Saturday, March 15, 2014
Blue Room (Omni Shoreham)
The reform program of Mario Monti’s technocratic government combined three startling characteristics: a deeply regressive set of fiscal adjustments, the absence of either social partner or political party involvement, and the enduring personal popularity of Monti himself in public opinion. If austerity were popular, every politician would be doing it. But Monti’s reforms were not themselves popular; indeed, they resulted in substantial protests. Yet protests occurred not where Monti’s cuts were broadest (such as a sharp increase in petrol tax or cuts to healthcare or education) or deepest (such as the money saved through a pension age increase). Protests resulted, instead, where politics was organized over past lines of conflict: the coverage of workers already in early retirement, the regulation of protected professions, and the symbolic involvement of a labour court in redundancies. This represents a sharp departure from the politics of the Italian technocratic reforms of the 1990s, where substantial pension and wage-setting bargains were negotiated with social partners and which paved the way for the organization a system of bipolar politics. The paper argues that the Monti reforms are a product of a weak state trying to govern a disorganized society. The lack of traditional relays between politics and reforms (political parties and unions) results in a rapidly escalating disaffection with democratic institutions.
