Dave Kellaway reports from Italy on the referendums promoted by the main trade union confederation and the official left of centre opposition parties to limit some of the more repressive anti-trade union laws and to improve the citizenship process for immigrants.

Results

Referendum question	Yes	No
Stopping sacking without justifiable cause	89.06	11.94
Legal compensation for workers in workplaces with less that 15 workers	87.60	13.40
Making short term contracts more difficult to impose	89.04	11.96
On subcontracting/Health and safety	87.35	12.65
On halving 10 year process for citizenship	65.49	34.51

Turnout: 14.07 million (registered electorate is 45.99 million):  30.59%.

All five referendums were lost because none of them reached the quorum of 50% of the electorate. Around 88-89% who voted supported the progressive changes to the labour laws but this went down by 33 percentage points when it came to the change to the citizenship process for immigrants.

Over the last thirty years only one out of nine referendums reached the quorum – in 2011, to defend water as a public good. Even then the government manoeuvred so as not to implement the change demanded by the broad left and a vast grass roots campaign.  As a democratic mechanism for change, it worked effectively to legalise divorce and abortion rights in the seventies and eighties when Italy was a different country with a turnout of over ninety percent for many elections.

A more individualized country

I remember how different civil society was even in a town of around 60,000 in the South near Naples.  The local branch offices of the Italian Communist Party (PCI) were a hub not just for party members but anyone on the left or progressive. Then the piazza was still vibrant in a political sense and the big well-organised factories were more prevalent. The gains of the seventies had not been rolled back and neoliberal austerity was still ahead of us.

Today everything is more individualized and commodified. Local fetes of the PCI or of anybody else hardly happen. Culture no longer has much of a budget from public bodies and is just a consumer spectacle controlled by big business. Walking around looking for a photo of referendum campaign posters for this article, I could not even easily find any. Voting in all elections has declined massively. People do not join political parties, unions or even civil society associations like they used to. The disconnect with the political process has helped the rise of hard right populist politics exemplified by the present government.

Meloni’s government coalition is revelling in the defeat of the referendums.  The anti-working class labour laws implemented by a previous left of centre government (led by Matteo Renzi) will all continue to operate.  The post-fascist premier and her ally Salvini are particularly exultant about the much smaller number of people who voted to support immigrants gaining citizenship more quickly. It will encourage them to reinforce their racist anti-migrant policies. It goes without saying that representatives of capital are happy that their freedom to exploit working people continues with no added restrictions.

The bosses are happy

Watching the post-results TV coverage, one comment from the so called independent journalist stood out for me. He said this result shows you that all that old-style confrontation in the workplace that the CGIL wants to stir up again with this referendum is over; we need to move on, focus on issues of wages and productivity rather than all that stuff that is historically finished. This is the narrative the government and bosses want. Keep politics out of the workplace, let us just discuss it as a technical matter; the people have shown they are not interested in resurrecting outdated talk about class struggle.

The government actively encouraged people to go to the seaside or for a walk in the mountains rather than to actually participate in the democratic process. Meloni had herself shown on the media going to a polling station and refusing to take a ballot paper. Of course legally it is a legitimate tactic and governments with different politics have done the same thing when the right wing have organised referendums. Still it reflects a refusal to engage in any discussion about these big workplace issues. One minister, when questioned on TV, could not even accurately say what the referendums were about.

It denounced these referendums as a manoeuvre to challenge the government and as an internal faction fight within the PD (Partito Democratico, Democratic Party).  The left of centre opposition were accused of being led by the main trade union confederation, the CGIL, which has strong links with the main opposition party, the socially liberal PD. 

Landini, the CGIL leader, was the main promoter of the referendum.  He mobilized the union structures to get the half million signatures and then criss-crossed Italy in the last months trying to get out the vote.  The government and right wing forces are falling over themselves in using these results to discredit him.  Even though he has failed to really lead national strike action to defend workers living standards, they want to neutralize even the small possibility that he will lead the unions in any sort of confrontation with the government over the wage contracts presently in dispute.

Internal conflict in PD

Elly Schlein,, the PD leader, beat the more moderate leadership challenger and the right wing of the party to become leader two years ago. She has been keen to disown the worst anti-working class policies of a previous PD leader and prime minister, Matteo Renzi. He had proposed and implemented the Jobs Act, a so-called modernizing piece of legislation which was a sweetheart deal with neoliberal capital. It removed some of the progressive labour laws which allowed for some protection, although in practice the bosses were not particularly restrained.  The rifromisti – the PD right wing minority who basically still support Renzi’s position opposed the party line of five Yes votes, with three No votes on the Jobs Act changes. Although a smallish minority among the membership, the riformisti has some important elected representatives. For example Picerino, vice president of the European parliament, openly campaigned for three No votes.

So on one level, it is true that the referendums were also part of an internal debate within the PD.  For the PD this sort of institutional campaign, which the whole left supports, is the priority for political action. There was little of the mass campaigning that the local committees organised for the 2011 water referendum.  Schlein has not really changed the overall socially liberal policies of the PD and certainly not mobilized working people against the hard-right Meloni government.

 I was surprised to see that even before the referendum was over, Schlein was already expectation-managing, saying that 30% would be a good result. In any sort of sporting contest – let alone a political one – it is hard to mobilize your people if you accept defeat in advance. Landini, to his credit, did not adopt this line.  Her target figure of 30% was decided on because she wanted to say that if the referendums had more that 12.5 million voters it would be more than elected the Meloni government. The government opposed the referendums but more people voted in them than voted for her government so this would be a defeat for Meloni and Salvini.  Nobody much is buying this line.

Depending how you add things up, there may be about the same number of Yes voters as voted for Meloni. But you cannot toss in all the No votes or ignore the vote on citizenship (only 9 million Yes, and the centrist parties supported this) which is a main plank of the government’s programme. On citizenship, the Yes vote was certainly far less than those who elected Meloni. Migration will be a theme of any future election campaign much more than the labour laws. Schlein will be facing angry reactions from the right of her party who are saying her referendum strategy and alliance with Landini has had a boomerang effect and gifted Meloni a victory.

Has much changed as a consequence of the votes?

The big question is whether the opposition or the government has gained or lost from the referendums. Clearly these numbers do not give the left of centre parties much hope that they will defeat the right wing coalition any time soon in an election. You cannot translate these results simply into general election voting intentions and the citizenship question spells bad news for the opposition.

It is true that the campaign to get the referendums and the electoral process has put these issues on the table as Landini has argued since the defeat. However, it shows the limits of the left of centre parties’ implantation in the country and ability to mobilize a majority.  It also exposed the divisions within the opposition compared to the government’s compact unity. Conte leads the Five Star Movement (M5S) and  although he personally said he would vote Yes on the citizenship question, there was no official party position on it. As for any broader electoral unity with the centrist parties like Renzi’s Italia Viva or Calanda’s Azione, both of them voted No, except on citizenship.

Conte’s M5S has a lot of electoral support in the South but this is where the turnout was worse (low twenties) whereas in the PD fiefdoms in the North/Centre the turnout was above average (36-9%). As might be expected, turnout was best in the big towns and urban areas. Working class areas turned out more for the votes on contracts while the more middle class historic centres voted most for the citizenship change. Small towns with fewer union structures and smaller influence of the left of centre parties turned out a great deal less than the larger urban areas. Women voted more than men.

Are referendums any use any more?

After the results, there has been some discussion of the usefulness of the abrogative referendum system. It did bring some positive historic changes, like on abortion, and the left has generally supported using the process since, as with water, you can use it to build a big campaign and even win. However with only one quorum since 1997, some people are arguing for reducing the quorum to encourage more participation. On the right, there is talk of making it more difficult to hold a referendum by increasing the number of signatures needed.

These votes have reflected the relationship of class forces in Italy which is still very unfavourable to the working class. The struggle to defend workers’ rights and living standards will continue through the building of militant currents in the unions and the workplaces. This continues through the rank and file unions and inside the CGIL.

Dave Kellaway is a member of Hackney and Stoke Newington Labour Party and a contributor to International Viewpoint and Europe Solidaire Sans Frontieres.