Many of the elements of Berlusconismo were already present in that first campaign to become prime minister: Berlusconi’s larger-than-life persona, his unscrupulous use of his media empire to propel himself onto the political stage, his proto-populist marketing-style approach to politics. Yet, for several years, as far I was concerned, Berlusconi was little more than an annoying interruption between episodes of my favourite TV shows.

This changed in the final years of high school, when I became involved in Left-wing politics. One of the first things I learned was that being Left-wing in late-Nineties Italy meant being against Berlusconi. Even though I didn’t realise it at the time, what I was being exposed to was perhaps one Berlusconi’s most toxic legacies: the fact that, by then, the Italian Left had come to define itself almost exclusively in opposition to Berlusconi — as anti-Berlusconismo.

This changed, briefly, with the advent of the anti-globalisation movement. The horizon of Left-wing politics was extended beyond national borders (and beyond Berlusconi) to embrace — in our naïve vision at least — the entire planet. There were much bigger threats than Berlusconi looming out there: neoliberal globalisation, transnational corporations, free-trade agreements, and global financial institutions such as the IMF, the World Bank and the WTO.

That movement culminated in the massive demonstrations that were held against the G8 summit in Genoa in July 2001 — one of the largest protests in Western Europe’s recent history, and one of the bloodiest. It culminated in violent clashes with, and brutal repression by, the security forces, and in the fatal shooting of 23-year old anarchist Carlo Giuliani by the police. For everyone on the Left, and especially for those who had witnessed first-hand the violence in Genoa — including myself — the blame for those tragic events fell on one person: Silvio Berlusconi, who had won the elections for the second time just a few months earlier.

As the anti-globalisation movement waned during Berlusconi’s second term in office between 2001 and 2006 — the longest served by any Italian leader since the Second World War — Italian Left-wing politics once again came to be defined by anti-Berlusconismo, though for a few years the latter overlapped with opposition to the war in Iraq (for several years, Italy was the third-largest contingent of the US-led coalition). In 2008, after a two-year centre-left government led by Romano Prodi, Berlusconi was elected as prime minister again. By the time the euro crisis hit in 2010, he had been in power for almost a decade. Meanwhile, anti-Berlusconismo had metastasised into a political obsession: if only he could be removed from the equation, everything would be fine.

This came to a head in late 2011, when a financial crisis forced Berlusconi to resign. Within hours, a large crowd had gathered in front of the Quirinal Palace — the official residence of the President of Italy, where Berlusconi went to tender his resignation — to celebrate his departure. As someone who had grown estranged with Italian Left-wing politics in the previous years, the whole thing struck me as odd. I was no fan of the man. But even accepting the official narrative of events — that the crisis had been the result of financial markets punishing Berlusconi for his poor handling of the economic crisis — I couldn’t see how an elected government being forced to step down by financial speculators could be a cause for celebration — especially for those on the Left.

The short-sightedness of the celebrations became tragically obvious when Italian president Giorgio Napolitano appointed Mario Monti, a former European Union commissioner and international adviser to Goldman Sachs, to form a “technical government”, which proceeded to administer a devastating austerity “cure”. In a way, the whole affair exposed the myopia of anti-Berlusconismo. By obsessively focusing on Berlusconi and his threat to democracy, the Italian Left had ended up ignoring — or worse, embracing — the more significant structural trends that had been weakening Italian democracy for the past 20 years and more: the gradual erosion of sovereignty at the hands of the EU and later the euro; the growing power of the technocratic apparatuses of the state, such as the Bank of Italy and the President of the Republic; the undermining of Italy’s strategic interests by its supposed allies, exemplified by the Nato-led attack on Libya in 2011.

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While Berlusconi didn’t explicitly push back against any of these things — he was, after all, staunchly Atlanticist and pro-European — he did try, though never with enough conviction, to strike a balance between Italy’s international obligations and his vision of the national interest. This was particularly apparent in his foreign policy, through which Berlusconi tried to assert a relative degree of autonomy and independence. Aware of Italy’s dependency on foreign energy imports, Berlusconi won favourable gas and oil deals by cultivating strong friendships with the leaders of energy-producing countries: President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey, Colonel Muammar Gaddafi of Libya and, most notably, Vladimir Putin.

In 2008, for example, Berlusconi signed a “friendship treaty” with Libya, promising $5 billion over 20 years to compensate for Italy’s colonial occupation in the early 20th century; in exchange, Libya agreed to sign off on lucrative energy contracts and to prevent unauthorised immigrants from travelling to Italy. Before that, he had tried to talk Bush, with whom he was on good terms, out of invading Iraq. Similarly, he backed joint energy projects between Gazprom in Russia and the Italian energy company Eni at a time when the EU was pushing for less dependence on Russian gas. Berlusconi also criticised the American missile defence project, the eastward expansion of Nato, and the West’s support for Kosovo’s independence for being “provocations of Russia”.

“Our relationship with Berlusconi is complex,” wrote Elizabeth Dibble, the deputy chief of mission at the United States Embassy in Rome, in a 2009 cable. “He is vocally pro-American and has helped address our interest on many levels in a manner and to a degree that the previous government was unwilling or unable to do.” Yet, the diplomat noted, there were other areas where Berlusconi “seems determined to be best friends with Russia, sometimes in direct opposition to American, and even European Union, policy”. Once the euro crisis hit, Berlusconi also tried to resist, to a degree, the aggressive austerity policies demanded by the EU and Germany, locking horns with Merkel, Sarkozy and Brussels on more than one occasion.

All of which meant that, by 2011, a consensus had formed on both sides of the Atlantic that Berlusconi had to go. In 2015, former Spanish prime minister José Luis Zapatero recounted to the Italian daily La Stampa the events that took place at the G20 in 2011, just a few days before Berlusconi’s resignation: “I will never forget what I saw at the G20 meeting in Cannes… Berlusconi and Tremonti [Berlusconi’s finance minister] were under immense pressure to accept an IMF bailout. But they staunchly refused. Shortly afterwards, I heard Monti’s name mentioned in the corridors. I found it very strange. Was it a coup d’état? I don’t know, all I can say is that the proponents of austerity wanted to decide Italy’s economic policies in place of the government.”

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Indeed, over the years, it has become apparent that the financial crisis behind Berlusconi’s fall wasn’t simply caused by financial markets — but by the European Union itself. As even the Financial Times acknowledged, the ECB under Mario Draghi “forced Silvio Berlusconi to leave office in favour of unelected Mario Monti”, by discontinuing the central bank’s Italian bond purchases — thus deliberately causing interest rates to rise above safety levels — and by making the ousting of Berlusconi the precondition for further ECB support.

Regardless of what one thinks of Berlusconi, it’s hard to imagine a more disturbing scenario than a supposedly “independent” and “apolitical” central bank resorting to monetary blackmail in order to expel an elected government from office and impose its own political agenda. Yet the evidence suggests that it was a monetary coup d’état that took place in Italy in 2011. The consequences would become tragically apparent in the following years: Italy has essentially been put into “controlled administration” by Brussels and Frankfurt — and, increasingly, Washington. The kind of relative autonomy that Berlusconi had succeeded in carving out for his country is today a distant memory. Today, blind obedience to the Euro-Atlantic status quo is firmly expected of Italy’s governments, lest they want to face the consequences of stepping out of line — a point that Meloni understands all too well.

None of this means that we should glorify Berlusconi, of course. All the charges laid against him over the years — his murky business deals with shady characters tied to the Mafia, his sex scandals, his patronage of the country’s political elites, his unscrupulous use of his media empire, his use of politics to advance his own economic interests — are, after all, true, and very serious. And whenever he had to choose between the country’s interests and his personal ones — over Libya, for example — he always ended up choosing the latter. Yet, there is little doubt that Berlusconi, for better or worse, was Italy’s last statesman. Despite being dismissed as a threat to democracy, it was his departure that really opened the door to Italy’s post-democratic, and therefore post-political, turn. Since he left office, our elected governments have morphed into mere implementers of foreign diktats — and anti-Berlusconismo did nothing to stop it.

Brothers of Italy, in particular, continues its surge ahead of all the other parties, establishing Meloni as the de facto leader of the centre-Right coalition and as a likely candidate to become the first female prime minister in Italian history. Her party is now polling at around 25%, with Salvini’s Lega at 15% and Forza Italia at 7% — close to potentially giving the coalition more than 60% of the seats due to the current electoral system.

On the opposite front, the centrist Democratic Party (PD), the party of the establishment, has severed all ties with Giuseppe Conte’s Five Star Movement, which they hold responsible for the fall of the Draghi government — an unforgivable sin in the eyes of the Italian elites. However, by foregoing an electoral alliance with Conte’s party, which until a few months ago seemed all but certain, the PD has effectively given up its only chance of coming anywhere close to a majority. On its own, the PD is currently polling at 23%, making it the second party in the country. But with its centre-Left coalition made up of small parties, they are unlikely to gain more than 30% of the votes.

For its part, the Five Star Movement has experienced the most spectacular fall from grace of any party in modern European history: at the last elections, in 2018, on the back of a strongly anti-establishment rhetoric, it gained an astonishing 32.7% of the votes, 11 million in total, making it by far the most-voted party in parliament. Today it is polling at around 10%.

This is the result of what many view as a betrayal of the party’s ideals. Failing to achieve much during its short-lived “populist” government alliance with the Lega, it subsequently underwent nothing less than a full-blown transformation, first allying itself with the pro-establishment PD and then offering its unwavering support for the technocratic government of Mario Draghi, the embodiment itself of post-democratic technocratic management. Needless to say, voters weren’t impressed — hence the party’s free-fall in the polls.

Indeed, for the many millions of Italians who placed their hopes in Five Star, the lesson is a bleak one: voting is pointless. Unsurprisingly, most polls forecast the turnout at the upcoming elections to be the lowest ever — with potentially more than 40% of voters not bothering to head to the polls.

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However, it would be a mistake to blame this on the Five Star’s betrayal — or on Matteo Salvini’s equally pathetic downfall from populist rabble-rouser to establishment apparatchik for that matter. These are epiphenomena of a much deeper, structural malaise of Italian post-democracy: the fact that governments, regardless of who gets elected, have little choice but to go along with what Brussels and Frankfurt say.

This became apparent during the Five Star Movement-Lega government. First, President Mattarella vetoed the economic minister proposed by two parties due to his euro-critical stance, forcing them to opt for a more status quo-friendly choice; then the executive found itself on a collision course with Brussels over a minuscule budget deficit increase, which eventually compelled the government to back down. Or one could go back to the even more dramatic events that led to Berlusconi’s resignation in 2011, when the European Central Bank, led by Draghi, engineered a sovereign debt crisis in order to force Silvio Berlusconi to leave office in favour of technocrat Mario Monti.

To put it starkly, Italy is no longer a democracy — it’s an appendage to the EU empire. There’s really no other way of describing a system where democratically unaccountable institutions, such as the European Commission and ECB, are able to arbitrarily decide the policies of elected governments or even forcibly remove them from office. So citizens can hardly be blamed for thinking that voting is, ultimately, pointless.

Parties are perfectly aware of this, but are unwilling to admit it to voters. And no one is more aware of it than Giorgia Meloni. She knows very well that Italy is not a sovereign nation, and that winning an election is only part of the effort. Having the support of the European (and American) establishment is just as important, if she wants to remain in power.

This is why she has gone to great lengths in recent months to dispel concerns about the party’s neo-fascist roots, and to express her wholehearted support for the European Union, the Euro-Atlantic partnership and Nato, including voting for sending weapons to Ukraine. Indeed, the first two points of the centre-right coalition’s agenda are the “full adherence to the European integration process” and “respect for Italy’s international alliances”.

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By the same token, for all her talk of “being on the side of workers”, Meloni has made sure to steer clear of any socio-economic proposals that might come up against the EU’s economic governance, knowing full well that it would result in swift and merciless retaliation by the European authorities. Indeed, her economic agenda is a classic neoliberal-conservative agenda programme — based on lower taxes (but fiscal rectitude), workfare schemes (making income support conditional on accepting whatever job recipients are offered), and greater labour flexibility. The only proposal that defies the economic orthodoxy is the call for slightly higher pensions.

Overall, Meloni prefers to talk of cultural-identitarian issues rather than economic ones. Hence her agenda’s focus on defending and promoting “Europe’s classical and Judeo-Christian historical and cultural roots and identity”, tighter immigration rules and greater crime-prevention measures. This is partly a result of Meloni’s background, of course. But it’s just as much a consequence of the way in which the EU’s economic pensée unique, by ruling out all alternatives to managing society and the economy, inevitably ends up pushing political challenges to the status quo, and to the EU itself, on to a strictly cultural and identitarian terrain.

This explains why, across Europe, opposition to the EU isn’t couched so much in terms of the bloc’s economic policies but of its encroachment upon the “diversity” of the European peoples. This puts Meloni’s Brothers of Italy up there with all major European Right-wing parties — Viktor Orbán’s Fidesz, Poland’s governing Law and Justice or Austria’s Freedom Party — none of which openly challenge the EU’s economic architecture, but mostly focus their criticism on the bloc’s threat to European cultural and religious traditions. This is not to say that these issues are not important, but this trend is revealing of the way the EU has succeeded in shifting any opposition to itself from the socioeconomic terrain to the identitarian terrain, thus fuelling the very culture wars that are tearing our societies apart.

What we might expect from a future centre-Right government was recently spelled out by Lucio Baccaro: “They will pass a few (heinous) laws about migrants, LGBTs, etc., they will get a bit of pork for their constituencies, but otherwise the country will continue being governed from outside.” Meanwhile, amid a dramatically worsening social and economic crisis, the concrete material needs of most Italians will go unanswered. Meloni — just like all the other parties — has no clue about how to solve the energy crisis, for example, and indeed has vowed to continue sanctions against Russia and military support for Ukraine, which of course are at the root of the current crisis.

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So why does Meloni enjoy such widespread and growing support? The answer is pretty straightforward: despite all the above, Brothers of Italy is the only party that has opposed the pro-EU and technocratic governments of the past ten years. And, therefore, in the eyes of a good number of Italians, Meloni still represents a challenge to the political establishment, which most Italians continue to rage against. For this very reason, Meloni channels the revulsion a lot of voters have for the PD, the incarnation of the progressive, pro-establishment, pro-EU Left.

This is also why the calls by the PD’s leader, Enrico Letta, to “unite against the fascist threat”, usually rather effective on Italy’s traditionally moderate electorate, are largely falling on deaf ears this time round. Not because Italians are developing a taste for fascism — there’s nothing “fascist” about Meloni by any reasonable understanding of the term — but because the anti-fascist trope rings increasingly hollow coming from a party that more than any other has supported the demolition of Italy’s democracy and welfare state at the hands of the European Union.

Even a growing number of people on the Left are coming round to this. A telling example was a rather astonishing article that appeared in the liberal-progressive magazine Left, which came to the following conclusion: “We need to face the reality that the Democratic Party is a deeply anti-popular, reactionary party, and is the main culprit of the Italian decline over the course of the past 15 years. Voting for it is not the least-worst choice, but the worst one.”

And yet, at the same time, those who vote for Meloni in the hope of changing things are likely to be disappointed. Given that the smaller anti-establishment parties — Gianluigi Paragone’s Italexit, the socialist anti-EU coalition Sovereign and Popular Italy, and the Left-wing Popular Union coalition — all risk remaining below the 3% threshold, the real threat to what’s left of Italian democracy doesn’t come from Meloni. Rather, it comes from the fact that, in all likelihood, 100% of the seats in the next Parliament will belong to the EU — and the stagnant economic system that caused this mess in the first place.

Everyone agreed: a Draghi government would be a blessing for the country, a final opportunity to redeem its sins and “make Italy great again”. Draghi, they said, simply by virtue of his “charisma”, “competence”, “intelligence” and “international clout”, would keep bond markets at bay, enact much-needed reforms, and relaunch Italy’s stagnant economy.

Alas, reality hasn’t exactly lived up to expectations: Draghi leaves behind a country in tatters. The latest European Commission macroeconomic forecast predicted that Italy will experience the slowest economic growth in the bloc next year, at just 0.9%, owing to a decline in consumer spending due to rising prices and lower business investment — a result of rising borrowing and energy costs, as well as disruptions in the supply of Russian gas.

Italy is also experiencing one of the fastest-growing inflation rates in Europe — which is currently at 8.6%, the highest level in more than three decades. Interest rates on Italian government bonds have also been steadily climbing ever since Draghi came to power, rising four-fold under his watch; today they stand at the highest level in almost a decade.

And this “polycrisis” has taken its toll on Italian society: 5.6 million Italians — almost 10% of the population, including 1.4 million minors — currently live in absolute poverty, the highest level on record. Many of these are in work, and that number is bound to increase as real wages in Italy continue to fall at the highest pace in the bloc. Meanwhile, almost 100,000 small and medium enterprises (SMEs) are at risk of insolvency — a 2% increase compared to last year.

So much for “Super Mario”, then. Of course, one could argue that other countries are experiencing similar problems, but it would be a mistake to let Draghi off the hook. He has been one of the staunchest supporters of the measures that led to this situation, having been a driving force in pushing for tough EU sanctions against Moscow — sanctions that are crippling Europe’s economies, while leaving Russia largely unscathed.

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Draghi even boasted about the bold measures adopted by Italy to wean the country off Russian gas — the result being that Italy is now the country that pays the highest wholesale electricity prices in the entire EU. The absurdity of these policies becomes apparent when we consider his attempt to reduce Italy’s dependence on Russian gas by reviving several coal-fired power plants — coal that Italy largely imports from Russia.

Worse still, Draghi did little or nothing to shield wage-earners, households and small businesses from the impact of these policies. Indeed, the few “structural” measures enacted by his government have all been aimed at promoting privatisation, liberalisation, deregulation and fiscal consolidation — such as opening up for privatisation those few public services that had remained outside of the scope of the market, further “flexibilising” labour, putting private beaches up for public tender for the first time in decades, or attempting to expand taxi services to include ride-sharing operators like Uber, sparking massive protests.

For anyone who has an inkling of Draghi’s ideology, this is hardly surprising. As I’ve argued before, Mario Draghi is the bodily incarnation of “neoliberalism”. Neither is it surprising that those policies haven’t delivered, given that the EU’s neoliberal logic, based upon privatisation, fiscal austerity and wage compression — which Draghi has played a crucial role in implementing since the early Nineties — is the main reason Italy is in such a mess to begin with. Draghi also further strengthened the EU’s stranglehold over the Italian economy by relentlessly peddling the narrative that Italy desperately needed the European Covid recovery funds to kickstart its economy, and that in order to access those funds it needed to diligently implement the reforms demanded by Brussels.

Yet in macroeconomic terms, the funds in question are a pittance, and nowhere close to what would be needed to have a meaningful impact on Italy’s economy. But they come with very strict conditionalities. This is ultimately what the EU’s Next Generation EU “recovery fund” is all about: increasing Brussels’s control over the budgetary policies of member states and strengthening the EU’s regime of technocratic and authoritarian control. And who better than Draghi could be trusted with locking such measures in place? As he himself noted, the “reform path” laid down by his government meant that “we have created the conditions for the [EU recovery] work to continue, regardless of who is [in government]” — thus ensuring that future governments wouldn’t stray from the path of righteousness.

Draghi, however, doesn’t just leave behind him a scorched economy but also a deeply fractured and divided society. He is the man responsible for devising the most punitive, discriminatory and segregational mass vaccination policies in the West, which not only excluded millions of unvaccinated people — including children — from social life, by extending vaccine passports to practically all public spaces, but also restricted many people from working. He also helped make the unvaccinated the target of institutionally sanctioned hate speech, such as when he infamously claimed: “You don’t get vaccinated, you get sick, you die. Or you kill.”

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All this might offer an indication of why a recent poll showed that 50% of Italians weren’t happy with the government’s work. And yet, in spite of these rather unimpressive results, when Draghi initially announced his intention to resign, the Italian establishment went into an apoplectic fit. In what will go down in history as one of the most pathetic demonstrations of the sycophantic conformism of Italian society, almost every professional category you can think of rushed to launch their own appeal begging Draghi to stay on — not only wealthy businessmen, as was to be expected, but also doctors, pharmacists, nurses, mayors, university deans, NGOs, progressive intellectuals and even the CGIL, the country’s largest union.

Even more pitiably, the Italian media gave massive coverage to several “pro-Draghi demonstrations” — numbering not more than a few dozen people. Perhaps most comically, one of the country’s largest news agencies, Adnkronos, even spoke of how several homeless people had come out to show their support for Draghi. One of these was quoted saying: “Draghi is making the difference. Italy has regained prestige and credibility thanks to him. As a homeless person I can testify to the fact that there’s a greater attention to us now and that’s thanks to Draghi.”

The Western international establishment also threw all its weight behind Draghi. Everyone from the Financial Times to the Guardian to the EU Commissioner for Economy Paolo Gentiloni came out to explain what a tragedy losing Draghi would be for Italy — and indeed for Europe as a whole. Gentiloni went so far as saying that “a perfect storm” would sweep over the country if Draghi were to leave; while the Guardian limited itself to instructing Italy’s MPs that Draghi “should stay for now”. The New York Times unironically claimed that Draghi’s departure would put an end to the “brief golden period” he ushered in for Italy. Talk of foreign actors meddling in Italy’s affairs.

So why, in spite of such massive pressures, did three parties effectively pull the plug on his government last week? Part of the explanation lies in the extent to which Draghi had managed to alienate parties such as the Five Star Movement and the League — refusing to engage with them on hardly any of his government’s policies, or to acknowledge even the most timid criticism. On more than one occasion, Draghi made very clear what he considered to be parliament’s role: that of rubber-stamping the decisions taken by government. This is evident also in Draghi’s abuse of the instrument of the confidence vote.

In his Senate speech last week, Draghi was even more explicit: after saying that he had decided to reconsider his resignation because “that is what the people want”, he essentially told Parliament that he was willing to stay on as premier only so long as the parties would agree not to interfere with any of the government’s future decisions. For many of those present in Parliament, the arrogance and megalomania of Draghi’s speech went a step too far — and moreover some say that Berlusconi was waiting for the right moment to avenge the time he was unseated by Draghi, in 2011, when the latter was president of the ECB.

However, one shouldn’t overstate the importance of Parliament’s anti-Draghi revolt. Ultimately, Draghi did little more than spell out an uncomfortable truth to the parties: “You have no real power, just accept it.” But that is a truth the political parties aren’t ready to accept. Ultimately, they are unwilling to face the fundamental contradiction between the country’s formal institutional architecture — that of a parliamentary democracy — and what we may call its “actually existing” institutional architecture, in which Parliament and by definition the political parties have almost no power whatsoever, because government itself, in the context of the eurozone, has little if any economic autonomy. The parties know this but are unwilling to admit it (to themselves but most importantly to voters).

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This leaves them in a state of permanent cognitive dissonance, leading to what we may call “the political cycle of the external constraint”. As in “normal” countries, parties vie for consensus on the basis of different electoral platforms — and as often happens, the parties promising “change” happen to win. However, unlike in “normal” countries, the parties that get into government soon find out that they lack the “normal” instruments of economic policy necessary to really change anything in socio-economic terms. In fact, they have little choice but to go along with what Brussels and Frankfurt say, and if they don’t play ball the ECB is always ready to turn up the heat. At that point, if the government doesn’t back down, the ECB will engineer a full-blown financial crisis (think Italy in 2011 or Greece in 2015) — which usually leads the political parties to turn to EU-backed technocrats to fix a problem the EU created in the first place.

Yet even if the government yields, the growing tension between the requirements of the external constraint and the demands of citizens, which the parties lack the tools to remedy, leads them to turn to technocrats to resolve the impasse, by having them implement the measures the parties don’t want to take responsibility for. Then, at a certain point, usually as new elections approach, political parties feel the need to re-legitimise themselves in the eyes of voters and thus  put the technocratic genie back into the lamp — until the next crisis, which sets a new cycle in motion.

This is largely the story of what happened between 2018 and Draghi’s ouster, as the Five Star Movement and League went from anti-EU populism to Draghi over the course of just a few years. And the next elections will set in motion a new cycle, possibly hailed by a centre-right Giorgia Meloni-led government. But as the social and economic situation continues to worsen, these cycles are also bound to grow shorter and shorter. A future centre-right government — “populist” or not — would have little or no ability to resolve the crises left behind by Draghi. As always, the shots will be called in Brussels and Frankfurt.

With the launch of its recent Transmission Protection Instrument (TPI), the ECB has provided itself with a tool that technically allows it to do “whatever it takes” to close euro spreads, thus potentially averting future financial crises. Such intervention, however, is conditional on compliance with the EU’s fiscal framework and with the “reforms” outlined in each country’s “recovery fund” plans — already locked in place by Draghi. But these will do nothing to end the unfolding social and economic crisis; in fact, they are certain to worsen it. In other words, the next Italian government, if it wants to stay financially afloat, will have little choice but to follow the economic diktats of the EU — or else. In such a context, how long before the last remnants of democratic legitimacy in countries such as Italy break down? And what then? Ultimately, the next euro crisis is much more likely to break out on the streets of Europe than on financial markets.

More than 50% of the country’s coastline is now rented out by the state to bagni, private beach resorts offering drinks, food, beach huts and hundreds of deckchairs for rent. In Tuscany and Romagna the percentage of these privatised beaches rises far higher: in Forte dei Marmi, on the west-facing sand of the Tuscan coast, 94% of the town beachfront is rented to bagni. Nearby, in Pietrasanta, it’s 98.8% and in Camaiore 98.4%. The record is held by Gatteo a Mare, on the Adriatic coast, where 100% of the town’s beaches are now privatised. That means there’s nowhere you’re allowed to throw a towel on the sand, plant a parasol and spread out your own picnic.

The growth of these bagni has become exponential in recent years: nationally, the number of private beach concessions has risen 12.5% since 2018. In the south the increases are even greater: in that same 2018-2021 period, the number of private resorts rose by 41.5%, 22.8% and 15% in Sicily, Campania and Basilicata respectively.

At these resorts, claiming the choicest space on the sand is almost as competitive as getting the right row in the opera. One woman I talk to is proud that her luxury resort in Liguria “won’t rent out the front row of lettini (deckchairs) right next to the sea even if they’re empty”. They’re reserved for the longest-standing families. As in nightclubs, a sense of exclusivity creates high demand and high prices. To keep cash flowing, though, some bagni employ heavies: last month it was reported that beach-goers in Bacoli, near Naples, were being frisked to check that no water bottles or homemade sandwiches were being brought in.

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There are few cheaper options. In Tuscany, a spiaggia libera ­— a free beach — is hard to find. They’re usually in the least desirable section of the coast: far from amenities and the shade of the pineta, often close to drains and estuaries, and likely to be more pebbly or prone to driftwood pile-ups.

The central criticism of privatised beaches is that resort managers are paying mid-20th-century rents while charging 21st-century prices. In 2017, it was revealed that the Arenile di Bagnoli in Campania, with two spaces totalling 14,000m² including a roof terrace and pool, was paying only €15,830 per annum. Covered beach-side spas like the Club Partenopeo, with lawns, jacuzzis and swanky bar, were paying only €2,621 per annum. The deckchair-renting racket is a glaring example of the demanio, state property, being milked for private gain. Overall, it’s estimated that the state only receives €100 million in levies from a business which has a turnover of €15 billion.

Further north, the profits are even higher. Flavio Briatore, the ex-Benetton and F1 Renault team manager, rents 5,000 m² in Marina di Pietrasanta for €17,619. Twiga, his luxury resort, can take that in one night. Briatore himself has been open about the absurdity, admitting the rental costs of bagni should be “tripled at the very least”. Franco, a do-it-all manager from another resort, admits that he’s running “a golden prison”. When I quote Briatore to Franco, he smiles and says: “Doubling it would be fine”. There can be few businesses in 2022 doing so well that doubled rents would be seen as no biggie.

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By THOMAS FAZI AND PAOLO CORNETTI

The issue of Italy’s private beaches is now coming to a head because Mario Draghi, the Italian Prime Minister, introduced legislation at the end of May to terminate all beach concessions by the end of 2023. This legislation is part of a wider overhaul of Italy’s competition laws that the country is obliged to carry out in order to be eligible for the next tranche of the EU-funded €210 billion Covid recovery plan.

The issue has been unresolved since 2006 when the Bolkestein Directive obliged EU member countries to offer coastal concessions for a “limited duration, and through an open public selection procedure, based on non-discriminatory, transparent and objective criteria”. Italy has never implemented the legislation, and city councils and national governments have issued repeated proroghe — extensions — to delay the Bolkestein Directive: resorts in Rimini enjoyed tenancy extensions taking them safely from 2009 to 2034. “Twenty-five years of extensions!” laments Roberto Biagini, the indignant President of the National Coordination for Free Seas.

The EU is right to suspect a lack of open competition in the assignation of these beach concessions. Many have been passed down the generations, and longevity of tenure is actually what many resort managers are most proud of. “My grandfather opened this place in 1930,” says Giuliano, who runs Paradiso bagno in Camaiore, Tuscany. “There was a woman in her eighties, she died recently, she had come here every summer since 1932.” Many resort managers say something similar: they feel they have built up businesses over many decades and that Europe is meddling in an Italian tradition.

At Paradiso, customers are almost like extended family and Giuliano’s reminisces are frequently interrupted by old-timers. It’s early morning in mid-June and families are coming back to his place for the first time in a year. He welcomes each of them by name like an accomplished hotelier, always in the sweet spot between formal and laid-back. He knows what they want through the morning: drinks, ice creams, fresh towels.

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In an attempt to make things fairer, beach resorts pay VAT at 22% rather than, as with all other tourist operators, the discounted rate of less than half that. After much legal wrangling, they also pay the IMU property tax as if they owned the beach, not the public.

But they still have, critics say, an unfair advantage over rivals. Businesses away from the sand, on the other side of the main road, are selling exactly the same goods but paying rates ten times higher. The anomaly has come about because, decades ago, a beach shack was seen as the poor person’s version of the posh patisserie in town and rates were, duly, set very low. Now it’s the reverse: everyone wants a coffee by the sea and the shacks have morphed into permanent chalets offering fine dining.

Politicians have tried to address the issue of long-term sand-squatters before, but never with any zeal. In August 2020, the minimum annual rent for beach resorts rose from €364 to €2,500, but there were many exemptions: the Covid crisis wasn’t the time to radically disrupt the exoskeleton of Italy’s tourism industry. Last autumn, Roberto Biagini came close to accusing politicians of taking bribes: “It’s a do ut des [“I give, you give”] arrangement for campaign contributions”, he said. “Politics has completely bent the knee in the face of the seaside goods.”

There’s a thriving black market in subletting too: many of the resorts are rented officially for one figure but often sublet for a far higher one. Biagini tells me that it’s not uncommon to have a concession which pays €8,000 to the state being sublet for ten times that figure. Most bagni will give you a till receipt as proof that they’re paying taxes, but many are clearly operating cash-in-hand.

More than just bending the knee, many politicians have got in on the act: Massimo Casanova is an MEP for the League who runs Papeete in Milano Marittima, where a few years ago the League’s leader famously danced to techno versions of the Italian national anthem surrounded by women in bikinis. Casanova pays, it’s believed, €10,000 per annum and enjoys a turnover of €700,000.

Some politicians, however, have taken on the resorts head-on. “Whoever runs a beach establishment is not the owner of anything,” said Josi Gerardo Della Ragione, the long-haired young mayor of Bacoli last month. “They have a concession on state property, managing a public asset for a certain time period, because the beach belongs to everyone. The sea belongs to everyone.”

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An unlikely political hot potato, the beach concession story roots through intriguing political and emotional terrain. In some ways, the debate lies on the fault line between Italian nationalists and Europhile internationalists. The defenders of the status quo say that the new legislation is an example of an unelected technocrat sacrificing one of Italy’s few buoyant industries, hospitality, to wealthy foreign investors at the behest of the EU. Matteo Salvini’s Five Star Movement/League and Giorgia Meloni’s Brothers of Italy are exploiting the debate to position themselves as lifeguards to the Italian underdogs. The Union Jack has even been flown pointedly in various resorts this summer as a symbol of Euroscepticism.

Protectionism is a habitual position of the Italian Right, and is rarely seen, as elsewhere, as solely negative. The idea that an Italian tradition is under threat from rapacious, foreign investors speaks to the gut of many voters, especially since Italy is very used to closed shops. There are dozens of closed professional orders, like the dreaded albo of journalists: outsiders simply aren’t allowed to disrupt a good thing.

So even if international law and economic rationality are clearly on Draghi’s side, one gets the feeling that the rump of Italian seaside-goers are contented with things as they are. The resorts make beach-going easy. Through the day they sell you everything you could want: coffee and a croissant, calamari and a glass of white. You can join a gentle water gym, play a few rounds of ping-pong, then swig a cold beer and go barefoot dancing in the evenings. “Most families,” says Biagini, “are far more concerned about seeing the same lifeguard or barman as last year than they are about the lack of free beaches.”

Since people usually spend weeks, or an entire month or two, in the same bagno — often returning there year after year — they feel like rustic, simple villages of gloss-painted pallet furniture and fraying, salted awnings. For millions of Italians — who enjoyed three months off school every summer as children — these resorts are where many of their fondest childhood memories are stored. It’s where they spent languid months with grandparents while their parents were working. Our children, too, have spent many happy weeks in these dunes, so it’s easy to understand the anxiety of those who don’t want anything to change.

But in the 25 years we’ve been going either east from Parma to the Adriatic coast, or west over the Apennines to Liguria and Tuscany, these resorts have gone from simple and spartan to offering evermore ambitious experiences: volleyball pits, Padel courts, and club nights. Temporary structures have become permanent. That’s why the most feared aspect of Draghi’s legislation is the “mapping”, in which the entire coastal area is due to be subjected to aerial and ground-level inspections. The discrepancy between what the concessions are supposed to be on paper and the reality of what, over decades, they have become is likely to be fairly wide.

Inevitably the protectionism which never gets mentioned is that of the actual coastline. The demand for immaculate sand means that the majority of driftwood, boulders, seaweed, and shingle spits have been removed, causing erosion issues which require the remedy of bulldozers lugging artificial protections into place. The sandy stretches have been so humanised that you see a hundred fag-butts and face masks to every crab or jellyfish.

Yet almost everyone agrees that it’s going to be arduous to impose any change. With a general election looming next year, Edoardo Zanchini, Vice President of the Italian environmental organisation Legambiente, says that “no politician will really want to take on the powerful lobby of the resort-managers”. If the country has delayed the imposition of EU legislation for 16 years, it seems unlikely, even with Draghi in the driving seat, that all coastal concessions will suddenly be put up for tender. “In Italy”, says Franco, “we do things in our own time.”

The latter had made his intention to become president rather clear: Draghi’s approval ratings as Prime Minister are falling, and likely to worsen as the country’s post-pandemic social and economic crisis unfolds and opposition to draconian Covid measures grows; he was, in effect, hoping to pass on that buck. Moreover, from the highest chair in the Italian state, he would have been able to oversee and steer any government for the next seven years.

Yet his odds faded as politicians failed to agree on a replacement prime minister with sufficient support or clout to see the government through to the end of the parliamentary term in 2023, thus raising the prospect of early elections — something hardly any MP wanted, for obvious pecuniary reasons. At that point, after a few failed attempts by the parties of the Right to gain support for a joint candidate, all the major parties (with the exception of Giorgia Meloni’s Brothers of Italy) opted for plan B and overwhelmingly re-elected Mattarella.

He represents the best possible outcome for the Italian and Euro-Atlantic establishment, if not for Draghi himself: the Draghi government will remain in place until the next elections, with a staunch defender of the status quo in the role of president.

From the establishment’s perspective, it also represents a win-win scenario for 2023. If a Right-wing coalition fails to secure a majority, they will be forced to find an agreement with other parties on a new “government of national unity”, much like the current one — and Draghi would be the most obvious candidate to head it. At the same time, if they were to succeed in securing a majority, they would still need a president capable of “vouching” for a Right-wing government and safeguarding it against any backlashes from financial markets or the European institutions — and Draghi would, again, be the most obvious choice. In that case Mattarella could step down, citing old age (he’ll be 81 next year), and pass the ball the Draghi.

That said, another positive unintended consequence of the election — again, from the establishment’s perspective — is to have made the prospect of a Right-wing majority in 2023 even less probable. The Right-wing alliance — Meloni, Salvini and Berlusconi — is more fractured than ever, and some even wonder whether it still exists. Berlusconi is no doubt furious at the other parties for not supporting Forza Italia’s candidate, Maria Elisabetta Casellati, the President of the Senate, in the secret of the ballot box. Meanwhile, Meloni chastised Salvini’s decision to support Mattarella, tweeting “I can’t believe it”.

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Indeed, it was the Democratic Party (PD), the main sponsor of the Draghi-or-Mattarella ticket, which once again came out on top, confirming itself as the real power broker of Italian politics — the party “that never wins an election but is always in power”, as the joke goes. As for the Five Star Movement, which has gone from being an anti-establishment party to an establishment wannabe, it is heading for an internal showdown: Giuseppe Conte, former prime minister and leader of the party, failed to whip up support for the unlikely choice of Elisabetta Belloni, head of Italy’s secret service; meanwhile, Luigi Di Maio, the party’s true éminence grise, was working behind the scenes to reconfirm Mattarella.

Yet on a deeper level, Mattarella’s re-election represents a failure of the entire political system, a choice that confirms the fundamental powerlessness and futility of Italy’s political parties, and of parliament more generally, and their existential fear of anything that actually resembles true politics; that is, a situation where they are called to make actual high-stakes decisions. The pathological infantilism of Italy’s political class is the result of 20 years of external constraint — that is, of the country being essentially managed by outside forces, in particular the European Union.

Political parties are well aware of the fact that, even if they manage to secure a majority in parliament, they lack all the “normal” instruments of economic policy necessary to actually steer the economy in one direction or the other, since these have all been ceded to the EU. Over time, this has created an enfeebled political class, which wouldn’t have the guts to make high-stake decisions — à la Brexit, so to speak — even if if had the means to do so. All of which explains why, in times of crisis, Italy’s political parties tend to pass the buck to technocrats such as Draghi and to the technocratic apparatuses of the state — such as the presidency — by having the latter take responsibility for policies, usually decided at the supranational level, which the parties don’t want to take responsibility for (but for which they can’t conceive an alternative).

It’s a TINA mentality on steroids, which is shared by the “progressive” civil society from which most of the support for establishment figures such as Draghi and Mattarella comes from. We’re talking of a relatively well-off minority that is terrified of anything that seems to threaten what they perceive to be “normality” — be it the rabble-rousing economic populists of the post-crisis years, the Eurosceptics or, today, those critical of vaccine mandates. Paradoxically, progressives have become so terrified of change that they have effectively become the most conservative bloc of Italian society, and the greatest supporters of anything and anyone upholding the status quo.

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Mattarella, with his sleepy, reassuring gaze, is the living embodiment of this comforting “normality” — and indeed enjoys widespread popular support for this very reason. By the same token, his re-election perfectly epitomises the transformation of the president’s role in the past few decades, and even years, from guarantor of the constitution to guarantor of the EU’s treaties and rules.

In 2018, for instance, following an alliance between the Five Star Movement and the League, the two parties, as required by the Italian constitution, submitted their choice of government ministers to the president for approval. Yet their proposed economic minister, Paolo Savona, was vetoed by Mattarella due to his euro-critical stance, forcing the two parties to opt for the more status quo-friendly Giovanni Tria.

More recently, when Matteo Renzi pulled the plug on the Giuseppe Conte’s second government in January 2021, Mattarella refused to dissolve parliament and call for early elections, instead working behind-the-scenes to ensure Conte’s replacement by Draghi, much like Giorgio Napolitano had done with Monti a decade earlier.

And over the past year, Mattarella has gone out of his way to vocally defend practically every policy of the Draghi government, including the more legally and constitutionally shaky ones — such as the introduction of vaccine passes and a de facto vaccine mandate, as well as the maintenance of a semi-permanent state of emergency. If one thing is clear, it is that Mattarella’s re-election will further strengthen Draghi’s authoritarian and anti-democratic grip on the country — now redubbed “Draghistan” by his critics — as the prime minister knows perfectly well that Mattarella won’t raise any issues of constitutionality in regard to his policies.

The Draghi-Mattarella regime exemplifies in many ways a disturbing evolution in Italy’s long-standing reliance on technocrats: what Christopher J. Bickerton and Carlo Invernizzi Accetti have dubbed technopopulism, which combines populist rhetoric to represent “the people” with technocratic claims to possess the necessary competence, experience and authority for translating its will into policy.

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Draghi, for example, recently painted himself as “a grandpa at the service of the state, with no particular aspiration” — that is, a common citizen who simply has the best interest of the nation at heart, a rather surreal claim coming from a former central banker who is considered by many to be “the most powerful person in Europe” and who is pursuing a very clear neoliberal political-economic agenda. In a similar vein, Mattarella stated that he had “other plans” but that he was willing to put his wishes aside and place himself once again at service of the nation, in what has been painted by the media as proof of the President’s supreme sense of selflessness, devotion and self-sacrifice.

This technopopulist mixture of technocracy and demagoguery is deeply worrying, and is at the root of Italy’s slide into autocracy — characterised by the centralisation of all major decisions in the hands of Draghi himself, the embarrassing level of government cheerleading by the media, and the silencing of any dissenting voices. That Twenties’ whiff just gets stronger and stronger every day. And with Mattarella in power, it doesn’t look like it will disappear soon.

It is generally believed that the Italian president performs a purely ceremonial and symbolic role, and throughout most of Italy’s life as a republic this has been largely the case. Italy, after all, is supposed to be a parliamentary democracy, with the government dependent on the confidence of the elected legislature.

And yet, in his official capacity as the “guarantor” or “guardian” of the constitution, the president holds considerable power: governments are required to obtain the “approval” of the president, who also nominates (“approves”) the prime minister and his cabinet ministers. Moreover, all laws passed by parliament have to be approved by the president, and he or she is also charged with signing off the dissolution of parliament, for example following a government crisis and loss of parliamentary majority. This means the president effectively decides whether elections should be held or not.

Nor does the president’s power stop there: the incumbent also ratifies all international treaties, and serves as commander-in-chief of the army and as the head of the governing body of the judiciary. The president also wields influence through the technocratic structures of the Ministry of Economy and Finance, particularly the all-powerful Accounting Office (Ragioneria Generale dello Stato) and the Bank of Italy.

It’s not, therefore, an inconsiderable source of power — especially in times of crisis, when the political system is incapable of delivering viable solutions and the president’s role tends to “expand”. Given the quasi-permanent state of political and economic turbulence that Italy has been mired in for at least a decade, it’s no surprise that the president today has evolved into a full-blooded political actor, with the power (and willingness) to intervene in the country’s decision-making process.

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But this transformation has been long in the making, and can be traced back to Italy’s gradual integration into the European Union and the euro, beginning in the early Nineties. For any country, membership of the euro means that the role of government — and therefore of parliament — increasingly becomes that of rubberstamping often unpopular economic decisions taken at the European level. This has inevitably entailed a process of state reconfiguration involving the strengthening of executive and technocratic powers at all levels, including that of the president, and the consequent marginalisation of parliament. Typically, this is presented as a necessary precondition for the swift and efficient implementation of the kind of economic policies enforced by the EU: fiscal austerity, wage moderation, and pro-market liberalisations and privatisations.

Once the choice was made by Italy’s elites to join the euro, it also became necessary to defend their decision from any possible popular-democratic challenges. And so the president’s role was transformed in another way: from guarantor of the constitution to guarantor of the country’s “international obligations”, in particular those to EU treaties and rules. Finally, the transfer of economic prerogatives to the EU meant that political parties, even if they managed to secure a majority in parliament, increasingly found themselves lacking the economic tools necessary to maintain societal consensus.

A system of quasi-permanent social and political instability was born, with the president adopting an increasingly “activist” role in the name of “stability” and “governability”. In short, Italy’s euro membership effectively set in motion a unique case of institutional transition from one form of democracy to another: from a parliamentary regime to a de facto presidential regime in which the legislature performs a marginal role.

This became particularly evident under the double term of Giorgio Napolitano (2006-2015), which coincided with the turbulent era of the post-financial crisis fallout. During that period, Napolitano became the “quiet powerbroker” of Italian politics, with critics referring to him as “Re Giorgio”, or King George. It is generally accepted, for example, that Napolitano played a crucial behind-the-scenes role in the “international coup” — involving, among others, the Bank of Italy, then-president of the ECB Mario Draghi, Angela Merkel and Nicholas Sarkozy — that led to the downfall of prime minister Silvio Berlusconi and his replacement by technocrat Mario Monti, personally chosen by Napolitano himself. Monti’s government was widely referred to as “a government of the president”.

Napolitano’s successor, outgoing president Sergio Mattarella, followed in his footsteps. In 2018, following an alliance between the Five Star Movement and the League, the two parties, as required by the Italian constitution, submitted their choice of government ministers to the president for approval. Yet their proposed economic minister, Paolo Savona, was vetoed by Mattarella due to his euro-critical stance, forcing the two parties to opt for the more status quo-friendly Giovanni Tria. As the law experts Marco Dani and Agustín José Menendez noted at the time, this would seem to point to the existence of “a form of ‘convention’ according to which political parties or coalitions that are critical of the existing economic and monetary arrangements within the eurozone cannot get into government. Or, more accurately, they are entitled to govern [only] in a tamed form”.

More recently, when Matteo Renzi pulled the plug on the Giuseppe Conte’s second government last January, Mattarella refused to dissolve parliament and call for early elections, instead working behind-the-scenes to ensure Conte’s replacement by Draghi, much like Napolitano had done with Monti a decade earlier. Indeed, according to several sources, Mattarella and Draghi were directly involved in the machinations that led Conte to step aside, with Renzi eventually moving away only once he had obtained reassurance from them that the former central banker was ready to step in.

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And over the past year, Mattarella has gone out of his way to vocally defend practically every policy of the Draghi government, including the more legally and constitutionally shaky ones — such as the introduction of vaccine passes and a de facto vaccine mandate, as well as the maintenance of a semi-permanent state of emergency and the strengthening of Draghi’s authoritarian and anti-democratic grip on the country. In other words, the president today no longer even pretends to be a neutral arbiter of the constitution. It’s not only taken for granted that he plays a deeply political role, but indeed the Italian elites increasingly expect him to do so: to use his king-like powers to uphold the status quo and keep “the barbarians” at bay, be they euro sceptics or vaccine sceptics.

In light of the above, the importance of the upcoming presidential election comes into sharp focus. With general elections scheduled for 2023 (and the possibility of a Right-wing majority), an unfolding post-pandemic social and economic crisis, growing opposition to draconian Covid measures, and a structural reform agenda which the EU expects Italy to implement in exchange for the meagre Next Generation EU funds, it’s clear that securing a man of the establishment in the role of president is essential for Italy’s pro-EU elites. Long before the pandemic, Draghi was seen as the natural successor to Mattarella. But his appointment as prime minister last February has made a potential transition more complicated.

If Draghi were to be elected president, the parties that make up the coalition government would have to agree on a replacement prime minister to see the government through until the end of the parliamentary term in 2023. However, it is widely believed that without Draghi it would be very hard to ensure the survival of the current “government of national unity”, which includes practically all parties except Giorgia Meloni’s Brothers of Italy. And since no one (except maybe Meloni, who is currently topping the polls alongside the Democratic Party) wants to go to early elections — and also because dissolving parliament before next September would mean that MPs would lose their hefty annuity pensions — in the secret of the ballot box many MPs might choose to vote down Draghi.

In the unlikely event of early elections, it’s very hard to fathom what the scenario could be: with Berlusconi’s Forza Italia now closer to the liberal-centrist Democratic Party than to its formal allies, the League and Brothers of Italy, securing a Right-wing majority might prove difficult. This opens up the prospect of yet another “technical” or “national unity” government, overseen by Mario Draghi, now in the role of all-powerful king-president.

And this scenario isn’t entirely implausible even if elections aren’t held until 2023. Even for those parties still betting on securing a Right-wing majority at the next elections, there would be a clear advantage in having Draghi as president: the “approval” and “supervision” of the former ECB leader would prove essential in safeguarding the government against any backlashes from financial markets or the European institutions — a fact that in itself says a lot about the democratic implications of euro membership.

Draghi himself recently signalled that he would be willing to become president, and explained that parties shouldn’t worry about future governments straying from the path of neoliberal righteousness: “We have created the conditions for the work to continue, regardless of who is [in government]”, Draghi said, essentially confirming that elections are of relatively little important these days, since the decisions that matter are taken elsewhere, namely in the technocratic apparatuses of the state charged with implementing EU dictates. Whether this will be enough to reassure MPs remains to be seen. Draghi’s election is not, for now, a foregone conclusion.

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Another option would be for Draghi to continue serving as prime minister until the end of the current parliament in February 2023. That would allow him to oversee the initial implementation of the EU’s reform agenda while a coalition of parties — potentially comprising the PD, the Five Star Movement, other smaller parties, and maybe even Forza Italia — work on a political platform that would furnish Draghi with a new majority in the next general election. In this case, it’s hard to predict who the next president might actually be. The only person actively campaigning for the election is Silvio Berlusconi, who has always dreamt of becoming president. But it’s unlikely that such a divisive personality will muster the broad support needed to become president.

Some have also posited a “creative” solution to get Draghi elected president while saving the current government: electing Mattarella for a second mandate until 2023 and then have him step down for old age and pass the ball to Draghi. Indeed, in a telling demonstration of just how desperate the Italian establishment is, opera-goers at Milan’s La Scala theatre recently greeted President Sergio Mattarella, who was in the audience, with chants of “bis” and “encore”, imploring him to serve another term.

It was proof that whatever happens in the upcoming presidential election one thing is clear: Italian democracy has become a largely elitist affair, in which warring factions of the establishment vie for power, while the majority of citizens don’t even bother to vote anymore. It’s no surprise that global elites today look to Italy as a model – The Economist even went as far as crowning Italy “country of the year”. Many of its citizens, however, would beg to disagree.

But, although it seems to have slipped the minds of the EU’s finance ministers at their meeting yesterday in Brussels, the truth is that the scope of the bloc’s support package has been wildly overblown. The IMF puts the EU’s discretionary fiscal stimulus at a paltry 3.8% of GDP — a figure dwarfed by the massive discretionary fiscal stimulus of 25.5% of GDP in the US.

The same chasm between narrative and reality can be seen with the much-vaunted Europe-wide “recovery fund” known as Next Generation EU (NGEU). Despite the fanfare, it amounts to barely 5% of the EU’s GDP. What’s more, the funds will be disbursed over the course of six years, resulting in, at best, a fiscal expansion of around 1% of GDP on average between 2021 and 2024. And that’s compared to a GDP loss for the EU as a whole of around 15% just in 2020.

Predictably, the funds come with very strict troika-like conditions attached. They are conditional on compliance with the European Commission’s infamous country-specific recommendations, which in the past have consistently demanded that governments cut public spending — especially on social expenditure (particularly pensions), healthcare and unemployment benefits. This is ultimately what the NGEU is all about: increasing Brussels’s control over the budgetary policies of member states and strengthening the EU’s regime of technocratic and authoritarian control. It’s the EU doing what the EU does best.

So overall we can say that the pandemic has not resulted in any radical rethinking of policy at the European level. Neither has it resulted in any structural change. Indeed, the old fiscal rules are set to be reinstated in 2023. Even though there’s much talk of “reforming the EU’s fiscal rules”, the truth is that everyone knows that serious treaty reform is off the table — as Valdis Dombrovskis, executive vice president of the European Commission, has repeatedly stated.

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It’s not just the opposition of the so-called frugal countries — the Netherlands, the Nordic countries, the Baltics and Austria. Anyone who expects a change of heart from the new German government is also bound to be disappointed. Olaf Scholz, Angela Merkel’s successor, is, as Wolfgang Münchau has noted, “a staunch fiscal conservative, on a par with his predecessors, Wolfgang Schäuble and Peer Steinbrück, the Social Democrat behind the debt brake”.

Moreover, regardless of who takes over Jens Weidmann’s role at the Bundesbank, growing inflationary pressures in Germany — in September, inflation hit a 29-year high of 4.1% — mean that fiscal hawks will easily gain the upper hand in the debate. Regardless of the actual cause of inflation (which is largely a result of the massive supply chain disruptions happening around the world), German fiscal hawks will blame it on overspending — with cuts being the only solution.

So, all things considered, we can expect a return of austerity to Europe in the near future. Indeed, it is already taking form. Mario Draghi’s Italy is a case in point. In the current debate, the EU’s most indebted country is often presented as a champion of flexibility and European fiscal reform. However, the reality is quite different. Italy’s latest budget report forecasts a huge deficit reduction — from 10% to 4% of GDP (more than 100 billion euros) in little over a year. Italy’s age of austerity, then, seems far from over.

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A return of austerity to Europe as a whole would be devastating, especially given that many countries are still recovering from the post-2008 austerity shock therapy. That experience didn’t just prove to be a colossal failure in economic terms but also led to nothing less than a social and humanitarian catastrophe, particularly in those countries that were subject to the “economic adjustment programmes” (EAPs) demanded by the EU-led troika: Greece, Ireland, Portugal, Spain and Italy (which was never officially in an EAP but saw the imposition of EAP-like policies by former European commissioner Mario Monti, who came to power through an EU-orchestrated “soft coup”).

Numerous reports over the years have confirmed that the budget cuts and tax hikes implemented in these countries disproportionately hit the poor and are directly responsible for a dramatic rise in inequality and unemployment levels (especially among the youth), as well as rates of suicide, poverty (including child poverty), severe material deprivation, homelessness, social exclusion and distress. Even a report from a few years back by the European Parliament’s own employment committee claimed that “the austerity policies and the structural reforms imposed in the troika countries have led to a real social tsunami of massive unemployment (it has tripled in some countries) especially among young people, the closure of hundreds of thousands of companies, mainly SMEs; and a sharp rise in poverty and social exclusion”. These policies have in many respects undermined the very material bases of democracy, leading to social and economic instability.

In recent years, some countries have introduced measures to cushion the effects of austerity. In Italy, for example, the Five Star Movement-League government that emerged from the 2018 elections — which was first and foremost a rebuke of the parties that had administered the disastrous austerity policies — introduced two major policies that went in that direction: a “citizenship income”, a form of income supplement for poor households, and a pension reform lowering the retirement age.

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Both those policies are now under threat from the techno-authoritarian government led by Draghi, who is, let us not forget, one of the chief architects of the EU’s post-2008 austerity framework. A new reform raising once again the pension age has already been announced, and the ranks of those in the Government calling for the abolition of the “citizenship income” continue to grow.

This would leave millions of families with no support whatsoever, in an economy that has been ravaged by 18 months of pandemic. But punishing the poorest and weakest members of society for crises they have not caused — first the financial crisis, now the Covid crisis — has long been standard policy, in Italy and elsewhere. As the saying goes, the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must.

It’s a party both proud of and reticent about its political ancestry: Fdl emerged — through a number of incarnations — from the post-war ashes of Benito Mussolini’s National Fascist Party. It’s something that still causes public embarrassment, though not enough to stop FdI putting forward Mussolini’s granddaughter, Rachele, in this month’s city council elections in Rome (she received the highest number of preferential votes of all councillors).

Meloni, meanwhile, is keen to emphasise that her party is merely importing the best of Italian nationalism into indecisive and dangerous times. She is bullish about performance in the polls — it has overtaken Matteo Salvini’s Lega — and, this summer, she published an autobiography which became an unexpected bestseller. The book’s title, I’m Giorgia, comes from a mantra she uses at rallies: “I’m Giorgia, I’m a woman, I’m a mother, I’m Italian, I’m a Christian: you won’t take that away from me!”

It’s a sign of how far the party has moved from its totalitarian ancestry that it is now trumpeting itself as the only party defending freedom and democracy. It has vociferously decried the democratic short-circuit of technocratic Prime Ministers; first the university law professor, Giuseppe Conte, and now Draghi, a career banker. “Italian democracy doesn’t need carers,” Andrea Delmastro, an FdI MP, tells me. “We’re resisting in the trenches for democracy.”

As a result of the pandemic, both of those unelected Prime Ministers have ruled through state-of-emergency decrees and inflicted unprecedented restrictions on civil liberties. Take Draghi’s Green Pass legislation, which came into force last week and requires a vaccination certificate (or a negative Covid test) to access all workplaces and social locations (restaurants, bars, libraries and so on). The legislation is draconian by Italian standards, and has led to nationwide “No Green Pass” (NGP) protests that have been scorned by the Left and listened to, and sometimes led, by the Right. “We believe”, says Delmastro, “that it’s an instrument of mass social segregation.”

But the NGP protests raise a problem as well as an opportunity for FdI. At one recent demonstration in Rome, a group of speakers from Forza Nuova (a genuine Fascist party) led a breakaway fringe in attacking the headquarters of one of the country’s largest unions, CGIL. In scenes reminiscent of the January 6 ransacking of the Capitol, Italy’s version of the “Proud Boys” smashed their way into the building with batons, helmets and flags.

The event brought to the surface the recurrent question always whirling around Fratelli d’Italia: how much ideological distance really exists between themselves and their fringe far-Right cousins? If that question is familiar, there’s another, more nuanced one: how much is the demonisation of FdI actually blinding commentators to any serious analysis of its policies and appeal?

***

Trieste, October 15. NGP protesters have gathered at the city’s port where workers (around 40% of whom are unvaccinated) are striking against the Pass. The pier has been turned into a cross between a stadium singalong and a seaside party. The chants are all from the ultra (hardcore football fans’) songbook: “la gente come noi non molla mai” — “people like us will never be moved.” Red-faced rogues are wheeling trolleys full of lager. There are megaphones, whistles, drums and plenty of pots and pans being banged. It’s noisy and fun.

The port-strikers are wearing Hi-Viz jackets, but like a music festival there’s so much fancy dress it’s hard to tell who is who. And that’s partly the point: it’s a movement so variegated that it’s impossible to label. Just as on the terraces, there’s a mixture of idealists, extremists and eccentrics, of accountants, lawyers, HGV drivers and nurses. After the violence at the rally in Rome, there have been efforts to avoid all political banners so the unions, the neo-Fascists, the ultras, the politicians and even plenty of police are now plainclothes.

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It’s no coincidence that Trieste has become the epicentre of NGP protests. The port is a vital nexus of European logistics, sending eight container trains to Budapest every day, and 12 to Munich. And Trieste has always been a hot political cauldron. The city is hybrid (Austro-Hungarian and Italo-Slavic) and home to many minorities outside the Catholic majority (Jewish, Protestant and Orthodox). It’s renowned as a cultured, literary and liberal city, but it’s also known for its determined, frontier Fascism. It was here that, in 1938, Mussolini chose to announce his Race Laws and it was here that FdI held its second national conference.

Trieste politicians have made the 1943 Foibe killings — where Italians were murdered by Yugoslav partisans in the nearby mountain ravines — an inversion of the Fascist-equals-Baddie narrative: there’s now a national day of remembrance. Recently a statue of the proto-Fascist writer, Gabriele D’Annunzio, was added to the city’s streets. One city councillor has campaigned to name streets after famous Fascist combatants while the deputy mayor, in 2019, won national acclaim (and scorn) for putting the blankets of the homeless in a skip. It’s a city whose politicians have a taste for old-fashioned order.

Last weekend Roberto Dipiazza secured his fourth term as the city’s centre-right Mayor. A suave former businessman, he dismisses the port protests as “madness”. When I point out that many of the parties supporting his candidacy are mixing with the NGP crowds, he smiles: “Don’t confuse politics with common sense.”

Like the majority of the Italian Right, he’s vehemently dismissive of those concerned about a Fascist resurgence: “Every time there’s an election, the Left pulls out this thing about Fascism. It’s their attempt to compact their electorate by saying ‘watch out, Fascism’s coming back’,” he explains. “Basta,” he adds wearily, “basta.”

Back at the port protests, meanwhile, it is clear how much Covid, just like post-industrialisation and mass immigration before it, has nudged many traditionally Left-wing voters into supporting emerging Right-wing movements. Whether or not their cause is rational — “We’re not flat-earthers,” one demonstrator tells me — it’s plain to see that these protesters feel scorned by their natural allies on the Left, who have offered only verbal slaps to the NGP movement. The protest, as a result, is a place where political silos dissolve. One unionist was quoted as Corriere della Sera as saying “I’m a Communist who feels more at home with the Fascists”.

The NGP movement may be a sub-plot to national Italian politics, but it remains an illuminating one. The actual industrial action will probably peter out — police moved in with tear gas and water cannons on Monday — but for this disgruntled minority, there’s a strong sense of political alienation, especially since the mainstream unions have recently argued against a minimum wage. “Politics is dead,” Stefano Puzzer, the stocky leader of the port protest, tells me. “These people haven’t voted for years.”

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In some ways, this NGP protest is not dissimilar to that other coalition of disillusioned voters, the Five Star Movement (M5S). Once polling at close to 30%, the M5S is now imploding and fracturing, and FdI clearly sees those frustrated voters who followed Beppe Grillo as their route to power. It’s not as improbable as it might appear. After spending time with the protesters, I started to sense something melancholic.

Many are sitting alone and looking at their phones. When a song begins, they join in with a tangible euphoria that they’re finally part of something. It’s as if this protest has given them a cause and a fellowship, even an identity.

And if there is one thing Meloni is offering in spades it is “identity”. One of the most repeated words in her keynote speeches, “identity” is, she says, “the principle enemy of the global mainstream”. By identity, she means “family”, “nation” and “Christian” — all concepts which are “under attack” because of “the politically-correct dictatorship in the hands of Silicon Valley ”. This very broad-brush analysis contains more than trace levels of paranoia: BLM thugs are compared to the Taliban, while global financial speculators want to “disarticulate nation states to make them weak”.

But that paranoia appeals to those who feel marginalised and ignored. Like cheap lager, Meloni goes straight to the belly and the bloodstream. Once you’re tipsy, it’s easy to nudge “identity” into “identitarianism”, which is the closest thing our century has to Fascism.

Perhaps it’s unsurprising, then, that the accusation sheet against the Fdl is long and familiar: critics say that behind the façade of a moderate, democratic party, it still celebrates the personalities, iconography and even ideas of 1922-45. There are many examples of Fascist memorabilia being spotted in FdI homes, if not offices. The rasping Ignazio La Russa, who led the Fdl before Meloni, even had a meeting with Forza Nuova leaders in March this year, so Meloni’s perplexed response to the recent Rome violence (“I don’t know the matrix”) sounded decidedly disingenuous.

Certainly there have been many recent examples of squadrismo (street-thuggery), often with the aim of strike-breaking. Every few years, a radicalised far-Right gunman launches an attack, while Paolo Berizzi, an investigative journalist who has written extensively about the far-Right, has been forced to live under armed protection. The alarms warning against contemporary Fascism clearly aren’t, as right-wing politicians say, “all cry-wolf”.

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Nor is it a phenomenon confined to the far-Right. Enrico Michetti, the centre-Right candidate who ran to be Mayor of Rome, recently wondered whether there was more sympathy for the murder of Jews in the Holocaust than for victims of the Foibe because the Jews owned banks and “belonged to a lobby able to decide the destiny of the planet”. Doubtless the recordings were released with cynical timing by his political opponents, but they still revealed a man who draws, unconsciously or otherwise, on far-Right tropes.

The problem for the Left, however, is that they don’t have the courage to offer their own cheap lager. Nothing they say ever speaks to the belly. The Italian Left is very good at being against things (Fascism), but it offers no narrative and no cause, neither a sense of struggle nor a direction. It doesn’t dare propose legislation which its rank-and-file have been clamouring for, such as “Ius Soli” (granting Italian citizenship to all born in Italy) or the proposed anti-homophobia law. The party has studiously avoided commenting on the recent referendum to decriminalise cannabis.

Leaders on the centre-Left point to successful mayoral elections in Milan, Bologna and Naples earlier this month as evidence that their sober, centrist strategy is working. This week, the Left also won mayoral run-offs in Rome and Turin with around 60% of the vote, and even won in the Right-wing strongholds of Varese and Latina. Only in Trieste did the centre-Right predictably win.

But the real victor in Italy’s recent elections was the anti-political non-vote: turnout was only 44%, down 9% from five years ago. “Very, very many people no longer believe that it’s possible to change things with the vote,” Marcello De Angelis, a former National Alliance senator, tells me. “Abstentionism is the degenerative illness of democracy.”

Whether it’s terminal or not remains to be seen. But if Meloni wants to become Prime Minister, she knows she will have to court that sceptical minority who now believe, like the NGP protesters, that democratic change is an illusion.

Some other European countries — most notably France — have similar measures in place, requiring proof of Covid status to gain access to indoor restaurants, museums, theatres and cultural events, or to work in certain sectors such as healthcare. But nothing comes close to Italy’s scheme in terms of range and scope; the only other country in the world to have introduced a mandatory Covid passport for all workers is Saudi Arabia.

How did Italy reach this point? Essentially, the Italian government adopted a textbook frog-in-boiling-water approach. The green pass was announced in mid-July, pretty much out of the blue, despite very few hospitalisations for Covid and a vaccination rate well above the European average. When they first came into force on August 6, they were initially limited to indoor restaurants, museums, cinemas and sports venues. Given that it was the middle of the holiday season, and that most restaurants in the summer offer outdoor seating (no green pass required), the impact of the measure was initially rather limited.

But that soon changed. On September 1, the green pass became mandatory also for medium and long-distance public transport, as well as for all school teachers, staff and university students. And just a week ago came the decision to extend it to all public and private-sector workers — a move that caught almost everyone by surprise.

As the rules became increasingly restrictive, opposition to the green pass started growing as well: thousands of people, who were largely vaccine-hesitant, started taking to the streets in several Italian cities. Some demonstrators even went so far as to compare themselves to holocaust victims by wearing Star of David badges, like those worn by Jews in Nazi-era Germany, bearing the words “not vaccinated”.

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Such comparisons are ridiculous, but the source of the protesters’ discontent is not. Covid passports — especially when so sweeping in scope — raise serious ethical and political issues. With these changes, we are effectively stripping citizens who haven’t broken any law whatsoever (in Italy, like elsewhere, Covid vaccines are not mandatory) of their basic constitutional rights — the right to work, to study, to move freely. That should give anyone reason to pause and reflect.

This kind of discrimination is also in direct violation of EU Regulation 2021/953, which states that “[t]he issuance of [Covid] certificates… should not lead to discrimination on the basis of the possession of a specific category of certificate”, and that “[i]t is necessary to prevent direct or indirect discrimination against persons who are not vaccinated, for example because of medical reasons… or because they have not yet had the opportunity or chose not to be vaccinated”. This is also echoed by Resolution 2361 (2021) of the Council of Europe.

In fact, the word “discrimination” doesn’t even begin to do justice to what we are witnessing in Italy. Representatives of the political, medical and media establishment have openly accused the unvaccinated of being “rats”, “subhumans” and “criminals”, who deserve to be “excluded from public life” and “from the national health service” and even to “die like flies”. Perhaps more worryingly, both prime minister Mario Draghi and the president Sergio Mattarella have accused the unvaccinated of “putting the lives of others at risk” (a claim based on the assumption that the vaccinated aren’t contagious).

It’s no surprise, then, that some of Italy’s intellectual heavyweights have come out against the green pass. Giorgio Agamben is perhaps Italy’s most famous philosopher, best known for his study of the concept of state of exception — situations of crisis or emergency that are employed by governments to expand their powers, and in which constitutional rights tend to be diminished, superseded and rejected.

Agamben, once a darling of the Left, became a controversial figure early in the pandemic after he claimed in an infamous article that the virus was “a normal flu” and that the pandemic was “a fabrication” aimed at “expanding government powers beyond all limits”. This understandably discredited him in the eyes of many, especially his leftist fans, who jettisoned their idol almost overnight in their rush to embrace the new state of exception, lockdowns and all.

Agamben’s comments were wrong, provocative and needlessly hyperbolic. But as the Government rolls out an unprecedented system of population control, it is hard to deny that some of his predictions have largely come true. This is probably why Massimo Cacciari, one of the country’s most respected philosophers and public intellectuals, recently agreed to publish an article with Agamben claiming that the green pass is a dangerously discriminatory measure that “automatically transforms an entire category of people into second-class citizens”, and that Italy is going down the same path as China, which “intends to keep tracking and control systems in place even after the end of the pandemic”. 

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It is frankly still unclear what purpose these green passes actually serve. According to the Government, the green pass is uniquely a public-health measure aimed at reducing the spread of the virus by limiting contact among the unvaccinated (and between the latter and vaccinated). The problem is that the science underpinning such an argument is shaky, to say the least. As Stephanie Hare wrote in The Guardian: “We don’t know how long immunity lasts. We don’t know to what extent vaccines reduce transmission, or by how much, or whether this varies depending on which vaccine we’ve had”.

Nor is it clear how contagious asymptomatic people, whether vaccinated or not, actually are. Similar concerns have been voiced by several Italian experts as well. According to Andrea Crisanti, professor of microbiology at the University of Padua Crisanti: “The green pass is not a public-health measure. We now know that even vaccinated people can become infected and infect other people after a certain period. This means that we don’t know what the effect of the green pass on the virus’s transmission is, if any”.

But if green passes are largely ineffective from an epidemiological perspective, what is the real basis for their introduction? The answer at this point should be rather obvious: to coax people into getting vaccinated, as is now openly acknowledged by straight-talking medical experts such as Andrea Crisanti and others. However, we are well beyond “nudging” here. By making one’s positive Covid status a precondition for leading anything resembling a “normal” life — for eating out, going to school, travelling, even working — Italy has essentially implemented a de facto mandatory vaccination (despite the fact that even the World Health Organization counsels against mandatory vaccination).

Some claim that this isn’t true, given that those who don’t want to vaccinate can obtain a green pass by taking regular tests. But this argument doesn’t hold water: Covid tests currently have a validity of 48 hours and can cost anything from 15 to 50 euros. This amounts to a monthly cost of at least 200 euros, which is prohibitive for low-income workers and amounts to class-based discrimination. Indeed, the Government has flatly rejected the unions’ demands that it offer free tests to workers, claiming that this would “discourage people from getting vaccinated”. And this is despite the fact that regular free testing for all would arguably be the best way to track the spread of the virus.

Such hypocrisy explains why opposition to the green pass is now gaining traction in unlikely quarters. Take the example of the recent appeal against the green pass signed by hundreds of university professors, including the hugely popular Left-wing historian, novelist and essayist Alessandro Barbero. They state that the green pass “surreptitiously enforces a mandatory vaccination in exchange for accessing fundamental rights such as the right to study and to work, without the full assumption of responsibility by the government”.

Interestingly, several studies suggest that vaccine requirements can be counterproductive because they make people feel pressured and may increase existing distrust of public-health initiatives, especially among marginalised groups. This seems to be happening in Italy, where the number of vaccines administered daily has dropped since the introduction of the green pass.

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This may easily be an unintended consequences of the government’s bullish strategy. However, the fact that this hasn’t prompted any rethinking of said strategy raises an even more disturbing prospect: that the green pass may not be just a means to an end — mass vaccination — but also an end in and of itself.

The Italian economic-political establishment has a long history of invoking, embellishing or even engineering crises — usually economic in nature — to justify technocratic governments and emergency measures, as well as the sidestepping of the normal channels of democracy. In this sense, it is not outlandish to posit that the country’s elites, under Draghi’s leadership, may view the current conjecture as a golden opportunity to complete the oligarchisation of the country they’ve been working at for the past decades (and in which Mario Draghi has played a central role).

A crucial feature of this process has been the transition from a post-war regime based on the centrality of parliament to one dominated by executive, technocratic and supranational powers, in which the legislature performs a marginal role, thus insulating policymaking from democratic processes. As a result, there has been an increased resort to so-called “technical governments” run by “experts” supposedly untainted by political partisanship and unburdened by the complications of parliamentary politics — as well as the transfer of key policy tools from the national level, where a certain degree of democratic control can always potentially be exercised, to the supranational institutions of the EU, which are undemocratic by design.

Thus, as Massimo Cacciari notes, “the green pass could easily become a way of surreptitiously prolonging a state of emergency”, thereby further entrenching the marginalisation of political parties and parliament, the unprecedented concentration of power in the executive and technocratic apparatuses of the state and the growing influence of the EU over national policymaking.

If that doesn’t sound like a state of exception, I don’t know what does. Agamben may have been wrong about the severity of the virus, but not about how it has been utilised by the state. And maybe, when he writes that “the real aim of the green pass is meticulous and unconditional control over all movements of citizens”, as unlikely as it may sound, we would do well not to write it off as the ravings of a paranoid.

Was it, as left-leaning commentators and supporters of the former PM argue, because Giuseppe Conte’s government’s timid social-interventionist measures incurred the wrath of the country’s business and financial elites? Or was it just a power play by Matteo Renzi gone terribly wrong?

I actually think it most likely that Conte was not considered by those elites to be strong enough to manage the “great reset” of Italy’s economy, an endeavour that can only be pulled off by a “technical” — or technocrat-led — government. But more interesting than the speculation about how he got here is what the prospect of a Draghi government tells us about the nature of Italian (post-)democracy, and the perverse effects that the euro has had on the country’s economic, social and political fabric.

Draghi’s descent into politics has been accompanied by feverish cries of jubilation by the mass media — on a level that would have probably embarrassed North Korean state media. And virtually all parties in Parliament— including Salvini’s Northern League, which seem to have jettisoned what little was left of its “eurosceptic” posturing — have expressed support. The tone of the discussion was captured well by the powerful governor of the Campania region, Vincenzo De Luca (PD), who compared Draghi to “Christ” himself.

Nearly everyone seems to agree: a Draghi government would be a blessing for the country, a final opportunity to redeem its sins and “make Italy great again”.

Such prophecies aren’t based on an analysis of what Draghi’s policies may actually be — and whether they would be in the interest of the country and its citizens, workers and businesses — but on vague references to the man’s “charisma”, “competence”, “intelligence” and “international clout”. This is a reflection of a sick political culture, whereby statecraft is reduced to a purely technical affair, in which notions such as power, class, ideology are erased from the equation. Instead, they are seen as inconvenient hindrances to the “efficient” management of government, which only requires the “expertise” of well-studied (and politically neutral almost by definition) “technicians” or technocrats.

This concept is well summed up by the notion of “technical government”, which most non-Italians readers are likely to be baffled by. Indeed, the concept doesn’t exist in nearly any other Western country. The basic idea is that in moments of deep crisis only “experts” supposedly untainted by political partisanship and unburdened by the complications of parliamentary politics can be trusted with making the “right” and “necessary” decisions.

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It’s a concept that, alas, has a long-running history in Italy. It harks back to the fraught relationship the country’s economic elites have always had with mass social democracy, and how they sought to resolve this tension by resorting to self-imposed “external constraints” of various nature. Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, Italy’s ruling elites were faced with an increasingly militant and “ungovernable” working class and a state-centric, redistributive political economy (grounded in the country’s socialist-leaning Constitution) that was deeply incompatible with the emerging neoliberal paradigm.

They thus began to theorise that only by “tying the hands” of government via a political-economic straitjacket — an external constraint or vincolo esterno — could they hope to achieve a dual objective. Their aim was to essentially “break the back” of the working classes while spearheading those “reforms” for which there was very little popular consensus. And that vincolo esterno was, of course, the process of European integration, beginning with the system of semi-fixed exchange rates known as European Monetary System (EMS), in 1979, all the way up to Maastricht and then the euro (EMU).

One of the main advocates of the vincolo esterno was Guido Carli, Italy’s highly influential economic minister from 1989 to 1992, not to mention one of the mentors of Mario Draghi. In his memoirs Carli made no secret of the fact that “the European Union represented an alternative path for the solution of problems which we were not managing to handle through the normal channels of government and parliament”. Namely, the wholesale transformation, or neoliberalisation, of the country’s political economy. This can be said to embody what Edgar Grande calls the “paradox of weakness”, whereby national elites transfer some power to a supranational policymaker (thereby appearing weaker) in order to allow themselves to better withstand pressure from societal actors by testifying that “this is Europe’s will” (thereby becoming stronger).

The concept of “technical government” is largely a by-product of the vincolo esterno. On the one hand, the apparently inexorable logic of the external constraint — be it the maintenance of a fixed exchange rate or the need to appease “markets” or “the EU” in order to avoid retaliation — creates a semi-permanent “state of exception”. This means that at any moment the complex dynamics of parliamentary politics may need to give way to “non-political” (i.e., “technical”) governments tasked with “getting the job done”.

Such a move implies that the policies they carry out are not a political choice but something entirely rational and necessary, which Parliament should limit itself to rubber stamping without asking too many questions. On the other hand, the socio-economic effects of the external constraint — particularly disastrous in Italy’s case — create growing tensions between the demands of citizens and the requirements of the external constraint (plus the inter/supranational institutions overseeing it). National parties are unable to resolve these because they lack all the “normal” instruments of economic policy necessary to maintain societal consensus. Which then leads them to turn to technocrats to resolve the impasse, by having them implement the measures the parties don’t want to take responsibility for.

It’s no coincidence that the era of the technical governments begins in the early 1990s, following Italy’s signing of the Maastricht Treaty, which was negotiated by none other than — you guessed it — Mario Draghi, at the time director general of the Italian Treasury. The first technocrat-led government, led by former governor of Italy’s central bank, Carlo Azeglio Ciampi, was formed in 1993 and inaugurated the first round of mass privatisation of state assets. Just a few years later, it was the turn of Lamberto Dini, prime minister between 1995 and 1996.

Throughout this entire period, Draghi, in his capacity as director general of the Treasury, was one of the main proponents of the privatisation of Italy’s state-owned companies, and of the vincolo esterno in general. The fall of Berlusconi’s last cabinet, in 2011, saw the ushering in of another technocrat, Mario Monti, former European commissioner and an international advisor to Goldman, who proceeded to administer a devastating austerity “cure” recommended by Brussels. This was largely a consequence of the decision by the newly-appointed president of the ECB – yes, Mario Draghi again – to stop the purchases of Italian government bonds, which caused Italian interest rates to skyrocket.

In short, either in his capacity as director general of the Treasury or president of the ECB, Draghi oversaw mass privatisation, severe public spending cuts and tax hikes that all had a deleterious impact on Italy.

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The experience of the Monti government is a perfect case in point: the healthcare cuts administered by Monti, as well as other administrations, and demanded by the European Commission, left the Conte administration dramatically ill-prepared to fight the Covid-19 outbreak. The architecture of the euro continued to impede an efficient response, despite extensive central bank support and the temporary suspension of the EU’s budget rules. This led to mounting economic and social costs, and ended up placing a growing strain on the government — an impasse that we are now told can only be solved by yet another deus ex machina technocrat.

This is madness. There is little doubt that Italy’s crisis must be regarded as a crisis of the post-Maastricht order of Italian capitalism, and more in general of the logic of the external constraint based upon privatisation, fiscal austerity and wage compression. This hasn’t just entailed the permanent stagnation of Italy’s economy but has also had the effect of disarticulating the normal functioning of democracy. If that is the case, then it is folly to think that Mario Draghi — literally the bodily incarnation of the political-economic model that has ruined Italy — can represent a solution.

Draghi didn’t just directly oversee the dismantling of Italy’s public industry and application of severe austerity in the early 1990s during his position at the Italian Treasury. He also fine-tuned the external constraint itself by spearheading the transformation of the euro system. It changed from a dysfunctional but formally democratic monetary union into an inter/supranational governance structure where governments are punished through a complex array of institutional mechanisms.

A system in which the formal democratic process itself is systematically subverted through financial and monetary blackmail — first and foremost at the hands of the ECB — to the point that one may reasonably question whether euro area member states can still be considered democracies. Even according to the narrow “bourgeois” understanding of the concept, one would certainly be hard-pressed to still consider Italy as such. Especially now that Mario Draghi has been called in to finish the job he began 30 years ago.