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c h a p t e r s e v e n Defense of Democracy Actors and Strategies in Comparative Perspective We must emphasize the importance of defining the disloyal opposition clearly and at some stages isolating it politically, but this process can be successful only if there is concomitant readiness to incorporate into the system those who are perceived as at least semi-loyal by some sectors of the regime-building coalition. Statesmanship, flexibility, and timing are badly needed at this stage, because the process of incorporation, which does not always represent a gain in e≈cacy, can be very important in the process of legitimization of an open, competitive system. — j ua n j . l i n z , ‘‘ c r i s i s , b r e a k d o w n a n d r e e q u i l i b r at i o n ’’ Defending democracy from its internal enemies is more di≈cult than any other form of government. To start with, democratic governments need to respect basic guarantees and rights, which substantially limits their space for maneuver: although civil and political rights were often, both de jure and de facto, restricted in the cases analyzed so far, they were never fully abolished. The main di≈culty, though, is that in order for e√ective strategies of defense to be put in place while substantially respecting the existing constitutional framework , agreement on this objective from a su≈ciently high proportion of the democratically minded forces is necessary, agreement that is all the more di≈cult to reach when antisystem forces are strong. As explained in the first chapters, the emergence of strong antisystem parties has a twofold negative e√ect on the stability of democracy: first, it embodies an ideological challenge that reduces the system’s legitimacy; second, it makes coordination and cooperation among prosystem forces more di≈cult. The latter is the consequence of the ‘‘relational anti-systemness’’ of large ideologically extremist parties: their size combined with their adoption of aggressive propaganda tactics influence the dynamics of the party system, in which centrifugal tendencies prevail in the 180 Comparative Perspectives electoral competition (Sartori 1976). The prevalence of centrifugal drives in the electoral arena can then transfer to the parliamentary arena, triggering the emergence of projects of political reaggregation that involve sectors of the governing majority. Those projects have the declared goal of changing the existing coalition alignments, dividing the political center, and shifting the general political equilibrium towards one of the extremes. They generally find fertile ground given the very characteristics of polarized party systems: centerbased , fragmented, and ideologically diverse ruling coalitions are in fact the direct consequence of the systematic exclusion from government of large antisystem parties. Such coalitions are particularly vulnerable to the defection of some of their members: the parties composing them normally have to reach di≈cult compromises on policy preferences and o≈ce share, which in turn makes them more vulnerable to electoral losses to opposition parties. And we have seen how, in the countries analyzed so far, significant sectors of the parties most exposed to the electoral aggression of the strongest antisystem actors have attempted to defect from the government, seriously endangering its stability in very delicate moments of the crisis. Their plans could be stopped only thanks to the determined action of centrist forces (within the same parties and within the coalition) that prevented them from dragging the whole party to ‘‘defectionist’’ positions. This result, normally achieved at a high political cost, is a necessary condition for defending the regime through the implementation of ad hoc anti-extremist strategies. This chapter takes stock of the analysis of the responses to political crises in Czechoslovakia, Belgium, and Finland, and compares those cases to the political dynamics leading to democratic breakdown in Italy during the 1920s and in Germany during the 1930s. These countries, which constitute the two examples in interwar Europe of ‘‘takeover’’ of a democratic system by an antisystem party, underwent political crises that were not intrinsically di√erent from those experienced by the three most di≈cult cases of democratic survival analyzed so far. The analysis of Italy and Germany (which will be more succinct than that of the survival cases, as these developments are better known) constitutes the ‘‘mirroring’’ experience of what we have seen so far: just as ‘‘right’’ choices by incumbent elites were probably decisive in saving democracy from collapse in Czechoslovakia, Belgium, and Finland, by...

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