Abstract
Italy has been severely damaged by the economic crisis. So why haven’t they embraced the Occupy movement, asks
‘Why don’t Italians occupy?’ That’s exactly what social movement researcher and activist Lorenzo Zamponi was wondering in autumn 2012. While many Western countries have been bubbling with anti-austerity protests and occupations in the face of the current economic crisis, Italy, a country renowned for a lively civil society and its engagement with radical and noisy social movements, has kept relatively quiet and unexpressive. The financial crisis has paralysed rather than inspired Italian demonstrators.
What is behind this Italian anomaly? Are Italians expressing their frustrations in some other way?
Since the end of the 1990s, a very active global justice movement has flourished in Italy. On 15 February 2003, about three million people marched in Rome against the then-imminent attack on Iraq (the rally was included in the 2004 Guinness Book of Records as the biggest anti-war march in history). The so-called social forums, self-organised arenas displaying the motto ‘another world is possible’, mushroomed nearly everywhere in the peninsula. Huge mass mobilisations targeted global summits such as the meeting of the eight biggest world economies (G8) in Genoa in July 2001, when about 300,000 people and 700 civil society organisations took to the streets to call for redistributive justice. The counter-summit was met by brutal police repression, resulting in the death of one protester and with several hundred suffering injuries, in what Amnesty International defined as ‘the most serious suspension of democratic rights in a Western country since the Second World War’. (See Maurizio Regosa's article on the Italian film industry, pp 116–118.)
The ‘movement of movements’ embodied a multifaceted national ‘soul’, where grassroots collectives and traditional non-governmental organisations, church groups and leftist unions co-existed, albeit not without tensions. Very diverse movement activists occasionally converged in unusual but effective coalitions.
But social movements normally mobilise in waves and Italy is no exception. Over the period 2008–2011, following yet another electoral victory of the centre-right coalition led by Silvio Berlusconi, the movement went dormant, entering a period of relative silence in spite of the economic crisis and austerity policies.
The three years that followed were dominated by the student movement, which mobilised from 2008-2010 against the harsh reform of the public education system – affecting universities in particular – proposed by Minister of Education Mariastella Gelmini, who is a member of Berlusconi’s cabinet. The mobilisation became known as Onda Anomala ('the anomalous wave’). Curiously, it was Italian students who first protested against austerity measures, establishing the terms of the protest that later characterised the Spanish Indignados: they protested against the budget cuts affecting their schools, they marched chanting the slogan ‘We won’t pay for your crisis’. Rapidly, student mobilisation became more radical and politicised, broadening its discourse to include an explicit opposition to the austerity measures beyond their impact on public education. Although the protest weakened in December 2010 with the approval of the so-called Gelmini law, the students’ claims were picked up by several rallies throughout the spring of 2011, including a national day of action for casual workers and a rally protesting against the ways women and girls were being represented in the aftermath of Berlusconi’s underage sex court case, in which he was accused of having sex with a 17-year-old girl in 2010. Italy ranks 80th in the Global Gender Gap 2012, a survey published by the World Economic Forum, indicating that in Italy a wider gap exists than in countries like Peru, Botswana, Honduras, Ghana or China.
Not much happened in the streets of Italian cities following the Arab Spring and the Spanish protests of early 2011. Eventually, on 15 October 2011, 300,000 people marched in Rome for a global day of anti-austerity action called and inspired by the Spanish Indignados and the Occupy movement. The demonstration had been organised by an impromptu broad coalition of grassroots groups and leftist organisations. However, most demonstrators never made it to the end of the rally, as small isolated groups of protesters dressed in black started damaging private property and were confronted by the police, who, in many cases, were unable to stop the violence or destruction. As a result, the mayor of Rome, Gianni Alemanno, issued a month-long ban on rallies in the capital, including a national demonstration by the steelworkers’ union scheduled to take place later that month. Minister of Interior Roberto Maroni argued in favour of limitations on the right to demonstrate, which were actually never implemented. Most participants distanced themselves from the violent episodes, interpreting the looting as a violent attack on the protesters themselves. Some groups had intended to set up a camp following the demonstration. The plan never saw the light of day.
On 17 November 2011, amid pressures of the global financial markets, a technocratic cabinet, led by economics professor and former European Union Commissioner Mario Monti, replaced Berlusconi. Tasked with fixing the shaky state finances, Monti imposed another batch of radical austerity measures, including a much-hated tax on property and a severe pension system reform. But Italians did not take to the streets in the way that Greeks and Spaniards did. Nor did they camp out in public spaces, resisting the considerable influence of the Occupy Wall Street movement and the protests taking place in town squares around Greece. Although the number of strikes increased by 25 per cent in 2012, according to an article published by Roberto Mania in La Repubblica entitled ‘Rome is not in danger of the contagion of the piazza’, they remained on the fringes and Monti’s austerity policies did not trigger major protests involving the broad citizenry.
Although the number of strikes increased by 25 per cent in 2012, they remained on the fringes and Monti’s policies did not trigger major protests
In any case, students, teachers, temporary workers, and steelworkers alike ended up adopting the anti-austerity rhetoric. Students were able to translate a particular discourse on university reform into broader anti-austerity speech targeted at Italian society as a whole, focusing on the social conditions of the Italian youth and referring specifically to what they saw as their bleak future. Initially, however, it was the mainstream media that used the label Indignados and the movement itself did not embrace the term. Throughout the summer of 2011, journalists extended it to include nearly every protester in the country, from citizens mobilising against a corrupt mayor in northern Italy to unemployed workers staging protests.
Only in the autumn of 2011 did activists appropriate the brand, practices, and symbolic discourse of the Indignados/Occupy movement, exploiting the symbolic resonance of the Occupy Wall Street movement in the Italian media and how it was presented to the wider public. They organised hit-and-run peaceful protests, pitching tents in public spaces in several major Italian cities. But, unlike their foreign counterparts, these actions lasted only a few hours, targeted strategic locations (like the Italian Central Bank), and were planned by local groups with virtually no connection to one other.
A demonstrator holds a bat as a Carabinieri police vehicle burns during a demonstration against banking and finance in Rome on 15 October 2011. Around the world, demonstrators rallied, accusing bankers and politicians of wrecking economies, but only in Rome did the global ‘day of rage’ erupt into violence
Then came the 15 October violent events in Rome, which contradicted the image of the Indignados/Occupy movement as peaceful, spontaneous and innovative protest, as previously represented in the media and championed by protesters. As Lorenzo Zamponi wrote in an article entitled ‘Why Don’t Italians Occupy? Hypotheses on a Failed Mobilisation’ in the journal Social Movement Studies, after the violence it became nearly impossible for protesters to use the Indignados/Occupy label to recruit people or secure favourable media coverage. The short-lived camps that emerged in different cities vanished as quickly as they had appeared.
Italy’s failure to occupy
There are a variety of reasons behind the Italian ‘failure to occupy’. Some, such as internal tensions, generation gaps and the nascent Italian Indignados’ loss of credibility following the 15 October incidents, are characteristic of the movement. Others are linked to the idiosyncrasy of Italian politics and directly refer to the financial crisis. In the case of the latter, the economic crisis shaped the internal formal politics of the country so dramatically that there was no room or opportunity for alternative views to emerge.
First, the crisis served as the main justification for the appointment of a technocratic cabinet, presented as a necessary response to the fact that the cost of Italian borrowing had skyrocketed, leading Angela Merkel to call for immediate reform across the European Union. Monti’s government began implementing measures, including increasing taxes, investigating tax evasion and reforming pension schemes, in order to boost confidence in Italian markets, particularly after huge jumps in the country’s bond yields threatened economic stability.
Across Europe, the popular view among politicians was that fiscal reforms, however tough, were ‘badly needed’ if Italy was to avoid the fate of Ireland, Greece or Spain. The implicit message was that it would have been irresponsible to challenge austerity measures. In this way, what might be called the rhetoric of the crisis served both as the justification for the austerity measures and the antidote against any potential protest.
Second, Monti’s cabinet, supported by a cross-party grand coalition, had virtually no political opposition in parliament. With no left-wing party backing or voicing the claims of the protesters, people were not encouraged to take action. In other words, there was no political interlocutor able to unify the protests, which remained localised, confined to specific situations (for example, a factory about to close down).
Third, the cumbersome figure of Berlusconi, busy with defending himself and his businesses from numerous court cases at the expense of the badly-needed reforms, catalysed opposition, obscuring other external targets such as the European Union (called into question by, for example, Greek and Spanish protesters). In other words, in the eyes of progressive activists, Berlusconi’s inability to put forward the necessary reforms ended up absorbing a good portion of the crisis-related grievances, obscuring the impact of the EU and its pressures on national policies.
Italian police and repressive tactics
But if, on the one hand, Italy represented an anomaly in a European (and Western) panorama of diffused anti-austerity mobilisations, on the other hand, in terms of how its police repressed protest, it was perfectly aligned with other European countries.
The extreme measures taken by police against protesters at the 15 October rally have been compared to the policing of the Genoa 2001 G8 counter-summit (see Lorenzo Zamponi and Donatella Della Porta’s article ‘Protest and Policing on October 15th, Global Day of Action: The Italian Case’, published in the journal Policing & Society in 2011). In fact, in Rome, as happened in Genoa, police adopted a strategy called ‘selective incapacitation’, designed to isolate demonstrators from the symbolic areas of the protest, such as government headquarters or summit venues. Protesters were kept out of the so-called ‘red zones’ using fences and intimidation strategies. With a large portion of the resources devoted to defending institutional buildings, the police were unable to intervene to prevent looting or stop violent incidents. Instead, they brutally dispersed peaceful protesters, who were denied their right to demonstrate.
How protests are policed tends to reflect government inclinations. On 14 November, at a student rally in Rome, part of a pan-European strike against austerity measures, police forces’ aggressive behaviour attracted much criticism. An amateur video showed teargas being fired on the students from the upper floors of the Ministry of Interior headquarters. A minister, Rosanna Cancellieri, called for an internal investigation, declaring that ‘violence on a defenceless individual is intolerable and inexcusable’.
Monti resigned on 21 December 2012. The February 2013 elections resulted in political paralysis, with no clear majority among the main parties and the emergence of the anti-establishment Five Star Movement. It was widely seen as a vote against austerity. In this climate, it remains to be seen what will happen to protest in Italy.
