Italy Appoints Third Unelected Prime Minister

Matteo Renzi was sworn in as Italy’s third unelected prime minister in two years on February 22 after he ousted his predecessor, Enrico Letta, and took his place at the head of Italy’s fragile coalition government.

Italy’s political system is dysfunctional even at the best of times. Renzi is the leader of Italy’s 63rd government since the current political system was formed 68 years ago. But the succession of unelected leaders, coupled with rising social unrest, shows that the euro crisis has triggered a political crisis that has not disappeared even though the euro’s troubles are now out of the headlines.

After Italy ran into debt problems, the European Union forced then-Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi out of office, replacing him with Mario Monti. Then in 2013, Italy held elections. After the economic crisis, voters became disillusioned with Italy’s major parties. The Five Star Movement, led by a comedian and blogger Beppe Grillo, came from nowhere to win more votes with its anti-elite and anti-establishment message than any other party.

With the Five Star Movement taking up 25 percent of the vote, none of Italy’s traditional left- or right-wing groupings had enough seats to form a coalition on their own. So they cobbled together a messy left-right coalition, appointing Enrico Letta prime minister as a compromise candidate, despite the fact that he was not running for that office.

Matteo Renzi, then the mayor of Florence, won the leadership of Letta’s Democratic Party in December. On February 14, he persuaded the party to vote against Letta and bring down his government.

But despite the change in leader and the unwieldy coalition, Italy’s parliament does not plan to hold new elections. This is partly because Italy’s old election law has been ruled unconstitutional and a new one has not been decided.

Parliament is in no hurry to pass a new law. Italy’s traditional elites are worried that in fresh elections, they would lose even more power than before. Delay gives them a good excuse to cling to power a little longer.

So Italy continues with a government that can barely function, united only by the fear of fresh elections, and becoming increasingly less representative of the country that elected it. That is a recipe for social unrest.

The Five Star Movement is part of this trend—street rallies were a big part of their campaign. So is the Pitchforks Movement, which started out as a protest in Sicily calling for the island to have more autonomy but has now become a nationwide anti-establishment movement.

The Pitchforks Movement combines farmers, truckers, unemployed, far-right and far-left groups, football hooligans and others to create a relatively small but widespread protest group. It held its last major protests in early December, disrupting road and rail networks.

The small, but substantial, violent element of this protest group could end up killing it, putting off the more moderate supporters. But the anger behind it is not going away.

Unemployment is around 13 percent. Youth unemployment hovers at a shocking 42 percent. People have very serious problems, and the government looks like part of that problem. It certainly isn’t providing any solutions.

There is nothing wrong with replacing a prime minister without holding elections. This is simply how a parliamentary democracy works. But at a time when the nation is experiencing real hardship, having a leadership that seems cut off from the people, and unaccountable to them, can cause the anger and discontent to grow. If the nation votes in a leader and he makes a mess of things, the people at least bear part of the blame for giving him the job. But Italy is now on its third unelected prime minister. Couple that with the fact that a growing number of important decisions are taken by unelected European bureaucrats, and you have plenty of reasons for Italian voters to feel angry and frustrated.

Italy is simply part of a trend across the Continent. In Greece, the traditional parties saw their support vanish almost overnight. France’s president keeps setting new records for the lowest-ever approval rating, while the National Front has become a serious competitor to France’s traditional left and right parties. Spain’s main parties are both struggling. Even in northern Europe, traditional parties are being confronted by new upstarts.

Polls for the European parliamentary elections in May forecast that it will soon be in the same situation as Italy’s parliament. Far-right, non-mainstream and Euroskeptic parties are expected to take a large chunk of the seats, forcing the left and right wings of the parliament to create some kind of centralist coalition.

It is tempting to be optimistic about all this. Few would mourn the demise of the complacent and traditional elites that got Europe into this mess in the first place. Democracy isn’t meant to create a permanent ruling class.

But the history of the 1930s gives us a powerful warning. European politics are following exactly the same path as they did back then. The sudden rise of new parties force traditional parties to form left-right coalitions. Historically, these have proved messy and ineffective, which meant that voters became even more disillusioned, turning even more to the new extreme parties.

Today, the fringe parties are not as extreme as they were in the 1930s. But there is still danger in all this anger and disillusionment. Many are becoming convinced that their democratic system works against them and must be destroyed.

Mussolini rose to power on the same wave of anger at the political elites that Grillo and others are riding today. They share some of the same slogans and use some similar rhetoric. Of course, they have some important differences: Grillo has no plans to carve out an empire in Africa or plunge Europe into war. The real danger is probably not Grillo—it is that Italy’s angry voters could rally around someone more like Mussolini.

Democracy is more fragile than we like to think. In much of Europe, it has existed for only a few decades. Italy’s third unelected prime minister in a row shows that democracy is dying in Europe.

America is trying to hand over the job of “leader of the free world” to Europe. If Europe loses democracy as it becomes more active in the world, that is a danger for the whole planet.

For more on this danger, and the parallels with 1930, read last year’s article “Déjà Vu.”