II · 2008
Today the Second Republic, as it has come be called, is fifteen years old, equivalent to the span of time stretching from Liberation to the arrival of the Centre-Left in the First Republic. An era has elapsed. What is there to show for it? For its promoters, commanding an overwhelming consensus in not only the media but public opinion in the early nineties, Italy required a comprehensive political reconstruction, to give the country government worthy of a contemporary Western society. Probity, stability, bi-polarity were the watchwords. Public life was to be cleansed of the corruptions of the old order. Cabinets were not to fall every few months. Alternation of two moderate parties—or at worst, coalitions—in office, one inclining to the right and the other to the left, would be the norm. Once the political system was overhauled along these lines, the reforms needed to modernize Italian society, bringing it up to standards taken for granted elsewhere in the Atlantic community, could at long last be enacted.
By the turn of the century, the balance-sheet of the new Republic was, for its champions, a mixed one—frustrating in many ways, but not definitively disappointing. On the positive side, the political landscape had been transformed, with the extinction of all the parties that had populated the First Republic, and the distribution of their successors into two competing blocs see-sawing in office. A great economic change had followed with Italy’s entry into the Eurozone, barring henceforward the country’s traditional primrose path of devaluation, inflation and mounting public debt. On the negative side, two developments were disturbing. The first, decried across the board by polite opinion, was the failure of the electoral reform of 1993 to purge the political system of lesser parties, of more radical persuasion, on the flanks of the competing coalitions now ranged against each other, and capable of extracting concessions from these in return for their support. The work of the new Republic would not be complete until such blackmail—the term invariably used—was eliminated.
The second cause for concern was, in the nature of things, less universally pressed. But the prominence of Berlusconi, as the most spectacular newcomer on the political scene, aroused anxieties that were not confined to those most averse to him. Not only was he deeply implicated in the corruption of the last phase of the First Republic, but as a media magnate turned politician he embodied a conflict of interests felt to be intolerable in other democracies, controlling at once a private empire and public power, each at the service of the other. Fears were repeatedly expressed that here could be the makings of an authoritarian system of rule distinct from, but genetically related to, the nation’s previous experience of plebiscitary power. Still, in the opening years of the Second Republic, these remained more notional than actual, since between 1994 and 2001 Berlusconi was only in office for seven months.
When, in the spring of 2001, he finally won a full term of office, warnings were widespread on the left of the danger not only of a semi-dictatorial development, but of a harsh regime of social reaction, an Italian version of the radical right. The reality, however, proved otherwise. The social and economic record of the Berlusconi government was anodyne. There was no significant attack on the welfare state. Social expenditure was not cut, pensions were raised, and employment increased.30 Measures to loosen the labour market and up the legal retirement age remained gingerly, and tax cuts less significant than in Social Democratic Germany. Privatizations, abundant under the Centre-Left coalition of 1996 to 2001, when Italy held the European record for selling off public assets, were minimal. The main advantage of the regime for the rich lay in the amnesties it granted for the illegal stacking of wealth abroad, and flouting of building controls at home. Ostensibly tougher legislation on immigration was passed, but to little practical effect. Externally, Berlusconi joined Blair and Aznar in sending troops to Iraq, a contribution to the American occupation that the Centre-Left did not oppose. A package of constitutional reforms giving a more federal shape to the state, with greater powers for the regions—the top priority for the Northern League, headed by Umberto Bossi—was pushed through Parliament, but came to nothing in a subsequent referendum. No great drive or application was displayed by Berlusconi in any of this.
The principal energies of his government lay, starkly, elsewhere. Berlusconi’s over-riding concern was to protect himself from prosecution, amid the thicket of cases pending against him for different kinds of corruption. At top speed, three successive laws were rammed through Parliament: to block evidence of illegal transactions abroad, to decriminalize falsification of accounts, and to enable defendants in a trial to change their judges by shifting the case to another jurisdiction. When the first and third of these were voided as unconstitutional by the courts, Berlusconi reacted with a fourth, more drastic law, designed to sweep the board clean of any possibility of charges against him, by granting him immunity from prosecution as premier, along with the president, the speakers of the two Chambers, and the head of the Constitutional Court, as four fig-leaves. Amid widespread uproar, this too was challenged by magistrates in Milan, where the major trials in which he was implicated were underway, and was ruled unconstitutional six months later. But the barrage of ad personam laws, patently the government’s most urgent agenda, had immediate, if not yet definitive, effect. No sooner was Berlusconi in office than he was absolved by an appeals court of bribing judges to acquire the Mondadori publishing conglomerate—not for want of evidence, but for ‘extenuating circumstances’, defined in a memorable précis of Italian justice as ‘the prominence of the defendant’s current social and individual position, judged by the court to be decisive’.31 Before formal immunity against prosecution was struck down, it had closed another leading case against Berlusconi, and when it was reopened, a new court delivered the requisite judgement, absolving him.
After protecting his person came protecting his empire. By law Mediaset was due to relinquish one of its TV channels in 2003. Legislation was rushed through to allow it not only to retain the channel, but to enjoy a massive indirect subsidy for its entry into digital television. Since Berlusconi now commanded not only his own private stations, but controlled state broadcasting as well, his dominance of the visual media came close to saturation. But it failed to deliver any stable sway over public opinion. By 2005, when he was forced to reshuffle his cabinet, the popularity of the government had plummeted. In part, this was due to the unseemly spectacle of the ad personam laws, denounced not only in the streets but by most of the press. But more fundamentally, it was a reaction to the economic stagnation of the country, where average incomes had grown at a mere 1 per cent a year since 2001, the lowest figure anywhere in the EU.
Watching its ratings drop precipitously in the polls, the ruling coalition abruptly altered the electoral system, abandoning its predominantly first-past-the-post component for a return to proportional representation, but with a heavily disproportionate premium—55 per cent of seats in the Chamber of Deputies—for the coalition winning most votes, and a threshold of 4 per cent for any party running on its own. Designed to weaken the opposition by exploiting its division into a larger number of parties than the bloc in power, the new rules played their part in the outcome of the general election held in April 2006.32 Contrary to expectations, the Centre-Left won only by a whisker—25,000 votes out of 38 million cast for the Chamber, while actually scoring less than the Centre-Right for the Senate. On a difference of less than 0.1 per cent of the popular vote, the premium handed it a majority of no less than sixty-seven seats in the Chamber, but in the Senate it could count on a precarious majority of two, only because of the anomaly—newly introduced—of overseas constituencies. Having believed in a comfortable victory, the Centre-Left went into shock at the result, which came as a psychological defeat. Prodi, now back from Brussels, was once again premier. But this time, he presided over a government mathematically, and morally, much weaker than before.
Not only did Centre-Left rule now hang by a thread, but it lacked any organizing purpose. In the nineties, Prodi had possessed
one central goal, Italy’s entry into the European monetary union, whose pursuit gave his tenure a political focus. His new administration—which unlike its predecessor, now included Rifondazione Comunista, widely regarded as a formation of the extreme left, as an integral part of its coalition, rather than as an external support for it—had no equivalent coherence. At the Finance Ministry, Tommaso Padoa-Schioppa, one of the original architects of the European single currency, gave priority to reducing the public debt, which had crept back up a few points under Berlusconi, and cracking down on tax evasion, to some (although officially exaggerated) effect. A scattering of minor measures of liberalization, designed to make life easier for consumers of chemists, taxis and the like, was soon dissipated. Gestures, but no more, were made towards a thirty-five-hour week, as a placebo to keep Rifondazione quiet while the Centre-Left pursued a foreign policy of undeviating Atlanticism. Prodi’s government reinforced the Italian contingent in Afghanistan; withdrew troops from Iraq very gradually, according to Berlusconi’s own plan for doing so; approved an expansion of the American air force base at Vicenza that had been a launching-pad for the Balkan War; dispatched forces to Lebanon as a glacis for Israel; and retroactively covered kidnapping and rendition by the CIA from Italian soil.
None of this did anything for the popularity of Prodi or his ministers. Increased fiscal pressure angered the traditional taxevading constituencies of the Right. The lack of any significant social reforms disappointed voters of the Left. Most disastrously, no attempt was made either to deal with Berlusconi’s conflict of interests, or to introduce better standards of justice. Instead a sweeping amnesty was declared—in theory to clear hopelessly over-crowded prisons, but in practice releasing not only common felons, but every kind of notable convicted of corruption. This indulto, proclaimed by the notorious Clemente Mastella (the shadiest politician in the coalition, a former Christian Democrat from Campania who had been made minister of justice to keep his tiny party in its ranks), provoked widespread outrage. By 2007, with Prodi’s own standing in free fall, the leadership of the DS—the ‘Democratic Left’ into which the bulk of Italian Communism had evolved—decided that its mutation into a Democratic Party pure and simple, dropping any association with the Left and absorbing assorted Catholic and ex-Radical politicians grouped in the so-called ‘Daisy’ component of the coalition, could allow it to escape the sinking repute of the government, and elbow Prodi aside in public view. Massimo D’Alema, foreign minister in the government, was too damaged by his role in the final debacle of previous Prodi administration to be a credible candidate to head the new formation, whose leadership fell to his long-time rival Walter Veltroni, the DS mayor of Rome, as a fresher choice. Privately, the two men despise one another—D’Alema regarding Veltroni as a fool, Veltroni D’Alema as a knave. But outwardly, together with a motley crew of devotees and transfuges, they joined forces to give birth to a new centrist party, to be cleansed of all connexion with a compromised past. By the autumn of 2007, Veltroni was more or less openly positioning himself as the alternative to Prodi, who theoretically still had three more years in office to run—in effect, repeating an operation mounted at Prodi’s expense by D’Alema in late 1998.
This time, however, the ambitions were greater and talents lesser. Veltroni’s aim was not to replace Prodi at the head of the existing coalition, but to bank on early elections to bring him to power as chief of a party that would rival Berlusconi’s in novelty, breadth and popular support. But his limitations had long been apparent. Vaguely resembling a pudgier, bug-eyed variant of Woody Allen, Veltroni—an enthusiast for filmic dross and football, delighted to lend his voice to a Disney cartoon; author of opuscules like ‘Thirty-Eight Declarations of Love to the Most Beautiful Game in the World’—had the advantage of an image of greater sincerity than D’Alema, as more spontaneously conformist, but possessed little of his sharpness of mind.33 In November 2007, the Centre-Right bloc was in danger of falling apart, when Berlusconi—frustrated by failures to topple the Prodi government in Parliament—suddenly folded Forza Italia into a new organization, Popolo della Libertà, demanding that his allies, other than the Lega, join it as the single national party of freedom. Both Gianfranco Fini and Pier Ferdinando Casini, leaders of the former Fascist (AN) and Catholic (UDC) components of his coalition, rebelled. Instead of capitalizing on their disaffection, and splitting the Centre-Right, Veltroni eagerly offered himself to Berlusconi as a responsible partner in the task of simplifying Italian politics into two great parties of moderate opinion.34 What this meant was clear to all: once again, as in the mid-nineties, the attempt to strike a deal for a new electoral system designed to wipe out small parties, leaving the newly constructed PD and PdL in sole command of the political field. In the ranks of the opposition, this danger promptly brought Fini to heel, returning him to allegiance to Berlusconi, and reviving the compact of the Centre-Right. In the ruling coalition, its effect was an even deadlier boomerang.
While negotiations between Veltroni and Berlusconi were proceeding in Rome, a long-gathering crisis was about to explode in the south. In late December 2007, rubbish collectors stopped work in and around Naples, where all dumps were full, leaving huge piles of rotting garbage accumulating in streets and neighbourhoods. Waste disposal in the region had long been a lucrative racket controlled by the Camorra, shipping toxic refuse from the industrial north into illegal dumps in Campania. There, both the region and the city of Naples had been fiefs of the Centre-Left for over a decade—the governor (and former mayor) ex-PCI, the mayor ex-DC. Under this pair, Antonio Bassolino and Rosa Russo Jervolino—the first by far the more important—there had been much boasting of the outstanding work performed in the restoration of Naples to its original beauties, and the advent of clean, progressive administration in Campania. In reality, notwithstanding municipal embellishments, corruption and gangsterism had flourished unchecked, without the Prodi government paying any attention to what was going on in its bailiwick.35 In January, the citizens of Naples finally rose up in furious protests against the mounds of putrescence visited on them. The damage to Centre-Left rule was immeasurable.
Two months later, its downfall combined, with peculiar local aptness, the outcomes of the tactical and moral blindness of the coalition. Within days of the outbreak of the garbage crisis in Naples, the wife of the minister of justice, Sandra Mastella, president of the Regional Assembly of Campania for the Centre-Left, was put under house arrest, charged with attempting to corrupt a local hospital trust for the benefit of her party, the UDEUR. Her husband resigned his ministry in protest, and was promptly reappointed by Prodi. But his loyalty already weakened by failure to respect collegial omertà in Naples, Mastella could see the writing was on the wall for his party anyway, if Veltroni’s deal with Berlusconi went through. To block it, he switched sides, and his two senators in the upper chamber brought the government down. In a riotous scene, the Centre-Right benches exploded with jubilation, corks popping and champagne spraying along the red velvet seats of the hemicycle in the Palazzo Madama.
Paying the bill for his miscalculations, Veltroni now had to fight an election at short notice, without having had the time to establish his party, or himself, as the beacon of civilized dialogue in a too faction-ridden society, on which he had counted. Rejecting any understanding with the three smaller parties to the left of it, the PD entered the lists alone, to underline its mission to give Italy a modern government, uncompromised by any participation of extremists—making an exception, at the last moment, only for Italy of Values, the small party owing allegiance to the most pugnacious of the Clean Hands magistrates, Antonio Di Pietro. Berlusconi, on the other hand, having integrated Fini’s forces into his new party, had no compunction in moving into battle with allies—above all, the Lega in the north, but also the minor regionalist Movement for Autonomy in the south. The campaign itself was universally judged the dullest of the Second Republic, Centre-Left and Centre-Right offering virtually identical socioeconomic platforms, until
at the last minute Berlusconi promised to lower property taxes. Otherwise, the two sides differed only in their respective rhetorics of morality (how to protect the family) and security (how to suppress crime).36 So far did Veltroni go out of his way to shun any aspersions on Berlusconi that he avoided even mentioning him by name, instead speaking throughout respectfully just of ‘my adversary’. His audiences were not roused.
The magnitude of the ensuing disaster exceeded all expectations. The Centre-Right crushed the Centre-Left by a margin of 9.3 per cent, or some 3.5 million votes, giving it an overall majority of nearly a hundred in the Chamber and forty in the Senate. Gains within the victorious bloc were made, however, not by the newly minted PdL (into which Forza Italia and AN had merged), which actually ended up with a hundred thousand votes less than the two had secured in 2006. The great winner was the Lega, whose vote jumped by 1.5 million, accounting for virtually all the total increase in the score of the Centre-Right. The PD, presenting itself as the party of the progressive Centre to which all well-disposed Italians could now rally, proved a complete flop. With just over 33 per cent of the vote, it mustered scarcely more votes—on one reckoning, actually less—than its component parts in 2006. Indeed, even this score was only reached by the voto utile of about a fifth of the former voters of the parties of the Left proper, which this time had combined into a Rainbow alliance, and been wiped out when it fell below the 4 per cent threshold, with a net loss of nearly 2.5 million votes. Overall, the value-added of the Democratic Party, created to reshape the whole political landscape by attracting voters away from the Centre-Right, turned out to be zero.37
The New Old World Page 41