Success stimulated ambition. Federalism was not enough, declared Bossi in 1995, he now wanted secession and independence for the north, a region he called ‘Padania’ that stretched southwards from the Alps to the River Po. The following year he led a multitude to the banks of the river and held a ceremony at which he declared the independence of Padania. ‘Padanians,’ he cried, ‘no longer feel Italian’, a sentiment often repeated in later years, even on T-shirts for children carrying such slogans as ‘Padania is not Italy’, ‘Born to kill Italy’, or simply ‘Bossi’s boys’. Other gimmicks included a ‘shadow parliament’ in Mantua, a Padanian Liberation Committee and a foray by militants into Venice, where they occupied the campanile in San Marco and flew the flag of the Venetian Republic from its top.
How much secessionism was a tactic and how much a principle is still debatable. In the event, influenced by political developments in Britain, Bossi soon changed his mind and declared that the League’s aim was now ‘devolution, Scottish style’, pronounced in a thick Lombard accent. Although the League had withdrawn its support from Berlusconi within a few months of the 1994 elections they had jointly won, thereby causing the downfall of his government, it joined forces with him again in 2001 and also agreed to respect Italy’s national sovereignty. While this concession did not hinder League supporters from chanting ‘Devolution or Death’ or Bossi himself from again threatening secession, the party was with Berlusconi once more in the Right’s victory in 2008, when it persuaded its allies to support the cause of ‘fiscal federalism’.
The League owed its success to its populism and emotional appeal but also to economic arguments that attracted people who were not personally inclined to vote for it. Such a man was Riccardo Illy who, apart from intermittently running his family’s coffee company, became successively (with support from the Centre-Left) mayor of Trieste, a deputy in Rome and the president of the autonomous region of Friuli-Venezia Giulia. Illy did not wish to disunite Italy but he did want it to become a truly federal state. Rome could remain the national capital, and the government there would retain control of defence, foreign affairs, security and public order; it would also preserve some authority over health. All other matters, he believed, should be handled by properly autonomous regions.
From the perspective of Rome, it seemed fair and natural for the richer areas to subsidize the poorer ones. A businessman in the north might also see the justice of this principle, but his chief concern was to keep his business going in conditions that allowed him to compete successfully with rival firms in neighbouring parts of Europe. His competitors in Austria, for example, were in 2004 paying substantially lower corporation tax than he was. In Slovenia, which was enjoying 7 per cent growth and receiving structural funds from the EU, an industrialist was paying labour costs a third lower than those burdening his Italian equivalent. The situation was so unbalanced, observed Illy, that a sensible businessman in Italian Gorizia should simply relocate his business across the road to Nova Gorica in Slovenia. Difficult though this situation was for Friuli-Venezia Giulia, it was even worse in non-autonomous regions such as Lombardy, the Veneto and Emilia-Romagna, which annually lost between a fifth and a sixth of their incomes through their subsidization of other parts of the country. Warning Italians that they were in danger of losing the north, Illy argued that the people making the economic decisions there must be northerners, people familiar with their regions’ needs and complexities.3 By 2009 most Italians agreed with him that fiscal federalism was a good thing, but not many were seeking to answer the question, ‘Who is going to pay for the schools and hospitals of Calabria?’
The least attractive side of the League was its xenophobia, its dislike of foreigners and its habit of playing on the electorate’s fears of illegal immigration from Africa and the Balkans. In the general elections of 2008 one of its posters portrayed a ‘Red Indian’ chief, whose noble image and feathered head-dress were accompanied by the words, ‘They were unable to stop immigrants, and now they live in reservations!’ Certain senior figures in the party sometimes sounded like neo-nazis ranting about ethnic purity. At a festival of the ‘Padanian people’ in Venice in 2008, a long-serving mayor of Treviso known as the ‘sheriff’ fulminated against Muslims and gypsies, raged at the building of mosques in Italy and denounced the idea of ‘black or brown people teaching our children’. In the same year a Trevisan councillor urged the council to ‘use the same system as the [nazi] SS’ when dealing with illegal immigrants, ‘punishing ten of them for every slight against one of our citizens’.4 Occasionally the League made a gesture of conciliation such as supporting the election of a black mayor (the son of an American soldier and an Italian woman) or choosing a coloured girl to be Miss Green Shirt and to sing ‘Va pensiero’ at party festivals. Yet for all that, it remained a party suffused with racism, one which owed much of its appeal to its skill in persuading people that Italy was being swamped by foreigners.
The League and its supporters had similar feelings towards Italians of the south. It was an old gag that Italy stopped at the Garigliano – the river that once marked the boundary between Naples and the Papal States – but the ancient mockery was rejuvenated with new insulting epithets such as ‘Calafrica’ and ‘Saudi Calabria’5 or with the banner at Milan’s San Siro stadium that greeted Neapolitan football fans with the words, ‘Welcome to Europe’. Especially provocative was the jibe that ‘Garibaldi did not unite Italy: he divided Africa’, because it mocked the central tenet of the Risorgimento that Italy was a nation. In its declaration of Padanian independence in 1996, the League took this further by alleging that united Italy’s history had been one of ‘colonial oppression, economic exploitation and moral violence’. The state had ‘deviously compelled the Peoples of Padania to endure the systematic exploitation of the economic resources created by their hard work, and see them squandered in the thousand streams of support for the Mafia clienteles of the south’.6
One of the Italians most appalled by such heresies was President Ciampi, the former partisan, Governor of the Bank of Italy and interim prime minister in 1993. During his presidency from 1999 to 2006 he constantly urged his countrymen to remember the Risorgimento and even implored directors to make more films of that courageous and ‘wonderful adventure’.7 It was a strange plea, in itself an admission that unification had not built a nation, and in any case it was too late. Italians cared increasingly little about those ‘beautiful legends’ Giolitti had been so eager to preserve, and they seldom visited the places designed to enshrine them. I have been to a dozen Risorgimento museums and find myself invariably alone with the ticket-seller and an attendant unless I am in Rome, where the museum is at the top of the Vittoriano and attracts tourists who have been taking photographs on the terrace. Few Italian children today have any idea what events are commemorated by all those streets in their cities called 4 Novembre, 25 Aprile or 20 Settembre. In 2008 the municipality of Rome even ridiculed the last date – the day the capital was ‘liberated’ in 1870 – by turning the anniversary ceremony upside down. Instead of remembering the forty-nine bersaglieri and other infantrymen killed at the Porta Pia, the event commemorated only the nineteen soldiers of the papal army who had died in the defence of the city. It seemed a gesture as derisive of the Risorgimento as the jibe about Garibaldi dividing Africa: by implication the true martyrs had been those fighting to defend the temporal power of the papacy.
BERLUSCONI
As Italy’s traditional parties disintegrated in 1994, a very remarkable thing happened. A Milanese businessman without political experience set up a new political party, won a general election and became the country’s prime minister. Although his government was brought down only a few months later by his ally, the Northern League, Silvio Berlusconi bounced back to win another election in 2001 and yet another in 2008. In May 2010 he became the third-longest prime minister in Italian democratic history, ahead of De Gasperi and not far behind Giolitti and Depretis.
Berlusconi’s success in 1994 was
extraordinary. After just a few months of preparation, he announced in January that he was ‘getting on to the pitch’ as the boss of a new party he christened with a football chant of a name, Forza Italia (‘Come on, Italy’). Two months later, he employed the most simplistic of messages to persuade Italians to vote for him as their leader. He was a successful man and he was going to make them also successful. He had become the richest man in Italy, he had rescued AC Milan and turned it into the finest football team in Europe; he was a clever operator, he got things done, he was the man to transform the country. In case voters might need some kind of programme, he promised tax cuts, a free market and victory over the ‘communists’, who were now masquerading as the Partito della Sinistra (PDS), the Party of the Left.
As the ‘first-past-the-post’ – or ‘winner-takes-all’ – electoral system tends to lead to contests between two power blocs, Berlusconi knew he had to unite the Centre-Right in order to defeat the Centre-Left and win the election. His most promising potential partners were the Northern League and the Alleanza Nazionale (National Alliance), but these unfortunately disliked each other so much that they would not join the same coalition. Whereas the League was sometimes federalist and sometimes secessionist but always anti-southern, the Alliance favoured centralized government and received the bulk of its support from the south. It was in fact the old neo-fascist party (the MSI) with a new name and a new leader, the presentable and articulate Gianfranco Fini, who had been national secretary of its youth front. Although he was still in this period describing Mussolini as a great statesman, Fini did not look or sound like a fascist and, as he grew older, he became positively anti-fascist. He came to regard fascism as an ‘absolute evil’, an opinion that drove the Duce’s granddaughter, Alessandra Mussolini, out of the party, and in 2008 he threatened to expel any fascists from his (until recently) neo-fascist organization.8 By then he had become one of the most coherent liberal voices in the country.
Since Berlusconi could not form a single coalition, he decided to construct a couple of them in different parts of the peninsula. In the north he joined forces with Bossi and the League in the ‘Liberty Axis’, and in the south and the centre his Forza Italia united with Fini and the Alliance in the ‘Axis of Good Government’. The success of this manoeuvre was astonishing, for at the election the coalitions won 366 seats in the Chamber against 213 for their opponents on the Left, and Berlusconi became prime minister. Yet he had little time to enjoy the office because Milanese magistrates began investigating him for corruption before the year was out and the Northern League deserted him.* A government of technocrats then took over until new elections were held in 1996, when the parties of Bossi, Fini and Berlusconi did even better than in 1994, the three of them plus a small christian democrat group winning over 52 per cent of the vote. Yet as Forza Italia and the League were competing with each other in the northern constituencies, they both lost out, which allowed their opponents, the Olive Tree coalition, to take power despite winning only 44 per cent of the ballot.
The Olive Tree was the first government of the Left that Italy had ever had and relied in parliament on the former communists of the PDS, the largest party in the coalition. Berlusconi and his colleagues strenuously insisted that the Party of the Left was still communist, an accusation its leaders did little to refute when they retained the hammer and sickle as its symbol, albeit now placed under an oak tree. Yet although the cabinet contained nine ministers from the PDS, it did nothing very radical. It was headed by Romano Prodi, who had run the state’s Institute for Industrial Reconstruction (IRI), and most of its ablest members were men of the Centre or Centre-Right, including two former employees of the Bank of Italy who had briefly been prime minister (Ciampi and Lamberto Dini) as well as the very popular Antonio Di Pietro, the most prominent of the Milanese magistrates in the Clean Hands campaign. The main achievement of Prodi’s ministry was to reduce inflation and the deficit to a level that enabled Italy to enter the European Monetary Union. With higher taxes, cuts in spending and a special ‘Euro-tax’, the government met the criteria and adopted the euro as its currency. By then, however, Prodi had been brought down by a faction inside his coalition and had gone unwillingly to Brussels as president of the European Commission. He was succeeded by Massimo D’Alema, the leader of the PDS, who made the mistake, which the Left was to repeat, of underestimating Berlusconi. His chief error was his failure to legislate on media monopolies and ‘conflicts of interest’, which in consequence allowed Berlusconi to control almost all commercial television and, if ever he returned to power, the state channels as well. The leaders of the Left seemed unable to understand charisma – they had little of it themselves – and they did not foresee how charisma plus television control would be a powerful electoral combination.
The Olive Tree was in disarray by the time it fought the elections of 2001. It had lost Rifondazione Comunista, the communist hardliners who had refused to join the PDS (now called the DS, Democratici della Sinistra), and it lost potential voters to a new party called ‘Italy of Values’ set up by Di Pietro to oppose Berlusconi and corruption. Its leader this time was the mayor of Rome, Francesco Rutelli, a former member of both the Radical and the Green parties, who was now the leader of the Margherita (Daisy Party), a name which understandably gave the Olive Tree a rather fey and wimpish image. Although Rutelli himself was an attractive and plausible candidate, he was no match for Berlusconi, who managed to resurrect his 1994 coalitions with both the National Alliance and the Northern League. Bossi and Berlusconi liked to insult each other – the Lombard Braveheart doing so in public, ‘Berluskaiser’ (as Bossi called him) choosing to do so in private – but they were aware that they could only win the election if they fought side by side in the north.
At the head of a coalition he now called ‘The House of Liberties’, Berlusconi promised to lower taxes and the crime rate, to increase pensions and to create at least a million jobs. The programme sounded appetizing but it was not accompanied by explanations of how he was going to achieve these goals or how he was planning to pay for them. It certainly did not fool the Economist, the influential London weekly that would normally have supported a politician of the Right who believed in free enterprise. After a front-page headline proclaiming that Berlusconi was ‘unfit to govern Italy’, the magazine observed that he was under judicial investigation for corruption on several counts, that the conflict of interests arising from his media empire should make him ineligible for office, and that ‘it would be unthinkable in any self-respecting democracy’ to elect such a man.9 Berlusconi’s acolytes dismissed the Economist’s survey as a communist plot, though the application of the adjective to such a dogmatically free trade publication was as laughable as it was to the author of the devastating judgement, Xan Smiley, who was the journal’s European editor and a liberal conservative.
The Economist’s views were widely publicized in Italy but evidently had little effect on the electorate. Berlusconi duly used his commanding ownership of commercial television to project his image into Italian homes, and he employed his wealth to print and distribute an illustrated book displaying his qualities to 18 million families. (Some years later he claimed to be the greatest prime minister Italy had ever had.) Yet most Italians refused to become indignant. They did not seem to care about the conflict of interests, just as they were apparently unperturbed by the criminal charges against him of corruption, tax evasion and the bribing of judges. In the elections Berlusconi had no difficulty in trouncing the Left, his coalition winning 367 seats in the Chamber against the Olive Tree’s 248.
After occupying the premiership for a full term of five years, it was predicted that Berlusconi would be badly defeated in the elections of 2006. Of all the pledges he had made in the previous campaign, he had managed to fulfil only one, an increase in pensions. He had failed to create the jobs he had promised, he had failed to reduce the crime rate and he had failed to lower taxes, though he had made it easier for the rich to evade them. Above all,
his assertion that the Italian economy needed an entrepreneur like him to get it moving had been made to look ridiculous. Over the course of his second premiership Italians became poorer, and their economy grew at an average annual rate of just one-third of 1 per cent, slower than in any other country in the European Union. Nor were there identifiable political achievements to set against this dismal economic record. In fact the prime minister had demonstrated his contempt for parliament by ignoring it, preferring to rule by decree, even though he had a large majority, rather than suffer the tedium of having to debate bills in the Chamber. Under his rule the chief political forum became the one he felt most at home in, the TV studio. When he made the decision to withdraw Italian troops from Iraq, where he had sent them to support the American invasion of 2003, he chose to announce the move not in parliament but in an interview on television.
The Pursuit of Italy Page 46
