Trasformismo was the method of making a flexible, centrist coalition of government which isolated the extremes of the left and the right in Italian politics after the unification but before the rise of Benito Mussolini and Fascism. One of the more successful politicians was Giovanni Giolitti who succeeded in becoming Prime Minister on five occasions over 20 years. Under his influence, the Liberals did not develop as a structured party. They were, instead, a series of informal personal groupings with no formal links to political constituencies.[1]
At this time middle class politicians more concerned with achieving deals with each other and less about political philosophies and principles moved in and out of office. Large coalitions were formed, with members being bribed to join them. The liberals, the main political group, were tied together by informal "gentleman's agreements", but these were always in matters of enriching themselves. Indeed the actual governing did not seem to happen all that much, but since only 2 million men had franchise, most of these wealthy landowners they did not have to concern themselves with such things as improving the lives of the people they were supposedly serving through democracy.
The process was initiated by Agostino Depretis, the Italian Prime Minister in 1883, who was a member of the Constitutional Left party. He moved to the right and reshuffled his government to include Marco Minghetti's Conservatives. This was a move Depretis had been considering for a while before 1883. The aim was to ensure a stable government that would avoid weakening the institutions by extreme shifts to the left or right. Depretis felt that a secure government could ensure calm in Italy.
However trasformismo fed into the debates that the Italian parliamentary system was failing and weak, it ultimately became associated with corruption. It was seen as the sacrifice of principles and policies for short term gain.
The system of trasformismo was a little loved one and seemed to be creating a gulf between 'Legal' (parliamentry and political) Italy, and 'Real' Italy. The politicians became increasingly isolated. This system brought almost no advantages, illiteracy remained the same in 1912 as before the unification era, and sanitary squalor with economic backwardness continued to prevent the rural areas from becoming any better.
Drawing upon Antonio Gramsci's observations of Italian politics and history, Canadian historian Ian McKay has suggested that trasformismo has also played an important role in Canadian politics. The Macdonald-Cartier coalition, the basis of the Conservative Party which dominated Canadian federal politics for most of the latter half of the nineteenth century, and the Liberal Party which had dominated Canadian politics for the twentieth century, are portrayed as examples of a Canadian variant of trasformismo.
In the 1930s, Professor Frank H. Underhill of the University of Toronto also argued that Canada's two major political parties, the Liberals and Conservatives, had operated in similar ways, advancing the same policies appealing to the same variety of sectional/regional and class interests. In doing so, Canada had perfected the two-party system and in doing so had marginalized liberalism and radicalism. The result, argued Underhill, was a pervasive poverty in Canadian political culture. Not coincidentally, Underhill was centrally involved in the formation of the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation, a farmer-labour coalition born during the Great Depression which became Canada's first successful federal third party, the labour-based New Democratic Party.