned to office (2008–2011), a situation worsened by cabinet divisions that left the prime minister unable to address the eurozone economic crisis. Heightened rivalry and head-on conflict, characterised by the demonisation of the opponent, marked every arena. In parliament, in the public squares, and on television, party representatives attacked their adversaries with a level of animosity and verbal aggression that made the usual interchange between government and opposition impossible.

Political debate became so vitriolic that the President of the Republic, Giorgio Napolitano, on several occasions asked the parties to reverse such a pernicious climate. At a public lecture at New York University, in March 2011, Napolitano observed that the main problem of Italian politics was ‘the hyper-partisanship’ that had created a daily war between parties, establishing a mutual delegitimisation and thus making political dialogue impossible (Bosco & McDonnell 2012, p. 49). Almost the same words were used by Sartori in a 2010 interview, when he referred to the ‘Berlusconi anomaly’. A leader at ease when ‘waging war’, for Sartori Berlusconi was disrupting bipolarism, which can work properly only when the two poles (whether parties or coalitions) cooperate to find shared solutions (Massari & Sartori 2010, p. 324). As a consequence, after the end of the First Republic, Italy came to resemble one of the exceptions or ‘alternative possibilities’ that Sartori had already previewed in his overall framework, that of ‘limited but polarised pluralism’ (Sartori 2005, p. 259).

In his contribution to this volume, Bordignon emphasises that Berlusconi, as a highly divisive figure, introduced a form of leader polarisation, splitting Italian public opinion into pro- and anti-Berlusconi camps. Political divisions were thus based on ideological (right/left) as well as leader (pro-/anti-Berlusconi) polarisation, two overlapping cleavages which were impossible to disentangle. The ideological and leader polarisation indexes calculated by the author show that Berlusconi was the most polarising figure of and his fourth government (2008–2011) was characterised by an extremely high degree of ideological and personal polarisation (Bordignon 2020).¹¹ In 2018, when the Lega (League) emerged as the third party and the largest component of the centre-right coalition, its leader Matteo Salvini opened a new chapter in the Italian tradition of leader polarisation (see below).

Greece: from polarised bipartyism to polarised bipartyism

Polarisation has been a persistent phenomenon in Greek politics. In the early years of the post-1974 democratic regime, when the new party system was taking shape, Greece experienced a brief phase of polarised pluralism (Pappas 2003; Tsatsanis 2018).¹² In the late 1970s, parliament encompassed an extended ideological space including a far right grouping and several radical left forces. Political competition was centrifugal and the two main players, the governing ND (Νέα Δημοκρατία – New Democracy) on the right and PASOK (Πανελλήνιο Σοσιαλιστικό Κίνημα – Panhellenic Socialist Movement) on the left, appeared to be separated by an ideological gulf. ND’s slogan of ‘We belong to the West’ summed up a platform based on consolidating Greece’s geopolitical position in the Western capitalist system. In contrast, PASOK, in its early anti-imperialist phase, rejected Greece’s Cold War orientation while advocating economic ‘self-management’ and the ‘socialisation’ of the means of production.

Just a few years later, this programmatic polarisation had been significantly mitigated. Both before and after forming its first government in 1981, PASOK moderated its platform, initially to attract former centrist voters and subsequently in response to the realities of running the country. The shift was fundamental, including the acceptance of Greece’s European Community and NATO memberships and the renewal of the US military bases agreement, all of which the party had previously strenuously opposed. But this sea change was not reflected in the nature of party competition, where PASOK and ND continued to treat each other as belonging to different ideological worlds while denying their rival’s credentials as a democratic actor. The two major parties promoted a Manichaean view of politics, in which even a second order election was presented as a ‘final confrontation’ between the forces of darkness and light, ‘not a conflict between two parties but between two ways of life’ (quoted in Pridham & Verney 1991, p. 48).

This pattern of polarised bipolar competition has a structural explanation. In 1981, the third election of the democratic era marked the dissolution of the traditional Centre. With the electoral law favouring the formation of single-party majoritarian governments, Greece essentially became a two-party system, with PASOK and ND alternating in power. Successive parliaments included minor parties, always to the left of PASOK and sometimes to the right of ND, but never in the centre, thus maintaining the centrifugal dynamic. Moreover, the rhetorically emotive discourse resonated on both sides at a time when a left-wing party had taken power for the first time in post-civil war Greece. The right – which, after the 1940s Civil War victory, had been the dominant political force for most of the post-war period until the 1967–74 dictatorship – now found itself outside government. Meanwhile the left, with traumatic memories of exclusion from multiple aspects of public life under the post-civil war ‘political apartheid’, had no desire to lose its new relationship with power.

At the societal level, the clientelistic framework of Greek politics further reinforced polarisation. The party in government had direct consequences for an individual’s relationship with the state machine and particularly their prospects of obtaining a public sector job. In this climate, competing clientele networks acted as channels of social mobilisation. The period was characterised by impressive levels of participation in mass rallies, with party supporters bussed from all over Greece. The extent to which polarisation had become embedded in society was graphically illustrated by the phenomenon of coffee-drinking segregation, especially in the countryside, where supporters of the two main parties conducted this important social ritual in separate ‘blue’ and ‘green’ coffee-shops.

1989 was a turning point for Greek polarisation. A more proportional electoral law led to a temporary move from single-party to coalition rule. Two short-lived governments were formed, overcoming historical cleavages. The first government, consisting of ND and a leftwing coalition, marked a symbolic reconciliation between the civil war winners and losers. The second united the 1980s adversaries, PASOK and ND, in a three-party coalition with the left. Following this experience of government collaboration, it was no longer possible to maintain, as the PASOK and ND leaders had done in the past, that their opponents were traitors with whom it was unthinkable even to hold a TV debate.

In the 1990s, the rapid deepening of European integration and the national project of Europeanisation offered a framework for policy convergence, not only with the EU but also between the two major parties. In particular, the Maastricht criteria for entry to Economic and Monetary Union promoted a consensus between PASOK and ND on fundamentals in the key field of economic policy. Their increased ideological proximity was indicated by the labels of ‘centre-left’ and ‘centre-right’ now regularly used to describe the two major parties. The shift to regarding the rival party as a political opponent rather than a direct threat to the regime encouraged a de-fanaticisation of political life. This contributed, particularly from the late 1990s, to reduced societal involvement, linked to a new phenomenon of ‘armchair elections’ (Nicolacopoulos 2005), with citizens following debates on TV rather than participating in the squares.

While political competition clearly became more centripetal, the climate was not consensual. As noted by Lyrintzis (2005, p. 257), there is ‘no tradition of inter-party cooperation and accommodation in Greek politics’. The dynamics of the ‘winner-takes-all’ electoral system, to which Greece reverted after 1993, encouraged strong competition between the two main parties. This was reinforced by the persistence of clientelism, making the recapture of the state machine essential for the party out of power, in order to satisfy its supporters’ expectations of favours. The outcome was a pattern of unconstructive opposition, entailing persistent calls for new elections and hostility to government proposals as a matter of principle, even when they coincided with the opposition party’s own policies. This antagonistic style of bipolar competition had thus become well entrenched.

Then the early years of the economic crisis saw polarisation enter a new phase of high intensity, as the prospect of national bankruptcy and the therapy prescribed to avert it sent shock waves through Greek society. The new memorandum/anti-memorandum split referred to attitudes towards the harsh austerity and tough reforms mandated by the Memoranda of Understanding accompanying Greece’s international bailouts. The agreements were politically poisonous, triggering a wave of popular fury, manifested in repeated strikes and demonstrations, civil disobedience and a movement of the squares. The political debate was highly emotive with both sides – those who accepted the memorandum as a necessary evil and those who rejected it – accusing their opponents of treachery and betrayal of national interests. In this heated political climate, party alignments with the memorandum camps were often unexpected, uniting both left- and rightwing parties behind opposing flags. But the dividing line, while very sharp at any given moment, proved rather fluid over a short space of time.

The changes in the composition of the two camps tended to be linked to parties’ relationship to government rather than new ideology. Thus in 2010 ND, then in opposition, lined up with the radical left to oppose the first bailout, which was supported by the governing PASOK and a small party of the radical right. In contrast, in 2012 ND joined PASOK in government to support the second bailout, which was opposed by all the other political forces. This rapprochement between the old adversaries did not reduce the level of polarisation, as the anti-memorandum fight continued under new leadership. Meanwhile, polarisation passed not only between but also within the political forces, with those parties which had accepted bailouts weakened by internal splits.

With the political fragmentation induced by the second bailout, Greece entered a new phase of polarised pluralism. The political spectrum of the 2012 parliament was even more elongated than in 1977. It encompassed three parties to the left of PASOK and two to the right of ND, including the neonazi Golden Dawn, one of the most extreme parties in Europe. The centrifugal competition especially benefitted SYRIZA (Συνασπισμός Ριζοσπαστικής Αριστεράς – Coalition of the Radical Left) which became the biggest anti-memorandum force in 2012 and then first party nationwide in 2015. Meanwhile, ND emerged as its chief opponent following the spectacular decline of PASOK.

In January 2015, the anti-memorandum camp took power, with an ideologically disparate government consisting of SYRIZA and the nationalist rightwing ANEL (Ανεξάρτητοι Έλληνες – Independent Greeks). The polarisation around the memorandum reached a peak when this government first attempted to renegotiate with the EU and then called a referendum on the bailout terms, which were roundly rejected by the voters. Facing the threat of a disorderly exit from the eurozone (‘Grexit’), the previously anti-memorandum government signed a third bailout anyway, supported by all parliamentary parties except for Golden Dawn and the communist party at the two ends of the political spectrum. With this acceptance by the political elites that Greece had no option but to remain within the memorandum framework, the issue which had polarised Greek society for five years ceased to be politically salient. Nevertheless, while polarisation changed shape again, it continued to flourish, this time around the clash between ND and SYRIZA, thus marking a return to polarised bipartyism.

Spain: from consensus to competitive polarisation

Like Italy and Greece, Spain was also not new to polarisation in 2019–2020. After the first democratic elections in 1977, Spain became famous for the implementation of the politics of consensus ‘in which all significant nationwide parties were quite restrained in articulating their conflicts with rivals and behaved in accord with “consensual” norms and procedures’ (Gunther & Montero 2012, p. 101). With the consolidation of Spanish democracy and the institutionalisation of the party system, consensus progressively gave place to a more adversarial political game which brought with it increasing levels of polarisation.

A first step in this direction took place in the 1980s, when the PSOE (Partido Socialista Obrero Español – Spanish Socialist Workers’ Party) won an absolute majority of seats in 1982, 1986 and 1989, and AP (Alianza Popular – Popular Alliance) replaced the centrist UCD (Unión de Centro Democrático – Union of the Democratic Centre) as the main contender on the centre-right of the party system. On the one hand, the extreme conservatism of AP, a party still perceived as linked to the authoritarian regime, widened the ideological distance between the parties; while, on the other hand, the modernisation reforms that the PSOE implemented between 1982 and 1989 without compromising with the opposition, led AP to inaugurate a strategy of harsh delegitimation of the government’s policies (Gunther & Montero 2012).

In 1989, the refoundation of AP as the PP (Partido Popular – Popular Party), a conservative catch-all party, contributed to decrease polarisation over the 1990s. However, between 1993 and 1996 there was a temporary increase in polarisation when the PP chose an opposition strategy based on rancour and animosity against the PSOE, which had won the general election for the fourth time in a row. In 1996, after an alternation in power, the PP abandoned the polarising strategy and started a consensual government experience (Gunther & Montero 2012, pp. 117–121; Maravall 2008).

The PP governed Spain for two legislative terms, between 1996 and 2004. While the first minority government led by the PP leader, José María Aznar, was moderate and compromise-inclined, the second brought polarisation back on the scene. Between 2000 and 2004, Aznar, whose government rested on an absolute majority of seats, adopted highly divisive decisions including participation in the Iraq war, opposed by all the other parties and Spanish public opinion. By the end of Aznar’s second term in office, in 2004, the politics of consensus had been definitively cancelled and the period 2004–2011, covering two consecutive legislatures, was marked by heightened tension and hyper-conflictuality between the PSOE-led government and the PP opposition. These seven years were marked by contentious antagonism with head-on conflict between the opposition and the government in parliament, the media outlets and the streets. In the Spanish case, polarisation was triggered and maintained alive by the PP until 2011, when the party won the election, and the first government led by Mariano Rajoy occupied the Moncloa Palace (the prime minister’s office).

Having unexpectedly lost the 2004 elections to José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero’s PSOE, Rajoy adopted an attitude of extreme hostility towards the socialist government, which came to be known as the ‘crispación strategy’ or ‘strategy of confrontation’¹³ (Fundación Alternativas 2007; Maravall 2008). It was an approach that involved challenging the incumbent with extremist and alarmist messages, which portrayed the government’s policies as illegitimate in their origin and catastrophic in their consequences.¹⁴

The strategy was twofold. On the one hand, it entailed an implacable opposition – with the support of the conservative sectors of Spanish society – against Zapatero’s civil rights policies like same-sex marriages or the memory law which made it possible to compensate the Republican victims of the civil war and Francoism (Bosco & Sánchez-Cuenca 2009). On the other hand, it entailed politicising ‘state issues’, like counter-terrorism and the territorial organisation of the state, which until 2004 had been considered ‘above politics’ and the object of consensual decision-making between the two main parties, the PSOE and PP.¹⁵

The PP attacked the PSOE on these once ‘protected’ issues, delegitimising Zapatero as an alleged partner in crime of ETA terrorism and a PM who infringed the constitution. Since Zapatero, his ministers and his party did not react to the PP’s insults, the crispación remained a unilateral strategy (Gunther & Montero 2012, p. 124). The acrimony injected by the PP into the political debate was, however, amplified and communicated by the media organisations within the opposition party’s orbit.

During Zapatero’s second term in office (2008–2011), when the economic crisis occupied the political agenda and Spain risked defaulting on its debt, Rajoy accused the prime minister of having been directly responsible for the crisis, and rejected all of the government’s initiatives to tackle the recession. As Zapatero headed a minority government, the PP strategy was particularly problematic when it came to parliamentary votes concerning measures and reforms regarded as essential by the EU and the international markets.

Pursued by Rajoy with the aim of demobilising the socialist electorate and improving the PP’s electoral prospects, polarisation had significant consequences at the mass level. First, it contributed to polarising the electorate as well, as shown by the data on ideological and affective polarisation presented by the contributors to this volume (Rodríguez-Teruel 2020; Simón 2020a; Orriols & León 2020). Second, during the period from 2008 to 2011 in particular, the hyper-conflictuality between the PP and PSOE and their inability to tackle the economic crisis through a wide-ranging political agreement aroused growing frustration and irritation among Spanish citizens, causing confidence in the government, the parties and parliament to plummet (Bosco 2018).

Finally, but very important, the PP’s strategy contributed to polarise the Catalan (and national) political elite and electorate around the highly sensitive centre-periphery cleavage, thus politicising an identity issue which would lead to strong affective polarisation in the following years. For reasons of space, it is not possible to recall here the process of territorial polarisation, but suffice it to say that Rajoy’s vehement rejection of further decentralisation as well as his decisions to challenge the new Catalan statute in the Constitutional Court, to avoid changing the regional finance law, and to elude opening a discussion channel with the Catalan separatist elites, increased polarisation along both the ideological and territorial dimensions (Bosco 2018). As shown by Simón in this volume (Simón 2020a) territorial polarisation increased after 2008, 2011 and 2015. This led to an increase in left-right polarisation as well, due to the fact that in Spain the ideological and territorial cleavages overlap. It is important to stress that after the PP’s return to government in 2011 (where it remained until June 2018), polarisation did not decline but instead remained very high – as the contributors to this volume show – due to the territorial cleavage and the connected Catalan crisis.

Polarisation in the 2019–2020 political cycle

The short excursion we made into the past experiences of polarisation in Italy, Greece and Spain has highlighted similarities and differences. In Italy and Spain the party elites bore the responsibility for having triggered the polarising drives which, in turn, had a cascade effect at the mass level. In Greece instead there was a significant interaction between mass and parties’ polarisation, especially during the economic crisis.

The link between the elite and the mass level in the process of polarisation has attracted huge attention, and while some scholars point to the choices made by the elites and political parties, others prefer to stress the role played by citizens in triggering and reinforcing polarisation. While it is impossible to completely disentangle the mass level from the elite one, the first perspective looks at the top-down ‘transmission belt’ of polarisation from the elite to the mass levels (see, among others, Lupu 2015; Castanho Silva 2018). Focusing on the emergence of new parties on the political scene, Bischof and Wagner (2019) have found that the entry to parliament of right-radical parties can lead to long-time increases in voters’ polarisation. Furthermore, the authors stress that also events like leadership changes, or the electoral success of radical parties, can fuel polarisation at the mass level. As shown in the contributions to this volume, the consequences of elite-driven polarisation at the mass level were clear in Spain and Italy. Elite polarisation influenced the electorate and contributed to the (re)politicisation of new and old lines of division, like the justice cleavage in Italy and the territorial one in Spain.

The second scholarly perspective, which is linked to the studies on affective polarisation, tends to highlight the push exercised by partisans on their representatives, generating a sort of polarisation spiral: ‘affective polarisation increases support for extremist politicians, or, at least, blinds partisans to the ideological extremity of candidates from their party … Hence, affective polarisation may yield extreme politicians, who then send policy cues to their base, exacerbating mass ideological polarisation’ (Iyengar et al. 2019, p. 142). In Southern Europe such a spiral is visible in the Greek case, where mass mobilisation during the crisis years was the backdrop to elite polarisation around the new memorandum/anti-memorandum cleavage. In turn, as shown by Tsatsanis, Teperoglou and Seriatos (2020), affective polarisation has taken hold due to the negative partisanship towards SYRIZA and ND (see below). The role of mass mobilisation was also visible in Catalonia, where the territorial conflict was and is one of the main drivers of affective polarisation (Orriols & León 2020).

During the economic crisis, left-right polarisation remained alive and kicking in Italy and Spain while in Greece it was temporarily replaced by the memorandum/anti-memorandum divide. Coming to the most recent phase of polarisation studied and measured by the contributors to this volume, the left-right divide was again highly salient in all three countries. In Spain and Greece the climate of heated polarisation was also rooted in national identity issues which reinforced the left-right cleavage.

In Spain after the phase of the crispación and the end of Zapatero’s second term in office, polarisation resurged under the push of two strictly related factors. As explained by Simón in this volume (2020a, 2020b) the emergence of a new party system, with the entry to the national parliament of the left-wing Podemos and the centrist Ciudadanos in 2015 and of the radical right-wing Vox in 2019, progressively increased left-right polarisation to the point that, after the November 2019 election, it reached the highest level in decades (Simón 2020a). On the other hand, after 2008, the identity issue linked to the centre-periphery divergences and Catalonia’s bid for independence, marked the fast rise of territorial polarisation. Two points need to be stressed regarding territorial polarisation. First, the territorial cleavage – which from 2010 mainly concerns the Catalan separatist process – has become an identity issue that sets the defenders of Spain’s unity against the supporters of different degrees of regional self-government (from more autonomy to independence). Second, the ideological and territorial cleavages are linked, with the right traditionally opposing decentralisation while the left has been more favourable to the requests of the regional nationalist parties. Indeed, this has been so much the case that the territorial cleavage is one of the main drivers of electoral competition.

In 2019–2020 ideological and territorial polarisation have resulted in intense animosity, contempt and hostility among Spanish parties and voters. Simón (2020b) clarifies how party system fractionalisation, volatility and uncertainty pushed the party leaders of the centre-right to choose polarising strategies for competitive reasons. However, using polarising strategies to appeal to volatile electoral bases has not proved rewarding. In his contribution to the volume, Rodríguez-Teruel (2020) highlights the unintended consequences of the strategies adopted by Ciudadanos and PP to compete between themselves and with the radical-right Vox. Both Cs and PP moved to the right: the former by refusing to support a PSOE government after the April elections and trying to surpass the PP in votes; the latter by copying the extreme positions of Vox. However, as explained by the author, these strategies ended with the unexpected shift of conservative voters to Vox because they blurred the images of the three rightwing parties in the eyes of the voters while, at the same time, increasing the perceived distance between the parties and voters’ own positions.

The rising levels of affective polarisation in Spain are analysed by Orriols and León (2020). They show how it first played an important role within the left, where hostility between the partisans of PSOE and Podemos rose after the emergence of the challenger party led by Iglesias (2015–2017). In a later phase (2018–2020), instead, intra-left antagonism declined, while affective polarisation between the left and rightwing ideological blocs increased. Orriols and León highlight the role played by the three crucial drivers behind this alternation: the electoral competition strategies of the parties, their ideological positions (as perceived by the voters) and the territorial cleavage.

While in Spain, the threat of Catalan separatism contributed to polarise and divide the parties and public opinion, in Greece it was the solution to the long-running Macedonian name question that set spirits on fire. The issue was deeply divisive and split the government, causing the resignation of SYRIZA’s junior partner, the rightwing nationalist ANEL. Unlike in Spain, however, this ‘national issue’ did not constitute an independent dimension of cleavage. Rather the way it played out in the run-up to the 2019 election campaigns served to reinforce the new SYRIZA/anti-SYRIZA split which had succeeded the polarisation around the memorandum.

After the signature of the third bailout, although SYRIZA had moved to more moderate positions, it was treated as dangerously extremist by its opponents, led by ND. Political debate continued to be shaped by the legacy of the crisis period, with ND presenting SYRIZA as the irresponsible crafter of a process of ‘Grexit’ (Tsatsanis, Teperoglou & Seriatos 2020). In turn, SYRIZA continued to depict both the pre-crisis parties of power as agents of corruption and vested interests, who had brought Greece to near bankruptcy in the first place. During the crisis, both ND and SYRIZA had nourished an intense antipathy and distrust among their voters towards the opposite party. As a result, as Tsatsanis, Teperoglou and Seriatos (2020) show in their contribution to this volume, Greece was characterised by affective polarisation built on mass negative partisanship. Significant in the maintenance of this climate was that in January 2015, for the first time since 1974, a government had been formed which included neither ND nor PASOK. As in the early 1980s, this was a political conflict between those enjoying the fruits of power for the first time and the habitual owners of government contesting their usurpers.

It was against this background that SYRIZA’s prime minister signed the Prespa Agreement in June 2018. Under this treaty, Greece’s northern neighbour was to be renamed and internationally recognised as the ‘Republic of North Macedonia’, ending Greece’s claim to a monopoly on the Macedonian name. The failure to resolve the Macedonian question had been destabilising the Balkans, with a Greek veto blocking its neighbour’s NATO entry and participation in EU Enlargement. However, since the end of the Cold War, this had been a highly emotional issue in Greek politics, triggering a strong sense of national threat. As explained by Skoulariki (2020) in her contribution to this volume, the debate in Greece revolved around three dimensions related to ‘security (threats to Greek national sovereignty), identity (Greek vs Slavic culture, language and descent), and history (the heritage of the Ancient Macedonian civilisation)’. It is likely that the settlement of this issue at any time would have been controversial and divisive. Opinion polls showed a large majority of the population opposed the treaty and a succession of mass demonstrations were held, with the debate soon becoming an inflamed contest between ‘patriots’ and ‘traitors’.

Nevertheless, the political forces clearly fuelled the flames by making this a highly partisan issue. With the minor exception of the centrist To Potami (The River), which itself split over this issue, all the opposition parties – now including SYRIZA’s former government partner, ANEL – denounced the Prespa Agreement as nationally dangerous. Notably, both ND and PASOK’s successor, KINAL (Κίνημα Αλλαγής – Movement for Change) voiced a blanket condemnation of all the treaty’s articles, including some provisions which they had been prepared to accept when in power previously.

In this respect, the mobilisation around the Macedonian name issue contributed significantly to the climate of hostility and polarisation in which the 2019 election round was conducted and to its essential nature as a referendum on the SYRIZA government. With the elections fought primarily as a duel between SYRIZA and its leading opponent, ND, the outcome was the ‘two-partyism reloaded’ described in depth by Tsatsanis, Teperoglou and Seriatos (2020). This apparent return to a two-party system – albeit with a different shape from its pre-crisis predecessor – and the election of the first single-party majority government since 2009 make Greece an outlier in today’s Southern Europe. Both Greece’s previous record and the levels of negative partisanship suggest polarisation is likely to continue to flourish in this new/old context.

Since the 2018 election, the Italian case shows how polarisation has permeated not only the relationship between government and opposition, as in Spain and Greece, but also the Conte I cabinet, a singular coalition formed by two populist parties, the Lega and the M5S (Movimento 5 Stelle – 5 Star Movement). Reciprocal hostility and loathing are not typical of populist coalitions. In Greece, where the all-populist government formed by SYRIZA and ANEL remained in power from 2015 to 2019, polarisation did not harm the cabinet collaboration except until the Prespa Agreement came to the fore, bringing about a rapid dissolution of the coalition. In Italy, in contrast, the Lega-M5S government lasted only 14 months (June 2018-August 2019), was constantly plagued by highly conflictual divergences, and finally collapsed when Salvini decided to withdraw his party from the executive.

In his article Bordignon (2020) shows that after the end of Berlusconi’s fourth government, in 2008–2011, ideological polarisation declined, to increase again after the 2018 election, when elite-driven polarisation resumed, this time around the figure of Matteo Salvini. The personal attributes of Salvini, his innovative use of the social media, dialectic ability and aggressive language polarised and divided the electorate as only Berlusconi had done in the past. Differently from Spain, were old and new parties of the centre-right adopted polarising strategies, in Italy Salvini’s polarising drive reflects the experience of an old party reshaped and renewed by a new leader who knew only too well that in Italy ‘the fast reconfiguration of people’s attitudes appeared to be more reactive to the elites’ strategies than rooted in social change’ (Bordignon 2020, p. 26).

The Italian case shows the political paradox of a divisive leader like Salvini, who decided to join government with one of its electoral adversaries, the M5S. In their analysis, Conti, Pedrazzani and Russo (2020) reveal how Salvini and the M5S leader, Di Maio, were conscious of the ideological and policy distance existing between them and how they tried to offset it, by drafting a post-electoral contract including the government agenda and by setting up a conciliation committee for managing the conflicts that could arise. Both the contract and the conciliation committee were unheard of in preceding Italian governments. However, despite a very long gestative period of about three months after the elections (Chiaramonte et al. 2018), the parties were unable to find effective mechanisms to defuse polarisation and reduce distances in cabinet or parliament. The policy and competitive positions were too divergent to compromise and the authors show how a classic polarising dynamics took place in the cabinet, leading to its eventual split.

Since 2018 party polarisation in Italy has intensified well beyond the usual topics of taxes and public spending or the leaders’ personalities, and has also involved dimensions like immigration, further EU integration, and lifestyle policies like same sex marriage. As argued by Tronconi and Valbruzzi (2020), polarisation along these dimensions has been amplified and made evident to the voters, not only by the opposite positions of the Lega and the M5S in cabinet decision-making but also by their permanent electoral competition. As a matter of fact, the two parties took advantage of the EP and regional elections to compete against each other, thus fuelling even more polarisation into the system.

Thus, when the Lega became first Italian party in the EP elections, Salvini decided to withdraw his party from the government betting on the convocation of new elections. However, the head of state, who has the responsibility to dissolve parliament, avoided unleashing an electoral battle in the middle of a phase of high polarisation and preferred to wait and see if it was possible to form a new government. This resulted in the creation of a coalition between the M5S and the PD (Partito Democratico – Democratic Party) headed by the outgoing Prime Minister, Giuseppe Conte. Despite the failure of Salvini’s goal and his return to opposition, Tronconi and Valbruzzi highlight that, from the 2020 viewpoint, the country ‘has clearly shifted its centre of gravity to the right’ (2020, p. 14). The electoral success of Salvini’s Lega and FI (Fratelli d’Italia – Brothers of Italy), heir of the post-fascist Italian Social Movement, mean that Italian voters have electorally rewarded two radical and polarising parties in the conservative field, whose political message is characterised by nativism, sovereigntism, euroscepticism and opposition to immigration.

Comparing polarisation drives

The exploration of polarisation phases in Italy, Spain and Greece is a helpful exercise to understand both the past and the present of the three political systems. The evidence collected by the contributions to this volume allows us to present a few findings that we hope can become the basis for further research on the topic.

First, in contrast to Portugal, whose political elites show a tradition of cooperation (De Giorgi & Santana-Pereira 2020), in Italy, Spain and Greece, polarisation is not a brand new phenomenon but the continuation of a process that had started earlier in each country. Polarisation is an old habit that is well known by the political elite and the most politically active citizens. In Italy, leader polarisation under Salvini is a new edition of polarisation driven by Berlusconi; in Spain the crispación introduced by Rajoy is replicated by Pablo Casado, the new leader of the PP, while Vox seems to look at the lesson by Salvini; finally in Greece, where polarisation has existed, in one form or another, since the return to democracy, today’s adversarial politics reproduces a political style which developed in earlier periods.

Second, it is also clear that ideological and affective polarisation have been on the rise in Greece, Italy and Spain in recent years and the data presented in this volume show that at the beginning of 2020, polarisation was at a high or even record level in each country.

Third, in terms of the content of polarisation, recent years have seen the emergence of multiple dimensions around which parties polarise, beyond the left-right axis: the memorandum/anti-memorandum divide in Greece, the territorial cleavage in Spain, the divides around immigration and European integration in Italy. In addition, the left-right axis itself has evolved in all three countries, with a stretching of the ideological space through the emergence or reinforcing of parties significantly distant from the political centre.

Fourth, the main entrepreneurs of the current (and past) phases of polarisation in Southern Europe are the political parties and their leaders. While divisions existed within the societies, the parties were able to channel, politicise and maximise them in support of their own strategies. This could be for competitive reasons (Rajoy’s Spain; Berlusconi’s and Salvini’s Italy; Greece before 2009) or as a strategy to retain the electoral base in non-institutionalised party systems characterised by volatility and fragmentation (Spain after 2015), or as a way to mobilise support amid a catastrophic economic crisis (Greece). In any case, party elites seem to have been a driving force behind polarisation in Southern Europe, even if fertile soil already existed within the national societies. Furthermore, it is interesting to notice that in Italy and Spain the most recent polarisation drives originate from right-wing parties, whether in government or opposition. In Greece in contrast, both left and right played a role in polarising competition. Finally, some of the main polarising parties have a long tradition in national politics (Lega, PP, ND) showing that polarisation does not only originate from newly founded challenger forces.

Fifth, research showed that polarising elites were able to increase their parties’ vote shares, not only because citizens found them appealing but also because of the negative feelings emerging towards the opposing camp at the mass level (Orriols & León 2020; Tsatsanis, Teperoglou & Seriatos 2020). Affective polarisation can clearly be found in Southern Europe. Of our three country case studies, the most prominent example is Greece, due to the intensely negative feelings that ND and SYRIZA leaders and especially their supporters hold towards each other. Not by chance, Greece is the case with the highest out-party dislike among the twenty countries examined by Gidron, Adams and Horne (2020, p. 23).

Sixth, polarisation clearly played a major role in the ’government epidemic’ syndrome identified in Southern Europe in an earlier phase (Bosco & Verney 2016) and repeated in 2019. On the one hand, polarisation had negative consequences for government stability in all three countries. Polarisation over the Prespa Agreement brought the splitting up of the SYRIZA-ANEL coalition government in Greece (Skoulariki 2020). Intragovernmental policy polarisation and competition between the Five Star Movement and the Lega in Italy caused the break-up of the Italian Conte I coalition in August 2019 (Conti, Pedrazzani & Russo 2020). Meanwhile in Spain, polarisation was responsible for the 2019 repeat election because Ciudadanos’ move to the right made a government agreement with the PSOE impossible (Simón 2020a, 2020b). On the other hand, government formation processes in Italy and Spain also showed a number of those unique events, uncharted outcomes and repeat elections indicating the good health of the syndrome which had emerged during the Great Recession. Such were, in Italy, the creation of an all-populist coalition government (with the help of novelties like the cabinet contract and the conciliation committee), and in Spain the formation of the first coalition government since 1977. The leftist alliance between the PSOE and UP, formed in January 2020, is also remarkable as a minority coalition that needs to fight for support in parliament. In contrast, the formation of a single-party majority government in Greece for the first time in a decade appeared almost as a novelty. What was once normal today seems unusual in Southern Europe.

Given all the above, if Sartori was studying Southern Europe today, he might detect the presence of the two ‘alternative possibilities’ which he proposed as theoretical but improbable models in his overall framework on party systems: the ‘two party polarised’ and the ‘limited but polarised pluralism’ (Sartori 2005, p. 259). These were party system types which Sartori built as mixed categories, more for the sake of completeness than for empirical aims. The former could be used to depict the Greek case while the latter could help us understand Spain and Italy in the last few years.

Anna Bosco and Susannah Verney are the Editors of South European Society and Politics and the related Routledge book series. Together they have co-edited four comparative books, all published by Routledge, most recently Crisis Elections, New Contenders and Government Formation: Breaking the Mould in Southern Europe (2018).

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Anna Bosco

Anna Bosco is Associate Professor of Comparative Politics and Politics of the European Union at the University of Florence. She has carried out research on parties and party systems change in Italy, Spain, Portugal, Greece and East-Central Europe.

Susannah Verney

Susannah Verney is is Associate Professor of European Integration and European Politics at the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens. She has carried out research on Greek and South European politics, euroscepticism and EU Enlargement.

Notes

1. According to Gerring, descriptive arguments describe a phenomenon by answering ‘what’ questions – when, whom, how possible, in what manner – while causal arguments answer ‘why’ questions. ‘Where knowledge of a topic is minimal, description must proceed independently of causal propositions’ (2012, p. 733).

2. On the relevance of anti-system parties as indicators of polarisation, see Sartori (2005, pp. 307–308, 1982, p. 221).

3. A polarisation index was thus defined as ‘the distance between any two groups of partisans, as measured by the (absolute) difference between their mean self-locations divided by the theoretical maximum, which, on the left-right scale in question, is 9’ (Sani & Sartori 1983, p. 321).

4. The parties were, in Italy, the PCI (Italian Communist Party) on the left and the MSI (Italian Social Movement); in Spain, the PCE (Spanish Communist Party) and the rightwing Alianza Popular; in Greece, the KKE (Communist Party of Greece) on the left and a succession of far right parties, the National Camp (Εθνική Παράταξη) represented in the national parliament (1977–1981), the Progressive Party (Κόμμα Προοδευτικών) and EPEN (Εθνική Πολιτική Ένωση – National Political Union), with one European Parliament seat each in 1981–84 and 1984–1989 respectively.

5. On the democratic adaptation of anti-system parties in the democracies of Southern Europe, see Bosco (2001).

6. According to the literature on affective polarisation, which is based on the Social Identity Theory by Henri Tajfel, partisanship has become an indicator of social identity: ‘parties are salient social identities and … citizens derive self-esteem and satisfaction from the relative success and status of their party compared to that of the other’. As a consequence, not only voters will focus on news and opinions that favour their party, but ‘the combination of these strong identities and formation of biased beliefs is hypothesised to generate affective polarization between the parties’ (McCarty 2019, p. 62).

7. The Affective Polarisation Index elaborated by Reiljan (2020, p. 380) ‘indicates the average of partisan affective evaluations between in-party and out-parties, weighted by the electoral size (vote share) of the parties’. For a discussion on the measures of affective polarisation, see also Druckman and Levendusky (2019).

8. Reiljan relies on data from the third and fourth waves of the Comparative Study of Electoral Systems, and therefore takes into account Portugal in 2009 and 2015, Spain in 2008 and Greece in 2009 and 2012.

9. The authors take into account Greece in 2009, 2012 and 2015; Portugal in 2002, 2005, 2009 and 2015; and Spain in 1996, 2000, 2004 and 2008 (Gidron, Adams & Horne 2020, p. 19).

10. In the 46 years between 1948 and 1994, the DC ruled in coalition with minor centre-left and centre-right parties and only four prime ministers (out of 30) were not Christian Democrats.

11. Further evidence that mass polarisation was driven by Berlusconi can be found by looking at the justice cleavage. In the period 1994–2011 diverging trends of trust in the judiciary according to citizens’ political orientation showed that ‘Berlusconi’s anti-judicial rhetoric .. had a significant impact on public attitudes towards the judiciary, and contributed to exacerbating the polarisation between two opposite views of the justice system in Italy’ (Dallara 2015, p. 60).

12. Mavrogordatos (1984), in an influential article, was the first to apply the polarised pluralism model to Greece, but for the post-1981 period.

13. In Spanish, the term means dramatic confrontation, the application of force, extreme conflict. Given the absence of a precise equivalent in English, the Spanish term is used here.

14. The PP, which in 2004 expected the vote to confirm its hold on office, stigmatised the PSOE victory as an ‘accident’ brought about by the terrorist attacks that had taken place in three Madrid railway stations on the early morning of 11 March (M-11), only a few days before the elections of 14 March.

15. Although Rajoy attacked almost every decision of the Zapatero governments, his prime targets were not the more ideologically-driven measures – on which the PP would have gained a hearing only among its own supporters – but ‘state issues’, such as counter-terrorism strategies, the territorial organisation of the state and, after 2008, the management of the economic crisis. In other words, the PP chose to politicise transversal issues that were more likely to attract to the party the support of progressively-minded voters while toning down its profile, seen as too conservative by most Spanish voters (Bosco 2018; Gunther & Montero 2012).