The shifting landscape of the Italian left: Exploring its contemporary state

This article asks, ‘What’s left of the Italian left?’ arguing that an answer to the question presupposes having the answer to four more specific questions, namely, what does the term ‘left’ mean? What parties belong to this category thus defined? What accounts for the parties’ electoral decline since the end of the cold war? What, if anything, can be done to revive their fortunes? I argue that the terms ‘left’ and ‘right’ describe a spatial metaphor having to do with attitudes to equality. The electoral difficulties of the parties belonging to this category over the past thirty years can be explained by reference to three interlinked processes of long-term economic, social and political change that help account for the electoral decline of mainstream parties of the left in Western democracies in general in recent decades. In the context of globalization, a revival of the fortunes of the left in Italy appears to lie in the direction of an embrace of a social democratic ideology combined with a renewed emphasis on the principal of internationalism.