La «Segunda República» en Italia: crónica política de una transición sin fin

The article retraces the main events of Italian political history between the crisis of the political system in 1992-94 and the rise of the current Prime Minister, Matteo Renzi, in 2014. These twenty years have seen the disappearance of those parties that had characterised the first fifty years of republican history (DC, PCI, and PSI), and the birth of new and quite instable political groupings, devoid of political culture. They have also seen the success and decline of Silvio Berlusconi’s strong leadership, the introduction of a weak alternation between a moderate and a progressive pole, and the birth of movements that are strongly critical towards politics in the name of the values of civil society. These twenty years are now commonly defined as «Second Republic», even though the first historiography on the period is far from such an interpretation and despite the fact that there is not a visible way out into a new stable and shared political system on the horizon, nor a clear direction for the transition.