Padania – inventing a nation. Frankenstein Jnr in northern Italy.

More than 2,400 years ago, Plato observed that every nation needs a foundation myth and described how it might be done, and a lot more recently Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger in The Invention of Tradition analysed some of the lies and half-truths that most of us use to create our national identity. So we’ve had a long time to understand the dark art of nationbuilding.
Even so, watching Umberto Bossi’s crude antics aiming at manufacturing “Padania” is surprising and more reminiscent of Frankenstein (Junior)’s efforts to create life than the 19th century British enhancement of Boudicca or the German glorification of Herman/Arminius.
On Friday, Bossi performed the “traditional” late summer ritual of taking an “ampolla” (a flask to you and me) of water from the source of the Po. According to Bossi, this is a druidic rite (and the “Padanians” are Celts as we all know) honouring the great river god that gives life to “Padania”. The origins of the ancient tradition are lost in the mists of time of the mid-1990s. When he was in better health, he would carry the bottle down the length of the river stopping on the to milk the crowds and with equal ceremony pour it into the lagoon in Venice… uniting “Padania” – geddit? This year he just managed the beginning and the end of the trip.
The whole charade is weird patchwork of very visible spin and PR mixed with the genuinely traditional Italian propensity for a walk and picnic on a pretty hillside in late summer – the scampagnata.
The previous week was taken up with another attempt to graft “Padania” onto another real Italian tradition – the bicycle race. We had the first (and probably last) Giro della Padania with real cyclists albeit most were past their prime. It was won by Ivan Basso, former Giro d’Italia winner from Varese like Bossi. Once again, “Padania” was being symbolically united by the race except that it was greeted partly with boredom and partly with protests.
The “Padanian” identity is constructed on a supposedly Celtic heritage; the area was after all called Cisalpine Gaul by the Romans, Gaul on this side of the Alps for us Romans, and was largely inhabited by Celtic Gauls. But like Transalpine Gaul on the other side, it was then invaded by Germanic tribes – Franks and Lombards to name just two that gave their names to the places they occupied. Since then, there has been a lot of coming and going in the Po valley which is neither ethnically nor linguistically very pure… it’s true that the League’s leader in the European Parliament has the nickname Obelix because he looks like Depardieu fatted up for the part and that another leader the rubicund Roberto Calderoli could pass for a plump and florid Irishman (but also Englishman or German for that matter).
While the French make a world famous cartoon strip of their Celtic-Gaulish heritage or call their cigarettes Celtiques or Gauloises, Bossi has made a political party and his own very successful career.
In a country where local identity is stronger than almost anywhere else in the world and where many of those identities are based on former political unity or present linguistic or gastronomic unity, “Padania” does not feature as one of them. Most define themselves first as “Piedmontese”, “Sicilian” or “Tuscan”, “Sienese”, “Venetian” or “Neapolitan”; no one seriously thinks of themselves as “Padanian”.
The League’s other symbols also show the magpie tendency of filching anything that glitters and some things that don’t. Their green is a shade somewhere between Ireland and Qaddafi’s Libyan flag – maybe geographically appropriate given the position of northern Italy but not what they are trying to suggest. Their symbol, supposedly "the alpine sun"

looks more like a call for legalising weed – not part of their programme either. When the leaders stand together in solemn moments, their right hands cover their hearts, a quintessential American gesture, not a Lombard (or Piedmontese or Venetian) one. In insults too, they have followed the American example with Bossi frequently raising his middle finger

(most recently towards the Italian national anthem) rather than using the much more athletic Italian and French gesture of putting the left hand on the crook of the right elbow and sharply raising the forearm.
As for music, the Northern League has appropriated one Italian symbol though. From its first performance in 1842, the Hebrew slaves’ chorus in Nabucco was taken as a call to freedom – initially from Austrian domination and then more generally for the whole of Italy. For a time in the 1940s, there was the suggestion that it should become the anthem of the new Italian republic. Now the Northern League use it sing of liberation from Italy much to the annoyance of supporters of Italian unity and Verdi fans..
For the last month, Bossi has again been using the language of secession. In the mid and late ‘90s the party programme moved between wanting a completely independent state (their telephonists at the Chamber of Deputies answered the phone with “Lega Nord, Padania Libera”) and the division of Italy into a three republic confederation. The difference is that Bossi and some of his colleagues are now ministers of the Republic of Italy and have sworn to defend its interests.
Over the summer, they combined unity and secession in a single gesture; the four ministries run by leghisti were transferred to Monza just outside Milan. Never mind that they still have not been staffed and opened and never mind that the other regions of the north were left out. It was Bossi’s devolution equivalent of the secessionists’ military exploit some years ago when a few of them “invaded” Venice with a tractor dressed up in sheet metal to look like a tank: an empty sham, thankfully.
The secessionist rhetoric is actually a superficial inconsistency. The real construction of Padania is a non-starter. Instead, Bossi and his supporters are defending themselves against internal attack – a possible takeover by his rival, the Interior Minister, Roberto Maroni. The physically and politically ailing Bossi wants to consolidate his position within the party. Outside the party but within the centre-right, he wants to distance himself from Berlusconi and the People of Freedom, ready for elections not later than 2013 but very probably sooner. During the Po water ceremony, he pointedly made no commitment to supporting the government for another 18 months.
So despite all the noise, we’re more likely to see an indepenent Scotland or Catalonia than “Padania” but that won’t stop Bossi’s rant.

Not even a perch at the victors’ table

Every Italian schoolchild knows that the Piedmontese prime minister sent troops to fight with the British and French in Crimea in the hope that at the end of the war, Piedmont would have a place among the powers to negotiate the peace settlement. Not for the last time, the Piedmont’s and then Italy’s crack bersaglieri were playing diplomats more than warriors.
In the event, Piedmont took its place at the Paris peace conference and forged a new and strong link with France. Cavour negotiated a deal which led to French support against Austria and the unification of Italy under the king of Piedmont. Cavour and the bersaglieri served their king and country well.
More than 150 years later, Italy has been once again fighting side by side with the French and British, this time much closer to home, in Libya. And this time, the Italian contribution was crucial; without Italian bases, the NATO effort would have been much more difficult; Italian aircraft played an important role and the navy even more so.
Much more importantly, Italian interests are closely intertwined with Libya for both oil and gas and development contracts. Libya is also a former Italian colony (the invasion began 100 years ago this month) with much of Tripoli and Benghazi looking like La Spezia. Today it is the principal stepping stone for irregular immigration into Italy from sub-Saharan Africa (with migration control used by Col. Qaddafi as a carrot and stick).
And yet, for the moment at least, Italy has reaped fewer benefits from its support of the rebels and the National Transition Council than Piedmont did in 1856.
On Thursday, Sarkozy and Cameron performed a good revival

of the Entente Cordiale and yesterday Recep Erdogan

showed Turkey’s contemporary diplomatic muscle rather than rekindling their former Ottoman glory. Next week is President Obama’s turn to do the victory parade with the Libyan leader at the UN. Along with the heads of state and government, the diplomats and businessmen beaver away with less pomp and photocalls but more substance.
Where is Italy in all this? The embassy has re-opened and the foreign minister, Franco Frattini has assured Italians in his usual stunningly banal manner that all is well. Berlusconi is far too busy trying to persuade Chancellor Merkel that he did not make disparaging and sexist remarks about her and that she should be prepared to use German euros to buy Italian debt. He would like to show the money markets, the ECB and the European Commission that his latest budget really is going to rein in the Italian debt.
He is also trying to keep his ever more wobbly coalition together as voter confidence in him, his party and his ally the Northern League plummets.
Most importantly, he and his lawyers are in emergency damage control mode to try an prevent the flow of revelations that suggest that he has been at the centre of a massive prostitution ring and is being blackmailed by the pimps and quite a few of the girls.
This means that he does not have time to go to Tripoli in order to try and establish a new relationship with Libya – it would certainly never be quite as chummy as the one he had with Qaddafi but there could be solid working relations based on mutual interests. Even if he did have time, he could certainly not find space on any of the flights going into Tripoli at the moment. Even his once good friend Erdogan presumably wants his company like a hole in the head. Ditto Obama, Sarkozy and Cameron none of whom have had a soft spot for Silvio.
Despite all Berlusconi’s boasting about the success of his personal foreign policy, he risks not even being offered a stool at the victory banquet.
PS. An undenied report of a couple of months ago suggests that a consignment of weapons confiscated from Serbian forces by NATO in the ‘90s and given to the Italian army for destruction, were not destroyed and left their deposit in Sardinia in June for an unknown destination. If the weapons went to the NTC, the delivery could have been public as Italy had already recognised the provisional government. If they went to Qaddafi forces, we would have the curious scenario of weapons (some of them heavy) confiscated by NATO being supplied by a NATO member to be used against NATO forces. If true, it could be one reason why Italy is keeping such a low profile and not just because of Berlusconi’s whoremongering.

They don’t get it…

Italian politicians have a pretty high opinion of the themselves on the whole. They are furbi or cunning, and are, after all, the heirs of the inventor of modern politics, Niccolò Machiavelli and no one is sharper than him…
The self-congratulatory Berlusconi has declared himself the best prime minister Italy has ever had and has rated himself on par with Justinian and Napoleon as a lawgiver. His colleagues are no less modest.
But they are now dangerously distant from the national and international reality. For the third time in two months, there is an emergency austerity budget before Parliament – this is yet another attempt to inject some confidence into the Italian economy; like the others, it will be very painful for all taxpayers and especially the poorer ones.
As part of the belt-tightening move, Parliamentarians cut some of their allowances in an early draft. The version that the Senate passed on Wednesday and that the Chamber is likely to pass this coming Wednesday reduced that reduction so we’re almost back to square one. And since the Government called for a vote of confidence on the bill, there no possibility of amending it.
The proposal to abolish the provinces (Italy has four levels of government to most other countries’ three) has been tabled as a constitutional amendment meaning that even if this legislature runs its full course, the amendment will not have the time to be passed.
Cutting Parliamentarians’ perks, allowances, pensions and salaries will not solve Italy’s debt problem. Even drastically reducing the number of politicians at all levels will not bring Italy’s debt down to the euro norms but addressing the questions will make it just a little bit easier to persuade the rest of the country that the austerity measures are fair. But the politicians don’t get it.
Four years ago, Gianantonio Stella and Sergio Rizzo published La casta (The Caste) documenting politicians’ privileges in painful detail. It became a bestseller and the title has become normal usage. Over the last few months, revelations and bitter criticism have increased. One summer example: lunch in the Senate restaurant costs less than €10, a plate of turbot €2.50 served in a delighful Baroque dining room by elegant waiters…
Parliamentarians are also given a generous pension after just a single legislature ostensibly to guarantee that they do no abuse the position of power that they held. And even very eminent older politicians have been vehemently defending this precious guarantee of democratic righteousness.
More important on the international scene is the government’s stubborn unwillingness to accept that Italy is in the middle of a major crisis and one which risks seriously damaging the euro, possibly even destroying it.
The president of the employers’ federation, Emma Marcegaglia said last week that the government should act or let someone else do it. The Milan stock exchange has been in free fall for almost two months.
The European institutional leaders have also been putting pressure on both President Napolitano and on the government. These last few days have seen the publication of intercepts between Berlusconi and a fixer-pimp who is alleged to have been blackmailing the prime minister which apparently include disparaging sexist remarks on Angela Merkel, one of Italy‘s potential saviors. This is juicy stuff but even if the language is presumably less graphic, I would be far more interested in the conversations between the ECB’s present and future presidents, Trichet and Draghi and Chancellor Merkel and in what they have been saying to Napolitano. The Italian president, after all, is not responsible for the budget and strictly speaking is overstepping his institutional powers when he urges the Prime Minister to act decisively.
It is relatively easy to explain why the parliamentarians are so arrogant in their defence of privilege. First, they are indeed out of touch with their electorate; they are elected from fixed party lists and not directly from a defined constituency or district. The second reason sounds absurd but is still true; the majority of Italians are not yet angry enough with la casta to do anything concrete about it. Twenty years ago disgruntled Romans threw coins at Bettino Craxi to show their contempt at his venality. This has not happened yet.
As for the government, the explanations are more nuanced. Berlusconi has two contradictory spins. The first is that there was no crisis until a couple of months ago and even now, the Italian economy is actually sound. Nothing has changed dramatically in the financial or business world since July, except that now the markets no longer feel that Italy’s debt is secure; the dastardly speculators are wrong according to Berlusconi. But blaming the markets is like blaming the thermometer when you have a temperature. Berlusconi doesn’t get it.
His second explanation is that he didn’t create Italy’s massive debt, as he repeated just yesterday, it was the catto-comunisti, the Catholics and the Communists in the ‘80s. It was actually his friend and protector, Bettino Craxi more than anyone else who made Italy’s debt balloon out of control (and sponsored Berlusconi rise). And he can hardly claim he is the new kid on the block who has to clear up the mess left by a predecessor, like Enda Kenny in Ireland or David Cameron in Britain, or even Papadreou in Greece.
Italian growth has been low or even negative for almost 20 years now and Berlusconi has been in power for all but two of the last ten years.
Then there are the personal and electoral reasons; Berlusconi finds it impossible to deliver bad news and harsh measures because his popularity is more important than the country’s or Europe’s interests. This is for psychological reasons as well as for obvious electoral interests. His allies even more, are terrified of facing an electorate after cutting resources.
They also have an underlying presumption that “it’ll all turn out all right in the end”. This is part facile optimism and part the idea that there are “grown-ups” in “Europe” who will sort everything out. “We’ll raise the pension age but only if Europe tells us to” said Berlusconi a couple of days ago.
The problem is that Italy’s mess is too big for “Europe” (Commission, ECB and Germany) to sort out without a major effort by Italy itself.
But they don’t get it.

Italy’s Real Deficit

For the last month, Italy has been buffetted more than most by the financial storm hitting Europe and the US. In the last week, the storm became a hurricane and there is no guarantee that it won’t continue or even worsen next week.
Far from being the most relaxed time of year with everyone by the seaside or about to go, politicians are looking forward to a hard, fraught and working August.
The longterm reasons are clear enough; the national debt has been growing since the Eighties while the economy has stagnated. The country became less and less competitive with globalisation and since joining the euro, devaluation has no longer been an option to reduce debt and make Italian goods and services more attractive. Servicing that debt is becoming more and more expensive as the perception of the country’s reliability declines. Italian 10 year treasury bonds are close to 4% higher than German one, the so-called spread has moved between 350 and 400 points over the last week, only just below Spain’s and occasionally above it.
Italy’s debt is today around 120% of its GDP (and was higher than the 60% Maastricht criteria maximum when Italy joined the euro – like Greece’s debt and creative accounting, this is another and much bigger original sin of the euro). The increase since the 2008 crisis has been more due to slow or negative growth rather than greatly increased spending. It’s hardly a happy state, but it’s not catastrophic either and it very definitely did not appear out of the blue in the last few months.
The budget deficit has also been creeping up and is well over the ECB limit but a good part goes to pay interest on the debt and without that, the budget is close but within the limit. Again, a grey outlook but not disastrous. Certainly nothing like Greece.
Italy’s banks and savings are pretty sound as well – there are no bubbles in housing or anything else as in Ireland or Spain.
By most accounts then, Italy should be bumping along the bottom without a major crisis. But it isn’t and the reason is blindingly obvious. The crisis is caused by real flaws in the system and the numbers behind them, but above all, it is the result of lack of leadership.
This is the country’s most crucial deficit.
Since Lehman Brothers blew up, the Prime Minister has been telling Italy that there is nothing to worry about. The crisis, according to Berlusconi, was an international one and Italy was in a much stronger position to weather it. This was actually partially true, but only if something was done to address the much older structural problems.
For most of the last year, the prime minister and the economics minister, Giulio Tremonti, sniped at each other with the first saying that everything was fine and the second calling for spending cuts. When it came to passing a serious austerity budget, Tremonti was told first that “no one is indispensable” and then that the budget was “a collective responsibility of the cabinet”. As it turned out to be – last month’s bill was a mess that pleased no one, least of all the markets. It promised to balance the budget by 2014, after the next elections with most of the cuts delayed. It was obvious then that it was not enough so after disappearing from the scene for more than a fortnight, and after a run on the Milan stock exchange, Berlusconi spoke on Wednesday to reassure the country and the markets. Amazingly, once again, it was the markets that were wrong, not the government.
It was a dreary, lacklustre speech obviously written by a not very harmonious committee (and political philologists had a field day guessing who was behind it). The only time Berlusconi woke up from his stupor was when he was heckled about the stock market. He replied “I have three companies quoted on the Milan exchange – I’m a businessman on the front line of this battle of the markets”. Funny… I thought he was prime minister of Italy. Once again, there seems to be no translation of “conflict of interest” – or at least not one that Berlusconi understands. He promised that funds already allocated would actually be spent and promised the usual run of committees to see where savings in politicians’ perks and privileges could be made – as if the world had long since learnt that a committee is just a semi-polite way of stalling.
The following day, Thursday, he met with what Italians call le parti sociali, employers’ groups, trades unions, trade and business organisations. They gave him and his ministers a six point plan some of which to be executed now, in August; a balanced budget by 2014, reduction of costs of politics and administation, including the abolition of the provinces (Italy has four tiers of government compared to most countries’ three. That could be done immediately and the number of comuni or municipal governments greatly reduced. Politicians’ privileges could be cut tomorrow), liberalisation and privatisation (on one index of “economic freedom”, Italy was 64th in 2008 and 76th in 2009 ), freeing up of investments, simplification of the public administration and the labour market. The unions did not agree to privatisation but accepted the rest. It was a measure of the urgency that parties who are normally antagonists, got together in order to pressure the government.
The best result was a press conference in which Berlusconi said that “if I had any money, I would buy shares in my companies because they’re sound” and then added: “If you want to invest you should buy them too”. Old salesmen never lose their patter, apparently. He also contradicted Tremonti in front of all the cameras once again underlining their disagreements.
It was not till yesterday, after the European markets had closed that he again called a press conference to say that some of the budget measures would be brought forward and that government and parliament would be open over August to work something out.
This was after the markets had battered Italy very seriously for a week, after the parti sociali had begged him to do something quickly, after ECB president, Jean-Claude Trichet had asked Italy to act , after the EU Economic and Monetary Commissioner Olli Rehn had done the same . The European institutions cannot bail out Italy and we all know that – if Italy fails, the whole euro is in trouble. Now the US ratings have been downgraded which will produce more pain. Next week will give us more surprises.
The man who sold himself as a man of action, a Milanese businessman who deals with facts, not hot air, has once again shown himself to have feet of clay. There are no easy solutions for Italy and if Berlusconi stepped down, there would be no rosy dawn – but it would a start in reducing at least one on Italy’s deficits.

All the President’s Powers

Power is like a liquid, sometimes erupting under pressure to cover all around it, sometimes seeping through cracks to find its own levels. The Italian President has no volcanic properties but when there is a vacuum he can and does fill it.
There has been much talk over the last ten days about Giorgio Napolitano increasing the role and importance of the president. Some say that he is overstepping his constitutional powers, others are grateful for a steady hand in the present storm. Either way, he has been much in evidence.
The recent austerity budget had a rough ride to Parliament; Tremonti wanted it tougher, Berlusconi and most of the cabinet wanted it much softer and threatened to fire Tremonti. The European Commission and the markets wanted some sign of life in Palazzo Chigi. It was at this point apparently, that Napolitano intervened first to make sure that the bill would make it through the cabinet into Parliament and then to ensure that the opposition would not obstruct it wheb it arrived. The result was the fastest budget in history – it was maybe too little, too late; on Monday the response was underwhelming, but since then the markets at least have stabilised. But whatever the mediumterm results, it was a smart piece of manoevering by the Quirinale. Nowhere in the constitution does it give the President budget powers but for a few days at least, he had taken over from the prime minister who was absent both physically and politically throughout.
Then in the middle of the week, he again took the political initiative when he gave the magistrature a severe rap on the knuckles. He told a group of newly appointed magistrates “to avoid conduct which creates undue confusion between roles and encourages the existing intolerable and sterile clash between politics and the magistrature”. For someone who is supposed to be a largely symbolic leader and head of the judiciary, these are strong words.
First of all condotta is stronger and more negatively marked than “conduct” and much more so than “behaviour”. Not so long ago, Italian schoolchildren were marked on “conduct” and there is a whiff of schoolmasterly disapproval behind the word. The phrase also presumes that magistrates are overstepping their roles and moving directly into politics and accepts that there is indeed a clash between “politics” and the judiciary. It is a “when did you stop beating you wife?” statement.
It also takes for granted that “politics” is something apart from the law and the judiciary. At least since Craxi in the Eighties, elected politicians have tried to argue that they are somehow apart from the rest of society with privileges and immunities due. When one of them has been investigated for alleged wrongdoing, they close ranks and defend “politics”. Berlusconi of course has taken this to paroxistic levels but even a magistrate and former speaker of the chamber, Luciano Violante has made the distinction between “legality” and “politics”, a point he repeated last week.
The President is the titular head of the judiciary; the not-so-veiled subtext of his speech was that prosecutors and judges should pull their punches in order to keep the country going. If they continue with their investigations, arrest warrants for parliamentarians, telephone taps, Napolitano implied, then there might be another corruption scandal as in 1992 and in the present economic climate, Italy cannot afford it. Even less than mediating the passage of the budget, the constitution certainly does not give the President the power to instruct judges and prosecutors not to apply the law.
It was a remarkable speech because any investor listening could only presume that there is more rot to be uncovered by investigaters and more institutional instability just below the surface making Italy even more unreliable than it looks.
The more partisan interpretation is that Napolitano was trying to defend his former party comrades some of whom are under investigation. This is unfair as, unfortunately Napolitano has long separated “moral questions” from political ones.
In any case, the following day after widespread criticism, he argued that he had just recommended magistrates not to do anything that might weaken their efforts to guarantee legality especially when dealing with politicians.
Normally Italian presidents, Napolitano included, sail high – well above the day to day scrummage of party politics. They open public works and talk about progress or go to schools and extoll the benefits of education. The only political negotiation that they are involved in is the formation of a new government but they are normally behind closed doors.
This time Napolitano has come out into the open, first to see the budget through Parliament and then to try and damp down the growing public insufferance for the whole political class. It is true that power fills vacuums and that there is a dire lack of leadership in Italy today, but if the decisionmaker of last resort becomes involved in day to day politics, he is likely to lose his prestige without even resolving the issues. And that would leave Italy even more dangerously uncovered and vulnerable to a more violent type of power.


Last blog on the president, 6 Feb. 2011 Of cabbages and kings

Prime ministerial succession in Italy and Britain

There’s talk of David Cameron having to step down and of course the chorus of calls for Silvio Berlusconi to resign is rising. So a little comparison of the two systems might be interesting.
Both countries have prime ministerial systems – that means that the head of government stays in power for as long as he or she has the confidence of Parliament. If they lose that confidence, either in an explicit vote or because they lose the support of their party or their coalition, then they will normally give their resignation to Queen or President. The latter then follows a clear procedure to find a successor which sometimes takes a few days but has on occasions taken months. The former normally has a pre-chosen successor ready in waiting.
The Italian method is well tried and pretty straightforward, only as with many things in this country, it can take some time.
Despite the plethora of no confidence votes recently and despite the 57 governments since Italy became a republic, almost none of them fell after a vote. Normally, internal opposition made it known to the serving prime minister that he no longer had the support of the House (it was normally the Chamber of Deputies). He would then offer his resignation to the President who would follow the Constitution, consult with party leaders and former presidents, try and find a likely candidate to take over and give him a mandate to form a government. The negotiations sometimes took months. In the so-called First Republic, this process was even used after general elections. Since then, from 1994, the candidate for prime minister has been explicit but even then, sometimes it has taken time to form a government.
Today, there is a contradiction between the prime minister who was listed as the leader of a coalition (and therefore is in a sense an “elected” prime minister, or at least someone with a personal popular mandate) and the constitution which still gives supremacy to parliament. So Berlusconi argues that he is “anointed by the people” and that if he loses support (as he did in 1994), there should be new elections (which did not happen then). So if and when he goes, especially if it is soon, he will certainly demand new elections and almost certainly he will not get them. The most likely scenario is that Napolitano will follow the constitution, consult party leaders and, most likely, find a suitable non-party “technician” to lead a government of national unity. Alternatively, in theory at least, there could be a new centre-right leader with the same majority but somehow that does not seem likely.
In Britain, without a codified constitution, everything is much more flexible. Since World War II, six serving prime ministers have stood down: Churchill (1955), Eden (1957), Macmillan (1963), Wilson (1976), Thatcher (1990), Blair (2007). The first three were Tories who at the time had an informal consensus system of choosing leaders – the party grandees decided who was the best chap to run the show and he became leader. If they were in power, then he became prime minister. Any backbiting or infighting was kept well behind closed doors. Wilson was succeeded by James Callaghan in a vote by Labour MPs. Thatcher was ousted by her own party most of whom felt by 1989 that she was a liablity to their chances of winning the next election. It was a bitter and difficult series of campaigns in which Thatcher felt she had been betrayed by her party and said so very openly. Again as with the Labour party, it was the MPs who elected John Major as her successor and PM. Gordon Brown was elected leader of the Labour Party to replace Blair in what was in practice a non-contested election.
In all these cases, the party in power had a clear majority in the Commons so the leadership and the premiership went together. This is not the case today.
Today, if Cameron were to resign, the Conservatives would have to elect a new leader but he or she would not automatically become PM. For the first time since the war, Britain has a coalition and just as we were in uncharted waters last year when there was no majority, so there are no precedents today.
There have been some suggestions that “Nick Clegg must lead” and create a new Lib-Lab coalition with Ed Milliband’s Labour Party. That is a possibility but at the moment, not a very likely one. Another is that Clegg could take over the existing coalition but I can’t see many Tories accepting that. Or they could follow previous precedents which would mean a new Conservative leader taking over the party and Downing Street.
It will be new, it might be messy but paradoxically, despite the uncertainties, it will definitely be quicker and cleaner than the Italian succession whenever that takes place.
I’ll come back to the questions of the Italian succession very soon as it is a pressing problem.

The Economic Pain Grows in Italy

For those of us not versed in the dark arts of accounting or international finance, there is little more solid than money; I have it or I don’t, I can borrow it or lend it and measure it down to the last penny. But confidence is an altogether different commodity, far more abstract and difficult to gauge. This week, Italy is having to persuade us that the world should have confidence in the country.
This week Italy is trying to persuade us that the world should have confidence in both its political and financial stability. It will not be easy.
One index are the ratings agencies evaluation of a country’s creditworthiness and another is the divide beween Germany’s interest rates and the other eurozone rates. On both scores, confidence in Italy is declining day by day.
Until recently, Italy had avoided the worst of the world and European crises. There was no housing bubble as Italian banks demand copperbottomed collateral before they will lend the ordinary housebuyer a cent. There were almost no toxic assets as Italian banks are amazingly conservative in their investment policies. Once upon a time few Italian bankers spoke a word of English; today most of them speak the words and grammar but to their credit they don’t speak the language of the City or Wall Street or the innovative financial operators who filled the market with dubious products over the last decade.
Despite a declining economy, Italians still save and private saving is among the highest in Europe. It’s debt is the second highest in Europe at 120% but its budget deficit is not outrageous and is close to balanced when interest payments are taken out. Italy seemed condemned to a slow and fairly dignified relative decline, a bit like Venice in the 19th century.
But the workings of the financial markets are not slow and Berlusconi and his government are anything but dignified so Italy’s fate is rather different.
The problem is leadership. Silvio Berlusconi won elections not just because he owns half the country’s television stations (though that helps) but because he projects optimism. He has always been very careful not to deliver bad news himself and is highly critical of anyone in the opposition who suggests that all is not well economically. But for the last year, it has been a hard act to keep up; it is not because he is accused of having sex with under age prostitutes nor even that he is on trial for having set up slush funds or for paying English lawyer David Mills to perjure himself or for paying a judge to award him Italy’s biggest publisher in a takeover case. In any case his supporters either don’t believe the accusations or they don’t care even if they’re true.
His optimism falls flat because there are too many Italians underpaid, unemployed of underemployed; too many companies are either struggling or have already given up the ghost. In Italy, he is no longer credible and abroad, the EU, the ECB and the ratings agencies look at Italy’s debt and wonder where it will end.
Enter Giulio Tremonti. The economics minister has rarely been off centre stage, actually, but now he spends more time there than Berlusconi. He arrived, like a good portion of Berlusconi’s ministers and parliamentarians as a business associate, his principal accountant. But unlike the other ex-employees, Tremonti has never been a yes-man and has earned a reputation for solid if not hugely innovative policy. He left the cabinet over policy differences in the last Berlusconi government and for most of this legislature, he has been closer to Berlusconi’s coalition partner Umberto Bossi and has been making thinly veiled moves towards succession.
Over the last year, Tremonti has repeated that Italy needs to reduce its debt and that a major austerity package was inevitable. Berlusconi in contrast has been trying to deal with decling approval ratings and an increasingly divided coalition, quite apart from his court cases. Obviously he is less than enthusiastic about an austerity budget. He has to manoevre between the EU rock and the Tremonti hard place. He knows that if he fired Tremonti, internationl wrath would follow. Last month, Berlusconi said pointedly that cabinet decisions were collective and Tremonti could not dictate a budget and last week he accused Tremonti of “not being a team player”.
Tremonti himself does his best to make himself unpopular, calling a cabinet colleague “a cretin” in a stage whisper in front of an open mike during a press conference. He is alone in the government but has some support from business and the Church. If he was forced to resign, then he would be in a good position to put himself forward as an economically safe alternative to Berlusconi. His only problem at the moment, is the criminal investigation into one of his close staff at the ministry who was also hosting his boss in an €8,500 per month flat.
Beyond the personal and policy differences between the two men, there are big divisions between Berlusconi’s People of Freedom and Umberto Bossi’s Northern League. Berlusconi knows that he must reduce the deficit, Bossi is just concerned about how to stop the hæmorrage of votes and knows that austerity does not win elections.
This week parliament starts debating Tremonti’s €47 bn budget. It should have calmed markets but in the discussions, the main issues were lost. It is a fudged budget – first of all, most of the cuts will affect the next government: €2 bn this year, €5 bn in 2012, and €20 bn each in 2013 and 2014 – with elections due in April 2013 at the latest. Secondly, most of the cuts are regressive – higher health service charges, fixed, whatever your income; cuts on medium range pensions, and cuts on payments to local and regional authorities who provide much of Italy’s social security and health service.
There is no certainty that even these cuts will be implemented. There is the likelihood of government amendments “to improve the bill” said one spokesman, reducing the pain – Tremonti has said that anything is possible but overall savings must stay the same. There is even the possibility of re-introducing a clause which would save Berlusconi’s Fininvest company €570m. The figure was awarded to Carlo De Benedetti as civil damages. In 1991 Berlusconi’s lawyers had bribed a judge to give him rather than De Benedetti the country’s biggest publisher, Mondadori. The criminal case against Berlusconi was dropped because of the statute of limitations but others were convicted. The civil case recognises Berlusconi as responsible.
The original draft budget had a clause which would have delayed payment until the third and final level of judgement. It was yet another blatant example of Berlusconi’s conflict of interests and was removed after an outcry and the preventive interventation of the President of the Republic. Now there are suggestions that it might be re-introduced. Neither Moody’s nor the ECB, nor, one presumes Chancellor Merkel who called Berlusconi on Monday 11th July had this in mind when they pressed for an austerity budget.
So there are many obstacles before even this budget passes and if it is not implemented, then the confidence problem remains.
If the budget passes more or less in its present form, on the other hand, then confidence will remain fragile but intact. If Tremonti is forced to go, if the Northern League decides they are better off in opposition, if parliamentarians worried about having to face an electorate, reduce the cuts, then that confidence will break and the future would be very bleak for Italy and for Europe too.
However bad the Greek crisis is, the Greek economy is tiny. Italy is the third biggest economy in the eurozone with a massive debt that it has difficulty servicing. The only answer would be radical changes in the economy and in order to do that, there would have to be radical changes in politics, not just in the present leadership, that goes without saying, but in most of the discredited political class.
Every generation since the beginning of the 20th century, Italy has reinvented its politics, usually under pressure from outside forces, the world wars, 1968 and the end of the cold war. The time is ripe for change and the financial crisis might just be the stimulus Italy needs.

This was published in The Daily Telegraph on 12 July.
A week later, after the austerity budget has become law - it was rushed through Parliament on Thursday and Friday and President Napolitano signed it into law on Friday evening; already Italians are paying more for their health service - things look even worse. The markets have so far not shown confidence in Italy and the discontent at the perks and privileges of the political class are growing

Rumour and recriminations in Rome

Governments and financial markets are run by hardheaded men and a few women who deal with facts, like Mr. Gradgrind… they evaluate the data and don’t let emotions get in the way of their pursuit of power and profit, right? Well, no, not exactly. The markets yo-yo at every half-truth and successful politicians must control the image before the facts. Rumor is a much better metre than Gradgrind’s “facts”: I, from the orient to the drooping west, 
Making the wind my post-horse, still unfold 
The acts commenced on this ball of earth. 
Upon my tongues continual slanders ride, 
The which in every language I pronounce, 
Stuffing the ears of men with false reports.

And if some of them are true, no matter, they will give credence to the false ones. Still, Shakespeare’s references to reports in many languages flying from east to west on the wind ring true today.

Italy’s crisis is nowhere near as dramatic as Henry VI’s nor as bloody but like the Wars of the Roses, it has some striking actors. Like Rumor, Italy’s crisis is fuelled by reports in Greek, in Portuguese and Spanish, and in English. Italy’s Gradgrind “facts” are bad, but hardly worse today than they were a year or two or three ago. Italy’s ability to repay its debts is no less either. But if everyone, the markets, think that it is weaker, then it is. And if the government is unable to lead, then the crisis becomes real. Here the rivalry between the Prime Minister and the Economy Minister is crucial, a rivaly which is personal and policy-driven.

Center stage at the moment, and enjoying every minute, is Giulio Tremonti, Minister of the Economy and Finance and this week at least, savior of the Italian economy and possibly the euro too. There has been almost a year of grumbling in the center-right coalition. Tremonti has been calling for spending cuts and prime minister Silvio Berlusconi and the rest of the government wanting to spend their way back into better approval ratings.

On Thursday, he presented his budget to the Senate. The Prime Minister’s seat next to his was conspicuously empty and Tremonti was happy in the limelight with a speech full of his trademark sarcasm and I’m-cleverer-than-you remarks ending with the warning that “if we don’t act now, then we will be like the Titanic and even the first class passengers suffered”. Curiously he pronounced the word “titanich” as if it were Yugoslav partisan. Maybe he needs that kind of ruthlessness. In any case the simile was apt as many more first class passengers survived than second class or steerage and his budget hits the middle and poorer classes heavily. Corriere della Sera, hardly a diehard anti-Berlusconi rag, reckoned that families would be paying €1,000 more in the coming year.

Health service charges have gone up, tax deductions are down. Government payments to cities and regions (the equivalent of US states) are cut which means that their social services will be reduced or local taxes will be increased. Taxes on fuel prices went up 6 cents a litre last week with gasoline at €1.60 per litre and diesel at €1.50.

But there was no obstruction from the opposition; the bill passed without debate in both houses with each party just declaring how they would vote and why. The opposition found itself in a corner; if they had tried to stop the measure, then the speculators would have continued, the spread between Italian and German government bonds would have continued to widen and the crisis would have moved into catastrophe mode. And the opposition would have been blamed. Instead, they accepted President Napolitano’s council and allowed the budget through in two days.

Tremonti recognised their support in what was a genuine expression of gratitude. He concluded, though, in his more normal supercillious vein with a clear stab at Berlusconi. He quoted Livy “Hic manebimus optime” literally translated as “we will stay here very nicely”. Actually, he was saying “don’t think you can fire me because I have the support of President Napolitano and if you try, then the rating agencies, the ECB, EU and above the speculators will shaft Italy”. It was another salvo in the longrunning war between Berlusconi and Tremonti.

A month ago, Tremonti put forward his plans for a serious austerity budget only to have Berlusconi tell the world that “Tremonti does not run the show. Cabinet decisions are taken collectively”. The proposal that appeared last week was a pale copy of the original; €47 bn saving but only €2 this year and €5bn next. €20 bn for 2013 after the elections and another €20bn in 2014. It also included a clause which would have delayed payments of damages in civil cases; happen that a verdict was expected in which the defendant was Berlusconi’s Fininvest. This was blatantly pro-Berlusconi measure and Tremonti denied any hand it it. In any case Napolitano made his disapproval very clear and the clause was removed. But to make Berlusconi pique even more explicit, he gave an interview in which he said that Tremonti was not “a team player”

Tremonti is not only under attack from his boss. One of his close advisors in the Ministry, Marco Milanese is under investigation for corruption. He is alleged to have taken payments in return for positions and contracts from the ministry as well as having a highly extravagant lifestyle. He apparently turned down the offer of an Aston Martin because it was “second hand” and took a Ferrari instead. He relived a film about “Christmas in New York”, same hotel and same film stars (Cristian De Sica and Sabrina Ferrilli). Worst of all for Tremonti, he paid €8,500 a month for the appartment that Tremonti occupied for the last year, echoing another Berlusconi minister who was forced to resign when it was discovered that his house was paid for by someone else “without the minister’s knowledge”.

Milanese is also alleged to have been carrying out Tremonti’s duties without any official delegation of authority and to have been rather too close to the minister. The mudslinging has not begun yet.

On the prime minister’s side there is plenty of mud which has already been slung and plenty more waiting in his various trials but apart from the personal scandals, he is politically weaker than ever. Local elections and referendums in May dealt him serious blows and his approval ratings are below 25%. This last week he made no public appearances, avoided the Senate debate and arrived late for the Chamber vote without speaking. The hero of the hour is Napolitano. The Italian president is a largely symbolic figure like Queen Elizabeth but he has residual authority which he uses when the normal executive is lacking. It was his mediation which took the budget through Parliament and Berlusconi felt left out (and was).

He has also never liked giving bad news and he also feels that Tremonti’s success is somehow his failure. And then the civil damages verdict which he was so afraid of was published awarding another rival €560m, a hefty sum even for Finivest. It was not a good week for Berlusconi.

Paradoxically, the weakness of the two men means that neither can trump the other, at least in the short term. If they tried, then the sharks from the financial markets would rush in the results would be disasterous not just for Italy but the whole of Europe. So for the moment, they are the odd couple who have to put up with each other though the clouds on the horizon are not far away.

The budget had no immediate measure to cut the costs of politics. Italian parliamentarians are the highest paid in Europe and they have very generous pensions afterwards. On Monday, Italians will be paying more for their health service and pension increases will be stopped for many and yet cuts in deputies’ perks will only take effect after the next elections.

Italians’ unhappiness about politicians’ greed is growing; it hasn’t reached the point of violence as we’ve seen in Greece but as the cuts begin to be felt, there is bound to be some reaction.

There is the drama of the big players in Italy which makes for good theatre but the country’s discontent is very real and needs no Rumor to propagate it.

This was published in Foreign Policy on 15 July

Budget bombshell

As I wrote on Sunday, the final text of the budget bill had not been sent to President Napolitano so we didn’t know some of the details.
Yesterday the bill was finally published and the reason for Tremonti’s modesty was made clear. Once again and in a blatantly gross way, Berlusconi is using the government to protect his personal interests.
Hidden in the folds of the bill are a couple of apparently innocuous additions to the Civil Code. On page 105 (out of 117), Art. 37, clause 22, subsection b suspends payment of damages in civil cases after the appeal judgement when the sum is more than €20m. It just happens that in a few days time, there will be the verdict in the civil action between Carlo De Benedetti and Berlusconi. In the court of first instance, the judge awarded De Benedetti €750m. The appeal judgement is expected to reduce this to around €500m. The sneak clause, if passed would suspend payment of damages until the third and last level of appeal (which only deals with questions of law); it would save Berlusconi half a billion euros for a few years at least.
However deeply buried, the clause has not stayed hidden for long. The storm broke this morning with ministers falling over themselves to say they knew nothing about the clause. Starting with Tremonti himself who apparently knew nothing about it; he cancelled a press conference this morning allegedly because of a thunderstorm but no one believes that. Berlusconi’s lawyer, Niccolò Ghedini has said he did not write it and foreign minister Frattini who often acts as Berlusconi’s spokesmen has also denied knowledge.
The Northern League ministers have also said they knew nothing about the clause.
Senior magistrates have suggested that the clause might well be unconstitutional
Even moderate Catholic papers like the bishops’ Avvenire have condemned the move (along with the more leftwing Famiglia Cristiana).
The bone of contention is that after Berlusconi’s Fininvest paid judges in order to allow them to take over De Benedetti’s Mondadori (Italy’s biggest publisher) 20 years ago and after criminal convictions, De Benedetti sought damages and won. The civil case is the result of crimes which have already been dealt with.
Unless the government withdraws the bill, the next move has to be Napolitano’s, a hot potato that he presumably would rather not have on his desk.
The episode shows an arrogance which is exceptional even for one not known for his modesty. Either he thinks that he can hoodwink ministers, allies and the rest of Italy or he is so desperate that he doesn’t care. Either way, it’s not a pretty picture.

The Real Robin Hood

Mel Brooks’ 2000 year old man explained it perfectly “Robin stole from everyone and kept everything”. It was Marty, the press agent who put out the story “he took from the rich and gave to the poor” to all the papers. “Who knew? He give you such a knock on the head that you wouldn’t remember anything anyway”.
Economics minister Giulio Tremonti is trying to emulate that version, but he doesn’t have Marty and he has not been able to knock us out before the act.
When he presented his budget to Cabinet on Thursday, the detailed measures were shrouded in mystery, or rather, they were simply fudged. First of all, €40bn of the €47 bn plan will have to be carried out by the next government in 2013 and 2014. And then it was not clear where the €20 bn p.a. cuts were going to come from.
Now we have a better picture. Pensions between €1,428 and €2,380 gross (per month) will only have 45% of their cost-of-living increase. Above €2,380, there will be no increase at all. With a large and rapidly increasing older population, these cuts hit former wage earners (tendentially centre-left) more than self-employed (tendentially centre-right) but they will affect all social classes and voters enough to worry both the Northern League and the People of Freedom.
Another massive part of the budget comes from increased health service charges. At the moment they are talking of €10 extra for tests and specialist consultation and €25 for emergency services, not so much for Americans but a lot for Italians, especially poorer ones. According to a Rome University of Tor Vergata study,it would mean €10 bn cuts to health service translating into €500 extra per family per year .
Other estimates are equally dire. One study suggested the budget would cost everyone €741 this year; another that spending power would be reduced by €927 per family.
Local authorities are due to lose €9.3 bn cuts which will mean higher local taxes. And the proposal allows the government to gradually increase VAT over the next four years .
Outside the budget is an extra 6 cents on petrol and diesel supposedly to go to culture and to cover “extra” costs of immigration. According to a consumer group, this will cost everyone an extra €488 just this year.
So much for “stealing from everyone”. But he, or they, all the Merrie Men, keep it all for themselves. There is none of the “we’re all in this together”; on the contrary, most politicians think they earn their salaries and their generours perks.
Raising taxes at the moment is hardly unique to Italy but the increasing awareness of the excesses of the political class (known as the Caste after the 2007 bestseller La Casta) makes increased taxes doubly unacceptable. Wages and subsidies to national politicians will be reduced (tho’ one League politician had the nerve to say that municipal representatives were underpaid) but only after the next elections. Large official cars will also be abolished (with a limit of 1600 cc for all except the top people) but only when the present cars are ready to be written off. Not surprisingly, critical media delight in showing David Cameron on his bike followed by footage of an ordinary Italian minister in his large bullet-proofed car followed by a motorcade.
Italian members of parliament are the highest paid in Europe and the best that Tremonti can do is to propose a committee to discuss how to bring salaries into line with the bigger European countries. In contrast to pension reductions for the rest of the country, he has said that for politicians, “rights which have been acquired” cannot be removed. It is clear that for the moment, Berlusconi considers his followers’ loyalty much more important than his electoral support in the country. But many of those followers, especially in the League are already worrying about being re-elected so they will have to give the voters something and it’ll have to be more than Robin Hood’s press agent Marty.
In any case, we still do not have a clear picture even of what the government would like the budget to be – so much so that President Napolitano issued a communiqué today pointing out that he still has not received the bill. As ever, when there is uncertainty, speculators dive in and the ratings agencies worry. They still maintain that there is a 1 in 3 chance of lowering Italy’s ratings over the next two years.
I will try and deal with the costs of politics this week, if the rubbish in Naples and anti-high speed train wars in Piedmont don’t take over.

Much Ado About Nothing or Very, Very Little: Katharsis is Greek, not Italian.

The Greeks have a word for it and they seem to be in the middle of practicing it. Catharsis is the dramatic liberating moment of a tragedy which allows the survivors to pick themselves up and start again. But that does not happen in Italy.
Last week we were supposed to have one of those moments, a verifica or reckoning with the truth between the government coalition allies (which passed with hardly a murmur) and today we have economics minister Giulio Tremonti’s much-heralded budget package being presented to the Cabinet. There have been plenty of leaks so we don’t know exactly how it will look (and obviously, even less what it will look like when it’s been through the Parliamentary wringer). It is at least partially a response to the EU’s demand that Italy balance its budget by 2014.
According to what we do know about it (and if there are dramatic changes, I will do an update this evening), its subtitle could be “never do today what can be put off till tomorrow”. In a €47 bn measure, less than €2 bn will be cut this year, €5 bn next year and €20 bn each in 2013 and 2014. Guess what? Elections are due in 2013. So if the plan is passed in approximately its present form, it will only start hurting when a new government is in place. If ever there was a poisoned chalice…
Tremonti promised swingeing cuts but in the name of “collegiality” and less subtly, under threat of the sack, he has produced budget which tickles rather than slashes, at least for the first two years.
Most of the measures are gentle and designed to hurt unidentified, indirect or small and unpopular categories. In the first group are those who will not replace civil servants who retire (only police and firemen will be replaced), tho’ those remaining will certainly know that they have more work to do. In the second, are cuts to the regions and municipalities so that they rather than national government will look bad as they cut services (and more than half of them are centre-left anyway). And in the third is a proposal for a financial transaction tax, higher taxes on SUVs and some cuts in payments to politicians (there is a rising tide of disgust at how much politicians milk the taxpayers; this might just be the fuel for the next revolution).
There is the usual claim that tax evasion will be reduced; VAT will be reorganised and Tremonti hopes to bring in some money with a flat rate payment to resolve disagreements between taxpayers and the revenue, a sort of mini-amnesty. Distinctly unpopular is the plan to increase health service charges but with a nod to the Northern League, there will be no fines for exceeding milk quotas and with another to an important Berlusconi support group, women’s pensionable age will not start being raised to 65 until 2020 to be completed in 2034.
The opposition have called it a joke and a time bomb which they will have to defuse. Antonio Di Pietro has put forward his own alternative budget which might even get a look in rather than be mere rhetoric as yesterday the government lost two important divisions in the Chamber showing that they are even more divided than ever. But the opposition is hardly more united or clear in what path to take. Umberto Bossi has not guaranteed the Northern League’s support so the tension continues there.
It is the very weakness of the government that holds it together. Both League and PdL know that they would lose heavily in early elections; for all his vaunted fiscal courage and rigour, Tremonti is not prepared to resign yet and Berlusconi cannot fire him without incurring the wrath of the EU and the markets both of which see Tremonti as the only barrier preventing a Greek meltdown.
At the end of the day – today but also all the days between now and the passage of the bill – it is Europe and the markets which matter. The spread between German and Italian bonds is growing so if Italy really does go down the Greek road, it would be a disaster not just for Italy but for the euro and European institutions.
Catharsis is still to come.

The constraints of Italian politics. The big picture.

This is going to be a busy and challenging week for the government. An undersecretary declared very publicly on Sunday that Tremonti’s proposed budget should be examined by a psychiatrist. Then one of Tremonti’s closest advisors resigned because he is under investigation; the tension between Bossi and Berlusconi continues and yesterday saw the confrontation between police and anti-high speed train protesters in the north. The Naples rubbish crisis stinks on, with much buckpassing.
I will deal with all these issues when there is a clearer picture, Thursday, maybe, when the budget goes before the Cabinet. Instead, I want to take a much, much broader look at Italian politics
A group of Dutch journalism students visited recently. They were doing a master class on Italian politics and the media and I was asked to start the course off with an introduction to Italian politics. Since then, I’ve done similar talks for American politics and media students from Northeastern in Boston and Minnesota.
It presents a certain challenge. In 30-45 minutes, I try to give an overview of this country’s political system – something that can be quite an effort even with a whole semester to play with. The aim is to identify the most important constraints on Italian politics starting with the distant ones which have conditioned the country since unification or before and ending with today’s limits. It might help us as we start on what is going to be a very fraught and probably dramatic next few weeks and months.
First the factors which have conditioned Italian life and politics since unification (and long before, for that matter). The social ones can be grouped together as uncertainty, indecisiveness and the need for constant negotiation, lack of clear responsibility and lack of respect for rules. The traits are visible and tangible every time one takes to the road. Traffic regulations are a relative concept up for negotiation at almost every intersection not to mention building regulations, ministerial responsibilities and rules and of course laws. When Berlusconi complains that he can’t get anything done because of procedural difficulties, he only partially dishonest. Even for the prime minister, it is difficult to find out who is really in charge; for the rest of us, it is a life’s work.
Connected to these traits are two institutional constants which condition the country. The first is the presence of the Roman Catholic Church as both a spiritual and temporal entity. Since the 1929 Concordat, it is able to play on three different tables according to its specific needs and aims; as a sovereign state distinct from Italian society, as a major political player in Italian civil society and as moral and ethical leader. This gives the Church an influence even greater than in traditionally Catholic countries like Poland or Ireland.
The second constant is the difference between north and south; the so-called Southern Question. It is something more than the economic and cultural differences that any country has, deeper and more long lasting.
It is not that the Church and the south have created a culture of continuous negotiation, uncertainty and lack of respect for secular authority but it would take a long and controversial piece of sociological research to determine which was the chicken and which the egg. The most apt metaphor that I have found is the observation of a 16th C Venetian ambassador to Paris who said that the “disorder was like ivy which had taken over and destroyed a wall but by now was actually holding it up”.
More recent and more political constraints start with the 1948 constitution designed very carefully not to give too much power to the executive – they had had quite enough with Mussolini. This also gave the system its key tone – it was based a founding myth of the partisan war in which all were antifascist from the Monarchists on the right to the Communists on the left. It was true enough and did create a unity which covered the very real divisions created by the Cold War when the Iron Curtain not only divided Europe but came down in the middle of the Italian Constituent Assembly
It was a consociational system in which almost all decisions were taken collectively and resources were divided in strict proportion to each party’s electoral strength. The first was given the name of partitocrazia, literally “party power” or a system run by the parties. There were few outstanding leaders and most elements of civil society were linked to a party. This went from top public managers (who were “close to” this or that party) to children’s socialisation so that kids would play table football in the parish or the Communist Party’s section depending on their parents’ inclinations. Chief executives at all levels of government (city, region and national) were not chosen by the people who voted for the party which then decided who was going to be mayor, regional president or prime minister and who could and often did change between one election and the next. The second, spoilsharing system was called lottizzazione, literally dividing up into lots on a building site. The pork was shared according to voter share and went once again, from top public executives, the Southern Development Fund, IRI, the state holding company, ENI, the state hydrocarbons company, down to clerks and streetcleaners in the smallest municipality.
At first Socialists and Communists were excluded from the system at a national level but the first joined the system in the early ’60 and outdid the original members and by the late ‘70s the Communists too became junior partners and part of the establishment. Their presence as the biggest leftwing party created another factor in what came to be called “the First Republic”. Obviously, it was a geopolitical impossibility for a Communist Party to be part of a NATO government which meant that all coalitions excluded the PCI. It was dubbed bipartitismo imperfetto by political scientist, Giorgio Galli, “the imperfect two-party system”.
Finally, it was a very centralised system despite attempts from the ‘70s onward to devolve power to the regions.
It came to an end when the end of the cold war coincided with the need to stop deficit spending in order to bring Italy into the future common European currency. The massive corruption of the ‘80s created a runaway debt which had to be stopped and the fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of the Soviet Union meant that the by now politically moderate Communists could recycle themselves as social democrats without links to the defunct Soviet Union.
So the “Second Republic” was born. It had the same constitution but a change in the electoral systems meant that the chief executive candidate at the national, regional and city levels was known and usually served the full mandate. The buzzword was “governability” which meant having a chief executive who was responsible to his or her electors. In practice it is close to a majoritarian democracy where power alternates between left and right. And of course it has focussed attention on the leaders, above all Silvio Berlusconi who “came onto the field” in his own words, in 1994 to fill a vacuum on the centre-right.
Given Berlusconi’s massive wealth and control of both the electronic media and publicity, it is a system with an institutionalised conflict of interest, a dangerous legacy for the future. Berlusconi’s other legacy is the power of television – videocracy, a social change even more than a political one.
The corridor negotiations of the partitocrazia have very partially given way to an increased role of institutional mediators like the Constitutional Court and the President but the Court still plays a marginal role compared to the US, say. The worst institutional conflict is between the judiciary and the executive/legislature, usually referred to as la legalità contro la politica, surprising as in most other countries “politics” accepts “legality” or the rule of law. The most vociferous proponent of this theory is of course Berlusconi, but the centre-left does not like to be examined too closely either.
Finally, there are a couple of structural changes in Italy over the last two decades. One is immigration; Italy now has 4.3m legal immigrants or 7.2% of the population. It is a multi-racial society more and more like the rest of western Europe and with all the richness and tensions that this brings.
It is also, and this brings us back to Thursday’s special budget, an economy which had grown less than the rest of Europe for 20 years now. The 2008 crisis and today’s Greek crisis have not actually changed the Italian economy but they have brought matters to a head so that action is now unavoidable.
There is a good chance that these economic issues will close this phase of Italian politics – sooner rather than later.

Pontida and the Northern League – Riding Two Horses in the Circus

“Long live freedom, long live an independent Padania!”
Not for nothing the self-declared “Celts” of the Northern League worship Braveheart as one of their heroes. But Mel Gibson/William Wallace cries “freedom!” a moment before execution; after his rendering yesterday at the Northern League’s annual rally at Pontida, Roberto Maroni went back to his day job of being a minister of the Republic of Italy. Incongruous to say the least to demand independence from the government that you’re part of.
The Scottish Labour politician, James Maxton said famously that “if you can’t ride two horses at the same time, you shouldn’t be in the circus”. Umberto Bossi and the League have put on the same show for 20 years so they should be good at it but in the latest Pontida rally the contradictions were just too visible. The two horses haven’t changed but they have moved a long way apart.
The whole point of the Pontida show is like most political conventions and congresses; it should energise the base and show them that the League is still a revolutionary movement fighting for the good of the common, straight-talking (northern) people against thieving, plotting, dishonest Roman, southern and establishment interests. Hence Maroni’s call for independence (and calls to Bossi from the crowd for “secession”. Maroni also attacked the war in Libya, NATO which was “able to stop ships entering Libya but not the refugees leaving” and the magistrates who are “more concerned about immigrants than our own people” and a government which does not help the northerners who do the real work in the country.
In a very short speech, he took on NATO, the Church (at the same time as Pope Benedict was exhorting the faithful in San Marino to look after the less well off, and the outgoing archbishop of Milan, Cardinal Tettamanzi made solidarity to immigrants part of his mission), the judiciary, the EU and at least part of the government, specifically on fiscal policy; his was an appeal to those in the crowd waving “Maroni Premier” placards. There is nothing like having enemies to unite one’s own people; but when you’ve stopped attacking the “enemies” and insulting them it is then much more difficult to work with them and deal with real issues. That is what Maroni does when he is riding his other horse.
He has been Minister of the Interior since May 2008 and for eight months in 1994 (and deputy prime minister at the same time), for five full years he was Minister of Labour (2001-06). He and three other League Cabinet ministers, voted extra status to Rome and supported the intervention in Libya. “Consistency”, “resign” and “collective cabinet responsibility” are obviously not part of Maroni’s or the League’s vocabulary.
In contrast, Bossi speech was quintessentially reasonable. It was if Bossi and Maroni had exchanged roles. He laid down a series of conditions for the League’s continuing support of the government, mostly vague like passing resolutions in cabinet rather than actually implementing reforms. Ilvo Diamanti, who has studied the League for more than 20 years and knows it better than most wrote with surprise this morning that far from the usual plaintalking Bossi, he used language redolent of a past era. He sounded like a Christian Democrat to the point of being like the most obscure of them, Aldo Moro, who needed a soothsayer to interpret the arcane messages.
Bossi’s speech has kept Berlusconi and the PdL happy for the moment. They are not going to pull the plug… yet. Maroni’s speech was ignored by most of the media and both the PdL and left for what it was, a speech for the faithful and his first campaign speech as possible successor to Bossi.
The problem is that the League’s grassroots are not happy. Some 55% of League voters are dissatisfied with the Government’s performance and many of them showed their displeasure in the recent local elections and the referendums.
Both Bossi and Maroni know that if they left the government today, they would be seriously punished by their electorate. They cannot leave until they have something to show to their own people for the last three years in government. Hence the demands.
Four ministries should be moved to Milan and Monza – not necessarily a wise move as other parts of the north will complain that they have been left out. It is in any case not going to happen for practical reasons as well as the massive opposition from the South and Rome. Bossi wants a new economic stability pact to give local authorities greater spending power, a constitutional amendment reducing the number of parliamentarians and making the senate a “chamber of the regions” (an idea which has been floating around for almost two decades and which no one opposes strongly), reduction of the costs of politics (everyone in favour as long as it doesn’t affect my budget). These are all vague enough for Bossi and the other League leaders to decide when and how they will leave.
So once again, a possible cathartic moment has passed (predictably, by the way). There will be another one on Thursday when the Chamber discusses Tremonti fiscal package. But it won’t be over “until the fat lady sings…” I’m sorry, until the short man in make-up finally leaves.
Until then, both Bossi and Maroni will have to go on riding their two horses.

Bloomsday and Berlusconi – James Joyce on Italian Politics

Yesterday was Bloomsday, the day when Leopold Bloom journeyed round Dublin, himself, his wife and just about everything else. And not only the then known world, Joyce had a clear eye for the future, it seems.
One of the rituals of Bloomsday is to read a portion of Ulysses with friends – we had the following passage which struck me as germane to present goings on in Italy.
Leopold is pondering a book that Molly is reading:

He turned over the smudged pages. Ruby: the Pride of the Ring. Hello. Illustration. Fierce Italian with carriagewhip. Must be Ruby pride of on the floor naked. Sheet kindly lent. The monster Maffei desisted and flung his victim from him with an oath. Cruelty behind it all. Doped animals. Trapeze at Hengler’s. Had to look the other way. Mob gaping. Break your neck and we’ll break our sides. Families of them.

Berlusconi’s parties have not yet revealed any sado-masochistic pastimes, but a circus they certainly are as is the rest of the political scene. The double meaning of “ring” is something that B himself would appreciate but rather more crudely, and the “doped animals” are, I suppose, the longsuffering Italian electorate who are part of the spectacle tho’ there are strong signs of an awakening. There are plenty of illustrations on the cellphones of the girls who take part in the parties and you can take your pick of who plays the “fierce Italian with the carriagewhip” or the “monster Maffei”. Another performer in the circus is “Leo ferox, the Libyan maneater”, surely a reference to B’s erstwhile friend Qaddafi.
Elsewhere, B makes another appearance at the head of a delegation of The Friends of the Emerald Isle

“Commendatore Bacibaci Beninobenone (the semiparalysed doyen of the party who had to be assisted to his seat by the aid of a powerful steam crane”

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Even on 16 June, it seems we can’t avoid him. A more serious blog this evening and then a comment on those other (self-styled) Celts, Bossi and the Northern League on Sunday.

The Nuclear Option

Before polls closed this morning, Prime Minister Berlusconi admitted to the visiting Bibi Netanyahu that Italy’s nuclear energy programme was over and that he should concentrate on renewables. There is another nuclear option available, though, but not to Berlusconi; if his essential ally, Umberto Bossi decides to withdraw the Northern League’s support at their annual rally at Pontida on Sunday, the effect would be the same as a bomb on the government. For the moment, one of their ministers, Roberto Calderoli said that they’ll use Pontida to tell Berlusconi what they want from the government for the 22 June vote of confidence.
The League has been increasingly unhappy with their position in the government and over the last few days their leaders have been trying to ride grassroots discontent. There are real issue differences which have nothing to do with Berlusconi personally. The most important is the disagreement with Tremonti over his economic austerity programme which the League reckons is far too stringent. Until recently, it looked as if Tremonti was the darling of the League but at the moment, the shine is off. Then there is the war in Libya which the League was always unhappy about and despite the almost daily declarations that “Qaddaffi’s time is up”, the war, its cost in money and in immigrants and refugees continues to mount up. Finally it is the perceived lack of control on irregular migrants that the League complains about.
Then there is the implicit but never voiced criticism of Berlusconi himself as he appears to be less and less in control of the situation, so Bossi and the League want to distance themselves.
Berlusconi’s admission to the Israeli prime minister was the admission of what he hopes is a tactical defeat in order to avoid the total defeat of a collapsed government. He still has a majority in Parliament but it is clear that he does not have one in the country.
For the last two days, Italians voted four referendums. The holy grail was a quorum of 50%+1 of the electorate. In the event, all four had a turnout of over 57% in Italy which is enough to guarantee the quorum even if residents abroad are included. All four have a majority of well over 90% which means that more than half of the total electorate supported the repeal of the four laws. More than the substance of the laws, most of them were making a clear statement of their distaste for the Prime Minister. Once again, for the third time in a month, Berlusconi backed a loser.
In Milan he stood as a councillor to prove that the Milanese supported him against the Milan court: his vote was halved compared to 2006 and his mayoral candidate had to face a run-off. After a bitter and racist campaign, she then went on to lose the run off as did his candidate in Naples. This time for the referendums, he feigned indifference and said he was not going to vote because the referendums were irrelevant, hoping that a combination of opposition and apathy would win the day for the noes.
Instead a large number of Italians made the effort to go out and vote despite the call of the beaches in late spring. Some pollsters reckoned that as many as 6-7% voted precisely because Berlusconi wanted them not to, much the same as happened 20 years ago when his friend Bettino Craxi told Italians to “go to the seaside”. They did, but they voted first and soon threw out Craxi.
This time, they repealed two laws which encourage the privatisation of water supply, an important measure but not in itself vital. They repealed the law which sought to re-start Italy’s nuclear energy programme which means that it will be another decade or two before an government can restart another programme and finally, the bellwether question, they abolished the prime minister’s and ministers’ possibility of not turning up to their trials because of a “legitimate impediment”. The law had a twilight clause on it and was due to terminate in October and in any case the Constitutional Court had given most of the control back to the court sitting in judgment. The effects on Berlusconi’s trials will be minimal but the political effect is very clear. Most Italians do not like their prime minister avoiding judgment.
Of course Berlusconi could step down, but that is not his style. It is very clear that the centre-right is in a serious mess and that they have no exit strategy. With a one-man party, there is no mechanism to find a new leader and no obvious substitute. Two of his apparently most faithful courtiers, the undersecretary Daniela Santanché and businessman, Flavio Briatore, were caught in a leaked telephone conversation admitting that he was ill, had not changed his lifestyle (and continued with his bunga-bunga parties, only in a different villa) and showed little concern for the country. “If people like that think he’s cooked… what about the rest of us?” was a widespread feeling.
So Bossi keeps his nuclear option ready.
For the moment, at any rate, Berlusconi “staggers on like the mummy” said one friend, and he is looking increasingly like one too.

Referendum update 2

It’s been a bad week for Berlusconi.

On Monday Bill Emmot in The Times said “the Italian Prime Minister is a political vegetable — one that’s riddled with E. coli” and predicted his imminent political demise. Then Ariel Levy produced an elegant eleven page description of Berlusconi sleaze in The New Yorker “Basta bunga bunga”. And now The Economist has produced yet another devastating dossier, this time by John Prideaux. The paper edition was “delayed for inspection” for a few hours at Rome airport on Friday

But the worst could yet be to come.

The last polls suggested that the 50% turnout was right in the middle of their range of uncertainty . Bersani confirmed the presumption in his final rally and Berlusconi’s own pronouncements give the same impression. A fortnight ago, he repeated that even if he lost Milan, it would make no difference to the government. His own polls were warning him of an impending disaster. He is doing the same now and one of his most loyal courtiers, Vittorio Feltri, now back as editor of the Berlusconi family paper Il Giornale wrote an explicit editorial today. “It would take a majority in Parliament to bring down the government”, not a defeat on the referendums.

True enough; but if Bossi and the Northern League decide that Berlusconi is a liability, then the government will lose its majority.

Despite protestations to the contrary from both sides, today’s vote is blatantly political – a single referendum on Berlusconi, not four on water, nuclear energy and “legitimate impediment” (the most explicitly anti-Berlusconi referendum). If they pass, it will be a blow against Berlusconi but once again, not a lethal one. Next week Bossi and the League have their annual get-together at Pontida (site of the supposed oath of the Lombards against Barbarossa in 1167) and he will certainly talk about the future of the government but is unlikely to blow it up then. After all, the League lost in the recent elections.

Losing the referendums would take us another step towards the end of the Berlusconi government and probable early elections.

It is far from certain that he will lose them. There is no doubt that the yes vote (to repeal all four laws) will win, but if there is no quorum (50%+1 of the electorate), the vote has no effect. There are two crucial figures 25,297,435 and 23, 678,940. If more than the first figure vote, there will be no doubt; the laws are repealed and Berlusconi suffers. Less than the second and nothing happens. The difference between the two figures are the 3.2m Italians resident abroad. They have the vote so they should be included in the total electorate; but there have been so many mistakes in letting them know, delivering their ballot papers, receiving completed votes, that the pro-referendum committees have already promised appeals if turnout is between 23.6 and 25.3 million and some have been already lodged. There will be work for lawyers and the Court of Cassation and probably the Constitutional Court. We will know soon after 15.00 tomorrow and the Court of Cassation has promised a verdict for Thursday 16 June.

In the meantime, Pierluigi Bersani of the Democratic Party encouraged his supporters to vote early knowing that if early turnout figures are good, it will encourage waverers to go. At 12.00 today, some 11% had already voted, a good figure, comparable to the last time a referendum reached a quorum in 1995.

Berlusconi and most of his cabinet have said they will not vote, hardly surprisingly. The centre-right mayor of Rome will vote and will the League’s president of the Veneto, Luca Zaia. A number of senior Italian churchmen like the archbishop of Turin have declared in favour of public ownership of water supplies and from the Vatican, Cardinal Turkson, head of Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace says instead that water is a common good, should be public.

More tomorrow.

European, Christian, Catholic, Orthodox Values. Pope Benedict in Croatia, Lady Gaga in Rome.

This is an explosive week for the Vatican and Brussels even if neither are normally given to incendiary behaviour. The Pope visited Croatia last weekend and as in the past was less than subtle in his admonitions. He hoped that Croatia would soon complete its EU accession process because the country is after all “at the centre of Europe, Mitteleuropa, not the Balkans” a phrase which was no doubt music to his listeners’ ears but not to the other countries of ex-Yugoslavia. Having said that Croatia deserved Europe, then turned to denigrate Europe as being a centralised bureaucracy and home to “abstract rationalism” which Croatia might soften with its accession.
The two faces of “Europe” Van Rompuy and Ashton do precious little to defend “European values” and in any case it’s probably wise not to pick a fight with the Pope but there is no little irony in dismissing those European values in favour of Christianity, especially from south east Europe.
Christianity is, I think, the only major world religion that explicitly separates church and state with Christ’s response “Render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s and to God what is God’s”, a remark much fought over with words and weapons in western Europe’s middle ages as the popes took on more and more temporal power.
The Protestant Reformation and subsequent wars of religion then laid the bases for modern democracy as we know it. In the 16th century the English fought each other at least partially over religion and half of Europe spent 30 years also fighting at least partially over religion. At the end, implicitly and then explicitly they began to develop the concept of religious toleration. We have to learn to agree to disagree, they reckoned, otherwise we will continue slaughtering each other.
The Enlightenment in France, Scotland, England followed, consolidating tolerance of ideas and behaviour unthinkable under absolutist monarchs and above all absolutist religions which believed they had the monopoly of truth. They created a pluralism which is the basis of what we mean by democracy and “European values”.
Both before his election and since, Benedict has railed against the “relativism” of secular values, the very relativism that allows for religious freedom; he and his predecessor have made it very clear that other Christian denominations, Jews and Muslims are at best misguided and that the Church of Rome still has the only truth even if it is prepared to go on peace marches to Assisi with everyone.
For all its ineptitude in trying to stop the Yugoslav wars, the European institutions took some action – as I mentioned a couple of weeks ago, the Vatican did nothing even to stop the killing by Catholic Croats in the early ‘90s. Some 800 years ago Venice pressganged a crusading army into besieging the Dalmatian town of Zadar instead of attacking the infidels. Innocent III ordered them not to do it and when they ignored him excommunicated the crusaders and ordered Venice to compensate the Zadar survivors.
More recently, in World War II, Italians were again mistreating Slavs, this time in the concentration camp on the Dalmatian island of Rab. Slovenian and Croatian bishops told the Vatican which intervened on the Fascist government and conditions improved.
Three times in the 20th century there was terrible bloodletting among the south Slavs but instead of using this visit to try and overcome some of that rancour, Benedict visited the tomb of Aloysius Stepinac, the controversial Croatian prelate beatified in 1999. Stepinac was the primate of Croatia during the murderous Croatian fascist Ustaše regime of Ante Pavelić. He described Stepinac as “a defender of life and of the right of man to live with God” .
I found a chilling quote of Stepinac’s eulogising Pavelić and his Ustaše regime “The times are such that it is no longer the tongue which speaks but the blood, through its mysterious union with the earth, in which we have glimpsed the light of God. We are convinced and expect, that the Church in the resurrected state of Croatia will be able to proclaim in complete freedom the uncontestable principles of eternal truth and justice” . This was after Pavelic had issued decrees discriminating against Jews and Serbs.
The Ustaše set up Jasenovac, the extermination camp which was so brutal that Pavelic’s Nazi allies asked him to be more humane. The victims were Serbs, Jews and Roma. This week, there were complaints by holocaust survivors’ associations and the Serbian Church made it clear that it would probably not invite the Pope for the 1,700th anniversary of the Edict of Milan in 2013, the Emperor Constantine’s decree which proclaimed religious toleration in the Roman empire.
It is a different sort of toleration which is being celebrated in Rome tomorrow, but one which is just as much part of Europe’s “abstract rationalism” and “centralised bureaucracy” that Benedict complains about. Lady Gaga is due to close this year’s Europride being held in Rome. Apparently the US ambassador, David Thorn added his weight and indirectly, President Obama’s to support the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender (LGBT) movement to persuade the Queen of Transgression to appear. Two million spectators are expected for the free concert.
Apart from the music and high camp, there is a letter from LGBT Christians addressed to the Pope asking him to speak out against violence to them, and to deny the biblical injunctions against non-conventional sex. They will also ask him to remove the epithet of “sick” and “needing medical treatment” for homosexuals. In Croatia, the Pope reiterated his belief that marriage (implicitly, religious and Roman Catholic) was the only basis for a family and that living together was not acceptable. A few years ago, the Church was able to block an Italian bill allowing civil unions while the number of religious marriages continues to fall and children born to non-married partners continues to rise.
Rome and Brussels continue to battle over values but this week Rome also has Lady Gaga and not just Joseph Ratzinger. This contrast enhances the best “European (and American) values”, not the “rational abstract” one but the human ones that touch the real lives of real people.