Matteo Renzi: the limits of doing

Elected leader of Italy’s Democratic Party at the end of last year, Matteo Renzi has now been nominated prime minister, in place of his colleague and former political ally, Enrico Letta. This means Italy will have had three prime ministers nominated without popular mandate in as many years (Monti in 2011, Letta in 2013 and now Renzi in 2014).

The reaction to Letta’s resignation has been mixed. Though his government had lost much of its steam, there has been wide criticism of the manner in which Renzi has taken power. Known for his determination and political cunning, Renzi is now being described as an arch-schemer and hypocrite: ever since his election as head of the Democratic Party, he had promised not to destabilize Letta’s coalition. The two men are, after all, members of the same party. True to his own media-obsessed style, Renzi had even started a Twitter hashtag #lettastaisereno, which literally means ‘Letta don’t worry’. In the space of only a few days, Letta was out in the cold and Renzi was to become Italy’s youngest ever prime minister.

The idea that Renzi masterminded this ‘coup’ chimes with recent events in Italy. This month, it emerged that in 2011 the Italian president, Giorgio Napolitano, had discussed with Mario Monti the possibility of his replacing Silvio Berlusconi as prime minister long before Berlusconi actually resigned. Arguing that the president overstepped his powers and acted against the rules of the 1948 constitution, Beppe Grillo has called for Napolitano’s impeachment. Renzi’s actions fit in well with this culture of backdoor deal making, where prime ministers come and go depending on the political deals brokered under the gilded ceilings of the Quirinale Palace.

But looked at more closely, it seems far from clear that Renzi masterminded this particular turn of events. Upon becoming leader of the Democratic Party, his goal was to be an agenda-setter for the government. From the outside, he could steer Letta’s coalition and foist his own reform agenda onto it. He also took it upon himself to make a deal with political opponent Silvio Berlusconi on a new electoral law that would favour Italy’s two main parties. In fact, not holding any office in government suited Renzi rather well: he was able to push for policies without taking responsibility for the resistance they generated. He enjoyed national prominence free from the criticisms thrown at Letta. And he needed the time to consolidate his own support within the party, to put in place his ‘dream team’ and to refine his political message.

With all these advantages, why take power now in such a grimy and Machiavellian way? Some have suggested this is a plot by Renzi’s enemies to weaken him. If true, why would the arch tactician have walked straight into the trap? The day after Letta announced his resignation, Renzi himself declared that “this is not how I had dreamed of it. But, at this stage, I had no other choice.”

What seems to have happened is that Renzi’s own political strategy and rhetoric left him with little alternative. This strategy has long been based around what commentators call “the ideology of doing”, fare in Italian. This was Renzi’s promise all along: in contrast to the weak and ineffectual figures at the top of Italian politics, he will get things done. Fare,fare,fare. He will ‘do’ where others have not done. Having staked so much upon this idea, when the opportunity presented itself to become prime minister he could hardly say no. With so much emphasis upon his capacity to act, he could not avoid taking the chance to act when it came along. And with encouragement coming from all sides, how could he have justified not taking office? To argue that he wanted to do so under more advantageous circumstances i.e. after a strong electoral win, would have seemed as if he were only thinking of himself and his own political future.

His competitors have been smart to take advantage of this and Renzi is now in a difficult position. Forced to rely on the same unsteady coalition as his predecessor — which includes his own party, Monti’s, and a breakaway from Berlusconi’s — he is also expected to ‘do’ much more. Far from playing down expectations, Renzi has raised the stakes. “I will make the Italian electorate forget the way in which I came to power by launching a dazzling set of reforms that will truly revolutionize the Italian system,” he recently declared. In reality this will be difficult given that his opponents’ main goal will now be to prevent him from ‘doing’ very much at all. By stymying and frustrating Renzi as prime minister, come the next elections they will be able to claim that his talk about fare was after all just that: talk.

Renzi has been caught up by his own ideology. In politics, ‘doing’ needs to be balanced against many other factors, not least that of strategy, timing and the content of one’s political project. No such balance is evident in Renzi. He may manage to soldier on for a while by pushing through at least some the changes he had promised but already there are suggestions that two of the main reforms around which he had structured his political campaign — reform of the electoral law and abolition of the senate — may be put to one side. Since elections are not on the agenda any more, at least in the short term, many in his camp have begun to argue that the new government should focus on solving Italy’s ‘real’ problems, i.e. the economy, rather than devoting its time to institutional questions.

We are beginning to see the limits of this “ideology of doing”. Action for its own sake is hardly something to be celebrated. When it becomes an ideology, it forces its adherents to ‘do’ something new and surprising all the time, even if and when it is not necessarily in their interest. For all of his energy and charisma, Renzi seems to lack one key quality — political judgment.