Political crisis in Italy
Barkan, Joanne
No sable-hatted bureaucrat with a corner office in the Kremlin ever held onto power and privilege more tenaciously than the gaggle of political bosses who run Italy. Thus anyone in the past who...
...Since the end of the cold war (and the renaming of the Communist party), most politicians agree in theory that any party can now govern or go into the opposition...
...Like other progressive advocates of party realignment, he wants to break Craxi's long-standing alliance with the Christian Democrats...
...The destigmatized former Communists would finally be able to draw in left-wing Socialists, radical Catholics, independents, and new social movements...
...Now things will change...
...But under the Mafia gun and threats from a European Community that wants to see some economic discipline, Amato has half a chance to run a more effective than usual administration...
...Cabinet minister (thirty or so of these prizes...
...After 1948, two simple rules shaped Italy's postfascist democracy: the Communist party could not participate in a national government...
...But now chances of a major party realignment look less improbable...
...The party has flopped in local as well as national elections...
...they crowed...
...a former mayor of Milan who happened to be Craxi's brother-in-law...
...Business as usual . . . until May 23, when a powerful, remote-controlled bomb, carefully positioned beneath a highway outside Palermo, blew up the motorcade of Giovanni Falcone, the dynamic magistrate heading up the effort to prosecute mafiosi...
...The Greens rose from 2.5 percent to 2.8 percent...
...his cronies beg him to reconsider, and the next thing you know, he's back in charge...
...Ooehetto has refused to lead his party in any direction...
...In the brand new parliamentary commission that has just inaugurated the second decade of debate on electoral reform, the usual bosses will continue to squawk and stall...
...How do you radically transform a system if working within it requires that you always shore it up...
...By proposing a magnetized Third Way as the model for the left, Occhetto was actually carrying the torch of Italian Communism into the postcommunist era...
...If the left ever manages to pull off this realignment, a political epoch will finally close...
...No more...
...The two contingents are discussing the possibility of a federation pact, a joint working group in Parliament, and the formation of local federation clubs around the country...
...Unfortunately the shake-up, if it happens, will not be the direct result of the normal democratic process...
...Prime minister...
...The Democratic Party of the Left took 16.1 percent, and Communist Refoundation 5.6 percent ( — 4.9 percent for the two groups that once comprised the Italian Communist party...
...Behind their choices—and beneath the debate that's ripping apart the PDS —lurk old, old questions...
...Craxi put up a good fight but on June 18 finally okayed someone else as prime minister: PSI Vice Secretary Giuliano Amato...
...The PSI group clears everything with Claudio Martelli, Minister of Justice and once a Craxi protég...
...It overwhelmed the personal power base of Bettino Craxi, grand vizier of the Socialist empire since 1976...
...Only the atmosphere of crisis (created by the Mafia challenge to the state, economic stagnation, inflation, and a budget deficit that's 11 percent of GDP) and the belated acknowledgement of the electorate's anger make anyone think that this round of reform talks might produce results...
...the huge Christian Democratic party could not go into the opposition...
...A redrawn political map for Italy that includes a potentially majoritarian, left-reformist alliance would be a step forward for the entire left...
...The extremity of the situation temporarily mobilized Parliament...
...Perhaps the sheer size of the Italian left (close to 50 percent of the electorate in the 1970s) and its remarkably radical character in the postwar period created expectations that die hard...
...Naturally many Italians assumed at first that Amato would simply carry out Craxi's orders, but commentators believe Amato's independent streak will show precisely because Craxi is tangled up in the biggest mess of his career...
...Membership is plummeting (1.5 million in 1989, 1.1 million in 1990, and 827,500 in 1991...
...His nightmare is yet another split...
...The Republicans, who had quit the government to protest its incompetence, climbed from 3.7 to 4.4 percent...
...Instead it took the spectacle of grotesquely brazen Mafia assassinations and a kickback scandal of operatic proportions to jangle the nerves of the "political class...
...Occhetto murmurs interest now and then, but he fears alienating the PDS left faction...
...The participants are political leaders and members of Parliament less tarnished than the average...
...Until this summer, I wouldn't have risked money on it...
...The vision once captivated a third of the population...
...La Rete (the Network), a new mix of reform-minded Catholics and assorted leftists, won 1.9 percent...
...Some Italians want proportional representation scrubbed altogether and replaced with an American winner-take-all system...
...and Craxi, a gold-medal tactician, could come from behind to reestablish his control...
...Yet as rotten as the system became, it wasn't politically or numerically possible to chuck the Christian Democrats and fashion an alternative...
...Their position on alliances could conceivably change if Craxi is deposed and the PSI moves sharply to the left, but for now their goal is a rambunctious opposition...
...And there was Arnaldo Forlani, secretary of the Christian Democrats, handing in his resignation to the party leaderFALL • 1992 • 433 ship—as one might expect after his organization's worst defeat in postwar history...
...The voters have sent a clear message...
...No matter that he had declared in an interview to Le Monde on April 3, "In the case of defeat, I will withdraw...
...The up-to-date party would provide action far more radical than the PSI but more grounded in reality than the old-style left...
...The striking results of national elections last April seemed to count for nothing at first...
...There was Bettino Craxi, secretary of the Socialist party (PSI), angling for the presidency or prime minister's job...
...In the foreseeable future, Italians might enjoy a real choice of governments—more progressive or more conservative —a choice most Europeans take for granted...
...Meanwhile a massive kickback scandal in Milan mushroomed into something qualitatively new...
...Italians voted on April 5 for a new Parliament...
...Citizens battered the old guard: the Christian Democrats won only 29.7 percent of the vote ( — 4.6 percent relative to the 1987 parliamentary elections...
...The group that quit reconstituted itself as Communist Refoundation...
...But realignment will require electoral reform...
...FALL • 1992 • 435...
...Both Communist Refoundation and the left PDS faction claim they won't touch a Socialist party that governs with the Christian Democrats and reeks of the same corruption...
...The questions sound like anachronisms—relics of the age that preceded Thatcher-Reaganism...
...The entire affair has been orchestrated as one of those very public, secret maneuvers...
...In some locales, the faction fights rage...
...Prime Minister Amato's wafer-thin majority in Parliament could snap anytime...
...In the space created by the global collapse of communism, the protagonists of party realignment and left unity in Italy have already made their first moves...
...Who would get to be president...
...Martelli has yet to attend any joint strategy meetings (one journalist compared him to Mario Cuomo: always on the verge of doing something), but he's publicly declared himself for unity on the left and an end to the old multiparty coalition governments that straddle right and centerleft...
...The beleaguered PDS, still the largest party on the left, could play a key role...
...Never, however, has an earthquake rattled so few so little, What followed the election were two long months of deja vu: the same pols jockeying for the same political plums...
...According to critics, his paralysis is destroying the PDS...
...A cartoonist could depict the predicament of the PDS in this way: a pile of metal shavings is being pulled apart by two magnets, one to the left and one to the right...
...Two days after Falcone, his wife, and three bodyguards perished, legislators came up with a president for the republic: Oscar Luigi Scalfaro, a Christian Democrat but not the usual "inside player...
...They trooped to the polls in the usual large numbers (87.2 percent of the electorate participated), and, as expected, they voted against the traditional parties, which have served up decades of asphyxiating rhetoric, bumbling coalition governments, and a society whose every board of directors and back office is chopped into fiefdoms and doled out to the party faithful according to a perverted extension of the proportional representation system—the larger the party, the more spoils it controls...
...The scattershot voting, made possible by Italy's exaggerated version of proportional representation, delivered thirteen parties to Parliament and little likelihood of political stability...
...it called its strategy the Third Way...
...PDSers who are moving toward realignment with the Socialists or alliance with Communist Refoundation have rejected paths they can't see in favor of well-worn roads...
...Martelli has distanced himself from his mentor, and some observers believe he's ready to spring for Craxi's spot at the first opportunity...
...it rejected banal reformism, but never defined its alternative to capitalism...
...The riformisti know they must persuade the larger center faction (where Secretary Occhetto presides) to come along...
...In the commotion over dropping the name Communist (and all that it implied about reforming as opposed to rejecting capitalism), Occhetto lost about a quarter of the party in 1991...
...Rather than implement agreed-upon programs, all the political partners dug into the spoils...
...Everyone labeled his election an "institutional" (as opposed to a "political") solution...
...As the Christian Democrats gradually lost strength (but remained Italy's largest party), coalition governments became dependent on the PSI...
...and several of Craxi's closest friends and longtime political associates...
...When the act of governing yields only imperfect reforms and corrupts the actors, is governing a better choice than forever relinquishing power to forces you deplore...
...But here's the 434 • DISSENT rub: significant reform will kill the system that the governing parties know and love...
...The squabbling sounded worse than usual because the old governing parties had less legitimacy, and the newcomers and opposition parties put up a bigger fuss...
...Somehow leftists elsewhere learned to live—painfully for the most part—with compromise...
...As the dust settled, the picture of post-earthquake Italy became visible: it looked exactly the same...
...In the 1970s under Secretary Enrico Berlinguer, the Communist party billed itself as neither Leninist nor social democratic...
...They've already drafted a manifesto and are planning a programmatic forum for the fall...
...No pun intended, this image is sadly ironic...
...Thus anyone in the past who bet on a thorough (and much needed) shake-up of the Italian political scene was working with truly lousy odds...
...Instead they've agreed to work together against the Amato government...
...How serious is this effort...
...Yet realignment will do nothing for the left unless the Socialists have some credible partners...
...The pundits called it an earthquake...
...Maybe it can happen—but only risk-lovers should place bets...
...Newcomers and protesters made out better: the League (a right-wing populist group, born in the North, that stands for regional autonomy if not demagogic separatism, strict limits on immigration, lower taxes, and economic efficiency) soared from 1.3 percent nationally to 8.7 percent...
...Left-leaning PSI leaders disaffected with Craxi have been meeting with leaders of the riformista wing of the Democratic Party of the Left (PDS...
...The Socialists took 13.6 percent ( — .7), and the Social Democrats 2.7 percent ( — .2...
...Occhetto's modernized variant didn't rouse the masses...
...If Craxi's grip on the PSI really slips, a new leadership group is ready to step in and, for the first time in thirty years, build an alliance to its left...
...The system of proportional representation needs adjustment so that elections produce fewer but stronger parties...
...In others, activists are making the choices that Occhetto avoids: they're hooking up with the PSI or Communist Refoundation...
...Assuming the realignment project doesn't collapse, it seems to offer the PDS the best, perhaps the only, alternative to relentless decomposition...
...One by one, the scandal toppled the lieutenant in charge of the powerful PSI apparatus in Milan who happened to be Craxi's son, Bobo...
...Undersecretary (seventy or so of these...
...But so far, only its minority riformista faction shows enthusiasm for the new alliance...
...Other consequences of a long-term setback for Craxi could be much greater, especially for the Italian left...
...He waves goodbye to reporters and is whisked away in his chauffeured car...
...These PDSers are equally disaffected with what they see as their party's dead-in-the-water politics under Secretary Achille Occhetto...
...And more than a few are just going home to wait for what they call the Second Republic—a political phoenix that will emerge after the current republic burns itself out...
...Politicians in Rome appeared not only helpless to deal with organized crime run rampant, to most Italians they looked like buffoons in their inability even to organize themselves into a government...
...His enemies (with former Communists in the lead) jumped at the opportunity to squash his bid for a top government post...
...Occhetto and his leadership group built their argument for changing the name of the Communist party around the notion of a magnet: the renamed party, with its dual purpose of vigorous opposition and dynamic governing, would act as a magnet, pulling together all those pieces of the left driven asunder by the prejudices of the cold war...
...The description sounded something like that famous Third Way—the alternative to both desiccated social democracy and discredited revolution...
Vol. 39 • September 1992 • No. 4
