A-Infos (en) Italy, UCADI #201 - YOU CALL THEM IF YOU WANT… ELECTIONSY (ca, de, fr, it, pt, tr)[machine translation]

Giani is the new President of the Tuscany Region. It was obvious, and 
there wasn't much excitement. This time around, the fake "the fascists 
are coming" warnings raised in the last election against a candidate, 
Susanna Ceccardi, who to call embarrassing is an understatement (even if 
she earns a five-figure salary, maybe we're the idiots).
The election campaign was nonexistent, aside from Meloni's quip about 
the "left (which one?) being like Hamas," but otherwise the EEG was flat.
For its part, the right nominated the usual "outsider" destined for 
defeat, sacrificed on the altar of apparent otherness.
In truth, in Tuscany, the right isn't interested in governing. The 
"formerly red" region has had a solid foundation of interests for over 
50 years, rooted in every nerve center of society, a legacy of the PCI 
machine. The PCI no longer exists, but this tangle is not only still 
very present but has become completely endemic.
I'd like to clarify that there's no moralistic criticism in this 
consideration (though perhaps it's needed), and we must acknowledge that 
Tuscany has maintained some (albeit shaky) important issues and 
positions: anti-fascism (which, however, by dint of scraping away the 
class struggle, risks transforming fascism into a kind of ante-litteram 
bullying), some consideration for social issues, and some remnants of 
old communist attitudes.
However, the hard core that keeps the Tuscany Region from being prey to 
influxes is precisely the identification between the government and the 
socioeconomic structure. Cooperatives employ thousands of people, a 
closely connected trade union system (there's no longer a transmission 
belt. Let's just say today there's Wi-Fi), and a
still broad base of people who, as Gaber sang, "are moved at popular 
festivals."
This is no small feat, mind you; hegemony comes in many ways, and 
Gramsci died in 1937.
This kind of structural conformism (mistaken by its protagonists for 
some form of "otherness") also makes me reflect on something that 
readers might find scandalous. Tuscan fascism was the most violent, but 
also the most significant in terms of "consensus" (with all due caution 
when using this word). I certainly don't mean to imply a shift from the 
black shirt to the red (and now rosé) one, especially since Tuscany was 
truly the cradle of the resistance, and Florence liberated itself on 
August 11, 1944.
I want to say exactly the opposite: that is, that the current ruling and 
dominant classes (even though they remember the celebrations of when 
they were "red") demonstrate a very "sticky" pervasiveness together with 
a completely liberalist vision that we could certainly compare to the 
conformism of the same classes during the twenty years. Of course, for 
goodness sake, there is no violence, truncheons and castor oil and these 
classes have nothing to do with fascism (which, after all, would be a 
politically unfeasible option today, especially in Tuscany, and with the 
methods we know). But there is
one aspect that could unite the two distant shores: reassurance towards 
the ruling class. A reassurance that passes through, to quote a famous 
book, "a certain reciprocity of favors".[1]
Be careful, Tuscany is not Sicily, and this reciprocity cannot pass 
through the mafia system (although the KEU affair perhaps makes this 
point less valid) but must permeate the entire complex, multifaceted, 
and interlocutory galaxy of associationism (understood in its broadest 
sense).
One might object that this is the form that, in a capitalist landscape 
that now appears to have no alternative, a proper relationship between 
society and government can take. Let's say, a kind of "popular" Giolittism.
I agree with this objection, provided that the emphasis was placed on 
the "beneficial" goals, which certainly did not include the emancipation 
of the lower classes and the overcoming (vade retro!) of the 
socioeconomic system.
Tuscan social democracy (a term the PCI avoided like the plague) has 
thus taken on unique characteristics, combining some residual form of 
the PCI's old "good governance," along with paternalism, and an 
unreserved adherence to the capitalist system, which appears to shield 
it from any assault: from the right (because the economic policies it 
promotes are all within capital), from the left (because anti-fascism is 
the political basis of the ideology, along with the fight for civil 
rights, provided they are not mixed with social rights), and from the 
center (because
no structural framework is called into question).
A perfect formula that could be undermined only if the ruling classes 
found another point of reference with which to re-establish new and 
fruitful relationships. But would it be worthwhile? What's the point of 
risking social conflict to call into question a system that until now 
seems to have worked admirably?
Here too, one could rightly object that the turnout of less than half of 
eligible voters (in a part of Italy that saw percentages well over 90%) 
could be a sign of the disarmament and a possible crisis of the "Tuscan 
model".
This consideration does not take into account many variables:

First of all, the phenomenon of abandoning the ballot box is typical of 
countries with highly developed capitalism. It's as if the "citizens" 
have now abdicated any role in political participation, effectively 
delegating the government, now completely (wrongly) considered a mere 
administration, to even make their own decisions. To consider "not 
voting" as some kind of "protest" would be to assign this non-choice a 
political value that seems unlikely to me and highly unmeasurable 
(another value in this sense could be invalid ballots), and I don't 
believe the Tuscany Region has more than 50% of anarchists dedicated to 
rejecting voting as a bourgeois weapon.
For the parties that exist today (i.e., a completely different reality 
than a few decades ago), whether 70, 50, or 10 percent vote makes no 
difference. Not only is the issue untouched (just imagine if this had 
happened in the 1970s), but the erosion of voter turnout has been 
declining for decades and is completely contained by electoral laws that 
no longer have anything to do with representative democracy. Indeed, we 
could say that the fewer people who vote, the better.
The issue of electoral law deserves a separate point. If there is one 
aspect that, in these 30 years of counter-revolution, has overturned the 
very meaning of the Italian Constitution, it is certainly the serial 
amendment of national and municipal electoral laws, and subsequently, 
with the demolition of the same unitary framework "torn to pieces" by 
the subversive amendment to Title V, regional electoral laws. The 
establishment of these provisions has erased the participatory principle 
underlying the Italian Constitution, privileging operational and 
governance aspects over representation (which is, after all, the very 
meaning of the birth of constitutional systems). This occurred after the 
employers' revenge of the 1980s and the constant harping on the 
"instability" as the cause of all the country's ills. In reality, the 
so-called reforms (here too: the very meaning of the word reformism has 
been reversed) have not served to reduce instability (assuming that this 
was a real problem) but to distance citizens from participation and to 
"reassure the markets" (the true mantra of the thirty years of slime), 
as hoped for by the Trilateral Commission since the 1970s [2].
Among the electoral laws that have stood out for their anti-democratic 
nature, Tuscany stands out, where the voting system is deliberately 
cumbersome, the threshold deliberately punitive, and the allocation of 
seats appears marked by a profound disregard for participation. A 
candidate who receives 70,000 votes doesn't even get a seat on the 
Council, depriving thousands of citizens of even minimal representation. 
Of course, elections have never brought about revolutions, but here we 
are truly on another level.
Therefore, lack of participation is not a problem, except for a few 
survivors, but can even be an opportunity, and those who win certainly 
don't bother considering themselves unrepresentative. Because the aim is 
to win, to govern, to reassure the ruling classes.
I realise that I have painted a bleak picture. I wouldn't put it that 
way. There have been even worse periods, and, after all, our political 
objectives are very long-term.
However, we must be aware that the hypothesis of "post-democracy", the 
term with which Colin Crouch titled his work over 20 years ago,[3] today 
appears almost complete. Moreover, the massive demonstrations of recent 
months against the genocide in Gaza seem to bring attention back to 
grassroots participation (although, as always, if there is no political 
project behind them, their duration is strictly linked to that of the 
event against which they are protesting).
Some might say: in other regions, things are even worse, much worse, 
and, ultimately, Tuscany appears to be a kind of happy place in an 
increasingly right-wing Italy, governed and surrounded by purely 
reactionary forces.
This might be a sensible point: be content and wait for the night to 
pass. Perhaps the 52% or so who didn't vote even explicitly said so: 
"Take care of it yourselves and wake me up when you've done so."
Assuming anyone knows what.

Andrea Bellucci

[1] P. Pezzino, A certain reciprocity of favors. Mafia and violent 
modernization in post-unification Sicily , Franco Angeli, 1990. [2] 
https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/La_crisi_della_democrazia._Rapporto_sulla_governabili 
t,C3%A0_delle_democrazie_alla_Commissione_trilaterale
[3] C. Crouch, Postdemocrazia , Laterza, 2023.


https://www.ucadi.org/2025/11/01/tu-chiamale-se-vuoi-elezioni/
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