The New Old World

by Perry Anderson

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  The shock of the election of 2008 has been compared to that of 1948, when Christian Democrats—this was before opinion polls, so there was little advance warning—triumphed so decisively over Communists and Socialists that they held power continuously for another forty-four years. If no such durable hegemony is in sight for today’s Centre-Right, the condition of the Centre-Left, indeed the Italian Left as a whole, is in most respects—morale, organization, ideas, mass support—much worse than that of the PCI or PSI of sixty years ago: it would be more appropriate to speak of a Caporetto of the Left. Central to the debacle has been its displacement by the Lega among the northern working class. The ability of parties of the Right to win workers away from traditional allegiances on the Left has become a widespread, if not unbroken, pattern. First achieved by Thatcher in Britain, then by Reagan and Bush in America, and most recently by Sarkozy in France, only Germany among the major Western societies has so far resisted it. The Lega could, from this point of view, be regarded simply as the Italian instance of a general trend. But a number of features make it a more striking, special case.

  The first, and most fundamental, is that it is not a party of the establishment, but an insurgent movement. There is nothing conservative about the Lega, whose raison d’être is not order, but revolt. Its forte is raucous, hell-raising protest. Typically, movements of protest are short-winded—they come and go. The Lega, however, has not just become a durable feature of the national landscape. It is now the oldest political party in Italy, indeed the only one that can look back on thirty years of activity. This is not an accident of the random workings of the break to the Second Republic. It reflects the second peculiarity of the Lega, its dynamism as a mass organization, possessing cadres and militants that make it, in the words of Roberto Maroni, perhaps Bossi’s closest colleague, ‘the last Leninist party in Italy’.38 Over much of the north, it now functions somewhat as the PCI once did, as rueful Communist veterans often observe, with big gains in one formerly Red industrial stronghold after another: the Fiat works in Mirafiori, the big petro-chemical plants in Porto Marghera, the famous proletarian suburb of Sesto San Giovanni outside Milan, setting in the fifties of Visconti’s Rocco and His Brothers. This is not say that it has become a party based on labour. While it has captured much of the working-class vote across the north, the Lega’s core strength lies, as it has always done, among the small manufacturers, shopkeepers, and self-employed in what were once White fortresses of the DC—Catholic provinces of the north-east, now increasingly secularized, where hatred of taxes and interference by the central state runs especially strong. Here resentment of fiscal transfers to the south, perceived as a swamp of parasitic ne’er-do-wells, powered the take-off of the League in the late eighties. Immigration from the Balkans, Africa and Asia, which has quadrupled over the last decade, is now the more acute phobia, laced with racism and prejudice against Islam. The shift of emphasis has, as might be expected, been a contributory factor in the spread of the League’s influence into the northern working-class, more exposed to competition in the labour market than to sales taxes.

  The truculence of the League’s style has been perhaps an even more important source of its popular success. Defiance of the sickly euphuism of conventional political discourse, as cultivated in Rome, confirms the League’s identity as an outsider to the system, close to the blunt language of ordinary people. The party’s leaders relish breaking taboos, in every direction. Its political incorrectness is not confined to xenophobia. In matters of foreign policy, it has repeatedly flouted the official consensus—opposing the Gulf War, the Balkan War and the Lisbon Treaty, and advocating tariffs to block cheap imports from China, without inhibition.39 Breaking verbal crockery, however, is one thing; effecting policy another. Since its period in the desert between 1996 and 2001, the League has never rebelled against the orthodox decisions of the Centre-Right governments to which it has belonged, its rhetorical provocations typically operating as symbolic compensation for practical accommodation. But it is not a dependency of Berlusconi. The boot is rather on the other foot—without the League, Berlusconi could never have won the elections in which he has prevailed, least of all in 2008. The broker of the alliance between the two, Giulio Tremonti, now again minister of finance, is not by accident both the author of a critique of unfettered globalization sharper than anything Veltroni’s Democrats have dared to venture, and after Berlusconi himself, the most powerful figure in the present government.40

  If the League has been the principal nemesis of that part—the majority—of the PCI which made a pilgrimage from communism to social liberalism without so much as a stopover at social democracy, the fate of the minority that sought to refound a democratic communism has been largely self-inflicted. Instead of keeping clear of Prodi’s coalition in the elections of 2006, as it had done to good effect a decade earlier—when a pact of mutual desistance had allowed it to enter Parliament as an independent force in rough proportion to its electoral strength, and lend external, but not unconditional, support to the ensuing Centre-Left government—Rifondazione Comunista signed up as a full member. Its leader, Fausto Bertinotti, was rewarded with the post of speaker of the Chamber, nominally the third personage of the Italian State, and replete with official perquisites of every kind and automatic access to the media. This empty honour went, as hoped, to his head, ensuring that the RC became a docile appendage in the ruling coalition, unable to secure any substantive concessions from it, and inevitably sharing in the disrepute into which it fell. In keeping with this performance, the party voted war credits for Afghanistan not long after Bertinotti had explained that the great mistake of the Left in the twentieth century had been to believe that violence could ever be an instrument of progressive change—only its complete renunciation for an ‘absolute pacifism’ was now politically acceptable. Predictably, the combination of co-option and abjuration was suicidal. Facing the polls in a last-minute cartel with Greens and the remnant of the PDS that could not abide the dropping of even a nominal reference to the left in the PD, Rifondazione was annihilated. Voters in their millions abandoned a party that had scuttled its own identity.

  The scale of his victory has given Berlusconi the leeway to pursue a tougher socio-economic agenda than before, of the kind long urged on him by mainstream critics and commentators inside and outside Italy. Where this would hit opposition constituencies, his coalition is ready to act: draconian cuts in higher education, and compression of teaching staff in elementary schools, promptly enacted, strike at a relatively easy target of Centre-Left support, where institutional vices are widely acknowledged. Where its own electoral base is concerned, rigour is unlikely to be any more applied than in the past. The world recession would in any case not encourage an intrepid neo-liberalism, even were it contemplated. The immediate focus of the government has lain elsewhere. Back in power, Berlusconi could return to the unfinished business of putting himself above the law. Within a hundred days of the election, Parliament had rushed through another bill for his immunity from prosecution, re-drafted by his lawyers to sidestep the grounds on which the Constitutional Court had voided the previous one. This too has already been challenged in the courts; beyond them, a campaign to abrogate it by referendum is in waiting. The political life of the country once again turns on the personal fortune, in all senses, of its billionaire ruler.

  Today Berlusconi is incontestably the icon of the Second Republic. His dominance symbolizes everything it has come to stand for. Few secrets remain about the way in which he acquired his riches, and how he has used them to gain and preserve his power.41 The larger question is what, sociologically, made this career possible. An obvious answer would point to the unbroken sway of Christian Democracy in the First Republic, and see him essentially as its heir. The element of truth in such a reading is clear from the underlying electoral balance in the Second Republic. Proportionally, in all five elections since 1994, the total Centre-Right vote, excluding the League, has exceeded the to
tal Centre-Left vote, excluding Rifondazione Comunista, by a margin varying between 5 and 10 per cent.42 Italy, in other words, has always been, and remains, at bottom an extremely conservative country. The reasons, it is widely argued, are not hard to find. Fewer people move away from their areas of birth, more adult children live with their parents, average firms are much smaller, and the number of self-employed is far higher, than in any other Western society. Such are the cells of reaction out of which a body politic congenitally averse to risk or change has been composed. The sway of the Church, as the only institution at once national and universal, and the fear of a large home-grown Communism, clinched the hegemony of Christian Democracy over it, and even if each has declined, their residues live on in Berlusconi’s following.

  The deduction is too linear, however. Berlusconi has certainly never stinted appeals to Christianity and family values, or warnings of the persistent menace of Communism, and Forza Italia plainly inherited the bastions of DC clientelism in the south—most notoriously in Sicily. But the filigrane of Catholic continuity in his success is quite tenuous. It is not only that the White zones of the north-east have gone to the Lega, but practising Catholics—the quarter of the population that now attends mass with some regularity—have been the most volatile segment of the electorate, many in the early years of the Second Republic voting not only for the Lega but also for the PDS.43 Nor is there a clear-cut connexion between small businesses or the self-employed and political reaction. The Red belt of central Italy—Tuscany, Umbria, Emilia-Romagna and the Marche—where the PCI was always strongest, and which the PD still holds today, is rife with both: family enterprises, flourishing micro-firms, independent artisans and shopkeepers, as well as the region’s cooperatives—a world not of large factories or assembly-lines, but of small property.

  Berlusconi’s real lineage is more pointed. Fundamentally, he is the heir of Craxi and the mutation he represented in the Italian politics of the eighties, rather than of the DC.44 The descent is literal, not just analogical. The two men were close contemporaries, both products of Milan, their careers continuously intertwined from the time that Craxi became leader of the Socialist Party in 1976, and Berlusconi created his first major television station two years later, funded with lavish loans from banks controlled by the PSI. The relationship could hardly have been more intimate, at once functional and personal. Craxi created the favours from the state that allowed Berlusconi to build his media empire: Berlusconi funded Craxi’s machine with the profits from it, and boosted his image with his newscasts. A frequent guest at Berlusconi’s palatial villa in Arcore, where he was liberally supplied with soubrettes and haute cuisine, Craxi was godfather to Berlusconi’s first child by the actress Veronica Lario in 1984, before he married her, and best man at the wedding when he did marry her, in 1990. On becoming premier in 1983, he rescued Berlusconi’s national television networks, which were broadcasting in defiance of a Supreme Court ruling, from being shut down, and in 1990 helped ensure Berlusconi’s permanent grip on them, with a law for which he received a deposit of $12 million to his account in a foreign bank. At the pinnacle of his power, Craxi cut a new figure on the post-war Italian scene—tough, decisive, cultivating publicity, in complete command of his own party, and a ruthless negotiator with others.

  Three years later, with the revelations of Tangentopoli exposing the scale of his corruption, Craxi had become the most execrated public figure in the land. But he was not finished. His own career in ruins, he passed his vision of politics directly to Berlusconi, urging him to take the electoral plunge in a meeting in Milan in April 1993. According to an eye-witness,

  Craxi paced the room like a hunted animal as he talked. ‘We must find a label, a new name, a symbol that can unite the voters who used to vote for the old five-party coalition’, Craxi told Berlusconi. ‘You have people all over the Italian peninsula, you can reach that part of the electorate that is disoriented, confused, but also determined not to be governed by the Communists, and save what can be saved’. Then Craxi sat down and began drawing a series of concentric circles on a piece of paper. ‘This is an electoral college. It will have about 110,000 people in it, about 80,000 to 85,000 with the right to vote. Of these only about 60,000 to 65,000 will actually vote. With the weapon you have with your television stations, by hammering away with propaganda in favour of this or that candidate, all you need is to bring together 25,000 to 30,000 people in order to have a high probability of reversing the projections. It will happen because of the surprise factor, because of the TV factor and because of the desire of many non-Communist voters not to be governed by the Communists’. Craxi then got up to go. After showing him out, Berlusconi said, ‘Good, I now know what to do’.45

  Though by the end of its time the DC had, under pressure of competition, descended to the same levels of venality as the PSI, between Craxi’s model of politics and Christian Democracy there was historically a significant difference. The DC not only possessed the reflected aura of a time-honoured faith, but a deep-rooted social base that Craxi’s brittle machine never acquired; and it had always resisted one-man leadership, remaining an intricate network of counter-balancing factions, immune to the cult of the strongman. Down to the end, however many billions of lire its bagmen were collecting from contractors and businessmen, less went into the personal pockets of its leaders, whose life-style was never as showy as that of Craxi and his colleagues. Scarcely one of its top figures came from Lombardy. Culturally, they belonged to another world.

  Berlusconi, catapulted to the political stage as Craxi fled into exile, thus embodies perhaps the deepest irony in the post-war history of any Western society. The First Republic collapsed amid public outrage at the exposure of stratospheric levels of political corruption, only to give birth to a Second Republic dominated by a yet more flamboyant monument of illegality and corruption than the statecraft of the First had ever produced—Craxi’s own misdeeds dwarfed by comparison. Nor was the new venality confined to the ruler and his entourage. Beneath them, corruption has continued to flourish undiminished. A few months after the Centre-Left governor of Campania—Antonio Bassolino, formerly of the PCI—was indicted for fraud and malversation, the governor of Abruzzo, another stalwart of the Centre-Left—Ottavio del Turco, formerly of the PSI—was arrested, after a private-health tycoon confessed to having paid him six million euros in cash as protection money. Berlusconi is the capstone of a system that extends well beyond him. But, as a political actor, credit for the inversion of what was imagined would be the curing of the ills of the First Republic by the Second belongs in the first place to him. Italy has no more native tradition than trasformismo—the transformation of a political force by osmosis into its opposite, as classically practised by Depretis in the late nineteenth century, absorbing the the Right into the official Left, and Giolitti in the early twentieth, co-opting labour reformism to the benefit of Liberalism. The case of the Second Republic has been trasformismo on a grander scale: not a party, or a class, but an entire order converted into what it was intended to end.

  Where the state has led, society has followed. The years since 1993 have, in one area of life after another, been the most calamitous since the fall of Fascism. Of late, they have produced probably the two most scalding inventories of avarice, injustice, dereliction and failure in any European country since the war. The work of a pair of crusading journalists for Corriere della Sera, Gian Antonio Stella and Sergio Rizzo, La Casta (2007) and La Deriva (2008), have been best-sellers—the first running through twenty-three editions in six months—and they deserve to be. What do they reveal? To begin with, the greed of the political class running the country. In the Assembly, deputies have raised their salaries virtually sixfold in real terms since 1948, with the result that in the European Parliament an Italian deputy gets some 150,000 euros a year, about double what a German or British member receives, and four times a Spaniard. In Rome, the Chamber of Deputies, Senate and prime minister occupy altogether at least forty-six buildings.4
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  The Quirinale, where the president of the Republic—currently Giorgio Napolitano, till yesterday a prominent Communist, as impervious as his predecessors—resides, puts at his disposal over nine hundred servitors of one kind or another, at last count. Cost of the presidential establishment, which has tripled since 1986? Twice that of the Elysée, four times that of Buckingham Palace, eight times that of the German president. Takings of its inmates? In 1993 Gaetano Gifuni, the Father Joseph of the Palace, at the centre of then President Scalfaro’s operations to protect himself from justice, received 557,000 euros at current values for his services—well above the salary of an American president.47 Transport? In 2007, Italy had no fewer than 574,215 autos blus—official limousines—for a governing class of 180,000 elected representatives; France, 65,000. Security? Berlusconi set an example: eighty-one bodyguards, at public expense. By some reckonings, expenditure on political representation in Italy, all found, is equivalent to that of France, Germany, Britain and Spain combined.48

  Beneath this crust of privilege, one in four Italians lives in poverty. Spending on education, falling in the budget since 1990, accounts for a mere 4.6 per cent of GDP (Denmark: 8.4 per cent). Only half of the population has any kind of postcompulsory schooling, nearly twenty points below the European average. No more than a fifth of twenty-year-olds enter higher education, and three-fifths of those drop out. The number of hospital beds per inhabitant has dwindled by a third under the new Republic, and is now about half that in Germany or France. In the courts, criminal justice takes an average of four years to reach a final verdict, time that is taken into account in the statute of limitations, voiding up to a fifth of cases. In civil suits, the average time for a bankruptcy hearing to be completed is eight years and eight months. In late 2007 two septuagenarian pensioners, trying to bring a case against the Social Security Institute, were told they could get an audience in 2020. As for equality before the law, an Albanian immigrant charged with trying to steal a cow in his homeland spent more days in an Italian prison than one of the mega-crooks of the food industry, Sergio Cragnotti, who destroyed the savings of thousands of his fellow citizens. Politicians were treated still better than tycoons: Berlusconi’s right-hand man Cesare Previti, convicted of corrupting judges after hearings that lasted for nine years, and sentenced to six years imprisonment, spent all of five days in jail before being released to perform community service.49