Between a Rock and a Hard Place: The Governing Dilemmas of Rifondazione Comunista

Abstract

Italy is an unusual case in that, until very recently, outsider parties of the left (and right) were significant, taken-for-granted and seemingly permanent features of the political landscape. After World War II, the second largest party was the Italian Communist Party (Partito Comunista Italiano, PCI). Its outstanding electoral performances (as compared with communist parties in other western democracies) meant that it was always ‘system relevant’ in Sartorian (1976) terms, while its permanent exclusion from office was one of the cornerstones of what was most distinctive about the Italian party and political systems. That is, the Cold War dread of communism, and thus the absence of any feasible governing coalitions not built around the large centre-placed Christian Democrats (Democrazia Cristiana, DC), reduced electoral pressures on the governing parties to enact coherent legislative programmes – by rendering alternation in government impossible. Parties relatively free of pressures to enact coherent legislative programmes were, consequently, unable to construct coalitions with any real cohesion and therefore power vis-à-vis the legislature. Hence governments were highly unstable – there were 50 between the election of the Constituent Assembly in 1946 and the general election of 1994, easily a European record – and their party components had to rely on clientelism and patronage as the only alternative to policy as a basis for competition between them, a feature also giving the Italian system notoriety on the European stage.