Exploring the question of Italy’s ‘difficult democracy’. Comparing the formations of the centre-left and the West German grand coalition

Abstract

The centre-left still faces a paradoxical legacy: while some credit it for consolidating Italian democracy, others locate here the roots of Italy’s supposedly uniquely ‘difficult’ democracy as it evolved over the final decades of the twentieth century. This article provides a new window on this question of Italy’s difficult democracy, by comparing the motivations for the centre-left with those for the first coalition between Socialists and Christian Democrats in postwar West Germany. By looking at the different conceptions and narratives of democracy that key politicians put forward, it traces the emergence and dominance of a more consensual and inclusive notion of democracy around the turn of the 1960s. While, based on this standard, Italy’s centre-left did not manage to achieve the aim of a more consensual form of democracy, the article concludes, based on the comparison, however, that we cannot measure democratic consolidation or difficulty by the yardstick of party-political consensus alone.