Accept the loss and start over

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The first thing to do in the face of a defeat is to call it by that name. 

True, one can strain to some extent to find encouraging signals: more than 14 million voters still showed up under difficult conditions, with the government’s hostility and boycott. But one doesn’t organize five referendums just to do a poll to gauge Italians’ voting intentions. 

Nor is it sound to treat the roughly 12 million “yes” votes on the four labor questions (overseas ballots excluded) as evidence of an alternative majority to the 12.3 million votes the center-right drew in a very different contest three years ago. The math doesn’t line up, and the logic is shaky, especially because the organizers also urged Giorgia Meloni’s voters to turn out for their rights as workers, whatever their party leanings.

The appeal to right-wing voters may have partly worked, in fact, judging by the turnout in certain urban suburbs, which beat the historic centers even though the left has lost ground on city outskirts for years. The fifth referendum, on citizenship, is telling: its “no” share was nearly triple that of the other questions, hinting that some of the right-wing electorate made it to the polls. More troubling, it also confirms that hostility toward migrants has also made inroads among the left as well.

So, we must talk about the defeat as such. Repeal referendums are launched in the belief they can be won, remedying bad laws when unions have no other lever and cannot rely on the opposition parties. Perhaps one of the few benefits we can name is that those parties – dragged into a fight they never wanted – briefly reconnected with workplaces and union halls during the campaign. The hope, of course, is that this connection will last.

For now, the loss weighs heavily, especially because turnout sank even below the unofficial 35 percent “psychological” floor. It will be a point in favor of the government in negotiations with the unions, where they will insist that Italians have rejected the most useful and reasonable solution for subcontracting and procurement, which would have been adopted in case of a victory. It will hide behind “the people’s will” to keep sparing employers, no matter how many workers die on the job. The setback will haunt every attempt to link the employed poor to precarious work, the core message of the referendums about the fall in wages. And it will significantly embolden the administration’s racist approach on migrants and migration.

We have to start over, but we cannot just charge ahead.

Not the CGIL, a huge organization even by European union standards; it now bears the mark of defeat and must realign its work, from the leadership down, with the vast majority of workers, which no longer trust their representatives nor mechanisms of direct democracy. Neither can the center-left, which, like the rest of us, faces an enormous democratic dilemma.

A 70 percent abstention rate shows that the bedrock of participation is vanishing. It’s even worse than a confirmation of the trend: in parts of the South and inland regions in particular, turnout has plunged to a mere one or two voters out of ten.

Clearly, the abrogative referendum tool itself needs scrutiny. The right may be likely to exploit it, yet we cannot scrap it outright. True, the institution of the referendum is best protected by thinking twice before calling one and by avoiding reckless bets. It is also true that the lofty quorum designed in 1948 – when 92 percent of eligible citizens voted – and reaffirmed 20 years later makes little sense today. However, abolishing any validity threshold is not an option. Instead, lawmakers could devise a system in which abstention – which is obviously always a legitimate choice – does not begin with such a colossal edge that it can make the entire “no” campaign irrelevant. These are reflections we must undertake when we are looking at a defeat.

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Originally published at https://ilmanifesto.it/riconoscere-la-sconfitta-per-ripartire on 2025-06-10