05.12.2013
Running the show from outside
The absence of any serious leftwing political force leaves the working class in the unenviable position of choosing the butcher, writes Toby Abse
Silvio Berlusconi’s expulsion from the Senate on November 27 was a very severe blow to the 77-year-old fraudster, who has held parliamentary office - first as a deputy and then as a senator - for nearly 20 years. Even when in opposition, rather than government, he had used this status as a barrier against prosecutors eager to press him to appear in court in the numerous criminal proceedings in which he had been a defendant.
The relevant provision of the Severino law - for which Berlusconi’s Popolo della Libertà (PdL) had voted without hesitation in December 2012 - clearly stated that he should have been “immediately” thrown out of parliament after his definitive conviction by the Cassazione (supreme court) for an offence carrying a maximum penalty of more than two years’ imprisonment.1 However, this had, ludicrously, taken nearly four months to be applied, but in the end, despite all Berlusconi’s numerous delaying manoeuvres, a vote was taken to impose a six-year ban on his holding, or standing for, elected public office, whether it be as a member of either of the two houses of the Italian parliament - the Chamber of Deputies and the Senate - or the European parliament.2 It is generally believed that even a hypothetical future pardon for the tax fraud that gave rise to the ban would not have the effect of cancelling this secondary sanction and allowing Berlusconi an early return to the parliamentary arena.
However, in practice it is possible to control and lead a major Italian political movement with substantial representation from outside parliament, as the example of Beppe Grillo, the leader of the populist Movimento Cinque Stelle (Five Star Movement - M5S) has clearly demonstrated over the last nine months - a parallel which Berlusconi has repeatedly referred to this autumn, after his exclusion became increasingly probable. Moreover, as Berlusconi has hastened to emphasise, it is more than likely that within a few days the centre-left Partito Democratico (PD) - the third of the major forces in Italian politics - will also be led by a man who does not hold parliamentary office. Matteo Renzi, the mayor of Florence, is the current front runner in the contest to become secretary of the PD, which will be decided by open primaries on Sunday December 8.3
Nonetheless, despite Berlusconi’s pretence at nonchalance exemplified by these superficially plausible comparisons with Grillo and M5S or Renzi and the PD, his cowardly behaviour on the day suggests that he does not really believe his own rhetoric. Berlusconi did not even attend the debate on his expulsion, let alone make a defiant, melodramatic speech in his own defence, as he had repeatedly claimed he would. Ultimately - for all his posturing as a martyr in the cause of Italian democracy allegedly under attack from ‘communist’ magistrates - the thought of being in the chamber to hear the president of the Senate calmly giving instructions to the attendants to escort him out of the building was more than he could take. No doubt he feared that hostile crowds would gather outside the Senate and express their derision as he exited - as had occurred with his old patron, the erstwhile Socialist prime minister, Bettino Craxi, on his disgrace in 1992.
Berlusconi’s protest rally held outside his sumptuous Roman residence, the Palazzo Grazioli, whilst the debate was going on in parliament, proved a damp squib. Despite hiring hundreds of coaches from all over Italy to bring supporters to Rome free of charge, only a thousand or so turned up. The freezing cold weather did not help. The shivering faithful could not muster much enthusiasm - after the Cassazione verdict in August Berlusconi could muster greater numbers. But at least he had the moral support of his youthful fiancée, Francesca Pascale, who comforted him after he wept at the end of his own speech - it clearly moved him rather more than it did many of his audience, including Forza Italia veterans, who doubtless remembered the more stirring performances 20 years earlier. The depressed old felon cancelled his scheduled appearance on prime-time television with his favourite interviewer, Bruno Vespa, and instead scurried away in his private jet back to his northern retreat near Milan.
Split
Berlusconi desperately tried to turn back the clock by abandoning the increasingly unpopular PdL label that he had imposed on his followers in 2008, in what proved to be a not entirely successful bid to absorb the ‘post-fascist’ Alleanza Nazionale, and reverting to the ‘Forza Italia’ brand, which had brought him so much success in earlier years.
However, this reversion to the origins of the movement accelerated the split between hawks and doves that he had attempted to conceal - with considerable loss of dignity - in October. At that time he yielded to PdL secretary and interior minister Angelino Alfano and agreed at the very last minute to give a vote of confidence to Enrico Letta’s coalition government that he had planned to bring down in a bid to precipitate an autumn general election before any ban on his holding public office kicked in.
When it became apparent that Berlusconi - and the hawks such as Denis Verdini, who were urging the tycoon on to ever greater intransigence - had clearly got the two-thirds majority at the PdL national council required to implement the name change to ‘Forza Italia’, Alfano supporters not only boycotted the decisive NC meeting and refused to join the resurrected Forza Italia that it endorsed. They broke with Berlusconi to constitute separate parliamentary groups in both the Chamber and Senate, under the label of ‘Nuovo Centro Destra’ (NCD) - or New Centre Right. Although some cynical outside observers thought that this was a cunning exercise in niche marketing, analogous to Ignazio La Russa’s ‘Fratelli d’Italia’,4 and that the moderates of the NCD would ultimately reconcile themselves with the hard-liners of Forza Italia in a reunited centre-right electoral coalition, the gulf deepened when Forza Italia withdrew support from the Letta government by voting against the budget in a vote of confidence on November 25. That is two days before the vote on Berlusconi’s expulsion.
With Forza Italia in opposition and NCD votes guaranteeing the passage of the budget, the fact that Alfano and his followers loyally voted against Berlusconi’s expulsion had little real political significance; Berlusconi may be reluctant to publicly brand Alfano as a traitor in the way that the more prominent Forza Italia hawks now regularly do. However, in private he makes little secret of sharing the hawks’ views and is obviously unconcerned by press leaks about these outbursts, probably orchestrated by the hawks themselves in a bid to consolidate their hold on the old criminal.
Berlusconi now seems to be hoping that divisions within the PD may precipitate the end of the Letta government and pave the way for an early general election in spring 2014. That might give him the vengeful satisfaction of seeing the treacherous NCD being wiped out as a parliamentary force, like Gianfranco Fini’s battalion of deserters from the PdL were in February 2013, even if it would not necessarily produce a Forza Italia government.
This is not pure day-dreaming on Berlusconi’s part. There is indeed considerable tension between Enrico Letta and Matteo Renzi, despite, or because of, their very similar political origins in the former Christian Democratic, rather than former ‘official communist’ component of the PD. Until very recently Letta had relied on the unstinting support of president Giorgio Napolitano, who could be seen as the principal architect of the ‘grand coalition’ between the PD, the PdL and the centrist Scelta Civica.5 However, Napolitano’s reaction to Forza Italia’s desertion of the coalition has been to press Letta to demonstrate that he has a majority for his programme and government in parliament, which seemed perfectly obvious in view of the majority in favour of the budget on a vote of confidence.
Renzi’s ambivalent attitude to the Letta government has two motives. Firstly, he is well aware that the grand coalition with Berlusconi remains very unpopular with many of the PD’s own members and most committed voters. So too great an identification with the coalition is unhelpful to Renzi in the contest for the PD party secretaryship. Hence his recent calls for the PD to be much more forceful in setting the coalition’s agenda, exemplified by his remarks after Berlusconi’s expulsion that the PD has 300 deputies, whilst Alfano has only 30.
Secondly, Renzi is not fundamentally interested in the secretaryship as a means of rebuilding the PD itself. His chief rival for the post, Gianni Cuperlo, claims, whether sincerely or not, to see the post as a long-term, full-time job.6 Its purpose would be to reverse the PD’s declining membership and restore its morale, which has been shattered by episodes like April’s presidential ballot, in which 101 traitors failed to deliver their votes to Prodi, ensuring the humiliating defeat of the PD’s own favoured candidate.
Renzi, however, views the party secretaryship purely as a stepping stone to becoming PD candidate for premier at the next general election. The longer Letta remains in office, the more likely it is that he and not Renzi will win. If Letta’s premiership of the new, narrower coalition fails to deliver any more than the old grand coalition - which became notorious for endless postponements of any decision on controversial issues such as the IMU (the local property tax on each household) - his position may be further weakened. However, the danger for Renzi is that even if he, not Letta, is the candidate premier in a 2015 contest, PD would lose the general election because of disillusionment amongst its natural supporters. Obviously if Letta remains in office until 2015 and can claim to have achieved something regarded as positive by the electorate, Renzi’s career in national politics might well be over, as so much of his appeal is based on an ephemeral and vacuous rhetoric of youth and novelty openly borrowed from Tony Blair. A man whom he still sees as a role model.7
Whilst Berlusconi may hope Renzi brings Letta down, for Italian workers there is probably nothing to choose between these two potential PD leaders - their prominence is an indication of how far the PD has moved from its roots in the labour movement. Nor is Sinistra Ecologia e Libertà (SEL), the only parliamentary group to the left of the PD, offering any real alternative to the policies of privatisation and austerity.
The disappointing end to the five-day wildcat strike by the Genovese transport workers last month - a strike against privatisation of transport services that gained considerable support from the wider working class of that city - demonstrates the continuing lack of any political leadership that is capable of responding to spontaneous surges of working class militancy with a perspective that challenges the logic of capital. Sadly it was no accident that the mayor against whom they were striking was elected as a left challenge to the PD and is closely associated with SEL .
Notes
1. Berlusconi had been sentenced to a nominal four-year prison term, even if his age and lack of previous convictions, together with an indulto (pardon law) passed by the last government of Romano Prodi, means that the real penalty will be a year or less of either community service or house arrest; at present, apart from the confiscation of his Italian passport, which should prevent him going abroad, he is a free man awaiting a judicial decision as to whether his application to do community service has been accepted or not.
2. Ultimately the vote took the form of a public roll call, not the secret ballot that Berlusconi had hoped for and which his supporters had frequently claimed was required by parliamentary regulations. The PD parliamentarians, some of whom were at first quite willing to accept a secret vote, had been forced to stand firm on this issue by extra-parliamentary pressure from their own members and supporters, who were only too mindful of Berlusconi’s capacity to buy parliamentarians’ votes on previous occasions in 2008 and 2010, as well as of the strange voting patterns of PD grand electors during secret ballots in this year’s presidential election.
3. The contest is not limited to PD members, but is open to anybody willing to sign a declaration of general principles aligning themselves with the centre-left and willing to pay €2. There will be three candidates, after a fourth, Gianni Pittella, got less than 6% and was therefore eliminated from the open primaries. Amongst PD members Renzi got 45.3%, Gianni Cuperlo 39.4% and Pippo Civati 9.4%.
Whilst Cuperlo is regarded as the ‘left’ candidate, he is essentially an archetypal apparatchik, who started his political career as secretary of the FGCI, the youth organisation of the old Partito Comunista Italiano, and is heavily identified with his original patron, Massimo D’Alema, a man notorious for devious manoeuvres and unbridled personal ambition rather than any firm leftwing principles. Although Civati started off on the right rather than the left of the PD, he seems more of a maverick and opposed Berlusconi with more consistency than either of the main candidates, as well as showing a greater openness towards the demands of M5S than either the neoliberal mayor or the bureaucratic champion of party orthodoxy.
If no candidate gets more than 50% in the primary, there will be a run-off between the two front runners, but this will involve the thousand members of the PD national assembly - also to be elected on Sunday - not a renewed open contest with hundreds of thousands of participants, comparable to the run-off between Renzi and Pier Luigi Bersani for centre-left candidate premier last year.
4. This grouping broke away from the PdL and reclaimed its old neo-fascist identity, but nonetheless remained part of Berlusconi’s February 2013 electoral coalition, even if it kept out of the subsequent grand coalition.
5. Scelta Civica has itself recently fragmented between the more secular supporters of former premier Mario Monti and the Christian Democratic nostalgics around Pier Ferdinando Casini, who will perhaps ultimately fuse with the NCD.
6. This is a dig at Renzi, who shows no sign of wanting to resign his Florentine mayoralty if he is elected party secretary.
7. Whilst the identification of the PD’s founder, Walter Veltroni, with Blair in his pomp at the turn of the century was more understandable political opportunism (on the part of a man who by 2008 had switched to borrowing Obama’s catch phrase, “Yes, we can”), Renzi’s belated idealisation of a figure now thoroughly discredited in his home country is perhaps an indication of the neoliberal mayor’s provincial parochialism.