The Lega – Five-star government: Tanto fumo per poco arrosto?

As we were going to press towards the end of January, two of the most high-profile issues on the agenda of public discussion were the citizens’ income and an escalating row with France over migrant arrivals in Europe. The first had been one of the Five-star Movement’s flagship policies in the previous year’s election, and it was provided for through a decree law approved by the Cabinet on 17 January. The second was triggered by suggestions by Luigi Di Maio a few days later that France’s policies towards Africa¹ were impoverishing many countries there, making it responsible for the European migrant crisis. Both issues are relevant for an assessment of the nature and performance of the Lega – Five-star (M5s) government.

The so-called ‘citizens’ income’ is not, in fact, a citizens’ income at all, and in terms of substance differs very little from the ‘inclusion income’ that had already been legislated for by the Movement’s much criticised mainstream opponents. Otherwise known as a basic income, the idea has deep historical roots stretching all the way back to Thomas Paine and even earlier; and, as it came to be discussed in several European countries in the 1980s, it referred to an income paid to everyone, simply in virtue of citizenship, regardless of wealth, employment status, or anything else. It is easy to see why such an idea would appeal to a party that claimed to want to challenge elites and to redistribute power from the top downwards since, by giving everyone more choices about how to work and for how much of their time, it would empower ordinary people enormously. But the ‘citizens’ income’ M5s-style bears little real relation to such an idea. It will only be available to those in absolute poverty; it will require the recipient to agree to work or training; it will be withdrawn from those refusing the third offer of employment deemed suitable for them. The ‘inclusion income’ introduced by the Gentiloni government in 2017 was essentially the same: yes, it was less generous than the citizens' income; but it too was confined to those of limited means, and it too was tied to recipients’ willingness to accept specific employment or training obligations.

The spats with France were rooted in genuine divergences of view between the two countries with regard to north Africa. For example, Italy, with obvious interests in Libya (stemming from her energy needs and the migrant crisis) had been engaged in a series of diplomatic efforts designed to bring stability to the country – but had then found its attempts undermined by French efforts to the same end: President Emmanuel Macron’s invitation to Libyan Prime Minister, Fayez Serraj, and his main opponent, General Khalifa Haftar, to talks in Paris in July 2017 did not produce any major diplomatic developments, but it did change the dynamics of Libyan negotiations (Felsen 2018, 370–1). Still, as the editor of liMes, Lucio Caaracciolo, put it on 23 January, the polemical exchanges between Rome and Paris (which had been going on for several months) were examples of ‘two countries speaking to themselves by speaking to the other’; and to reduce Italy’s foreign policy in Europe to a question of the CFA franc was not to engage in foreign policy, but rather, propaganda.²

The two issues exemplify what seem to have become the distinctive traits of the government since it took office on 1 June last year. On the one hand, it is a government composed of outsider, populist, parties which nevertheless – as the articles in this special issue discuss in some detail in relation to the larger of the two – have found themselves obliged to come to terms with the constraints involved in working within the established representative institutions. As a consequence, they have, with the passage of time, become institutionalised, obliged to modify and in some instances drop, radical procedural and substantive demands. The shift from the citizens’ income, as originally conceived, to its current version is just one of numerous examples of retreat from what had once seemed positions of principle. The formation of the government itself had represented the latest in a long series of examples of the Movement’s capacity to break old taboos (Bordignon and Ceccarini 2019) – in this case the taboo against alliances, forced on it by the parliamentary arithmetic and its awareness that fresh elections would likely have been political suicide.

On the other hand, faced with the constraints on their capacity to deliver in terms of substance, the governing parties seem to have been engaged in a more or less constant propaganda war (whether it is against against France, migrants, Europe, la casta or something else), taking a tendency towards permanent campaigning to a new level, thanks especially to the opportunities afforded by the new media. Twitter, Facebook and other platforms have allowed leaders like Di Maio and Matteo Salvini to appeal to their supporters directly and so evade the constraints of the traditional media as communication channels – and in so doing to provide news material setting an agenda the traditional media have themselves been obliged to follow. And yet in doing this they have been forced to break still further taboos: as the articles in this special issue make clear, bowing to electoral imperatives, Di Maio and other M5s leaders have long abandoned the Movement’s one-time prohibition on personalising appeals through the media, once rightly understood as highly dangerous for a movement looking to eliminate the risk of oligarchical tendencies arising within it.

Does this mean, then, that the M5s and its coalition partner, are becoming domesticated, that they are bound to end up – and to end up legislating – just like the mainstream parties they so despise? To answer this question, it needs first to be reiterated that these are populist parties and as such are corrosive of democracy; for in claiming to be the authentic representatives of the interests of ordinary people against the elites (M5s) and outsiders (Lega), they imply that the only test of democratic legitimacy is the will of the people itself as determined by the counting of votes – forgetting that the democratic quality of a decision is also a function of the availability of opportunities for deliberation before votes are counted, and of respect of inalienable rights of minorities (including elites and outsiders). There are, then, two ways of addressing the question.

On the one hand, unlike the fascism of the pre-war period, the parties have no real image of the ‘good society’ – no real project for the remaking of society from the bottom up. And the empirical evidence suggests that in entering government, outsider, populist parties are always confronted with a dilemma which they find very difficult to manage without eventually losing support. On the one hand, once they reach a certain size, refusing to join government means that they risk consigning themselves to irrelevance. On the other hand, joining government subjects them to pressures to compromise – pressures whose management exposes them to the risk of losing support on two fronts. Refusals to compromise, if they threaten government instability or other undesirable consequences, may undermine the support of moderates. Compromise and a willingness to abandon first principles means the risk of losing the votes of diehard, principled supporters. The True Finns learned this in October 2015 – when their support fell to 10.7% from the 17.7% they had won in the elections in April, with some supporters calling upon them to leave the governing coalition over what they saw as the centre-right government’s soft immigration policies (Milne 2015) – as did the the Norwegian Progress Party which had taken 16.3% of the vote in the parliamentary election of September 2013 and took 9.5% in municipal elections held in September 2015 since they could no longer complain about salient issues such as road tolls (as they controlled the transport ministry) or taxation (as they controlled the finance ministry).

It might seem, then, that there is little to worry about. However, the other way of looking at the question is one that invites continued caution. The governing parties, we suggested, seem engaged in a constant propaganda war: almost a permanent election campaign. Now political communication, as we know, takes place through the construction of narratives or stories – stories which, in Laity’s (2018) words, ‘build us up’: we need stories because a story

helps us share; it creates a common culture and teaches ethics … because otherwise we are atomised individuals: we don’t want to be atomised individuals, we want to be part of the gang. So which gang are we going to be a part of? And what is the ethos of that gang? [T]hat gang can be a small group of people … and it can end up being a country or an empire.

So when we sign up to a story we come to accept a way of viewing the world which, for us, is true because we want it to be true and which therefore leaves us unmoved by evidence and rational argument. Herein, then, lies the danger: the stories that migrants pose a security risk; that Europe has brought austerity; that the French and/or established politicians cannot be trusted, are very powerful stories. And they are worrying both because they underpin support for politicians whose commitment to liberal democracy one might at least question given their embrace of populism, and because they are themselves corrosive of the attitudes of tolerance and trust necessary for healthy democracy. At the end of January 2019, as the propaganda war looked set to intensify with the approach of the European Parliament elections, there seemed little reason to expect that the danger would diminish any time soon.

Notes

1. Associated with its management of the CFA franc, a colonial era currency backed by the French treasury.

2. Interview given during the course of La7 broadcast, ‘Otto e mezzo’, 23 January 2019, http://www.la7.it/otto-e-mezzo/rivedila7/conte-allattacco-delleuropa-23-01-2019-261171.