Italy: Screwed-up but not as screwed as you think

Matt Yglesias writes:

For such a nice country, Italy's politics seem weirdly screwed up. There's the famous instability of the governments, of course. And then there's the fact that their main right-of-center party is led by the legendarily corrupt Silvio Berlusconi. And then there's the fact that despite the broadly discreditable nature of Berlusconi, the left-of-center bloc can never seem to stop him from coming back to power.

Well, yes and, as is so often the case, no. I don't know what correlation there is between a country's niceness and the screwyness of its politics, but itt's true that foreigners of all stripes enjoy their occasional surveys of Italian politics. Certainly no commentary can avoid having fun with the "famous instability" of their governments. But like so much in Italy, appearances are somewhat deceptive. For most of the post-Word War 2 period Italian politics were bedeviled by too much stability, not too little.

It used to be said of Irish rugby that though the situation in other countries might often be serious it was never hopeless, in Ireland it was often hopeless but never serious. Well, as in Irish rugby so in Italian politics. At least until recently...

It's true that, one way or another, there have been something like 62 governments in Italy since 1945, but most governmental changes were more a matter of rearranging the deck-chairs than actually changing the character or form of leadership. And there was a very good reason for that: the Christian Democrats were in office for more than 40 consecutive years. Giulio Andreotti, for instance, was Prime Minister five times and held positions in more than 30 different governments. Other prominent politicians, including Moro and Fanfani were also Prime Minister on multiple occasions.

The consequences of what was, effectively, one party rule have been severe. But there is, actually, grounds for thinking that Italian politics are now less weird and more typical of the way politics is conducted in other western countries than they have been at any point since the war. The great political problem that would, in the end, come close to destroying the Italian state was Italy's inability to find a way of ensuring that opposing political groupings could swap power back and forth as Republicans and Democrats in the United States or Labour and the Conservatives have managed to do so in the United Kingdom.

The hope that Italy might be able to have a "normal" form of politics ended, in retrospect, in 1948. Before the elections that year the Communists had actually held posts in De Gaspari's government, but once the 1948 election - which was subject to considerable interference from both Moscow and Washington - had ended in a convincing victory for the Christian Democrats the ground-rules for the next forty years of Italian democracy had been set. In this sense Italy was a victim of the Cold War and an example, as Matt might appreciate, of the second-order or satellite consequences of Empire.

Though the Italian Communists would steadily distance themselves from Moscow (and do a decent job in local government in Bologna and elsewhere) they, and the 25% of the electorate or so who supported them) were frozen out of power. (And when Moro proposed his "historic compromise" of course, he was kidnapped and murdered by the Red Brigades - a factor that helped ensure the sclerotic status quo endured). One may argue that there were advantages to that, though one consequence was that factionalism within the CD became rife as each party grandee built powerbases - frequently through the adroit distribution of supposedly-public funds - for themselves. Aided by a proportional representation electoral system that made it difficult for change to be expressed at the ballot box, the prime skill required of any leading politician was the ability to satisfy the competing elements within the CD while also buying off representatives from smaller parties with local autonomy or patronage powers. Clientilism ran rife, to the exclusion of open government and with the consequence that the future was mortgaged to grease the present. That couldn't last forever. 

Naturally, the factions within the right-wing could shift, while the left was split between socialists and communists with each leading group in turn containing several competing factions who differed on goals as well as policy.

Silvio Berlusconi may well be "legendarily corrupt" but he's not especially notable for that. Or rather, he's not notably more corrupt than his predecessors in office, Andreotti and Benito Craxi who, though notionally on opposite ends of the political spectrum, shared an appetite for and - expertese at practicing - the darker recesses of politics that Berlusconi can only dream of. Between them, however, they helped make Berlusconi possible.

Craxi's socialist power base in Milan was every bit as corrupt as Andreotti's CD machines in Rome and Sicily. But when magistrates began uncovering the true - and appalling - extent to which Italian public life had been corrupted, the electorate quite reasonably decided that a) enough was enough and b) all politicians were to blame. The tangentopoli scandals revealing bribery, kick-backs, racketeering, slush funds, links to the mafia came on top of previous revelations that uncovered the existence of a far-right organisation - Gladio - prepared to mount, essentially, coup, in the event it proved necessary as well as a secretive quasi-masonic network of shady influence that confirmed that you went into politics to become rich, not to advance the public interest. In the circumstances you can understand why voters might feel like despairing.

Berlusconi is indeed a phoney and, often, a buffoon. But despite the lack of clarity surrounding his own business interests - not least the extent of his own links to Craxi - Italian politics is probably more open now than it has been in decades. This is true even though Berlusconi controls the three alternatives to the state RAI TV network. Not to mention his publishing houses and newspapers.

But it's also the case that Belusconi's return to power can be explained by political realities that go some way beyond his flair, colour and almost childish exhuberance. Realities that also extend beyond the appeal of a politician who promises to do something or even anything. Italy's economy has the slowest - almost minimal - rate of growth in the G8; Romano Prodi's government raised taxes (and cracked down on tax evasion - a very unpopular move) but was unable to control spending or public debt (a problem given the need to obey Euro currency rules). The Italian economy is especially dependent upon manufacturing - often in consumer goods and luxury items vulnerable to competition from Asia and elsewhere - while investment in infrastructure and education remains sluggish to say the least. these then all helped create conditions or Berlusconi's return.

One must regard the possibility that Berlusconi will be able to solve these problems with some scepticism. Still, Italian politics is now, in many ways and at long last, like the politics practised in other countries. By which I mean that there is, finally, a reasonably coherent right-of-centre bloc and an equally clear left-of-centre group. At long last, Italian politics is moving from left to right and back to left again just as politics does in other countries.

True, Berlusconi's rise ensures that the Northern League is back (along with the reconstituted National Alliance) and yes, as Matt notes, they are an unpleasant, xenophobic bunch. But it would, I think, be a mistake to read too much into their success. The Northern League is a natural home for protest votes north of Rome just as, in many respects, Jean Marie Le Pen's National Front has tended to attract support from disillusioned voters (including middle-class voters) in France. Not all their support can be attributed to this, of course, but a good percentage can In happier economic times, it's reasonable to suppose their support will melt away just as it has in the past. Their rise, then, is a warning flag but not necessarily proof that Italy has gone to the dogs.

In fact, Berlusconi's People of Freedom movement is a coalition of often contradictory interests and philosophies in much the same was as the US Republican party contains myriad tensions within it - between populists and free-marketeers, social conservatives and libertarians, paleoconservatives and neoconservatives and so on and so on. Opposing it is Veltroni's left-wing goruping that, though it contains different strands within it, is little less cohesive than the US Democratic party has traditionally been.

So the headline is perhaps an unsual one: Italian Politics Is Newly Normal.

Comments

[bob]

I think you underweight Berlusconi owning most of the Italian media.

[MNPundit]

But you forget the American Republican Party has not only completely fucked up the world, they think that what they have done is a good thing.

You do not want anything in your country to be like the American Republican Party in any possible way.

[Hank]

Well put, although I'd like to add something about the Lega this time around. Although I think you're right that historically casting a vote for Lega is casting a protest vote, I think this time around it is a little different. There is no doubt that a lot of Lega's anti-Southerner, anti-immigrant rhetoric is provocative and repugnant, but it seems like one thing that would account for the astonishing 8% of the total vote they took this time would be the fiscal federalism that they're offering northern Italy. (I won't call it "Padania.") Other autonomy movements (Liga Veneta, Lega Lombardia, and even the Southern Leagues) are all campaigning for a federalized Italy or at least for automony to the degree that regions like Sudtirol/Alto Adige and Valle d'Aosta have, and it seems like the idea is finally catching hold as a way to ease the truly onerous tax burden that most Italians feel (particularly with their lower-than-average salaries). I'd wager that a lot of that 8% are something akin to what were called "Reagan Democratics" in the 1980s in the US -- Italian voters who may feel repelled by Bossi's "clandestines out" election posters but who see no other feasible way of getting lower taxes.