Silvio’s Party

Abstract

Italy is going through a new crisis in its party system comparable in many respects to the one that brought down the First Republic at the beginning of the 1990s. On 12 November 2011, against the background of a global economic and financial crisis that hit the southern countries in the euro zone particularly severely with Italy according to the experts threatened with bankruptcy in the same way as Greece and Portugal, Silvio Berlusconi, under pressure from Brussels and the financial markets, was forced to tender his resignation as Italy’s Prime minister. A few days later, the President of the Republic, Giorgio Napolitano, appointed Professor Mario Monti who quickly put together a government of political and financial experts. The Monti administration immediately imposed a raft of austerity measures that, after only a few months, had the effect of restoring Italy’s credibility in the international financial markets. At the end of 2012, after some hesitation, emboldened by his initial success, Monti announced that he would lead a centrist coalition in snap parliamentary elections held on 24 and 25 February 2013. However, the strong medicine Italians had been forced to swallow to restore the health of the state’s finances seriously undermined the popularity of the man who had entered office as ‘Super Mario’, and the ‘Con Monti per l’Italia’ list, far from carrying off the anticipated victory suffered a drop in support that was seen as an outright rejection.¹