As a mayor’s wealth and patronage increases over the years, so does his power. If it is clear that a mayor has at least another ten years in office, then obviously as a citizen my best strategy is to support him overtly to ensure that whatever favours I may need from the administration will be given. A mayor’s power increases exponentially with his length of tenure, since when he is well ensconced it makes little sense to be a lone opponent. Little by little opponents dwindle and the mayor’s political party grows in number. Italian political parties are not based at grass-roots level on ideology, but are tribal – an extension of the family self-help group. Allegiances are based on self-interest, and even the ex-Communists, who once held the moral high-ground, are now seen as no different from anyone else.
The voters must also adapt their voting strategy to their conditions. Town administrations tend to change after a long-serving mayor, who has been in office for twenty to thirty years, retires or dies. This is a major upset, since alliances and allegiances have to be forged anew. In Italy it is vital to be on the winning side, or at the very least not to be the vociferous spokesman for the losing side. The floating voter is the norm. Even paid-up members of a political party think nothing of cancelling their membership and joining another party should a change of administration demand it. The important thing is to be a friend of the administration, or a respected opponent who needs occasional appeasement.
These are not petty considerations. It is in the gift of the administration to make people very rich indeed, even while staying within the law. Like most of the towns in the valley, the fictional Comino gets its funds from the central coffers, based on its size of approximately 1,000 people. The first part of the funds allocated for the rebuilding after the earthquake of 1984 was just over £2 million. By law each comune must appoint an engineer to oversee the work on all the buildings that were affected. His fee, as set out in the legislation, is 20 per cent of the monies spent on rebuilding. So, for the couple of years during which rebuilding takes place, £400,000 is available to the man the administration chooses to appoint. Comino has two resident engineers, one who belongs to the ruling party, the other who heads the opposition. No prizes for guessing who gets the plum.
The earthquake was in many ways the saviour of the valley. Although strong, it was short. Many houses were severely damaged, but none collapsed and no one was seriously injured. The state funds allocated were huge, bearing in mind the size of the towns. It worked out at approximately £25,000 per affected house. For a valley of some 25,000 inhabitants, this represents a major injection of cash and work.
People with long memories recall earthquakes in Sicily that happened twenty years or more ago where the victims are still living in caravans. Why the Comino Valley should have had such generous and prompt help is a matter for conjecture, but our proximity to Rome, the centre of disbursement of funds, must be in part responsible. The rationale behind the state’s funding of the rebuilding programme is that all houses are part of the state’s patrimony and therefore eligible for aid. Carried to extremes, this line of reasoning results in the rebuilding of mountain villages in the Abruzzi which are no longer inhabited.
A second tranche is due from central funds for the repair of houses that were less affected, and will bring further prosperity. It will also bring further dishonesty to our fictional town. There is dishonesty in the claims that are made by the citizens for repairs, just as there is on the part of the administrators, the builders and the overseers. There are people in the town of Comino who have had cattle barns rebuilt as houses, who have had new rooms built on their houses, who owned empty, dilapidated houses that are now new and rentable. All this courtesy of the state. As no one is unsullied, no one casts the first stone.
Italy is currently undergoing the trauma of seeing its national dirty linen paraded in public. Since the huge bribery scandal centred on Milan and the Mafia’s assassinations of Judges Falcone and Borsellino in Sicily, the public has suddenly woken up to the extent of the corruption in public life. The papers have christened it tangentopoli, or bribesville. The shock to the national psyche is that the administrations of the north, previously held up as the antithesis of the corrupt southern ones, seem to have their snouts in the same trough.
Italians now recognize that there is nowhere to hide. The corruption is pandemic and is at every level. The choice is a stark one – either continue to live with a system of backhanders and favours on the nod, or make an attempt to reorganize the system. The second option would, in my opinion, have a slim to zero chance of coming into being. Most rational Italians that I speak to are full of admiration for the civic administrations of Germany and Great Britain, which they perceive as treating all citizens equally before the law. It is an ideal to which they feel Italy should aspire. They are also aware that it is unlikely to work in Italy. The established system of families and favours is too ingrained. Besides, at a fundamental level there is self-interest involved.
All the citizens of Comino are aware that, although in theory the law forbids many things, the town hall will almost invariably turn a blind eye to even the most blatant abuses in return for a vote. In effect there is an unspoken conspiracy where everyone benefits from abuses of the system. Only the most naïve fail to take advantage. To put it another way, the current system of institutionalized corruption benefits more people than it harms, so it is unlikely to change. A cynic might also observe that the very people who are in the position of being able to effect a change – the politicians – are the ones who most benefit from the present arrangement.
At the simplest level the corruption begins with ‘recommendations’. If my son has recently graduated and is looking for a job, I will recommend him to someone who owes me a favour, or who may be hoping for one from me. This has been the way things work for as long as anyone can remember and the result is that many jobs are filled by people eminently unsuitable for the task. I know of three teachers of English who could not speak the language to save their lives, yet have gainful employment teaching the language to children. Conversely, I know a schoolmistress who speaks English perfectly, but who has had an immense struggle to find work.
Public appointments are ostensibly filled in Italy by concorsi, public examinations. These examinations are both written and oral, and the winner is awarded the job on offer. Before any concorso takes place, the names of the members of the examining board are made public, thus ensuring that anyone with the right connections can contact the examiners and recommend their preferred candidate. This works, because, although written work may be subject to later public scrutiny, the performance of the candidate in the oral examination is written on the wind. All that is left are the recollections of the examining board, and so their final selection, based on written and oral submissions, is impossible to dispute.
An even easier way to ensure that the correct candidate gets a given job is to make the job available only when the preferred candidate is free to take it. Many positions are left vacant for a year or two simply to ensure the job goes to a friend. There appears to be no sense that this is unethical; it is seen as the right way to behave to help a friend. Just as an employment agency might take the equivalent of the first month’s salary for its fees, a present of a similar amount of cash to the person who arranges a job is normal. They are simply doing unofficially what an agency does officially, so the payment has its own rationale. It follows that a civil servant working in, say, the Ministry of Education has the opportunity to find jobs for a great many teachers, so his earning potential is considerable.
The Italian attitude to a job is that the power of the position should be realized and exploited to the last iota. It is not hard to imagine where the temptations lie for the civil servant who heads the committee that sets the price of milk for Rome and its millions of inhabitants. Would this man be courted by the dairies? As the Romans used to say, ‘Cacatne ursus in silvis?’
Seeking out the power in any position is second nature to Italians; perhaps
this is why they make such good bridge players. A fine example of this phenomenon has been uncovered recently. Professor Duilio Poggiolini, head of the Health Ministry’s pharmaceuticals division, now in prison, became very rich by allowing the price of pharmaceuticals to rocket, and possibly allowing the sale of suspect ones as well. His wealth is phenomenal. So far the investigators have found a safe in his house containing 6,000 gold guineas, twenty large diamonds, ten silver ingots, hundreds of gold coins and a hundred gold ingots, eight of which weighed a kilo. Magistrates have also found a Swiss bank account with 13 million Swiss francs, twenty other Swiss accounts whose details are still unknown, two Italian accounts holding 75 billion lire – about £31 million. Lastly there are the paintings, sixty of them, including Picassos, Modiglianis and Dalis. Interestingly, the professor was a member of the infamous P2 Masonic lodge.
Traditionally, one of the differences between northern and southern Italians is their attitude to employment by the state. Although the civil service offered security of tenure, a title and a pension, it didn’t pay well. Italians from the north, with its developed economy, did not apply, but went for jobs where the money was good. It is still true that the vast majority of civil servants in Italy are from the south. As prosperity has come to Italy, so the money flowing through the hands of the civil servants has grown exponentially. The European Community has added to the administrative burden of handling so much money. Suddenly minor civil servants have within their grasp the chance of riches. Dispensing funds from, for example, the EC’s Regional Fund becomes a plum job. Each application that passes the desk is an opportunity for enrichment. This is the reason why so little of the money that is allocated for a given task ever reaches its destination. All along the route there are people taking their tangente, their slice of the cake.
Tracking down lost or misplaced funds in Italy is a sequestrator’s nightmare. Very rarely is anything recovered and even more rarely is a culprit found. Even when officials are caught in flagrante delicto, taped and filmed taking bribes, nothing much happens. Trials can be postponed almost indefinitely, evidence gets misplaced, statutes of limitations come into effect, the public forgets. Because all this is known to prosecution and defence alike, there is rarely any vigour in the prosecution; it’s like stirring porridge with a rubber spoon – much effort is expended but little is accomplished. Sooner or later the media circus moves on to a new scandal, new revelations, and new Draconian laws are passed to ensure nothing like this ever happens again. As far as I can see no one has yet lost faith in the law. It must be some racial memory from Roman times, but there is an almost naïve belief that passing a law banning a particular malpractice is somehow the same thing as eradicating the crime itself. Passing a new law is the knee-jerk reaction of government to any crisis and, up to now, it seems to have kept the public happy. Adding a new law to the Civil Code becomes a substitute for action.
A lot of news in Italy makes more sense if simple economics are borne in mind. If a builder gets a contract to build an apartment block after putting in his tender, there is not a lot of room for manoeuvre. All of what he has contracted to do is on view. He could skimp on the quality of the finishes, use a little less cement than he should (apartment blocks have collapsed in Rome from over-eager users of this technique) but basically the builder will be obliged to produce a building much as the one envisaged in the plans. A road presents a different set of circumstances. No one is going to check the depth of the foundations or the final layer of tarmacadam for the length of the road. Anyway, the man whose job it is to oversee that all the materials specified are used will sign any declaration in return for his tangente. Unlike a building, a shoddy road means only that three years from now the contract for repair will be up for tender, whereas falling buildings tend to precipitate inquiries and awkward questions, especially if people are dead. So roads make money better than houses. With this firmly in mind, the fact that the roads around Irpinia have been repaired to motorway standard, while the people remain in caravans, begins to make sense. Seemingly mindless or random decisions by officials are very rarely that. It is but simple economics at work.
Roads in Italy serve many purposes. They are a physical manifestation of the Italian urge to sistemare all around them. Roads open up areas of countryside to machinery, allowing more land to come into cultivation or forestry available for logging. They are also a means of making a lot of people a lot of money. If a comune has not had the good fortune to have had an earthquake, it can obtain significant money from the state for building roads. Obviously any request for financing a road must be accompanied by some sort of reason for needing it. Much thought goes into finding reasons for roads.
The fictional comune of Comino includes land on the lower slopes of the Apennines which has been for centuries the preserve of shepherds and, once upon a time, charcoal burners. It is accessible only by mule track and has little value. Suppose I am mayor and I own acres of this wilderness; how fine it would be to have a road going to or through it. Not only would the land be easily accessible, it would be available for building houses, multiplying its value by a factor of ten or twenty. All that is needed is to satisfy the state that the road is necessary and the funds will arrive. It is worth considering what ‘satisfying the state’ actually means. Clearly, the state must at some point be embodied in an individual whose signature will make it all possible – and who may be responsive to a deal that will benefit all parties.
A corollary to this is that if I, as mayor, have plans for the development of an area of the comune, I could set about buying land there and then, once it is mine, start the development. These simple truths explain much of the landscape: why housing developments appear in unlikely and curious places, and why roads lead to the top of a mountain and stop, not connecting with other roads.
The pattern of behaviour of local administrations is strangely constant. When a new administration takes over a town, its first five years of tenure sees a huge output of work. All kinds of civic projects that somehow never got done are completed, a sense of urgency and competence abounds. Projects that have a high visibility – like replacing public benches, street lights, paving-stones in the piazza, or a new surface on the main thoroughfare – are all completed with speed and efficiency. The evidence of a new broom is there for all to see. The administration establishes itself in the minds of the electorate as a very different beast from the one it has supplanted. Meanwhile the administration begins to find its feet in the netherworld of provincial and regional distribution of funds. It begins to establish contacts with the building firms that will be its partners in all civic projects – it begins to find its allies.
Its next term of office sees less projects of obvious benefit to the community as a whole, and more that have dubious value. Slowly the administration, like the pigs in Animal Farm, comes to resemble what it replaced. By the third and fourth term the comune will have become the personal fiefdom of the mayor and his trusted associates. By this time the mayor, if he is of at least average ability, will have a firm political base for his next move: a seat on the provincial council. Dealings at this level grow enormously in complexity; for provincial elections a mayor will need not only the votes from his own comune, but also votes from many other comuni where he may not be known. The only way to achieve this is through the party machinery. In neighbouring towns the local party will give instructions to its troops as to who should get their second-preference votes. As elections to the provincial council are also based on proportional representation, the transfer of second-preference votes is crucial. An ambitious man can work his way from provincial, to regional, to national government. Each step needs carefully constructed alliances, an astute estimation of who is important and therefore to be cultivated, and an ability to feel no remorse for those who can no longer be of help. By this means Italy fills its upper houses of the legislature with the quality of people it deserves.
And what of the honest man? As a political species he is endangered bu
t not quite extinct. The problem facing him is that the political arena is an inhospitable habitat. If an honest man accepts no bribes, how can he hope to influence those who do? Where will he get the money? Certainly at local level, where the relationship between the voters and the elected is incestuously close, his problems are huge. Suppose this honest councillor objects at a council meeting to a planning proposal that he feels is wrong; the proposal will be blocked. After the meeting the mayor will be asked by the applicant what transpired. ‘It would have been passed,’ says the mayor, ‘but Tizio blocked the proposal.’ So Tizio loses votes at the next election. If he blocks any more proposals, he will lose still more votes. If he never gets elected again, none of his ideals or his honest approach will influence council meetings. The strategy of an honest man must be of infinite subtlety if he is ever to have an effect on Italian political life.
That such men undoubtedly exist despite the system is a testament to man’s indomitable hope. The brave men who knowingly risk their lives by becoming judges or prosecutors in Sicily’s anti-Mafia campaign may be few in number, but at least they prove that the whole of the body politic is not yet infected. It is possible that Giuseppe Falcone’s murder by the Mafia might ignite in the Italian people an urge to reform the system and perhaps look more closely at the kind of individuals who present themselves for election.
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North of Naples, South of Rome Page 12
