Italy’s stunned centre-left reaches out

“We will try our best to avoid chaos in Italy.”

Those words from Enrico Letta, deputy leader of the Democrats, spoken around midnight on Monday, reflected the devastating shock at official results showing Italy’s main centre-left party had lost some 3.5m votes – about 30 per cent of its supporters – compared with the last elections in 2008.

The party had hired a grand theatre in Rome for what had been intended as an election victory celebration. Instead, Pier Luigi Bersani, party leader, did not even show his face, leaving his deputy to face the music.

A day later and the Democrats were trying to pick up the pieces, working out how they might form a viable government out of a hung parliament. Thanks to Italy’s convoluted electoral system, the centre-left alliance will have a majority in the lower house, benefiting from bonus seats given to the winning coalition which just scraped ahead of Silvio Berlusconi’s centre-right, but will fall well short of a majority in the Senate.

“The winner is: Ungovernability”, proclaimed the headline in Il Messaggero. Like all newspapers, the Roman daily reflected on the stunning result of the anti-establishment Five Star Movement, with over 160 seats in the two chambers, riding a wave of anger at the political and corporate elite and despair at austerity-induced recession.

Looking grim and tired, Mr Bersani finally broke his silence on Tuesday evening, laying claim to the “responsibility” of trying to form a government and offering to his opponents in the next parliament the bare bones of a programme based on institutional reforms and an easing of austerity policies. “I am not one to abandon the ship,” he said, ruling out his resignation.

Weeks of uncertainty and intense manoeuvring lie ahead. The new parliament will not convene until March 15 and Mario Monti, whose centrist alliance flopped in the elections, will remain caretaker prime minister until a new government is formed, perhaps by April.

Mr Berlusconi has already reached out to the centre-left, saying a repeat election would not be “useful” and that Italy needs to be governed. His supporters declared a “miracle” at the centre-right’s better than expected result, but one that masks a loss of over 4m votes, or 40 per cent, for the former prime minister’s People of Liberty compared with 2008.

But Mr Bersani and senior Democrats on Tuesday ruled out the idea of such a “grand coalition”, and are clearly not enthusiastic about a return to the polls – which could not take place till late June at the earliest and would risk handing an even greater victory to Beppe Grillo’s Five Star Movement.

Barring the unlikely appointment of another interim technocratic government, that leaves the Democrats with the option of trying to form a minority administration with the support of the other parties.

A scrum of reporters camped outside Mr Grillo’s home in Genoa bombarded the blogger comedian-turned-politician with such questions.

Mr Grillo, who did not run for office and describes himself as the “guarantor” of the web-based grassroots movement, excluded any formal alliance with “failed” politicians of the mainstream parties. But he left open the possibility of co-operation over his agenda, as has happened in Sicily’s regional government since the Five Star Movement won 15 per cent of the vote in the island’s elections last October.

Common ground between the Democrats and the Five Star Movement could be found in changing the unpopular electoral system, cutting the size and costs of parliament, anti-corruption and conflict of interests legislation, and moves to ease the pain of austerity – points that Mr Bersani outlined.

Whether a minority government could survive even a year is open to doubt, however. Loretta Napoleoni, an economist close to the Five Star Movement, says she is convinced that Mr Grillo’s ultimate aim is another election.

“Grillo’s idea is that parliament must be completely renewed with new people . . . This is actually a revolution,” she said.

Ms Napoleoni, who has met the movement’s new parliamentarians – all political novices – stressed that their success at the polls was not based on an “anti-European ticket”, a position that would never be acceptable to the pro-Europe Democrats.

“It was an anti-austerity campaign, but not so much anti-Europe. It was an anti-corruption ticket . . . Grillo was very careful. He did not campaign against the euro,” she said. “Italians do not want to get out of the euro, not yet. The Greeks perceive their austerity as dictated by Europe, the Italians do not.”

Giovanni Orsina, history professor at Rome’s Luiss University, says any solution in forming a government will be complicated. He sees Italy moving along the tracks of what he calls “counter democracy, where citizens know well what they do not want but it is hard to build a political project” – especially as both Mr Bersani and Mr Berlusconi are seen as the heirs of a discredited system.