The New Old World (56 page)

After protecting his person came protecting his empire. By law Mediaset was due to relinquish one of its TV channels in 2003. Legislation was rushed through to allow it not only to retain the channel, but to enjoy a massive indirect subsidy for its entry into digital television. Since Berlusconi now commanded not only his own private stations, but controlled state broadcasting as well, his dominance of the visual media came close to saturation. But it failed to deliver any stable sway over public opinion. By 2005,
when he was forced to reshuffle his cabinet, the popularity of the government had plummeted. In part, this was due to the unseemly spectacle of the
ad personam
laws, denounced not only in the streets but by most of the press. But more fundamentally, it was a reaction to the economic stagnation of the country, where average incomes had grown at a mere 1 per cent a year since 2001, the lowest figure anywhere in the EU.

Watching its ratings drop precipitously in the polls, the ruling coalition abruptly altered the electoral system, abandoning its predominantly first-past-the-post component for a return to proportional representation, but with a heavily disproportionate premium—55 per cent of seats in the Chamber of Deputies—for the coalition winning most votes, and a threshold of 4 per cent for any party running on its own. Designed to weaken the opposition by exploiting its division into a larger number of parties than the bloc in power, the new rules played their part in the outcome of the general election held in April 2006.
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Contrary to expectations, the Centre-Left won only by a whisker—25,000 votes out of 38 million cast for the Chamber, while actually scoring less than the Centre-Right for the Senate. On a difference of less than 0.1 per cent of the popular vote, the premium handed it a majority of no less than sixty-seven seats in the Chamber, but in the Senate it could count on a precarious majority of two, only because of the anomaly—newly introduced—of overseas constituencies. Having believed in a comfortable victory, the Centre-Left went into shock at the result, which came as a psychological defeat. Prodi, now back from Brussels, was once again premier. But this time, he presided over a government mathematically, and morally, much weaker than before.

Not only did Centre-Left rule now hang by a thread, but it lacked any organizing purpose. In the nineties, Prodi had possessed one central goal, Italy's entry into the European monetary union, whose pursuit gave his tenure a political focus. His new administration—which unlike its predecessor, now included Rifondazione Comunista, widely regarded as a formation of the extreme left, as an integral part of its coalition, rather than as
an external support for it—had no equivalent coherence. At the Finance Ministry, Tommaso Padoa-Schioppa, one of the original architects of the European single currency, gave priority to reducing the public debt, which had crept back up a few points under Berlusconi, and cracking down on tax evasion, to some (although officially exaggerated) effect. A scattering of minor measures of liberalization, designed to make life easier for consumers of chemists, taxis and the like, was soon dissipated. Gestures, but no more, were made towards a thirty-five-hour week, as a placebo to keep Rifondazione quiet while the Centre-Left pursued a foreign policy of undeviating Atlanticism. Prodi's government reinforced the Italian contingent in Afghanistan; withdrew troops from Iraq very gradually, according to Berlusconi's own plan for doing so; approved an expansion of the American air force base at Vicenza that had been a launching-pad for the Balkan War; dispatched forces to Lebanon as a
glacis
for Israel; and retroactively covered kidnapping and rendition by the CIA from Italian soil.

None of this did anything for the popularity of Prodi or his ministers. Increased fiscal pressure angered the traditional taxevading constituencies of the Right. The lack of any significant social reforms disappointed voters of the Left. Most disastrously, no attempt was made either to deal with Berlusconi's conflict of interests, or to introduce better standards of justice. Instead a sweeping amnesty was declared—in theory to clear hopelessly over-crowded prisons, but in practice releasing not only common felons, but every kind of notable convicted of corruption. This
indulto
, proclaimed by the notorious Clemente Mastella (the shadiest politician in the coalition, a former Christian Democrat from Campania who had been made minister of justice to keep his tiny party in its ranks), provoked widespread outrage. By 2007, with Prodi's own standing in free fall, the leadership of the DS—the ‘Democratic Left' into which the bulk of Italian Communism had evolved—decided that its mutation into a Democratic Party pure and simple, dropping any association with the Left and absorbing assorted Catholic and ex-Radical politicians grouped in the so-called ‘Daisy' component of the coalition, could allow it to escape the sinking repute of the government, and elbow Prodi aside in public view. Massimo D'Alema, foreign minister in the government, was too damaged by his role in the final debacle of previous Prodi administration to be a credible candidate to head the new formation, whose leadership fell to his long-time rival Walter Veltroni, the DS mayor of Rome, as a fresher choice.
Privately, the two men despise one another—D'Alema regarding Veltroni as a fool, Veltroni D'Alema as a knave. But outwardly, together with a motley crew of devotees and transfuges, they joined forces to give birth to a new centrist party, to be cleansed of all connexion with a compromised past. By the autumn of 2007, Veltroni was more or less openly positioning himself as the alternative to Prodi, who theoretically still had three more years in office to run—in effect, repeating an operation mounted at Prodi's expense by D'Alema in late 1998.

This time, however, the ambitions were greater and talents lesser. Veltroni's aim was not to replace Prodi at the head of the existing coalition, but to bank on early elections to bring him to power as chief of a party that would rival Berlusconi's in novelty, breadth and popular support. But his limitations had long been apparent. Vaguely resembling a pudgier, bug-eyed variant of Woody Allen, Veltroni—an enthusiast for filmic dross and football, delighted to lend his voice to a Disney cartoon; author of opuscules like ‘Thirty-Eight Declarations of Love to the Most Beautiful Game in the World'—had the advantage of an image of greater sincerity than D'Alema, as more spontaneously conformist, but possessed little of his sharpness of mind.
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In November 2007, the Centre-Right bloc was in danger of falling apart, when Berlusconi—frustrated by failures to topple the Prodi government in Parliament—suddenly folded Forza Italia into a new organization, Popolo della Libertà, demanding that his allies, other than the Lega, join it as the single national party of freedom. Both Gianfranco Fini and Pier Ferdinando Casini, leaders of the former Fascist (AN) and Catholic (UDC) components of his coalition, rebelled. Instead of capitalizing on their disaffection, and splitting the Centre-Right, Veltroni eagerly offered himself to Berlusconi as a responsible partner in the task of simplifying Italian politics into two great parties of moderate opinion.
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What this meant was clear to all: once again, as in the mid-nineties, the attempt to strike a deal for a new electoral system designed to wipe out small parties, leaving the newly constructed PD and PdL in sole command of the political field. In the ranks of the
opposition, this danger promptly brought Fini to heel, returning him to allegiance to Berlusconi, and reviving the compact of the Centre-Right. In the ruling coalition, its effect was an even deadlier boomerang.

While negotiations between Veltroni and Berlusconi were proceeding in Rome, a long-gathering crisis was about to explode in the south. In late December 2007, rubbish collectors stopped work in and around Naples, where all dumps were full, leaving huge piles of rotting garbage accumulating in streets and neighbourhoods. Waste disposal in the region had long been a lucrative racket controlled by the Camorra, shipping toxic refuse from the industrial north into illegal dumps in Campania. There, both the region and the city of Naples had been fiefs of the Centre-Left for over a decade—the governor (and former mayor) ex-PCI, the mayor ex-DC. Under this pair, Antonio Bassolino and Rosa Russo Jervolino—the first by far the more important—there had been much boasting of the outstanding work performed in the restoration of Naples to its original beauties, and the advent of clean, progressive administration in Campania. In reality, notwithstanding municipal embellishments, corruption and gangsterism had flourished unchecked, without the Prodi government paying any attention to what was going on in its bailiwick.
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In January, the citizens of Naples finally rose up in furious protests against the mounds of putrescence visited on them. The damage to Centre-Left rule was immeasurable.

Two months later, its downfall combined, with peculiar local aptness, the outcomes of the tactical and moral blindness of the coalition. Within days of the outbreak of the garbage crisis in Naples, the wife of the minister of justice, Sandra Mastella, president of the Regional Assembly of Campania for the Centre-Left, was put under house arrest, charged with attempting to corrupt a local hospital trust for the benefit of her party, the UDEUR. Her husband resigned his ministry in protest, and was promptly reappointed by Prodi. But his loyalty already weakened by failure to respect collegial
omertà
in Naples, Mastella could see the writing was on the wall for his party anyway, if Veltroni's deal with Berlusconi went through. To block it, he switched sides, and his two senators in the upper chamber brought the government
down. In a riotous scene, the Centre-Right benches exploded with jubilation, corks popping and champagne spraying along the red velvet seats of the hemicycle in the Palazzo Madama.

Paying the bill for his miscalculations, Veltroni now had to fight an election at short notice, without having had the time to establish his party, or himself, as the beacon of civilized dialogue in a too faction-ridden society, on which he had counted. Rejecting any understanding with the three smaller parties to the left of it, the PD entered the lists alone, to underline its mission to give Italy a modern government, uncompromised by any participation of extremists—making an exception, at the last moment, only for Italy of Values, the small party owing allegiance to the most pugnacious of the Clean Hands magistrates, Antonio Di Pietro. Berlusconi, on the other hand, having integrated Fini's forces into his new party, had no compunction in moving into battle with allies—above all, the Lega in the north, but also the minor regionalist Movement for Autonomy in the south. The campaign itself was universally judged the dullest of the Second Republic, Centre-Left and Centre-Right offering virtually identical socioeconomic platforms, until at the last minute Berlusconi promised to lower property taxes. Otherwise, the two sides differed only in their respective rhetorics of morality (how to protect the family) and security (how to suppress crime).
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So far did Veltroni go out of his way to shun any aspersions on Berlusconi that he avoided even mentioning him by name, instead speaking throughout respectfully just of ‘my adversary'. His audiences were not roused.

The magnitude of the ensuing disaster exceeded all expectations. The Centre-Right crushed the Centre-Left by a margin of 9.3 per cent, or some 3.5 million votes, giving it an overall majority of nearly a hundred in the Chamber and forty in the Senate. Gains within the victorious bloc were made, however, not by the newly minted PdL (into which Forza Italia and AN had merged), which actually ended up with a hundred thousand votes less than the two had secured in 2006. The great winner was the Lega, whose vote jumped by 1.5 million, accounting for virtually all the total increase in the score of the Centre-Right. The PD, presenting itself as the party of the progressive Centre to which all well-disposed Italians
could now rally, proved a complete flop. With just over 33 per cent of the vote, it mustered scarcely more votes—on one reckoning, actually less—than its component parts in 2006. Indeed, even this score was only reached by the
voto utile
of about a fifth of the former voters of the parties of the Left proper, which this time had combined into a Rainbow alliance, and been wiped out when it fell below the 4 per cent threshold, with a net loss of nearly 2.5 million votes. Overall, the value-added of the Democratic Party, created to reshape the whole political landscape by attracting voters away from the Centre-Right, turned out to be zero.
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The shock of the election of 2008 has been compared to that of 1948, when Christian Democrats—this was before opinion polls, so there was little advance warning—triumphed so decisively over Communists and Socialists that they held power continuously for another forty-four years. If no such durable hegemony is in sight for today's Centre-Right, the condition of the Centre-Left, indeed the Italian Left as a whole, is in most respects—morale, organization, ideas, mass support—much worse than that of the PCI or PSI of sixty years ago: it would be more appropriate to speak of a Caporetto of the Left. Central to the debacle has been its displacement by the Lega among the northern working class. The ability of parties of the Right to win workers away from traditional allegiances on the Left has become a widespread, if not unbroken, pattern. First achieved by Thatcher in Britain, then by Reagan and Bush in America, and most recently by Sarkozy in France, only Germany among the major Western societies has so far resisted it. The Lega could, from this point of view, be regarded simply as the Italian instance of a general trend. But a number of features make it a more striking, special case.

The first, and most fundamental, is that it is not a party of the establishment, but an insurgent movement. There is nothing conservative about the Lega, whose raison d'être is not order, but revolt. Its forte is raucous, hell-raising protest. Typically, movements of protest are short-winded—they come and go. The Lega, however, has not just become a durable feature of the
national landscape. It is now the oldest political party in Italy, indeed the only one that can look back on thirty years of activity. This is not an accident of the random workings of the break to the Second Republic. It reflects the second peculiarity of the Lega, its dynamism as a mass organization, possessing cadres and militants that make it, in the words of Roberto Maroni, perhaps Bossi's closest colleague, ‘the last Leninist party in Italy'.
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Over much of the north, it now functions somewhat as the PCI once did, as rueful Communist veterans often observe, with big gains in one formerly Red industrial stronghold after another: the Fiat works in Mirafiori, the big petro-chemical plants in Porto Marghera, the famous proletarian suburb of Sesto San Giovanni outside Milan, setting in the fifties of Visconti's
Rocco and His Brothers
. This is not say that it has become a party based on labour. While it has captured much of the working-class vote across the north, the Lega's core strength lies, as it has always done, among the small manufacturers, shopkeepers, and self-employed in what were once White fortresses of the DC—Catholic provinces of the north-east, now increasingly secularized, where hatred of taxes and interference by the central state runs especially strong. Here resentment of fiscal transfers to the south, perceived as a swamp of parasitic ne'er-do-wells, powered the take-off of the League in the late eighties. Immigration from the Balkans, Africa and Asia, which has quadrupled over the last decade, is now the more acute phobia, laced with racism and prejudice against Islam. The shift of emphasis has, as might be expected, been a contributory factor in the spread of the League's influence into the northern working-class, more exposed to competition in the labour market than to sales taxes.