The tide has turned

A week ago, Berlusconi’s archrival put it very clearly and presciently “Berlusconi was politically born in Milan, and in Milan he has politically died,” says the industrialist Carlo De Benedetti.

The results were better than anyone on the centre left had dared hope for. First of all Milan with 55.1% for Pisapia, and 44.89% Moratti; a double whammy against an unsuccessful mayor and a grossly overbearing Berlusconi who hijacked the campaign to show the world that he was still in control and failed miserably. The Milanese showed both pragmatism along with principle and fair play. They punished parties and individuals who could not solve the city’s and the country’s problems but they also punished a vainglorious and obsessive leader who is way past his best by date. They or at least a majority of them did not accept the insidious and racist scare tactics used over the last fortnight and it looks very much as if humour was a perfect antidote for hate; there is a lovely short showing “The wonderful world of Pisapia” full of drugs, immigrants landing from boats on the canals, and congestion charges in the suburbs . Even Berlusconi’s home base Arcore with his most famous villa went for the centre-left with a huge swing (56.65% compared to just over 50% for the centre right last time).

The other big one was Naples where Luigi De Magistris won a massive victory with 65.38% compared to Gianni Lettieri’s 34.61, 39,000 fewer votes than first round. It is true that Naples has a habit of looking for Messianic saviours and that De Magistris will have a difficult job fulfilling electors’ hopes but even more than in Milan, it is a crushing defeat for Berlusconi’s “can do” miracleworking. They don’t believe him and have had enough.

The centre left won in Cagliari and Trieste and the Northern League’s heartland of Novara.

The blighted former minister of culture, Sandro Bondi has already resigned from his party position and a newly appointed undersecretary, Daniela Melchiorre resigned after Berlusconi’s performance at the Deauville summit. Like an over made up ancient mariner on lifts (but without Coleridge’s language), he buttonholed Obama to tell him how he was being persecuted by left wing judges.

Taken all together, it looks like a rout. It is, but only a minor one, a skirmish when the real battle is yet to come. Berlusconi already said that he would not resign even if they lost Milan and Naples, and he won’t, at least not tomorrow. But Umberto Bossi and the Northern League are already blaming him for the defeat and will certainly make him pay for it.

In two weeks time there will be another test for the government when Italy votes on four referendums. The government is against all of them and wants a low turnout which would make them invalid; if the quorum is reached, then it will be yet another nail in Berlusconi’s coffin and Umberto Bossi will be very tempted to pull the plug on the government. He could do that at the League’s annual beano at Legnano on 19 June in a grand coup de théâtre or he could do it more slowly and calculatedly over the summer and early autumn, pushing for an interim government led by Tremonti and elections in spring.

On the other side, the left and centre left has had an immense boost and shown that they can work together and win elections when there is the right person and the right programme. Now they have to do the same nationally and do it quickly.

Bossi’s balance and Berlusconi’s bluster (or toxic propaganda)

Umberto Bossi is no Dorian Gray but somewhere in his attic, he has a locked cupboard. Instead of a portrait, there is a set of scales; one side weighs the advantages that the coalition with Berlusconi brings the Lega Nord (LN, Northern League). The other side measures the cost of that alliance in electoral terms.
Not being privy to Bossi’s inspections, I do not know which side is heavier, but I do know that since last week’s elections in Milan the costs weigh much more heavily than before but not enough to make him break with Berlusconi and his Popolo della Libertà (PdL, People of Freedom). Tomorrow and Monday the Milanese will give the balance another shove when the outgoing PdL mayor, Letizia Moratti, fights for her political life against Giuliano Pisapia, the centre-left candidate who beat her by more then six percentage points in the first round.
To guarantee full support, Bossi demanded that one or maybe two ministries should be transferred to Milan, maybe even the Ministry of Economics “because Milan is the centre of the Italian economy”. One of the LN ministers, Roberto Calderoli claimed that if they were not given ministers, then the north should stop paying taxes “no representation, no taxation”. Most of the PdL said no, the rightwing mayor of Rome, Gianni Alemanno, very loudly. Berlusconi himself has kept very quiet.
Instead, he has raised the ante by introducing what one columnist, Barbara Spinelli, called “toxic propaganda”. Older English readers will remember Enoch Powell’s “Rivers of blood” speech in which he used Virgil’s phrase (“the Tiber will flow with blood”) to threaten Britain with the consequences of immigration. It was a racist speech which cost Powell his career; Berlusconi and his supporters are using far more inflammatory language and few seem to mind. Even Spinelli does not seem to realise the longterm effects of the poison. Whoever wins this weekend, this type of language has been used by the prime minister, not by some neo-fascist maniac on the fringes. It will be difficult to bring Italian political language back to acceptable European levels.
If Pisapia wins in Milan, the city will become a Gypsytown (Zingaropoli) says Berlusconi; it will be a Muslim city and one in which immigrants will take over. And as if that is not enough, it will be Stalingrad (a metaphor for unreformed communism rather than successful resistance to Hitler’s armies) with hammers and sickles taking over as the city symbol. Pisapia is accused of supporting the left-wing “social centres” (centri sociali), stigmatised as hotbeds of anarchist revolution at the same time as supposedly being part of the city’s radical chic, out of touch with reality. He is also accused of wanting to intruduce gay marriage and supporting abortion and euthanasia.
These last are a distortion of reality and are bad enough; the first three are overtly racist and will haunt Italian politics for years to come as the country tries to deal with the real pressures which mass immigration engenders.
Pisapia has indeed said that he is in favour of building a mosque in Milan – Rome already has the largest in Europe together with an Islamic cultural centre since 1995, designed by the distinguished Italian architect, Paolo Portoghesi. The Italian Bishops’ Conference has said that they have nothing against a Milan mosque. Milan has as many as six irregular mosques, one of which in viale Jenner has been accused of encouraging extremisms. All were accepted by Moratti’s administration and her predecessor.
He has also said that legal immigrants should have representation in the city council – in many other cities including Alemanno’s Rome, they already have both the vote and their own councillors. Last year Berlusconi complained that Milan looked like an “African city” and he was not referring to the architecture. He has also said explicitly that he is against “a multiethnic Italy”.
Quite apart from the ethics and legality of this type of racism, Berlusconi and the centre-right are encouraging behaviour which will make integration all the more difficult as his remarks become usable. It is not just Berlusconi who has been playing this tune, but whole sections of the PdL and Lega Nord have been given team orders and they followed them. It is a far cry from forcing Powell to leave politics.
The other remarks are pale in comparison.
Taken all together, they show a desperation which suggests that Berlusconi’s polls (public polls are not permitted in the lead-up to elections) tell him that Moratti will lose the run off. The same is true in Naples except that the centre left is doing its best to show a divided front and allow the centre right to win.
In any case, Berlusconi has said explicitly that he will not resign if the PdL lose Milan and Naples even though he started the campaign staking his future on Moratti’s election and his success as city councillor in Milan.
But in any case, it does not depend on Berlusconi; if those scales in Bossi’s attic weigh much further on the cost side, it will be Bossi who pulls the plug. An opposition victory in Milan and Naples would increase that weight and a government loss in next month’s referendums would probably tip the balance. Bossi could make his move at the League’s summer beano at Legnano on 19 June. That would be spectacular but it’s more likely that they’ll spend the summer negotiating over a possible future government.
In the meantime real political issues are ignored while the politicians play campaign tunes; they are in the doldrums as the constitutionalist Michele Ainis suggested. A correspondent, Yusef Izmirli, pointed out that Italian vessels are supplying Qaddaffi with petrol at the same time as its planes are bombing his facilities. It would be interesting to know how much the government knows about it. Elections are not everything but until Monday evening, we’ll concentrate on them alone.

Humble pie for Berlusconi

The Milan elections were always about much more than who was going to be the next mayor. For more than a month Silvio Berlusconi campaigned as if his premiership and personal reputation depended on it. He stood as a candidate for the council hoping to win more personal preference votes than his 52,000 in the last local elections in 2006. In Italy’s double ballot system (where if no one wins an outright majority in the first round, the two most voted candidates go to a run-off two weeks later), not winning at the first round was to be taken as a slap in the face.
As the votes were counted, it was clear from the beginning that the outgoing mayor, Letizia Moratti had not won a clear majority and that there would be a second round. Much worse for the centre-right, as counting continued, we saw that not only was she second, but she had lost by a large margin. The centre-left’s Giuliano Pisapia had won 48.04% to Moratti’s meagre 41.58% with the same 67.56% turnout as in 2006. As for preference votes, Berlusconi took just over half of the 2006 score; it was a major defeat.
The third blow would be if Pisapia wins the run-off on 29 May. Not quite a knockout for Berlusconi but very serious for the survival of his government. Italy (and Berlusconi) are not like Germany or Britain where the chancellor suffered heavy losses in the March elections in Rhineland-Palatinate and Baden Württemberg, and Nick Clegg’s Liberal Democrats lost the referendum on their plan to change the voting system and took a drubbing in the council elections. There the governments and coalitions in Berlin and London continue but here the sound of creaking timbers is already audible and some might crack under the strain of the loss of Milan.
Berlusconi’s main ally, Umberto Bossi’s Northern League is very unhappy with their alliance with the Popolo della Libertà. Bossi expressed his displeasure after last week’s megabrick. Moratti accused her opponent of having a conviction for car theft (and associating with terrorists) 33 years ago and having been amnestied. In actual fact, he appealed against the amnesty and was given a full aquittal. She made the accusation in the last minute of a live debate so that Pisapia had no time to reply.
If Moratti had been a pitbull politician who delights in savaging friends and foe alike, she might have got away with it. But she is a rather drab upper class Milanese lady who was clearly uncomfortable with her own performance. “To thine own self be true” said Polonius, and she wasn’t and the voters noticed. Berlusconi is certainly true to himself when he berates the judiciary but by now, a lot of conservative Milanese are fed up and either didn’t vote or voted for the centrists who took 5.54%. And then, some were actually voting on Moratti’s lacklustre administration over the last five years.
Whatever happens in a fortnight, yesterday was a triumph for Pisapia, but it is one which will cause the PD some worry. Pisapia was supported in the primaries by Nichi Vendola’s Sinistra Ecologia Libertà against the PD’s candidate. It will be even more difficult now for the PD to refuse primaries to choose the centre-left’s candidate for prime minister.
But however important Milan is, there were another 12 million Italians voting.
The PD can draw some consolation from their victories in Turin and Bologna where their candidates won on the first ballot. Piero Fassino won in Turin, well-known and well-liked senior party leader and former minister (but even he still polled less than the very popular two term mayor Sergio Chiamparino who he will replace 56.66% compared to 66.60%). In Bologna after a very messy selection process and a very strong showing from Beppe Grillo’s Cinque Stelle left wing protest movement (9.40%), the PD candidate scraped in on the first round with 50.46%.
The other big city, Naples, was much more messy. The city has been run by the centre left since 1993 and has been covered in rubbish for most of the last five years. It should have been easy for the centre right to win. But Berlusconi’s triumphalism when he first cleared up the rubbish in 2008 has, like the rubbish itself, come back to haunt him. The buckpassing between central, regional and city governments has reduced confidence in everyone with the result that the centre-right only managed 38.53%. On the other side, once again, there are divisions with the main centre-left candidate from the PD, coming third with 19.15%, beaten by the crusading magistrate, Luigi De Magistris from Di Pietro’s IdV.
In the rest of the country, the message is similar. The centre-right, PdL and LN, have lost but the PD is still not clearly the answer. Grillo has done well as have Di Pietro’s candidates (less the party – it is possible to vote a candidate but not the coalition supporting him). Gianfranco Fini and his Futuro e Libertà faced their first challenge with the polls and did not do well and the other centrists or “Third Poll”, Casini and Rutelli did not do much better.
The only conclusion is that Italians are more and more fed up with politics – turnout was down but only from 72.85% to 71.04, hardly dramatic. They do not like Berlusconi or Bossi, but they don’t love Bersani. Many voted for protest parties, but again, not in dramatic numbers.
The drama will start now as the negotiations for the second round begin; candidates campaigning for themselves but also trying to persuade their former rival candidates support them. Will Grillo declare for the PD? I doubt it. Will the second centre left candidate and the PD in Naples give De Magistris full support? Yes, but grudgingly. Who will Fini and the other centrists support in Milan? They’re already bickering. Most important, what will the Northern League do to the government if they lose Milan…?

Local elections – national repercussions

Local elections are normally fairly tedious affairs, more about street lighting and trams. They become more interesting in Naples where refuse collection (or lack of it) is a major issue but wherever they’re held, they are an indication of what might happen in the next elections, but just an indication, a small blip on the barometer.
But Berlusconi’s Italy is not “normal” as we well know and with 13 million Italians voting on Sunday and Monday there is a lot more at stake than a few city councils. Apart from Milan and Naples, Turin and Bologna will also be electing a new mayor and council along with 1,300 other councils and 11 provinces. Where a candidate does not win an absolute majority, there will be a run-off ballot on 29 May.
As ever, since 1994, the first question is what is Berlusconi’s position; every election since then has in practice been a referendum on one man. The second is how well are the two main coalitions doing (and to a lesser extent, how well is the so-called Third Pole, the centre-right opposition led by Gianfranco Fini). And thirdly, what are the relative strengths of the parties that make up the left and right.
Over the last week, the centre-right has raised the temperature in order to activate their own electorate. Italy is so polarised that there are few floating voters left and one side wins by persuading its sympathisers to go out and vote.
Berlusconi has staked his reputation and position on the Milan election (where he is top of the list for the city council) supporting the outgoing mayor, Letizia Moratti. He has used his court appearances over the last couple of months as an opportunity both to harangue his supporters and schmooze with them, turning his prosecutions into Silvio’s battle with what he calls “the Communist prosecutors”. He has called them a “cancer” and has again attacked the leader of the prosecution team, Ilda Boccassini, a woman who has spent all her working life on mafia, terrorism and corruption cases with considerable success, this time calling her a “metastasis”. This is a month after one of the PdL candidates in Milan had put up posters across the city calling for “The Red Brigades out of the Courts” making the explicit equation of the Milan court with the 1970s terrorists.
As part of the campaign, Berlusconi and his followers have shown a blatant disregard for the truth. Moratti accused her opponent, Giuliano Pisapia of having been convicted of a car theft linked to a terrorist attack 33 years, and then having been amnystied. She did this moments before the end of a live debate on Wednesday, knowing that Pisapia would not have the opportunity to reply. But the broadcast was at 2 pm so that by the evening news and even more by Thursday’s papers, Pisapia was able to show the full extent of the lie. Yesterday, another Milanese PdL representative, Daniela Santanché brandished a newspaper photo on another live talk show saying that Pisapia’s supporters waved Hamas flags. Later it was pointed out that the flag was an Italian NGO.
Berlusconi himself has been saying that “the left” (he never says the “centre-left”) will introduce a wealth tax despite all the PD party literature and leaders explicitly denying the policy.
They are trying to play Don Basilio’s game “La calunnia è un venticello” (“slander is a little breeze” from the Barber of Seville)– a great aria and very convincing but they shouldn’t forget that it is Don Basilio and his louche associate Bartolo who are worsted in the end.
But Berlusconi has once again demonstrated his ability to play to two audiences when he promised Naples an amnesty for illegal building. This might come back to haunt his alliance with the League (Calderoli criticised the move) but not before Sunday. He also became more strident on the immigration issue and has tried to outflank the League on the right.
On the left, the more moderate PD will hope to show that it is the undisputed leader of the centre-left. In Naples, Di Pietro’s IdV is standing against the PD so if as is likely the centre-right does not win on the first round, the two elements of the left will have to come together. In Milan, if Pisapia does well (he was selected as candidate after a primary), then the PD will find it diffucult to refuse a primary for the general elections and there Vendola would give Bersani a good run for his money and quite possibly win.
And there is the “Third Pole”; this is the first elections with Fini, Casini and Rutelli together. If they do well, especially if their vote prevents Moratti winning at the first ballot, then they will look forward happily to the general elections. If they bomb, they will be able to say that after all, these were just local elections and they did not have time to build up a local base and in any case, their star, Fini, was not campaigning.
As ever, whatever the results, there will be solace for all. The figures can be coaxed into demonstrating a victory or at least, not a defeat for just about everyone.
If, as is likely, the League does well with respect to the PdL, we can expect Bossi to up his demands both for policy and positions. For policy, he will want an acceleration of the fiscal devolution to city and regional levels – not just in theory but with laws and policy being genuinely implemented so that he can go to the polls next year or in in 2013 with something concrete to show for his efforts. The other policy move will be anti-immigrant measures, probably more for show that substance as he and his voters actually need immigrant labour to run their factories and look after their families.
He will also be looking for more positions in government; Berlusconi will have to repeat his loaves and fishes act, blessing the undersecretaryships and cabinet posts in order to keep all his supporters happy. Last week he appoint nine new undersecretaries, paying debts for support in December’s vote of confidence and he immediately said that he needed more.
Even if the Moratti were not to win on the first round, or, heaven forbid, actually lose, Berlusconi is unlikely to resign as Massimo D’Alema did when the centre left lost badly in the 2000 regional elections. “I was elected by the Italian people” is the refrain we have often heard “and D’Alema was not”. The most we can expect is perhaps a reshuffle.
Monday afternoon will be interesting for all, not just where they have voted.

Punching below its weight

Tomorrow the Contact Group for Libya meets in Rome. The summit is co-chaired by the Italian foreign minister, Franco Frattini and the Qatari prime minister and minister of foreign affairs Hamad Bin Jassim Bin Jabr Al-Thani. Hillary Clinton will be there along with NATO secretary, Anders Fogh Rasmussen, the British and French foreign ministers as well as representatives of the Arab League and the Libyan Transitional National Council. In all there will be 23 countries, 7 IGOs and four observer countries.
Italy is a crucial player in the Libyan issue; Italy is Libya’s largest trading partner its first exporter supplying 17.5% and taking 20% of Libya’s exports equivalent to 4.6% of Italy’s imports, almost all oil and gas, fifth after Germany, France, China and the Netherlands. Until the February crisis, Libya supplied Italy with a quarter of its oil and 10% of its gas. Unfreezing Libyan oil and assets is an important item on tomorrow’s agenda, especially for Italy. There are Libyan investments in the engineering giant Finmeccanica, the UniCredit bank, the formerly public energy company ENI and even the Turin football club Juventus. In 2008 Qaddaffi and Berlusconi signed a much trumpeted friendship agreement.
The two countries have historical links as Italy was the colonial power from 1911 to 1943 and they are almost contiguous.
Apart from the close mutual involvement of economic and security interests between the two countries, Italy is still an important player on the world stage. Its economy is seventh or eighth in the world. It is a major contributor to UN agencies both in money and peacekeepers and it is one of the EU’s big four.
By just about any measure, Italy should be at the forefront of international affairs (“the least of the great powers” as it was once called) and should be leading the international community in its attempts to resolve the Libyan crisis.
And yet this is clearly not the case. Since Douglas Hurd declared that Great Britain “punched above its weight” it has been a conceit of UK foreign policy that Britain achieves more than its hard power should give it. This may or may not be true for Britain but Italy undoubtedly punches well below its weight and the present Libyan issue is a perfect illustration.
The eternal problem is Italy’s lack of reliability. As Corriere della Sera commentator and former diplomat, Sergio Romano put it in 1993, Italy is equivocal and marked by “the anxiety to participate and the desire to avoid the rule of participation”. (Or as Bismark put it a century before “Poor Italy, such a big appetite but such poor teeth”).
With Italian planes flying combat missions over Libya, the Northern League first said that Italy should not be fighting and threatened to bring the government down if the Italian air force continued bombing Libya. As we know, this was posturing in view of the local elections on 15 May but it does send out a very peculiar message to Italy’s partners and allies at tomorrow’s summit. There are three League cabinet members and if the League deputies voted against a motion in either house, the government would lose the vote (unless of course the opposition supported them, but that would still mean a minority government).
In the event, a compromise was reached and this morning, the League and the main government party, Berlusconi’s People of Freedom voted a motion which purports to put an end date to the military action and underlines Italy’s constitutional rejection of war. It and the League’s first draft could well have been written by pacifists on the left in the past while today, the centre-left and the centrist opposition support the NATO action against Qaddaffi.
The whole Libyan crisis has been marked by ambiguity in Italy. The 2008 treaty still has not been revoked so, in law at least, Italy is committed “not to interfere in Libya’s internal affairs” and to “not allow its territory to be used for hostile acts against Libya”.
Two months ago, Berlusconi said that Qaddaffi should not be disturbed and then that he was upset at the thought of a friend of his being attacked. Finally, he allowed Italian aircraft to fly combat missions even though it is almost certain that they were already doing so before the official order. Immediately afterwards, the government almost falls because half of them do not want to go to war.
It is easy to criticise the present government but the centre-left has been equally ambiguous or uncertain. In 1999, D’Alema denied that Italian aircraft were attacking Kosovo and Serbia (in order to protect his own left flank) while they were in fact very active. And in 2007, the Prodi government lost a vote on the financing of missions abroad and was only saved when the centre-right came to help. A year later, the government did actually fall, two years into its mandate, showing the world that longterm cooperation was uncertain and difficult.
Then there are the personalities. Leave aside Berlusconi’s endless bricks, when his foreign minister, Frattini appeared on BBC Newshour during the first Libya Contact Group meeting interviewed by Jeremy Paxman, he showed why the US dispatches called him a messenger boy; not a figure to inspire confidence.
Three weeks ago, at an EU meeting in Luxembourg, three Italian ministers gave a hurried statement in a corridor and refused to take press questions, while other countries’ ministers were holding serious press conferences.
Only yesterday, Defence Minister Ignazio La Russa was caught on camera during a talk show asking his gopher “Who is Lukashenko?” That was just for domestic consumption but La Russa is such a caricature of the Fascist bully that his European colleagues must think he was sent by Central Casting.
Other prime ministers, foreign and defence ministers have had better manners and have been better able to deal with the press and foreign colleagues but none have been able to overcome the fundamental unreliability of Italian foreign policy. So even tomorrow, when Italy should be at the centre of the ring, it will still be punching below its weight.

Holy Royal Humbug

Ebenezer Scrooge thought that any festivities were humbug, particularly Christmas and anything else which might stop him making money and which disrupted his normal way of life. I can sympathise – not so much about the money which I’m not very good at but certainly about the disruption. Last week I was in London which was preparing for the Royal Wedding and this weekend I am a fugitive from Rome which has been invaded by a million or so people celebrating the beatification of Pope John Paul II.

There are many similarities in the two gatherings.
Both are massive media and public events calling for organisation, security and media management; both have invited huge commercial exploitation and speculation with huge costs for the two cities and huge benefits for the private sector. Unlike big sporting events or music festivals, both are quintessentially political celebrations as a show of power and influence with a significant presence of heads of state and government with no doubt quite a lot of informal diplomacy going on at both. The beatification is explicitly religious while the wedding (apart from being a religious ceremony) involves the future head of the Church of England. Both are organised by probably today’s two greatest masters of pomp and ceremony, the Vatican and the British Crown.
The two entities are also very expertly reconciling their traditional roots which go back a thousand years for one and 1,500 for the other (as a political power) with the 20th C. need for some popular legitimacy and the 21st C. obligation to exploit all the media available. They are using the web and social media to present the events to widest possible audiences to consolidate their status and prestige in the world.
But there are major differences in the two ceremonies.
The wedding has done much to consolidate the institution of the British monarchy (and for all the other countries which have Queen Elizabeth as their head of state). The institution is solid and reliable at the same time as providing celebrity glamour and material for the gossip columns – but above all, it is a symbol of national identity, culture and life. Someone who leads the mourning in tragic times and the celebration in good times. For the most part, a constitutional monarch puts flesh on the abstraction because most of us need something real rather than imagined.

Along with presidents in parliamentary republics, they have an advantage over executive presidents in that they do not take political decisions. If a prime minister messes up, then he or she leaves without damaging the symbol. The monarchs have the slight edge over presidents because if one of them is a mess, we can blame genes not ourselves for having elected him or her. They have another advantage over presidents in their continuity. We all have families so can identify with them in some distant sort of way.
It is true, they are hardly democratic and reinforce privilege and are expensive (but the Italian presidency costs more than the British monarchy) but for those that still have them, a monarchy is an effective way of filling the symbolic function. Plato spoke of the need for founding myths 2,500 years ago and we can allow ourselves a myth or two when the worst that might come of it is a lot of young women getting married in imitation Kate dresses.
The other ceremony is far from representing a myth. It honours the man who led the Roman Catholic Church for longer than all but one pope and who transformed the Church more than any other pope since the Reformation.
Karol Woytila had been a parish priest and diocesan bishop for most of his ecclesiastical life before becoming pope and as such he worked with ordinary catholics and the Polish authorities rather than with diplomats and the curia like most of his immediate predecessors. After his election, he used his charm not only to engage with Rome and the faithful but to project the Church across the world, both catholic and non-catholic. He developed the timid outreach of John XXIII (another pontiff of enormous charm and carisma but without Woytila’s media skills) and the official visits that Paul VI had begun. And he did it in a big way. For the first time, the spiritual head of the Roman Catholic communion was not just the leader of millions, he was actually a presence in most of their countries.
John Paul II gave moral and financial support to his fellow Poles fighting against Soviet and Communist control and undoubtedly gave an important contribution to the final fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of the Soviet Union.
He is being recognised for revitalising the Church and bringing spiritual enthusiasm to millions of young people and for his contribution to ending the Cold War.
But he represents so much more.
As leader of the Church he refused to act when told about the sexual abuse allegations in the US, Ireland and elsewhere. He defended Fr. Maciel, the founder of the Legionnaires of Christ, a brilliant organiser and fundraiser but also a priest with two families and abuser of children, and refused to allow investigations to be completed.
While modernising the medium, he kept his message rigorously mediæval. There was to be no contemplation of relaxing the celibacy rules for clergy; along with his successor, he rejected any other truth outside the one decreed by himself. He spoke with other religions and their leaders but on many occasions he reiterated the absolute truth of the Roman Catholic truth and the error of other Christians not to mention other religions or worse, no religion at all. To emphasise this point of view, he beatified Pius IX, the man who invented the doctrine of papal infallibility. Like Pius IX, but 150 years, John Paul was an enemy of the enlightenment and 19th and 20th C. modernity.
In politics, he was a severe critic of those catholics who wanted a less hierarchical church from Latin American clerics like Boff or Romero who was assassinated for his activities. In Europe he suspended theologians like Hans Küng from his job. At the same time, he welcomed and honoured General Pinochet and then interceded with the British government for him to be released during the extradiction proceedings to Spain for murder.
Finally, he was a man who spoke much about peace and indeed in 2003 used Vatican diplomacy to try and prevent the invasion of Iraq, but on the three occasions during his papacy when it was catholics who were the murderers rather than the victims, he did nothing.
In Ruanda, Bosnia and Northern Ireland, I am not aware of any condemnation and sanction of the killers. His predecessors were quick to excommunicate their enemies from Victor Emmanuel II to the Italian Communists in the ‘40s and Woytila could have threatened Ruandan génocidaire priests, on Bosnian Croats and Irish catholic nationalists. In Northern Ireland, he did issue a joint statement with the primate of the Church of Ireland when he visited, not quite the same as a direct condemnation and excommunication of the Omagh bombers.
By beatifying John Paul II, the Roman Catholic Church sends out a disturbingly fundamentalist image of itself. And, a small point, by disregarding its own rules that beatification processes cannot start until five years after the death of the candidate, the Church tells us that rules do not apply to the popular and powerful – a dangerous precedent.
So today’s ceremony in St. Peter’s Square is very different from Friday’s in Westminster Abbey and not just because of the different faces on the mugs

. Humbug perhaps but with very different messages.

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.