Italian politics and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine: Quo vadis?

As the journal’s editors, Maurizio Carbone and I are delighted that with the publication of this issue, Contemporary Italian Politics is once again providing the platform for the English-language edition of Politica in Italia, the fifth year in a row that it has done so. Politica in Italia is published each year by il Mulino with the sponsorship of the Istituto Carlo Cattaneo based in Bologna, and the School of Advanced International Studies at the Johns Hopkins University of Bologna (SAIS-JHU). The latest edition, dedicated to developments in 2021, has been guest-edited by Giliberto Capano and Giulia Sandri to whom we are enormously grateful. By offering each year description and analysis of the most significant economic, social and political events of the previous twelve months, Politica in Italia implicitly invites its contributors, and especially the guest editors, to reflect on the extent to which the year in question has been one of continuity or change. In the present case, the editors’ reflections are especially interesting as 2021 began with the events culminating in the February appointment of the Draghi government. As the government was appointed in the middle of the pandemic emergency, and as Draghi himself is a man with considerable prestige – one whose authority derives directly from a president who, given the circumstances, was able to act independently of the parties – Draghi has, from the start, been very powerful as Italian prime ministers go. Consequently, 2021 was, as Capano and Sandri point out, a year that raised significant questions about the extent to which it marked continuity or change ‘in the evolution of the Italian political system and in the overall functioning of the Italian polity’ (Capano and Sandri 2022). Their conclusion is that the decisive governance exemplified by the Draghi executive was a significant novelty, a new trajectory of political change having been generated by the government’s formation; by the policy changes stemming from that, and by the changes among those in charge of managing responses to the pandemic. To reflect on whether the recent past has mainly been one of continuity or change is implicitly to make suggestions about what the future will look like. In that regard, it is significant that the Russian invasion of Ukraine appears to have brought the continuation of two of the most obvious novelties in Italian politics in 2021 (or more accurately 2021 and 2020), namely, perceptions of national emergency and the phenomenon of ‘rallying around the flag’ (Bordignon, Diamanti, and Turato 2022). These have in turn helped to ensure a continuation of Draghi’s authority and made it difficult for the parties to recover for themselves the role they play in ‘normal’ circumstances. At the beginning of the year, it had looked as though the fading of the Covid emergency and the approach of the next parliamentary election (which must be held no later than the spring of 2023), was increasing the government’s fragility and bringing a decline in Draghi’s authority as the parties sought to ‘snatch back’ (Capano and Sandri 2022) the power they had relinquished with the government’s appointment the previous February. Since the start CONTEMPORARY ITALIAN POLITICS 2022, VOL. 14, NO. 2, 115–117 https://doi.org/10.1080/23248823.2022.2065127