Regime change

It looks like the dust has finally settled after the elections. People are jockeying for position, accusations of disloyalty are flying around, but nobody’s disputing what the numbers say. The Prime Minister is still there, for now. He’s been announcing to anyone who will listen that he tells his allies what to do and not the other way round – so no change there. But at least he’s resigned. The Italian elections were extraordinarily close: in Italy’s recently-adopted national list system, two coalitions competed for the votes of the entire country, and one came out ahead by less than 25,000 votes. It would be easy to give some credence to Berlusconi’s argument that the centre-left should have been more magnanimous in victory – the left has occupied the state, half the country is not represented in government, and so forth. Easy, but wrong.

To understand Berlusconi’s current position you need to understand his coalition – and to understand that you need to go back to 1948. (Sorry, but that’s the way it is. We’ll get back up to the 1990s quickly enough.) It was in 1948 that the Christian Democrats became Italy’s ruling party, consigning the Communists and Socialists to opposition. For the next forty years the Christian Democrats stayed in power, with a shifting line-up of collaborpartners – including the Socialists from the mid-1960s onwards. The Communists stayed in opposition, although from the mid-1970s on they built up a presence in local government and state-owned industry. (It doesn’t make much sense in the British context to talk about a political party having a presence in state-owned industry. To understand the Italian context, think networking; think interview panels; ultimately, think brown envelopes.) Right out in the cold were the extreme Left (which in Italy meant ‘anyone to the left of the Communists’) and the extreme Right (which in Italy meant exactly what you’d expect).

Then came Tangentopoli – Bribe City, a nickname which was coined for Milan when investigators first revealed how big the problem was, but was applied more widely when they discovered how big it really was. The problem for Italy’s governing elite was that Italian investigating magistrates are duty-bound to investigate all allegations of criminal activity which are brought to them. Once they started pulling at the loose threads of Tangentopoli, the entire political system began to unravel. The Christian Democrats split, then the fragments split again; the Socialist Party went up in smoke. The Communists – now trading as the Democratic Left – tried to capitalise on their rivals’ downfall without going too big on the whole ethical crusader thing; Communist politicians hadn’t been at the centre of the investigations, but they hadn’t been entirely untouched either. The only ones with uncontestably clean hands were those who had never been allowed anywhere near the money-tree: the extreme Left, the extreme Right and the regionalist Lega Nord. Still, the Left Democrats looked set fair to survive the storm.

And cue Berlusconi. He’s an outspoken, headline-seeking right-wing populist with a huge personal following; he’s Italy’s biggest media entrepreneur; he runs a party which perpetuates the worst traditions of the Christian Democrats and Socialists – including their belief that they have a right to occupy the state and exclude the Communists. Imagine if Robert Maxwell owned ITV, had the personality of Kilroy-Silk and led the Continuity Conservative Party – he’s that scary. Ever since the launch of Forza Italia, the great theme of Italian politics has been coalition-building: could Berlusconi build a sustainable coalition of the Right? could the Left build a coalition capable of defeating him? A year or so it looked as if Berlusconi had finally cracked it; there was talk of merging the major parties of the Right into a single party, to be led (of course) by Berlusconi. What the election result tells us is that the Left has solved the problem as well – and that Berlusconi’s solution has a shorter shelf-life than we thought.

Berlusconi’s main allies are the post-Christian Democrat UDC and the post-Fascist Alleanza Nazionale; Umberto Bossi’s Lega Nord is still in the picture, but tends not to be let out in public these days. If we go from Right to Left, we’ll have to start with the Lega: a bizarrely, almost insanely horrible party, held together by a flourishing leader-cult and the reassuring warm throb of hatred. The Lega were never typical regionalists; they stood for a well-off and culturally conservative electorate, in opposition to another region (Southerners, feckless spongers in hock to the Mafia) as well as the centre (Rome, corrupt bureaucrats in hock to the South). They’ve broadened their range of hate-figures as time has gone on; it now includes Communists, immigrants, the Catholic Church, the Masons, the EU and China. The Lega’s vote never gets into double figures these days, and most of the other 90+% roundly detest them. For all that, Bossi is Berlusconi’s staunchest ally, and vice versa. Berlusconi has likened himself to Jesus, and he seems to see Bossi as John the Baptist – his precursor, blazing a trail on the populist Right. If Bossi says No to something – and he says No to most things – the chances are that Berlusconi will fall into line.

To the left of the Lega are the post-Fascists. Under Gianfranco Fini’s leadership, AN have officially denounced the Holocaust, Nazi Germany and Mussolini’s regime (both Mussolini’s regimes, to be pedantic about it); Fini has repeatedly clashed with Bossi over the latter’s racism, and criticised Berlusconi’s lapses into Mussonostalgia. There’s a tendency, particularly outside Italy, to greet all this with scepticism – sure, they say they’ve changed… The trouble with this argument is that it’s difficult to see what would be different about AN if they had actually ceased to be a Fascist party. They are fairly ghastly clash-of-cultures conservatives, with the predictable set of weird ideas on subjects like homosexuality (they’re agin it) and drugs (they’re agin them too) – but Fascist? I don’t see it. They regularly get around 12% of the vote, which is considerably more than they did in the old days of proper neo-Fascism.

The UDC are AN’s chief rival for the votes of Italy’s Catholic conservatives. The UDC’s former leader, Marco Follini, was purged last year for speaking out too loudly against Berlusconi’s ‘single party of the Right’ project. The UDC seem to get on quite well with the former Christian Democrats who are now in the centre-left coalition – rather too well for Berlusconi’s liking. The demotion of Follini signalled that Christian Democrats Reunited wasn’t on the cards any time soon; what it didn’t and couldn’t do was whip UDC permanently into line. It would be far too flattering to say that UDC represents the ethical element of the Christian Democrats and Forza Italia the corrupt part; apart from anything else, UDC’s willingness to line up behind Berlusconi in the first place suggests that a break with the years of corruption wasn’t at the top of their agenda. But there is a certain solidity and consistency to UDC’s politics, which is a lot more than you can say for Forza Italia.

And Forza Italia? Paradoxically, the newest Italian political party is the one most strongly redolent of the old regime. And ‘regime’ is the operative word. In Italian ‘regime’ is roughly synonymous with ‘one-party state'; it generally appears in the phrase ‘the left wants to establish a regime’. But a regime in this sense is precisely what the Christian Democrats ran for forty years. Regime thinking lives on in Forza Italia, in the assumption that ‘our people’ can only be represented by one party; in the assumption that one party has a right to remain in power; and in the utter refusal to treat other parties as legitimate rivals. Berlusconi’s repeated objections to the election result follow precisely this pattern: the Right cannot be excluded from power, because the Right represents half the country, and only the Right can be trusted to represent those people. If the election result was not overturned, Berlusconi promised that Forza Italia would challenge it themselves; if that failed, then the Right should be offered a veto over the election of the President (whose term, coincidentally, expired earlier this month); if they didn’t have a veto, then they wouldn’t agree on a compromise candidate and the Left would have to elect a President on its own; if the Left did this, after having won the parliamentary election outright, then a left-wing ‘regime’ would clearly be in place, and the Right would oppose it at every step and encourage its supporters to do likewise. There was even some talk of encouraging a tax strike, although even Forza Italia’s spokesperson edged away from this one fairly rapidly. Faced with oppposition on this scale, the Left regime could only fall, and Forza Italia would be back in power, where it ought to be. Who’s with me?

The problem for Berlusconi is that his allies are not following the script. The UDC’s tone is increasingly critical of Berlusconi and increasingly conciliatory towards the new government: they’ll fight them, you understand, but it won’t be all-out war over every little thing, where would be the sense in that? The longer-term project is to woo the ex-Christian Democrats of La Margherita away from Romano Prodi’s centre-left coalition and rebuild the Christian Democrats, perhaps no longer as a dominant party but as a centrist hub whose support neither Left nor Right could do without. I suspect that Prodi is well aware of the danger: like Berlusconi, he’s started talking about merging some or all of his coalition into a single party. Prodi is an extraordinary operator, even by Italian standards, but I suspect this may be beyond him. As for AN, they’re firmly ensconced on the Right, and would like nothing better than a ‘normal’ system of political alternation, in which a large party of the Left and a large party of the Right compete for power – just as long as they were a significant part of the Right party. The goal for AN, in other words, is to come in from the cold. Berlusconi’s project for a single party suits them well enough – Fini has already put his coat on the Deputy Leader’s chair, with a view to ultimately succeeding Berlusconi – but his reluctance to consider political alternation, or to spend any time in opposition, doesn’t fit their plans. That only leaves the Lega, and even they aren’t consistent: part of the time the Lega is more royalist than the King, egging Berlusconi on to face down the evil Communists; part of the time they’re a fulminating, Father Jack-like presence, denouncing Berlusconi along with everyone else in sight.

The national-list system under which the election was conducted needs to be changed – before the election, the Lega member who drafted the system described it as a porcata (‘pile of crap’, roughly) and said that he’d designed it to make the major parties look bad. But the election results are what they are, and everyone, including Berlusconi, now accepts them. The centre-left won by a narrow margin, but they did win. The new President – old Communist right-winger Giorgio Napolitano – was elected without the official support of the Right, but he was elected. The government represents all the people of Italy, including the 49.7% who voted for another coalition – and Prodi’s democratic legitimacy, based on 49.8% of an 84% turnout, is considerably stronger than that of Bush or Blair. The Left is in power; the President is a Communist; and the Right is slowly but surely breaking up. Perhaps, by voting out Berlusconi, Italy has finally achieved what eluded it for forty years after the war: regime change.