Berlusconi contra mundum

There are many serious issues facing Italy at the moment and I hope that sooner or later I will be able to comment on them – the role of immigrants in Italian society and their integration, the concerns of employers and unions on how to move the economy forward, Italy’s lack of influence in international relations even in areas where there are serious interests. All worthy topics, but once again, it is the Prime Minister who screams for attention and gives cause for grave concern.
This week, the Political Science Association holds its annual conference in London and the coordinater of the Italian politics group, Jim Newell has invited a three of us to either discuss new papers or re-evaluate older papers analysing Berlusconi’s legacy “Italian politics. Quo vadis?” Indeed; I wish we knew. For my part, I am revising the paper I gave in Washington last September. Although much has happened in terms of tactical moves, the underlying analysis remains the same; Berlusconi and his ideas and methods are even more firmly entrenched and Italian democracy though resisting, is seriously under attack and has already been damaged.
Last week, the Chamber of Deputies passed a bill which would reduce the time before the statute of limitations stops criminal proceedings against defendants without a criminal record. It was hotly contested with the opposition mounting a filibuster and demonstrations outside the Chamber. Berlusconi has admitted that it would shorten the time limit on one of his trials. He was referring to the charge that he bribed the English lawyer David Mills to perjure himself. Mills has already been convicted but the sentence was quashed on a technicality. Over the few days, Berlusconi has been particularly outspoken in his criticism of all who oppose him, especially the magistrature.
These speeches are the opening shots in the local election campaign where a good part of Italy will vote on 15 May but even the usual campaign hyperbole, Berlusconi combattivity and vitriol is exceptional.
First, though, it was the judge in a civil case who was attacked. “Armed robbery” is how the Prime Minister described the €750m. damages payable by his Fininvest to CIR. Berlusconi’s lawyer (and sometime minister of defence), Cesare Previti was found guilty of corrupting a judge to annul an agreement which had awarded Italy’s biggest publisher, Mondadori to the CIR in 1991. Instead, because of the corruption, Mondadori was acquired by Fininvest which 20 years later will have to pay damages.
The same day, he also attacked the European Union and in particular, France and Germany, for not helping Italy with the flow of economic migrants from Tunisia “If we can’t reach a common point of view, it’s better to split”. Italy is not about to leave the EU but eurosceptic rhetoric is not limited to the UK or Denmark.
He was even less tender with Italy’s constitution which is where the real danger lies; the day before, he told students at La Sapienza University in Rome “to have a real democracy, we need to change the constitutional structure” he was very clear in what he meant and why the constitution should be changed “because the government has no decisionmaking power but at most can only make a proposal to Parliament. This goes to Parliamentary committees and then to the whole Parliament and finally the Head of State must like it… a law which is a thoroughbred when it leaves Cabinet becomes a hippopotamus by the end… and if some leftwing judges don’t like it, they can cite it before the Constitutional Court which since it is made up of a majority of leftwing judges, overturn it. So to have a real democracy, we must change the Constitution and reform the present institutional architecture”.
On Saturday, he repeated the speech to a

PdL party get-together organised by tourism minister, Michela Vittoria Brambilla (pictured with him) to rapturous applause. This time he went a stage further and called the still unnamed “left wing judges” “subversive”. This came after his supporters had put up posters shouting “Get the Red Brigades out of the Milan courts” following on from Berlusconi’s remarks that the prosecution in his trials were terrorists.
The posters and the remarks were particularly grotesque a the Red Brigades killed judges and prosecutors in the ‘70s and ‘80s. Even the most conservative and potentially pro-Berlusconi judge bridles at hearing his murdered colleagues compared to the terrorists who killed them.
But it is the broader picture which is the most disturbing. This is a man who says explicitly that an elected leader should not be controlled by other powers. Montesquieu and Madison might be turning in their graves but it is today’s Italians who have to deal with the erosion of the separation of powers.
Berlusconi has already passed laws to give himself immunity from prosecution and no doubt will pass others – do deal with his underage prostitution case and the slush funds cases. Already he has proposed limiting the use of telephone taps and he has the numbers in Parliament to do so.
But worse than Berlusconi’s personal measures is the underlying sense that much of the opposition actually agrees with him. According to US ambassador Ronald Spogli in a WikiLeak published 24 Dec 2010, the president of the Democratic Party (PD), the principal opposition party, Massimo D’Alema said in 3 July 2008 that “the magistrature is the greatest threat to the Italian state” referring to the publication of telephone taps.
The PD secretary, Pier Luigi Bersani has just published an interview book in which he says “We have a government that does not respect the separation of powers, and in the last few years, a number of magistrates have also not respected that separation… politics should regain the authority to tell magistrates that they should rigorously respect the boundaries of their field of responsibility”.
So we have a prime minister who calls the judiciary “subversive” and conducts political rallies against them outside the court where he is being tried, a situation which is unprecedented in western democracies. And worse, part of the opposition that disapproves of the tone, but actually rather likes some of the substance.

All the prime minister’s trials

For the first time in almost 8 years Silvio Berlusconi appeared in a Milan court this morning. It had little to do with the law and a lot to do with political theatre. After years of shunning the courts, he has decided that the best defence is attack and attack on his own terms, not the court’s. Until now, he appeared in the dock as little as possible; now he has said that he will dedicate Mondays to court appearances. Monday (or even Saturday) mattinées were never like the Berlusconi show. The few formalities in court this morning were completely overshadowed by the performances before and after.
The morning began with Mattino Cinque a morning chatshow on Berlusconi’s Mediaset flagship channel Canale 5. It was hosted by Maurizio Belpietro employed by Berlusconi on the television show but also as editor of the strongly pro-Berlusconi paper Libero and previously editor of the Berlusconi family owned Il Giornale. The prime minister gave one of his well-honed speeches, one he has used a dozen times before. It was a peroration for the defence and of course without cross-examination but with a jury of millions listening. He has been “persecuted” and not prosecuted; “thousands” of magistrates have spent years trying to convict him in “25 prosecutions” but he has always been given a full acquittal; all of them, he maintains began after he went into politics. The charges against him are “ridiculous”.
As ever, Berlusconi was being flexible with the truth or just plain lying; he has had clashes with the law since 1979 and above all when he said that he has always been acquitted. On some occasions, charges were dropped because of the statute of limitations; on others, because the law was changed (by Berlusconi). He has been convicted at the court of first instance and then either acquitted or charges were dropped. But as on many other occasions, he swore on the heads of his children and grandchildren that he was innocent and that was the message he has succeeded in getting across to millions of Italians.
Then as he went into court and after the formalities, he was greeted by a claque of fans. On his way out, he stood on his car’s step and waved to them

. No rock star or sportsman could have done it better.
All this razamatazz will not change the prosecutor’s or judges’ minds but it does make a big difference. Ten days ago he introduced his “epochmaking” reform of the justice system – a reform which will go nowhere but last week one of his deputies introduced a tiny amendment to a bill in committee which if it becomes law, will reduce the statute of limitations for 65 year olds with a criminal record. It’s a pensioners’ get out of gaol free card; just what Mr. B needs.
In front of all this spin, the actual charges are almost irrelevant. Today’s trial, due to continue next week on 4 April, accuses Berlusconi of inflating payments for the rights of American television series in order to siphon off part into slush funds. The actions he is accused of allegedly took place up until 2009 so for this at least, the statute of limitations is still a long way off.
His criminal trials actually began again last week after the long hiatus due to his immunity laws. There are another three; three, apart from the Mediatrade case, have been running for some time and involve corruption of one form or another. In the fourth he is accused of having sex with an under age prostitute and for abuse of power – the so-called Ruby case. That will come to court next week on 6 April, the second anniversary of the L’Aquila earthquake and given the subject matter will have far more coverage than the others whether Berlusconi graces the court with his presence or not. In the meantime, there have already been revelations about Ruby and her friends which would make Leporello blush. He said that Don Giovanni had had 640 amours in Italy, but none was subpoenaed unlike Berlusconi’s who might well give flesh to Leporello famous “il catalogo è questo”.
On 11 April, another embezzlement and fraud trial known as Mediaset, comes to court. Berlusconi missed the first hearing in February but has said that he will attend next month.
The prime minister will be busy quite apart from what is happening in Libya.

Italy at 150

There is an essential incongruency seeing prelates celebrating an anti-clerical movement led mainly by Masons. Or of proven republicans celebrating the proclamation of a new kingdom. Or of the left celebrating an elitist movement in which in 1861, only 1.8% of the population were enfranchised. But anniversaries are all about symbols and today’s politics and not very much about real history. In 1989, there were wonderful photographs of that well-known trio of revolutionary sans culottes, Margaret Thatcher, François Mitterand and Helmut Kohl celebrating the 200th anniversary of the fall of the Bastille. And for the handful of French royalists or the people of the Vendée, 14 July is hardly an auspicious day; strictly speaking, for loyalists or slaves, 4 July was not a declaration of independence either. Both, though, are taken as symbols of the nation and national unity.
The difference between them and Italy is of course that in the last 200 plus years, both the US and France have been through enough to make them into single countries. They have their founding myths, half truths and full truths which all but a few diehards can live with and actually buy into.
As today’s anniversary makes clear, Italy is not like that. On 17 March 1861, the new Italian Parliament proclaimed Victor Emmanuel II

of Piedmont Sardinia as king of a newly united kingdom of Italy. It was the culmination of a movement which was far from all-embracing. It was mostly middle and upper middle class with the occasional participation of peasants who saw Garibaldi as some sort of messiah. Some were young romantics who really did believe in freedom and the nation. Many of them had fought for the Roman Republic back in ’49 for a constitution and freedom from foreign rule or influence.
As I write, sitting on the Janiculum, President Napolitano and other national dignitaries are half a mile away celebrating Garibaldi and his defence of the Janiculum and the whole city of Rome against French troops fighting to re-install Pope Pius IX as temporal ruler. Even this produces its contradictions; the Irish ambassador to the Holy See (whose residence round the corner was seriously damaged in the 1849 siege) recently had to politely decline invitations to some of the festivities pointing out that the events of 1848-9 were revolutions against the government to which he is accredited. The Pope today compliments Italy on its anniversary and compliments Roman Catholicism for being the glue which holds the country together; many of his predecessors worked hard and successfully to prevent Italian unification and from 1870 to 1929 the papacy did not recognise the new state.
On the other side, today centre-left politicians appear on television wearing a tricolour rosette; on Saturday there was demonstration with the left defending the constitution against Berlusconi’s justice reforms and many of them literally wrapped themselves in the flag.
There are other reasons beyond the initial contradictions, though, that the foundation of the Italian state is not celebrated like 4 or 14 July. The local identities were strong in the middle ages and are still strong today; they are made up of language, food and art and a very strong sense of belonging. Most of the pre-unification Italian states lasted more than 150 years and many of them demand respect not just for their art and food but their political institutions too.
Then there are the wars which in most countries unite the population either in conquest or defence. Italy has had none which genuinely had the support of most of the population. Indeed the first war that Italy fought was a civil war against the so-called brigands of the south and even today, many Sicilians talk about “the Piedmontese” rather than Italians – for them it was a northern conquest not unification. The Italian colonial wars were expensive in both blood and treasure and yielded little glory and and less income. The first world war was opposed by a majority of the population and cost thousands of lives and the very identity of the country; its result in both the government’s and public mind was “a mutilated victory”. Mussolini’s wars were no better and were strongly opposed by the anti-fascists. Perhaps if he had stopped with the conquest of Ethiopia, not only might he have survived but Italy might have been united around “King and Emperor”. Instead he went into Spain and then, worse, world war two, disasterous and the end not only for him and the kingdom of Italy itself but devastating for the country. The partisan war did indeed unite part of the country and became the elaborate founding myth of the Republic but even that is now considered “a civil war” and not only a war of liberation.
Wars did not unite Italy – but peace has, along with prosperity and social mobility. This and immigration mean that local identity is waning in favour of an Italian identity.
While there are separatist movements in other parts of Europe, paradoxically, the anti-unification rhetoric in Italy seems to underline the national identity. In the past it was the south that put on a show of non-Italian-ness. Sicily had its separatist movement, the heirs of the 1860s “brigands” on the mainland. One of them even wanted Sicily to become the 49th state of the US. Today it is the north with Umberto Bossi’s Northern League posturing rather than shooting like the post-war Sicilian or South Tyrol separatists. Their regional councillors in Lombardy ostentatiously went to the bar when the national anthem was played and their parliamentarians are not attending today’s joint session of Parliament… but their ministers are still in the government. The provincial government of South Tyrol (Alto Adige in Italian) declared they had nothing to celebrate as they were annexed by Italy in 1919 while Sardinian separatists also snubbed the celebrations – this is ironic as the Savoy family title of “king” first applied to Sardinia.
So today’s celebrations are anything but triumphalistic, quite rightly so but it is surprising quite how much interest and support there is for the idea of Italy. There is a surprise and relief that it has lasted 150 years. Despite the rain, thousands have turned out for today’s events and the tricolour is not just flying on public buildings. Most Italians spend their time criticising their country so a celebration once every 50 years or whenever Italy wins the World Cup is surely in order.
And a happy St. Patrick's day too…

For more history on the subject, see my piece, Italian Unification, 150 years on in this week’s issue of Wanted in Rome.
On 8 and 9 April The American University of Rome is hosting an international conference on “Italy at 150”. Scholars from Europe and North America will discuss the consequence of unification for art and music as well as politics and economics. Click on a detailed programme, or call +39 06 5833 0919 ext. 323.

The Libyan mire

Whatever happens in Libya over the next few days and weeks will have more impact on Italy than any other country apart from Libya itself. And yet there is a deafening silence in Italy about what should be done there. In the US there is a furious debate over whether America should intervene or not and if so, how. It cuts across party lines and covers politics, ethics and commercial interests. President Sarkozy weighed in with France’s recognition of the provisional government. This has once again put the Elysée among the world’s foreign policy leaders. David Cameron has supported Sarkozy’s calls for airstrikes if Qaddafi attacks civilians while Chancellor Merkel has said that she is “fundamentally sceptical” about military intervention.
Here in Italy, there is almost nothing. Obviously the papers lead with the Japanese earthquake and tidal wave but not only from the Japanese angle. What has happened there is used for or against Italy renewed commitment to nuclear energy. A good deal of space is devoted to the anniversary of Italian unification on Thursday and then there is still a fair amount of coverage of Berlusconi’s trials and his proposed reform of the administration of justice. Libya is very low on both the media agenda and the government’s.
The foreign minister, Franco Frattini put Italy’s position in a letter to Corriere della Sera on Saturday. He said that “Italy had no uncertainties” and wanted to clear any “doubts and uncertainties”. He did this by saying that if others (the EU, the UN, the Arab League) led, Italy would follow. It was a very firm maybe; reiterated today at the meeting of G8 foreign ministers where he called for “an immediate ceasefire in Libya”; at the moment it is more likely to snow in Benghazi than for Qaddafi’s troops to stop fighting.
The Prime Minister has been even less pro-active. He spoke to Qaddafi on 22 February, then to Obama, Cameron, Ban Ki Moon and finally van Rompuy on 1 March when he also gave an interview to the Roman daily Il Messaggero. Since then, nothing on the prime minister’s site and only occasional remarks to the press.
This sort of low and non-committal profile would be unsurprising for a country far away and with few links and interests in Libya. But Italy is not Costa Rica, say, or Latvia. This is the former colonial power which governed Libya for 30 years fighting a long and bloody war there and establishing cultural and commercial ties. Italy relies, relied on Libya for almost a quarter of its oil and a tenth of its gas. There are huge investments by Libya in Italy from banks to football clubs and vice versa in oil and civil engineering. If there is a major humanitarian crisis in Libya with thousands of refugees, Italy will bear the brunt of it. On top of the national political and economic interests, the Qaddafi’s personal link Berlusconi was stronger than with any other head of state or government. The footage of Berlusconi kissing Qaddafi’s hand has gone

the rounds and was vaunted by Qaddafi himself.
As Franco Venturini pointed out in Corriere della Sera for the former colonial power to keep such a low profile and follow the stream is neither good for Italy’s image or its interests. Italy is a major economic power and has a well-earned reputation for both military, peacekeeping and humanitarian initiatives abroad so should be doing rather more.
In the distant (Fascist) past, Italy’s aggressive foreign policy actions were disastrous and partly as a reaction, during the Cold War, the country kept a low profile sheltering under the American umbrella. But since 1989, Italy has developed a more active foreign policy in keeping with the post-Cold War world and its own status.
Today’s silence is not only unbecoming, it is against Italy’s own interests and a renunciation of responsibility. No one expects Italy to take unilateral action, but to have a position like the French, the British and the Germans is not too much to ask. Or at least to debate the issue.
And it is not only the government that is absent; opposition leader Pierluigi Bersani mentioned Libya a week ago, but only to criticise Berlusconi’s links to Qaddafi. The other centre-left leaders have been similarly reticent. The centrist Pierferdinando Casini has been more forceful suggesting today that the EU should act now. But there is no debate similar to Kerry and McCain advocating intervention against Gates and Rumsfeld wanting to hold back. Nor have the papers been any clearer. Apart from Venturini’s piece there has been very little either in favour or against intervention.
My own position is that Italy and the rest of the EU should be prepared to act militarily – aggressively if necessary; the “no fly zone” is a fictional “non-aggression” policy. But only if and when there is imminent danger of a humanitarian disaster.
There should be four conditions met for justifiable intervention: it should be legal; it should be legitimate; it should be in the intervenors’ interest and it should be practical. Action in Libya will never be sanctioned by the UN but it could become legitimate if, or rather when, Qaddafi starts his reprisals. The Arab League’s demand for intervention also creates legitimacy which could be made even more visible by Arab military cooperation as in the 1991 Gulf War. Material interests are already present for Europe and neighbouring Arab countries. Finally, most defence analysts reckon that Qaddafi’s armed forces could be dealt with relatively easily by well-trained and equipped troops. It is clear that unlike Iraq or Afghanistan, the vast majority of the population would support intervention.
The nearest parallel is Kosovo in 1999 when all conditions were fulfilled except a UN resolution. Such an action would require the painstaking diplomacy that George H. W. Bush and other carried out in the lead-up to the Gulf War. In 1999, there was some ambiguity in Italy, but there was a debate. Today, the silence is deafening.

“Epochmaking reform”; Berlusconi against the judiciary

No one denies that the administration of justice in Italy is in a mess; the length of trials is measured against eternity with civil cases being handed down lovingly from parent to child like some sort of heirloom even though criminal liability is thankfully extinguished at death so that the sins of the fathers are not visited on the sons, at least not legally. The adage “justice delayed is justice denied” has no currency in Italian.
Over the last few decades there have been some reforms in procedure moving Italy a small way towards the English accusatorial system away from the continental inquisitorial form. But the hybrid has actually slowed down the trials.
So any reform that brought Italian justice up to scratch would indeed be “epochmaking”. And that is just what Berlusconi promised before he unveiled his new bill yesterday.
Berlusconi and his supporters have never made any secret for what they call the toghe rosse or “red robes”, red for the political colour, robes for the judges. And they have frequently called for them to be reined in. If the reform passes, it would create a massive shift in the balance of powers in Italy. Alessandro Sallusti, the editor of one of the Berlusconi family papers, Il Giornale, said the reform “would free the country from the magistrates’ dictatorship” calling the magistrates “untouchable” without a reform. Berlusconi himself proclaimed disturbingly that if this law had been in force 20 years ago there would have been no “clean hands” investigations. These were the Milan corruption trials of the early Nineties which in practice destroyed the parties which had been in government for the previous 45 years. What he wanted to say was that the judiciary overstepped its powers then and moved into the executive and legislature; instead, the message seemed to be that he wanted to cover up the corruption and that politicians should be above the law.
If we look at the bill, some of the proposals do not sound unreasonable to anyone used to common law systems. At the moment magistrates in Italy are a single group which includes judges and prosecutors. They enter a career path after a degree in law and competitive exams and normally have security until retirement. This means that a magistrate may be both judge on the bench and prosecutor at different moments in his or her career, a combination which would seem to contravene some of the principles of natural justice.
Other proposals which do not seem so scandalous to an English or American observer are the need to prioritise the types of crime which are prosecuted and the impossibility for the prosecution to appeal an not guilty verdict. Few Anglo-Saxon lawyers would argue that all alleged crimes have to be pursued; there simply are not enough resources. And no one who works in the common law system is surprised that the defence can appeal while the prosecution usually cannot. After all, the prosecution has to prove guilt “beyond reasonable doubt”.
In a more tranquil Italy, these points could be debated and the possibility of the separation of prosecution and the bench was included in a constitutional reform package in the ‘90s headed by Massimo D’Alema.
But Italy is not tranquil today and the Berlusconi proposals are clearly in bad faith.
The separation of bench and prosecution is meant not to create two separate but equal careers as the Minister of Justice Angelino Alfano maintains but to weaken the prosecution. Berlusconi made this clear when he said yesterday that “prosecutors should go the judges cap in hand”.
Berlusconi argues that his reform would level the playing field between defence and prosecution (and even presented a simplified diagram

so that we stupid people would understand). Instead, by removing the prosecution’s right to appeal a verdict, he would weight the scales heavily in favour of the defence. In the Italian system, the judge’s duty is establish the truth (inquisitorial) and not to act as impartial umpire as in the common law accusatorial system, so the two sides are actually equal.
Deciding which cases to prosecute would not be scandalous either – the Crown Prosecution Service does it in England except that the reform would give this prioritisation to Parliament, i.e. the majority. Should prosecutors investigate political corruption, vote buying, mafia and politics… or should they concentrate on street crime, burglaries, riots? Once again, the measure would move the centre of power closer to the executive.
Another punitive measure meant to clip the wings of overzealous prosecutors is to introduce personal civil liability for judges and prosecutors. Any professional mistakes that they might make would be actionable and the single magistrate would have to pay out his or her pocket (at the moment if a magistrate makes a mistake it is the state which pays).
Finally, the biggest giveaway is that the reform does nothing to change the dire state of civil cases. Delays in civil case are not only an injustice for the injured party but are one of the many brakes on economic development in Italy.
If the reform passed in more or less its present form, it would not save Berlusconi from his four prosecutions (today the Mills case had its first hearing since the Constitutional Court changed Berlusconi’s immunity) but would greatly reduce the power of the judiciary and the constitution’s separation of power. Even if it does not pass, it is a warning barrage against the magistrature and a very good diversionary tactic to take public awareness off the other problems that the government is not facing.
As a constitutional amendment, it will have to go through both houses of Parliament twice with at least three months between votes. With a maximum of two years before the next elections (and a high probability of early elections before then), the chances of the reform passing are very slim.
Instead, Berlusconi could offer to withdraw the overall Justice Reform in exchange for the re-introduction of parliamentary immunity from prosecution and/or the so-called processo breve or short trial in which every trial has a best by date stamped on it and if the verdict is not reached by that date it prosecution fails. This would let Berlusconi off all of his cases except his indictment for underage prostitution.
Tomorrow there will be demonstrations in 104 cities to “save the constitution”; their success will be a measure of how much Italians actually care about this reform. The magistrates have already expressed their opposition so once again there will be a major clash of institutions.

The usual questions…

This last week has been hectic for Italy-watchers with first a huge demo last Sunday which might, just might, mean the beginning of a change of direction in Italian society. Then on Tuesday there was Berlusconi’s indictment on charges of under age prostitution and abuse of power. The first hearing will be on 6 April but before then we will have hearings for his three other prosecutions (two for setting up slush funds: Mediaset on 28 February and Mediatrade on 5 March, both for fiscal fraud and embezzlement aimed at setting up the funds and one for corruption: the Mills case where the English lawyer, David Mills was paid to perjure himself. That is on 11 March).
Over the last few days, there has been the Berlusconi counterattack. His own media and his allies have accused the opposition of being nosey moralistic puritans unable to defeat him electorally (nothing new in this, but they have been particularly loud these days). His lawyers have threatened all the legal responses possible in order to delay the Ruby hearing and politically he has managed to pick off (Fini has explicitly accused him of buying them) another half a dozen opposition parliamentarians to consolidate his majority in both houses, and he has launched a series of drastic initiatives to curb both the ordinary judiciary and the Constitutional Court.
Meanwhile on the other side of the Mediterranean, his friend Muammar Gheddaffi seems to be in trouble but Berlusconi does not want to “bother” Gheddaffi except to worry about a possible flood of refugees which in any case has already started from Tunisia.
There has also been some pretty serious friendly fire in the reports by US diplomats published by WikiLeaks which confirm that Berlusconi is considered weak and malleable and a liability for Italy.
I will try and deal with all these issues over the next few days but for now, will answer some of the questions which have been put to me by foreigners who find it difficult to understand the country. They are mostly the same ones that we have all been asking ourselves for years but there are still no set answers.
Berlusconi's approval ratings have plummeted to 30 per cent, a survey showed on Monday. Does that mean the prime minister’s supporters have been split because of the scandal?

B’s approval ratings have been sliding for the last year mostly because of Italy’s economic woes and the perception that the government is not actually acting. Unemployment and the number of businesses failing have been rising; the recovery is very sluggish compared to the rest of Europe. These are the real reasons for Berlusconi’s declining popularity. His ratings have not “plummeted”, on the contrary, some surveys suggest that he might even have gained some support recently. A 14 Feb survey gave him a 32% approval rating down 2% from 7 Feb while another survey gave him as much as 50%; both were friendly surveys. Obviously there are some conservatives who like Berlusconi’s politics but not his lifestyle but all of those who speak, are vocal in not letting one weigh on the other. Those who do not speak are apparently a small proportion.
Nonetheless, it is worth remembering that even when Italians actually voted, it was a minority who actively supported Silvio Berlusconi’s party. The rest either voted for his allies (the Northern League), or they voted for the opposition or else they didn’t vote at all. The result of course is that he won the elections, but that is not the same as saying that most Italians support him. Today with only surveys to go on, that support has further waned but given the electoral system, he could well win again.
As for the accusations, criminal and moral, there has only been muted criticism from Cardinal Bagnasco, head of the Italian Bishops’ Conference. After a ceremony to commemorate the signing of the Lateran Pacts between Italy and the Vatican, Berlusconi said that relations with the Church were excellent as always, the cardinal responded saying that the meeting was a “symbolic and institutional” hardly a ringing endorsement.
Prime Minister Berlusconi has repeatedly shrugged off a string of accusations and scandals to win three elections since 1994. Could this time be his downfall?

Berlusconi has made it very clear that he has no intention of stepping down. On the contrary, while most of the international media has wondered when he is going to go, he himself has been attacking and proposing new measures. He has said he will not go until he is convicted and there is every reasons to think he will keep his word. Since there are three levels of judgement in Italian law, that could take some time. It is possible, and looking ever more likely that the Northern League will indeed insist on early elections but if that happens, there is no guarantee that Berlusconi would lose them. He still has enormous resources, financial and political combined with control of much of the media. He is still an expert campaigner and the opposition is still very divided. We should not hold our breath.
Why has the prime minister has remained popular for such a long time on Italian political stage? Could anybody replace him?

His popularity depends on the three reasons I’ve just listed plus of course the essential quality of any successful political leader, that he has to inspire his people, either by his own example “you too can be like me” or by his positive promises “I will make your lives better so that you can live your dreams” or by promises of protection from danger “I will save you from the left”. Berlusconi has done all three for most of the last 17 years in Italy. There is no one able to replace him using all three elements but there are some centre-right politicians lining up to try and give a less flamboyant voice to conservative Italy.

Beyond the bimbos

There are two dramas being played in Italy today. The first is Silvio Berlusconi’s personal and political story. It combines political power and sex, high finance and the media, organized crime and corruption; a heady mix by any standards and one which makes the characters from “Dallas” look tame. With the Roman settings and operatic staging, there have been times when it looked like Benny Hill was playing Scarpia but the reality has not been as comic. His indictment today is only the latest episode in the ongoing saga.
The other spectacle is not centered on one person but it affects the whole country. “Berlusconi-ism” is not just a way of conducting politics; he has profoundly changed Italian society and the change began long before he “came onto the field” as a politician in 1994 and will continue long after he leaves it. On Sunday more than a million people came out on the streets, not only of Italy but across the world from Aukland to Honolulou, via Geneva, London and New York and even including Maputo, Jakarta and Kathmandu. Their slogan was “If not now, when?” and was a call for Italian women to take back their dignity.
The first drama is drawing inexorably to a close but like grand opera, the finale will be a long time coming. In the meantime, we can be sure that there will be plenty of revelations about the prime minister’s lifestyle. The most immedate issue is whether the accusation that he paid for sex with a 17 year old and used his position to get her released when she was accused of theft. After today’s decision by the Milanese investigating magistrate, the case will have its first hearing on 6 April.
It is ironic that while Italians discuss whether their head of government is a victim of “moralistic puritans” a married American representative resigned after being caught trying to find a date on line. Berlusconi makes no secret of giving parties for up to 30 young women, some under 18, and a few, usually elderly male friends. Indeed one of his own family owned papers, Il Giornale, has just published photographs of one of the girls who calls him “Papi”, Noemi Letizia . She spent New Year’s Eve 2008-09 in his Sardinian villa when she was 17. Her friend who took the photographs was asked “Did the prime minister ever give you money?” “Money for sex? Never. Money for little presents, €2,000 or sometimes presents like necklaces or bracelets, the usual sorts of presents that an uncle gives a niece”. Nor does he deny knowing Karima el Mahroug (aka Ruby) or having phoned the Milan police station where she was being held to get her released. In contrast, representative Christopher Lee, stepped down after sending a possible date a picture of himself stripped to the waist. But Italy is different as we know.
Not only does a large proportion of the country accept their prime minister’s behavior, verbal as when he said that President Obama was “suntanned” (and called an American journalist an idiot when he suggested that the remark was offensive. Then repeated the remark) and in substance when he maintains control of much of the country’s media.
It is this control that has been used since the Ruby indictment loomed. Over the last few days, his media have started what looks like an organized campaign to defend the boss and attack his enemies. The Noemi photos are part of this campaign. Last week, Giuliano Ferrara, the editor of another Berlusconi family paper, the low circulation, opinion daily, Il Foglio, published a long interview with Berlusconi in which he accused the Milan prosecutors of carrying out “a moral coup” against him, acting illegally. He compared them to the Stasi and today’s Italy to East Germany. Ferrara was also allowed a six minute monologue on RAI’s Channel 1 prime time news program in which he attacked the main anti-Berlusconi media. RAI is Italy’s public broadcaster and Channel 1 is their flagship channel; the news editor, Augusto Minzolini has become famous for his opinion piecesd to camera in which he either praises Berlusconi or attacks the opposition. Last week, there was an interview with the prime minister without a single question about his trials.
It is hardly news that a political leader has meetings with his staff to plan his media strategies but what makes Berlusconi different is that the “staff” are editors of family owned newspapers or television channels covering more than half the population. Even some of the public broadcasters, like Minzolini, are part of the Berlusconi phalanx and it is a testimony to Italian independent thought that despite this overwhelming firepower, Berlusconi has been defeated twice in national elections. Still, it is not surprising that Freedom House has downgraded Italian media to “partly free” for the last two years.
It was Berlusconi brilliance at seeing media opportunities and taking them with the help of his political friends that put him where he is today and gave him much of his wealth. But it is also the mainly Berlusconi media which transformed Italy before he even “came onto the playing field”.
This transformation is most visible in the role that women have in Italy today. Sunday’s massive demonstrations are perhaps a sign that after 30 years something is changing.
In the late ‘60s and for most of the ‘70s, Italian society changed dramatically under both demographic and political pressure. As in the rest of Europe and the US before, 1968 brought millions of young people out on the streets demanding change.
For women, this meant divorce in 1970 (confirmed in a 1974 referendum), family law reform and the legalization of family planning both in 1975 and legal abortion in 1978 all of which gave women greater legal, financial and health security. The student protests and changing social climate gave women a dregree of real freedom an increasing voice in the work place and in the wider society.
But instead of moving to the near equality that women enjoy in the rest of western Europe and north America, in Italy the process stopped, or rather, was pushed off course. There are certainly underlying sociological reasons for this not least the influence of the Roman Catholic church but Berlusconi’s televisions certainly weighed heavily.
The liberalization of broadcasting in the late ’70 was the opportunity for Silvio Berlusconi to create an alternative to the very staid public broadcaster. His commercial stations pandered to consumers and created a world where fame was appearing on television. For women, that meant with few clothes on. The recent Swedish documentary “Videocracy” describes a world in which as a high school student put it in yesterday’s demonstration “the superficial became reality and everything was for sale”. Pretty scantily dressed girls became essential decoration for most television shows, to be seen but not heard.
Success through sex or being sexy is not unique to Italy but here it became the only way for most Italian women and the model for most girls.
Berlusconi and his channels were the prime propagators of the model and Berlusconi himself became the symbol as well as the main engine of the social change. And the glass ceiling is much thicker and tougher than elsewhere.
The story of Ruby is the quintessence of what the journalist Paolo Guzzanti, a disillusioned Berlusconi supporter, dubbed mignottocrazia or “tartocracy” but it is also paradoxically now the story of Italian women deciding that they have had enough and must start again where they or their mothers left off 30 years ago.

This is a different version of the piece which appeared in Foreign Policy this morning under the title Berlusconi's real woman problem

Clash of institutions

Italy’s image abroad reels under each revelation of Silvio Berlusconi’s private life – the sex, the parties, the favours and largesse and political jobs given to pretty young women. Berlusconi has become an instantly recognisable peg for comics across the world to hang their jokes on. At home the prime minister’s lifestyle leaves him open to blackmail not only by the girls who go to his parties and their friends but also his business and political partners interested in government affairs. But worse than either is Berlusconi’s attempt to subvert the constitution, to annihilate the power of the judiciary and concentrate power in the executive and this is what he is trying to do now. This is a clash of institutions which can be a serious threat to Italian democracy.
Today was supposed to see the Prime Minister demonstrating against the Milan public prosecutors. At least that was what we thought a fortnight ago when two of Berlusconi’s closest supporters issued a communiqué proclaiming a Saturday 12 February as a day of action of Berlusconi against the prosecutors. Then the editor of one of the Berlusconi papers, Giuliano Ferrara (pictured above with Berlusconi) called the communiqué “politically criminal” and the machine went into reverse.
Instead one of the two original proposers, demonstrated outside the Milan Palace of Justice yesterday and we did indeed have a demonstration today but led by Ferrara himself in defence of Berlusconi and against what Ferrara calls “puritan moralism”.
For a prime minister to lead a crowd of supporters against the judiciary would have been a dress rehearsal for a coup d’état. But to have one of his most faithful courtiers doing it instead is not very different, especially since Ferrara published an interview with Berlusconi yesterday in which Berlusconi declared “there is an anti-democratic plan to get rid of me without a vote. It is managed by spying prosecutors followed by a crowd of Jacobins. But I will not yield and there is a gentleman in the Quirinale”, he again accused prosecutors of making Italy into a Stasi-run DDR because of their use of phone intercepts. Yesterday at a press conference, he said that the prosecutors were subversive and acting illegally and that he will sue the state for damages.
Far from being either subversive or illegal, the Milan prosecutor’s office is investigating the episode in May last year when Berlusconi phoned a Milan police station in order to have a 17 year old girl accused of theft released immediately. It transpired that she had stayed at Berlusconi’s villa in Arcore and had had frequent contacts with him. Investigators made extensive use of telephone taps of the girls that go to Arcore and the organiser of the parties. This is why Berlusconi calls the prosecutors “spies” and compares them with East Germany. The prosecution believes they have enough evidence to indict Berlusconi for abuse of power (the call to the policeman to get the girl released) and paying for sex with a minor. They reckon that there is clear and sufficient evidence to use a fast-track prosecution procedure and sent their request to the investigating magistrate this week. She should decide next week.
If she accepts the request, Berlusconi will argue that the Milan court does not have jurisdiction and will certainly do his best to delay the case coming to court.
But in the meantime, the prime minister and his supporters are doing their best to delegitimise the judiciary. They are trying to spin his tussles with the law into a supposedly anti-democratic move by revolutionary (hence the use of “Jacobin” to describe them) prosecutors who are “using the courts to subvert the people’s democratic will”. He and his supporters do not countenance the possibility that there might be some substance to the accusations against him.
In actual fact, it is Berlusconi who once again is trying to undermine the democratic process.
Whatever definition one takes of democracy today, it is a system in which no single element predominates in society or the political system. The separation of power is scissors, stone and paper written into the constitution with the rule of law as important as the rule of the majority. That majority rule must in any case be tempered and limited by among many other things, respect for human rights and minorities. Another fundamental feature of democracy is that no one is above the law whether for sexual misdemeanours like Bill Clinton a decade ago or for crimes like president Moshe Katsav of Israel who stepped down after being accused of rape and who was convicted in December.
Not for the first time, Berlusconi presents his view of the prime minister as being uncontrollable either by the law or indeed parliament. If either try to do so, he becomes angry and impatient. Even more so when newspapers or television programmes criticise him.
He is not even prepared to be conditioned by a political party so that when Gianfranco Fini dared counter him, Fini was expelled.
The corollary of unbridled power is populism and Berlusconi is very good at it. Over the last few weeks, he has increasingly used direct appeals both to his people and the whole of Italy. There are shades of Big Brother in his strategy – Orwell’s rather than the softer, more recent one which is another symbol of Berlusconi’s times. The Leader is always liable to turn up on one’s screen either with a mellifluous message or an attack on his enemies.
A message broadcast on the party website is not so surprising but for a prime minister to call a live television chat show and insult the presenter “your presentation is disgusting, foul and repugnant and completely untrue… I know what I’m saying, you don’t… this is a television brothel” is rather more unusual in western democracies. A few days after this episode, the director general of the public broadcaster, the RAI called another presenter to “disassociate” himself from the broadcast, another example of a lack of division of roles.
When he does appear on television, it is only with well-housetrained interviewers and he is now planning a careful media counterattack as damage control for the Ruby case. Once again, a dominant position in the media is a serious limit on democracy and both Freedom House, The Economist and Reporters without borders all have Italy’s ratings declining since 2008. Freedom House puts Italy at 72nd out of 196 for press freedom; “partly free” for 2010; Reporters without Borders puts Italy at 49 out of 175.
So far from democracy being under attack from latterday Robespierres, it is once again, Silvio Berlusconi’s refusal to accept limits which threaten Italian institutions. For the moment, though, they are holding firm and by now there is also some popular movement as well. Tomorrow sees demonstrations across the country in favour of women’s dignity. I will describe that Italy in the next blog.

Of cabbages and kings

Italian politics today make Lewis Carroll’s world seem remarkably staid but The Walrus and the Carpenter is as good a place as any to start any voyage through the absurd. Italy does not have a king any more but it does have a president and this last week he was an important figure. The 84 year old Giorgio Napolitano might have thought that he would have just a ceremonial and elder statesman role when he was elected in 2006 but instead, he has been busy with real politics; especially now. On Friday, he refused to sign a decree law passed by Cabinet but not by Parliament. The first take was that this was a major constitutional clash; the second that it was just a minor procedural glitch. The reality is that was just another Berlusconi sortie in the guerrilla war to increase executive powers and reduce all the others.
One of my correspondents suggested a blog on the head of state and this seems the right cue.
The section of The Italian constitution that deals with the President (Part II, Title II, articles 83-91) is short and vague. It describes a mainly symbolic figure with few formal powers. In practice he is has residual powers and is another guarantor of the constitution. The present president has increased his approval ratings from 58.5% in 2008 to 62.1 in 2009 to just over 70% last year according to Eurispes; that compares to around 25% for the government and over 40% for the magistrature.
He is elected to a seven year mandate by both chambers of parliament plus representatives of the regions. So he does not have a popular mandate but is usually elected by a broad majority (not Napolitano, though, who was elected by a simple majority). He “represents national unity”, and is the commander in chief of the armed force though not surprisingly, none has done anything substantial even when Italian troops were engaged in combat actions. He is also presides over the judiciary’s self-governing body, the High Council of the Magistrature but only one president, Cossiga, really chaired meetings and that only briefly.
Much more important is his power to dissolve parliament, a weapon which Berlusconi has often said he would like to have in the prime minister’s armoury in order to keep wayward allies under control. So when the prime minister resigns, the president will normally try and find an alternative before calling early elections.
Also more than a purely formal power, ministers are appointed by the president on the prime minister’s recommendation, not his right. So in 1994, Scalfaro baulked at the idea that Cesare Previti could be Minister of Justice. Previti was Berlusconi’s lawyer who was later given a six year sentence for bribing judges.
Most important for every day politics is the president’s role as the notary for all legislation. Unlike presidential systems where the head of state is also head of government, the Italian president cannot object to a bill on its substance. The US president can and does veto bills because they are politically unacceptable; the Italian president cannot veto a bill but he can send it back to Parliament if he reckons that there is insufficient financial cover (the usual reason before 1994) or if he thinks the bill might be unconstitutional. Even then, he cannot stop a bill; if parliament were to re-present a bill, he would have to sign it and it would be the Constitutional Court which would decide. But this has never happened. Moral suasion and back channels are the more usual ways of dealing with disagreement.
Napolitano has returned government decree laws though. In 2009 he refused to sign a decree which would have obliged physicians to keep a young woman, Eluana Englaro, on life support against her will confirmed by the Court of Cassation. Since there was a bill before parliament, undiscussed, the President refused to sign because he said there was no urgency.
This week, a Parliamentary commission did not approve one of the decree laws regulating fiscal federalism. An extraordinary Cabinet meeting was called which issued the decree law. It was this decree that President Napolitano returned saying that he was unable to receive it because it had not been approved by Parliament. The substance does not change as the decree will be put to both Chambers and will be passed and Napolitano will sign it. But Berlusconi and his allies have admitted that they were out of order. It was another gesture which showed Berlusconi’s impatience with democratic procedure.
Much more serious are his outbursts against the judiciary; he does not actually say “off with his head” like Alice’s Queen of Hearts, but he thinks it gets very close to saying it in public. These last few days have seen him once again attack the judiciary which he says is guilty of “illegitimate interference” in his private life (today); “Italy is a republic controlled by the prosecutors … a judicial republic” (yesterday). A week ago, he suggested an anti-judge demonstration in Milan; there was a rapid withdrawal when one of his advisors pointed out that having the prime minister demonstrate against the courts was close to a coup d’état.
These are the cabbages (or cavoli in Italian, a euphemism for unpleasant stuff in general). Next week, there will be a big cabbage for the prime minister, the court that Berlusconi wanted to demonstrate against will almost certainly put him on trial for abuse of power and under age prostitution. If and when that happens, there will be major international comment accompanied by resignation and indignation on either side of the Italian divide.
All sides claim that they do not want early elections but they are all preparing for them. If there are any more glitches in the road to the Northern League’s fiscal federalism, it will be Bossi that calls time. So we are back to Alice – elections in a country where no one wants them, with a government brought down by the prime minister’s closest ally.
The problem, of course, is that Italy is not on the other side of the looking-glass, at least for those of us who live here. It is the real world where the laws of physics apply but most other laws are up for negotiation.

Municipal federalism

Many thanks to those of you who reminded me that Michelangelo’s David is not in the Uffizi but in the Accademia. The point remains, wherever the illustrious marble stands: who owns it? And who can use for good or ill? Now we are told that two days after the government tried to push their municipal federalism decree past President Napolitano, the Grand Canal belongs to the Italian state and not to the city of Venice. I’m not sure what that means in practice and apparently nor do the city authorities or central government but it does demonstrate some uncertainty about what “federalism” really means.

Two women

We’ve heard so much about Italian women being bimbos prepared to do anything to get a part in “Big Brother” or a job in politics that you might be forgiven for thinking that it’s the only truth. Unfortunately it is indeed true that a large number of Italian women think that sex is the best way to success, and not only the younger ones.
But it is far from being the only truth. Today, the left wing paper L’Unità (one of the two national dailies edited by a woman) organised a demonstration of women in Milan “to bring back some dignity to Italy”. On the other side of the political barrier, the right wing (ex-Alleanza Nazionale) paper, Il Secolo d’Italia, also edited by a woman has made the same appeal “to give dignity back to women” and to organise a demonstration on 13 February (to coincide with Berlusconi’s anti-judiciary demo).
As if to symbolise the other side of Italian women, in a remarkable coincidence, for the first time, the heads of the biggest employers’ association, the Confindustria and the biggest trade union, the General Confederation of Italian Workers (CGIL) are both women.
The first is Emma Marcegaglia, 45, from Mantua in Lombardy. Her father started a successful steel processing company in which both she and her brother became senior management. She went to the Bocconi in Milan and then took an MBA at NYU. In March 2008, she was elected President of Confindustria. She had been vice president under the two previous presidents resigning over political differences with one and completing her mandate with the second. Since taking up the high profile position she has shown that she is clearly an able woman despite being part of a family firm.
The Financial Times ranks her 29th in their list of fifty most powerful women in the world. Here in Italy, with an increasingly directionless government of the economy, the voice of employers becomes ever more important. Marcegaglia recently criticised the government for not having done anything for the economy in the last six months and gave an implicit nod to economics minister Giulio Tremonti taking over from Berlusconi.
The other woman at the top is Susanna Camusso, 55, who took over the leadership of the CGIL in November. Once upon a time she would have been Marcegaglia’s direct antagonist but given today’s climate, their interests are surprisingly parallel. She explicitly endorsed Marcegaglia’s remarks on the government’s lack of action. Camusso is also a Lombard, from Milan and almost as a mirror image of Marcegaglia, spent most of her career in the metalworkers section of the union.
The CGIL has been the strongest opponent of Fiat’s reorganisation plans and in particular, the metalworkers at the Termini Imerese plant are furious because they will stop producing cars at the end of this year and in the rest of the country because of the new contract with the other unions. Camusso is going to have to play the delicate negotiating act between her own members and the sister unions and the less delicate negotiation with Fiat CEO Marchionne.
This week she also led a demonstration which presented a draft bill to regulate one of the plagues of the Italian workplace, the unofficial work gangs or caporalato.
Given the governments lethargy, it is employers like Marchionne and the Confindustria or the unions who are actually addressing today’s issues and two of prime actors are women. So women’s prospects should be good in Italy, shouldn’t they? Well, up to a point…
Despite these two very visible success stories for gender equality, the reality is far more depressing and closer to the bimbo stereotypes.
In politics, parliamentarians are in practice appointed by the parties so the Berlusconi factor is very visible; the Chamber of Deputies has 133 women members or 21.1% and it is striking that they are heavily weighted on the younger side. Between age 24 and 29, there are four women and no men; 30-39 41.8% women: 40-49 25.7% women: 50+ 15.6%. The optimistic take on the numbers is that there is change taking place and that in ten or twenty year there will be Norwegian near parity. The cynical view is that physical appearance is more important than experience. In the European Parliament and the regional assemblies, this even more apparent.
Not surprisingly, the Cabinet shows the B-factor most heavily. Of the 24 members of the Cabinet, five are women (3 without portfolio, 2 with) three had very close personal connections with B before going into politics. It is striking that all five are young (between 33 and 43) and by any standards go from the good looking to the very goodlooking while the 19 men are mostly older and go from the ordinary to the the distinctly ugly. Just last week, the most notorious of Berlusconi’s women ministers, the former showgirl and topless model, Mara Carfagna, now minister for equal opportunities came to an agreement with the self-governing board for publicity. The ministry will be able to ask for the withdrawal of advertisements that “degrade the image of women or which are violent or sexist”. There is more than a touch of irony in the announcement given what Carfagna did before becoming a deputy and what her boss apparently still does with a wide variety of lovelies.
In the civil service and wider public service, there has been an increase in the number of women employed going from an overall 48.7% in 1994 to 54.4% in 2006, apparent progress for gender equality. Most of that increase has been in the health service: 55.2% to 62.0% and the regional and city administrations: 42.2% to 50.4% (both around a fifth of the total each), schools (over 30% of the total) 72.2% to 76.6%. But at a senior level, the increase has been slight; 28.8% diplomats and prefects in 1994 to 35.4% in 2006, universities 38.8% to 43.8%. The figures mask a very solid glass ceiling.
In the general labour market, according to the OECD, less than half of Italian women work (46.4% compared to almost 80% of Norwegians). Only Turkey in Europe is worse at 24%, and the Italian figure is declining – in 2008 47.2% worked. The 2007 World Economic Forum gender gap index put Italy in 84th place down from 77th in 2006.


So all in all, despite Marcegaglia and Camusso, the rest of Italy is pretty bleak for women.

Strikes and demonstrations

Italy is not just concerned with the prime minister's sex life. On Friday there were demonstrations across the country with the CGIL in particular preparing the ground for their battle with Fiat over the new contract that Fiat CEO, Sergio Marchionne signed with the other unions last year.
This is certainly not anything like a full scale revolution - both the labour movement and the centre left parties are seriously divided over what position to take - but the rising unemployment and decreasing purchasing power mean that most Italians are less well off today than they were a year ago or two years ago. But there is not a critical mass big enough to affect government policy yet.
Here was my own tuppenny ha'penny worth of comment.
It is interesting that the only real innovation and movement towards free market liberalism has come from Marchionne and not from either Tremonti or Berlusconi both of whom affect a great admiration for the Thatcher and Reagan reforms of the Eighties.

Federalism Italian style

Fiscal federalism is one of the core issues of the now wobbling Berlusconi government. Umberto Bossi, the leader of the Northern League (LN), made it the key issue in his support for Berlusconi in both the September and December votes of confidence. He also said last month that if the first of the enabling laws was not passed by 28 January, he would insist on early elections. That was a paper threat; the decrees are not going to pass today and there will not be an immediate call for early elections at least not today. But if there are elections the issue will play a huge role in the campaign.
Gianfranco Fini and his new party Futuro e Libertà and the opposition Democratic Party accept the general principle of some sort of federalism or devolution but draw the line at reducing economic support for the poorer south. Fini’s original split with Berlusconi in April last year was largely because he felt Bossi was leading the dance and Berlusconi was following. The centre left opposition also supports some of the principles of fiscal federalism but does not want to lose its electoral support in the south. The whole issue is another version of the differences between north and south, the Southern Question which has dogged Italy since unification. One commentator, Luca Ricolfi argues that the real divide in Italy is not left-right but north-south.
The problem today is that the fiscal federalism bill was passed in May 2009, but very few people even in government actually know exactly what the phrase means. More importantly, they don’t know how much it will cost and to whom. All the leaders of the Northern League have made it very clear that their support for the government is conditional on the implementation of fiscal federalism. It was listed as one of the five issues in last September’s vote of confidence but is still far from being a reality. The discussion this week is on what sort of tax and spending powers the local councils should have.
This plan does not aim to make Italy a genuinely federal state nor does it pretend to. Actually, the centre-left made Italy “federal” just before they left office in 2001 with a constitutional amendment confirmed in a referendum. It changed Chapter V of the constitution and gave more power to the 20 regions but it was never implemented. In practice, Italy is still one of the more centralised states in Europe and there has been next to no debate on what “federalism” actually means.
Put very crudely, a federal state is one where the constitution explicitly gives certain powers to central government and others to the lower or meso-levels. Some constitutions define the centre’s powers and leave the rest to the meso-level. Others do the opposite and others again are precise in their distribution. In the American case, the states have responsibility for most of the civil and criminal laws and their application and they have complete fiscal independence. Washington does not bail out an improvident Sacramento (nor does Albany bail out New York City); Massachusetts residents are painfully aware of how much they pay to keep their state going while Nevada residents are happily supported by the out of state gamblers who pay most of their taxes. Germans and Swiss too are very conscious of the different taxes and service from one canton or Land to another or from one city to another. In Italy, in contrast the responsibilities of the different levels are far from clear. The Naples rubbish crisis for the last three years has been an object lesson in buckpassing between national, regional and city governments.
Italian fiscal federalism is just that – fiscal and the legislation being discussed now is just for cities or comuni, not even the regions. Laws and law enforcement agencies will stay Italian. Some property will be transferred to regional and city governments and some already has. There are curious spats like the one between the city of Florence and the Ministry of Fine Arts over who owns Michelangelo’s David. Betta Povoledo described the serious and frivolous aspects of ownership of cultural heritage. The Mayor of Florence is adamant that it belongs to the city. The ministry argues that since it was commissioned for the Grand Duke of Tuscany, title has passed to Italy as the successor state. The Accademia is a state museum and David is the principal attraction; all income goes to the state. In another argument after last month’s snow, the Tuscan regional government wanted to fine the State Railways €1.3m for delays due to their incapability of dealing with bad weather. We can expect a lot more spats like these ones.
Spending will be proportional to taxes received which means that the north will get more and the south less. According to Il Sole 24 ore, a study published by IFEL for the national association of local authorities (ANCI) calculates that there will be a €2.5bn overall drop in income for the comuni or local government after last year’s cuts. The government calculated that a lower flat rate for tax on rent (payable to the comuni) would make up the shortfall but ANCI reckons the calculation is over-optimistic.
There are some elements of the reform which almost everyone agrees on – health services (managed by the regions) should cost the same to the regional provider throughout the country. At the moment the same service (clinical analyses, operations &c.) can be accounted for at vastly different prices in Sicily, Tuscany or Lombardy, with the price usually being more in the south.
But as the economist Mario Deaglio pointed out this week, not all local governments are actually capable of delivering the necessary services at the moment. Everyone loves the idea of federalism but the reality is very different, especially for the poorer or less efficient comuni or regions. And the French and Piedmontese centralisation is so deeply ingrained in Italian political thinking and practice that the centre always wants to keep tabs on what the periphery is doing.
The result is that even if Bossi manages to get some degree of fiscal autonomy for the north, it will be a small part of regional and local government business. And as the costs become clearer, the opposition mounts. The Northern League started its fight for fiscal autonomy in 1994; they risk having to wait another 17 year and still have little to show for the campaign. The immediate result is an even weaker government.

Comment!

In the meantime… no change. Eppur si muove.

A fortnight away and once again, everything changes in Italy; and yet, and yet, when I asked a friend what had happened while I was away, he replied, depressed, “Nothing!” Actually, lots of things are happening but it is very difficult to make sense of events beyond the immediate scandals. A couple of days ago, a deputy confessed to me that he really had no idea of what was going on and how it would end. He was an opposition backbencher but I suspect that even government ministers do not have any better ideas – except they don’t admit it.
A quick summary: ten days ago the Constitutional Court finally gave its verdict on the so-called legitimate impediment law. This was a law passed a year ago which allowed the prime minister and cabinet to claim that government business prevents them from answering summonses to appear in court as defendants in criminal cases. In practice it was meant to give Berlusconi immunity because he did not have to go to court on three major corruption charges. The law is only valid for 18 months and was supposed to be an interim measure before a constitutional amendment is passed giving the prime minister a more solid shield. After twice declaring Berlusconi’s immunity laws unconstitutional, this time the Court allowed the concept of “legitimate impediment” but declared that it would be the courts themselves to decide when the impediment was legitimate and not the prime minister himself.
This was not what Berlusconi wanted and the Milanese courts trying him immediately set about summoning him to hearings. Much worse for him was the news that prosecutors in Milan were investigating him for his involvement with the Karima El Mahrough aka Ruby a then underage prostitute,. The whole business was immediately dubbed “Rubygate”. Telephone taps suggest that not only was she a frequent guest at Berlusconi’s principal residence but that there were lots of other girls involved. There were also some details of what the supposedly exotic and erotic (and not a little racist, too) “bunga-bunga” really is.
Since then, the president of the employers’ federation, Emma Marcegaglia of the Confindustria, criticised the government by explicitly saying they had done nothing to improve the Italian economy for six months; essentially they had not been governing, she said. The president of the Italian Bishops’ Conference, Angelo Bagnasco made veiled criticisms of Berlusconi when he spoke of the climate of “moral discomfort” in the country. But he also criticised the judiciary for being overzealous. It was a typical cardinal’s speech with no explicit judgement but the implication was clear enough.
And then Berlusconi called an evening talk show which was investigating Rubygate, insulted the presenter and his guests and then hung up. He refuses to defend himself in court but is happy to do so on television. But then the call was a dialogue defined as “I talk, you listen, and if I don’t like what you’re saying, I hang up”. In one sense, this was very refreshing as Berlusconi is the most unspun of politicians; this was a raw, unmediated response, the sort of outburst that drives his minders crazy and endears him to his core supporters
All this makes good copy but is there anything new? We have known publically about the prime minister’s penchant for young girls since his wife said “he frequents minors” in April 2009. And details of what that meant have been piling up since then. The Constitutional Court has already overturned two laws which gave the prime minister immunity from prosecution. Both the Catholic Church and the employers have been criticising him more or less openly for more than a year and Berlusconi has been making surprise calls to talk show hosts for years defending himself and insulting them.
In this sense, my friend was right when he said that nothing had happened while I was away. It was all more of the same. Once again, there is the sad picture of an old man watching television alone and flying off the handle when there is something he disagrees with on the tube. When he’s not alone in front of the box, the same old man needs a bevy of bimbos to tell him how young and potent he is. And his natural political allies try to nudge him back into reality.
But there has been a change nonetheless. The sheer quantity of evidence is mindboggling and there are even allegations that some of the girls were not willing at least for some of the personal services requested. If the charges are sex with underage girls and maybe rape as well, then this would be a different level. With Naomi Letizia (the first girl that we know about who called him “Papi”), it was possible to finesse the exact nature of their relationship. With Ruby, it is next to impossible.
The conclusion is that Berlusconi is no longer a man in control either of his government or of his own private life. He is a fighter, though, and the television outburst shows his mettle. He still has huge resources and is prepared to use them all to maintain his position and his power. He has threatened prosecutors and the courts that he will take to the streets with all his supporters if they continue prosecuting him, I’m sorry, persecuting him; in practice a coup d’état against the judiciary. Approval ratings for him and his party are still around the 30% mark and even the worst still puts his party first.
While the rest of the world is agog at the Italian prime minister’s antics and cannot understand why Berlusconi has not resigned, Italians worry about rising prices and reduced purchasing power and lowered wages (or none at all). One of Berlusconi’s ministers faces a vote of no confidence today and the his closest allies, the Northern League are fighting to get their fiscal federalism implementation measures through parliament (my next blog). So not everything has changed but as Gallileo said “but it does move!”. He was talking about the earth but there are times that the movement in Italian politics is as imperceptible.

Italy-Ghana. Micro international relations

Politics is not only the grand activities of leaders or the effects of big numbers – economical, electoral or social. It is also the sum total of millions of tiny events, decisions and discussions. Politics is about the distribution of power and resources, material and non-material; political science tries to analyse that tangled mess.

The Winter programme that my university, The American University of Rome runs in Ghana is one example. Since 2004 we have been using Ghana as a classroom for our own international students and for Ghanaians. They visits sites and talk to experts and opinionmakers as well as ordinary people in Accra and the villages. For a fortnight, we learn about Ghanaian history – the slave trade, an earlier globalisation which brought together Europe, Africa and the Americas. Ghana has some of the most striking monuments; British, Dutch, Danish and Portuguese castles and forts which starkly illustrate the Atlantic trade. Then the colonisation and independence where Kwame Nkrumah’s legacy is felt keenly – his daughter Samia is now a member of Parliament and she gives us a direct link with the past and an up to date picture of today’s politics.

Politics and Ghana’s democracy are the programme’s second pillar. Over the last 20 years Ghana has moved from military dictatorships and weak democracies to a well consolidated example of democracy not only for Africa but the rest of the world. There have been two peaceful changes of party with the 2008 results fought down to the wire over a handful of votes; but with no violence whatsoever. A far cry from Kenya that year or neigbouring Côte d’Ivoire today. The third element is west African international relations; developments in the Ivorian crisis will show us exactly what the international community can and cannot do.

Finally, there is economic development; Ghana aims at reaching emerging economy status by 2015. Oil started flowing a month ago and everyone is very conscious of the perils that oil wealth might bring and working on making oil a blessing and not a curse.

And on our own micro level, we are part of that development; we have been awarded a grant by the Latium Regional Government (the regions are Italy’s second level of government and Rome is in Latium). Development aid and projects can either go through multi-million dollar initiatives run by governments of UN agencies like the FAO or they can be managed by NGOs and universities like ours; it’s called “decentralised cooperation”. Here the support comes from local government, like the regions or cities for much more modest sums, tens of thousands of euros.

Our own projects are both commercial and educational “Sustaining Education; Educating for Sustainability”. Our partner in Rome is La Sapienza, Rome’s first university and our partners in Ghana are the Kokrobitey Institute where we will be contributing to “Little Steps” an initiative which teaches young women from the village to produce and market fashion items from recycled material. The second part is at the Cape Coast School for the Deaf together with the Cape Coast NGO, DASFA (Development Assistance for School Farms) where we will be working on their school farm, building on the previous fundraiser which gave the farm a poultry unit. We hope that along with the very concrete benefits which the grant will be able to produce, it will also enhance links between Ghana and Rome and Latium. Apart from fashion items where Italian and African design could produce some very creative results, “Little Steps” produces shopping bags made from recycled sacking and posters – from 1 January, Italy has banned plastic bags from the supermarkets, so there’s a new market for us.

The other piece of excellent news is that we have our Spring 2011 AUR Ghana Scholarship beneficiary: he is Darlington Kwablah Wiredu, third year Business Administration student from the University of Ghana. Congratulations Darlington. Darlington will spend two weeks with us on the January programme before coming back to Rome with us for the regular semester. Our thanks too, to the Committee: Profs. Samuel Agyei Mensah and Kodjo Gavua of the University of Ghana, Legon, Dr. Kwesi Aning, of the Kofi Annan Inter¬national Peace¬keep¬ing Training Centre, Prof. Nana Apt, Dr. Zelalem Birhanu, a physician who works on public health and with refugees, Commissioner Anna Bossman of the Commission on Human Rights and Administrative Justice, Prof. Gyimah Boadi, Executive Director of the Ghana Center for Democratic Development, and of course, the director of the Kokrobitey Institute, Renée Neblett who chaired. They did all the work publicis¬ing the award and then going through the applications. Thanks to Bliss Holloway who provided the funds to get the scholarship going and who provided the links to get the programme started back in 2004.

But in order to maintain the scholarship we will need contributions from others. AUR waives full tuition and I am normally able to find a home stay or a space in AUR housing. That leaves the allowance which at the moment is set at €500 per month or €1,750 per semester, €3,500 per year.

At the same time, I would like to offer a scholarship/grant to support a student going to Ghana. After paying for the course, the flight and spending money, there is little change from €3,000 which I still reckon is a good deal, but it is still quite a lot of money. I would like to aim at two €1,000 awards to be given to students from Rome who can show a combination of need, academic excellence and good reasons for wanting to go.

I would like to aim at €6,000 for the first year and to start the ball rolling I will put in €500 myself. Those of you who are earning in the US can of course make the donation tax deductable and I would guess that something similar exists in most other countries.

How to donate

From the US (in Dollars), wire to:
Bank of America
Account: 001923458961
Routing: 026009593

From Europe (in Euros), wire to:
Banca Popolare di Sondrio
Account: 3010X51
IBAN: IT48C0569603221000003010X51
SWIFT: POSOIT22

By check (in Dollars or Euros) to:
The American University of Rome

Send check to:
The American University of Rome
Via P. Roselli 4 – 00153 Rome, Italy

Or send check to:
The American
University of Rome, c/o NIAF
1860 19th St. NW
Washington, DC 20009

Donors should specify what their donation is for. AUR President’s assistant, Maurizia Garzia, keeps a log of donations and issues thank you letters with tax relief notes to donors, but she needs to know what donations are for. Please can you let me know as well.

We have also established link with the Italian public broadcaster, RAI’s flagship international affairs programme Radio 3 Mondo; Anna Maria Giordano is due to be with us for the second half of our stay. This is another example of the synergies which this type of programme can develop.

Academic and policymaking research is also part of the programme. We have a project with the Real Instituto Elcano and the Kofi Annan International Peacekeeping Centre on transnational organized crime. We will be meeting with Dr. Kwesi Aning of the Centre to work on the project.

As well as Anna Maria Giordano’s reporting on Ghana and West Africa, I plan to write on Ghana’s successful route to democracy, transnational organised crime and oil.

• Candidates for the Fall 2011 Scholarship or those who want practical infor¬mation about applications should get in touch with Nathanael Larbi nlarbi@kokrobiteyinstitute.org
• For enrollment or information about the 2011 and 2012 Program, get in touch with me at j.walston@aur.edu

The risks of mayhem

Last week as Parliament was about to pass the controversial university reform bill, Rome braced itself for trouble. On 14 December, the week before, street violence had once again erupted with pictures of cars in flames in the Corso and Piazza del Popolo; masked and helmeted youths and policemen beating each other. Thunderflashes and molotovs were much in evidence. Windows were smashed and ATMs broken. It took one back more than 30 years to 1977 when there were similar scenes in Rome. Or to London or Athens over the last month.
This time my own experiences were some loud bangs from the outside of the Chamber of Deputies while the no confidence vote was being counted. In the square there was a surreal quiet as police and carabinieri put a ring of vehicles and men around the sensitive areas. Walking home through empty streets, the only indication of trouble were a few gaping holes in the cobbles. Rome’s sanpietrini make an effective, abundant and easily available missile for any hostile crowd that needs one.
Most of the students had demonstrated peacefully but there was clearly some sympathy for the demonstrators who showed their mettle. There was talk of agents provocateurs or infiltrati, plainclothesmen who stirred up trouble and the temperature went up. The Minister of Defence, Ignazio La Russa walked out of a television talk show when some students refused to condemn violence while his colleague, the majority leader in the Senate, Maurizio Gasparri, seriously suggested “preventive arrests”. Both had been active in violent right wing groups when they were young so the irony was not lost on commentators. La Russa is not known for his calm nor Gasparri for his legal acumen but they did present a government which was upping the ante. On 21 December, a pipe bomb was found in the underground but it had no detonator. The right used it as proof of trouble to come, the left presented it as a tension raising plant.
So on 22 December there was nervous expectation with big demonstrations planned to coincide with the final passage of the university reform bill. Many shopkeepers in the centre decided not to open and the traffic was absurdly thin for the busiest shopping period in the year. There were police, carabinieri and finance guards everywhere in the centre.
And then… nothing happened.
The students demonstrated in various parts of the city and for a time blocked the ring road. They had decided very explicitly to avoid any provocation and succeeded. They even found some solidarity among the traffic jammed motorists. At the same time, President Napolitano invited a student delegation to the Quirinale to talk about their issues. He played the role of the firm but just grandfather who would still have to sign the bill into law but was listening to their grievances.
There was indeed violence in other parts of Italy and no one thinks that the implementation of the new law will be without hiccoughs. But for that moment before Christmas, violence was avoided and there was a lesson both for the authorities and for the discontented students.
At least since De Toqueville and in a scientific way since Ted Gurr’s Why men rebel in 1975, we have known that most revolts begin not when people are in total misery but when they feel worse off than they were before. Gurr called it “relative deprivation”. Italian (and British and Greek) students are not starving but they will have to pay much more for their education than their parents or forgo it completely and they have far fewer prospects of a steady job or a pension. An interviewer pointed out to the 37 year old Minister of Education, Mariastella Gelmini, that unlike her, many of her contemporaries still don’t have a job or prospects and her reform cuts budgets even further. Touchée.
Then just before Christmas, there were parcel bombs sent to the Chilean, Swiss and Greek embassies all claimed by a so-called Informal Anarchist Federation, a tautology and contradiction in terms in just three words. Yesterday, a couple of people threw thunderflashes at a section house of the Northern League in the village where its leader Umberto Bossi lives. There was an explosion outside a court in Athens today. All this has provoked a buzz about “global anarchism” or, for Italy, a “a return to the Seventies”. As part of that debate, along with a former US diplomat in Greece and a British security expert, I was asked about the Italian aspects on al Jazeera “Inside Story” 27 December 2010.
We all agreed that however unpleasant the recent bombs are for people close to them, they do not presage a worldwide anarchist plot. Their communication methods have changed but they aims and even their weapons are much closer to the world of Conrad’s Secret Agent at the end of the 19th century or the Russians of a generation before. They would like to start a world revolution but are unlikely to succeed.
In Italy, in particular, anarchism has always held far less appeal than more organised forms of revolt. The language of the left has nearly always been a Marxist one; it spoke with violence against fascism through the Communist partisans in the war and again in the ‘70s through the Red Brigades against the Italian Republic. The fascist right was born in violence through the ‘20s squadristi and again found expression in the ‘60s and ‘70s.
Political violence is as Italian as pasta and returns every generation. Given the discontent today and the very real relative deprivation, the conditions are right for another round. There is political and economic instability and a very uncertain future so the future is not rosy.
But it is not anarchist violence from a few small groups that is the worry. And last week’s lesson from the students is that politics does not have to be violent.
So for the moment, I hope, the worst we can expect are the new year’s eve fireworks and bangers. And a happy new year to you all.