Italy

Political realignment in Italy

By Martin Thomas At the Lutte Ouvriere fete, on 26-28 May 2007, near Paris, I talked with Roberto Luzzi of Pagine Marxiste and with Franco Grisolia of McPCL , and attended a forum given by the PdAC . General background: in 2005 Rifondazione comunista (PRC, the only large leftish splinter to come out of the decomposition of the European Communist Parties) joined the Unione, an electoral alliance of 11 parties under the leadership of the Christian Democrat Romano Prodi. PRC refused to join the previous Prodi coalition, the Olive Tree, and in 1998 forced the fall of a previous Prodi government by...

Italian left: the end of an era

By Cath Fletcher The Rifondazione project has failed, and the Italian left now needs to rebuild. More than a year on from the narrow victory of Romano Prodi’s coalition L’Unione, which includes the Rifondazione majority, both major left currents in the party are looking to alternatives. The trade unions, meanwhile, have announced public sector strikes for early June as negotiations over a new national contract falter. The Rifondazione majority have enthusiastically embraced joint government with Prodi’s motley collection of Catholic social-democrats and Blairite ex-CPers. Former party leader...

Gramsci: In the aftermath of the Turin factory occupations

By Antonio Gramsci The proletarian vanguard, which today is disillusioned and threatened with dissolution, must ask itself whether it is not itself responsible for this situation. It is a fact that in the General Confederation of Labour there is no organised revolutionary opposition, centralised enough to exercise control over the leading offices and capable not only of replacing one man by another, but one method by another, one aim by another and one will by another. This is the real situation, which lamentations, curses and oaths will not change, only tenacious and patient organisation and...

Italian Tube crash

One person has died and another 60 have been injured - five seriously - in a crash on Rome's underground. A train drove into the back on another which was stationary in the platform.

While officials work out whether the cause was human error or a technical problem with the signalling system, Tubewo...

Italy’s economic disaster

Italy has the lowest employment rate of the big western European countries: 58% of the working-age population is in work, compared to 72% in Britain. According to the Economist Italy would need another five million jobs just to match Britain’s employment rate, but Italian industry is being undercut in the global market by manufacturers in lower-wage economies such as China. The proportion of workers in the black economy has risen from 12.9% in 2004 to 14.2% in 2005. In the five years of Berlusconi’s government, the rich in Italy got richer and the poor poorer. While the income of the self...

The election in numbers

The turn-out was very high – 83.6%, up from 81.4% last time round. L’Unione’s votes break down as follows: Senate: Left Democrats (DS) 17.5% Margherita 10.7% Rifondazione 7.4% Rosa nel Pugno 2.5% Comunisti Italiani & Greens 4.2% Italy of Values 2.9% Others in L’Unione 3.5% Camera: Olive Tree (Left Democrats plus Margherita) 31.3% Rifondazione Comunista 5.8% Rosa nel pugno 2.6% Comunisti Italiani 2.3% Greens 2.1% Others in L’Unione 2.9% Left Democrats: These used to be part of the CP but are now social democrats. Some of the former Socialist Party have ended up here. Margherita: Used to be...

Prodi says: don’t march

This peace demonstration was held on Saturday 18 March, just three weeks before the election. The majority of L’Unione — despite its policy to withdraw troops from Iraq — refused to support it. They also succeeded in convincing Italy’s biggest trade union federation, the CGIL, not to give its official backing. Prodi and his supporters said they feared the demonstration would end in violence: an anti-fascist mobilisation in Milan a week earlier had ended in street-fighting between anarchists and the police. In the event there was no such trouble, nor was there ever likely to have been. The...

Italy’s left and the Blairites

By Cath Fletcher The centre-left has scraped into power in Italy. Romano Prodi’s coalition, L’Unione, won April’s election by the barest of margins, beating Silvio Berlusconi’s governing coalition by 25,000 votes to win a majority in the Camera dei Deputati (lower house). Its Senate majority of one came only thanks to a quirk of the electoral system: there it got a smaller share of the popular vote than the centre-right. This was no 1997 in Britain, with a wave of public enthusiasm for kicking out the right wing. At times on election night, as the projections swung against the left, it felt...

Italy And The "Modello Blair"

By Cath Fletcher Italian news has been dominated proposals from Berlusconi’s coalition, the Casa delle Libertà (CdL), to change electoral system. Fearful that they may lose the 2006 election, they have designed a proportional system that gives them all the advantages and the opposition all the disadvantages. Under these new plans, parties have to get a minimum of 4% of the votes to be allocated seats — and as there are more small parties on the left than the right this helps the CdL. There is also a “bonus” for the biggest coalition, which will be allocated extra seats in parliament to give it...

Workers of the world round-up

News from working-class struggles around the world... ITALY The importance of the August holiday tradition in Italy can be seen in the fact that — during the break — the trade unions and management have a “summer truce” and class struggle comes to a halt for several weeks. Except that this year, the transport union SULT called a strike of Alitalia cabin crew during the holidays. The strike’s over the derecognition of SULT after the union refused to discuss a restructuring plan put forward by Alitalia. The government has responded by threatening the “call-up” of Alitalia staff. The word they...

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