JUST as Britain’s recalibrated relationship with the European Union is beginning to acquire more settled contours, politics in Britain conforms more to a continental model with a multiplicity of political forces contending for electoral support and none able to command a majority support.

Britain’s peculiar, undemocratic and increasingly dysfunctional election system is inadequate to the task of representing political opinion.

The ABC of 21st-century politics takes as a universal truth that it is classes that rule. But unless the practical dictatorship of the bourgeoisie takes the form of a dictatorship which, within living memory, was the case in most of Europe, the standard European system, indeed the most prevalent global system, of electoral arrangements has the principal representative chamber elected on the basis that seats allocated should broadly reflect the votes cast.

The consequence is that where the main parties of capitalist conformity are no longer able to alternate in office, new political alignments emerge at the same time as mass movements that escape the compass of either the main parties of bourgeois power or the parties that claim a social democratic heritage.

I write this from Italy on the day that Italian workers, led by insurgent “unions of the base” but encompassing workers in the more established trade union centres, have paralysed much public transport and taken to the streets in solidarity with Gaza. With Genoan and Venetian dockers intent on a paralysing strike if the Israeli military interdicts the Global Sumud Flotilla, the humanitarian mission sailing its way to Gaza, over 80 cities saw people take to the piazze in a national strike.

Similarly, in France, last week saw workers organise a massive blockage of normal commercial life, public services, industry and transport not simply to protest against a new attempt to impose further austerity on working people but to stop it.

In Britain, months, years of sustained protest with repeated mass demonstrations of great determination and stamina have changed the political chemistry and compelled the recognition of the Palestinian state.

Although this is a largely performative manoeuvre by a Labour government still entirely submissive to the Donald Trump regime, and more generally to US capital, it presages further steps to isolate the Israeli regime, which has lost support among British people save reactionary zionists, rank conservatives and outright fascists.

At the same time, an inchoate movement, organised by fascists and lavishly funded by US big business, saw a big demonstration, if not the delusional three million claimed by Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, at least more than 100,000.

Italy, much like Britain, is a test case of a politics in which popular demands cannot be satisfied by governments that represent the continuity of capitalist consensus, but in which the forces which could challenge this do not yet exist at the formal level. 

The USB and other unions of the base declared that the Italian actions were “an unequivocal signal to the Giorgia Meloni government, a large-scale popular demonstration.”

Demonstrators clashed with police at Milan’s central station following a massive march through the city, with dozens of police reportedly injured and a dozen protesters arrested.

While in most places large crowds assembled without problems with the local police, in Bologna, 50,000 blocked the main north/south coastal road. Another 50,000 gathered in Rome, blocking the ring road and entry to the airport, while 20,000 assembled in Venice with clashes at the ferry terminal.

In Livorno and Genoa, the ports were blocked with similar actions, as was Trieste. In the south, in Naples, the railway station was occupied, in Cagliari, a crowd of 15,000 brought the roads to a standstill, while in Palermo, 10,000 gathered to protest. Catania saw 5,000 in action.

10,000 assembled in Turin, while even in my nearest city — the sleepy wine, hazelnut and truffle centre of Alba — more than 1,000 filed through the streets on two days running.

Alba is an atypical Italian city in that class tensions are traditionally moderated despite the city’s status as a hero city that rose up in 1944 to overthrow the Nazi fascisti in a swiftly suppressed insurgency.

I was struck by the style of the Alba procession, quiet, orderly, and lacking the usual proliferation of red flags and symbols of the fissiparous Italian left, with many people carrying homemade placards signifying an extraordinary solidarity with Gaza.

Through the careful decades of Catholic philanthropy by Italy’s richest man — the chocolate and hazelnut billionaire Michele Ferrero — social tensions are moderated. When I asked my bank manager, a sardonic Piedmontese republican, who ruled Alba, he replied: “The priest.”

Thousands are employed at the Ferrero plant in the city, while every village in the nut and wine growing region boasts a Ferrero-badged school, community centre or playground, and a free Ferrero-supplied bus service takes workers from the villages to the factory. But still, the urgency of the Gaza genocide brought out a challenge to the present state of things.

Across the country, it was the slogans and singing of the partisan song Bella Ciao that manifested a universal anti-fascist character to the movement.

This reflects a growing antipathy towards the coalition government of the right headed by Meloni, whose attempts to modify the image of her Fratelli di Italia party — descended from the post-war heir to Mussolini’s fascisti, often runs up against the reflexes of her supporters.

Nevertheless, for the moment and despite a certain polarisation, the right-wing coalition looks stable with Meloni’s 25 per cent vote now transmuted into a 30 per cent approval rating while her coalition partners, Lega and Forza Italia, have now both slumped to around 10 per cent.

Notwithstanding her re-election anti-EU rhetoric, Meloni has proved a loyal subscriber to the EU’s regime of fiscal “responsibility.” Equally, her economy minister, Giancarlo Giorgetti of the Lega, has abandoned all populist pretension to fall loyally in behind the austerity economics that now unites the so-called centre left with an improbably designated centre right.

This growing convergence at the state and supra-state level gives Meloni the political space to carry through her goal of subordinating the judiciary to political power and continuing the restructuring of political institutions and regional government.

Where this becomes a problem for her preferred quasi-federal system — designed to institutionalise transactional relations between central government and the regions — is in giving greater autonomy to the regions — especially the richer Northern provinces that were the base of Matteo Salvini’s Lega.

This has the potential to disrupt the fragile unity of the right-wing parties. A first stab at a new law was stymied when the constitutional court limited its effect. This allowed the government to dodge a referendum on the issue, which would have opened up the long-standing North-South tensions and threatened the government alliance.

In June this year, centre-left parties and the CGIL union federation mobilised the provision of the Italian republican constitution, which allows citizens to call referenda on various labour law and citizenship issues.

For Meloni, the problem that threatens her centralising tendency — she wants the prime minister to be directly elected with a national popular mandate — is that this would trigger a referendum which would polarise voters while threatening to dissolve the right-wing alliance.

This highlights the long standing political reality in Italy, that neither the various centre-right and right-wing formations can guarantee a continuity in office without modifying the electoral system to their benefit while the centre left — presently constituted as the Democratic Party, Five Star Movement, the Greens and the left — cannot break with its long standing conformity with the fiscal regime imposed by membership of the EU or the foreign policy that membership of Nato entails.

Meloni has reached an accommodation with the EU and affects an intimate connection with Trump. Conformity to the EU-enforced fiscal regime, combined with an EU-wide increase in arms expenditure, narrows the margin she has to deal with Italy’s social and economic deficits.

Thus, the Italian political model is in trouble. In discussing the post referendum political situation, the Communist Party’s Patrizio Andreoli analysed Italian capitalism with great precision: “A capitalism capable of combining brutal and even revived primitive forms of profit-making (which we thought had been eradicated and overcome in the 20th century) with the maximum use of technological skills translated into advanced systems of management and organisation of society and the economy, the likes of which have never been known in human history.

“A concentration of skills and ‘knowledge’ bent for profit (in all its forms, from the most direct to the most manipulative and persuasive) which today represent the most effective and functional policeman for maintaining the present state of affairs.”

In Britain, as in Italy, the force of this analysis signifies the necessity of a profound change for which the forces are beginning to emerge.

Nick Wright blogs at 21centurymanifesto.wordpress.com.