Italy: a volcano in the early stages of an eruption

Expert vulcanologists commenting on Italy's Mount Vesuvius have pointed out that ­it isn't a question of if it will erupt but when. Before an actual full-blown eruption there are the telltale signs: the magma begins to build up beneath the surface, there are increased tremors, and changes in gas emissions or steam activity. Minor lava flows can take place before a major eruption.

This description could be applied to the class struggle in Italy over the past decades. The last time we saw a major eruption was at the time of the famous Hot Autumn of 1969. That year saw the working class coming onto the scene and shaking the system to its very foundations. That eruption was carefully managed by the leaders of the trade unions and the PCI (Italian Communist Party), who initially had to go with the flow so as to be better able to safely channel the immense energy of the working class until it finally quiesced once more, thus saving the system for the capitalist class.

Once all the energies had been released – and, most importantly, once the very same channels through which that energy could be expressed, the trade unions and the Communist Party, had disappointed the mass of working people – the eruption came to a halt, and all but ceased. After that period, one could talk of a relatively dormant volcano. The class struggle did not disappear, but it never regained the level of intensity of the late 1960s and early 1970s. 

Vesuvius last erupted in 1944, and has been dormant since then, but it is not dead. The same was true of the working class after the 1980s. (For a more detailed analysis of that period you can read, Italy on the Brink of Revolution - Lessons from the 70’s)

Crisis of the ‘First Republic’

Since then, there have been moments when fissures in the system have appeared that revealed the underlying tensions. In the aftermath of the intense class struggles of the 1970s, the ruling class of Italy attempted to shift the political pendulum to the right – or the ‘centre’ as they liked to call it. 

This was achieved by ending the Christian Democrat collaboration with the Communist Party (1976-79), and re-establishing the old ‘centre-left’ coalitions of the 1960s involving the Christian Democracy and the Socialist Party (PSI), together with a number of minor parties, which now became known as the ‘Pentapartito’ – the five-party coalition.

The parties involved in these coalition governments behaved like pigs at the trough, taking the system of bribery and corruption to higher and higher levels. A system that was designed after the Second World War as a means by which the most important bourgeois party, the Christian Democrats, could consolidate its roots. 

The levels of corruption in Italy have to be understood in the context of a weak Italian capitalism, one that had come on the scene when other powers, such as Britain and France, and later Germany and the United States, dominated the world market. This left parts of Italy economically undeveloped. 

In the early sixties there was talk of the ‘Italian miracle’ which reflected a period of major industrialisation and growth of the economy / Image: public domain

Bourgeois rule was further undermined by the consequences of the two-decades long fascist regime with full backing by the Italian capitalists. The revolutionary upsurge of the Italian masses and the anti-fascist resistance movement that overthrew the regime left the capitalists relying for survival on the Christian Democracy and a certain degree of collaboration by the Communist Party leaders. 

There was, therefore, a relationship between corruption and use of public spending as a means to earn loyalty and stabilise capitalism. Both were in the DNA of the Christian Democracy from the outset. This was the lubricant that allowed them to keep running an unstable compromise between the different parts of the ruling class, while keeping on board the bureaucracy of the trade unions and the PCI.

Corruption, however, was only one of the causes of the piling up of public debt, and not the main one. The state in Italy had played a disproportionate role in the economy for decades, due to the historical weakness of the capitalist class. 

In the early sixties there was talk of the ‘Italian miracle’ which reflected a period of major industrialisation and growth of the economy. It was on the back of that boom that many concessions could be made to the working class, which saw the development of the welfare state, and growing living standards. The end of the postwar boom in the 1970s, however, meant that things now started going into reverse.

As long as the postwar boom lasted – with the real and significant increase in national wealth that flowed from it – public debt could be kept within certain limits. However, it began to get out of control in the 1980s because of the slower pace of economic growth. 

By the mid to late 1970s the public debt had hit the ratio of 60 percent to GDP, three times higher than the rate in France and double that of Germany. Rising inflation, reaching over 25 percent in 1975, and falling or stagnating GDP led to a period of stagflation (high inflation combined with low economic growth), in which the state was forced to increase debt to pay for public spending, which grew year after year.

The debt grew to such levels that the interest payments alone were enough to keep the debt growing. In fact, interest payments rose from about 8 percent of GDP in 1984 to 11.4 percent by 1994, much higher than in other European countries. Thus, the debt continued to grow, reaching over the level of 120 percent to GDP by the mid 1990s, and although it subsequently slowed for a few years it never went back below the 100 percent mark.

The ruling class was under pressure to get debt down. When debt reaches such levels the question is necessarily posed as who should pay to get it down. Should it be the rich and powerful, the capitalist class, or the mass of working people? As the system is designed to defend the interest of the wealthy, it is clear whose shoulders the burden is unloaded onto. What is needed is a party of the working class that is capable of openly posing the question of expropriating the wealth of the major corporations. 

If power and wealth is left in the hands of these corporations, then whoever comes into government has to abide by the needs of the owners. That is true today, and it was true in the 1990s. And this meant applying severe cuts to spending. 

The Italian ruling class thus tried to push the Christian Democracy to begin dismantling the welfare state, and to move towards a programme of privatisation. Italy, for historical reasons, had a very big public sector, with many state-owned companies. All this was no longer tenable. 

The problem was that all the local patronage upon which the Christian Democracy’s electoral support was in part based would crumble if national funding were to be severely cut off. Therefore, in spite of the pressure, the Christian Democratic party proved to be a tool that no longer corresponded to the needs of the ruling class at that time. The national leaders of the party could see what was necessary, but they were moving too slowly for the needs of the Italian ruling class. 

The Christian Democracy, during the period of the postwar boom, had built its political influence on a widespread system of patronage, with ‘jobs for the boys’ corruption at all levels. Votes were literally bought by making concessions, such as jobs in the state bureaucracy, the granting of social housing, and welfare benefits. To cut the funding for all this would mean destroying the very base of support upon which this party had rested for decades. 

It was Bettino Craxi, the ‘socialist’ prime minister, that first reduced the effects of the sliding scale of wages in 1984 / Image: public domain

As a means of applying pressure on both the Christian Democracy and the Socialist Party, the judicial investigation was let loose. It was basically a threat: ‘either step into line or we will unveil all the corruption you have benefitted from!’ This would eventually lead to the Mani pulite  [clean hands] judicial investigation into political corruption, which started in February 1992. Initially, the ruling class saw it as a lever to pressurise the Christian Democrat leaders, but each scandal led to another, until it became a generalised crisis of the whole political system.

The judges’ investigation uncovered corruption at all levels, with one scandal leading to another, and the Christian Democracy and the PSI were both engulfed by that crisis, which would eventually lead to their electoral collapse in 1994. This marked the end of what became known as the First Republic and with it we saw the collapse and disappearance of many of Italy’s traditional political parties.

The Pentapartito coalition wasn't hated solely because of its corruption, however. They had also been instrumental in beginning the task of taking back from the working class what it had won in the postwar period. The capitalists were demanding measures to ‘reduce the cost of labour’, blaming inflation on wage increases.

One of the big attacks was therefore on the sliding scale of wages, a reform that had been won by the Italian workers back in 1945-46, which guaranteed all workers a degree of protection against inflation. 

It was Bettino Craxi, the ‘socialist’ prime minister, at the head of the coalition, that first reduced the effects of the sliding scale of wages in 1984, while at the same time increasing VAT and taxation in general. This provoked a huge movement with around one million workers and youth converging on Rome. The Craxi government, however, was able to proceed with its attack. 

Eventually, in 1992 the sliding scale was finally abolished by the coalition government led by Giuliano Amato in a deal that the trade union leaders agreed to. This produced a huge wave of anger among the ranks of the trade unions. There were spontaneous protests in response to the agreements, many workers organising independently, with demonstrations and wildcat strikes, with the aim of putting pressure on the union leaders.

The anger of the workers was graphically demonstrated in a series of regional trade union demonstrations, which is remembered as the ‘stagione dei bulloni’ [the ‘season of bolts’], when workers threw eggs and bolts at the trade union speakers in Florence, Turin, Milan, and many other cities. The threat to the trade union leaders was such that they started putting up plexi-glass screens to protect them at later rallies! Such was the anger of the working class at the total sell-out by the trade union leaders.

This period also saw a constant decline in trade union membership, from the peak of 52 percent of workers in a union in 1977 to a figure around 30 percent, a process which accelerated from 1993 onwards. Parallel to this was the phenomenon of breakaway unions from the main three confederations of the CGIL, CISL, and UIL. 

These had been involved in many rotten deals and had become an obstacle for many militant sectors of the working class. Thus, the train drivers broke away and formed their own ‘Cobas’ [Rank and File Committees] as they no longer trusted the official unions to represent them in negotiations with the bosses. This was repeated in several sectors.

The USB union (Unione Sindacale di Base) today, in fact, has its roots in that period. It is the product of a fusion of several of these breakaway unions, and has some influence in sectors such as the dockworkers, teachers, and healthcare workers. And although it has in no way replaced the three big confederations, it is the union that initially sparked the big protest at the end of September that then led to the CGIL being forced to join the call for a general strike against the genocide in Gaza on 3 October of this year.

As we have seen, the anger from below in the early 1990s was mounting at all levels, on both the political and the trade union front. And, such was the disgust of the mass of the population at the degree of corruption that had been revealed by the Mani pulite investigation that millions eventually abandoned the traditional parties at election time in 1994. 

In passing, it is worth noting that the corruption scandal also tarnished the image of the PDS (the Democratic Party of the Left, the PCI changed its name in 1991), as it was uncovered that a Communist Party official had received bribes in connection with contracts with the ENEL electricity company. He was sentenced and served time in prison. This left a sour taste in the mouths of many who still adhered to the idea that corruption was not part of the heritage of the old Communist Party. But it is also true that the PDS suffered far less from the corruption scandal because no major party leader was actually directly involved.

That is why the collapse in confidence in the parties that had governed Italy for decades produced a vacuum mainly on the right and posed a serious problem for the ruling class of how to govern the country, now that their traditional instruments had been destroyed. 

A new regime installed

The bourgeois were able to fill the vacuum by launching new parties, in particular Berlusconi’s Forza Italia. The ex-fascists of the MSI (Italian Social Movement) also recycled themselves to appear as a more traditional right-wing conservative party, which allowed them to win some of the electorate that was abandoning the Christian Democracy. Today’s premier, Meloni, has her roots in that formation. In the north a mood developed among certain layers of wanting to break Italy up altogether, which found its expression in the Lega Nord, now simply the Lega.

The bourgeois were able to fill the vacuum by launching new parties, in particular Berlusconi’s Forza Italia / Image: Niccolò Caranti, Wikimedia Commons

Thus the risk of a new explosion of the class struggle was avoided, and Italy saw a series of governments, some technocratic, but with the support of this or that coalition, and then a period in which we saw a swing from ‘centre-left’ to ‘centre-right’ coalitions, and back again. 

The significant point to understand here is that with each successive coalition, whether of the ‘left’ or the right, more or less the same programme was carried out. It was as if an invisible hand was guiding the policies of each government. When in opposition both the centre-left and the centre-right would make a bit of noise about what the other side was doing, but in practice the same programme was steadily being applied.

In effect, the bourgeois of Italy were able to govern the country both through the ‘centre-left’ and the ‘centre-right’. When one coalition lost consensus, the other coalition could step in. But nothing fundamental changed for the working class. The inexorable advance of the interests of the capitalist class continued. And the serious analysts of capital understood this.

Centre-left and centre-right: two sides of the same coin

Professors at the Political Science Department of the LUISS university in Rome produced a paper in 2022, The Season of Privatisations in Italy, [La stagione delle privatizzazioni in Italia]. In this text, Domenico Bruni and Alberto Iozzi argue that privatisations are the only way of guaranteeing “an economic, social and political recovery" in Italy. Therefore one cannot accuse them of being hostile to privatisations. They are in fact thoroughly bourgeois in their outlook.

They mark 1992 as being the year in which the programme of privatisations began seriously, that is the year in which the old political set up was beginning to crumble. Throughout their text, they exude enthusiasm for the successful carrying out of the privatisations, listing each time the billions that were apparently being made by the state in selling off state-owned enterprises.

They ask a very interesting question, “Are Italian privatisations right-wing or left-wing?” The answer they give is that there isn’t much sense in asking the question, and that is because both the left and the right carried out privatisations. With the tacit understanding between all parties, shared by the trade union leaders, that new governments would not touch the counterreforms introduced by previous ones. 

They explain that no matter which coalition came into office, “...once the programme was launched, there was practically never a decisive change of direction dictated by ideological motivations.”   

They make one interesting comment, however, which is that “...in this context, the centre-left recorded the most state divestment operations”, i.e. the centre-left governments actually privatised more than the centre-right. And they refer to the "paradox that in Italy, the centre-left have accused the centre-right government of having interrupted the privatisation campaign vigorously launched by previous governments [i.e. by themselves]." 

Imagine this scenario: the right-wing win the elections, and although they continue with the privatisations, they do so at a slower pace, and then they get accused by the so-called ‘left’ for not privatising fast enough! And then today’s leaders of the so-called ‘left’ wonder why so many people can’t see any fundamental differences between left and right.

Here we have to understand that the programme that each successive government has had to carry out was already decided before they came into office. This was, and is, the programme of finance capital, both Italian and European. That programme was basically one of widespread privatisation of everything there was to privatise, together with a generalised onslaught on all the gains that the working class had made in the postwar period.

Bosses announce their plans

In 1994, the then chairman of the Confindustria [the Italian bosses’ union], Luigi Abete, was interviewed by the newspaper, Il Sole-24 Ore, the Italian equivalent of the Financial Times. It is the mouthpiece of Italian capitalism, and in the interview the plans of the bourgeois were laid out very clearly.

Abete starts by stressing the fact that the pressures of international competition required serious measures, and one of these was a reform of the electoral system. They needed to break with the old proportional representation. This is something they did, adjusting and readjusting as they went along, to get the required parliamentary majorities they needed in order to carry out all the counter-reforms they were planning to carry out.

At the top of the list was the lowering of tax levels for the higher incomes and for profits. Which also involved greater taxation at the level of consumption, which meant making ordinary working people pay for the tax discounts granted to the rich, when they did their shopping. This was carried out. 

And because energy, transport, waste disposal, etc., were subsidised by the local authorities, the demand of Abete was that the costs of these services should be unloaded fully onto the shoulders of the consumers, i.e. again, onto ordinary working class people. This also has been done.

Healthcare also was to be ‘reformed’ by introducing ‘competition’. This meant promoting private healthcare / Image: Roberto Ferrari, Flickr

Healthcare also was to be ‘reformed’ by introducing ‘competition’. This meant promoting private healthcare. This has led to a situation today where millions of Italians are forced to choose between waiting months – if not years – for a test or operation, or paying someone in the private sector to speed up the process.

He also listed everything that needed privatising, from ENEL, the then state-owned electricity company, to telecommunications, local municipal bus companies, the metro, the railways, the motorways, etc. All of this has been privatised, leading to significant price hikes for the consumers. Municipally owned water companies have been privatised, leading in some cases to a tenfold increase in water bills.

A central plank of Abete’s proposals was putting an end to the ‘rigidities’ of the labour market. What this meant was doing away with long-term work contracts, increasing the flexibility of employment regulations, and facilitating the sacking of workers, which in other words meant the introduction of extreme casualisation of labour. 

Together with this, he proposed giving fiscal discounts to anyone that wished to send their children to private schools, thus helping the higher income brackets, as ordinary working class people could never contemplate such a thing. All this was acted on by successive governments.

The capitulation of the left

In the meantime, the old Communist Party (PCI) had gone through a transformation, changing its name to the PDS (the Democratic Party of the Left) in 1991. This came on the back of the collapse of the Berlin Wall, the fall of all the former Eastern European Stalinist regimes and the ongoing crisis in the Soviet Union which was also about to collapse. 

The leadership of the party had become reformist in all but name, preferring to describe themselves as ‘Eurocommunist’. Its leaders were imbued with a reformist outlook, and the very name ‘Communist’ had become a burden they wished to free themselves of.

Already in the 1960s, the more openly right-wing reformists of the party, whose most well-known figure was Giorgio Amendola, had proposed reunification with the Socialist Party. This was a clear indication that they had broken with the revolutionary traditions of 1921, when the revolutionary wing of the then Socialist Party split away to become the Italian section of the Communist International.

The party under the leadership of Enrico Berlinguer (from 1972-1984) had in fact already distanced themselves from Moscow. In the 1970s Berlinguer famously stated that he felt safer under the umbrella of NATO! Abandoning the name of ‘Communist Party’, however, would have been a step too far for the ranks of the party.

The party vote had been in steady decline since 1979. It had reached its peak in 1976, but after collaborating with the Christian Democrats for three years (1976-79) its vote started to decline, falling to around 26-27 percent by the late 1980s. 

The party leadership never fully acknowledged that the reason for their electoral decline was not to do with the party’s identity as ‘Communist’, but was due to its class-collaborationist support for the austerity policies carried out by the Christian Democracy. Instead, they used this decline to push the line that the image of the party needed to be changed, and the collapse of the Stalinist regimes was the excuse they needed. 

The PDS would later fuse with a number of minor bourgeois parties to become simply the PD, (the Democratic Party). Its leaders enthusiastically embraced the so-called reforms that had been proposed by bosses like Abete, marrying completely into the idea that privatisation meant greater efficiency.

This subsequently served to blur even more the old lines of demarcation between the ‘left’ and the ‘right’. In fact, because the ‘left’, mainly in the form of the Democratic Party, was an enthusiastic supporter of many of these measures, in the minds of a significant layer of the working class the very word ‘left’ lost its meaning and has actually become synonymous with liberalism.

As the PDS moved to the right, the left wing of the old Communist Party which rejected being part of the new party, now known as Rifondazione Comunista (Communist Refoundation), had a window of opportunity to build a genuine, fighting party of the working class. 

In the 1970s Berlinguer famously stated that he felt safer under the umbrella of NATO / Image: Gorup de Besanez, Wikimedia Commons

The anger at the policies of the government, of the PDS and the class collaboration of the trade union leaders, saw Rifondazione emerge as a viable force on the left. In cities like Milan and Turin they won around 14 percent in the local elections, and 8 percent nationally. It reached the peak of 130,000 members, with a strong worker and youth base.

Unfortunately, all this was thrown away with the leaders insisting on ‘lesser-evil politics’. Berlusconi won the 1994 elections in a coalition with the ex-fascists of Alleanza Nazionale. Arguing that in order to stop the right it was necessary to support the new centre-left, the party participated in the Prodi governments of 1996-98 and 2006-08. 

It is worth remembering who Prodi was. He was a member of the Christian Democrats and served as a minister in 1978. Subsequently, from 1982 to 1989 and in 1993-1994, he was appointed president of the IRI [Institute for Industrial Reconstruction], where in both cases he was responsible for a broad program of privatisation of state assets. Thus, there could be no doubts as to where he stood politically.

This open class collaboration in government proved to be the kiss of death for Rifondazione Comunista and led to its electoral collapse to just 1 percent and losing all its MPs. This left the workers and youth without a clear point of reference on the left.

Meanwhile, as part of the bosses’ desire to ‘cut the cost of labour’ there was also the question of pension levels and the age of retirement. The first attack on pensions was carried out back in 1992 by the Amato government, and again in 1995 by the ‘technocratic’ Dini government, which significantly reduced pensions. And the latest major attack, known as the ‘Riforma Fornero’, was carried out by another ‘technocratic’ government of Monti in 2011. This further reduced the value of state pensions and also increased the age of retirement to 67. 

We should note that Monti – a former economics professor and also EU commissioner dealing with finance – had the parliamentary backing of both the Democratic Party and Berlusconi, i.e. of the ‘left’ and the ‘right’. Monti was severely punished at the 2013 election where he decided to stand with his own coalition and only obtained about 10 percent of the votes. 

The electoral standoff between the centre-left coalition led by the PD and Berlusconi’s coalition was upset by the rise of an entirely new formation led by Beppe Grillo, a comedian, the Five Stars Movement (M5S). Out of the blue, the M5S won 8.6 million votes (more than 25 percent), establishing itself as the main opposition to the two coalitions in parliament. 

We have to remember all this when it comes to understanding the present political situation in Italy. Wages and conditions of work have been under constant attack no matter what the composition of the government has been. Whether it was the centre-left or the centre-right, or a technocratic government supported by both sides, the suffering of the working class continued relentlessly. This explains the meteoric rise of the M5S.

The rise and fall of the Five Stars

It was in this context of apparent immobility in the collaboration between the left and the right that we felt another tremor in the political situation in 2018. The Five Stars Movement – which declared that it was neither left-wing nor right-wing, and in the previous parliament had posed as alternative both to the centre-left PD coalition and the centre-right Berlusconi coalition – surged once again in the elections, winning almost 33 percent of the vote.

The success of the Five Stars reflected a growing resentment among millions of voters towards the ‘Second Republic’ set up. The reason is clear to see: the main parties involved in various governments, all of which had been carrying out austerity measures, as outlined above, were being punished by the electorate. 

One could say that the Five Stars channelled a more or less left-leaning electorate that was looking for an alternative. The mirror image of this phenomenon was the success of the right-wing League, which channelled a similar sense of resentment, which explains its short-lived electoral success in the 2019 European elections, when it received over 34 percent of the vote. The two parties that suffered the most in this situation were the Democratic Party and Berlusconi’s Forza Italia.

The Five Stars promised it would introduce a ‘citizens’ wage’, i.e. unemployment benefit, which it managed to act on once elected. A single person who met the necessary criteria could receive up to €780 per month; a family of two adults and one child could get anything between €800 and €1,300 per month. Over two million families, and almost 5.5 million people received at least one month’s payment while the benefit remained available, from April 2019 to December 2023 when the Meloni government removed it.

The success of the Five Stars reflected a growing resentment among millions of voters towards the ‘Second Republic’ / Image: Livioandronico2013, Wikimedia Commons

The Five Stars also promised a minimum ‘citizen’s’ pension of €780 a month – which was carried out and later taken back by Meloni – and tax cuts for the lower incomes. All this made the new political formation very popular, especially in the poorer areas of the south, where it won over 50 percent of the votes cast.

The electoral success of the Five Stars Movement brought to the surface and highlighted the real issues facing ordinary working class families: low wages, low pensions, and lack of jobs for the youth. In fact, among the youth the Five Stars was the most voted party, and in the south it won a landslide.

However, the victory of the Five Stars created a stalemate situation in parliament. It won 223 MPs, out of a total of 630, coming first, but very far from having a majority. No parliamentary alliance had a majority to form a government and this was only resolved when the Five Stars formed a coalition with the Lega. 

This was seen as a betrayal by the most left-leaning part of the electorate who voted for the Five Stars. After having governed with the Lega, its subsequent alliance with the Democratic Party alienated the rest. All this took the shine off the Movement and it subsequently split and declined electorally to its present 15 percent or so.

Draghi’s grand coalition and the rise of Meloni

The final act in this tragicomedy, one could say, came in 2021-22 with the grand coalition around Mario Draghi, the former governor of the European Central Bank. His government – with its harsh austerity programme – was backed by all the parties in parliament: the Democratic Party, Five Stars, Forza Italia, the Lega, together with a number of smaller forces. 

The exception was Giorgia Meloni’s Fratelli d’Italia, a party that had sprung out of Alleanza Nazionale, which was the continuation of the neofascist MSI and until then had been on the right-wing fringes of the centre-right coalition. Meloni was left out of the grand coalition supporting Draghi’s austerity government. And this explains her electoral success in 2022!

In the 2022 election campaign Meloni seemed to come from nowhere, winning 26 percent. Her party had previously stood at around 4 percent. She stood in an electoral alliance with Forza Italia and the Lega, who suffered a crushing defeat, winning 8 percent and 8.7 percent respectively. The coalition as a whole, however, won 43 percent, coming first and therefore benefitting from the bonus number of MPs awarded to whichever coalition tops the polls.

All the noise on mainstream media from liberal or so-called left analysts back then was about Italy turning to the right, with some raising the scarecrow of fascism, with this victory of ‘far-right’ Fratelli d’Italia. However, if we look more closely at what happened, a very different picture emerges.

The actual turn-out was a historically low 63.9 percent of the electorate, which means that only 27.5 percent of registered voters actually cast their votes for the right-wing coalition. That means that almost 3 out of every 4 people did not vote for Meloni’s coalition. Her base of popular support is not as strong as the mainstream would like us to believe. And she is not installing a fascist regime. Of all countries in the world, Italy should be the place where the real essence of fascism should be understood. 

In the 2022 election campaign Meloni seemed to come from nowhere / Image: European Union, Wikimedia Commons

During the Fascist regime there was no right to strike; there were no free trade unions; there was no right to free speech; only one party was allowed to exist, all the others having been banned when Mussolini declared his dictatorship in 1926. Leaders and activists of the other parties were either in exile or in prison. The regime had powers to ban gatherings of more than three people. No opposition journals were tolerated. Under Mussolini we would not have seen free trade unions calling a general strike with two million people protesting on the streets of Italy.

That is not the type of regime we have under the Meloni government. That does not mean that nothing is changing. Earlier this year a new ‘security’ law was introduced with several measures that give the police greater powers and also makes such acts as blocking roads and railways, or writing graffiti on walls, criminal offences that can be punished with lengthy prison sentences.

This government is trying to curb rights. It is manoeuvring against certain journalists, for example. And like most governments across Europe, it has attempted to beat the drum of ‘antisemitism’, trying to criminalise anyone who protests in favour of the Palestinian people.

The irony of all this is, of course, that Meloni in her younger days, when she openly identified as a fascist, praised Mussolini to the high heavens as the greatest statesman of the 20th century. And she was active in a milieu that was deeply immersed in real antisemitism. She now prefers to obfuscate her own past and present herself as a ‘democratic’ politician that respects the rules of parliamentary democracy.

For now, she is able to hold onto her position in government because the opposition parties in parliament have been largely discredited and are not seen by many as a credible alternative. Once again, there is in fact a very high degree of mistrust towards all the parties, and this is reflected in the growing numbers that abstain at election time.

What is worth noting, in fact, is the acceleration in the level of abstensions in the period 2008 to 2022, a decrease of almost 17 percentage points in voter turnout. This, and the violent swings in voting whenever any alternative seems to appear on the scene as with the Five Stars, reflect the growing and widespread disillusionment of a significant layer of the population with all the parties. Especially in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis and all the ills that came with it for ordinary working people.

A feeling of deep malaise permeates the whole of society

Here it is worth taking a closer look at what the working class has suffered in this period. Nominal wages have remained stagnant for the past thirty years, growing by no more than around 1 percent a year, with some years, such as 2019-2020 seeing an actual fall of nearly 6 percent. According to the International Labour Organization (ILO), real wages fell by 8.7 percent between 2008 and 2024. 

Italy is in fact the only member of the G20 to have experienced a decline in wages in real terms in this period. Pensions are at a standstill, and last year pensioners got a real smack in the teeth when the government granted them an increase of a paltry €3 a month! This year they will be getting a €20 monthly increase, a pittance considering the real increase in the cost of living. 

Meanwhile, over the last twenty years (2004-2024), prices actually increased by an average of 49 percent. Since 2019 alone, food price inflation has been around 30 percent. On top of this we have the rapid increase in rents, which have gone up by around 40 percent over the past decade with some cities seeing increases up to 70 percent. At the same time, youth unemployment stands at over 20 percent, one of the highest rates in the European Union.

This explains why since 2011 the numbers emigrating abroad have been rising, with up to 160,000 leaving the country in some years. According to official statistics, between 2002 and 2021 approximately 1.4 million Italians left the country, most of these being youth. Without this, the levels of unemployment would be much higher.

With her three years in office, Meloni’s is the third longest lasting government of the past 80 years / Image: European Union, Wikimedia Commons

Due to the high food price inflation 70 percent of Italians have actually changed their food spending habits, with 35 percent reducing either the quantity or the quality of their purchases. And due to the collapsing national healthcare services, it has been reported that 4.3 million Italians have given up on seeking treatment because of the excessively long waiting lists, in some cases being up to two years.

It is not difficult to see why there is a generalised feeling of deep malaise that permeates the whole of Italian society. It is like that build up of lava before a volcanic eruption. And after being relatively dormant for a long period, the volcano finely erupted on the 3 October with the general strike and mass demonstrations in support of the Palestinians fighting for their very survival. 

There was a genuine feeling of disgust and anger at what the Israeli military was doing to the people of Gaza. The mobilisations were truly monumental and historical in terms of both size and political significance. Gaza proved to be the spark that lit the fire. 

Meanwhile, the Meloni government continued to express support for Netanyahu and his genocidal war against the people of Gaza. One also has to note that Italy is the third largest provider of weaponry for Israel, with its armaments industry making fat profits from the war.

The question may therefore be asked as to why the Meloni government is one of the longest lasting since the end of the Second World War. The average duration of a government since 1945 has been around 14 months. Therefore, with her three years in office, Meloni’s is the third longest lasting government of the past 80 years.

After the big mobilisations of October we have had three regional elections in Italy, in the Marche, Calabria, and Tuscany. All of them were marked with record low turnouts, 50 percent in the Marche, 43 percent in Calabria, and 47 percent in Tuscany. The Marche and Calabria saw wins for Meloni, with her coalition winning 52.4 percent and 57 percent respectively. In Tuscany, on the other hand the coalition made up mainly of the Democratic Party and the Five Stars won with close to 54 percent.

These results are an accentuation of what we saw in 2022 in the national elections, with around half the electorate not voting at all, and therefore whichever coalition wins only represents the active support of around one quarter of the electorate.

Widespread alienation of the electorate

The reason for all this is to be found in the fact that now at least half the population – and that number is growing – has no faith in any of the mainstream parties. The Lega, Forza Italia, the Democratic Party, and the Five Stars have all been in government and all have failed to stop the constant deterioration in living conditions, the constant eating away at the standard of living of millions of working people.

It is because of this past that Meloni continues to hold up in the opinion polls, standing at around 30 percent, with the Democratic Party in second place at 22 percent, the Five Stars at around 13 percent, followed by Forza Italia and the Lega, both at around 8-9 percent each. Remember, however, that you have to halve these figures to see the actual real, active support among the electorate, considering the levels of abstention. 

The reason for this scenario is to be found in the total lack of a genuine alternative on the left. There is no fighting, working class party that can appeal to the workers, that can offer them a way out of the present nightmare scenario. Therefore, Meloni trundles on.

But something below the surface is rumbling. The telltale signs of future volcanic eruptions are there. One big lava flow was the pro-Palestine movement. And although the lava may have slowed somewhat, the pressure has not gone away. What Meloni promised and what she has delivered are two very different things and more and more people are beginning to see this. 

What Meloni promised and what she has actually done

Let us recall for a moment what Meloni and her ministers promised they would do once in office. They promised they would bring down taxes, that they would reduce the national tax burden, i.e. the overall level of taxes as a percentage of GDP. But instead this has increased to 42.8 percent since they came into office at the end of 2022. 

In the most recent changes to taxation introduced in the latest budget, all those earning less than €28,000 – the overwhelming majority of Italians – saw no cut to the taxes they pay. It was the higher income earners who saw some degree of tax reduction.

There is no sign anywhere that the Meloni government is going to undo all the cuts to pensions carried out by previous governments / Image: Quirinale.it, Wikimedia Commons

They promised to reduce the waiting lists in the health service, and to increase spending on healthcare, but none of this has actually materialised. Government spending on healthcare in nominal terms has increased – from €125.4 billion in 2022 to €136.5 billion in 2025 – but that growth is only apparent. Inflation has eroded the real value, and in reality healthcare spending as a percentage of GDP has actually gone down from 6.3 percent in 2022 to 6.1 percent in 2024-2025.

Matteo Salvini, the leader of the Lega and deputy prime minister, promised to undo the Riforma Fornero on pensions, but there is no sign anywhere that the Meloni government is going to undo all the cuts to pensions carried out by previous governments. 

The accumulated effect of the various pension 'reforms' – that require people to work longer and have more years of paid contributions – has already had the following impact: “... the effective average retirement age increased by more than five years between 2001 and 2024, to 64.6 years; the rate of participation in the labour market among the 55-64 age group more than doubled, from 28.2 to 61.3 percent” (according to a Bank of Italy report). In fact, as things stand, the age of retirement is expected to rise to 69 by the year 2050.

Berlusconi – who was still alive and campaigning back in 2022 – had raised the idea of increasing the minimum pension to €1000 per month. There is no sign of that happening anytime soon. The minimum pension still stands at just a little over €600. Meanwhile, the National Institute of Statistics (ISTAT) found that last year (2024), 23.1 percent of Italians were at risk of “poverty or social exclusion”, an increase on the previous year.

Meloni has acted on one of her promises, however, and that is the numerous tax amnesties she has introduced, a real smack in the face for the millions of workers and pensioners who have no choice but pay their taxes, which are directly taken from their monthly income. There is a layer of businesspeople who have evaded taxes over the years. Their cases have now been archived.

More Draghist than Draghi

As we have pointed out, Meloni had one big advantage in the 2022 elections. Her party was the only one that had not been part of the Draghi grand coalition. Her party was founded in 2012 as a split from the Popolo della Libertà (PdL), a party which had been formed through a fusion of Berlusconi’s Forza Italia and the reformed ex-fascists of Alleanza Nazionale. Meloni’s party remained a marginal force, winning just 2 percent in the 2013 elections and 4.3 percent in 2018.

Back then she adopted a eurosceptic stance, even raising the possibility of Italy exiting the eurozone. She could afford to present herself as a hardline anti-EU politician back then, because she had no possibility of actually acting on it. This played to her advantage, because all the previous governments – especially the centre-left coalition governments – used the pro-EU rhetoric as a means of justifying austerity and privatisations (the Maastricht treaty convergence parameters on public debt, the introduction of the euro single currency, etc.) 

This led many to see the EU and the euro as the reasons why they were suffering cuts in wages, cuts in pensions, and a general dismantling of the welfare state they had been accustomed to for decades.

A vote for Meloni therefore also meant a vote for someone who would stand up to the EU bureaucrats. But as she got closer to power, and once in government, her tune changed sharply. She is the prime minister of a major capitalist country, the third economy in the eurozone, and she has adopted the policies required of her by the people that count at the top of Italian and European capitalism.

She is now openly accused of being ‘più draghiana di Draghi’: ‘more Draghist than Draghi’. And it could not be any different. Finance capital decides the policies of her government. Italy has received large amounts of funding from the European Union through the ‘recovery and resilience plan’, close to €200 billion, two thirds of which is in the form of loans. 

Meloni is now openly accused of being ‘more Draghist than Draghi’ / Image: Presidenza della Repubblica, Wikimedia Commons

Without this, the government would be facing serious financial difficulties. Now whenever a minister of Meloni’s government is questioned about what they promised during the elections campaign of 2022 and what they have actually done, the answer they give is ‘we are in Europe’, meaning they must abide by EU regulations.

When she was elected all this was not immediately evident to millions of Italians, but now it is dawning on many that she is no different. She is destined to go the way of the other parties. Just as the Five Stars rose in popularity and then fell when they failed to deliver when in office, so will the Fratelli d’Italia also lose their shine and enter into decline. And although in percentage terms her party is still holding up in the opinion polls, if we look closer at what is actually happening, as things stand she is actually losing a significant part of her electoral base. 

The greater levels of abstention mean that Meloni's 30 percent in the most recent opinion polls today is actually fewer votes in absolute terms than her 26 percent of three years ago. What is more important now, however, is the widespread anger and radicalisation that is affecting millions of workers and youth in Italy. Some commentators are asking themselves the question as to why such huge street protests as the ones we saw at the end of September and beginning of October have not yet radically changed the political landscape.

Well, the answer to that question emerges abundantly clearly if we consider everything we have outlined in this article. Many angry workers and youth cannot see a party they identify with, a party that truly answers their aspirations. It is abundantly clear that millions of working people want a decent wage, decent pensions, decent jobs, a shorter working week, no increases in the age of retirement, a decent healthcare system, decent schools, a society that offers some hope for the future. 

None of the parties present in the Italian parliament today offer any of this. In fact, even these basic aspirations cannot be fulfilled by Italian capitalism today. That is where the contradiction lies.

That explains why, after years of apparent stasis, we saw such a huge eruption of anger on the streets, such huge mobilisations for the people of Gaza. The people on the streets were protesting for Gaza, yes, but they were also protesting against their own government. That same government that supports the butchery of the Israeli military in Gaza, is also attacking the living conditions of ordinary working people in Italy.

A new generation of class fighters

This is what explains the sharp radicalisation taking place, especially among the youth. They were out in huge numbers during the general strike of 3 October. Many high schools were occupied with intense debates going on among the school students. They also had the backing of their parents and their teachers. It is a new generation that is waking up and becoming conscious of the impasse facing the system, and they are looking for radical solutions.

We, the revolutionary communists, the Marxists, can see this very clearly. But quite often in history, the more intelligent elements within the ruling class can see the same process, but from their own class point of view. An interesting editorial comment appeared in Il Foglio, a conservative/liberal daily paper in Italy which aligns with the centre-right. It was a comment about the nature of the movement that erupted over Gaza. On 7 October it published an editorial under the title “The intertwining of the fight against ‘global Israel’ and all local causes”.

The author asks a question, “Could anyone think of a more beautiful sight than tens of thousands of young people taking to the streets to celebrate the end of a terrible war?” His reply is that he is going to explain why he doesn’t share such optimism. He goes on to explain that, “It is clear that the Gaza demonstrations were the political baptism for a new generation, which is going to leave an imprint destined to last.” And he ends his comment thus, “The real news here is the emergence of a political generation that has learned to connect the fight against ‘global Israel’ with all the local causes. And that is not good news.” [My emphasis]

Here we have the true voice of the capitalist class. The fact that the youth in Italy has been radicalised by the events in Gaza is seen by them as bad news. And the reason is evident. The crisis of their system is so deep that it requires brutal austerity measures at all levels. This means the youth has no future to look forward to. This will propel them towards revolutionary alternatives, towards a policy in complete contradiction to that which the bourgeois need to apply. A head-on collision is being prepared.

Over the past decades the ruling class of Italy has been busy trying to block every channel through which the anger of the working class could be expressed / Image: fair use

To return to our analogy with volcanic eruptions. Lava flows and tremors can recede, and even stop for a period, but the pressure from below continues to build up. And sooner or later new eruptions are inevitable. At a certain point the flow becomes unstoppable. A similar process takes place in the relations between the classes. When a powerful eruption takes place, the real state of affairs becomes clear and the consciousness of millions is transformed rapidly.

In order to understand the situation in Italy today we need to look deep beneath the surface of society. We need to listen to that part of the people, the millions without a voice in parliament, without a voice in the press. The parliamentary games and manoeuvres which hit the headlines daily are going on while something far more powerful is being prepared.

Over the past decades the ruling class of Italy has been busy trying to block every channel through which the anger of the working class could be expressed. With the help of its reformist leaders, they destroyed the old Communist Party, they tamed the unions, and they have been trying to restrict all room for dissent. They continue to do that to this day. 

This, however, also brings dangers for the capitalist class. By blocking off all the channels through which the working class and the youth could express their dissatisfaction, they have obstructed the safety valves preserving the stability of the system. The apparently dormant nature of the working class in fact has been like a volcano whose craters have been blocked. 

But like Mount Vesuvius, new and more powerful eruptions are being prepared. 3 October saw the first in what will prove to be a series of eruptions. And just as in the case of Vesuvius, a bigger and more powerful eruption is being prepared in the coming period, and when it comes it will shake the whole rotten system from top to bottom.

The historical traditions of the Italian working class will re-emerge. The working class could have taken power on three occasions in the 20th century, in 1918-20 which culminated in the occupation of the factories, in 1943-48 during the movement that brought down the fascist regime and the huge wave of strikes that ensued [see In Defence of Marxism issue 49], and the period of intense class struggle that followed on from the Hot Autumn of 1969.

With the enormous contradictions that have now piled up, and with the enormous resentment that has been accumulated in the depths of society due to all the attacks on the working class, as outlined in this article, when the next eruption comes, it will be on a far higher level than anything we have ever seen before.