I believe part of Italy's democratic crisis is much older than we are accustomed to think. It did not begin with Tangentopoli. It did not begin with Berlusconi, and it certainly did not begin with the Five Star Movement. If we want to understand where some of its roots lie, we have to go back to the years immediately after World War II, when Italy was emerging from war, fascism, and poverty and beginning the difficult task of building a new democracy. On paper, the new Republic was founded on voting, participation, and political representation. In reality, however, in many parts of the country the relationship between citizens and politicians remained rooted in something much older: not the relationship between voters and representatives, but between people asking for something and people who had the power to give it to them.
When a Vote Had a Price
In Naples, this reality even had a figure who became almost legendary: Achille Lauro. The “Commander,” as he was known, belonged to a political era in which campaigns could be built around gestures that were immediate and tangible. Pasta, canned tomatoes, assistance, favors, promises—the vote became something you could actually hold in your hands. Seen from the distance of seven decades, the scene can look almost folkloric. But behind that folklore was a deeply consequential idea of politics. Citizens were not necessarily won over through a platform, a vision for the city, or a promise of a better future. They could be won over through need. And when need becomes the ground on which political support is built, the ballot may remain formally free while political freedom becomes something much more fragile.
Lauro, however, was only the most colorful face of a much broader phenomenon. In postwar Southern Italy, Christian Democracy built extraordinarily powerful networks of political support in which politics, government administration, the professions, economic interests, and personal relationships could become intertwined for generations. In some places, those networks also came into contact with organized crime, producing some of the darkest chapters in the history of the Italian Republic. Not everything can be reduced to patronage, and not all Christian Democratic support can be explained as a simple exchange of favors. That would be historically unfair. But it would be equally naive to deny the enormous role played by patronage, vote trading, and personal networks in Italian politics, particularly where the state was weaker and people depended more heavily on personal connections for protection, employment, and access to public institutions.
The Great Machines of Political Power
Then came the powerful political bosses, the factions, the preference votes, and the territorial machines. Figures such as Antonio Gava and Ciriaco De Mita belonged to a political world in which power was not built in a few months through a carefully managed social-media profile, but over decades of personal relationships. That system had many flaws—some of them extremely serious—but it possessed one characteristic that we may be tempted to miss today: it had a structure.
There were political parties, local chapters, political schools, grassroots organizations, activists, elected officials, professionals, and people who spent years learning how government actually worked. Politicians built networks, and through those networks they built political support. It was often a deeply clientelistic form of politics, certainly. But it was also a system in which power required a long-term presence in the community and at least some ability to manage complex relationships.
When Politics Lost Its Memory
The collapse of the First Republic brought that world down with it. Tangentopoli destroyed part of the old political establishment. Traditional parties disappeared or reinvented themselves. Ideologies lost much of their power. Politics became increasingly personal.
Television gradually replaced the local party office. Then the Internet replaced television. Finally, social media made it possible to build political support with little or no traditional organization behind it.
Even the meaning of political experience changed. There was a time when it seemed obvious that anyone who wanted to run a city should first know the city, work within a political organization, learn how government functioned, study, and earn experience over time. Eventually, we began to treat all of that almost as a liability. Experience became synonymous with the “old politics,” while inexperience was presented as proof of authenticity.
The Revolution of the Amateurs
The Five Star Movement became one of the clearest expressions of this transformation. Its initial appeal was precisely the promise of bringing ordinary people into institutions—people who had never belonged to the traditional political establishment. It was an understandable response to the growing distance between citizens and political elites.
But that same revolution contained a contradiction that has become much harder to ignore: being an ordinary citizen can be an excellent reason to enter politics, but it is not necessarily enough to run a city, a region, or a country. Good intentions cannot replace competence, just as personal honesty cannot replace administrative ability.
And this applies to the Five Star Movement just as it applies to every other political force. The real question is not which party an elected official comes from. The question is whether that person is actually prepared to exercise the power voters have entrusted to them.
Once They Fixed Other People's Lives. Now They Can Fix Their Own
This is where, in my view, another transformation in Italian politics took place. The old-style political boss needed other people in order to build his own power. He had to know people. He had to deliver something. He had to keep promises. He had to build a network and maintain it over time.
Today, part of politics seems to operate according to a different logic: entering politics can itself become a way of getting ahead.
It is no longer necessarily the old bargain—“Vote for me and I'll find you a job.” It can become something much simpler: “Vote for me and I'll get inside the system.”
Once inside, there may be connections, appointments, visibility, opportunities, and eventually a career. Politics, which should be the place where people temporarily agree to put their abilities at the service of the community, can instead become a form of personal investment.
The Little Courts of Power
This transformation is especially visible in local government, where the distance between ordinary citizens and political power is far smaller than it is in Rome. A city council is not Parliament, and a local council member is not a cabinet secretary. But decisions made in those offices can directly affect people's lives. Budgets, public contracts, hiring, zoning, public services, property, taxes, and concessions all require knowledge that cannot simply be improvised.
And yet local government is precisely where some of the most astonishing situations can emerge: people entering politics with little real preparation; political groups forming and disappearing around individual candidates; alliances built more around convenience than ideas; small circles of influence that begin to resemble what I can only describe as courts of miracles.
I am not suggesting that city councils should be populated only by lawyers, economists, engineers, or career politicians. Democracy must remain open to everyone, and no citizen should need a political résumé to earn the right to represent others. The problem begins when inexperience is no longer considered something to overcome through study and learning, but becomes almost a virtue in itself.
That is when politics risks becoming a profession in which the only truly indispensable skill is knowing how to win votes.
And winning votes and governing well, unfortunately, are two entirely different jobs.
The Problem Is Not the South
Southern Italy makes this phenomenon particularly visible, but it would be a mistake to tell this story as yet another tale of an allegedly backward South incapable of modernizing. The problem belongs to the entire country. Southern Italy simply retains some characteristics that make it easier to see what has become more sophisticated elsewhere.
Personal networks, the need for intermediaries, the search for personal connections, direct relationships with politicians, and the conversion of political support into personal capital are not exclusively Southern Italian phenomena. They are part of the broader history of Italian politics, even if they take different forms from one place to another.
A Democracy Can Empty Out Without Dying
The real question, then, is not whether Italian democracy is formally alive. It is. Italy still has elections, political parties, Parliament, city councils, mayors, and competitive voting.
The more uncomfortable question is this:
How much of the principle of political representation is still alive?
Because a democracy can preserve all of its procedures while slowly losing its meaning. It can continue counting ballots while citizens stop choosing on the basis of ideas. It can preserve the right to vote while the vote itself increasingly becomes a transaction—a reward, a form of protection, or a personal bet.
Perhaps Italy's crisis, then, is not simply that we have had bad politicians. Perhaps it is that we have gradually lowered our expectations of what politicians should be.
We have become accustomed to the idea that a politician's most important qualification is the ability to win an election, rather than the ability to govern. We have confused popularity with authority, visibility with competence, and personal access with genuine representation. And once we stop demanding preparation from those to whom we entrust political power, we should not be surprised when that power ends up in the hands of people who do not really know what to do with it.
Perhaps Italian democracy did not fail in the postwar years. Perhaps it simply began, from the very beginning, to coexist with a contradiction we have never fully resolved: the vote was declared free, but citizens often remained connected to power through need, personal relationships, and favors.
Maybe the history of Italian democracy over the past seventy years is, in part, the history of this transformation: from the politician who handed out pasta and canned tomatoes to the politician who hands out promises; from the powerful political boss who built a territorial network to the local official who builds a personal career; from the political party that tried to organize society to a politics increasingly devoted to organizing itself.
And in the end, one question remains—one that goes far beyond any argument about one party or another:
When the vote serves more to advance the person receiving it than to represent the people casting it, are we still talking about the democracy we once imagined?
