Economic Crisis and Party Transformation: The Rise of a New Opposition in Italy?

The objective of the present work is to investigate the behaviour of the opposition actors in Italy from a comparative perspective and verify the impact of both the transformation of the party context (long term dynamics) and the financial crisis (short term dynamics) on their conduct. The costs of the crisis in the EU member states have not been only economic, but political. Most of the governments were not reconfirmed in office at the elections held from 2008 onwards and the crisis brought to the increase of abstention, party fragmentation and the emergence of new (radical) political forces (Bosco and Verney 2012). In this regard, the Italian case is paradigmatic. At the 2013 election, the two coalitions which had alternated in government for nearly two decades lost millions of votes, while a new political force without any previous parliamentary experience, the Five Star Movement (M5S), got about 25 per cent of the preferences. But what happen once in parliament? Does the M5S parliamentary party group really distinguish itself from the other parties in opposition? Are they capable of proposing a concrete alternative to the government in office or do they rather contrast the government actions, adopting a substantially adversarial behaviour? May we actually speak of the rise of a “new opposition” (Mair 2011) in Italy? This is what we will try to explore.