Australasian Parliamentary Review, Autumn 2002, 17(1), 26–48.

Italy’s national elections of May 2001 saw a convincing win for Forza Italia on the Centre–Right led by media proprietor and businessman Silvio Berlusconi, a political leader more sceptical of Europe than is usual in Italy. For some, the election marks the true beginning of Italy’s Second Republic. For others Forza Italia’s success has given rise to questions of how much Italian politics has been normalised, and how much the style and practices of the Cold War era politics of the ‘First Republic ’ have survived. Normalisation, Italian-style? If we had to pick the most common theme in analyses of Italian politics at the end of the twentieth century, we would certainly choose their portrayal of an electorate that, disillusioned by repeated promises of political and institutional miracles, was in weary search of a return to normality (Diamanti and Lazar 1997). After the corruption scandals, the collapse of the dominant parties of the Christian Democrat regime between 1945 and 1994, the trials of senior politicians for mafi