Abstract
Edited by Susannah Verney and Anna Bosco, this book focuses on the breakthrough elections that took place in Italy and Greece in 2012 and 2013 and the emergence of ‘challenger’ parties in both countries. The underlying main argument of this work is that, despite a different impact of the economic crisis and a divergent political scenario in the previous decades, Italy and Greece had ‘parallel lives’ in the crucial period 2012–2013. The similarities comprise the decline of the pre-crisis governments, the presence of technocratic cabinets (2011), supported by mainstream parties in both countries, an analogous electoral shock in the legislative elections and the ‘continued convergence’ between mainstream parties.
The book is divided into two parts: four chapters are centred on the Italian case study. Here, the focus is on the rise of the Five Stars Movement (M5S) (chapter 2) and on three elections held in 2012–2013: two municipal (chapters 3 and 5) and one parliamentary (chapter 4). The second part (chapters 6 and 7) is dedicated to the Greek case, notably, the legislative elections in June 2012 and the growth of Golden Dawn (Xρυσή Aυγή).
The reconstruction of the events which led to the crisis of both party systems is accurate and worth reading for both academic and non-academic readers. In particular, the two analyses of the municipal elections in Italy provide an in-depth picture of the evolution of M5S from its first local successes in 2012 to the difficulties faced after the 2013 electoral breakthrough in the parliamentary elections. Nonetheless, the focus seems to be unbalanced in favour of the Italian case, since only two chapters are dedicated to the Greek case.
As for the framework of analysis, the concept of protest elections, while defined in the introduction, is not fully developed in the chapters dedicated to elections. Moreover, in delineating what characterises a protest election, a comparison with the critical elections theory proposed by V.O. Key in 1955 would have been useful.
Along the same lines, the ‘challenging’ feature of a political party is not properly explored either in the introduction or in the chapters on the Five Stars Movement and Golden Dawn. Although the evolution of the two parties is analysed in detail, other emerging parties – at least from an electoral point of view – should have been taken into consideration too, that is, SYRIZA, DIMAR and ANEL in Greece and the new Italian centrist rassemblement Scelta Civica (Civic Choice) led by the technocratic Prime Minister, Mario Monti.