Italy's Shifting Politics

...It would not be an exaggeration to say that Di Pietro created the political opening Berlusconi rollerbladed through in 1994, then tripped him up...

...But as such speculations are being debated in loftier precincts, the citizens who will decide the November 9 special Senate election are no doubt pondering the same question the Mayor of a small town in the Mugello district has been quoted in the press as asking...

...Berlusconi screamed robbery and conspiracy...

...Di Pietro and three colleagues protested the proposals on national television and won...

...On November 21, just as he was about to open a major Conference on Organized Crime in Naples, the Milan magistrates announced they were investigating him for corruption...

...Especially given the changes in the governing structure that are in the offing...

...Thus he has folded conspiracy accusations into an expanded package of corruption charges that he recently filed against Di Pietro in Brescia, along with a mass of documentation...

...Into the vacuum stepped Silvio Berlusconi...

...Berlusconi has chosen his candidate shrewdly...

...The sentiment is that the Clean Hands have become hyperactive and the point has arrived for them to stop setting the political agenda...

...More important, it could not be shown that his dealings had in any way influenced his persistent and effective investigations...

...For Berlusconi, the Senate race has provided another opportunity to put his nemesis through a juridical marathon similar to the one he is undergoing...

...and Italy's traditional postwar parties lay in smithereens...

...The charges were ultimately deemed insubstantial—but they were not baseless...

...But he quit the post after seven months, in part to defend himself against allegations by Berlusconi...

...Yet the harsh tactics, combined with more accepted methods such as computer cross-checking of financial transactions, clearly were working...

...Increasingly, it seems likely that Italy will soon opt for investing its president, currently a largely ceremonial figure, with powers comparable to those of France's president...

...Today, Di Pietro is no longer a magistrate...

...The magistrates themselves were now a political force to be reckoned with...

...Curzi says he is running because Di Pietro lacks any Leftist credentials...

...That feeling is shared by many of the officeholders who came to power in the wake of Tangentopoli...

...Di Pietro is the candidate of the ruling Center-Left Olive Tree coalition...

...He spearheaded the investigations and prosecutions that prompted the admiring sobriquet "Clean Hands" magistrates...

...He is pitted against Giuliano Ferrara, a Falstaffian ex-TV commentator and editor who is the standard bearer of the Center-Right Liberty Pole opposition group, and Sandro Curzi, a former TV news programming director who has donned the colors of the hard-line Communist Refounding Party (RC...

...He is competing for a vacant Senate seat in a rural special election that has become partly a vendetta, partly a television carnival...

...Toward the close of the year, two developments in rapid succession sent Berlusconi reeling...

...Indeed, by April '93 PSI leader Bettino Craxi had been forced to resign and flee to Tunisia...

...That grudge, and the ambitions both men may be harboring for high office in the future, are what this election is about...

...Like Di Pietro, his ideology is dubious: He has been a Communist, a Socialist and a minister in Berlusconi's Center-Right government...

...If he seemed indecisive during the next months about whether to toss his hat into the political ring, and for which party, he has been anything but when going toe-to-toe with his opponents...

...Berlusconi did demonstrate that the prosecutor had received loans and favors from several individuals he was investigating...

...Ferrara gave up the editorship of a major news magazine, Panorama, to perform this public service...

...The century-old Italian Socialist Party (PSI) was decimated too...

...Some members of the Olive Tree coalition soured on the former magistrate as a consequence of the revelations in court, and opposed his candidacy for the Mugello Senate seat...

...This change—motivated by the chronic lack of a strong, effective government—has been under discussion for years...

...With only the refashioned Communist PDS and the neo-Fascist National Alliance Party (AN) still intact, the head of Fininvest, Italy's second largest privately held enterprise, quickly threw together a coalition of Center-Right remnants that absorbed the AN and ambushed the PDS...

...Evidence came to light confirming long-rumored links between the Mafia and the Christian Democratic Party (DC)—the dominant force in every ruling coalition here since the end of World War II...

...A second Center-Left government, the Olive Tree coalition led by former Christian Democrat Romano Prodi, emerged from the April '96 elections...

...His law-and-order pedigree—before he was a magistrate, he was a policeman—would suggest that his sympathies lie somewhere to the right of center...

...Di Pietro's decision to run for Senate may in fact reflect a concern that he needs the political credentials the seat would afford to take on the former Prime Minister...

...Sparked by his new Forza Italia Party, the Liberty Pole Alliance won the March 1994 elections...

...Di Pietro, of course, has a pretty good sense of TV theatrics himself: Upon concluding his successful 1995 trial of members of the Craxi government for profiting from the sale of the state petrochemical concern Enimont, he removed his gown as viewers watched and dramatically announced his resignation from the magistracy...

...But ideological purity—Curzi's candidacy notwithstanding—is rarely the fulcrum of political campaigns in the sound-bite, photo-op '90s...

...That gives him an edge, since the Mugello district (north of Florence) where the Senate seat is up for grabs is a farming region that has long been a mainstream Communist stronghold...

...Some 200 parliamentarians had been investigated and called to account...

...It has since snowballed...

...He is also astute, as his timing in switching professions attests...

...Arrests began in February '92 and continued throughout the year...

...Some also see the balloting as round one of Italy's anticipated first direct presidential contest...

...His courtroom prowess made for high drama: Looking as if he were about to explode from exasperation, he grilled and incriminated one kickback-tarnished pol after another in a drive that eventually contributed to the downfall of the government headed by media magnate Silvio Berlusconi...

...What, he wondered, do any of the three candidates really know about the problems of the district they are vying so hard to represent...

...It was no longer possible for government officials to subvert a magistrate's finding evidence of corruption by having him transferred...

...The bearded, hefty Ferrara is a media-savvy brawler who, as a TV commentator, gained notoriety with such onthe-air stunts as throwing water at an interviewee...

...The thenPDS secretary, Achille Cicchetto, contributed to the outcome by comparing his organization to "an invincible army," an image that sent shivers down the spine of much of the electorate...

...Christian Democratic mainstay and former Prime Minister Giulio Andreotti stood implicated in Mafia dealings...

...Instead, though, President Oscar Luigi Scalfaro, possibly because the Prime Minister was being investigated, asked a former Berlusconi minister, Lamberto Dini, to form a government...

...He did, but with the support of the Center-Left, not the Center-Right...

...He was energetic, outspoken and seemingly fearless, qualities that registered widely because his successes as a public prosecutor were televised nationally...

...While that would have been an annoyance for Berlusconi, it would not have necessarily been a disaster...

...A few weeks later one of his coalition partners, the separatist Northern League, pulled out...

...Di Pietro, although the thirdranking member of the department, was fired up and had the advantage of being computer literate...

...Spoiling for revenge and fighting fire with fire, he had initiated corruption proceedings against Di Pietro after losing office...

...A recent poll had him drawing 47 per cent of the vote, to 27 per cent for Ferrara and 19 per cent for Curzi...

...The more important half is that Ferrara was hand-picked by the Center-Right leader Berlusconi, who has a grudge to settle with Di Pietro that goes back several years...

...Taking advantage of emergency legislation enacted to counter terrorists and the Mafia, they had imprisoned suspects, and only after getting confessions released them to await trial...

...They were overridden because the votes Di Pietro commands promise to reduce the coalition's dependence on the support of the rigid RC...

...In such cases the President usually calls for new elections...

...THE MAGISTRATE Italy's Shifting Politics By Desmond O'grady Rome Four years ago, when Antonio Di Pietro was a Milan magistrate on a tear against corrupt politicians, most of his countrymen saw him as a savior—the spotless crusader of Italian public life...

...The strictly proportional voting system that tended to yield shaky multistripe administrations was partially reformed in 1993...

...The speed and massiveness of the onslaught signaled a new era in Italy...

...But that is only half the story...

...Desmond O'Grady...

...When and if they are, Berlusconi and Di Pietro could very well be presidential candidates...

...Berlusconi's becoming Prime Minister did not move the Clean Hands magistrates to relax, however, and their relentlessness began to make some citizens nervous...

...What particularly makes the November 9 three-way race a microcosm of Italian politics, though, is its reprising power shifts that have taken place over the past five years—namely, the ascendance of the judiciary and the collapse of the country's traditional party structure...

...The scandal, dubbed Tangentopoli (Briberyville), spread outward from Milan and tainted the Center-Left political establishment from top to bottom...

...That left his government in a minority...

...Now the Bicamerale, a nonpartisan committee of both houses of Parliament, has proposed adopting the French model and having a hands-on president who would be elected directly (rather than by Parliament and Regional Assembly delegates...

...President Guiliano Amato had been obliged to step down...

...And he is himself trying to fend off charges of corruption...

...Several had committed suicide in prison, inspiring protests against human-rights violations...

...Several commentators characterized their gambit as an unwarranted interference in the political realm...

...He claims he did so to expose Di Pietro's having accepted money from some of the politicians he investigated...

...In addition, he has recruited Ferrara to further muddy the knight...

...And Berlusconi's proxy war against the ex-magistrate, in turn, may be part of a strategy to weaken a potential rival...

...Yet imprudent as Di Pietro's behavior may have been, he was able to prove that he had paid back the loans...

...But Di Pietro had once more played the crusader, and on the whole his stock was never higher...

...a new contributor, is a longtime Australian correspondent in Rome and author of The Turned Card: Christianity Before and After the Wall...

...The Center-Right leader believes, perhaps justifiably, that the Milanese magistrates and the President ganged up on him when he became Prime Minister...

...Nevertheless, he was asked to run under the Olive Tree banner by none other than Massimo D'Alema, secretary of the Democratic Party of the Left (PDS), as Italy's former Communist Party has renamed itself...

...Defections that topple governments are fairly routine in this country where politics often makes bedfellows strangers...

...When he removed his prosecutorial robes, a backlash was setting in against the magistrates...

...By doffing his robes, therefore, Di Pietro has neatly repositioned himself politically as well as professionally...

...The Milan magistracy, whose chief had turned a blind eye toward corruption in the past, rose to the occasion...

...Shortly after he assumed office, Berlusconi sought to reverse that shift by introducing measures to limit the magistracy's power...

...Since the construction industry was so paralyzed by the Clean Hands' investigations that it was thought to need revitalization from the top, Prodi appointed Di Pietro Minister of Public Works...

...Actually Di Pietro's political views, apart from his championing the Constitution, state institutions and Italy's prestige abroad, are something of a Rorschach blot...

...Early in the decade, a time of general political and economic instability in Italy, a scandal broke involving allegations that Milanese politicians were enriching their party coffers by taking bribes from public works contractors...

...The Bicamerale's recommendations have to be ratified by Parliament...

...He even claims he was victimized as part of a plot to replace him with Di Pietro...