Bulletin of Italian Politics Vol. 2, No. 1, 2010, 137-45 The Regional Elections of 2010: Much Ado about Nothing? Antonio Floridia Electoral Observatory of the Region of Tuscany Abstract: This article, taking its point of departure from the research presented at the annual workshop of the Italian Society for Electoral Studies, analyses the principal outcomes of the elections held in 13 Italian regions on 27 and 28 March 2010. One of the most significant features of these elections is that they do not appear to have resulted in any major changes with respect to the electoral cycle initiated in Italy by the parliamentary elections of 2008. Featuring a very low level of turnout, typical of “second-order” elections and affecting all the parties, the only winners were the parties (the Northern League and Italy of Values) which managed to consolidate their support or limit their losses. The article then analyses in more detail the result obtained by the Democratic Party and dwells on the fact that the success of the centre right, despite winning four of the regions previously governed by the centre left, does not seem, however, to have reinforced the Berlusconi government due to the growing political significance of the League and the conflicts this produces. Ultimately, the regional elections have highlighted all of the dillemmas affecting Italian politics without resolving any of them. Keywords: Berlusconi, regional elections, Lega Nord, Democratic Party As it has become accustomed to doing in the wake of a round of elections, SISE, the Italian Society for Electoral Studies (Società Italiana di Studi Elettorali), decided this year too to organise a workshop – which took place in Milan on 10 May, a few weeks after the regional elections, at the headquarters, and with the support of the Milan provincial government. The objective of these post-electoral workshops is to enable the “work in progress” of scholars and experts to be compared, through presentations of the initial results of their research, thus allowing direct comparison of the interpretive hypotheses informing their analyses: workshops do not, therefore, have the format of a traditional conference, but rather consist of a series of rapid presentations and brief comments. The proceedings of the 10 May event, opened by the Society’s president, Carlo Fusaro, were more than usually stimulating, featuring as they did as many as 19 presentations touching on numerous aspects of the elections, held on 27 and 28 March, and a large number of in-depth analyses, especially analyses based on the geographical distribution of the 137 A. Floridia vote. Precisely because of its nature as “work in progress”, and because there were no papers as such, it is not possible to provide an exhaustive account of the work that was undertaken on the day. Rather, we shall attempt to describe the basic outlines of a debate that not only took place at the SISE workshop, but that also informed, more generally, the analyses and comments made in the country at large in the wake of the elections. 1 Who won and who lost? The regional polls as “second-order” elections It is understandable that general interpretations of an election result tend to be based on the prior expectations of the actors involved; but sometimes – and in many ways it happened in the case of these elections too – evaluations and comments on results are made without any regard for analyses of the data. In the initial hours following the vote, in the press and among commentators, a series of commonplaces were developed – commonplaces that then failed to stand up to more incisive analyses. Before the regional elections, expectations, including those of a number of analysts, were driven by a single question: Will these be typical “mid-term” elections? That is, coming as they do two years after the parliamentary elections of 2008, which brought triumph to Silvio Berlusconi, will they register the first signs of weariness and disappointment of the electorate with the government in office? Would Italian voters behave as French voters did fifteen days previously when they severely punished President Sarkozy, rewarding the left opposition? And above all, what would be the impact of the long series of scandals, concerning behaviour both public and private that for many months had been plaguing both Berlusconi and his government? The situation which, thanks to the elections of 2005, formed the point of departure for the poll was extremely unbalanced: of the 13 regions where voting took place, as many as 11 were governed by the centre left, only two (Lombardy and Veneto) by the centre right. The most obvious criterion to use in judging who won and who lost therefore seemed to be the number of regions likely to be won or lost by the different formations (and, as we know, the centre right won four, giving an overall score of 7 to 6 in favour of the centre left). But this too was a potentially arbitrary criterion: on the basis of the outcome of the European elections of 2009, for example, the centre left was likely to win only in the four “red” regions of central Italy. And few remembered the long-standing fact that if Lombardy and Veneto are excluded in the case of the centre right and the aforementioned four regions in the case of the centre left, then all the others (Piedmont, Liguria, Lazio, Campania, Puglia and Calabria) have always been contestable “swing” regions. In 1995, the contest resulted in a score of 7 to 6 in favour of the centre left, and in 2000, 7 to 6 in favour of the centre right, as the maps compiled by Ilvo Diamanti and his assistants – some of 138 The Regional Elections of 2010 which were presented at the SISE workshop by Terenzio Fava – clearly show (see the web site www.demos.it ). The 2005 result was rather unusual, coinciding as it did with the lowest point in the approvals ratings of the second Berlusconi government: indeed, one can say that it was precisely thanks to that defeat that the leader of the centre right reignited his campaign, re-thinking a strategy that was to lead to his comeback, to the spectacular “draw” at the elections of 2006 and to the brief and unhappy period of government by the centre left. As one can see, therefore, the regional elections of 2010 have to be interpreted from the perspective of the “electoral cycles” that mark Italian politics: and from this point of view, as many of the scholars (including Paolo Natale, Paolo Segatti, Roberto Biorcio, Cristiano Vezzoni and Roberto D’Alimonte) emphasised in their contributions to the SISE workshop, the regional elections of 2010 failed to mark a shift to any kind of new phase: on the contrary, they can be considered to have been entirely consistent with the cycle that began with the elections of 2008 and, in a certain sense, to represent their sequel. This is also true when it comes to analysing the result obtained by the Northern League, which was certainly the only party to come away from the vote with a real victory: in particular, Roberto Biorcio showed that the electoral history of the League can be viewed as a succession of three different “waves” (in 1992, in 1996 and in 2008), the party having drawn its support from a segment of the electorate that has oscillated periodically between it and the People of Freedom (Popolo della libertà, Pdl) and which in 2010 favoured the party led by Umberto Bossi. 2 The analyses of the vote flows – presented to the workshop by Piergiorgio Corbetta and Pasquale Colloca of the Istituto Cattaneo in Bologna, and by Lorenzo De Sio of CISE, the Italian Centre for Electoral Studies (Centro Italiano Studi Elettorali) in Florence – too showed the absence of any “systematic shifts” between centre left and centre right – thereby confirming the view that the League’s advance took place essentially thanks to the votes of those who had previously supported the Pdl. “The belief of many observers”, these authors said, “that the League makes its gains by winning over the support of voters from the left, finds no empirical support: in Turin, Milan, Brescia, Padua, Parma, Modena, Bologna, Reggio Emilia – in all of the cities of the North that were examined, without exception – the League advanced at the expense of the Pdl”. In Tuscany too, as revealed by an analysis of the vote contributed by the present author, the League’s gains were to a very large extent to be attributed to an inflow of voters from the right and the far right; and if in percentage terms the party’s growth is significant (its support rising from 4.2 percent at the 2009 European elections to 6.5 percent today), in absolute terms it represents a gain of just 8,000 votes as compared to last year. 139 A. Floridia One must not therefore make the mistake of considering these elections from the perspective of newspaper columnists as opposed to the perspective of Italy’s political and electoral history: these elections have not changed the balance of political and electoral forces that was established by the elections of 2008. And it is precisely this – the fact that there was no significant novelty – that perhaps constitutes the most significant political problem for all those hoping to build an alternative to Berlusconi. The political consequences of the vote As many of the contributions revealed, analysis of the results is a complex task: regional elections, thanks in part to the electoral system, have a large number of peculiarities. For example, there was confirmation of the significance of “exclusive” votes, that is, votes cast for the candidates running for the position of regional president, without the voter having also cast a vote for any of the supporting lists.