Articolo in inglese.

Saviour is symptom of Italy’s ills

By Philip Stephens

Published: April 17 2008 18:55 | Last updated: April 17 2008 18:55

Earlier this week I heard an Italian senator speaking of his ambitions for Italy’s newly elected government. The task of the incoming administration, he ventured on BBC radio, was clear: to modernise Italy and realign its economic fortunes and political status with Europe’s leading powers.

For a moment or two the thesis seemed entirely plausible, indeed encouraging. Italy has too long been trapped in decline, not so much the sick but the decaying man of Europe. It risks being described not by its rich cultural heritage, wonderful food and vast talent for stylish innovation, but by the rotting rubbish piled high in the streets of Naples and the demise of the national flag carrier Alitalia.

The election, the senator said, had swept away the big structural obstacle to change: the thicket of extreme groups of left and right that have bedevilled Italian politics. Some 39 parties had been represented in parliament before polling day. Now there would be just six.

The new government would have a majority in the chamber of deputies and senate sufficient to sustain it for a full term. Italians, disaffected with the centre-left coalition of Romano Prodi, had at last made a clear choice. The practice of democracy in Rome would soon resemble that in Paris, Berlin and London.

Persuasive stuff. Political stability is not to be lightly dismissed in a country that has suffered 61 governments since 1945. Yet the voters’ choice this week promises irrelevance rather than renaissance. The senator, you see, spoke as a supporter of the centre-right coalition led by Silvio Berlusconi. The price of the new clarity in Italian politics is Mr Berlusconi’s return as prime minister. The billionaire media magnate, self-styled political clown, and frequent defendant in the Italian courts could remain in power until 2013. Who knows, he might then chase his ambition to be president.

The price is too high. Mr Berlusconi certainly shares the ambition to rebuild Italy’s prestige. But the argument that he can lead Italy back to modernity misses the most simple objection. How can Italy recast itself as a vibrant European democracy when its prime minister would be disqualified from office in any and all of the states against which it wants to measure itself?

Put aside for a moment his duels with the judiciary – he says they are politically motivated. Forget the face-lifts and hair transplants. Close your ears to his campaign remark that Italy’s public prosecutors should face obligatory mental health checks. Ignore even the dismal record of Mr Berlusconi’s last term of office, during which he was largely preoccupied with escaping his own legal problems.

Some would say these were impediment enough. Others would add to the list his partnership with the Northern League, an unpleasant party that draws its appeal from being anti-immigrant, anti-globalisation and anti-southern Italy.

The thing, though, that should disqualify Mr Berlusconi without the slightest scintilla of doubt is his insistence on retaining his vast media empire. The prime minister-elect owns Italy’s three largest private television stations, two newspapers and a sprawling publishing empire. Try to imagine Angela Merkel, Gordon Brown or even the extrovert Nicolas Sarkozy doubling up as media tycoons. Impossible. It should be impossible also in Italy.

Italian friends tell me there are reasons why the voters decided otherwise: accumulated anger at a broken political system, a squeeze on living standards, widespread corruption, deep disappointment with Mr Prodi’s centre-left government. Mr Berlusconi, in this analysis, was the best option on offer. The sharp rise in the vote for the Northern League was another measure of desperation. All this may be true, but the outcome is depressing testimony also to just how far Italy has slipped outside the European mainstream.

The reasons are familiar. The economy has more or less stagnated for a decade. The country’s public debt exceeds its national income. The divide between the prosperous north and the backward south is widening. Mr Berlusconi’s comments about the prosecutors mirror a corrosion of confidence in the judicial system.

A recent parliamentary report noted that Italy’s biggest commercial enterprise was not the rejuvenated Fiat automobile company but the ‘Ndrangheta organisation. From its base in Calabria the criminal network controls an empire with an annual income estimated at €40bn ($64bn, £32bn). Stir the more familiar Mafia and its Neapolitan cousin, the Camorra, into the mix and you can see the scale of the challenge to the rule of law.

Economic ills at home are mirrored by declining prestige abroad. It was not that long ago that Italy was a significant player in European affairs. During the 1980s it had a pivotal role in the creation first of the single European market and then the single currency. Italy was the unabashed torch-bearer for integration. Now it goes unnoticed.

No doubt Mr Berlusconi wants to play on the world stage. This week he is hosting Russia’s Vladimir Putin. Incongruously, George W. Bush is his other best friend. Italian diplomats say he wants to get along with Mr Brown, Britain’s prime minister, and with Mr Sarkozy. As for the European Union, however, Mr Berlusconi is content to hurl bricks at the European Commission and the European Central Bank.

The other day he inadvertently invited us to measure Italy against Spain. José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, he remarked, had been foolish to include so many women in his cabinet. The Spanish prime minister’s new government was “too pink”. He would have “problems leading them [the women]”. In any event, in Italy it was much harder to find women “qualified for government”.

Leaving aside the chauvinism, the comparison was recklessly ill-advised. Because Spain has become what Italy has not. A little more than three decades free of dictatorship, a once chronically backward country has emerged a modern European society. Spain has its problems, but its people are now richer than Italians and, more importantly, they are at ease with globalisation and modernity.

That is what, I think, the senator wants for Italy. My Italian friends see slivers of light. If the new government disappoints, they say, it will have nowhere to hide. The defeated Walter Veltroni might yet meld the Democratic party into a coherent force of the centre-left. I hope they are proved right. Mr Berlusconi is the symptom of, rather than solution to, Italy’s ills. It deserves better than a slide into bombastic irrelevance.

magari un riassuntino in italiano sarebbe stato gradito