ISR Issue 60, JulyAugust 2008
Berlusconi is back
Dark days for Italian politics
WILLIAM KEACH reports from Italy
“ITALY IS facing its darkest times since the
birth of the republic”: this is the current editorial perspective of Il Manifesto, the independent
left-wing Rome daily.
Media billionaire Silvio Berlusconi’s People of
Freedom coalition (PDL) scored a decisive victory in the April elections
and brought far Right politicians back into major positions of power.
Gianfranco Fini, president of the lower house of Parliament, and Gianni
Alemanno, the new mayor of Rome, are both former members of the MSI
(Italian Social Movement), the successor to Mussolini’s fascists.
There are disturbing signs that this electoral shift
to the right has given a green light to anti-immigrant, racist, and
homophobic violence:
n In Verona, shortly
after the elections, twenty-nine-year-old Nicola Tommasoli, a Jew whose
family came to Italy from Romania, was beaten into a coma by five members
of a neo-fascist gang called the Veneto Skinheads. Tommasoli died on May
10;
n In mid-May, groups of
young men violently attacked Bangladeshis and other South Asians working in
the Pigneto section of Rome;
n In late May,
neo-fascists from a group called Forza Nuova (New Force) organized an event
at the main campus of Rome University and physically attacked left-wing
student protesters.
There are other, less immediately violent indications
of far Right confidence. Alemanno, the Rome mayor, has proposed naming a
street after Giorgio Almirante, founder and leader of the MSI in the 1970s
and 1980s.
Berlusconi’s new Minister for Equal Rights, Mara
Carfagna (a former topless model and Miss Italy runner-up) refused to
recognize this year’s Gay Pride Day, declaring that homophobia is no
longer an issue in Italian society. It was a sign of hopeful defiance that
some 300,000 turned out for the Rome June 8 Pride Day parade anyway.
The arrogant swagger from the Right coincides with a
sense of crisis at the level of basic social needs and services. For months
garbage has been piling up in the streets of Naples and the surrounding
area, a result of local government ineffectiveness and of the power of
organized crime in the waste management industry. In recent weeks
Berlusconi has sent military forces to the area and has boasted that he
will personally oversee an orderly cleanup.
Local resident have met these emergency measures with
angry opposition. They realize that Berlusconi’s plan involves
nothing more than moving the garbage from one dumping area to another while
creating the illusion of strong, decisive central government intervention.
Meanwhile the center-Left opposition is in complete
disarray, issuing statements of moralistic “concern” one day
and calling for bipartisan consultation and cooperation the next. Walter
Veltroni, previous mayor of Rome, heads the recently renamed Democratic
Party (PD), which shows all the weaknesses that brought down the previous
center-Left government headed by Romano Prodi.
Also in a state of disorganized confusion is what
remains of the socialist Left. Rifondazione Comunista, the strongest party
on the left, had been part of the Prodi governing coalition and paid a
serious price in terms of political credibility for supporting Italian
military participation in NATO and pro-business economic policies. In the
April elections, Rifondazione led a new “rainbow” slate that
failed dramatically. Many on the left refused to vote at all. There is a
good deal of hand-wringing and a lot of despair at the moment—but
little indication of a fresh initiative from the left.
The current crisis in Italian politics—the
aggressive resurgence of the Right in the wake of weak, ineffective
centrist government—arises from a constellation of underlying
economic and social factors. Despite some improvements in the period from
2005–07, the Italian economy has consistently lagged behind other
European Union countries. Persistent budget and trade deficits, plus a tax
system plagued by corruption, has meant an underperforming economy even in
relatively good times.
Recently Italy has been hit by the credit crisis and
economic slowdown radiating out from the U.S. recession. In response, the
Berlusconi government promises tax cuts for the wealthy and cuts in health
care, transportation, and social services for everyone else.
Unemployment is on the rise; wages and pensions are
falling. A recent report from the national bureau of statistics shows that
a third of Italian families are living in poverty. The historic movement of
workers from the impoverished south to the more prosperous north of Italy,
which had subsided in recent years, has resumed, heightening social
tensions exploited by the Lega Nord (Northern League), which doubled its
percentage of the national vote in April. Rooted in Lombardy and other
northern regions of Italy, the Lega deploys openly racist, anti-immigrant
propaganda in its campaign to separate itself economically, and to some
degree politically, from the rest of the country.
Undocumented immigrant workers have become the prime
scapegoats in the Berlusconi government’s current ideological
onslaught. Efforts to treat as criminals all foreigners who come to Italy
without a work permit and contract have been sharply criticized by the
European Union, and Berlusconi has had to soften his stand somewhat. But
pressure from the Lega Nord and other far Right elements insures that
anti-immigrant racism will continue to pose real dangers.
Will the broad Left recover and mobilize serious
resistance anytime soon? For now the question remains open. This
year’s military parade on the holiday commemorating the founding of
the Italian Republic (June 2) marched past Berlusconi and his ministers,
down the street Mussolini constructed to revive memories of the Roman
Empire, with no visible protest—for the first time in years.
Bush is scheduled to visit Berlusconi on June 11 to
discuss Italy’s continuing participation in U.S.-led military
operations in Afghanistan, Lebanon, and Kosovo. Left-wing groups have
called for an all-out protest. There are hopes that widespread and bitter
opposition to the war in Iraq can ignite a new wave of protest against the
current government.
The political Right has seized the initiative under
conditions of economic and social collapse, at a moment when the centrist
mainstream is widely seen as incapable of governing effectively. The
current situation in Italy, though certainly not identical to that of the
early 1920s, is still hauntingly familiar. The Italian Left faces a
critical challenge.
William Keach is a professor of English at Brown
University in Providence, Rhode Island, and is editor of Literature and Revolution by Leon
Trotsky (Haymarket Books).