30.05.2012
Last man standing
The Partito Democratico, dominated by ex-'official communists', is now Italy's leading party, writes Toby Abse
The second round of the Italian local elections on May 21-22 marked a new stage in the crisis of 2011-12 - a crisis triggered by external economic developments in the euro zone that is now turning into the death agony of the ‘Second Republic’ (1994-2011) associated with Silvio Berlusconi and his personalised parties: first Forza Italia and then more recently Popolo della Libertà (PdL).
This crisis in many respects increasingly resembles that of 1992-94, caused by the end of the cold war, which swept away Italy’s ‘First Republic’ (1946-92) and the Christian Democrat party that dominated it. The recent corruption scandals involving the finances of entire political parties are very similar to those known as Tangentopoli (Bribesville) that were at the centre of the earlier crisis. Some have seen more sinister resemblances between the school bombing at Brindisi[1] (and the kneecapping of a company boss in Genoa by anarchist terrorists belonging to the Federazione Anarchica Informale [2]) and the Mafia bombings of 1992-93, arguing that in all periods of crisis in Italy such events recur. Some draw linkages with the ‘strategy of tension’ during 1969-80, suggesting implicitly, or sometimes explicitly, that the secret services or powerful interest groups are behind such events. Even if such recent occurrences are mere coincidences, such thinking adds to the sense of tension in Italian society.
And, of course, after two serious earthquakes in the Emilia Romagna region in slightly over a week, there is a great deal of unease at the moment. The earthquake casualties, especially on the second occasion, can not be treated as victims of a purely natural disaster. Ten of the 16 dead on May 29 were factory workers, and three were small employers, killed as a result of the collapse of their factories. It has been pointed out that the factories were reopened quite quickly after the first earthquake, although large numbers of people, including many of the dead workers, were still prohibited from returning to their own homes for safety reasons.
At one rather superficial level the second round of the local elections, with its run-off contests between the two leading contenders for the mayoralties of the major municipalities, marked the triumph of the centre-left over the centre-right. Of the municipalities with more than 15,000 inhabitants where an election took place, the balance shifted dramatically from 98 centre-right mayors and 56 centre-left before the poll to 95 centre-left and 34 centre-right afterwards.[3] However, the ex-‘official communist’-dominated Partito Democratico (PD) has won a pyrrhic victory because of the massive decline in the votes for Berlusconi’s PdL and Bossi’s Lega Nord, rather than because of any increase in its own vote. The abstention in the second round set a new record for Italy, where traditionally the numbers voting in local and regional elections has been far higher than in the United Kingdom - only 51.4% of the electorate participated in the second round. Whilst it was higher amongst those who had voted for the parties associated with Berlusconi and Bossi over the last two decades, to some extent this unprecedented abstention represents a weariness with all political parties rather than just the absence of an attractive and viable option on the centre-right of the spectrum.
‘Five stars’
The revolt against the major parties has taken various forms. Some of them are quite healthy and give us cause for optimism, in that they have led to the election of mayors clearly to the left of the PD, associated with either Antonio Di Pietro’s Italia dei Valori (IdV) or Nichi Vendola’s Sinistra Ecologia e Libertà (SEL). For example, in Palermo the dedicated veteran anti-Mafia campaigner and former mayor, Leoluca Orlando, standing on behalf of IdV resoundingly defeated the PD’s Fabrizio Ferrandelli by 72.4% to 27.6%. In Genoa, the centre-left candidate Marco Doria, who is in fact closely associated with SEL, beat the centrist, Enrico Musso, by 59.7% to 40.3%, albeit on an horrendously low 39% turnout. Doria’s election means that two out of the three major cities of Italy’s ‘industrial triangle’ - Milan and Genoa - have mayors linked to SEL and not the PD, indicating the hidden potential for a radical left vote.[4]
However, the main expression of raging discontent with all the major parties and with the vicious austerity policies of Mario Monti’s technocratic government has not taken the form of votes for the IdV or SEL, but instead has been represented by the rapid rise of the grouping led by the 63-year-old comedian, Beppe Grillo, the Movimento Cinque Stelle (M5S) - literally the Five Stars Movement. This grotesque phenomenon bears some family resemblances to Germany’s Pirate Party: its cadre tends to be predominantly young and petty bourgeois (unlike the Pirates’ elderly and rather well-to-do leader), it makes extensive use of the internet and it has been able to profit from the weakness of its native radical left - in the German case Die Linke’s endless compromises with the pro-austerity SPD at the local and regional level; in the Italian case SEL’s tailing of the PD. But it has its own distinctly Italian features - the most evident being an absurd leader cult of a type that I believe does not exist, as yet anyway, amongst the Pirates.[5]
M5S made a breakthrough at the national level and won itself international publicity by first getting into second place in the first round of the Parma mayoral election and then rapidly overtaking the PD front-runner, Vincenzo Bernazzoli, in the run-off, so that the fairly young and politically inexperienced candidate, Federico Pizzarotti (a former IT manager for a bank, which in some ways typifies M5S’s social base) beat his rival by no less than 60.2% to 39.8%. M5S had led the local campaign against the construction of a rubbish incinerator - the kind of issue over which the rather technocratic Emilian PD tends to side with developers. However, regardless of such local factors, the victory in Parma greatly enhanced M5S’s credibility as a national force, with one recent poll giving it 18.5%, putting it in second place - behind the PD, but in front of Berlusconi’s PdL. Grillo is currently talking about standing about 100 candidates in the general election that is scheduled for April next year.[6]
It is worth remarking that there are already tensions within M5S between Grillo and Pizzarotti. The latter had suggested the appointment as “city manager” - an example of Italianised English, probably meaning a municipal chief executive - of somebody with previous experience of that role outside Parma. Since the man in question had been expelled or suspended from M5S by Grillo, the authoritarian demagogue has been attacking the right of the new mayor to make autonomous decisions about this or any other matter, and, with astonishing hypocrisy, attacked Pizzarotti for granting too many interviews to the media.
Panic
The advance of M5S has caused panic amongst the established political parties. The PdL is currently wracked by internal dissension. Needless to say, Silvio Berlusconi - who played such a minor role in the election campaign and deliberately fled to the safe haven offered by his friend, Vladimir Putin, in Moscow before the close of poll in anticipation of poor results - refuses to take any personal responsibility for the debacle and blames the hapless party secretary, his former tame justice minister, Angelino Alfano. Unsurprisingly, Berlusconi rather admires Grillo, despite the comedian’s abuse directed at the older buffoon - “Berlusconi is so dead he doesn’t even wear his make-up any more” was one choice outburst. After all, they are both narcissistic clowns who know how to use the media - even if Berlusconi uses television and Grillo the internet.
However, conflict within the PdL is not confined to mutual recriminations between Berlusconi and Alfano. The former Alleanza Nazionale wing of the party, which never really broke with its neo-fascist past (Ignazio La Russa does not really conceal his admiration for Marine Le Pen’s Front National), is now suggesting that the PdL should oppose Mario Monti and take a more rightwing line. Conflict is also taking a generational form, with two different groups of younger PdL members, who clearly see a future for themselves after Berlusconi’s death or retirement, holding meetings to publicly air their grievances with the party’s leadership and line.
The PdL’s credibility is now taking further knocks from the ever increasing allegations of sleaze surrounding the longstanding president of the Lombard region, Roberto Formigoni, whose new year holidays in the Caribbean have been paid for three years in succession by an extremely dubious entrepreneur, Pierluigi Dacco. Dacco is currently in jail charged with large-scale fraud resulting in the bankruptcy of a major Milanese private hospital and a medical research foundation in Pavia - both of which regularly received funds or contracts from the Lombard regional government during Formigoni’s tenure as president. In addition to the free excursions to the Caribbean granted to Formigoni (on one occasion involving the expenditure of €100,000 on the chartering of a private plane), during at least one summer Dacco hired a luxurious yacht for Formigoni. The latter has denied all allegations, claiming that he cannot remember where he went for new year a few years ago and that he has thrown away the receipts indicating he paid Dacco for his share in these group holidays. Given the police are claiming that Formigoni may have benefited to the tune of €400,000 in terms of free holidays and excursions, it might be pointed out that a man as careless and forgetful as this is certainly not a fit and proper person to be running Italy’s wealthiest region.
In the light of the growing vacuum on the centre-right of Italian politics, it is not surprising that Ferrari boss Luca Cordero di Montezemolo is now planning to launch a new political party. Montezemolo, the 64-year-old aristocrat and former president of the employers’ federation, Confindustria, has for some years been running a political think tank, Italia Futura, which he now intends to turn it into a fully-fledged party standing candidates next spring on what his associates describe as a “centrist, free-market platform”.[7] Whilst there has been a certain amount of rivalry between Berlusconi and Montezemolo, the Ferrari team’s exploits in Formula One have for some years been covered on all the Italian television channels at absurd length - as if F1 were a genuinely popular sport like football - and massive airtime given to interviews with non-Italian Ferrari racing drivers, spouting banalities in halting Italian. This means that his outfit has in effect got considerable advance publicity - an effect that mirrors Berlusconi’s use of AC Milan.
The PD’s reaction to the rise of M5S has not been to move leftwards in an attempt to channel the growing discontent in Italian society, but to shift further to the right. It has been engaging in interminable discussions with the PdL about changing the electoral and constitutional framework - discussions which suggest a desperate effort to find fundamentally undemocratic methods of excluding M5S (or any other challenger to the status quo) from parliamentary representation, by such methods as bringing a French-style, two-round voting system. The PD is also making clear that it is increasingly dubious about maintaining its projected electoral alliance with SEL and the IdV. It sees them as too leftwing, given their lack of enthusiasm or, in the case of the IDV, outright opposition to Monti’s austerity policies, with which the PD has so wholeheartedly identified itself. The centrist UdC, renowned for its dubious links in Sicily, is still being actively courted as a partner for next year’s general election and there is a lot of rather vague talk about deals with lists representing ‘civil society’[8] - part of a recognition that the PD brand has little wider appeal.
It seems increasingly likely that the PD’s tactical ineptitude will replicate that of the post-communist PDS during the 1992-94 crisis. Although in terms of the major parties, given the collapse of the Lega and the PdL, it could be seen as the last man standing, some more skilful new force may well arrive from the right and carry off the prize. Of course, for us the tragedy is not the degeneration of the heirs of the Italian Communist Party’s right wing, but the fact that, in contrast to Synaspismós/Syriza in Greece, no sizeable force of the radical left has emerged from the left Eurocommunists.
Notes
1 . Although the bomber seems to have been caught on CCTV as he pressed the detonator, this criminal investigation still remains open. The Apulian Mafia-like organisation, Sacra Corona Unita, has denied responsibility and one of its prominent associates has claimed that if they found the man who murdered the schoolgirl and sought to murder a much larger number they would “eat him alive”. While the SCU has murdered people in its time, it must be pointed out that it has never previously engaged in deliberate random killings of civilians unconnected with its own criminal activities.
2 . This FAI has no connection with the Federazione Anarchica Italiana, a much longer established organisation with no involvement with terrorism.
3 . The numbers do not tally exactly because some mayors are independents or represent formations that cannot be easily assigned to the two main camps. These figures are taken from La Repubblica (May 22).
4 . The ideological weakness of SEL, particularly its subaltern relationship with the PD, has become more manifest in the last couple of months if one makes the inevitable contrast with Syriza, whose largest component, Synaspismós, emerged from the same left Eurocommunist background as SEL’s leadership group.
5 . Obviously, as was pointed out long ago in that splendid polemic, ‘The tyranny of structurelessness’, all such ‘horizontalist’ movements produced an informal leadership group which behaves in a far more authoritarian and unaccountable way than organisations with an official leadership.
6 . According to his interview in The Guardian (May 26), he tends to make statements without much prior thought or consultation, so it is hard to know what to make of this. As things stand, he probably would have no difficulty in recruiting as full a slate as any major party.
7 . See ‘A Ferrari caress to get Italy back on track’ The Sunday Times May 27.
8 . Paul Ginsborg and other intellectuals have come forward with a vague project about a “new political subject”, but it is not clear if this is what the PD is seeking an alliance with. Given the existence of SEL, the IdV, the Federazione della Sinistra, M5S and so forth, it is hard to see the point of another organisation somewhere on the left of the spectrum, but with a confused and nebulous programme - although Ginsborg is apparently going to come to the UK to promote it to Italian academics employed over here.