Against parties? The Radicals between anti-partitocracy and reform, 1979–87

ABSTRACT Many historians and political scientists have seen the Italian Radicals as the ‘forerunners’ of the anti-partitocracy and anti-political battle, and some scholars have even referred to them as members of the populist family. Distancing itself from the latter definition, the article intends to focus on the emergence of the Radical Party’s (P.R.) anti-partitocracy battle, showing how it combined elements of ‘structural’ anti-politics with an attempt to promote ‘another’ kind of politics and party organization. In the second half of the 1970s, their criticism of parties and the political system shifted from the latter meaning to the first, a shift connected with the perception, from 1978–79, of a ‘blocked system’ and with the evolution of the Radicals’ political project. From 1984–85 they sought to find ways out of the impasse in which were the political system and their own anti-partitocratic critique. This way out took the form of promoting an electoral reform (one-round single-member majority system) and attempting to create a ‘third pole’ (between Christian Democracy and the Communist Party) with the other lay parties.