Political renewal Italian style

Contemporary Review, Nov, 1993 by Mark Gilbert

The recent spate of bomb explosions in Florence, Rome and Milan has acted as a potent reminder that Italy is undergoing its most turbulent political crisis since the late 1970s. Whoever is responsible for planting the bombs, the purpose of the explosions is clear. The blasts are an attempt to intimidate the judges, politicians and thousands of ordinary people who are trying, with some success, to renew Italian democracy.

The underlying causes of the current upheaval are to be sought in the failure of post-war Italian governments to build a normal bond of mutual service and respect between the state and the citizen. The trains do not run on time, though this, in fact, is the least of the average citizen's problems. A more serious issue has been the ossification of the country's political class into a privileged nomenklatura. The complexities of the Italian political system, with its party lists, abundance of parties and permanent Communist opposition meant that Italian voters were either unwilling or unable throughout the Cold War to vote the country's governing parties out of power. This situation generated predictable results. By the mid-1980s, Italian politics was a by-word for corruption, jobbery, wasteful ~pork barrel' legislation and the pointless pursuit of personal power by the political elite.

Though this system had its defenders, it was inherently unstable. The first signs of public restlessness with the political system came in June 1991, through a referendum to simplify the electoral system and stamp out fraudulent voting procedures. One of the nomenklatura's most glaring privileges was the possibility of using the immensely complicated party list system to manipulate election results. This made the huge victory won by the reformers, in the face of the open opposition of leading figures such as the former Socialist Prime Minister, Bettino Craxi, a symbolic affirmation of the public will for change. The long-serving government coalition, however, especially the Christian Democrats (DC) and the Socialists (PSI), acted as if nothing had happened. Confident that their strangle-hold on the state television network and much of the press would enable them to mould public opinion during an election campaign, Italian leaders continued to play politics by the old rules. The then President, Francesco Cossiga, grasped that the parties were making a disastrous blunder, but his efforts to make them change their ways were undermined by his eccentric methods of presenting his views. As a result, the parties only discovered how far they had underestimated the strength of public opinion on the reform question in April 1992, when they were given an unprecedented drubbing in the national elections. The ruling coalition only obtained a majority in Parliament by the narrowest of margins, and the DC slid below 30 per cent for the first time since the war.

Yet, in retrospect, the parties must be glad that the election was held when it was. Since April 1992, the political fortunes of the old guard have gone from bad to worse as the judiciary, sniffing weakness, began rummaging through the dirtiest political laundry in the western world. The subsequent revelations of the mani pulite investigations in Milan, Rome, Venice and Naples have shocked even hardened cynics. It has become clear that since the early 1980s major public works contracts were awarded entirely on the basis of enormous under-the-counter ~contributions' to politicians from favoured businessmen; that most of these tangenti never reached the parties' coffers, and that many leading ~statesmen' were living far beyond their declared means. Worse still, a clear connexion between the political parties and organised crime seems to have been established. This is not a reference to the judicial woes of Giulio Andreotti, whose alleged friendship with the capi of the Sicilian mafia and reputed involvement in the murder, in 1979, of the journalist, Lino Pecorelli, has still to be fully investigated, let alone proved. Rather, it is a comment on the situation in Naples, where a flood of detailed confessions from repentent camorristi and disgraced politicians has shown beyond reasonable doubt that the political hierarchies of the city were working hand-in-glove with the principal crime families.

No democratic political system, however well-entrenched, could survive wrong-doing on this scale. Even the competence and personal honesty of Giuliano Amato, the Socialist academic who became Prime Minister after the April elections, could not prevent the Italians from switching their votes away from the traditional governing parties at every subsequent opportunity. The biggest beneficiary has been the Lega Nord, the populist movement often characterised, falsely, as neo-fascist. Despite (or perhaps because of) the occasional verbal intemperance of the party leader, Umberto Bossi, the Lega's share of the national vote has mushroomed from about two per cent in 1990, to almost twenty per cent today. In December 1992, voters elected Lega pluralities in two important northern towns, Monza and Varese. In June 1993, the Lega took control of administration in Milan, recording the highest ever vote, thirty-nine per cent, for a single party, as well as of numerous other urban centres in the Po River Valley, Italy's industrial and commercial heartland. The coalition parties, meanwhile, suffered their Caporetto. The DC were the main victims of the Lega's success in the north of the country, while their grip on the south was loosened by the left and by the neo-fascist Movimento Sociale Italiano (MSI). The party now stands at a post-war low of just eighteen per cent: a projected change of name to the Partito Popolare may not be enough to save it. The PSI is still worse off: bankrupt, divided and vilified by the press and by public opinion, it obtained less than five per cent of the votes in the June elections and is now facing a serious threat of extinction.