Silvio Berlusconi’s Personal Parties: From ForzaItalia to the Popolo Della Libertà
Duncan McDonnellEuropean University Institute
Despite the electoral success of Silvio Berlusconi’s two political parties, little theoretical and empirical work has beendone on Forza Italia (FI) and the Popolo Della Libertà (PDL – People of Freedom).This article aims to fill these gaps.Following a short overview of the history of FI and the PDL, it discusses how scholars have conceived of Forza Italia.Building on the criteria of Joseph LaPalombara and Myron Weiner for the definition of a political party, a firstoperational definition is then offered of the term most used to classify FI and the PDL: the ‘personal party’. On thebasis of this, the article considers whether the PDL is another personal party akin to Forza Italia.This is done, first, bybriefly considering the party statute and communications and, second, by examining the views expressed in interviewsconducted across Italy with PDL elected representatives and ordinary party members.
Keywords: political parties; personal party; party organisation; Italian politics; SilvioBerlusconi
Considering the electoral successes of Silvio Berlusconi’s political parties – not to mentionthe international attention and debates that have surrounded their leader – it is striking howlittle theoretical and empirical work is available on Forza Italia (FI) and the Popolo DellaLibertà (PDL – People of Freedom). Following a number of useful studies in the early yearsof FI’s existence (Hopkin and Paolucci, 1999; Maraffi, 1995; Paolucci, 1999; Poli, 2001),very few attempts have since been made to advance and update our understanding first ofForza Italia and then the PDL as party organisations (e.g. Raniolo, 2006). Moreover, at notime (to my knowledge) have scholars investigated the organisational character of FI and thePDL through interviews with both party representatives and members. Simply put, whilewe now know a lot about what (allegedly) happens inside Berlusconi’s private parties, weknow almost nothing about the view from inside his political ones.
This article aims to go some way towards filling these theoretical and empirical gaps.After a short overview of the history of FI and the PDL in the first section, the second willdiscuss how party scholars have conceived of Forza Italia, particularly in terms of itsorganisation. By adapting the criteria of Joseph LaPalombara and Myron Weiner (1966, pp.6–7) for the definition of a political party, I will offer an operational definition of the termmost used in Italian to classify FI and the PDL: the ‘personal party’. On the basis of thisdefinition, in the third and fourth sections the article will consider whether the PDL is, likeForza Italia, another personal party.This will be done by briefly considering the party statuteand communications and then by examining the views expressed in face-to-face interviewsconducted across Italy between October 2009 and December 2010 with PDL representa-tives and ordinary party members. In particular, and in line with the definitional criteriaproposed in the article for a personal party, I will look at how respondents saw the party’sfuture, its dependence on Berlusconi and its organisation at local level.
Silvio Berlusconi’s Parties and CoalitionsThere are few (if any) party leaders in established democracies comparable to the founderof Forza Italia and the Popolo Della Libertà, Silvio Berlusconi. Not only has he ledcentre-right coalitions to three general election victories and served longer as PrimeMinister of Italy than anyone else since the end of the Second World War, but he has doneso having had no direct party political or representational experience prior to announcinghis entry into politics at the end of January 1994. To put it in context: Berlusconi’s firstexperience as a candidate was at the general election on 27 March 1994 which saw himbecome Prime Minister. From then until 12 November 2011 when his coalition govern-ment was replaced by Mario Monti’s technocratic executive, he was either Prime Ministeror leader of the opposition.
Berlusconi’s parties, Forza Italia and then the PDL, have constantly been the dominantforces on the Italian centre-right following the collapse of the main post-war Italian partiesin the early 1990s (see Table 1 below). While Berlusconi’s control over the centre-rightalliance was never the same as it was over his own party, his leadership of the coalition hadnever been as seriously questioned by other leading centre-right figures as it was when inopposition in the autumn of 2007.There is not space here for the details of this, but sufficeto say it was claimed that Berlusconi’s time had passed.What is more interesting for thisarticle is his response: taking even senior members of Forza Italia by surprise, Berlusconiannounced on 18 November 2007 (in the middle of a crowd in Milan) the creation of anew party, the PDL, which would incorporate Forza Italia and other representatives andparties that wanted to join.
While this move was initially ridiculed as a publicity stunt by two of the three othermain party leaders on the centre-right – Gianfranco Fini of the post-fascist AlleanzaNazionale (AN – National Alliance), and Pierferdinando Casini of the post-ChristianDemocrat Unione di Centro (UDC – Union of the Centre) – circumstances thereafterworked in Berlusconi’s favour. With the fall of the centre-left Romano Prodi govern-ment just two months later, leading to the prospect of a general election against afragmented centre-left, Fini and Casini were forced to rethink their stances. Now in aposition of great strength, Berlusconi was able to dictate the new conditions of alliance,informing both the UDC and AN that they could either merge their parties with FI inthe PDL or else take their chances running against him. Only the Lega Nord (LN –Northern League), which since 2001 had been Berlusconi’s most faithful ally, wasrewarded for its loyalty with the option of running in coalition alongside (rather thanmerging into) the PDL (Albertazzi and McDonnell, 2010). While Casini’s UDC chosenot to join, Fini accepted Berlusconi’s offer. The subsequent election in April 2008delivered an easy victory for the PDL–LN coalition which received almost 47 per centof the vote compared to the 38 per cent gained by Walter Veltroni’s centre-left coalition.Moreover, the PDL, with over 37 per cent, secured slightly more than the total votes forFI and AN in 2006 (see Table 1). Berlusconi’s new party was thus his most electorallysuccessful yet and he was once again Prime Minister.
The prospects for the new government seemed excellent, given that it enjoyed acomfortable majority in parliament and consisted of just two parties – the PDL and the
Lega Nord – which enjoyed a good relationship and were willing to accommodate eachother’s key policies (Albertazzi and McDonnell, 2010). However, problems quicklyemerged between Berlusconi and Fini, with the latter accusing the leader of doing nothingto build up the new party organisation and of stifling internal democracy.The escalation oftensions between the two culminated in a heated argument at a televised party executivemeeting in April 2010 – the first time Berlusconi had ever been openly criticised by aleading figure from within one of his own parties. What followed thereafter was largelypredictable: Fini found himself increasingly isolated and under attack within the PDL,including from former AN elites.When the expulsion from the party of a number of his keyallies in July 2010 made his position untenable, Fini created a breakaway group calledFuturo e Libertà per l’Italia (FLI – Future and Freedom for Italy).This initially providedexternal support for the coalition,before moving into opposition and aiding an unsuccessfulattempt in December 2010 to bring down the government. However, with its numbersreduced, Berlusconi’s administration was able to do little more than hang on to power forthe first half of 2011. Once the financial crisis struck Italy in the summer of that year andthe government lost the support of a handful of other deputies, the combination of itsparliamentary weakness, along with the external pressures from Europe and the markets,resulted in Berlusconi’s resignation and his government’s replacement by Mario Monti’snon-party technocratic executive (Bosco and McDonnell, forthcoming).
At the time of writing (late 2012), the prospects for Berlusconi and the PDL are veryunclear. After changing his mind on the matter serveral times, he has recently decided(unilaterally) that he will once again lead the party in the 2013 general election. This,however, seems by no means set in stone and it has been striking how often Berlusconi hasradically shifted position in late 2012 regarding his own role, his party’s possible alliancesand its attitude to the prime minister Mario Monti.While the ease with which Berlusconihas been able to make such U-turns appears to support the arguments presented in thisarticle, it is not my intention to examine the latest events or the earlier internal dynamicsof the FI-AN merger (although ‘takeover’ may be a more accurate term). Rather, myobjective here is to discuss the two parties Berlusconi has founded prior to 2012 and to
Table 1: Main Centre-Right Parties in Italian GeneralElections, 1994–2008 – % of vote polled
Note: General election results refer to those for the Chamber of Deputies. Asterisksindicate when parties did not run within the centre-right coalition. This was the case forthe LN in 1996 and for the UDC in 2008. FI and AN ran together as the PDL in 2008.
consider the degree to which the PDL, like Forza Italia, proved to be another personal partyat the time when I was conducting my research.
Forza Italia: A Personal PartyMost organisational definitions of Forza Italia have sought to emphasise the pre-eminentrole of the leader-founder in the party’s creation and subsequent history. For example,Richard Gunther and Larry Diamond (2003, p. 187) include FI in their ‘personalistic party’category, which they term the purest type of a wider set of ‘electoralist parties’.The solerationale of personalistic parties ‘is to provide a vehicle for the leader to win an election andexercise power’ and:
it is not derived from the traditional structure of local notable elites, but, rather, is anorganization constructed or converted by an incumbent or aspiring national leader exclusivelyto advance his or her national political ambitions (Gunther and Diamond, 2003, p. 187).
The appeal to voters ‘is not based on any programme or ideology, but rather on the personalcharisma of the leader/candidate, who is portrayed as indispensable to the resolution of thecountry’s problems or crisis’ (Gunther and Diamond, 2003, p. 187). In addition to ForzaItalia, they list as examples of personalistic parties those led by Alberto Fujimori in Peru,Benazir Bhutto in Pakistan,Hugo Chávez inVenezuela andThaksin Shinawatra inThailand.
Certainly, Forza Italia was founded in order to bring Berlusconi to power and he wasconstantly the focus of FI’s election campaigns which, to greater and lesser degrees, all casthim as the country’s sole possible saviour. Indeed,not only was Berlusconi at the heart of theparty’s communication strategies for national elections, but he also regularly played this rolein European, regional and local election campaigns.Although FI was characterised by whatPierre-André Taguieff (2003, p. 135) terms ‘hyperpersonalization’, it is wrong to dismisspolicy and ideology when assessing how the party constructed its electoral appeal. FI’spromises of low taxes, public works, reform of the public administration and visceralanti-communism (pleasing to many former Christian Democrats and others) were alwayscrucial to the party’s message in campaigns and other communications. Indeed, as JonathanHopkin and Caterina Paolucci (1999) show, Forza Italia went to great lengths to make surethey knew which policies would appeal to voters. More importantly for our purposes here,Gunther and Diamond’s classification places too much emphasis on election victories andappeals to be helpful in understanding the party as an organisation over time.
Gunther and Diamond say that their ‘personalistic party’ is equivalent to the ‘non-partisanparty’ category in which Piero Ignazi (1996, p. 552) had placed Forza Italia some yearspreviously. While Ignazi’s classification is very useful for understanding new, challengerparties which are able to mobilise quickly around a leader, it does not consider how theseparties then develop. Like that of Gunther and Diamond, it thus also seems too focused onelectoral achievements for our purposes in this article. For Ignazi, non-partisan parties are‘charismatic-like movements where a leader, without a partisan organizational structurewhich provides for a clear decision-making process or members’ recruitment/participation,attains a dramatic success’ (Ignazi, 1996, p. 552).Among these, he includes several flash-in-the-pan populist parties which had emerged – and then disappeared – in previous decades,such as the Anders Lange Party in Norway and New Democracy in Sweden.The lack of
formal organisation was certainly true of Forza Italia in 1994, when it was little more thanan electoral committee for Berlusconi, staffed with candidates from his companies and ahandful of First Republic politicians (Maraffi, 1995). And this innovative creation didindeed deliver a dramatic success of the type referred to by Ignazi.
As we now know, however, Berlusconi’s parties have proved to be far from flash-in-the-pan parties. Moreover, while the leader’s power within the party remained absolutethroughout FI’s history and there was never any internal democracy, FI in the late 1990s didat least superficially provide itself with a more traditional organisational structure and alimited degree of grassroots membership through a ‘franchise’ model (Paolucci, 1999; Poli,2001). In other words, the Forza Italia ‘brand’ was taken on, organised and represented atsub-national level in many parts of Italy by elites from the old parties of the First Republic.The extent to which Forza Italia, despite these changes, really did shed its ‘virtual’ nature isa matter of some dispute. In her 2001 study, Emanuela Poli argues that when the formerChristian Democrat, Claudio Scajola, was national FI coordinator in the second half of the1990s, the party established a genuine territorial presence and membership. Paolucci (2008,p. 472) contends however that Scajola’s efforts to create a mass party ultimately ‘failedentirely’, especially once the party returned to government in 2001.
Francesco Raniolo (2006, p. 446) rightly argues that the key point here is that Forza Italiawas not tied permanently to one or other organisational model, but rather deployed thosewhich served its needs in a given phase.That it could act with this flexibility perhaps tellsus more about the degree to which the party was centrally and vertically controlled thanit does about anything else. Not only ideologically, but also organisationally, Forza Italia waswhatever type of party Berlusconi wanted it to be, whenever he wanted it to be so. It was,as many Italian scholars have termed it, Berlusconi’s ‘personal party’.Although this term iscommonly used in Italian to classify Forza Italia, it is rarely found in English to define eitherFI or other parties.This is a pity because, unlike the ‘personalistic’ or ‘non-partisan’ labels,‘personal’ conveys a lasting proprietorial vision of the party on the part of the leader whichgoes beyond its initial creation and electoral success. This is particularly important tounderstanding why Berlusconi was not only able to dominate Forza Italia in the manner hedid from the moment he founded it but also, especially, why he was able to announce on18 November 2007 – without first engaging in any formal internal party discussion orencountering any subsequent dissent – that FI would be replaced by the PDL. Put simply,Forza Italia could not exist without Berlusconi and this was clearly and unanimouslyaccepted within the party. If Berlusconi decided that Forza Italia would change its name andmerge with one or more other parties into the new PDL, which he would also of courselead, then so it would be.
The first scholar to refer to Forza Italia as a ‘personal party’ was, as far as I can see,Norberto Bobbio, who did so on various occasions in his newspaper columns in the 1990s(e.g. Bobbio, 1995; 1996).The term became very popular in Italy following Mauro Calise’s2000 book Il partito personale (‘The Personal Party’) and is now regularly used to describean array of Italian parties, from those led by Berlusconi to other leader-created parties suchas Antonio di Pietro’s Italia dei Valori (IDV – Italy of Values), to civic lists supportingmayoral candidates (Calise, 2000).Among the many features of personal parties emphasisedby scholars, the three main ones are: (1) the party is the product of a leader rather than he
or she the product of a party; (2) party communications are focused on the leader; and (3)the leader dominates the party, especially in terms of decisions regarding candidates, policiesand alliances. However, while very useful, not even the above-cited features are agreed onby all scholars and, more importantly, at no point (to my knowledge) has a clear andoperational definition of a personal party been proposed. There is therefore a lot ofconfusion regarding which parties are ‘personal’ and which are not.
What everyone does seem to agree upon is that Forza Italia was the prototype of thepersonal party in Italy. With this in mind, if we wish to define the personal party, aninteresting starting point is LaPalombara’s (2007, p. 149) observation that Forza Italia ‘meetsnone of the definitional criteria’ that he and Weiner had stipulated in their classic 1966volume Political Parties and Political Development. In their introduction, LaPalombara andWeiner (1966, pp. 6–7) state that to be considered a political party (rather than simply an‘oligarchical group’of the type found in Latin America or Asia which they say are more akinto Roman ‘factions of notables’) required satisfying four key conditions. Of these, numbers3 and 4, concerning the parties seeking popular support and decision-making power do infact seem to apply to FI.However, the first two indeed do not appear to be fulfilled by ForzaItalia and are therefore worth citing here:
(1) Continuity in organization – that is, an organization whose expected life span is notdependent on the life span of current leaders;(2) Manifest and presumably permanent organization at the local level, with regularizedcommunications and other relationships between local and national units (LaPalombara andWeiner, 1966, pp. 6–7).
By adapting and expanding these, I therefore posit that a personal party like Forza Italia isone in which:
(1) The party’s expected lifespan is seen (not only by commentators, but also by partyrepresentatives and members) as dependent on the political lifespan of its founder-leader. In other words, significant internal doubts regarding party continuity in theabsence of its founder-leader are present.
(2) Organisation at local level is neither constantly manifest nor permanent (again, notonly in the judgement of commentators, but also according to party representativesand members).
To these, and in line with what we know about the personal party prototype, Forza Italia,I add the following two criteria:
(3) There is an extremely strong concentration of formal and/or informal power in thehands of the founder-leader.
(4) The party’s image and campaign strategies (in both first- and second-order elections)are centred on the founder-leader.
As with any definition based on a concrete prototype, it may be the case that, while thefour criteria above apply to the personal party Forza Italia, they are not all necessary andsufficient in distinguishing a personal party per se. This would be best investigated byconsidering a range of similar parties, but that is beyond the scope and main requirements
of the present article, which is fundamentally interested in the degree to which the PDLis a personal party akin to Forza Italia.What we can tentatively say here is that, of the fourconditions above, fulfilment of (1) seems logically to be a necessary and sufficient require-ment for classification as a personal party. And if this condition is not met, then we arenot dealing with a personal party.This is because, if there is the perception within a partythat it is unlikely to survive beyond the political lifespan of the founder-leader, then weare dealing with something that is qualitatively different from a party which is merelyheavily personalised in its communications and/or lacking constantly manifest local partyorganisation and/or in which the leader dominates formally or informally. In those caseswhere parties fulfil some or all of conditions (2), (3) and (4) without (1) being present,it may therefore be better to consider these as ‘personalised’ rather than ‘personal’ parties.The Lega Nord seems a good example of a personalised party. Generally, it satisfiedconditions (3) and (4) but, in interviews conducted by this author between 2008 and2010, LN representatives and members clearly saw the future of the party as extendingbeyond the career of the founder-leader Umberto Bossi (Albertazzi and McDonnell,forthcoming). The Lega Nord also does not fulfil condition (2) – quite the opposite infact (Albertazzi and McDonnell, forthcoming). Of course, since Roberto Maroni tookover as leader of the LN in July 2012, we now have an excellent case study of whathappens in such a party after the departure of the charismatic founder-leader (somethingthat is also true of the Front National in France, albeit with the caveat that in this casewe are also dealing with a form of dynastic succession).
Although it seems highly unlikely that a personal party would go to the trouble ofcreating manifest and permanent organisations at local level (given the acknowledged andintended transient nature of the personal party), we cannot rule out that, in some situations,the cultivation of a strong local organisation and grassroots activities could serve themobilisation needs of the personal party leader (Hugo Chávez may be a good example ofthis). Finally, it is possible that where condition (1) is present, condition (3) is then aninevitable consequence since it is hard to imagine a party whose very existence is so tiedto the founder-leader but which he or she does not dominate formally or informally.Likewise, it seems very plausible that such a party will seek to centre both first- andsecond-order election campaigns on the founder-leader. However, since our intention firstand foremost here is to examine the degree to which the four defining characteristics ofForza Italia as a personal party have been reproduced in the Popolo Della Libertà, we willtreat each of these criteria separately in this article.
Given what has been said so far, there seems little need to prove in great detail thatall the above are applicable to Forza Italia.We know from, among others, Marco Maraffi(1995), Hopkin and Paolucci (1999, pp. 320–32) and Paolucci (1999), that FI fulfilledconditions (2) and (3). Likewise, the extent to which condition (4) is met has beenextensively demonstrated by work in Italian (e.g. Barisione, 2006; Legnante, 2006),showing that both first- and second-order Forza Italia campaigns were heavily focusedon the leader’s image and on his ability to generate self-promotional events, particularlyon television. As regards condition (1), while I know of no work that investigateswhether there was an expectation among both Forza Italia representatives and membersthat the party’s lifespan was dependent on Berlusconi, the manner in which he archived
the party in November 2007 and how easily it was accepted very strongly suggest thatthis was indeed the case.
The PDL: Another Personal Party?While FI was a personal party with the traits outlined in the previous section, someobservers (e.g. Paolucci, 2008) believed that the creation of the PDL – incorporating themore orthodox party organisation of AN and with the stated ambition of being a long-lasting centre-right force – might have resulted in a party with a different organisationalstructure, a life expectancy beyond that of its founder-leader and a greater diffusion ofpower than had been the case in FI.Writing after the centre-right’s 2008 election victory,Paolucci (2008, p. 478) wondered if ‘Berlusconi, now with a large majority in parliament,which will allow him to stay in power for the whole legislature, may finally be encouragedto give up some control over the new party, of which he will be, again, founder and leader’.Hypothesising that the PDL might become more like the old Christian Democrats, withvisible factions able to coexist, she considered the possibility that the party could also attractmoderates from other parties, ‘provided the personalised leadership of Berlusconi losessignificance in internal party life and starts preparing its own succession’ (Paolucci, 2008, p.478). In other words, Paolucci wondered whether the PDL might not be a personal partylike Forza Italia and whether, as Angelo Panebianco (1988, p. 61) put it, the charismaticleader might ‘accept that partial diminutio capitis, that reduction in his personal power whichis indispensable to organizational institutionalization’.
As we will see below, however, the PDL turned out to be little other than an electorallyweightier version of Forza Italia – a situation that would lead the AN leader, Fini, to criticiseBerlusconi strongly and be forced to leave the PDL, thus recalling the observation again byPanebianco (1988, p. 188) that ‘no one can openly oppose the [charismatic] leader and hopeto win’.
In the rest of this article, using the criteria set out in the previous section, I will discusswhether the PDL is another personal party in the mould of Forza Italia. Since it is veryevident that criteria (3) and (4) are again true in the case of the PDL, I will deal with theserelatively briefly before moving on in the next section to the more difficult (and interesting)questions posed by criteria (1) and (2).
In terms of the power placed in the hands of the leader, if one looks at the first PDLstatute, approved by the national congress on 29 March 2009, and the revised statute,approved at the national congress on 1 July 2011, it is clear that this is again a party utterlydominated by Berlusconi. It is true of course that party statutes can often give a highlymisleading impression of internal party life. However, much like some constitutions ofpseudo-democracies, this tends to take the form of claiming that power is diffused andinternal democracy is present.This is not the case here. Rather, as in FI, so too in the PDLdo we find very considerable formal powers over internal party organs and candidaturesconcentrated in the hands of the party’s President, following his ‘election’ (by acclamation)at the party’s founding congress.According to the PDL statute (Popolo Della Libertà, 2011),the President is responsible for convening and nominating the majority of members of allparty bodies. He is also responsible for deciding all candidatures down to regional level.Most importantly, in terms of party organisation, until mid-2011 he nominated the
coordinating committee – a three-member body (with two members from FI and one fromAN) whose task was to oversee ‘the national and periphery organization of the party andall activities of the national party structure and territorial bodies’ (Popolo Della Libertà,2009, Art. 17).
Since July 2011, however, this committee (although still formally in existence) has beensubordinated to the newly created figure of the National Political Secretary who, as the2011 revised party statute says, is nominated by the President of the party for a three-yearterm (Popolo Della Libertà, 2011,Art. 16).To get an indication of the extent to which rulesand offices bend to the will of the president, it is important to note that this new role wascreated by Berlusconi in 2011 (there was no mention of it in the 2009 statute or anydiscussion of it prior to its announcement) and he proposed its first occupant, the formerFI and PDL Justice Minister Angelino Alfano. It was of course no surprise that, at the July2011 party congress,Alfano was duly ‘elected’ by acclamation as the new National PoliticalSecretary.This seems perfectly in line with what occurred in Forza Italia, when Berlusconicould create new posts within the party organisation and nominate whomever he pleasedto occupy them (Maraffi, 1995). It also tallies with the comment by Panebianco (1988,p. 146) that, in parties with charismatic leaders,‘improvisation is the only real organizationalrule’.
Giuliano Bobba and Antonella Seddone (2011, pp. 13–4) have shown in greater depththat, if anything, the PDL’s statute is even more expressly that of a personal party than wasthe case in Forza Italia.Moreover, as the effective expulsion of Fini and his followers in 2010demonstrated, the combination of informal and formal power available to Berlusconiremains that which he enjoyed in FI.We find a similar continuity of FI practices if we lookat the role of the leader in the PDL’s image and campaign strategies.An early indication ofthis could be found on the homepage of the PDL’s website: on the top right-hand side, oneread: ‘Iscriviti alla newsletter del popolo della libertà’ (‘Subscribe to the Popolo DellaLibertà newsletter’). When visitors clicked on this, however, they would be directed towww.forzasilvio.it, described as ‘the official network for supporters of Silvio Berlusconi’. Inother words, the ‘party newsletter’ was actually a website devoted to Berlusconi which thenemailed regular bulletins (focused on Berlusconi) to subscribers. As Panebianco (1988,p. 145) affirms regarding charismatic leaders,‘a total overlap of the leader’s image and partyidentity is the sine qua non of charismatic power’.
Berlusconi has also been firmly at the centre of campaigns, in both first- and second-order elections. The 2008 general election campaign predictably relied strongly on theimage of the leader – as reflected in the campaign song ‘Meno male che Silvio c’è’ (‘Just aswell that Silvio is here’) – but we have also seen Berlusconi’s image used heavily insubsequent local and European elections. For example, despite obviously having no inten-tion of taking up a seat, Berlusconi stood in all five macro-regional constituencies at the2009 European Parliament elections and, on posters throughout the country during thecampaign, people were urged to vote first for Berlusconi and only then for the localcandidate. Even in those second-order elections in which he was not standing, Berlusconiwas a central presence. For example, in the 2008 Abruzzo and 2009 Sardinia regionalelections, Berlusconi (despite his position as PM) dedicated a lot of time to campaigning onthe ground, with the actual PDL regional presidential candidates remaining very much in
the background (Corbetta, 2011, p. 16). In the 2010 regional elections, this level ofterritorial presence was less feasible, given that elections were held in thirteen regions;however it was noticeable that, in most cases, Berlusconi’s name would appear on electionposters in far larger letters above that of the actual PDL candidate. Likewise, as AlessioCornia (2010, pp. 41–2) shows, Berlusconi’s presence during the 2010 campaign was morethan double that of any other party leader or regional presidential candidate on bothtelevision and in the printed press.This culminated, as polling day neared, with Berlusconi’sappeal (yet again) to voters to ‘take a side’ for or against him and to consider the electionsas though they were national (Cornia, 2010, pp. 41–2). In conclusion to this section,therefore, we can say that the PDL appeared easily to satisfy conditions (3) and (4) forclassification as a personal party.
Inside the PDLIn this section, I examine the extent to which the PDL fulfils conditions (1) and (2) for thedefinition of a personal party akin to Forza Italia. The first of these requires consideringwhether the PDL’s lifespan is expected by party representatives and members to bedependent on the political lifespan of its founder/leader, while the second looks at theextent to which organisation at local level is neither constantly manifest nor permanent. Forboth of these, we require knowledge of the view from inside the party.The discussion hereis therefore based on 36 face-to-face interviews with a total of 22 elected representativesand 22 ordinary members (34 individual interviews and 2 group discussions, each with 5party members).These were conducted in different areas of Italy between October 2009and December 2010.1 Although explained in Endnote 1, it is worth reiterating here that noclaims of statistical significance are being made. What is offered is a snapshot, based oninterviews in a series of cities and towns, of how a selection of representatives and memberssaw the party. However, while the number of ordinary members is low compared to thepotential (and official) total, it is important to bear in mind – as will be seen in the sectionon party organisation – that the number of consistently active members in the PDL is in factextremely low (even in cities with between 0.5 and 1 million inhabitants, these may amountto no more than 40 or 50).Those interviewed were the rare members who participated inwhat few party activities were available.
After the LeaderAs Table 2 shows, less than a quarter both of party representatives and of membersinterviewed stated unequivocally that they believed the PDL would have a future beyondthe political life of Berlusconi. None of the five national representatives answeredunequivocally ‘no’, with two avoiding answering the question directly, two expressingdoubts and just one giving a definite ‘yes’. Among sub-national representatives, five said‘no’, seven expressed doubts, four replied ‘yes’ and one did not answer the question directly.The overall results from interviews with party members mirrored those from party repre-sentatives and no particular regional bias was noted.
While there is not the space (or the need for our purposes in this article) to go into detailsabout these responses, it is worth citing a few of them. Among those interviewees saying‘no’, the main reason given was that only Berlusconi could hold the PDL together. As
Panebianco (1988, p. 66) says, the charismatic leader ‘represents the cement’.We can see thisrealisation in the comment by Nunzia Brandi (Lecce city councillor) that ‘Berlusconi is theparty. And without Berlusconi, everything would break up! Lots of small parties wouldreappear’ (December 2009). Likewise, members 2, 20 and 11 (all from different regions) saidthat the party would split up after Berlusconi, since nobody could replace him. Member 2stated:‘It will break up.There’s no soft landing either:once he’s gone, there will be completechaos’. Member 11 said that, although they had hoped the party would continue, they didnot believe it would, adding:‘in the end, we are together because of Berlusconi’.The degreeto which the PDL is focused on Berlusconi is also cited as a key reason for several of the‘doubtful’ answers. Both Mariangela Cotto (Piedmont regional councillor) and CarloAlberto Tesserin (Veneto regional councillor) observed that the PDL is just one of severalparties in Italy that is centred on its leader and, like them, therefore has an uncertain future.Antonio Gabellone (Lecce province president) said, like many other interviewees, thatBerlusconi is the ‘indisputable leader’ and the future of the party ‘will depend on whether wecan substitute this figure with a successful team’ (December 2009).While not clearly statingthat the party necessarily would break up after Berlusconi, member 6 expressed seriousdoubt, saying that Berlusconi was the‘unchallenged king’of the party and that ‘my fear is thatwe will return to old-style smaller parties’ due to the PDL splitting up once Berlusconi is nolonger in politics.
This inability to conceive of a successor to Berlusconi within the party (often describedby interviewees as ‘charismatic’) was cited by most as a reason for doubt. For example,member 3 replied:‘I don’t know.Truly, this is a question I don’t know the answer to becauseI can’t see a PDL without Berlusconi’. On this point, member 12 observed that there wasno apparent successor because ‘perhaps they have not wanted to let one emerge’, adding that‘a far-sighted party’ ought already to have done so. Finally, of those who answered clearlythat the PDL would survive after Berlusconi, it is worth noting that respondents were also
Table 2: Do You Think There Can be a PDL after Berlusconi?
PDL ElectedRepresentatives
PDL OrdinaryMembers
Yes 5 5Doubtful 9 8No 5 6No answer 3 3
Note: Based on answers given in interviews regarding whether the respondent thought that the PDL had a future after the end ofBerlusconi’s political career. Answers are only classified as ‘yes’ or ‘no’ if this was clearly stated. In the case of answers marked‘doubtful’, this indicates that the respondent did not clearly say ‘yes’ or ‘no’ but expressed considerable doubt whether the partycould survive beyond the end of the political life of its founder. Obviously, the degree to which respondents viewed this as uncertaindiffered in intensity, although most appeared closer to ‘no’ than ‘yes’. Examples of some of these are discussed in the text. In the caseof representatives marked as ‘no answer’, these were respondents who avoided answering the question in a sufficiently directmanner to be classifiable. In the case of those members marked ‘no answer’, all three were group discussion participants who didnot express an opinion on the issue. In neither the representative nor member responses do we find clear cases of more answersof one type or another according to the time or place of interview. Finally, it is worth noting that, of the four ex-AN sub-nationalrepresentatives, one answered ‘yes’, one was ‘doubtful’, one said ‘no’ and one avoided giving a sufficiently clear answer.
quick to point out the centrality of the leader. For instance, SenatorVincenzo Barba fromPuglia commented that Berlusconi was ‘the unquestionable, unique, unrivalled no. 1!’(December 2009). Likewise, member 8 commented that the party ‘could survive becausethere are people who, while I’m not saying they could take his place, could lead the PDLafterwards’. In conclusion, to return to our criteria for a personal party, it seems safe to say– at least based on these interviews – that there appears to be significant doubt within thePDL about its chances of surviving beyond Berlusconi’s political lifespan.
Party OrganisationOur final condition – ‘organisation at local level is neither constantly manifest nor perma-nent’ – recalls the discussion of the degree to which Forza Italia had been present and activeat grassroots level. As was the case with FI in the second half of the 1990s, so too has thePDL sought to portray itself as a party with a genuine territorial presence and grassrootsactivism. Indeed, having not released any membership figures until the end of 2011, thenational membership office of the PDL told this author on 8 February 2012 that the partyhad circa 1,122,000 members. It seems prudent however to treat these figures primarily asan indication of how the party wishes to be seen. In fact, based on the interviews done in2009 and 2010, there is little evidence that the PDL is in reality active (and certainly notconstantly so) at local level. Rather, the impression is of a party in which (1) it is the directrelationship between the leader and the voter (mainly played out through the media andparty communications) that counts most and (2) little attention is paid either to building upthe party on the ground or to fostering horizontal and vertical linkages within the party.This of course connects to the previous discussion: if you are not concerned about whethera party will outlive its founder and you rely on the leader’s appeal in your communicationstrategies, there is little point in investing time in providing it with a lasting structure of localparty organisations and grassroots activists. Moreover, as Panebianco (1988, p. 67) says of thecharismatic leader, he or she ‘has no interest in organizational reinforcement which wouldinevitably set the stage for the party’s “emancipation” from his [or her] control’. Rather, itis sufficient for such leaders to rely on rhetoric about party organisational expansion forpublic legitimacy purposes (it still appears taboo to say that one’s party is a personal party)rather than seeking to create this reality.
Before considering the relationship between the party and its members, it is worthnoting that representatives from all areas were critical in interviews about their ownofficial party organs and committees at local level. For example, Alessia Rosolen (Friuli-Venezia Giulia regional government member – formerly AN) claimed at the end of May2010 that ‘since March 2009, the PDL here in Trieste had a provincial committee meetingin September or October to elect itself ... and then there was a meeting a few weeks ago’.Similarly, Daniele Cantore (Piedmont regional councillor) observed that in Turin ‘theparty organisms exist: there is a municipal committee, a provincial committee and aregional one, however I have to say that they don’t meet very often’ (June 2010). Headded that the situation had been little different in Forza Italia. Luigi Mazzei (citycouncillor in Calimera, Puglia) said in December 2009: ‘they should have organized theparty much better in the periphery. To think that we only announced the Lecce partyprovincial committee last week! It’s very slow, still top-down’.
While some PDL representatives, such as the Genoa Member of the Chamber ofDeputies, Roberto Cassinelli, who were previously in First Republic parties, express theirregret that at local level ‘the party structure is not organized better’ (November 2009), forothers the PDL structure simply reflects a different (and successful) party model. MaurizioBucci (Friuli-Venezia Giulia regional councillor) – prefacing his comments with ‘I am notsaying it is right, but it works’ – explained that the PDL ‘provides itself with a structurewhich inflates and springs into action when there are elections. And then the electedremain.The relationship with the grassroots activists is limited to a series of public, largemeetings’ (May 2010). Michele Coppola (Turin city councillor) said almost exactly thesame, explaining that ‘it is an extremely lean and extremely flexible party that can inflatewhen there are elections, but then inevitably deflates because it delegates its most importantactivities to its institutional representatives’ (October 2009). While acknowledging thatmeetings for members are ‘not very frequent’, he contended that this was indicative of howpeople’s ways of interacting with politics have changed, observing: ‘nowadays the politicalrally is like a football match: I can watch it from my couch at home’. Overall, what comesout very strongly from these interviews is that the main opportunities for both PDLmembers and supporters to interact formally with their party are by means of events, heldintermittently every three or four months, in a hotel or convention centre, and headlinedby a national ‘big name speaker’.
When asked about relations between the party and its members, Senator Enrico Mussofrom Genoa was very clear, saying that ‘they are limited to the bare minimum!’ (November2009). He went on to pose the question that, unless they were interested in running forelection,‘why would someone join this party?’ In interviews, members generally confirmedthat (particularly outside election campaigns) their possibility of formal interaction withPDL representatives and other ordinary members is limited to large, sporadic public events.The one exception to this was a provincial northern town where in 2010 a handful of localparty representatives had, on their own initiative, begun holding set meetings with membersonce a month in the party branch.This, however, was very much in contrast to what hadpreviously occurred in the town both with FI and then the PDL. Indeed, speakinganonymously,one local councillor said that not only did the party at higher levels show littleinterest in what the local level said or did in this respect, but some representatives weresceptical about the utility of holding regular meetings.
Elsewhere, the situation in terms of activity was uniformly poor. In one city of over half amillion people, member 1 said that, while in Forza Italia there had been occasional dinnersand big events, in the PDL‘there has not been a single meeting for members in the last year’.This decline in grassroots activity levels compared to those in Forza Italia was confirmed bymember 7 from the same city.The youth wing of the party in the same city did apparentlyhold a couple of meetings per month but, according to member 4, these attracted at most 20or 30 people (with only 10 of them constantly active). Interviewees in other cities and townsclaimed that meetings for members took place intermittently every few months, but thesewere usually of the ‘big event’ type and not held on a regularised basis. In any case, the partylacks the physical structures to do much more given that,even in some of Italy’s largest cities,the PDL has only one branch (usually located in the city centre). On this point, member 13(from another city of over half a million people) commented: ‘I’ve constantly complained
that we need branches on the ground.But instead,unfortunately,we’re shut up in that castle,that palace’ (referring to the rather plush party headquarters in the city).
It is worth noting, however, that while contact between (1) members and the party, (2)party representatives themselves and (3) ordinary members at local level is therefore neitherfrequent nor regularised, it often emerged in interviews that informal personalised contactsbetween specific groups of members and elected party representatives can be anothermatter entirely. Elected representatives cultivate ‘their’ representatives at lower institutionallevels and ‘their’ people on the ground through exclusive meetings, either held informally(in restaurants or at other social events) or in associations set up by individual national orsub-national representatives.As Carlo AlbertoTesserin (Veneto regional councillor) put it inMay 2010, while the party organises very little, ‘I call my members, I see them whenever Iwant and they come willingly’ (emphasis added). Consistent with this, all members inter-viewed pointed to a single local representative in their city or town as their ‘point ofreference’. As a result, the impression is that there is a parallel world beyond that of the partyitself in which this type of restricted, personalised and exclusive contact occurs. This ofcourse recalls the comments earlier about the franchise party,with local First Republic elitesbeing able to move both other representatives further down the institutional chain andgrassroots members to Forza Italia. One can well imagine that, if Berlusconi were to leavepolitics, a similar process would recur following a party break-up with these PDL local elitesmigrating (and bringing loyal representatives and members) to other parties able toguarantee their political survival. Leaving such predictions aside, it seems fair to say that, atleast according to the interviews conducted, the overriding impression is that organisationat local level in the PDL is indeed neither constantly manifest nor permanent.
Conclusion
Berlusconi cannot get his head around the concept of a pyramid-type party ... he believes thatin the United States parties are only electoral committees, which is not the case, but that iswhat he thinks.And his ideal is a party which does not give him too much cause for concern,which basically exists to provide him with power and then it is up to him to use that power.
The above quote is from an interview this author conducted in June 2010 with GuidoPossa, a PDL Senator who, having known Berlusconi since their schooldays, workedalongside him in his business empire and then joined him in politics. It was Possa who wasresponsible in the mid-1990s for the Forza Italia ‘Clubs’, the first attempt by the party tolay claim to some kind of local presence and grassroots membership. He is thereforeparticularly well placed to comment on Berlusconi’s political party organisations. WhatPossa describes seems consistent with the arguments presented in this article. Here, havingfirst of all discussed a number of different definitions of Forza Italia, an operationaldefinition of the term ‘personal party’ was proposed by building on LaPalombara andWeiner’s (1966) criteria for the definition of a political party. The four criteria of thisdefinition, which all applied to Forza Italia, were then used to analyse Berlusconi’s secondparty, the Popolo Della Libertà.This was done, first, by briefly discussing the party statuteand communications and then by a close study of interviews conducted in 2009 and 2010with PDL representatives and members. It was found – at least based on the material
available here – that the PDL is indeed another personal party in the mould of FI. It remainsfirst and foremost, to use Mauro Barisione’s nuanced description of Forza Italia,‘a reflectionof the leader rather than his reflector’ (Barisione, 2006, p. 74). Moreover, as Maraffi (1995,p. 257) wrote of Forza Italia in its early days, so too is it still the case with the PDL thatBerlusconi ‘can permit himself to dedicate very little time to his electoral machine, preciselybecause it is his’ (emphasis added).
Of course, while Berlusconi may be the creator of the personal party prototype in Italy, hisis not the only one on the market. Since the foundation of FI, Italian politics has seen thesubsequent rise (and, in some cases, fall) of numerous parties of right, left and centre whichare utterly focused on their founder-leader and whose survival seems heavily dependent onthe political lifespan of that founder-leader.These include Antonio Di Pietro’s Italia deiValori,Clemente Mastella’s UDEUR,former Prime Minister Lamberto Dini’s various creations fromRinnovamento Italiano to the Liberaldemocratici, Francesco Rutelli’s Alleanza per l’Italia,NichiVendola’s Sinistra Ecologia Libertà and many others besides. It would be interesting totake the criteria for definition of a personal party proposed in this article and apply it to someof these, perhaps bearing in mind what we said earlier about the differences in terms of theexpected lifespan beyond the leader and grassroots organisation between personalised partiessuch as the Lega Nord and personal ones like FI and the PDL.Similarly, there are cases in othercountries such as Geert Wilder’s Freedom Party in the Netherlands, the Lijst Dedecker inBelgium and Law and Justice in Poland which may be worth analysing in these terms. Afterall, given the changes in parties since the time of LaPalombara and Weiner’s volume, it seemsthat the personal party is no longer to be found only in Asia,Africa and Latin America wherethe authors had noted the existence of ‘oligarchical groups’ masquerading as parties, but alsowithin new and old democracies across Europe.
Finally, although beyond the scope of the present article, it would be worthwhileconsidering how personal parties represent a further development in the evolution of thepolitical party in established democracies. LaPalombara and Weiner’s original definition ofthe political party was clearly very much based on the mass party as a normative model.Thework of, among others, Panebianco (1988) and, later, Richard Katz and Peter Mair (1995;2009) has helped us understand how parties have subsequently changed both as regards therole of leaders and the relations between the party in office and that on the ground. Seenin this light, Forza Italia and the PDL appear not only as confirmation of the trajectories inparty organisation and leadership identified by scholars over the past three decades, but asthe harbingers of a new type of personal party in Western democracies which should forceus to reconsider our assumptions regarding the functions, structures, activities and lifespansof political parties.
(Accepted: 30 September 2012)
About the AuthorDuncan McDonnell is Marie Curie Fellow in the Department of Political and Social Sciences at the EuropeanUniversity Institute. He is the co-editor, with Daniele Albertazzi, of Twenty-First Century Populism (Palgrave, 2008) andhas published in West European Politics (2010) on the Northern League and in Party Politics (2011) on outsider parties.He has recently co-edited the 2012 Politica in Italia/Italian Politics yearbook with Anna Bosco.Together with DanieleAlbertazzi he is completing a book entitled Populists in Power which will be published by Routledge. In September
2012 he began a two-year Marie Curie project on populist party representation and organisation.Duncan McDonnell,Department of Political and Social Sciences, European University Institute, San Domenico di Fiesole, Florence, Italy;email: [email protected]
NotesThe fieldwork on which this article is based was carried out as part of a broader project conducted with Daniele Albertazzi of theUniversity of Birmingham on populists in government in Italy and Switzerland.This research was funded by the Leverhulme Trust(Application ID: 20761; Funder ref: F/00,094/AZ). All interviews were conducted by the author, with the exception of those inPuglia which were done by Davide Pellegrino of the University of Turin. I would like to express my sincere thanks to him for this.The article was mostly written during a Jean Monnet Fellowship in 2011–12 at the Robert Schuman Centre of the EuropeanUniversity Institute. In addition to the anonymous reviewers, many colleagues provided extremely useful feedback on previous draftsof the article. Among these, I would particularly like to thank Daniele Albertazzi, Mauro Barisione, Giuliano Bobba, EmanueleMassetti, Alfio Mastropaolo, Antonella Seddone, Marco Valbruzzi and Steve Wolinetz.1 A total of 36 face-to-face interviews were conducted with 22 representatives and 22 members of the PDL between October 2009
and December 2010. These comprised: (1) five semi-structured individual interviews with elected national representatives andseventeen individual semi-structured interviews with elected sub-national representatives (i.e. regional and local); (2) twelvesemi-structured individual interviews and two group discussions with ordinary party members (each group discussion involvedfive party members). Although it would require a far larger number of interviews (along with much greater resources) to constructa representative and statistically significant sample, it is worth noting that interviews with sub-national representatives wereconducted in three areas of the country with historically different political cultures and traditions of party activism: two north-westregions (Piedmont and Liguria), two north-east ones (Veneto and Friuli-Venezia Giulia) and one southern (Puglia). Interviewswith national deputies took place in Rome, Milan, Genoa and Puglia. Four former AN sub-national representatives (two from thenorth-west, two from the north-east) were included. The remainder had all previously been in Forza Italia. When quoted, thenames of elected PDL representatives are given along with their roles at the time of the interview and the month in which theinterview took place. Unless stated that they were formerly in AN, all those quoted were previously in Forza Italia. Gaining accessto members was particularly difficult compared to my experiences with other parties both in Italy and elsewhere. However,through contacts established with local party representatives, it was eventually possible to organise interviews (both individuallyand in groups) with a total of 22 members. Given the small sample size and the associated dangers of relying on a random sample,a purposive sampling strategy was used as far as possible. Interviewees were all active members (i.e. unlike the overwhelmingmajority of FI/PDL official members, those interviewed for this article had all participated in party activities at local level).Theyconsisted of 13 males and 9 females, with ages ranging from 20 to over 80. Interviews were conducted in cities and provincialtowns in three northern Italian regions, comprising both the North-West and North-East of the country. Ordinary members wereguaranteed anonymity.Their names, where they were from and the dates of these interviews have all therefore been omitted.
ReferencesAlbertazzi, D. and McDonnell, D. (2010) ‘The Lega Nord Back in Government’, West European Politics, 33 (6), 1318–40.Albertazzi, D. and McDonnell, D. (forthcoming) Populists in Power. London: Routledge.Barisione, M. (2006) L’immagine del leader: Quanto conta per gli elettori? Bologna: Il Mulino.Bobba, G. and Seddone, A. (2011) ‘Partito personale o personalizzato? Uno studio sulla scissione tra Popolo della Libertà e
Futuro e Libertà’. Paper presented at the Associazione Italiana di Comunicazione Politica conference,Perugia, 28 October.Bobbio, N. (1995) ‘Il conflitto e il suo vero nodo’, La Stampa, 28 May.Bobbio, N. (1996) ‘Grandi speranze, grandi timori’, La Stampa, 17 May.Bosco, A. and McDonnell, D. (forthcoming) ‘Introduction: Monti and the Downgrade of Italian Parties’, in A. Bosco and D.
McDonnell (eds), Italian Politics: From Berlusconi to Monti. New York: Berghahn.Calise, M. (2000) Il partito personale. Bari: Laterza.Corbetta, P. (2011) ‘The 2010 Regional Elections in Italy: Another Referendum on Berlusconi’, South European Society and
Politics, 17 (2), 155–73.Cornia, A. (2010) ‘Una campagna elettorale molto poco regionale’, in B. Baldi and F. Tronconi (eds), Le elezioni regionali del
2010. Bologna: Il Mulino, pp. 31–46.Gunther, R. and Diamond, L. (2003) ‘Species of Political Parties: A New Typology’, Party Politics, 9 (2), 167–99.Hopkin, J. and Paolucci, C. (1999) ‘The Business Firm Model of Party Organisation: Cases from Spain and Italy’, European
Journal of Political Research, 35 (3), 307–39.Ignazi, P. (1996) ‘The Crisis of Parties and the Rise of New Political Parties’, Party Politics, 2 (4), 549–66.Katz, R. S. and Mair, P. (1995) ‘Changing Models of Party Organization and Party Democracy:The Emergence of the Cartel
Party’, Party Politics, 1 (5), 5–28.Katz, R. S. and Mair, P. (2009) ‘The Cartel Party Thesis: A Restatement’, Perspectives on Politics, 7 (4), 753–66.LaPalombara, J. (2007) ‘Reflections on Political Parties and Political Development, Four Decades Later’, Party Politics, 13 (2),
141–54.LaPalombara, J. and Weiner, M. (1966) ‘The Origin and Development of Political Parties’, in J. LaPalombara and M. Weiner
(eds), Political Parties and Political Development. Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press, pp. 3–42.Legnante, G. (2006) ‘Leader e temi in video’, in P. Bellucci and P. Segatti (eds), Dov’è la vittoria? Il voto del 2006 raccontato dagli
Maraffi, M. (1995) ‘Forza Italia’, in G. Pasquino (ed.), La politica italiana: Dizionario critico 1945–1995. Rome: Laterza,pp. 247–59.
Panebianco, A. (1988) Political Parties: Organization and Power. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Paolucci, C. (1999) ‘Forza Italia a livello locale: Un marchio in franchising?’, Rivista Italiana di Scienza Politica, 29 (3), 481–
516.Paolucci,C. (2008) ‘From Democrazia Cristiana to Forza Italia and the Popolo Della Libertà: Partisan Change in Italy’,Modern
Italy, 13 (4), 465–80.Poli, E. (2001) Forza Italia: Strutture, leadership e radicamento territoriale. Bologna: Il Mulino.Popolo Della Libertà (2009) Statuto del Popolo Della Libertà. Available from http://web.archive.org/web/20100801132734/
http://www.ilpopolodellaliberta.it/speciali/statuto-del-pdl.pdf [Accessed 11 December 2012].Popolo Della Libertà (2011) Statuto del Popolo Della Libertà. Available from http://www.pdl.it/notizie/15377/statuto-del-
popolo-della-liberta [Accessed 11 December 2012].Raniolo, F. (2006) ‘Forza Italia: A Leader with a Party’, South European Society and Politics, 11 (3–4), 439–55.Taguieff, P.-A. (2003) L’illusione populista. Milan: Mondadori.
