Technically there is no Italian Second Republic. The current constitution of Italy is their first republican constitution, promulgated in 1948 after the overthrow of the fascist state previously led by Mussolini. The document was amended in April 1993, however, during the course of a massive investigation by the Italian magistracy (known as mani pulite—clean hands) which revealed corruption, largely through the granting of building and other contracts in return for contributions to party funds, so widespread that all the major parties at very high official levels were clearly implicated. The extent of the political change caused by the investigation and the consequent trials and constitutional amendments so transformed Italian expectations of politics, and to a lesser extent their practices, that many journalists took to describing the post-1993 political system as the ‘Second Republic’, and the phrase has entered the terminology of political science. The idea that Italy is now living under a second constitution arises from the sense that the changes were so extreme as to amount to a peaceful revolution. A further root of the political changes was the end of the cold war, and thereby the disappearance of much of the rationale of the dominance of the Christian Democrat Party (DC), which had been in control of every government from the beginning of the Republic, and which kept the Italian Communist Party (PCI) out of government despite its roughly similar level of voting support. With the removal of cold war fears and the consequent unlocking of voters from these traditional orientations, other political tendencies, especially the regional and semi-separatist Northern League were able to gain real support.
In a series of referendums, voters opted for a radical change in the electoral system, owing to disillusion with the endless succession of DC-led, but highly fragile, coalitions and the rampant inefficiency and corruption of the public-service sector. Italy had suffered from an extreme form of the multi-party system caused by its near perfect proportional electoral system.
The new elections, first used in 1994, moved sharply—though not completely—towards an Anglo-American style plurality system. Much of the idea that there is a Second Republic was based on the hope that such institutional reform would transpose the party system into something like the two-party or two-block system found in, for example, France or the United Kingdom. In fact, the changes in government stability, while undeniable, have not been that great, while the list of parties represented is smaller, though not much smaller, than in the past. Indeed, the two most notable changes, somewhat longer-lasting governments and the fact that the parties form two electoral coalitions of the centre-left and centre-right, have come about for other reasons. The first is that the collapse of the DC and the PCI has allowed their replacement with slightly more orthodox centrist parties of the left and right, although these new parties are not highly disciplined. The more important fact may be the almost complete decimation of the old–style party leaders, and indeed parliamentary deputies, through their arrests and investigations for corruption. The politicians of the Second Republic are to a very large extent either completely new figures, or the few figures from the pre-1993 era able to demonstrate a clean record. There is no doubt among observers that the necessary constitutional and institutional reforms have not yet been extensive enough to produce genuinely effective, responsive, and honest government in Italy. Unfortunately, there are signs that both the public and the political classes are now tired of change, and they would prefer to consolidate the reforms that have occurred rather than pressing for more.
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