Participation in Italy

Anna Pizzo is a director of Carta (a partner in Eurotopia), and has been a councillor for three years in the Lazio region, where she was elected as an independent with the support of Rifondazione Communista. Inspired by the experience of Porto Alegre, she has been working on ‘the borderline’ between the movements and the political institutions, in order to open up the Lazio regional council to the demands and pressures of the movements.

Recently she has been working with immigrants’ organisations on legislation to give immigrants rights of access to health care and social security. Through a combination of pressure and confrontation from the movements and alliance-building on the inside of the regional council, the campaign has been successful.
Such a successful opening up of the institutions is rare. Now, three months after the political tsunami that swept the radical left out of Italy’s national parliament and senate, Anna Pizzo reflects on her experiences and the problems she has faced, and points to the new struggles at a local level which she thinks contain the best hope for change.

At first, when I became a candidate, I believed that if citizens in Porto Alegre, a city in Southern Brazil, among thousands of social contradictions and in the absence of a “mature” polity like those in Europe, were able to take hold of the issues most important to their locality and decide their destiny, how much more could we do towards achieving popular self-government? In fact, after many fruitless attempts, I am now convinced that the established political institutions are the most powerful brake on the possibilities of democratic innovation.

The trauma we have just been through – the destruction of the entire left’s parliamentary representation – does not seem to have generated any enthusiasm for beginning to change what for almost a century has remained unchanged: the political parties. Political parties act as a screen, separating the representatives from the represented.

We have witnessed the end of one form of political representation and consequently need to pursue alternative forms of democracy. But the response – a product partly of a survival instinct and partly of widespread political illiteracy – has been one of fear, paralysing people’s ability to make a definitive break with the political parties and actually pursue more radical democratic forms, rather than just talk about them. The triumph of Berlusconi-ism is a new form of despotic populism: a political project of ‘safety first’ that exploits fear.

But the main reason for the defeat of the left is the suspension, if not collapse, of the hope for change inspired by the first World Social Forum in Porto Alegre in 2001. There has been a sweeping away of the bases from which to resist, most notably the global movements.

The only thing of note in an otherwise desolate scene is what radical urban planner Alberto Magnaghi calls ‘consciousness of place’, which provides the conditions for a pressure for popular participation. There are now, across Italy, hundreds of local conflicts over land and energy – over the waste of both economic and cultural resources. They are resisting the dominant model of development and more-or-less explicitly presenting an alternative, but coming up against the oligarchic nature of democracy.

This is an important source of political energy that could produce profound change in the political and social spheres, and it is strongly opposed to governments of both the right and centre-left. At the moment it is a source parallel to and practically invisible by comparison with existing political structures, but it may produce some surprises this autumn. What concerns me is that the pool of regional institutional politics, in which I will have to continue to swim for the next two years, responds more to the old forms of politics, and hardly notices at all the parallel track that citizens are constructing in make-shift fashion. It may soon, however, be forced to notice.