Reality Rears Its Head in Italy

...From the very beginning Occhetto was under heavy pressure...

...Nevertheless, after waiting 20 minutes for a bus only to finally learn that because of yet another political demonstration the buses have been re-routed, even the most romantic of foreigners is likely to wish he were perhaps in dull but oh-so-ef ficient Switzerland...

...According to Craxi, duplicity is apparent as well in Occhetto's holding to the stale anti-Western, anti-American line...

...And the "Octopus," as the network is called here, has branched out to the country's two major metropolises, Rome and Milan, to an alarming degree...

...As for whether Occhetto will experience a reversal of his own thinking on the subject of Italy's commitments to the Atlantic Alliance—commitments officially acknowledged in 1979 by the late CommunistParty leader Enrico Berlinguer—Socialist leader Craxi could not care less...

...Given the deep-seated hostility of the Socialists toward the erstwhile Communists, a Leftist alternative to the supremacy of the Christian Democrats is not in the cards...

...Now he was confronted not by majority-minority intraparty squabbles, but by a multifaceted international issue involving Mideast peace, relations with the Arab world, the Palestinian question, and anti-Americanism...

...John Paul IPs relentless denunciation of the Gulf War, his apocalyptic warnings, and his apparent refusal to make any allowance for armed self-defense, shocked secular public opinion and greatly surprised Vaticanologists...

...But the Vatican's stance finally forced Occhetto's hand...

...Its stability, alas, has not been matched by its productivity...

...In 1983, at a ceremony in Vienna marking the 300th anniversary of the defeat of the Turks by Polish King Jean Sobieski, Pope Wojtila had declared that "there are times when armed struggle is an inevitable evil...

...and the political parties, the nation's real masters, are marking time looking to the next deadline, the next party congress, the next election...

...A number of psychologists, oddly enough, indict thenew prosperity—a term, it must be stressed, that applies only to the central and northern regions of the peninsula...

...To be sure, there would have been a sizable loss of members and votes, but eventually those losses could be recouped: A compact, nonCommunist liberal party would attract large sectors of the electorate fed up with decades of inefficient, even corrupt, governments...

...The PDS Secretary could not afford to be outflanked by the Catholic Church, and from Pope John Paul II down to the widespread fundamentalist associations, the Italian Catholic establishment vociferously pressed for peace at all costs and a unilateral cease-fire by allied forces...

...Sicily, Calabria and Campania, with a combined population of 10 million, are virtually dominated by the commerce of organized crime: importing, distributing and retailing drugs on a large scale...

...Del Rio's explanation for the Church's response to the Gulf conflict is that in the past year or so the Pope has undergone a metanoia, a Catholic term for conversion (in Greek, literally "a change of head...

...The bottom line is that too many potential foreign investors are getting scared and turning their backs, leaving the unhappy small and middle-sized Italian entrepreneurs no choice but to limit themselves to local markets...

...Equally serious is the loss of respect in international financial circles resulting from an internecine struggle among the major domestic capitalist structures...

...Now CENSIS has rechecked the figures and come up with a disheartening discovery: Not only is Italy number six today when actual purchasing power is taken into account, but this has been the case for the last five years...

...It would also further strain the relations with Bettino Craxi's pro-interventionist Socialist Party (PSI), which was already deriding the idea of a Leftist alliance...

...Believing he had the whole PCI behind him, except perhapsforahandfulof diehards, he did not so much as consider that for the PDS to be seen as a progressive Social Democratic party with Western European roots, he would have to part company with the entire Communist old guard and its orthodox tradition of radical Leftism...

...With remarkably few exceptions, the notion of turning the PCI into a new group aspiring to a substantial governing role was seen as a positive development by non-Communist Italians...

...That might be dismissed as relatively unimportant if it were not accompanied by other deflating findings...

...To preserve its share of power in the provincial federations, the party's majority must compromise with an aggressive minority...

...Two recent reports by respected organizations—the Center for Social and Economic Research (CENSIS) and the National Institute of Statistics (ISTAT)—offer little ground for optimism, let alone complacency...

...Few people here need the latest reports of research organizations to know what ails their country...

...The rest—in effect the new party's left wing—declared that they would continue their fight from within...

...On the same day, the Pope's Vicar in Rome, Cardinal Ugo Poletti—himself no modern Savonarola—also stressed the existence of the menace...

...Shopping (they use the English word) is a national pastime for both men and women at home and abroad...

...Italians love to pamper themselves, and find clothing of any kind irresistible...

...It does not matter much, and is difficult to determine, whether the present paralysis is due to the quarrelsome and often parochial posture of the various sectors of private industry, or to the massive red tape imposed by a slow-moving and pervasive bureaucracy...

...The nays, led by such venerable and charismatic figures as former Party Secretary Alessandro Natta, controlled onethird of the delegates to the dissolution convention held in Rimini January 31February 4. Only 5 per cent of them walked out when the PDS was officially proclaimed...

...Moreover, if some cities continue to have their redeeming features, they are all but absent in three vast regions of Italy...

...The Pope himself avoided drawing the Une between aggressor and victim, saying instead that he backed pacifism with justice...

...Briefly, some thought this might be stimulated by the formation of a unified Left capable of threatening the hold the DC has had on the government since the end of World War II...

...Millions of mostly foreign bottles of champagne were uncorked on New Year's Eve, and caviar is "in": You do not have to enjoy it...

...In their opinion, the increased level of well-being is too recent to protect the individual from a callous and erratic society and to instill the feeling that the improvement is more than a passing dream...

...For several years the country had drawn considerable delight and encouragement from the knowledge that Italy's is the fifth largest economy in the world—behind the United States, Japan, Germany, and France, yet one notch ahead of Great Britain...

...On the other hand, ISTAT reveals, in this country of private pleasure seekers public hospitals provide inadequate treatment, and schools need hundreds of thousandsof classrooms...

...The government is hamstrung by an enormous public deficit...

...Italy seems to be confined to the Mediterranean sidelines...

...Before it can attempt to assert itself inEC affairs, Rome will have to address the internal political problems CENSIS points to...

...This year's analysis probes deeper into why the once poor yet content Italian views his present prosperity with neither serenity nor confidence...

...The combined effect is weakening the country, according to CENSIS, and hurting the people at large...

...During the period when the party was nameless and temporarily known as La Cosa (The Thing), a consistent minority voiced its opposition to his strategy...

...Some sociologists are more troubled by the individual state of mind, where irritation and impatience, as Ferrarotti puts it, mingle with a Utopian desire to see the nation clean the slate and start over from scratch...

...Transportation is flawed by late-running trains and buses—not to mention strike-plagued planes—so people use their cars to compensate and the traffic in major urban centers is a torment...

...Besides its political and economic observations, the CENSIS report includes a third element that is cause for concern...

...At the end of 1989, in a departure from its previous buoyant tone, the survey described the Italians as "affluent but unhappy," without delving into the possible reasons for their unhappiness...

...We are told that Italy is a rich country because, on a per capita basis, more consumer goods are bought here than anywhere else...

...Silvio F. Senigallia reports regularly for The New Leader on Italian affairs...

...Occhetto could not help being aware that such a policy would rule out any government role for the PDS in the foreseeable future...

...Apparently, too, "the Mediterranean diet" of bread, pasta, tomatoes, and wine is gradually being replaced by meals full of fat, sugar and protein...

...Thus he has taken to echoing Pope John ??III's words in the encyclical Pacem in Terris: "It is insane, today, to believe that war can restore rights that have been violated...

...Taking advantage of numerous organizational blunders Occhetto had made, they engineered his humiliating failure to muster enough votes to be elected PDS Secretary on the conference floor...

...Occhetto's lack of vision and courage, and subsequent appeasement of the dissenters, has produced a PDS that is identical to the late PCI...

...The DC-dominated partnership with the PSI (plus some minor parties) remains Italy's sole viable coalition formula...

...Occhetto's miscalculation is bound to plague the PDS with a crisis of ideological identity for a long time to come...

...Many years ago he had extolled the armed struggle against Nazi Germany, describing it as "the inalienable right of defense by European civilization against totalitarian oppression...

...The realization that the country shares the margin with Spain and Greece has to be a blow to national pride —already wounded by the prestigious London Economist's description of the EC under Italian leadership as "a bus driven by the Marx brothers...

...For example, despite the air of importance assumed by Foreign Minister Gianni De Michelis while Rome held the rotating presidency of the European Community (EC) in the second half of 1990, Europe's power is as concentrated as ever in Germany, France and Great Britain...

...In his opening address to the Rome Court of Appeals last January 10, Chief Justice Filippo Mancuso went so far as to declare that the Mafia had planted solid roots in the nation's capital...

...Italy's business community, as sociologist Franco Ferrarotti has severely noted in the Rome daily Repubblica, is no longer engaged in the daring and successful enterprises that put the economy in one of the top slots in the world...

...The result can only be stagnation...

...In addition, the badly bungled transformation of the Communist Party (PCI) has dashed the hopes of those who envisioned the emergence of a unified democratic Left that might provide a credible alternative to the longdominant conservative Christian Democratic Party (DC...

...The researchers note a general malaise, and seem to attribute it more to a collective mood than to individual frustration...

...Today, the qualities she spoke of—beauty, art, comfortable climate, good-natured people—are still available in this capital...

...There is no other country in Europe where a mere 52 per cent of all telephone calls reach the number dialed, or where a letter takes a minimum of one week to be delivered, regardless of the distance traveled...

...It is full of figures, percentages and details about Italians' habits, likes, dislikes, and patterns of behavior...

...Showing its true colors, a significant percentage of the PDS membership, including his own faction, demanded that Italy abstain from the fight over Kuwait and withdraw its five warships and 10 fighter planes from the Persian Gulf area...

...The clash between President Francesco Cossiga, suddenly given to extensive reinterpretation of his responsibilities, and a Parliament visibly concerned with tenure instead of effectiveness (see "From Pebbles to Brickbats in Italy," NL, November 12-26,1990), is indicative of a situation that is bound to continue to weaken the country's image abroad...

...In commenting on the adamant stand, Repubblica's, religious editor, Domenico Del Rio, recalled opposite pronouncements made by the Pope in the past...

...Indeed, as in the case of strengthening Italy's position abroad, for any improvement in the deteriorating state of affairs at home to occur there needs to be a shake-up at the top...

...In Coventry during the Falklands war, he had praised the Polish airmen who had joined the Royal Air Force in their World War II raids over Germany...

...In contrast to the CENSIS study, the report from the National Institute of Statistics is factual rather than analytical, informative rather than scholarly...

...This clearly meant reneging on the country's commitments to NATO and the United Nations, and seriously impairing relations with the U.S...

...When Communist leader Achille Occhetto first proposed changing the party name and symbol in the wake of the Soviet empire's collapse, the step seemed eminently logical...

...At this stage of the game, nobody seems to know or care whether the PDS is leftwing Democrat, right-wing Communist or simply a major party gone adrift...

...Although unadorned by commentary, the data speak with a loud voice...

...private industry is waiting for "positive signals" before investing...

...The dissenters argued that since Italian Communists in no way shared responsibility for Soviet crimes and misdeeds, there was no justification for abandoning their ever-glorious red flag with its hammer and sickle...

...To be fair, the Gulf war had added to Occhetto's burdens...

...They will tell you endlessly why they are fed up with their government— but words are cheap...

...And they quickly demonstrated that they mean to keep their word...

...A number of years back, while talking to a Dutch friend, I mentioned the problems prompting Italians to complain with a measure of monotony that Rome had become invivibile (unlivable...

...It took a week of ensuring amore disciplined majority and striking several deals with the leftists for him to secure the party stewardship...

...She replied that I was overlooking Italy's main asset: namely, the pleasantness of life...

...Throngs of Italian tourists are to be encountered in every European capital...

...He then went on to chastise his flock for their indifference, materialism, disregard of the values of faith and religion, and resignation before the spectacle of political life reduced to the transaction of "more or less dirty business...

...The Socialists have been openly critical of the PDS' ambiguities, and of the glaring contradiction between its alleged aim of guiding the party out of traditional communism into the European Left and its support of radical domestic movements and Third World pacifism...

...Occhetto had made a serious error in thinking the revulsion for everything Communist throughout Eastern Europe would be reflected in the PCI's ranks...

...Early in the 15-month gestation of what on February 3 was christened the Democratic Party of the Left (PDS), however, it became evident that the delivery would not be an easy one...

...In London's Harrods or Fortum and Mason, for instance, rich Milanese are a permanent feature...