29.08.2013
Italy: Threat to bring down government
Toby Abse reports on Silvio Berlusconis latest antics
For the last month, to the same extent as the last 20 years, Italian political life has continued to revolve around Silvio Berlusconi.
This felon is still in a position to make or break governments and his self-pitying and often paranoid statements are treated with the utmost seriousness in the Italian media. This is the case not just in what, behind a thin veil of control allegedly vested with family or friends, are really his own newspapers (Il Giornale, Libero, Il Foglio) and his three television channels, but also by the RAI (state television), Il Sole 24 Ore (the Italian equivalent of the Financial Times) and the Corriere della Sera (the equivalent of The Times).
Far from in any way coming to terms with his conviction for tax fraud upheld by the Cassazione (supreme court) on August 1, not just Berlusconi but his entire political party, the Popolo della Libertà (PdL), have in effect demanded that the verdict be quashed so that he can continue with his political career as if nothing untoward has occurred.
“The removal of Berlusconi from the office of senator is unthinkable and constitutionally unacceptable” were the words of Angelino Alfano, minister of the interior and deputy prime minister in the government of Enrico Letta. But, as party secretary, he was speaking for the PdL in an official capacity when he said this on August 25 - demonstrating exactly how much respect he has for the laws he is supposed to be enforcing in his day job. This totally unabashed contempt for any notion of the rule of law, which has in many ways been indulged, or at least treated as a legitimate expression of opinion, not just by the majority of the Italian media, but by many political figures nominally opposed to the PdL, including former premier Mario Monti, marks Italy out from the normal run of liberal bourgeois democracies in the advanced capitalist world.
Other, seemingly all-powerful, figures who have enjoyed comparable electoral success have been plunged into permanent disgrace by comparable brushes with the criminal law. To take a western European example, Helmut Kohl, the longstanding and very successful leader of German Christian Democracy (CDU), the chancellor who presided over the reunification of the two Germanies after four decades of division, had to retire from public life in the wake of a corruption scandal about illicit funds he had gathered from business interests to finance the CDU’s electoral campaigns (rather than for personal enrichment in the manner of Berlusconi). In the USA, even Richard Nixon, an unscrupulous survivor of many previous embarrassing, and probably criminal, episodes, had to accept, however reluctantly and belatedly, the outcome of the Watergate scandal and stand down as president with no possibility of any subsequent return to public life.
Berlusconi and his minions started August as they meant to go on with a direct and deliberately defamatory attack on Antonio Esposito, the president of the summer section of the Cassazione and the leading judge on the panel that upheld the ex-premier’s conviction. First of all, one of Berlusconi’s newspapers published an article claiming to be accurately reporting statements made by Esposito some years previously which allegedly showed gross bias against Berlusconi. The 72-year-old judge, who claims to be a teetotaller, was said to have made facetious drunken remarks about intercepted conversations concerning Berlusconi’s sex life.
This article and other material in a similar vein, suggesting, for example, that the judge was taking revenge for his brother’s career setbacks, were designed to discredit and provoke the judiciary - similar personalised attacks on Ilda Boccassini and various other Milanese magistrates who had charged, prosecuted or convicted him in lower courts had been the stock in trade of Berlusconi’s papers for years.
Unfortunately, Esposito, feeling isolated and vilified by a large section of the media and left unprotected by mainstream politicians, was foolish enough to grant an interview to a journalist on the Neapolitan daily Il Mattino, Antonio Manzo, whom he had known for some decades and wrongly imagined he could trust with a scoop. The naive Esposito thought that the journalist would abide by an agreed text sent to him via fax; however, the journalist had, unknown to him, made a tape of their entire telephone conversation and the version of the interview that finally appeared in print on August 6 included a phrase about Berlusconi having been “convicted because he knew” of the complex system of tax evasion set up by Fininvest, the company he had founded. Since the formal statement, in which the panel of five judges give the ‘motivations’ of their sentence, has not yet been issued, anything that could be seen as an advance leak to the press was somewhat unwise - even if in common-sense terms this was the only logical explanation of the Cassazione verdict and indeed only confirmed the views openly expressed by judges in the sentences that followed the previous hearings in the lower courts.1
Berlusconi and his political and journalistic courtiers mounted a concerted campaign against the judge, claiming that the incautious interview invalidated the guilty verdict and offered grounds for a retrial. Although this was completely absurd, since the interview was granted some days after, and not before, the verdict, the campaign gave rise to the preliminary stages of disciplinary action against Esposito. Whilst arguably the procurator general of the Cassazione was compelled to take such action by the magistracy’s own rules, the conspicuous and very well publicised involvement of Annamaria Cancellieri, the minister of justice, seems to have been entirely voluntary and might well be interpreted as the Italian establishment siding with the powerful convict against the judge who had had the audacity to find him guilty.
Pardon farce
Berlusconi’s refusal to even go through the motions of acknowledging some measure of guilt for his offence has also meant that, whilst he and his supporters have incessantly continued to demand an immediate presidential pardon, the elderly delinquent has adamantly refused to ask for one either directly or through his lawyers or close family members. Berlusconi believes that president Giorgio Napolitano should spontaneously offer him a pardon - he imagines he is entitled to one purely by virtue of the size of his electoral following.
On August 13 Napolitano issued a public statement addressed to Berlusconi in which he emphasised he was not going to grant a pardon unless an application was addressed to him according to the usual procedures. Since this statement in effect gave the impression that such a request would be given serious consideration, anybody with less breathtaking arrogance than Berlusconi might have refrained from further public denigration of both the verdict and the judiciary in general, feigned some degree of repentance and allowed some months to elapse in the hope that the president could subsequently assist him without arousing a public outcry. It might be added in parentheses that there would remain a potential problem for Berlusconi, and Napolitano, should the longer prison sentence - for under-age prostitution in the Ruby case - be upheld by the higher courts: if another set of judges were cussed enough to convict the criminal for a second offence, it would be hard to justify a second presidential pardon.
The PdL’s new campaign for an amnesty has been equally preposterous - the Italian right has never previously been known for its concern about the overcrowding in the country’s jails and, whilst those PdL members who are veterans of Forza Italia may not have made as much political capital about being tough on crime, particularly crime committed by immigrants, as either the Lega Nord or former members of the neo-fascist MSI, this sudden humanitarian turn is all too obviously an attempt to give Berlusconi a safe conduct. The amnesty would apply to anybody convicted of crimes that carry a sentence of up to six years2 - a higher ceiling than any other amnesty granted in recent times and one which would inevitably set free violent offenders, whose crimes even the PdL’s tax-evading electoral base amongst the self-employed and small businessmen would find rather shocking (presumably the notion of a personal amnesty for all crimes committed by Berlusconi must have been rejected as impossible in the current circumstances, given the lack of a PdL majority in parliament).
The last few days appear to signal an escalation in Berlusconi’s attempt to overturn the verdict by all possible means. Having initially claimed, in early August immediately after the sentence, that despite his personal problems he would continue to support Enrico Letta’s grand coalition government made up of the PdL, the Partito Democratico (PD) and Mario Monti’s centrist Scelta Civica, he is now in effect threatening to bring down the government unless his wishes are granted. The logic behind such a strategy is to precipitate early elections, in November, in the belief that the PdL would win and Berlusconi would return to the prime minister’s office and be in a position to defy every judge that dared to take him on; it should be pointed out that, quite apart from Napolitano’s stated reluctance to call early elections whilst the present electoral system (the Porcellum or ‘Pig Law’) remains in being, it is also rather debatable as to whether Berlusconi would be legally entitled to stand in a fresh election in the aftermath of his conviction.
Earlier this week it looked as though there would be a showdown between the PdL and the rest of the coalition; the immediate pretext seemed likely to be the dispute over the IMU property tax, which the PdL wants completely abolished. There is a real problem for the Letta government; in the view of economics minister Fabrizio Saccomanni, abolishing this tax would leave a €2 billion hole in the budget. It should be remembered that Letta has already humoured the PdL by cancelling one instalment of this tax, so there is no question of total intransigence on the issue. However, at the moment of writing, press reports suggest that Letta is willing to cancel the second (December) instalment in order to deprive Berlusconi of any excuse unrelated to his own judicial situation for bringing the government down in the autumn.
The abrupt and unpredictable about-turns in Berlusconi’s political stance are more explicable if we take into account that he is being pulled in two opposing directions by the ‘hawks’ and ‘doves’ in his entourage. The hawks are led by Daniela Santanchè, a former neo-fascist who takes great delight in describing herself as “the pythoness”, and former banker Denis Verdini, the collapse of whose bank gave rise to an ongoing investigation involving allegations of large-scale fraud. These two, unsurprisingly, always advocate a reckless ‘all or nothing’ strategy and appeared to be in the ascendant at the long summit that took place at Berlusconi’s Arcore residence on August 24, forcing a somewhat reluctant Alfano to issue a public statement putting pressure on the PD, Letta and Napolitano to resolve Berlusconi’s predicament.
The most influential doves are not politicians, although many put both Angelino Alfano and Renato Schifani in that category, but the two of Berlusconi’s five children who play a real role in his business empire, Marina and Pierluigi, and his long-time business associate, Fedele Confalonieri, who has been the nominal head of Fininvest/Mediaset since Berlusconi’s entry into politics in 1994. This trio are concerned with the survival and profitability of Berlusconi’s media empire, not his short-term political prospects, and the rapid fall in the share prices of Berlusconi’s two main companies on August 26 - as a result of the hard line adopted at the weekend - enabled them to exert a restraining influence on the tycoon in a way that others were no longer able to do.
The very latest rumour is that Berlusconi may be willing to accept a year of house arrest without further public complaint if Napolitano can exercise clemency by allowing him to remain in the Senate, but Italian political life will continue to be at the mercy of his changeable whims as long as the current president remains in office and certain elements within the PD continue to lack enough backbone to call Berlusconi’s bluff by speeding up the process of removing him from the Senate.
Notes
1. The journalists of Il Fatto Quotidiano, which used to be broadly aligned with Antonio Di Pietro’s Italia dei Valori and now might be seen as critically supporting Grillo’s Movimento Cinque Stelle, were almost alone in offering this defence of Esposito.
2. Although Berlusconi’s nominal prison sentence for the tax fraud is four years, the maximum sentence for the offence is six years and any legally binding amnesty would have to be framed in such a way as to ensure that anybody committing the offence would be freed, even if they had been given the maximum sentence.