Penal populism in the Multi-populist Context of Italy

In this chapter, we will illustrate how almost three decades of neo-populism have triggered several dynamics of penal populism, altering the relationship between politics and the justice system in this country. In particular, we will analyze the laws that have been produced in the last few years by ruling political forces of different ideological orientations on issues such as immigration, urban security and road checks. We will stress how the idea of justice that underpins these laws could be attributed more to reasons of political consensus than to a rational approach to the problems at stake. Furthermore, we will show that these actions promote a mindset aiming at changing the orientations of the civil society, shared values and common sense in a new perspective detached from the rule of law and based on irrational and emotional aspects, aptly defined “punitive society”. For the purposes of this analysis, we will start with a critical examination of the concept of “penal populism”, aware of the epistemological and definitional limits of this new category, which is difficult to describe, and through an approach aimed at, on the one hand, linking this phenomenon to the political context in which it is inserted and, on the other, at illustrating the more profound crisis of the rule of law in representative democratic systems. Our objective is therefore to redefine the concept of penal populism as the “populist use of criminal law”.