The New Old World (54 page)

There was a cost to this elegant operation. When Prodi's resentment threatened to become dangerous, it was deftly neutralized by exporting him to Brussels as president of the EU Commission, where he was soon out of his depth. But a spectacle of intrigue and division, recalling only too vividly the mores of the First Republic, had been given to the public, damaging the credibility of the Ulivo as a renovating force. Still, for the PDS the parliamentary coup was a necessary step towards Italian normalcy in a sense that was, in its view, more important. The heirs of the PCI were the centrepiece of the ruling coalition—in fact, the only substantial party organization in it—and freely referred to as the ‘principal share-holder' in the government. Yet an anachronistic prejudice still prevented them from converting effective into symbolic power, as would have occurred in any other European country, so they argued. Determined to break this taboo, D'Alema installed himself in the Palazzo Chigi.

What were the fruits of this closing of the gap between the
pays réel
and the
pays légal
in the Centre-Left? The top priority of the PDS had all along been to change the electoral system. Constitutional reform, much bruited, was always a means to this rather than an end in its own right—a bargaining chip in negotiations with the Right, which had initially wanted a strong presidential system. But the former Communists were not alone in feeling that a drastic electoral reform, abolishing the hated ‘Mattarellum', or hybrid system concocted in the throes of crisis five years earlier, was the key to founding a stable Second Republic.
²⁰
Virtually the entire press clamoured for one, while Segni and Pannella—the authors of the original referendum abrogating proportional
representation—were agitating for a second referendum to finish the job. Different foreign models, most of them Anglo-American in inspiration, were advocated by the interested parties. Far the most trenchant and lucid intervention in these debates came from Giovanni Sartori, the world's leading authority on comparative electoral systems, occupying a chair at Columbia and columns in the
Corriere della Sera
, who in a series of coruscating polemics championed the French model of a directly elected presidency and two-round majority voting.
²¹

The PDS was not enamoured of a French-style presidency, fearing that its personalization of power would give an advantage to Berlusconi or Fini. But it urgently wanted the
double tour
. In fact, this had been its over-riding strategic priority from the start. The reason was always clear. Under the existing rules, the party was stuck at around 20 per cent of the electorate—the largest party in the mosaic of the Centre-Left, but still a smallish one by European standards. Unable to advance further in straightforward electoral competition, it needed a restriction of the range of voter choice to eliminate its rivals to the left, and potentially somewhat to the right of it. Above all, the PDS wanted to clear the decks of any challenge from Rifondazione, as a force capable of attracting disaffected voters from its own ranks, and subjecting a Centre-Left government to unwelcome pressure from without. This was an objective, however, that had to remain tacit. Sartori, more candidly and consistently, argued that the
double tour
was vital to wipe out both the Lega and Rifondazione, as twin menaces to the emergence of a stable, non-ideological order in which all policies converged towards the liberal centre.

A huge amount of energy was invested by D'Alema and his party in trying, by one means or another, to force this change through, in the hope that Berlusconi would find it to his advantage too. But, though tempted for a time, Berlusconi soon realized that a much quicker and surer route back to power lay in renewing his alliance with Bossi, who was implacably hostile to the
double tour
. The eventual result of five years of unremitting, and increasingly
desperate, efforts by the PDS to change the rules of the political game was little short of farce. After strenuous demands for the
double tour
, when D'Alema fell from office in the spring of 2000 with only a year to go before new elections, the PDS suddenly backed the Segni–Pannella referendum for a complete first-past-the-post system (which it had always hitherto rejected) and when that failed, unsuccessfully converted to a full proportional system along German lines (anathema to it for a decade) purely as a means of staving off looming defeat in the upcoming polls. A more futile and ignominious pilgrimage of opportunism would be difficult to imagine. As for the ledger of constitutional reform, it remains bare.

Far more pressing, in reality, was the need for reform of Italian justice, with its mixture of a Fascist-derived legal code, arbitrary emergency powers, and chaotic procedural and carceral conditions. Here, indeed, has long been a panorama without equivalent elsewhere in Western Europe. There is no
habeas corpus
in Italy, where anyone can be clapped into jail without charges for over three years, under the system of
custodia cautelare
—‘preventive detention'—that is responsible for locking up more than half the country's prison population. Not only can witnesses be guaranteed immunity from prosecution, under the rules of
pentitismo
, but they can be paid for suitable testimony by the state, without even having to appear in court, or any record being visible of what they receive for their evidence—perhaps from the manila envelopes that, according to SISDE operatives, were pocketed every month by Scalfaro and his peers. In the magistracy, as noted, there is no separation of careers, and little of functions, between prosecutors and judges: in Italian parlance, those who lay charges are simply identified with those who are supposed to weigh the evidence for them, as
giudici
. In the prisons themselves, some fifty thousand inmates are jammed into cells built for half that number. The trial system has three stages, whose average length runs for ten years, and the backlog of cases in the courts is now more than three million.
²²
In this jungle, inefficiency mitigates brutality, yet also compounds it.

Such was the system suddenly mobilized by crusading magistrates against political corruption in the north and the Mafia
in the south. The personal courage and energy with which the pools in Milan and Palermo threw themselves at these evils had no precedent in the recent history of Italian administration. In Sicily, investigators risked their lives daily. But they too were the products of a culture that discounted scruples.
Custodia cautelare
was used as an instrument of intimidation. Illegal leaks of impending notices of investigation were regularly employed to bring down targeted office-holders. Tainted evidence was mustered without qualms—in the case against Andreotti, a key witness for the state was a thug who inconveniently committed another murder while on the public payroll for his deposition. Any idea of separating the careers of prosecutor and judge was attacked with ferocity. The rationalization of these practices was always the same. Italy was in a state of emergency; justice could not afford to be overnice about individual rights. But, of course, they were not just responses to an emergency, but also perpetuated it. A widespread contempt for law is not to be cured by bending its principles. ‘We will turn Italy inside out like a sock',
²³
Piercamillo Davigo, the clearest mind of the Milan pool, is said to have declared, as if the country were a discardable item from the laundry basket.

At the height of the prestige of Mani Pulite in the first half of the nineties, when its star prosecutor Antonio Di Pietro topped all media ratings, few doubts were voiced about the work of the magistrates on the Left. D'Alema himself was never caught up in this uncritical acclaim. But here too, short-term tactical calculations over-rode any coherent set of principles. For the most part, conscious of the popularity of the magistrates, the PDS sought to capitalize on their role. D'Alema eventually recruited Di Pietro as a senator in a safe PDS seat in 1997, even while upholding Berlusconi's credentials as a national leader, regardless of the legal charges against him. Whatever private misgivings may have been felt in the upper reaches of the party, there was no public criticism of the worst features of Italian justice—preventive detention, mercenary testimony, fusion of prosecutors and judges. The field was thus left open for the Right to make a self-interested case for more defensible alternatives, with a cynicism that only discredited them. In this field of force, no structural reforms of any moment were possible.
²⁴
At
the end of five years of Ulivo government, the magistrates had overreached themselves in pursuit of Andreotti on too gothic charges of which he was acquitted, yet failed to clinch far more plausible accusations against Berlusconi. Meanwhile Italy was treated to the tragic spectacle of the head of the Milan pool applauding Adriano Sofri's imprisonment, on the evidence of a
pentitismo
that the Left defending him could never bring itself to disavow.
²⁵
Conditions in the prison system remained as disastrous as ever.

Elsewhere the Centre-Left's performance was more respectable, if nowhere very striking. Administrative regulations were to some extent simplified—no minor matter for the citizen, in a country with over fifty thousand laws where Germany has about five thousand—and fiscal resources devolved to the regions. There was a limited reform of the university system, where traditionally three-quarters of students never complete their degree; but without more funding, substantial progress remains unlikely. On the other hand, the chance of improving the quality of the Italian media was thrown away, when the PDS, in its pursuit of a deal with the heads of Mediaset in the Bicamerale, chose to reject the term-limits independently set by the constitutional court on Berlusconi's television franchise. In foreign policy, D'Alema made the country the run-way for NATO bombing of Yugoslavia, a step further than Christian Democracy ever went in bending to the will of the United States, and in general the Centre-Left showed less independence of Washington—in the Middle East as well as the Balkans—than the regimes of Andreotti or Craxi had done before them.

Little in this record was calculated to inspire enthusiasm among the electors of the Ulivo coalition, let alone those who had voted against it. In the spring of 2000, regional elections handed the Centre-Left a heavy defeat. With a national reckoning only a year away, D'Alema could see the writing on the wall and quickly stepped down, to avoid being tarred with impending defeat. The most astute Italian politician of his cohort, he once tersely
remarked after meeting Blair: ‘
manca di spessore'
, ‘A bit thin'. But if he noticed the beam—the disc-jockey's vacant smirk—in the eye of the other, he could not see the mote in his own. His culture was no doubt somewhat more solid, but it was not enough. Excess of tactical guile, shortage of ideal reflection: the eventual upshot was a self-destructive reduction, to standard neo-liberal clichés of even the poor remains of ‘European social democracy', to which the PDS nominally aspired. The party would have done better to remain loyal to Prodi, who was respected by the public, and accept the rules on which he was elected. Voters had looked to the Ulivo for steady government, which D'Alema's ambitions had undermined. As it was, the experience of the Centre-Left came full circle, when its final premier became the initial re-tread of the decade, Craxi's former counsellor Amato.
²⁶
Understandably, it did not care to present him as its candidate to fight the Centre-Right a year later.

In these conditions, Berlusconi's victory in May 2001—with Bossi securing his flank once more in the north, and Fini in the south—was a foregone conclusion. The actual shift in votes, as in the previous election, was small. The Centre-Right, which already had a majority of voter preferences in 1996, this time converted it into a parliamentary landslide. Berlusconi had retained his following among housewives, conservative Catholics, small entrepreneurs, the elderly and the thirty-year olds. But now the renamed ‘House of Liberties' got more votes than the Centre-Left from the bulk of the working class in the private sector, as well. The key to the scale of its victory lay in the damning verdict of the electorate on the record of the Centre-Left in power—large numbers of those who actually voted for the Ulivo confessing they had more confidence in the capacity of the Centre-Right to solve the various problems facing the country.
²⁷
In the two epicentres of the crisis of the First Republic, Lombardy and Sicily, Berlusconi scored the cleanest sweeps of all.

Retrospectively, the Centre-Left is now faced with the bill for its manoeuvres to abort Berlusconi's administration in 1994. Then his parliamentary majority was far smaller; his political experience shorter; his financial empire weaker; his legitimacy more fragile. Thinking to gain time for itself by keeping him out of power, the Centre-Left merely allowed him to become better prepared for exercising it. For this time, Berlusconi's position is much stronger. Forza Italia is no longer a shell, but an effective party, capable of playing something closer to the role of Christian Democracy of old. Fininvest has recovered from its difficulties. His allies are unlikely soon to challenge him. His opponents have conceded his status as a national leader. In these conditions, fears can be heard that Italian democracy is at risk, should Berlusconi and his unsavoury outriders succeed in consolidating their grip on the country. Could Italy be staring at the prospect of a creeping authoritarianism, once again organized around the cult of a charismatic leader, but this time based on an unprecedented control of the media—now public as well as private television—rather than squads and castor-oil?

Two structural realities tell against the idea. Fascism rose to power as a response to the threat of mass insurgency against the established order from below—the danger that the ‘revolution against capital' Gramsci had hailed in Russia mght spread to Italy. Today there is no such ferment in the lower depths. The working class is atomized, there are no factory councils, the PCI has vanished, radical impulses among students and youth have waned. Capitalism in Italy, as elsewhere, has never looked safer. Historically, the second condition of Fascist success was nationalist self-assertion, the promise of an expansionist state capable of attacking neighbours and seizing territory by military force. That too has passed. The days of the autarkic state are gone. Italy is closely enmeshed in the European Union, its economy, military and diplomacy all subject to supranational controls that leave little leeway for independent policy of any kind. The ideological and legal framework of the EU rules out any break with a standard liberal-democratic regime. There is neither need, nor chance, of Berlusconi becoming an updated version of Mussolini.