24.01.2013
Italy: More of the same
There will be another round of cuts and austerity, whoever wins the general election, writes Toby Abse
The Italian general election will take place on Sunday February 24 and Monday February 25 - about a month earlier than the date president Giorgio Napolitano originally had in mind before Silvio Berlusconi pulled the plug on Mario Monti’s parliamentary majority in December.
Monti’s government remains in office on a caretaker basis, but after he and a number of his ministers took the decision to involve themselves with one of the coalitions fighting the election, it has effectively lost its legitimacy as an allegedly non-partisan, technocratic administration and cannot implement any new measures of any significance, even if Monti, like previous sitting prime ministers seeking re-election, has made use of his official position to secure increased and, some would have argued, disproportionate television and newspaper coverage in the run-up to the formal start of the electoral campaign.
The new, long overdue regional elections in both Lazio (the region centred on Rome) and Lombardy (centred on Milan) caused by the early resignation of two regional administrations wracked by massive corruption scandals will now take place on the same day as the general election, preventing any earlier real test of public sentiment other than the very imperfect one provided by opinion polls. However, after the sudden breakthrough of Beppe Grillo and his Movimento Cinque Stelle (M5S) in the Sicilian regional elections, the main parties had feared that these populist outsiders would use the regional elections as a means of building up momentum before the general election. So, despite sanctimonious talk about the need to avoid squandering public money on duplicating contests, that is the real reason why all the established parties colluded in this continuation in office on a caretaker basis of notorious embezzlers, who are still drawing their salaries and totting up their expenses.
Whilst no fewer than 215 groupings have submitted electoral symbols to the ministry of the interior (some of which may be rejected for deliberately attempting to ‘confuse the voters’ because of their similarity to those of established parties), there are five principal forces involved in this contest: the rightwing coalition led by Berlusconi, the centrist cartel headed by Monti, Pierluigi Bersani’s centre-left alliance, a radical left coalition led by Antonio Ingroia - and Grillo’s M5S. Of the minor formations not linked to the five principal forces, the only one to the left of Ingroia’s Rivoluzione Civile to be mentioned, however summarily, in the mainstream press is Marco Ferrando’s hard-line Trotskyist Partito Comunista dei Lavoratori.
The right
Despite much talk of serious splits in the latter months of 2012, Berlusconi’s Popolo della Libertà (PdL) has in fact survived more or less intact. Whilst there have been a few defections to Monti’s list - most notably Gabriele Albertini, a former mayor of Milan - many of the so-called ‘moderates’ within the PdL, supposedly anxious to align themselves with the mainstream, centre-right European People’s Party, have now swallowed their pride and put up with Berlusconi’s Europhobic or Germanophobic demagogy, portraying Monti as the puppet of Angela Merkel and the Bundesbank.
Also participating in Berlusconi’s electoral coalition is the ‘post-fascist’ Alleanza Nazionale led by Ignazio La Russa, the former defence minister with a vampiric appearance and a youthful record of street violence against leftists in Milan. Having seceded from the PdL, the Alleanza Nazionale has renamed itself the Fratelli d’Italia-Centro Destra Nazionale1, which will be joined in Berlusconi’s electoral coalition by Francesco Storace’s La Destra - a more blatantly nostalgic split from the old Alleanza Nazionale that never joined the PdL.2
Although Berlusconi’s alliance with these post-fascist fragments could have been predicted - as indeed could his welcoming back into the coalition of the two Sicilian splits from the PdL - the more significant and less predictable reconciliation was that with Roberto Maroni’s Lega Nord. Until a few days ago, the Lega Nord was talking about running independently of the PdL in the way it had done, very successfully, in the 1996 general election, saying it would never again accept Berlusconi’s leadership of the centre-right. Whilst there remains a deliberate ambiguity in the deal between the PdL and the Lega, according to which Berlusconi is the head of the coalition rather than the premier designate, in reality the words Berlusconi presidente on the PdL electoral symbol indicate that the 76-year-old would be premier in what seems the relatively unlikely event of the right winning the general election.
The relative decline of the PdL since Berlusconi’s clear-cut general election victory of 2008 means that any allies that can boost the coalition’s overall total are very useful. However, there were some more specific reasons for the Berlusconi-Maroni deal, pushed through in spite of opposition from both the Lega’s rank and file and leading figures amongst its Venetian municipal and regional representatives. Maroni is standing for the presidency of the Lombard region and did not want to be opposed by a PdL candidate who might well have split the rightwing vote and greatly increased the chance of a victory for the centre-left candidate. But Berlusconi’s prime concern is national, not regional - he is very aware that Roberto Formigoni’s 17-year spell as Forza Italia/PdL president of Lombardy ended ingloriously amidst an avalanche of allegations of corruption, and that a Lega candidate with a clean reputation would have much greater chance of keeping the centre-left at bay.
Under the Porcellum (‘pig law’), devised by the Lega Nord’s Roberto Calderoli on Berlusconi’s prompting in 2005, each region has a separate majority premium in the Senate (unlike the Chamber of Deputies, where the largest party or coalition is awarded 55% of seats). Lombardy as the largest and most populous region In Italy has more seats in the Senate than any other region, so if the PdL and Lega are in alliance, there is a strong chance that they, not the centre-left, will take the majority prize of 27 out of 49 seats in Lombardy.
The centre
In the centre of the political spectrum Mario Monti has, after some initial hesitation, emerged as the leading figure, even if he has had to compromise with longstanding professional politicians such as Pier Ferdinando Casini of the Unione di Centro (UdC) and Gianfranco Fini of Futura e Libertà per l’Italia (FLI). Monti had hoped that the existing centrist formations would be willing to liquidate themselves into a new, unified organisation under his own leadership, but Casini in particular raised objections. As things have turned out, there are three separate, but allied, centrist lists standing for the Chamber of Deputies and one unified list - Con Monti per l’Italia - standing for the Senate. The prime minister has attempted to impose his famous, or some might say infamous, neoliberal Agenda Monti on all the participants. He has also attempted to impose certain criteria on the candidate selection of the UdC and FLI, and not just the lists directly associated with him - trying, for example, to prevent the candidacy of those with criminal convictions or awaiting trial on criminal charges (a grouping in rather plentiful supply amongst Sicilian and southern Italian UdC notables), as well as keeping to an absolute minimum the number of those who have already served more than two parliamentary terms.
Monti’s objective is to present an image of a new and clean force representing ‘civil society’ rather than yet another recycling of the old, corrupt and clientelistic remnants of pre-1992 Christian Democracy. The very imperfect extent to which this aim has been realised has led Corrado Passera, the minister of economic development in the Monti government and former head of the Banca Intesa, to abandon his initial intention of standing for parliament, but Monti’s project has secured widespread backing from the Italian economic establishment - Luca Cordero di Montezemolo, the Ferrari boss,3 has placed the financial and human resources of his think tank/proto-party, Italia Futura, at Monti’s disposal. That backing has been absolutely essential when collecting the large number of signatures that are a legal necessity for parties wanting to stand candidates but not currently represented in parliament.
A public meeting between Monti and Fiat boss Sergio Marchionne in December 2012 - at a time when Monti was still nominally a non-partisan, technocratic premier - made it appear that the Fiat empire as a whole has come out for Monti against Berlusconi and his allies; and Monti’s willingness to meet Marchionne at the southern plant of Melfi, from which the metalworkers’ union, Fiom, had been excluded, made the anti-union and anti-working class character of the Agenda Monti crystal-clear. The premier has gone out of his way to mount personal attacks on Susanna Camusso of the CGIL union confederation, as well as on leaders of two left-of-centre parties, Stefano Fassina of the ex-‘official communist’-dominated Partito Democratico, and Nichi Vendola of Sinistra Ecologia Libertà, in order to claim that the PD-SEL alliance is too leftwing, despite the conscious moderation of the PD leader and candidate for premier, Pierluigi Bersani.
If any further proof were needed of the reactionary nature of the centrist coalition, Monti intends to stand PD defector and arch neoliberal academic proponent of further labour market ‘reform’ Pietro Ichino on his list of Senate candidates.4 Monti has also been able to undermine the longstanding alliance between Berlusconi and the upper reaches of the Italian church hierarchy, gaining support from both the Vatican and the Italian bishops conference, and has included a number of figures with longstanding close connections with Catholic associations on his list.
Centre-left
Although Bersani’s PD-SEL alliance is currently leading in the opinion polls, it is hard to underestimate the PD’s capacity to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory in the manner of Neil Kinnock in the British 1992 election.
To gain a majority in the Senate, the centre-left need 158 seats. If it were to win in every region, it would have 178 seats, with the rest being divided proportionately amongst the other parties or coalitions that exceeded the minimum threshold for representation. But if the centre-left were to lose in Lombardy as well as a region such as the Veneto or Sicily, it would fall short of an overall majority in the Senate, even if it had a respectable majority in the Chamber of Deputies.
Whilst the centre-left would be far more likely to look to Monti’s centre than to the PdL to cobble together a working majority, such a situation would increase Berlusconi’s bargaining power. That is vital to him, given that he is currently appealing against a guilty verdict in the Mediatrade case and faces possible conviction in two other ongoing trials - most notoriously the ‘Ruby case’, in which a verdict is now expected next month. Moreover, any unstable, and potentially unpopular, coalition might collapse in the way Romano Prodi’s 2006-08 government did and precipitate an early general election in which Berlusconi could return to power.
Bersani has long advocated an alliance between the ‘moderates’, which until recently meant the UdC (Union of the Centre), and the so-called ‘progressives’ like the PD. It is hard to believe that he would not do a deal with Monti in the event of a PD-SEL victory in the Chamber and a hung Senate. Indeed Bersani has more than once suggested that he would come to an arrangement with Monti even if he had a self-sufficient majority in both houses. After all, it is essential to keep Berlusconi’s PDL/Lega coalition and those like M5S at bay - that is the official rationale for this anachronistic aping of the ‘historic compromise’ of 1976-79, at a time when the PD is obviously no longer regarded as a pariah by the European and American establishments, as was its predecessor, the Partito Comunista Italiano.
Obviously, any deal with Monti would mean that not only would none of the neoliberal austerity measures imposed in the last year or so be reversed or even modified, but the working class would suffer further attacks on both pensions and job security, as well as the ghastly consequences of further privatisations of such state assets as the railways and the post office. Whilst Vendola has made it clear that he is not very happy about working with Monti or the more reactionary and overtly homophobic Catholics associated with the UdC, the experience of the Apulian regional government, where Vendola has been all too willing to do deals with very dubious figures, makes it unlikely that he will remain intransigent if the prize for collaboration is the ministry of labour, where he might well have the task of imposing sacrifices on the working class.
The one ray of hope in the current scenario is that the leftwing alliance, Rivoluzione Civile, seems to have a real chance of gaining parliamentary representation, with the possibility of crossing the national 4% threshold for the Chamber and attaining the required 8% for the Senate, at least in Sicily and Campania. Whilst this belated amalgam of the Partito della Rifondazione Comunista, the Partito dei Comunisti Italiani, the Greens, Antonio Di Pietro’s Italia dei Valori and some anti-Mafia or anti-Camorra mayors and magistrates is far from perfect, it does represent the only real opposition to both the corruption and criminality of the PdL and the more strident neoliberalism of Mario Monti’s followers.
If Rivoluzione Civile ended up holding the balance in the Senate, the possibility would exist that the PD-SEL could do a deal with forces to its left, not to its right. This is, of course, unlikely but we must continue to dream.
Where is Italy going?
Sunday February 3, 2pm Public meeting, Lucas Arms, 245a Grays Inn Road, London WC1. Speaker: Toby Abse.
Organised by Alliance for Green Socialism:
www.greensocialist.org.uk
Notes
1. Fratelli d’Italia - literally ‘Brothers of Italy’ - is also the title of the Italian national anthem and Centro Destra Nazionale is a slightly more moderate version of Destra Nazionale, a name given to a fusion of neo-fascists and monarchists some decades ago. In short the overtly ultra-nationalist and implicitly fascist allegiance of the new grouping will be quite evident to the niche market that they are trying to reach.
2. Logically a fusion of the Fratelli d’Italia with La Destra would have been a more reliable means of ensuring that they reached the 2% threshold required for parties inside a broader coalition to attain parliamentary representation, but, as often happens on the far right, personal antagonisms overrode ideological convergence.
3. Montezemolo was president of Confindustria, the Italian equivalent of the CBI, from 2004 to 2008 and chairman of Fiat between 2004 and 2010.
4. Ichino’s defection occurred as the election campaign was about to start and seems to have been a direct result of Bersani’s clear victory over the rabid neoliberal mayor of Florence, Matteo Renzi, in the PD primary contest for the premiership, in which about three million voters participated.