by Tobias Jones
That, indeed, was the next accusation: that the Pole of Liberties was an umbrella under which many closet Fascists were gathered. The National Alliance is simply the new name of the Movimento Sociale Italiano, the post-war Fascist party. Its leader, Gianfranco Fini, is a chess player, and always appears measured, calm and cerebral. In the ranks of his party, however, are many who have dark pasts, former Fascists who, according to the accusations, took a very active part in the country’s anni di piombo. The granddaughter of Il Duce, Alessandra Mussolini, is another of the party’s ‘big names’.
More extreme, and more maverick, was Umberto Bossi, the gravel-voiced leader of the Northern League. He’s always decked out in the party’s green livery and its symbol: a wagon wheel. He’s the prime example of what is called qualunquismo – ‘everymanism’ – a term for crude, vote-grabbing populism. His electoral base is the rich, industrialised north which views Rome and the south as the epitome of all that’s wrong with Italy. (‘Garibaldi didn’t unite Italy, he divided Africa’ goes the rhetoric.) When a piece of land at Lodi was recently set aside for a mosque, Bossi’s Leghisti protested, marching under banners proclaiming ‘our pigs have urinated there’. It was Bossi who, withdrawing his support from the government, caused Berlusconi’s downfall in 1994.
Meanwhile, Francesco Rutelli toured the country in a specially designed ‘Olive’ train (he is, after all, a former green). Next to the cult of Berlusconi, Rutelli – youngish but greying hair – appeared well-meaning, efficient, but lacklustre. Nor could anyone remember quite what the left had done in five years of government. Rutelli, for better or for worse, wasn’t even part of that government, but mayor of Rome. Many incumbent government ministers (Tullio De Mauro, the Minister for Education, Umberto Veronesi, the Health Minister) weren’t even standing for re-election, prompting the suspicion that they were abandoning a derailed train.
It was hard to know quite where and why it went so wrong for the left. When Romano Prodi won the 1996 election, it seemed that Italy’s bipartitismo imperfetto (with the Christian Democrats, or the right, permanently in power, and the Communists, or the left, permanently excluded) had finally, after fifty years, come to an end. In power, however, those Communists (or, as they’re now called, Democrats of the Left) and their allies proved to be strict monetarists, determined to prepare the country very painfully for entry into the Euro. In their five years in government, net borrowing as a percentage of GDP had fallen from over 7% to 0.3%; the national debt had fallen, as had inflation. Only taxes were increased, or new ones introduced, like the ‘tax for Europe’. Most suggest that Prodi’s government, and those which followed, had been very successful financially and fiscally. The consequence, however, is that they were, politically, a disaster.
The left’s greatest blunder, however, was simply tactical. Raising the spectre of Berlusconi’s conflict of interests should have been the Olive coalition’s winning game plan, but having ignored the problem for five years in government, they were unable suddenly to argue that it was a pressing problem. Massimo D’Alema, the man who replaced Romano Prodi as Prime Minister once the Refounded Communists withdrew from the coalition, had effectively been ‘made’ by a handful of votes from Francesco Cossiga (a former Christian Democrat, and a coalition partner even less reliable than Bossi). In an attempt to strengthen his hand, D’Alema, an astute, intelligent but old-school politician, had been locked in bipartisan, bicameral constitutional debates with Berlusconi. The intention was to give Italy once and for all a powerful executive and a presidential leader, no longer hostage to the small PR parties. As leaders of the country’s two largest political movements, D’Alema and Berlusconi clearly had interests in common when it came to the constitutional talks. Meetings (480 hours of them) dragged on for years, during which time legislation against Berlusconi was unthinkable. D’Alema, apparently desperate to pass a new electoral law, had thus leant over backwards to accommodate his rival in order to reach an accord. Having appeared so cosy with the leader of Forza Italia in the late 1990s, D’Alema’s subsequent suggestion – after the constitutional talks had collapsed and as an election loomed – that Berlusconi really was a Faustian figure after all lacked any credibility.
The difference between the two presidential candidates was underlined at a rally of Confindustria (the equivalent of the CBI) in Parma. Rutelli, as desperate as all the other politicians to appear anglosassone, stumbled through an economic analysis in English which no one understood. The next day, Berlusconi (relayed live on Mediaset channels) was the usual slick showman: relaxed and jokey, a man at ease amongst his fellow-businessmen. He invoked ‘Signora Thatcher’, and promised sweeping tax-cuts (he announced his intention to reduce the top rate of income tax from 50% to 33%, and to slash inheritance tax). He received ecstatic applause. Watching him, one could understand the attraction. He is, like Bettino Craxi before him, a charismatic leader amidst a sea of grey politicians and confusing coalitions. Former members of Craxi’s socialist party subsequently endorsed Il Cavaliere and his post-Fascist and federalist allies.
Berlusconi also benefited from the fact that the anti-establishment vote in Italy is always influential. Politicians are held in such low esteem that anyone who appears outside the old guard is immediately more appealing than the incumbent government. (One politician from the centre-left coalition admitted recently that any politician who denied taking backhanders was a bugiardo matricolato, an ‘out-and-out liar’.) So it was one of Berlusconi’s strengths to be able to portray himself as the non-politician, leading a party of entrepreneurs not politicians. (About 90% of the parliamentary intake of Forza Italia deputies in 1994 had never been in parliament before.) From that perspective, Berlusconi’s $14 billion private wealth became an asset, not a hindrance, to democracy: he openly argued in the run-up to the election (and one can see his point, if not necessarily believe it) that he was so rich that he was perfectly placed to become a statesman (meaning, no one could bribe me or buy me, so I can be trusted). Poor politicians are corrupt, the argument went, rich ones don’t need to be.
Another advantage was that, as Machiavelli recognised, Italy seems ever to be ‘waiting to see who can be the one to heal her wounds… See how Italy beseeches God to send someone to save her from those barbarous cruelties and outrages; see how eager and willing the country is to follow a banner, if only someone will raise it…’ There is, in Italy, a yearning for a redeemer, for a politician who will raise a new banner and ‘cleanse those sores’ arising from years of misrule. That was the appeal of Mussolini in 1922, or of the Christian Democrats in 1948. Each new political regime is seen as a bright dawn before being furiously rejected when that dawn appears as false as the last (which, naturally, only increases the yearning for another redeemer).
Beyond the symbolism of the non-politician healing wounds, Berlusconi’s bed-rock of support came from the business community. Even the most left-wing commentator would accept that Italy’s labour laws beggar belief. Contracts run on for ‘time immemorial’, and it is virtually impossible for any company with more than fifteen employees to lay anybody off. Wages might be measly, but at least they are still guaranteed for life. Companies are then forced to pay hefty pension contributions for any full-time employee, a figure that, given that anyone can claim a state pension at 56, is crippling to Italy’s small businesses. (No one mentioned that pensions would fall, and the retirement age rise, if Berlusconi’s reforms were put in place.)
He was promising to untie the red tape, slash taxes, reform labour laws. As a man whose business acumen has never been doubted, Berlusconi appealed even to the traditionally ‘red’ areas of Italy, in the richest parts of the centre and the north. His slogan was the ‘three i’s’ – internet, inglese, and impresa (business). New English words began peppering the political debates, as both sides tried to show how Anglo-Saxon (and therefore Thatcherite) they were: words like ‘flexibility’ and ‘new economy’. All of which only made Berlusconi more indignant when he came under attack
from those organs – the Financial Times and The Economist especially – who he thought shared his business vision.
And for all the criticisms of Berlusconi, he certainly has vision. His leadership is extraordinary and magnetic, and the fierceness with which people defend him bears witness to his charisma. His closest friends, lawyers from the 1970s or his pianist from the early cruise ship days, are still sworn allies and are now in parliament or heading arms of the business empire. His political offices are so slick that I almost forgot, phoning them occasionally to check facts or quotations, that I was really in Italy: they were polite, efficient, always helpful. That, Forza Italia voters kept telling me, was all they wanted from the Italian parliament: quick decisions, clarity, less red-tape. Berlusconi, they said, was good for business. ‘He’s on our side.’
Another appeal to the electorate was a bizarre, entirely Italian affair. The leader of Forza Italia was presented as a garantista, a defender of civil rights against the witch-hunts of the Italian judiciary. Having suffered first hand the legal attacks, Berlusconi promised a complete overhaul of the magistrature. Whatever Berlusconi’s motives, it was a winning line. Everyone knows that the legal system is excruciating here. 40% of those in prison are still awaiting trial; not just for a few days, but for years. The accused, according to one book by a Forza Italia deputy, are being effectively sentenced even before their trial. Thus the country warmed to a politician who promised radically to reform the whole judiciary. (The irony, of course, was that the perception of judicial corruption cut both ways: for Berlusconi’s admirers the judges were corrupt because they were persecuting Berlusconi; for his enemies, they were corrupt because they believed Berlusconi’s personal lawyer, Cesare Previti, had corrupted them with hefty bribes, an accusation for which he is currently standing trial in Milan).
Berlusconi’s other great vote winner was the immigration issue. Italy, for decades one of the world’s largest exporters of human beings, had in the space of a few years become a net importer. The country has invariably been the first port of call for refugees from the Balkans, Eastern Europe and North Africa. For a society which is so homogenous (socially, if not politically), and one with, significantly, the lowest birth-rate in Europe, the sudden influx had been traumatic. The problem of immigration was compounded by the much more serious problem of ‘illegal immigration’: the number of clandestini in the country was estimated to be nearing half a million, and every day more extracomunitari were arriving, thrown out onto the shores of the Adriatic from inflatables.
None of which, however, was really mentioned. Berlusconi, as the journalist Montanelli had realised, had become the ‘millstone that paralyses Italian politics’. Issues and ideas weren’t even debated. The election had become, in the words of Umberto Eco, nothing more than a ‘moral referendum’ on the leader of Forza Italia. It was simply a case of ‘for’ or ‘against’ one man. It was an experiment in saturation advertising: the brand was Berlusconi and the simple slogans were ‘liberty’ and ‘democracy’. By late spring few were in any doubt about the ‘morality’ of Silvio Berlusconi. It only remained to be seen whether the electorate even cared; whether –as The Economist had predicted – the public would acquit Il Cavaliere and thereby vote him into office.
April 2001. Little more than a month to go until the election and another two bombs appear. The first explodes in the early hours in Rome, outside the offices of the Institute for International Affairs and the Office for American–Italian Relations. Half a kilogram of TNT had been detonated by a mobile telephone: the door is blown away and its steel jambs left twisted like crossed fingers. Another bomb, which didn’t go off, was placed outside the former offices of Fiat in Turin.
The bomb in Rome is claimed by the ‘Nuclei of Revolutionary Proletarian Initiatives’ in a 36-page message emailed to newspapers via a mobile-phone modem. ‘With this attack,’ the group explained, it was ‘taking up a position with the strategic objective of constructing a combative anti-imperialist front.’ The targets at the Rome address where the bomb went off were chosen because ‘they orient positions of bourgeois imperialism…’ For pages and pages it continued, invoking the proletariat against ‘war-mongers’ and ‘landowners’, and warning that a Berlusconi government would ‘represent the substantial identification between state institutions and land-owning interests.’ The document was dedicated to four members of the Red Brigades killed by police in 1980.
Both bombs were minor but there was, not for the first time, a neurosis that Italy was witnessing a return to her dark, terrorist past. Giovanni Pellegrino – President of the Slaughter Commission and by now a rentaquote for opinions on Italian terrorism past and present – claimed that elections are like a ‘little wind which rekindles the flames’. And, absurd and inconsequential as the new terrorist groups seemed, they were strangely mimetic of party politics, fractured into tiny groupings of alphabet soup, each using pages (36 in all) of pompous prose to explain themselves.
Then, days before the electorate went to the polls, Berlusconi produced a brilliant piece of theatre. Sitting at an elegant, cherry-wood desk in a (RAI) television studio, he signed a contract with the Italian people. He promised to create a million new jobs, to increase pensions. He assured voters he would walk away from politics if at the end of his first term his promises hadn’t been met.
* * *
The day of the election, and the weeks that ensued, were tragicomic. Everyone had expected a low turn-out, a lot of disillusioned absenteeism from the voters on the left. Instead people flocked to the polls. Italy has always had one of the highest voter turn-outs in the west. During the electoral show-downs between Communists and Christian Democrats, voters were well-drilled and turnout was invariably about 95%. The 2001 election was like a return to the old days. People clearly felt strongly and overwhelmed the polling booths. Thus, when closing time was supposed to be called at 10 p. m., there were still thousands of voters, impatiently waiting in queues which snaked around entire suburbs. The (soon-to-be-out-going) Minister of the Interior duly went on television to say that the ‘urns’ would remain open into the small hours. It was all very familiar. It was like so many scenes I had seen during previous years: the queueing, the slowness with which things move, and, most of all, the changing of the rules half way through the game. ‘But this never happens,’ said my ‘betrothed’, offended that I was laughing at the chaos. ‘This is honestly the first time there have ever been queues at an election.’ The advantage, of course, was that whatever the result, the country’s new Prime Minister would have an overwhelming democratic endorsement.
Berlusconi won by a landslide. The interregnum was over, the restoration complete. The tactic of demonising Berlusconi had badly misfired. The more he was seen as under attack from pointy-heads on the left and financial journalists on the right (especially foreign ones), the stronger and more patriotic he appeared. In the ‘moral referendum’ the majority had chosen the ‘immoral option’. Forza Italia was voted for by almost 30% of the electorate. The left was decimated (only Rutelli’s ‘Daisy’ coalition didn’t wilt, claiming 15% compared to 9% five years earlier), and the few independent parties (Di Pietro’s ‘Italy of Values’ party, the ambiguous Radicals) failed to make the 4% minimum required for a parliamentary seat from the allocation of PR votes. Even so the election might have been a close finish had the Refounded Communists, full of pomp and principle, been allied to the ‘Olive’. In the new, two-coalition politics, the Communists’ 5% of the vote would almost have guaranteed a hung parliament. Outside the coalition, however, that 5% simply translated into eleven inconsequential seats in the lower house.
There were, of course, anomalies: Parma and its province, centre of ‘communist-chic’, returned five out of five candidates from the Olive coalition. The night after the election result, I was invited to the studio of a local TV station in Parma. The presenter was a staunch Forzista, and asked in all seriousness if there existed a conspiracy of foreign journalists aligned against Berlus
coni. I denied it, and the assembled heads of all the left wing parties smiled at me and nodded in agreement. The next question was what the British press made of the result. ‘The feeling is that it won’t last,’ I stuttered. With Italy having had 57 or so governments since the war, it seemed like a safe reply. But all the big-wigs, the entire horseshoe of local politicos around me shook their heads, either with glee or despair. The feeling was that Berlusconi was set to remain Il Presidente for a very, very long time.
The Italian election, then, was on 13 May. The British one was on 7 June, almost a month later. Yet the new British government was chosen and sworn in before its Italian counterpart. That gives an idea how long it takes for things to move. Once elected, it wasn’t enough for Berlusconi to pay a visit to the President of the Republic and get to work. There had to be ‘consultations’, everyone had to speak to everyone else. Deals had to be cut. Defeated powers had to be received and soothed by Ciampi. Berlusconi had to choose which ‘armchair’ to give to which party. For weeks there was speculation about who would get what. Finally, the team was assembled: the Leghista Roberto Maroni went to the Welfare Ministry; Maurizio Gasparri, a man who to my eyes behaves like a barking Fascist, was given the job of Minister of Communications (the ideal candidate to ‘clean up’, as predicted, RAI channels); Pierferdinando Casini, former Christian Democrat and now of the Catholic CCD, became the speaker of the lower house. To keep things ‘in the family’, Letizia Moratti, the cousin of the President of Inter Milan football team, became Minister for Education; although Count Montezemolo, head of Ferrari and favoured son of Agnelli, turned down the offer of an armchair. (Another trusted Agnelli stalwart, Renato Ruggiero, became Foreign Secretary.) Umberto Bossi, leader of the Northern League, became the Minister for Reforms. Gianfranco Fini, boss of the National Alliance, was the government’s vice-president.