From Covert Power to Relational Power

When people talk about Italian scandals involving covert networks of power, collective memory inevitably returns to P2. Licio Gelli’s lodge represents, in the Italian imagination, the classic model of clandestine power: an organized, hierarchical, recognizable structure, with members, relationships, and objectives that sought to remain hidden from public scrutiny.

But over the past few decades, a different form of power brokerage has emerged. P3, which came to light through judicial investigations in 2010, and above all the Mafia Capitale investigation, revealed phenomena different from P2, but useful for examining the same underlying question: how are power relationships actually built when formal institutions are not enough to explain what is happening?

From the Lodge to the Network

The fundamental difference lies in the structure.

A lodge belongs to a vertical model: there is an organization, there are memberships, there are internal rules, and there is a relatively clear boundary between those who are inside and those who are outside.

The model that has emerged from more recent cases is much more fluid. There is not necessarily a single command center. There may be individuals who simultaneously belong to different worlds, personal relationships that cross political and economic circles, interests that temporarily converge, and intermediaries capable of connecting people who would normally have no direct relationship with one another.

This is where the concept of the “Middle World” takes on a meaning that goes beyond any single criminal case.

“We Are in the Middle”

In the Mafia Capitale case, Massimo Carminati described, in a wiretapped conversation, his conception of a world in which the “upper” and “lower” levels met: on one side, politics and business; on the other, organized crime; and in the middle, individuals capable of connecting these environments and turning relationships into exchanges of mutual benefit.

The statement is not a scientific theory of power, nor can it automatically be taken as a description of the entire Italian political system. Yet it is an extremely effective representation of a particular mechanism: the power of the intermediary.

An intermediary does not necessarily have to control everyone. It is enough for that person to be indispensable to someone.

They may know the politician who has access to the decision-making process, the entrepreneur who controls the resources, the public official who understands the procedures, the professional who knows how to navigate the bureaucracy, and the criminal figure capable of applying pressure that others cannot exert directly.

Their power comes precisely from the connection.

The Gray Zone

This may be the most important difference from the traditional image of P2.

Contemporary power does not always need to hide completely. It can operate within the gray zone of personal relationships, where the boundary between a professional relationship, friendship, favor, economic interest, and political influence can become difficult to draw.

Public contracts, consulting arrangements, cooperatives, companies, appointments, associations, foundations, professional firms, and personal relationships can, in certain circumstances, become spaces where different interests converge.

This does not mean that every relationship between politics, business, and civil society is suspicious. Rather, it means that when oversight mechanisms are weak, informal networks can acquire an importance far greater than their formal status would suggest.

And this is precisely where the Mafia Capitale case becomes instructive.

The Limits of the Mafia Metaphor

There is, however, an important distinction that must not be overlooked.

The Mafia Capitale investigation was initially built in part around allegations involving mafia-type association. In the subsequent judicial proceedings, however, this classification was not upheld for the organization as a whole. The courts distinguished conduct characterized by violence and extortion from conduct based primarily on corruption and the management of relationships with public officials.

This point is crucial because it prevents us from turning the “Middle World” into a legal category that it is not.

It can instead, with the necessary caution, be understood as a sociological metaphor for the power of intermediation.

And perhaps that is precisely the most interesting part.

Power No Longer Needs a Secret Room

The old idea of covert power imagines a locked room, a handful of men sitting around a table, and a shared strategy.

Relational power can work differently.

It does not necessarily require a room. A series of phone calls, dinners, friendships, connections, companies, appointments, and reciprocal favors may be enough.

Not everyone needs to know the entire plan. It may be sufficient for each person to know the right person.

In this sense, power becomes networked.

Its strength depends not only on the position someone occupies, but also on the quantity and quality of the connections that person is able to control.

It is a much harder model to identify because it does not necessarily leave behind a membership card, a list of members, or a hierarchical structure.

It leaves relationships.

From P2 to the “Middle World”?

It would therefore be wrong to portray P2, P3, and Mafia Capitale as stages in the development of a single clandestine organization. They are not.

But they can, cautiously, be viewed as different episodes through which Italy has experienced different forms of informal interaction between institutional power, economic interests, and networks of influence.

P2 belongs to the logic of the lodge and the secret organization.

P3 concerns a different judicial case involving allegations of a secret association and activities aimed at influencing institutions.

The “Middle World,” by contrast, emerged from an investigation into crime and corruption in Rome and from a particular conception of the relationships between criminal networks, politics, and business.

Putting them on the same level would be historically inaccurate.

Putting them into dialogue at the level of the sociology of power, however, may be far more interesting.

Because the question is no longer simply: Who belongs to the network?

The question becomes: Who is capable of connecting worlds that would normally have no way of communicating with one another?

And perhaps this is one of the most important forms of contemporary power.

Not necessarily the person who commands.

Not necessarily the person who makes the decision.

But the person who can open a door.

And above all, the person who can decide whom to open it for.

The Democracy of Favors

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?

Italy Does Not Need a Coach

Let us be clear: Italy does not need a coach. Not because the country is perfect as it is — far from it — but because, within the geopolitical framework of the Western world, Italy has such limited influence that its political class can afford to survive without being truly held accountable for results.

The perception is that, especially since the end of the Second World War, Italy's room for strategic autonomy has often been constrained by international, economic, and geopolitical factors. From this perspective, it becomes easier to understand why politics can turn into a self-referential system, capable of reproducing itself regardless of its actual effectiveness. When the most important decisions appear to be heavily influenced by external forces, political competition risks becoming a matter of managing the status quo rather than shaping the future.

At this point, it is impossible not to refer to Gaetano Mosca, the Sicilian political theorist who was one of the founders of modern political science. More than a century ago, Mosca developed the theory of the political class, arguing that every society — regardless of whether it calls itself a monarchy, a republic, or a democracy — is ultimately governed by an organized minority over a largely unorganized majority.

According to Mosca, the essential difference between political systems is not simply found in their formal institutions, but in the ability of ruling minorities to organize themselves, occupy positions of power, and preserve their influence over time. Political elites are inevitable; the real question is their quality, their openness to renewal, and their ability to serve society rather than themselves.

Mosca also introduced the concept of the "political formula": the set of ideas, values, and principles through which a ruling class justifies its authority and presents its power as legitimate. Ideologies may change, political language may evolve, and slogans may be replaced, but the underlying mechanism often remains the same: a governing elite creates a narrative capable of maintaining consensus.

Seen through Mosca's perspective, contemporary Italy offers a striking example. The Right speaks of national sovereignty and tradition. The Left speaks of progress, equality, and rights. The Centre presents itself as the voice of moderation and responsibility. Each side has its own political formula, yet they often appear unable to challenge the deeper structures that allow the system to reproduce itself.

Meanwhile, citizens continue to finance an increasingly expensive political machine. After the abolition of direct public funding for political parties, the relationship between politics and interest groups has remained at the centre of public debate. Parliament is often perceived as a place where party discipline prevails over individual responsibility, with representatives following the instructions of party leadership rather than engaging in genuine independent evaluation of every legislative proposal.

Years ago, Sergio Rizzo and Gian Antonio Stella exposed the phenomenon known as the "casta", highlighting the privileges and self-referential nature of political elites. Later, the events surrounding Luca Palamara contributed to a broader debate about the internal dynamics of the judiciary and the influence of professional networks within it. For many citizens, politics and the judiciary have come to symbolize two powerful institutions that, despite their different roles, may share a tendency toward self-preservation.

From this point of view, Italy's problem is not the absence of a ruling class. Mosca would argue that every society inevitably produces one. The real problem is the quality of its renewal. When an organized minority stops allowing new talent, competence, and fresh ideas to enter, it risks becoming a closed oligarchy, more interested in managing its own survival than in leading the country.

This is perhaps the deepest crisis of Italian politics: not simply a crisis of ideology, but a crisis of circulation among elites.

Neither of the major political camps seems capable of offering a genuine path of renewal. A part of the Right continues to speak as if Italy were still a major international power, while the country's actual weight in the global system is much more limited. On the other side, a part of the Left remains attached to cultural categories inherited from the Cold War, even though many of its economic policies have gradually aligned with the dominant neoliberal framework. It is a significant contradiction: a twentieth-century vocabulary combined with twenty-first-century economic practices.

Then there is the Centre, the transformed heir of the old Christian Democratic tradition, which struggles to define a clear identity and is often perceived more as a permanent mechanism of mediation than as a force capable of proposing a long-term vision.

In such a scenario, talking about a "coach" who can awaken Italy risks becoming an illusion. A coach can help someone who is willing to question themselves. But Italian politics often appears trapped inside a vast echo chamber, where every faction believes its own narrative is sufficient to explain reality.

This is where Gaetano Mosca becomes surprisingly relevant again. If his theory is correct, no coach can truly transform a country as long as its political class remains an organized minority speaking mainly to itself, while the majority of citizens remains fragmented, passive, and unable to exert continuous pressure for genuine change.

The problem, therefore, is not finding a coach for Italy.

The real question is whether Italian society still possesses enough awareness, organization, and determination to force its ruling class to renew itself.

Because history shows that nations do not decline only when they lack leaders. They decline when their elites stop being challenged.