Ulivo and Kicking
BARONE, MICHAEL
Ulivo and Kicking by Michael Barone Iwent to Italy a week before the April 21 election hoping to observe a politics different from ours. Instead, I was struck again and again by the similarities....
...And yet the center-right coalition almost won...
...We had everyone against us," Berlusconi said after the election...
...Bill Clinton has moved to the right of late...
...The major argument in the Italian election was over how to discipline, downsize, devolve, even dismantle an over-large government which is strangling the economy and is losing the capacity to do even those things it used to do well...
...Ulivo made a point of noting that Prodi is a practicing Catholic (just as left parties in Britain and America have conspicuously religious leaders in Tony Blair and Bill Clinton...
...The Berlusconi alliance won the March 1994 election, but the Liga Nord split off soon after and the government fell in December 1994...
...Indeed, if Italy's 1994-96 shift to the left were duplicated in the United States, Republicans would not only hold Congress but would elect Bob Dole president...
...Parties of the Left can and do win, but only when they tack rightward, and credibly...
...How can they survive on 1,300,000 lira a month...
...they mistrust Berlusconi as a manipulator and despise him as a parvenu...
...In proportional voting for the country's lower house, probably the best gauge of party support, the center-right beat the Ulivo coalition 44 to 43 percent (the margin widens to 10 points if the far left is removed from the tally...
...Starting in 1994, Italy elected three-quarters of its Chamber of Deputies from single-member districts, as we do here...
...Begin with campaign tactics...
...only one-quarter were sent to Rome by proportional representation...
...Just think of the workers in front of Fiat...
...Or the fortysomething woman who says she votes Socialist because her late grandmother was a Socialist partisan guerrilla fighter against the Nazis-in World War II...
...The Left is outdated," they said...
...the Communists where Communist partisans fought the Nazis in the ''Red Belt'' from Tuscany to Bologna...
...But there are Italian political types you won't find in the U.S...
...in his last debate with Berlusconi, Prodi held up a copy of Business Week with his picture and the caption "Italian Renaissance...
...Its leaders pledged that Ulivo would cut back government and meet the European Union Maastricht Treaty requirements for a common currency...
...But in truth, all the major parties received about the same percentage this time as in 1994...
...I also encountered voters who have made journeys from left to right and vice versa in the four years since the prima repubblica-Christian Democrats whose concern for the poor has sent them to Ulivo, anticlerical Republicans whose free-market views have sent them right to Polo...
...Ulivo rhetoric sounded very much like the New Democratic themes Bill Clinton sounds in campaign years...
...That means the Ulivo government will have to get some votes from the Right to pass its budget...
...Walter Veltroni, number-two man in both Ulivo and its largest party, the PDS, the former Communists, told the crowd of 150,000: "We went to hundreds of piazzas and listened to hundreds of thousands...
...Educated by leftish teachers and professors, surrounded by a mostly pro-left media (except for the TV stations and newspapers owned by Berlusconi), they understand that their taxes go for welfare benefits they'll never receive and that the protections older workers enjoy mean there are no jobs for the young...
...than Giancarlo Fini and his Alleanza Nazionale, formerly the neo-Fascists...
...Army was in control, from Sicily up to Rome...
...Of course the unions and government employees were for the Left...
...While the Left was busy feeling Italians' pain, the Right was busy issuing 10-point contracts with the voters: The Contratto con gli italiani, signed by all its candidates, was the chief campaign offering of the center-right Polo coalition...
...Ulivo prevailed not because of a shift in national opinion but from some very successful backstage maneuverings...
...Like the grizzled fiftyish manual laborer Palmiro (presumably named for longtime Communist party leader Palmiro Togliatti) who backs the Rifondazione Communista, the party that was formed in protest when the Communist party changed its name...
...Italy's big business leaders have made their peace with the new government...
...We are more cultured," explained my indeed very cultured and capable pro-PDS interpreter...
...The Italian election is thus another example of a remarkable worldwide trend...
...As a result, 26 parties sprang into existence, and soon party alliances began forming...
...on the left, Prodi wants to cut government a bit, and so probably does the former Communist party, but the alliance's leftist wing wants to beef it back up...
...The press, except for Berlusconi's TV stations and newspapers, was pro-Left...
...The prima repubblica's two largest parties were built on two faiths-Catholicism and Communism-in which few Italians believe anymore...
...Then the supposedly non-political president, Oscar Luigi Scalfaro, refused to hold the new elections Berlusconi wanted and simply installed central banker Lamberto Dini as prime minister instead...
...The contrast is not presented quite crisply...
...the trend that, for the past 20 years, most elections have been won by parties of the Right...
...If Italy's politicians took their cues from Clinton and Gingrich, the voters I interviewed on the streets of Rome, in the bourgeois Prati district near the Vatican and in more raffish Trastevere, across the Tiber, seemed familiar as well...
...So the political system is struggling to create something like a two-party system...
...But young voters, especially those with short hair, usually favored Polo-though they were less likely to back former prime minister and media magnate Silvio Berlusconi and his Forza Italia...
...On the right, Berlusconi wants to cut government more than the former neo-fascists...
...In the prima repubblica, which ended in 1992 after four decades of chronic instability, most Italian regions voted for the party backed by those who carried the battle against the Nazis in those terrible years from 1943 to 1945-the Christian Democrats where the U.S...
...The Right had the votes, the Left the maneuverings...
...Elegantly, smoothly, effortlessly, with a mixture of idealism and snobbery, they purred out the party line...
...News & World Report...
...The leaders of the winning center-left Ulivo coalition rolled into their final rally April 18 in il pullman-a big-windowed bus on which they had been campaigning across the country...
...Men dressed in tweed sport-coats-architects, professors, retired civil servants- almost invariably supported Ulivo and the PDS and had voted Communist before the party's name-change...
...The Ulivo victory has been hailed as a victory for the Left, and it does formally install the former Communists in office for the first time since the prima repubblica collapsed...
...And if they were skeptical about Berlusconi's promise to cut taxes, "at least he won't raise them...
...We saw a lot of suffering...
...And it did not campaign as a very leftist party...
...Michael Barone is co-editor of the Almanac of American Politics and a columnist with U.S...
...the question remains whether he has done so credibly...
...The first was Berlusconi's, between his new Forza Italia party, the former neo-fascists, and the Liga Nord (which believes in separating the prosperous north from the rest of the country...
...The Catholic church was split, with many former Christian Democrats in both coalitions...
...Ulivo could not have succeeded had it not moved convincingly to the right...
...That gave time for the center-left Ulivo coalition to be formed-primarily including the former Communists and some former Christian Democrats like newly elected prime minister Romano Prodi...
Vol. 1 • May 1996 • No. 35
