Behind the G8 scenes – Italy's struggle to redefine politics

The rubble that will surround world leaders in L’Aquila, the earthquake-devastated Italian city where the G-8 summit meeting opens on July 8, is an apt metaphor for the political systems that await many of them back home. In the eight nation-states that account for 90 percent of the global economy, venerable mainstream parties are in tatters, and in some cases tottering on the brink of oblivion. At risk is the very concept of multiparty democracy.

The crisis has no clear-cut ideological pattern. In Germany and France, long Western Europe’s most important socialist-governed nations, the center-left has thrown itself into suicidal internal struggles. In Britain, the Labor government of prime Minister Gordon Brown has seen the spiraling resignations of key cabinet members, and is now favored by just 20 percent of voters in opinion surveys. In Japan and Canada, it is the right-of-center Liberal Democrats and Conservatives who hover on the precipice, facing prospects nearly as bleak as their counterparts in the sinking U.S. Republican Party.

Russia, the newest member of the G-8, has dropped any pretence of a functional democracy under former president and current prime minister Vladimir Putin.

Nowhere is the process of party disintegration, on both sides of the old political spectrum, more advanced than it is in the Italy of premier Silvio Berlusconi. Yet in the country that invented Fascism on the right and Euro-Communism on the left in the 20th century, a new direction for governance in the 21st may also be unfolding in the ruins.
BEST LEADER THE LEFT NEVER HAD

The unlikely hero of this political drama is Gianfranco Fini, 57 – currently Berlusconi’s restless coalition partner and president of the Italian legislature’s lower house.

What makes Fini’s emergence so surprising is that he began his career as a militant Fascist. Benito Mussolini, he once argued, “was was the greatest Italian statesman of the twentieth century.” The articulate and quietly persuasive Fini eventually rose to the leadership of the National Alliance (AN), chief heir to Mussolini’s extreme right. That’s where the story might have ended, had it not been for the “svolta.”

The word, simply translated, means “turning.” Superficially it refers to Fini’s 1995 reorientation of the AN, meant to move it closer to the political center. But for Fini himself, the svolta also meant the kind of intense self-questioning that St. Paul experienced on the road to Damascus. As the British daily The Independent put it in an admiring article, he evolved into “the best leader the Italian left never had.”

Perhaps more accurately, the politically born-again Fini is determined to set ideology aside, and nudge his countrymen into a reality trip. In contemporary Italy, that amounts to a full-fledged revolution.

Over the two decades that Silvio Berlusconi, television baron and billionaire, has dominated the dominated the political stage here, visceral effect has counted for everything in Italian politics. Hype and spectacle replaced substance. Vague invocations of “family values” triumphed over specific, carefully-defined platforms aimed at genuine political or economic reform. Enormous tax cuts were employed to woo voters, with consequences that few politicians wanted to discuss openly because a “pro-tax” reputation was tantamount to a political death sentence.

Few politicians except Fini, who began warning that Italy was on a disastrous fiscal road as long as 15 years ago. Every heedless tax cut, Fini points out, means fewer euros invested in schools, highways, railroads and advanced technology, the investments necessary to keep Italy among the G-8 affluent nations.

More important, in his view, reality in 2009 has to do with sheer demographic facts – above all, the fact that Italy now has one of the world’s lowest birth rates at 1.3 children per woman, and one of its fastest-aging populations.

Not long after 2050, the number of retired Italians above age 65 will nearly equal those of workers between 20 to 64, whose paychecks will also have to support Italy’s children — twice the “dependency ratio” predicted for the United States. Without dramatic changes, the entire economic structure could to collapse from the burden.

The only possible solution, Fini tells his fellow Italians over and over, lies in accepting and paving the way for a future premised on continuing immigration: “a multi-ethnic, multi-religious and multicultural society.”

Even more than talk of rational tax policies, these are breathtaking words in Europe today. Last week, Berlusconi signed a new bill making it a criminal act, punishable by imprisonment or immediate expulsion from Italy, to overstay a visa.The xenophobic Northern League, Berlusconi’s second coalition partner, has called for thousands of legal immigrants to be sent home, claiming they steal jobs from Italians.

Fini, by contrast, argues that immigrants are crucial to the economy and cannot be replaced. They “should be given full voting rights in the country,” he insists, and “drawn as fully as possible into the nation’s life.”

Across the board, what Fini has to say couldn’t be more at odds with the empty language of the status quo.

BEHIND PARTY COLLAPSE

The origins of the West’s party crisis lie in the implosion of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s, which suddenly eliminated what had been the principal focus of party identity in most western-style democracies for half a century. In the simplest terms, the right was obsessed with the fight against Communism at the expense of all other considerations, while the left was almost equally obsessed with the dangers of anti-Communism.

Utterly unprepared for the Soviet crash, major parties on the center-right and center-left alike were soon deliberately emptying themselves of content – “rebranding,” as Britain’s Tony Blair put it — in a search for a post-Cold War image that would appeal to voters.

A huge chunk of the electorate was up for grabs.

Italy’s own establishment meltdown, starting with the formal 1994 dissolution of the conservative Christian Democrats after a massive corruption scandal, anticipated the wider crisis by almost a decade. That same year, Berlusconi scrambled onto the public stage.

Like any good businessman, he recognized an unfilled need and came up with a purpose-made product to fill it. The product was Forza Italia, “Go Italy”, an instant political party that took its stylistic cues from Berlusconi’s game show tv broadcasts and its name from the rallying cheer of his Milan A.C. soccer team. The politics of empty hype took root.

The approach was embraced by ambitious political figures across the planet. But Berlusconi was its apotheosis.

As far back as 1994, when I covered his first election campaign, I began asking supporters of Forza Italia what it stood for. Nobody could answer the question in any detail, apart from citing anti-Communism and lower taxes – in an era when Communism had essentially vanished, and in a country where almost everyone rigorously dodges taxes.

An estimated 25 percent of the working population in Italy now declares less than $8,000 in annual income. A bare five percent admit to earning more than $55,000, although average per capita income is nearly $40,000 per year. Under Berlusconi, a prime minister who is unapologetically contemptuous of taxes and bitterly hostile to financial laws and regulations, the size of the underground economy according to Eurispes, an Italian think tank, has ballooned to an astounding $725 billion.

Although the 72-year-old prime minister has now ruled Italy for seven of the last nine years — currently under the banner of his “People of Liberty” (PdL) coalition — my interviews in 2008 produced the same answers as those in 1994: few voters could put their finger on his party’s program. It was impossible to avoid the conclusion that its main function was to re-elect Berlusconi and keep him in office – and say, his critics in Italian legal circles, out of jail.

Since 1990 alone, Berlusconi has been indicted and tried 12 times on serious criminal charges. Three times he was convicted and sentenced to prison terms that were never served, due to lengthy appeals that ended in the Italian equivalent of hung decisions. In all but one of the remaining cases, he was freed because of a blanket amnesty, subsequent changes in the law pushed through by his own parliamentary majority, or the exhausting of the statute of limitations while he enjoyed immunity as prime minister. Only once, in July 2008, has Silvio Berlusconi been found unambiguously innocent in a court proceeding.

In the past year, he has been constantly in the headlines, on allegations of improper relationships with underage girls – his estranged second wife has publicly accused him of “frequenting minors” – employing prostitutes at his private parties, and using government airplanes to ferry his friends and guests to them.

At critical junctures, such embarrassing revelations have been abruptly buried by sensational stories in the media, most of it controlled by Berlusconi, reporting violent immigrant crime waves. Seldom mentioned are figures from Italy’s own law enforcement authorities documenting a massive overall drop in crime in the past 20 years.

CHAMPION OF THE UNDOCUMENTED

In response to the fear mongering, Fini has taken the most radical step of all. He has become the outspoken champion not only of legal immigrants, but of the “clandestini,” the hidden and undocumented.

It is “immoral” to send illegal arrivals summarily back where they came from, he declared when such a policy was implemented by Berlusconi in May . “The clandestine must be first considered as human beings, and only afterward as immigrants.”

Remarkably, polls suggest that Fini has lost little of his conservative base, and is rapidly gaining supporters who never imagined they would vote someone whose youthful inspiration was the totalitarian state of Mussolini.

“The change in this man is real, it’s impossible to deny that,” a veteran left militant in Palermo told me when I sought her impression of Fini. “He is the only politician I really respect in Italy.”

The Catholic Church, which tacitly supported Berlusconi in gratitude for his moral rhetoric, has been rapidly distancing itself from him lately.

Almost everywhere today, notably in the United States and Great Britain, supposed standard-bearers of “family values” on the right are being unveiled as hypocrites. The public’s alienation has been deepened by the acrimonious doctrinal battles on the left, between factions that argue for no change at all in response to an altered political environment – or a wholesale adoption of the right’s vacuous emphasis on religious morality and low taxes.

Pollsters say Italians in general have finally tired of Berlusconi’s endless antics. They are also taking belated notice of a catastrophic decline in the national infrastructure after a decade of tax cuts.

On June 29, a freight train carrying liquid gas left the tracks in the Tuscan city of Viareggio, plowing into a residential neighborhood and exploding. At least 19 people have died so far, and ten more are barely clinging to their lives. When Berlusconi appeared at the accident site, he was booed and rudely urged by the survivors to “Go home.”

In informal discussions with voters in four different regions of Italy this spring and summer, every single person I spoke to — regardless of their nominal party affiliation — said they expected Gianfranco Fini to be the country’s next prime minister.

Asked at a recent press conference how he would describe himself politically, Fini smiled and tipped his hat to another political maverick, now residing in the White House and about to meet him at the G-8 summit. “I consider myself very post-ideological,” he said.

“I come from the right. But what matters to me, what we have to look at, is not the label on a bottle wine. It is the contents.”

Frank Viviano – barganews staff reporter – World View CBS5