Young Leaders Signals a Mandate for Political Change in It

[frigidmagi]

NYTimes

For all its melodrama and theatrics, Italian politics is often defined by what does not happen. The Italian Parliament has been deadlocked on major changes for years, unable or unwilling to enact bills to overhaul the political system or unshackle the economy, which has barely grown in two decades.

That is why the rise of Matteo Renzi, the charismatic young mayor of Florence, has sent a jolt through the landscape.

Mr. Renzi, 38, on Sunday became the leader of the country’s biggest party, the center-left Democrats, winning a nationwide primary by an unexpectedly wide margin — nearly 70 percent of the 2.9 million primary voters supported him. The outpouring was interpreted by many analysts as an unequivocal mandate to shake things up.

“This is so momentous,” said Franco Pavoncello, a political analyst and president of John Cabot University in Rome. “There has been a very strong resistance on the left to produce change.”

Italy once ranked among the richest nations in Europe, but it is suffering a prolonged economic downturn and persistent high unemployment, even as most other European nations have been gathering steam. Government finances hamstrung by the euro crisis and its aftermath have made matters worse.

The malaise in Italy has fueled rising public anger and alienation, which has proved to be a potent combination for the Five Star Movement, the antigovernment, anti-Europe party led by the comedian Beppe Grillo. It rose from nowhere to win 25 percent of the vote in parliamentary elections in February.

Mr. Renzi is a different sort of outsider than Mr. Grillo. Though he is not part of the entrenched old guard of the Democratic Party, his strategy is to work from within. He has promised to transform the party, the bastion of some of the country’s most powerful entrenched interests — and then to change Italy.

Mr. Renzi has talked about confronting many of his party’s sacred cows, especially the labor unions. He wants to overhaul education and the government health system. He also talks about seeking consensus with conservative voters, another idea rarely voiced by the left.

“Only change can close the last 20 years and open that new season that the country needs,” wrote Ezio Mauro, editor of the newspaper La Repubblica, in a front-page editorial.

The question, of course, is how quickly Mr. Renzi can refashion his party and make a run for prime minister. The scale of his primary victory suggests that the time may be ripe to push for early elections. But analysts point to two reasons that Mr. Renzi is likely to wait.

First, Italy’s highest court recently declared major parts of the country’s electoral system unconstitutional, and called on Parliament to fix the problem. Second, Italy already has a young prime minister from the Democratic Party, Enrico Letta.

Mr. Letta, 47, leads the “grand coalition” government of rivals, including parties from the center-left and center-right. Within the Democratic Party, Mr. Letta has his own camp of allies and is regarded as a protégé of President Giorgio Napolitano, perhaps the most respected political figure in Italy.

Mr. Renzi and Mr. Letta are both moderates, and analysts say their relationship could either make or break the party.

Roberto D’Alimonte, a political analyst and specialist on Italy’s election laws, saw the potential for the two leaders to form the kind of testy but mostly effective partnership in Italy that Tony Blair and Gordon Brown once had in the Labour Party in Britain.

Italy’s voting system is famously complex, and has been criticized for producing splintered results that lead to unwieldy, unstable governing coalitions lacking either a popular mandate or shared interests.

Analysts say that Mr. Renzi knows he could not achieve his goals with such a coalition, and that he wants voters to be able to choose lawmakers more directly. But to introduce such a system, Mr. Renzi will have to strike a deal with rivals — possibly with Angelino Alfano, the deputy prime minister in the government who is emerging as the next-generation leader of the center-right.

It was Mr. Alfano, 43, who led the rebellion of younger center-right lawmakers against Silvio Berlusconi in October, after Mr. Berlusconi, a conservative former prime minister, tried to bring down the coalition government. Now Mr. Berlusconi, 77, has been expelled from the Senate, while Mr. Alfano’s colleagues are positioning themselves for the future.

Italy’s European neighbors have watched it with apprehension this year, fearing that the political instability in a country that was deemed “too big to fail” in the financial crisis could now derail the tentative economic recovery elsewhere in the Continent.

Mr. Berlsuconi was a focus of the worries. Now, his fall and the rise of leaders like Mr. Letta, Mr. Alfano and especially Mr. Renzi illustrates that a new generation is finally assuming power in Italy.

Capturing the moment in an article called “The Seventies are Over,” Mario Calabresi, editor of La Stampa, a national newspaper based in Turin, wrote that it was still too soon to tell if the new leaders would be more capable than the old.

“But we know that they could be different,” Mr. Calabresi wrote on Tuesday, “more in tune with the society we live in, and its demands.”

Gaia Pianigiani contributed reporting.

[LadyTevar]

Italy’s highest court recently declared major parts of the country’s electoral system unconstitutional

That's a really bad sign. What parts were unconstitutional? How does that affect those already elected? What changes can be made?