14.08.2014

Berlusconi acquittal boosts reactionary drive

Plans for constitutional ‘reform’ represent a return to the notorious ‘Plan for National Rebirth’, argues Toby Abse

There had been a widespread hope that the decision of the Italian supreme court (Cassazione) to uphold Silvio Berlusconi’s tax fraud conviction in August 2013 marked the beginning of the end of his political career. But this has now been completely destroyed by his acquittal in the ‘Ruby case’ by the Milan court of appeal on July 18, which overturned the seven-year prison sentence imposed by the judges in the original trial.

The convicted fraudster was eventually expelled from the Senate in November 2013, and has for the next few months - probably until February 2015 - to do four hours community service a week, spending his Friday mornings looking after Alzheimer’s patients in an old-age home. However, the Italian media (apart from the anti-establishment Il Fatto Quotidiano and the “communist daily”, Il Manifesto) and the bulk of Italian politicians now behave as if nothing has happened. Berlusconi has regained the status of leader of the opposition and appears on television - including the publicly owned RAI, not just his own channels - not in relation to his trials, some of which are still ongoing (including one over allegations that he paid a centre-left senator €3 million to change sides in 2008), but to express his opinions on constitutional and electoral reform.

Berlusconi’s acquittal not only guarantees his own continued dominance over the centre-right of the Italian political spectrum - which had in the autumn of 2013 appeared to be seriously challenged by Angelino Alfano’s breakaway Nuovo Centro Destra (NCD - New Centre Right), but also places him at the very centre of Italian politics as the favoured interlocutor of both prime minister Matteo Renzi and president Giorgio Napolitano, the two leading figures in the nominally centre-left Partito Democratico (PD), of which Renzi is secretary.¹ This trio is totally united in aiming to push through parliament by the end of this year changes in Italy’s constitutional and electoral systems that will in practice knock the heart out of the 1948 constitution born of the resistance of 1943-45, which very deliberately created a large number of safeguards against the kind of personalised authoritarianism that had marked Mussolini’s 20 years of dictatorship.²

The acquittal has vastly increased the speed of the thrust towards rapid constitutional revision that was implicit in Napolitano’s unprecedented re-election to a second seven-year term as president last year and was made explicit in the agreement between Renzi and Berlusconi - the now famous Patto del Nazareno (Nazarene pact)³ of January 18 2014⁴ that paved the way for Renzi’s treacherous coup against his predecessor as prime minister and fellow PD member, Enrico Letta. Whilst Renzi claims that the Patto del Nazareno was merely an agreement to support the proposed electoral reforms known as the ‘Italicum’ and to abolish the directly elected Senate in favour of a nominated chamber with reduced powers, the text has never been published and remains a secret.

It seems likely, however, that, just as the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact of August 1939 was not just the non-aggression agreement it was initially presented as, so too the Patto del Nazareno covered far more than the already extremely retrogressive and anti-democratic constitutional and electoral changes that Renzi is willing to talk about. Il Fatto Quotidiano⁵ has long claimed that the Patto included a provision for a justice ‘reform’ that would be aimed at weakening the power of investigating magistrates rather than organised crime and by late July it was claiming that the pact also contained a clause in which Renzi and Berlusconi had undertaken to present a jointly agreed candidate as Napolitano’s successor, explicitly committing themselves to putting a veto on Romano Prodi, the one man on the centre-left whom Berlusconi both hates and fears.⁶

Berlusconi’s acquittal has vastly increased the steamroller effect of the bid to reform the constitution, which has become a ‘make or break’ issue for Renzi, in large part because Italy’s continuing economic stagnation makes it difficult for him to pose as the saviour of the economy or public finances - it is increasingly doubtful if the €80 monthly bonus that most income tax payers received just before the European elections, which some see as making a considerable contribution to Renzi’s endless reiterated 40.8% score in those elections, can be sustained over the longer term.⁷

Absurd

Before analysing the consequences for constitutional change of Berlusconi’s acquittal, it is necessary to say something about the verdict itself. The acquittal was, of course, utterly absurd, since the defence did not produce a single new witness or a single new piece of evidence to contradict the facts established in the initial trial. This had lasted for several months, during which the three judges, all of whom were women (something to which commentators have attributed some significance, given the subject matter of the trial), heard testimony from dozens of witnesses, as well as seeing transcriptions of numerous interrogations and wiretaps.

The judges at the Milanese court of appeal - two men and a woman - accepted that Berlusconi as prime minister had made seven telephone calls in one night from an international summit in Paris, urging the deputy police chief of Milan to immediately release ‘Ruby’,⁸ who was being held on a theft charge, into the care of Berlusconi’s chosen representative, Nicole Minetti, on the pretext that Ruby was the niece of the then Egyptian dictator, Hosni Mubarak,⁹ and that it was essential that Italy avoid a major diplomatic incident with the Egyptian government (Minetti was subsequently convicted of procuring prostitutes for the fraudster). However, the appeal court judges did not seem to regard this clear abuse of the office of prime minister as a criminal offence - presumably because the police officer was not explicitly threatened with dismissal and received no bribe. Therefore the police officer’s knowing breach of the standard procedures for the custody of juvenile delinquents held in police stations seems to have been treated as if it were a spontaneous whim rather than a response to overwhelming pressure.

Whilst the female magistrate responsible for the care of Milanese juvenile delinquents in police custody had protested in vain against the irregular course of action adopted in Ruby’s case, it seems unrealistic to expect the same degree of courage from a career police officer bombarded by a succession of late-night telephone calls from a sitting prime minister.

In relation to the second offence of which Berlusconi had been convicted by the lower court - that concerning under-age prostitution - the appeal court judges did not seek to deny that Ruby was engaging in prostitution at the time of her detention in the Milan police station or that Berlusconi had paid her for sex; however, they denied that Berlusconi had committed any offence, since, at least according to the explanation offered to the media by Berlusconi’s defence lawyer in the immediate aftermath of the verdict, they claimed that he genuinely believed Ruby to be 24 rather than 17 at the time. One presumes that their detailed reasoning will not comment on whether he also really believed Ruby to be Mubarak’s niece or attempt to explain his frantic nocturnal phone calls to the Milanese police station as a statesman’s concern about Italo-Egyptian relations rather than panic about the revelation of Ruby’s age, of the kind that might be experienced by any client of an under-age prostitute concerned about criminal charges and massive media exposure.

One might also observe that even the most unworldly of judges might have been aware that Berlusconi had in latter years developed a penchant for under-age girls, as the massive scandal around his appearance at Noemi Letizia’s 18th birthday party - the immediate trigger for the decision of Berlusconi’s second wife, Veronica Lario, to publicly denounce her husband’s behaviour and move towards an eventual divorce - amply demonstrated a year before the Ruby scandal broke. This previous incident might suggest that he was attracted to Ruby because of her age, not as a result of his ignorance of it.

Steamroller effect

Berlusconi’s acquittal has increased the steamroller effect of Napolitano’s re-election and the Patto del Nazareno for two reasons.

Firstly, it strengthens the tycoon’s own hand against any dissidents within his own Forza Italia who might have contemplated either defecting to the NCD or, in the case of Raffaele Fitto and his southern Italian followers, attempting to democratise Forza Italia in the understandable belief that this would enable the party to survive the marginalisation, physical decline or possible death of its aging founder, who will be 78 at the end of September.

Before the acquittal Forza Italia seemed to be falling apart, as the more moderate elements were being pulled towards the NCD, whilst the more hawkish rightwingers were dubious about Berlusconi’s deal with Renzi and the PD and felt more attraction to the xenophobic and racist populism of Matteo Salvini’s Lega Nord and Ignazio La Russa’s neo-fascist Fratelli d’Italia - both of which the NCD regards as beyond the pale, eager as it is to align itself with German chancellor Angela Merkel at the European level. Moreover, most of the longstanding Forza Italia politicians of whatever political current were increasingly at odds with the ‘magic circle’ surrounding the old man - especially his 29-year-old fiancée, Francesca Pascale, and her close friend, Maria Rosaria Rossi, who seemed to be in a position to shape his diary, with their control over access to him, and were even gaining influence over party policy and appointments, including for prospective candidacies for next year’s regional elections. It is interesting that since his acquittal Berlusconi has become more inclined to assert himself against Pascale - although it is a matter of dispute whether this apparent crisis in their relationship is due to his renewed political vigour, now that the danger of a further criminal conviction no longer obsesses him, or to a belief that he does not need to use his ‘engagement’ to give himself a belated veneer of respectability, now that his association with Ruby is no longer likely to have legal consequences.

Secondly, Berlusconi’s acquittal strengthens Renzi’s hand against those in the ex-‘official communist’-dominated PD who still show some vestiges of independence of judgement in relation to the constitution, the alliance with Berlusconi and the drift towards more blatant neoliberal economic and social policies, etc. Renzi’s appalling arrogance and intolerance of any criticism seems to have destroyed L’Unità - perhaps the last link between the PD and the communist tradition. Renzi is being blamed, openly or implicitly, by many on the left for the closure on July 31 of the daily paper founded by Antonio Gramsci in 1924. L’Unità was the organ of the Partito Comunista Italiano until 1991, when it became associated with the PCI’s successor, the Partito Democratico della Sinistra (PDS), then the Democratici di Sinistra (DS) and, to a lesser extent, the PD in the years since the PCI’s dissolution. Whilst L’Unità became nominally independent of the post-communists in 2001 and the percentage of the paper’s shares owned by the PD had become miniscule, it is hard to believe that a PD secretary/prime minister could not have persuaded some wealthy sympathisers to bail the paper out had he wanted to.¹⁰

Although it would be ridiculous to claim that the paper, which was always influenced by the prevailing wind in the PD, was consistently opposed to Renzi, it did give some space to articles by his critics, just as it had done in relation to articles written by critics of earlier PDS/DS/PD leaders in recent times after it adopted a more pluralistic stance than the one which had characterised it down to 1991. Clearly for Renzi any degree of criticism was unacceptable and his own Christian Democratic background meant that he had no sentimental attachment to any symbol of the old communist tradition.¹¹

Berlusconi’s acquittal has also meant that Renzi has lost any inclination to negotiate over constitutional reform with any political force apart from Forza Italia and, to some extent, his junior coalition partners in Alfano’s NCD. The on-off discussions that Renzi held with Beppe Grillo’s Movimento Cinque Stelle (Five Star Movement - M5S) have clearly come to an abrupt halt. Whilst Grillo himself had never been very keen on any move away from M5S’s original intransigent attitude towards the PD - an intransigence which wrecked the initial attempt by PD leader Pierluigi Bersani to form a minority government reliant on M5S external support in March-April 2013 - Grillo’s close advisor, Gianroberto Casaleggio, seemed to see some merit in negotiation and the 28-year-old M5S deputy speaker of the Chamber of Deputies, Luigi Di Maio, appeared genuinely enthusiastic, perhaps because it boosted his standing vis-à-vis both the older leaders of M5S. Whilst any compromise would have been difficult and Grillo’s attitude was, to say the least, always ambivalent, Berlusconi’s acquittal meant that Renzi lost any desire to placate M5S, which then took the lead in the doomed attempt to obstruct his constitutional reform in the Senate in late July.

Left crisis

The acquittal also seems to have been at the root of Renzi’s increased hostility towards Nichi Vendola’s Sinistra Ecologia e Libertà (SEL - Left Ecology and Freedom), although relations between the PD and SEL had deteriorated since February 2013, when they had formed an electoral coalition enabling SEL to gain parliamentary representation for the first time.

SEL’s last congress had pushed Vendola leftwards and made it impossible for him not to participate in the radical left electoral cartel for the May 2014 European elections, L’Altra Europa con Tsipras (‘Another Europe with Tsipras’, named after Alexis Tsipras, the leader of the Greek Coalition of the Radical Left, Syriza). The success of the ‘Lista Tsipras’ in narrowly scraping through the 4% threshold and getting three MEPs elected gave the project some continuing credibility, which earlier electoral projects of a broadly similar nature - Sinistra Arcobaleno in 2008 and Rivoluzione Civile in 2013 - had been denied by their failure to cross electoral thresholds. But SEL itself did not get an MEP and this was the last straw for its right wing, which never approved of the decision to participate in the Lista Tsipras anyway. Within a few weeks about a third of SEL’s deputies defected, a couple going directly to the PD, while the remainder, led by Gennaro Migliore, formed what looks like a temporary group of fellow travellers that will soon dissolve itself into the PD in any case.¹²

Faced with what appeared to be a hostile takeover bid by the PD, Vendola’s line of working with the PD at local and regional level and refusing to indicate whether SEL’s commitment to the Lista Tsipras had any significance in terms of national, as opposed to European, elections started to unravel. By tabling 7,000 amendments to Renzi’s constitutional reform bill as part of a deliberate filibustering campaign, Vendola had put SEL on a collision course with the PD. It is quite likely that this was conceived as a negotiating tactic, to make the maximum use of SEL’s seven senators to force concessions from the PD in the upper house, where the PD is relatively weaker than in the Chamber of Deputies. Whilst SEL was genuinely worried by the drift of Renzi’s constitutional proposals, the party may have been more concerned by the effects of the Italicum, Renzi’s new electoral law, with its thresholds deliberately designed to exclude smaller parties.

Regardless of SEL’s motivation, in the difficult passage of the constitutional reform bill through the Senate, during which the PD responded to the opposition filibustering by pushing the speaker to use a guillotine on discussions as well as a hitherto obscure device known as the ‘kangaroo’, through which the defeat of one amendment automatically led to the defeat of dozens of others with very similar wording, SEL, not M5S, became Renzi’s bête noire in the last week of July. Renzi, probably deliberately, attributed to SEL some of the more extreme verbal attacks on his constitutional proposals originating with M5S and told Vendola’s party that he would not be blackmailed into any concessions to them and would not in future make any alliance with SEL for local or regional elections.

If Renzi continues to pursue this line (which does not seem to be going down well with PD regional representatives in Puglia, Calabria or Emilia Romagna), and dismisses the potential danger of handing key regions or municipalities over to the right (or possibly M5S) through divisions in the ‘centre-left’, SEL may be pushed back to something resembling its old position before the Rifondazione split of 2008-09 and the Lista Tsipras might actually become the nucleus of an Italian party approximating to Syriza in Greece. By early August SEL was pursuing more ‘moderate’ parliamentary tactics, which made it possible to get the constitutional reform bill through the Senate by Renzi’s August 8 deadline¹³ and there were hints that some concessions on the thresholds in the Italicum might be forthcoming.

Anti-democratic

Regardless of any possible minor tweaks to conciliate SEL, the NCD or the Lega Nord,¹⁴ the overall drift of the constitutional and electoral reform package is away from the parliamentary republic created by the 1948 constitution towards a set-up which gives much more power to the prime minister. This in effect includes the ability to choose the president of the republic, since the combination of the thresholds and majority premium¹⁵ for the lower chamber and the much reduced size and nominated nature of the upper chamber¹⁶ means that the electoral college that chooses the president will be far smaller and more homogenous. It would also mean that appointments to the Consulta (constitutional court) and supreme council of the magistracy would be much more strongly determined by the parliamentary majority elected on a list system that entrenched the victorious party leader’s power of patronage.

It is worth pointing out that all this is being pushed through by the present parliament elected under a system (the Porcellum or ‘Pig Law’) that was ruled unconstitutional by the current Consulta in January 2014; whilst it may have been reasonable to allow this body to carry on with the ordinary business of administration until the next general election, it seems outrageous to let it usurp the function of a constituent assembly. Indeed, even if the current parliament had been elected under a more acceptable system, it would have had no mandate for a massive constitutional ‘reform’ that was not put before the electorate in February 2013.

The existing constitution was drawn up by a constituent assembly elected on a very pure proportional representation system with virtually no threshold and containing many intellectuals and constitutional lawyers over a period of more than a year - not something pushed through in a couple of weeks without proper discussion and with numerous abuses of standard parliamentary procedures by a prime minister who, like some 19th century American ‘know nothing’ populist, makes no secret of his total contempt for “professoroni”, as he dubs those constitutional experts who have criticised his back-of-an-envelope approach.¹⁷

Whilst Grillo’s constant inflammatory rhetoric and tendency to ‘cry wolf’ at every moment since February 2013 means that much of the M5S critique of the changes is not taken seriously by most of the electorate, it is in fact true that the new constitution in large measure corresponds to the authoritarian ‘Plan for National Rebirth’ drawn up by Licio Gelli and the P2 Masonic Lodge about 30 years ago - and we should never forget that Berlusconi, despite his usual ludicrous denials, was a paid-up member of P2.

Notes

1. In Italian politics the combination of the two offices of secretary (leader) of the dominant governing party and prime minister is by no means as automatic as in British politics, so Renzi’s dual role gives him more power than previous centre-left premiers.

2. The constitution also verbally entrenches ‘labour’ (lavoro) as the foundation of the republic, a formulation which has always grated with the more hard-line elements amongst Italy’s bourgeois elites. Whilst Renzi doubtless regards this phrase as an anachronistic relic of the influence of the defunct Partito Comunista Italiano, he seems to have no immediate plans to remove this phraseology, whose practical significance has long been minimal.

3. This is a reference to the location of the PD’s national headquarters in Rome, not to any connection with Jesus of Nazareth or any of his followers.

4. Renzi has had three subsequent meetings with Berlusconi, all at Palazzo Chigi, the prime ministerial residence, which indicates that the Patto remains a central part of Renzi’s political strategy.

5. This daily paper used to be close to Antonio Di Pietro’s Italia dei Valori and could now be seen as offering rather critical support to Beppe Grillo’s Movimento Cinque Stelle.

6. The hatred is because Prodi clearly beat him in two general elections -1996 and 2006 - a feat which no other centre-left leader ever managed. The fear is because Prodi would make no deals with him and is likely to support laws on the conflict of interests, media monopolies and so forth.

7. The former International Monetary Fund official put in charge of Renzi’s “Spending Review” (another Anglicising affectation on Renzi’s part, although his own references to it as “la Spending” demonstrate his total lack of linguistic competence) resigned in disgust at the end of July, claiming that the government’s figures did not add up - money saved on some items was now simultaneously reallocated to two or more new purposes. Despite Renzi’s rhetorical grandstanding on the European stage, it is quite obvious that Angela Merkel and her allies are unwilling to grant Italy or any other southern European country greater flexibility in balancing the national budget and European Central Bank chief Mario Draghi has recently emphasised that Italy is proceeding too slowly with the required ‘reforms’, so Italy’s autumn budget is likely to be much tougher than any politician in search of easy popularity would have wanted.

Although general unemployment has shrunk slightly, youth unemployment is still rising. The general picture is one of national decline. Italy’s GNP has now returned to its 2000 level. The country is in its third recession since the international financial crisis of 2007-08. The most dramatic collapse in GNP occurred in 2008-09, but from mid-2011 Italy has been in recession almost continuously, with the exception of a quarter of very minimal (0.1%) growth in the last three months of 2013.

Fiat has completed its merger with Chrysler and intends to move its headquarters out of Italy, registering itself in London for tax purposes - showing predictable ingratitude towards an Italian state which has subsidised it for decades. Italy’s national airline, Al Italia, is being taken over by the Abu Dhabi-based Etihad on very unfavourable terms for the Italian shareholders, not least the Italian Post Office.

8. The real name of the woman at the centre of this case is Karima El Mahroug, but she has become internationally famous under her stage name of Ruby Rubacuore (Ruby, the Heartstealer). She was 17 years old at the time of the events that led to the trials.

9. Ruby is actually of Moroccan origin, which self-evidently makes a mockery of this claim.

10. Renzi, like his hero, Tony Blair, seems to have a knack of attracting large donations from wealthy individuals, generally for his own campaigns, such as his PD leadership contests of 2012 and 2013.

11. Even Blair’s previous Italian fan, the PD’s founding leader, Walter Veltroni (who had started his political career in the PCI, joining the party at the age of 15, and later edited L’Unità from 1992 until 1996) had some vestigial attachment to the old party paper.

12. Migliore may have hoped that some anti-Renzi dissidents on the PD’s left might join a group that was halfway between the PD and SEL, but this appears the less likely scenario.

13. The opposition seemed to lose heart during the second week of discussions once the first two articles of the law - getting rid of elections and reducing the size of the senate - had been passed. Moreover, the different groups did not coordinate their tactics or stick to any consistent strategy - temporary walkouts alternated with noisy, disruptive heckling or in the case of M5S the wearing of gags. However, it is difficult to gauge whether there was any more effective method of filibustering once the speaker- a PD member, who originally had personal doubts about the changes - capitulated to pressure from his own party leadership and almost always interpreted the rules in a manner that favoured Renzi, even switching off the microphones in mid-sentence or refusing to allow senators to speak to their own amendments.

14. The Lega’s main objection to the changes concerns the return to a much more centralised system of government, which markedly reduces the powers in the hands of the regions and goes directly contrary to the increased devolution they have always sought. Renzi’s bill also abolishes provinces, the geographical and administrative units that stood between municipalities and regions, so its whole drift is towards centralisation.

15. According to Corriere della Sera and La Repubblica (August 7), at a meeting between Renzi and Berlusconi on August 6 it was agreed that the threshold for the majority premium would be raised from the 37% in the original version of the Italicum to 40%,with a run-off ballot between the two leading forces if no grouping reached this level. An interview in La Repubblica (August 8), with Berlusconi’s close associate, Denis Verdini, who was present at the meeting, seemed to deny this agreement on the premium, but, given that Verdini, a long standing Florentine acquaintance of Renzi, is currently facing a multiplicity of charges about the collapse into bankruptcy of a bank of which he was the managing director, it would be foolish to rely on his word. No agreement was reached on raising thresholds, something favoured by all minor parties from NCD to SEL, and this will be discussed again at a further Renzi-Berlusconi meeting in September.

16. Under the proposed legislation, the new version of the Senate will have 100 members - 95 nominated by the regional councillors and five by the president of the republic. This is being demagogically presented as a cost-cutting measure - the nominated mayors and regional councillors will receive no parliamentary salary, since they are already paid for their regional or municipal roles. Critics pointed out that part-time senators would be less of a check on the executive than full-time ones, as well as pointing out that most of the major political corruption scandals of the last few years - in Lazio, Lombardy and the Veneto - have involved regional councillors. Given that the new senators, like their elected predecessors, would have parliamentary immunity, there was a danger that the most corrupt characters in danger of prosecution would be nominated to the senate by corrupt colleagues aiming to protect clientelistic networks.

17. Some leading academic and legal constitutional experts have signed a petition drafted by the editors of Il Fatto Quotidiano against Renzi’s constitutional changes.