The Dark Heart of Italy

by Tobias Jones

  Meanwhile, a parallel piece of legislation seemed, in the face of international efforts, even more perverse. The government had added two amendments to a treaty agreed between Switzerland and Italy in 1998, and which was only now being ratified in parliament. Those amendments were effectively bureaucratic spanners in the wheels of international investigations into financial fraud. They rendered useless any documents used in on-going trials for banking irregularities unless they met rigid and improbable conditions (adherence, for example, to a raft of laws from February 1961, which ratified the Convention of Strasbourg). It seemed apparent that certain trials would have to be postponed, or begun again from scratch. By that time, the Statute of Limitations would take effect, and further prosecution would be impossible. The Director of Public Prosecutions in Geneva, Bernard Bertossa, spoke of his ‘impression that this disgraceful law has a clear objective: to do away with certain evidence to neutralise certain judicial processes in Italy.’

  Even on the government benches there was outrage at the legislation. For the first time, 27 franchi tiratori (‘snipers’ from Berlusconi’s own Pole of Liberties coalition) took advantage of the secret ballot to vote against the government. As the legislation was passed, there were physical fights on the floor of the parliament. It was described as a rissa: not exactly a punch-up, but a lot of pushing and shoving between opposing politicians. Indeed, as the amendments were being passed, opposition parliamentarians held up posters with the name of Cesare Previti (Berlusconi’s lawyer currently on trial in Milan) and the number of his Swiss bank account.

  It became very obvious that the backlog of court cases against Silvio Berlusconi and his allies was the main reason for the autumn’s rushed legislation. He intended, it seemed, not to defend himself in the various trials, but to defend himself from them. Even the Northern League, which at the beginning of the 1990s had appeared a minor party intent on rooting out the corruption of Rome, had become entirely co-opted to the cover-up. The Justice Minister, the Leghista Roberto Castelli, repeatedly inveighed against the ‘dirty togas’; Carlo Taormina, the Sicilian lawyer, went further, saying that any magistrates who continued to prosecute Berlusconi should themselves be prosecuted. Each time he went abroad Silvio Berlusconi desperately tried to explain himself to his allies: Italy had ‘Jacobin judges’ he said in Spain. ‘For the last ten years,’ he said in an interview with one of his own magazines, ‘there has been a civil war in Italy.’ In a move which seemed intimidating, and whose full significance would only be understood months later, protective escorts for magistrates were drastically cut back. By the beginning of December, after weeks of relentless attacks, the entire committee of the ‘National Association of Magistrates’ resigned en masse, the first time it had done so since 1924.

  Days later, the partners of the European Union met to discuss plans for a European arrest warrant for 32 of the most serious crimes: terrorism, arms-trafficking, paedophilia and so on. It was expected to be a straight-forward meeting, but Italy unexpectedly, and for the first time in her post-war history, had suddenly cooled on the idea of the European Community. The Italian delegation refused to sign the agreement. The motives for Italy’s reluctance to introduce a European arrest warrant were baffling. Others, though, suggested it was only natural: at a time when the Italian government was intending to stitch-up its domestic judiciary, it wouldn’t then go and create an international noose for the presidential neck. Roberto Castelli, the Justice Minister, returned from Brussels wearing his green, Northern League neck-tie, and duly announced to a rally in Milan that a European arrest warrant was a sure way to guarantee Communist justice; nobody, said Umberto Bossi – the Minister for Reforms and leader of the League – would have been safe from the left-wing ‘executioners’ had the legislation been signed. An agreement was eventually reached, but only once many of the crimes under discussion had become subject to ‘dual incrimination’: the arrest warrant would only be valid if the crime was legally a crime in both the country requesting extradition and the extraditing country. As Graham Watson, the Chairman of the European Parliament’s Justice and Home Affairs Committee, later told me: ‘The whole episode raised further questions in Brussels about the cleanliness of Berlusconi’s government. That a Prime Minster should go so far to guarantee what is effectively a veto against the arrest of criminals is very worrying. I should say that I don’t think he was trying to save his own skin, but that of his friends and allies.’

  Within a week, the European governments met for another summit, this time at Laeken in Belgium. The Italian contingent was, again, cantankerous. The Italian government pulled out of the military transport project, refusing to finance the purchase of any of the A400M aircraft. (Germany had purchased 73, France 50 and Spain 27.) The summit was also intended to decide the destination of various European agencies, but even agreement on that couldn’t be reached since Italy vetoed any distribution of the agencies that didn’t guarantee Parma, the ‘food capital of Europe’, the seat of the European Food Safety Agency. Helsinki had been the rival for the food agency, and Berlusconi was quick to ridicule Finnish cuisine: ‘They don’t even know what prosciutto is. I gave a strong “no”. I even had to raise my voice.’ The summit finished amidst bitter recriminations. The Italian Mario Monti (European Competition Commissioner) said that the Italian government’s behaviour had been ‘adolescent’.

  The rise in Italian patriotism, previously such an unseen sentiment across the peninsula, clearly meant that the country’s leader had begun to distance himself from the European Community only weeks before the vital launch of the Euro. Many suggested that the shift in policy had, paradoxically, been prompted by the rabid Northern League (a party which is actually opposed to the Italian nation state, and whose opposition to Europe is therefore entirely political, rather than patriotic: it’s simply too left-wing). The one government minister of truly international stature, Renato Ruggiero (former head of the World Trade Organisation and Foreign Secretary under Berlusconi) had repeatedly made clear his concern about Italy’s new-found Euroscepticism (called by the government ‘Eurorealism’). At the beginning of January 2002, after months of fractious criticism from his own colleagues, Ruggiero resigned in dismay. Berlusconi immediately appointed himself Foreign Secretary, the head of Italian diplomacy: ‘Who better than me?’ he asked journalists, who obviously didn’t offer any alternative suggestions.

  By then, even Gianni Agnelli appeared edgy. He had consistently defended Berlusconi in the run-up to the election, rounding on foreign journalists who used phrases like ‘banana republic’. Once ‘his man’ in the government, Ruggiero, had been humiliated, Agnelli said: ‘Banana republic? Italy doesn’t even have bananas. All we’ve got here are prickly pears.’

  Italy, it was obvious, was subtly changing. The best barometers of the change, as always, were the politicised plaques, memorials and graffiti. Throughout 2001 there was clearly a new symbolism emerging as an assiduous renaming of streets began (one to Benito Mussolini in Catania, two to Giorgio Almirante, the historic leader of Italy’s post-war Fascism). In Friuli, in the north-east of the country, a plaque bearing the Fascist slogan outside a secondary school was restored to its former glory: ‘Believe, Obey, Combat’ it read. In Benevento, the name of the central square, Piazza Matteotti (Matteotti was a socialist MP murdered by Fascists in 1924) was changed to Santa Sofia. All the mayors responsible for the new urban appearances were from the ranks of the National Alliance. As was the mayor from Latina (a town built from scratch by Mussolini), who decided to replace the marble plaque on the town’s modern bell-tower (it had been removed after the Second World War): ‘Peasants and rural people should look at this tower which dominates the plain and which is a symbol of the power of Fascism’. It all reminded me of a paragraph from Moravia’s The Conformist:

  At one street-corner a group of people had put up a long ladder at the corner of a building, and a man who had climbed to the top of the ladder was hammering vigorously at a stone which bore the name o
f the regime. Someone said, with a laugh, to Marcello: ‘There are Fascist signs everywhere… it’ll take years to efface them all.’ ‘It certainly will,’ said Marcello.

  Little by little the landscape of the country was altering. The changing of the political guard didn’t imply only new policies, it implied the complete overhaul of every institution: the magistrature, the television, the street names, the syllabus. Even the dignified President of the Republic, Carlo Azeglio Ciampi (in what could only be interpreted as an attempt to maintain the fragile sense of national unity), said publicly that the ‘Ragazzi di Salò’, those Fascists who fought the civil war to the bitter end in 1945, at least had the merit of fighting for a unified Italy. He was rounded on by the left, who accused the former resistance fighter of offering yet another sdoganamento (‘customs-clearance’) for Fascism.

  The strange thing is that, despite the hysteria, the government of ‘black shirts’ and ‘white collars’ isn’t about the return of Fascism. It’s about something much more subtle, much more amorphous. It’s about a style of government based upon crude power, using as its motto the old Sicilian proverb potere è meglio di fottere (‘power is better than screwing’). It’s nothing to do with ideology, with Fascism or anti-Communism, it’s simply about power and realpolitik. One of Mussolini’s political slogans used to be ‘ideas not men’. It expressed the idea that policies were more important than the politicians. Contemporary Italian politics, though, is the inversion of the slogan. For all the talk about Fascists and Communists, it’s really about ‘men not ideas’. The culture is one of clientelismo, the habit of mutual backscratching. A politician sits at the top of his pyramid of clients, looking after their needs as he tries to out-manoeuvre opponents. It’s an organic supply-and-demand of favours that, given the size of the public-sector work force and the reach of political appointments, runs through all levels of society. A new government implies a clean sweep through the ranks of RAI, it implies new magistrates and new teachers, all chosen upon the basis of their personal allegiances.

  That’s why any notion that one might voluntarily remove a conflict of interests is anathema. It goes counter to every notion of realpolitik. Days before the General Election, Berlusconi had melodramatically signed his ‘contract with the Italian people’. He promised that within one hundred days of entering office, he would resolve the anomaly of a politician whose telecommunications empire dominated domestic broadcasting. Eight months later, and nothing had been done. The conflict of interests had become blatant that autumn when an American offer of 800 billion lire for a 49% interest in the RAI infrastructure was bluntly turned down by the government’s Minister for Communications. As soon as the lucrative deal fell through, Mediaset shares soared on the stock exchange.

  In fact, rather than resolving the RAI-Mediaset conflict by selling Mediaset, Berlusconi was instead attempting to colonise RAI. One Sunday afternoon in December 2001, Quelli Che Il Calcio (a football programme on RAI 2) ran a satirical sketch about the ‘post-Fascist’ Minister for Communications, Maurizio Gasparri. As everyone knew, Gasparri was about to sack the head of RAI (present in the studio) because he represented the old-guard appointed by the former left-wing government. As soon as the sketch (a very gentle parody about political interference in television) was finished, the Minister for Communications unintentionally proved the point. He was immediately on the telephone, his booming voice interrupting the live broadcast of the country’s favourite television programme. The studio fell silent, everyone looked nervously at their shoes as the Minister berated them. He didn’t, he said, approve of the wrong kind of satire, and he hinted darkly that RAI should have known better since he, Gasparri, was now effectively its boss. That is just one, mundane example of Italy’s ‘vertical’ structure, in which power drips imperiously from above, rather than surges from below.

  January 2002. I was in a bar watching a late-night football match. In one corner I recognised a blond guy I had taught almost two years before. Marco was one of those silent types who very rarely spoke in the lecture hall. When he did, it was normally a memorable put-down to one of his fellow students. He wasn’t superior, just very studious, a little sarcastic and aloof. I liked him a lot, though I didn’t really know him.

  ‘Zio Tobia!’ He called me over to his table and I sat down opposite him. ‘Are you still writing that book?’ he asked.

  ‘I’m afraid so,’ I replied.

  ‘What are you writing about now?’

  ‘The government.’

  He looked at me and went quiet. Then he began shaking his head, grimacing. ‘Ma tu, non ti rendi conto?’ he hissed. (‘Don’t you get it?’ said as if he were accusing me of something.) And he was accusing me of something, however indirectly. ‘You foreign journalists are so facetious and condescending. You only write about how terrible our country is.’

  ‘But I’m only repeating what you all tell me. And it’s true, it is terrible.’

  ‘I know. But that’s exactly why you foreign journalists fuck me off. You come here and laugh at the farce, not realising that for us it is a tragedy. You come here with your British patriotism and laugh at us peasants before going back home. If you want to stay here, you mustn’t laugh anymore,’ he said. ‘This is a terrible country and Berlusconi is a tragedy for Italy. It’s all an unbelievable tragedy. Italians are coglioni [pillocks] who elect the first person they think will make them richer. Berlusconi only speaks to the pancia [the belly]. But you mustn’t laugh about anything anymore. You must write that there’s another side to Italy.’ He was exceptionally angry, tears rolling down his cheeks as he prodded his finger against my chest. ‘You must write that there’s a completely different country which hates Berlusconi and all his corrupt giannizzeri [flunkeys]. Life for us will be very difficult from now on. You don’t understand, but you will…’

  We sat in silence for five minutes, ignoring each other and just pretending to watch the game. He was right, of course. By then, after three years abroad, I longed to go back home. I was sickened not just by what was going on, but by the acceptance of it all. Saturated by Mediaset television, everyone seemed indifferent. I, by contrast, was feeling vitriolic and very foreign. It didn’t even feel like I was living in a democracy anymore. Marco, though, somehow knew that I would be staying, and he knew that there was still ‘a different country’, one outside the reach of Il Cavaliere, which I had ignored.

  He caught me looking at him and began to apologise. ‘Excuse me, Zio Tobia,’ he said finally. ‘Excuse me. It’s just that Berlusconi brings so much shame upon our country, and you mustn’t add to that. You must write about the other country, about the resistance.’

  ‘I will. I promise, Marco, that’s what I’ll write next. And I didn’t mean it’s all terrible here. I love it here, it’s just that…’

  ‘It’s terrible,’ he nodded, smiling.

  10

  I Morti

  Now that I have seen what a civil war is I know that, if one day it finishes, everyone will have to ask themselves ‘And what to do with the fallen? Why did they die?’ I wouldn’t know what to reply. At least not now. It doesn’t seem to me that the others know. Maybe only the dead know, and only for them is the war really over…

  Cesare Pavese

  Writing a book, however obliquely, about Silvio Berlusconi is rather like going to Britain to write about hooliganism or like going to Ireland to write about ‘the troubles’: there’s a danger that, as you try to explain a tragic phenomenon, a very nasty niche of the country comes to obscure all else. Admittedly, having given myself the task of taking the temperature of Italy’s body politic, I couldn’t then fudge the issue and pretend that that body wasn’t suffering from a very serious and unappealing infection. And yet, identifying Berlusconi entirely with his country is an unnecessary compliment to the former, and definitely an unkind slur on the latter. Italy is not a single entity but rather a country of two opposing sides. The country is, in fact, probably as divided now as it was during the civil wa
rs of the 1940s or the 1970s. There’s the same visceral loathing between two halves of the country. This mutual hatred and disdain might not have overspilled into another civil war, but there is once again a very obvious civil stand-off in which one half of the country looks with absolute contempt at the other. That cleavage within the country is as obvious to Italians as it is to a foreigner. As Angelo Panebianco, a journalist for Corriere della Sera, wrote in January 2002:

  [There is] a type of ‘battle between civilisations’. On one side are those who retain that the current government is a sort of infection, a repository of wickedness and illegality, and on the other are those for whom that same infection can be seen in the relationship between the political left and the magistrature. The division between the two Italys is radical. It’s a division about values and principles which cancels any possibility of communication and of compromise… 1

  I don’t suppose that in the preceding chapters I have particularly disguised my own position as regards that division. Yet in writing almost exclusively about that ‘wickedness and illegality’ I recognise that I have narrated only one, small part of the country. There obviously exists, within the physiology of the peninsula, a completely different heart: one disdainful of oligarchical football presidents, critical of corruption and unbounded construction, dismissive of a Prime Minister who now controls six out of the seven national television channels. It’s hard to underline the passion and vehemence with which they talk: some begin to cry, others bang their fists on the table. Most, like Marco, look around at their fellow countrymen (the other half) and spit out the word coglioni, ‘pillocks’.