11.04.2013
Italian political paralysis: Another papal conclave
Toby Abse reports on the backstabbing and intrigue, as Italian politics remains in paralysis
The Italian political crisis seems to be deepening. It has been further prolonged by the increasingly arbitrary actions of 87-year-old president Giorgio Napolitano, who seems determined not only to cling to his office until the very last possible day - May 15 - but also to make full use of every possible prerogative available to him in the interim.
Napolitano is trying to ignore both parliament and the outcome of the general election of February 24-25, in which Mario Monti’s centrist coalition came in fourth, far behind the other three blocks represented in parliament. Napolitano has not only sustained, but even reinforced, Monti’s crumbling technocratic government on the rather spurious grounds that Monti had never lost a parliamentary vote of confidence; this seems a wilfully perverse interpretation of the fact that Monti resigned as premier in December to avoid facing a vote of confidence, when Silvio Berlusconi and his Popolo della Libertà (PdL) withdrew support from the ‘strange majority’ that had sustained Monti for 13 months.
It should be emphasised that Monti’s government has not faced any test of its support in the new parliament, but seems destined to drag on its zombie-like existence until at least May 15, if not beyond, behaving as a rather passive executor of orders from the European Commission and the European Central Bank that are likely to worsen Italy’s deepening recession.
Napolitano’s own preference for a grand coalition involving both the ex-‘official communist’-dominated Partito Democratico (PD) and the PdL had long been barely concealed, but became much more blatant in a speech made on April 7, in which he evoked a parallel with what he sees as the positive experience of the ‘historic compromise’ between the Italian Communist Party and Christian Democrats of 1976-79. But he has technically played the parliamentary game according to the rules, even if his interpretation of these rules has been idiosyncratic, to say the least - going through the motions of letting the PD (as the main component of the coalition that took the largest share of the popular vote) attempt to form a government.
On March 22 Napolitano very grudgingly gave Pierluigi Bersani, the secretary of the PD, a provisional mandate to explore whether he could achieve a majority in both houses of parliament for a government led by his party. The PD’s centre-left coalition - of which Nichi Vendola’s rather more leftwing Sinistra Ecologia e Libertà (SEL) is the only other substantial component - has an absolute majority in the Chamber of Deputies, but not in the Senate, in which the system of regional majority prizes bears less relation to national shares of the popular vote. After six days of talks with representatives of all the other parties, Bersani returned to Napolitano to explain that he had no certainty of attaining such a majority in a vote of confidence, given the negative responses of the leaders of the two other major forces in parliament - Berlusconi’s PdL and Beppe Grillo’s Movimento Cinque Stelle (Five Star Movement - M5S).
It is more than likely that Bersani pleaded with the head of state in their March 28 meeting for a chance to put his proposed administration to a vote in the Senate, in the belief that he might obtain enough additional votes from rebellious M5S senators, the Lega Nord or other mavericks to sustain a minority government based on his eight-point reform programme. If, as is very probable, Bersani in private stood by his public stance of a programmatic opening to the M5S designed to expose it to the ire of at least a part of its own electorate in the event of outright refusal, Napolitano must have rejected with open contempt the very notion of a compromise with anybody other than Berlusconi. Bersani subsequently retreated to his home town of Piacenza for a few days, leading many commentators to wrongly assume that he had thrown in the towel both as a potential premier and as a party leader.
Napolitano spent Good Friday (March 29) in discussions with representatives of each party in turn and had no more luck than Bersani in achieving any certain parliamentary majority either for Bersani’s own proposal or for any other solution dearer to Napolitano’s own heart, such as a ‘government of the president’. In reality this would be a new version of Mario Monti’s technocratic government, albeit with some changes of personnel and in all probability a different figurehead premier. By the evening of Good Friday, speculation was rife that Napolitano was intending to resign the following day to clear the way for an election for a new president, who would have much more bargaining power with the politicians, since a newly elected head of state could dissolve parliament and call new elections if the stalemate continued - an outgoing one forfeits such powers in the final six months of a seven-year mandate.
‘Ten wise men’
In the event Napolitano seems to have changed his mind. Conversations with both Mario Draghi, the president of the ECB, and Ignazio Visco, the governor of the Bank of Italy, seem to have played some role in this volte-face, but it is unclear whether Napolitano initiated the telephone calls or merely acted as the recipient of instructions from the representatives of European and domestic finance capital, fearful that a presidential resignation would cause havoc on the markets as soon as trading resumed after Easter.
At lunchtime on Easter Saturday, Napolitano made a broadcast to the nation in which he announced his intention of carrying out his duties “until the last day” and announced that he was appointing “10 wise men”1 with the tasks of drawing up proposals for institutional reforms and urgent economic measures. By the evening the names of the “10 wise men” had been made public - the team was divided up into two ‘commissions’, one to draw up institutional reform proposals and the other to deal with economic matters, particularly those relating to the timetable set by the European Commission and ECB some months earlier in relation to targets for Italy’s budget deficit and national debt.
Whilst the appointment of the 10 wise men looked like an attempt to usurp the powers of the newly elected parliament, it has not been a particularly successful one. At first the established parties and the mainstream press congratulated the president on his great wisdom and even Grillo was initially quite positive - until he heard the list of names, most of whom were very much part of “la casta”, as he calls the political class.2 However, within a few days first the PdL and then the PD started to be much more critical of Napolitano’s proposal. Eventually only Monti’s centrists, who claim the credit - or perhaps one should say discredit - of presenting Napolitano with the profoundly undemocratic idea of the 10 wise men, continued to back the commissions with any enthusiasm. Whatever Napolitano may have originally had in mind, it now looks as if after two or three weeks of discussion the 10 will draw up some sort of memorandum, which Napolitano will then present to his successor as president for consideration.
The appointment of the 10 has effectively put on ice the question of a new government until after the presidential elections. Bersani is still eager to form a minority government of the centre-left and to see if he can gain some additional votes in the Senate on the basis of his programme. However, Bersani’s line and leadership of the party have been subjected to very serious attacks from within the PD. His most obvious challenger is Matteo Renzi, the mayor of Florence and neoliberal leader of the PD’s right wing. Renzi now has the clear backing of Walter Veltroni, the founding leader of the PD, who always saw Blairism rather than classical social democracy as his model. However, other, more traditionalist figures also oppose Bersani’s courtship of the M5S and are much keener on a deal with the PdL.
Bersani seems to be yielding to some extent to the pressure, albeit with great reluctance, and after discussions with caretaker premier Mario Monti - another champion of ‘large understandings’, ‘governments of the president’ and other euphemisms for a grand coalition - now seems to be conducting negotiations with the PdL about names of a possible new president. Bersani has on occasions seemed to have absurd illusions that the PdL would allow a PD-led minority government a reasonable period of grace if they were consulted over the presidency; experience should have taught him that, once Berlusconi obtained another president, he would pull the plug on Bersani as soon as it suited him - it beggars belief that after 20 years of Berlusconismo any practical politician could imagine the tycoon to be a man of his word who felt bound by any undertaking whatsoever.
Moreover, the only chance of any kind of benevolent neutrality from M5S, or a part of it, towards a PD-led government is dependent on the PD supporting a presidential candidate genuinely opposed to Berlusconi, such as Romano Prodi. Berlusconi is absolutely terrified of such an outcome, which would deprive him of any legal ‘safe conduct’ in relation to his trials. These have in effect been halted by Napolitano’s collusion with his spurious claims that his overwhelming institutional duties as the leading figure of Italy’s second political force during a major political crisis mean that he cannot spare a single day in court. Since Berlusconi, with his usual shamelessness, has been delegating most of any negotiations to his servile underlings and only once bothered to turn up for a Senate session since his election to that body on February 25, the full extent of Napolitano’s appalling complicity is utterly transparent, even if the mainstream press does not refer to it.3
Grillo is hoping for an inciucio (stitch-up) between the PD and PdL, which would leave M5S as the only opposition. Bersani has grasped this and has publicly stated on more than one occasion in the recent past that any grand coalition would mean that the PD suffered the fate of an Italian Pasok and would be reduced to a battered remnant at the next election, with the PdL and M5S the only serious players in Italian politics. However, Massimo D’Alema, whom Berlusconi has openly touted as his preferred candidate for the presidency if it has to go to somebody from the PD rather than the PdL, would not care about possibly destroying the social base the PD inherited from the Communist Party if it gave him seven years in the top job. Another equally despicable figure with a strong chance of getting the presidency in the event of a PD-PdL deal is Giuliano Amato, a former Craxian Socialist who presided over vicious anti-working class austerity measures in 1992 and had a second turn as premier during the dispiriting fag-end of the centre-left administration in 2000-01.
College vote
The first round of voting for the presidency will take place on April 18. For the first three rounds a two-thirds majority is required, but from the fourth round a simple absolute majority is sufficient. The electoral college consists of the two houses of parliament sitting in joint session with some additional regional representatives. The PD-SEL bloc accounts for only slightly under the 50% required in the fourth round, so in theory the centre-left would have a good chance of getting an anti-Berlusconi candidate elected if they got a few M5S or Monti supporters to join them. However, many previous presidential elections have been marked by backstabbing and intrigue and very often the candidate judged to be the favourite at the start of the competition has not obtained the prize. The collapse of Christian Democracy as a mass force in Italian politics in 1992-94 has not reduced the numerous similarities between the election of an Italian president and a papal conclave.
Meanwhile, M5S is engaged in an internet poll to choose its own presidential candidate. While M5S parliamentarians will very probably all display loyalty to this person in the first three rounds, once it comes to the fourth round, when a simple absolute majority is required, more flexibility may emerge, provided the centre-left candidate is not some totally compromised representative of la casta like D’Alema or Amato.
Until we know who the next president is, it is impossible to gauge the outcome of the deepening political crisis. Outside the parliamentary bubble, unemployment is rising, production is falling and debt-ridden pensioners commit suicide. But the leftwing electoral cartel, Rivoluzione Civile, has fallen apart and the communist groupings remain tragically weak and fragmented.
Notes
1. There were no ‘wise women’ amongst them, something which gave rise to much criticism from prominent female public figures, from Susanna Camusso on the left to Alessandra Mussolini on the right.
2. One ‘wise man’, Giovanni Pitruzzella, a Palermo-born lawyer from the PdL, had co-authored a book with Toto Cuffaro, the disgraced former president of the Sicilian region, currently in prison for Mafia-related offences.
3. See Marco Travaglio’s front-page article in Il Fatto Quotidiano (April 7), for a devastating but concise summary of Napolitano’s seven-year record of hostility to the judiciary, subservience to Berlusconi and willingness to force the Italian courts to condone illegal actions by Americans. These ranged from CIA officials involved in kidnapping the imam of Milan for rendition to Egyptian torturers to Amanda Knox, who clearly will never return to Italy, whatever the outcome of the supreme court’s decision to quash her bizarre appeal court victory.