20.02.2014
Italy: The new Tony Blair
The premiership of Matteo Renzi will make the previous government look positively progressive, writes Toby Abse
The fall of Enrico Letta’s coalition government after nearly 10 months in office1 may not in itself be a cause for regret - although, contrary to all expectations,2 Letta stood up to Silvio Berlusconi, split his Popolo della Libertà (PdL), consigned him to opposition and then facilitated the felon’s ignominious expulsion from the Senate. However, Letta’s replacement by Matteo Renzi undoubtedly signals a turn for the worse.
Letta was in no sense a man of the left, coming as he did from the former Christian Democrat wing of the Partito Democratico (PD), but he was essentially a pragmatist, whose economic policies were formed in response to the various, often conflicting, pressures exerted upon him either domestically, from his coalition partners, or externally, from the European Union. Renzi, on the other hand, is a fanatical ideologue, a rabid neoliberal, whose Florentine mayoralty (2009-2014) was marked by a series of privatisations and whose total contempt for the working class was best symbolised by his denial of the May Day bank holiday to underpaid and overworked shop workers in the Tuscan regional capital.
Renzi makes much of his youth, for at 39 he is the youngest Italian prime minister since 1945. It is worth stressing, however, that Letta was hardly an old man by Italian prime ministerial standards - when he took office in 2013 at 46, he was the third youngest premier in the republican era. However, when Letta in December 2013 tried, quite reasonably, to suggest that he, Renzi and the then deputy prime minister and interior minister, Angelino Alfano, all represented a new generation in Italian politics - implicitly counterposed to the 77-year-old Berlusconi and the 88-year-old president of the republic, Giorgio Napolitano - Renzi dismissed this out of hand, as if everybody over 40 had one foot in the grave.
Of course, Renzi is not the first Italian prime minister to be appointed at 39, although mainstream journalists, eager to curry favour with the rising star, seem very reluctant to mention the other one. Benito Mussolini was exactly that age when appointed premier by Victor Emmanuel III on October 29 1922 after the March on Rome. Renzi is two months younger on appointment than the founder of fascism was, and, given Renzi’s measureless vanity and boundless narcissism, it seems perfectly reasonable to suppose that it was a burning but unacknowledged desire to beat the Mussolinian record that lay behind Renzi’s treacherous refusal to give the unfortunate Letta any more time at Palazzo Chigi.
The original implicit agreement, frequently referred to in the Italian press over the last few months, had been that Letta would be allowed at least 18 months as premier, so that Renzi could, as the PD party secretary, concentrate on getting electoral and constitutional reform through parliament, whilst Letta concentrated on economic and fiscal measures - before a general election that was supposedly to be held in the spring of 2015 under the new electoral system, with Renzi as PD candidate premier.
An obsession with his own - increasingly relative - youth is not the only ugly trait that Renzi shares with Tony Blair,3 whom he shrilly proclaims as his role model almost daily.4 Like Blair, Renzi manifests an open hostility to all the best traditions of his own party - both any vestigial social democratic inclinations on the part of those whose entry into politics came via the old Partito Comunista Italiano, such as the Keynesian, Stefano Fassina, whom Renzi publicly insulted in order to force his resignation from the Letta government a few weeks ago, and any notion of collective leadership or inner-party democracy (Renzi was not prepared to tolerate his defeated opponent, Gianni Cuperlo, in the essentially honorary role of PD president.)
Readers will be well aware of the PD’s increasingly rotten politics - symbolised by its self-consciously American name, deliberately devoid of any reference to the ‘ left’, ‘socialist’, ‘labour’ or ‘ workers’ of the kind still present, however misleadingly, in the nomenclature of its British, French, German and Spanish counterparts. And now it is very clearly Renzi’s ambition to transform the PD into a one-man band resembling Berlusconi’s Forza Italia or Beppe Grillo’s Movimento Cinque Stelle (Five Star Movement - M5S). Whilst this danger has always been inherent in the trajectory followed by the PD and its forerunners since Achille Occhetto’s decision to liquidate the PCI in 1989-91, the rapid failure of Occhetto’s initial attempt in 1991-94 to emulate his friend, Neil Kinnock5, and the subsequent internal rivalries - most notably between Massimo D’Alema and Walter Veltroni6 - has so far staved off the total personalisation of the PD.
Manoeuvre
Renzi has laid enormous stress on the use of primaries in the election of PD leaders and, until very recently, in the choice of centre-left candidate premiers. It is interesting that his success on his second attempt, in late 2013, to gain the PD leadership was much more marked in the final round, open to all self-proclaimed PD supporters, when he gained 68%, compared with the 18% of Gianni Cuperlo and the 14% of Pippo Civati, than it was in the first round amongst actual party members. In short he was very reliant on floating voters, at least some of whom had voted for Forza Italia or the PdL at the height of Berlusconi’s popularity.
Despite this earlier wish to gain an almost plebiscitary mandate from a wider electorate rather than rely on PD stalwarts, the manner in which Renzi actually gained the premiership made a total nonsense of any notion of democracy, parliamentary or otherwise. Renzi used the position that he had gained in December 2013 as the PD’s secretary to mount a coup against Letta through the PD’s party apparatus - a manoeuvre more reminiscent of the old PCI during the First Republic than of the new transparency he claimed to believe in. On February 13 Renzi moved a resolution against Letta at a meeting of the PD’s leading body, the Direzione, and gained an overwhelming victory - 136 in favour, 16 against, with two abstentions.
Although the great majority of the PD parliamentarians elected in February 2013 had been supporters of the then party secretary, Pierluigi Bersani, who had allowed Renzi - his defeated opponent in the 2012 PD primary - only a relatively small quota of the party list, it was obvious that many opportunists and careerists had now become convinced of Renzi’s merits: doubtless some of his fiercest erstwhile opponents were now amongst the most vocal in his support. It was also obvious that Angelino Alfano, having betrayed his original patron - Berlusconi - had no greater loyalty to his latter-day saviour - Letta - and was now only concerned to do the most favourable possible deal for his own Nuovo Centrodestra (NCD - New Centre Right) with the man most likely to lead the next coalition on behalf of the PD. Letta had no wish for a humiliating vote of no confidence in parliament and resigned in the immediate aftermath of the PD leadership meeting.
Whilst there may not be much merit in the argument that Letta’s government should not have come to an end without a parliamentary vote, since Letta himself quite understandably had no desire whatever to gratify the sadism of those who stabbed him in the back, it needs to be stressed that in some ways Renzi is repeating the pattern that began with the unelected technocrat, Mario Monti. Renzi, like Monti, has never been elected to parliament as a deputy or senator, let alone gained a mandate from the electorate as a whole (as opposed to that of the octogenarian president) for his premiership.
It should also be emphasised that Renzi is currently advocating a coalition government that will carry on for the full potential duration of the legislature, another four years. Whilst the record of Italian coalitions would suggest that such an administration is unlikely to last as long as this, the sudden lack of enthusiasm for any early election, now that he has gained the premiership by backstairs intriguing, exposes both his total lack of principle and his autocratic inclinations.
Renzi’s desire to form a cabinet within 48 hours has come to nothing, since Alfano and the NCD are trying to hang on to their ministerial positions and to modify the ‘Italicum’, the new electoral law originating from the Renzi-Berlusconi deal that I referred to in my last article.7 They want to lower the bar for coalitions from 12% to something that represents a more realistic target for any combination of centrist groupings that might be cobbled together in opposition to both the PD and Forza Italia, so that the NCD does not have to go crawling back to a vengeful Berlusconi to ensure its own representation in the next parliament.
The stories in the Italian press - particularly the Corriere della Sera - about underhand negotiations between Renzi or his representatives and such particularly despicable Forza Italia figures as Denis Verdini, whose Florentine bank collapsed in mysterious circumstances, and Nicola Cosentino, the subject of ongoing legal proceedings for longstanding connections with the Neapolitan Camorra, suggest that if the NCD does not play along with Renzi’s wishes, he might be supplied with some apparent ‘defectors’ from Forza Italia’s parliamentary group.
It is to be hoped that Renzi’s already nauseating rescue of the ageing criminal, Berlusconi, does not lead to an even worse coalition - excluding the NCD, but replacing them with an even more loathsome contingent. It now seems likely that the soft-left Sinistra Ecologia e Libertà will remain in opposition, despite the enthusiastic acclaim of its leader, Nichi Vendola, for Renzi last December. But there is still some possibility of a split by the more rightwing of SEL’s parliamentarians under the leadership of Gennaro Migliore, who might be willing to make up the numbers if Renzi is having difficulty in forming a coalition over the next few days.
Notes
1. Letta’s government started off as a ‘grand coalition’ between the centre-left Partito Democratico, the centre-right Popolo della Libertà led by Silvio Berlusconi and various centrist forces. After the split in the PdL, the coalition became somewhat narrower, including Angelino Alfano’s Nuovo Centrodestra (New Centre Right), but not Silvio Berlusconi’s revived Forza Italia, the largest centre-right grouping in the current Italian parliament.
2. Not only Beppe Grillo and the Movimento Cinque Stelle, but also many more detached commentators, were quick to assume that as the nephew of Berlusconi’s chief political adviser, Gianni Letta, Enrico would prove a mere front man for the old fraudster and I suspect that I may have unwittingly fallen into this trap myself - although it could be argued that Berlusconi shared this misguided belief and got a big shock when the younger Letta proved to have more independence than he had bargained for.
3. Renzi is of course younger than Blair was when he entered Number Ten. The creator of New Labour was already 44 - early middle age by conventional standards.
4. Blair, desperate for media attention, and always keen on a free Italian holiday, could not resist praising Renzi’s “combination of realism and idealism”, as well as his “dynamism and creativity” on the Italian’s appointment as premier. Whilst this made the Corriere della Sera on February 18, the British press seems to have taken rather less notice of the now discredited warmonger.
5. It has been claimed that the notion of abandoning the communist label first came to Occhetto when he and Kinnock were watching the fall of the Berlin Wall together on live television.
6. Arguably this longstanding feud was even more bitter than the Blair/Brown rivalry within New Labour. Veltroni was already keen to be branded as Italy’s Blair, just as Renzi is now, whilst D’Alema was more of a traditionalist, looking back to PCI leader Palmiro Togliatti.
7. ‘Back into the centre of politics’ Weekly Worker February 6.