Italy goes to the polls on Sunday, 25 September. Normally, no one would notice — not even the Italians — because the country’s democracy has long seemed chaotic.

Since World War 2, Italy has had 19 elections, none of which has delivered a single-party majority, which has meant a permanent state of uneasy and tenuous coalitions. In 76 years, they’ve had 44 separate administrations under 30 different prime ministers. (By comparison, South Africa has had 12 leaders in that time. The US has had 14.)

Italy’s longest-serving prime minister in this period was the corrupt rogue Silvio Berlusconi, and in recent decades, their most effective politician has been television comedian Beppe Grillo.

The consequence is a sense that Italy seems to function as well as it does (with a superb public transport system which I experienced over the past three weeks, as just one example) in spite of — not because of — its governments, and for that reason their elections can safely be largely ignored.

That was a sentiment shared by the people I spoke to. They were more occupied with local tax burdens and gigantic Juventus’s stunning loss to the minnow Monza in Serie A.

But, this time round, the world is watching the Italian hustings closely because of fears of a populist right-wing government being formed in the country for the first time since the Mussolini era.

Brothers of Italy

If the polls are accurate, then this deeply conservative coalition will include Berlusconi’s Forza Italia, but will be dominated by the ominously named Brothers of Italy, which, somewhat bewilderingly, is headed by a woman, Giorgia Meloni.

She is the likely next prime minister and has expressed admiration for Italy’s fascist past, is a fan of Hungary’s extremist Viktor Orbán and has colleagues who openly boast about running Roma people and immigrants off the streets.

To be balanced, the 45-year-old Meloni has markedly moderated her public utterances during the campaign, volubly rejects Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and her image isn’t plastered everywhere in fascistic fashion — in fact, it was barely visible in the multitude of political ads I saw in the north and middle of the country. (She is from Rome and Italy is deeply provincial in its sentiments.)

I’ll leave others to explore her likely style of government and the implications of this latest episode in the disturbing pan-European drift towards native populism, and will focus instead on what we can learn from Italy for the future of our political system.

To a degree we are already in The Coalition Era in South Africa with so many hung municipalities — the DA is currently wrestling with a nine-party monster in Johannesburg — and we’ll go deeper into that era after the 2024 elections with the likelihood that the national and several provincial governments will need to be negotiated.

Important lessons

As noted already, Italy exists in a permanent state of coalitions. And their lessons are important for us.

The first is that coalitions are now formed in advance and are signalled on the ballot paper. Coalitions are effectively institutionalised. There are many individual parties (including the Party of Creative Madness!) and a far smaller number of coalitions.

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The voting process is complex, but the electorate has the opportunity to vote for both party and coalition. This narrows the scope for vanity freelancing by individual leaders of tiny parties seeking bigger leverage after the election, and it brings a degree of transparency and clarity. 

Helen Zille will no doubt argue that advance commitment on coalition partners impractically narrows negotiation space, but it will also prevent the kind of bewilderment created when the DA gets into bed with the EFF simply to get over the 50% line and into government.

The public service

Another lesson is to urgently depoliticise the public service. ANC cadre deployment has been a catastrophe in this country, but it will become even worse if many important jobs constantly turn over on the whim of the many coalition parties claiming their space at the trough.

Italy seems to have a generally solid local and national administrative class that gets on with running those railways efficiently, irrespective of the parliamentary dance. (Spare me a digression here: one of the most famous sayings justifying Fascism or a dictatorship is that “under Mussolini, at least the trains ran on time”. Two points — first, they run very much on time in the Italian democracy and, second, the truth is that they were inefficient under Mussolini, but the media was banned from commenting on this fact).

The final lesson of coalitions is harder to deal with.

For the past 18 months, Italy has experienced a period of political calm under the efficient technocratic leadership of Mario Draghi. The 75-year-old former European Central Bank boss was called on in desperation by the president to form a broad church government during the pandemic.

Draghi inspanned almost every party and delivered on his mandate in an apolitical manner. But egos ultimately got in the way and things fell apart. Draghi’s resignation has sparked this election.

The Brothers of Italy were the one significant grouping that stayed out of the coalition and, as a result, has surged in the polls. It has established a clear oppositional identity and has swamped the other conservative parties that did the right thing and joined the government of unity.

Rewards of going rogue

The political rewards for responsible participation in coalition governments are low — you cannot claim successes and you can be nailed for failures. The political rewards for irresponsibly staying out and going rogue are high… until you have to form a coalition government of your own. Then some chickens might come a-roosting, as Brother Giorgia Meloni could be about to find out.

Italy has also done something we should do. For this election, they’ve radically shrunk the number of elected politicians in both national houses by one-third — 400 deputies in the Chamber from 630, and 200 Senators instead of 315.

This creates a higher threshold for gaining a seat and should beneficially reduce the number of rats-and-mice parties. It also cuts plenty of anonymous backbench sleepers off the tax payroll. DM