Italy’s opposition. Disunited, disheartened

An opposition struggling to maintain a united front

BY HIS own account, Romano Prodi, former president of the European Commission, spent his Christmas holidays considering his future as unofficial leader of the opposition to Silvio Berlusconi's centre-right government. As well he might. For, barely a month after Mr Prodi's return to Italian domestic politics, the centre-left is in a sorrier mess than ever.

Its next big challenge - and perhaps its last big opportunity to sell itself to voters before the parliamentary elections that are due in 2006 - will come in April when local elections are to be held in 14 of Italy's 20 regions. Yet the parties of the centre and left, which are nominally all part of a grand democratic alliance under Mr Prodi's leadership, will now go into the April elections as competitors, not allies.

That is because, just before Christmas, talks to try to agree to common lists of candidates ran aground thanks to the misgivings of the second-biggest opposition group, the Margherita (Daisy) party. Its leaders were disappointed by the outcome of the European elections last year, when the Margherita ran alongside three other parties, including the bigger Democrats of the Left. They concluded that the Margherita could win more votes by standing alone. They also hope to demonstrate their party's popularity - and thus its importance to the centre-left alliance - before talks start on which candidate should contest which seat in the general election.

Seven days later, the centre-left suffered another blow when a smaller party, the Democratic Union for Europe (known as Udeur), voted to leave the alliance altogether and put up its own candidates, in both the regional and general elections. Once again, the issue was one of relative weight. The Udeur is plumb in the centre of Italian politics, so its leader, Clemente Mastella, who was a minister in Mr Berlusconi's first government in 1994, can credibly offer its support to right or left. Since the Udeur's voters are concentrated in the south, where electoral races are closer than in the north, it enjoys a potential influence out of all proportion to its numbers in parliament. On the basis of last year's European election results, Il Sole-24 Ore, a financial daily, has calculated that the Udeur, which has only seven seats in the lower house, could cost the opposition 27 seats if it runs alone and 41 if it stands with the Berlusconi coalition.

“We may be little, but we have the ambition to become decisive,” Mr Mastella declared recently. Many in opposition, though, believe that he will return once he has been promised, say, a seat in cabinet. But that would do little to detract from the significance of his desertion. Taken together with the Margherita's backsliding, it has confirmed that Mr Prodi is proving quite unable to persuade his fellow opposition leaders that they must stay united if they are to win power under a system that favours big blocks.

This is not all his fault. Italy's electoral system, while encouraging big alliances, also gives disproportionate weight to their smaller components. Roughly a quarter of the country's lawmakers are chosen by proportional representation, which tends to boost smaller parties. And there is no threshold for entry into parliament, as there is in Germany, where parties need to win 5% of the vote before they get any seats. So a group that is a minnow in the Italian parliament can become a very big fish by realigning, or threatening to realign, at election time. The temptation to do this is correspondingly enormous.

Whether it is wise to succumb to it is quite another matter, especially if the party concerned comes from the centre-left. Polls show that the opposition's keenest supporters are overwhelmingly in favour of a unified front. It is reasonable to assume that some of them will punish disunity with abstention. And the centre-left cannot afford that.

Il Sole-24 Ore's most critical finding was that, if the votes cast in last June's European election, which marked a low point in the Berlusconi government's fortunes, were cast the same way at a general election, the opposition would still lose. Its leaders are scheming and manoeuvring for rewards that they have yet to earn. They may never do so if they continue to be disunited. And they may also have to start considering if they have any alternatives to Mr Prodi as their champion.

The Opposition Parties in Italy are struggling to maintain a united front.