By John Lloyd
Aug 29 (Reuters) – The great Italian caricaturist Altan had
a cartoon on the front of La Repubblica last week, in which an
Italian is sinking below the waves, shouting: “I’m drowning!” On
the beach, a fat man whose swimsuit sports the German national
colors, says: “Zat is how you learn, zpendthrift!”
This was in a left-of-center daily that is supportive of the
crisis plan of Italian Prime Minister Mario Monti and has set
its face against anti-German populism. The press of the right
has been less restrained: A recent front-page photo of German
Chancellor Angela Merkel showed her with a hand upraised,
perhaps to wave — but vaguely reminiscent of Adolf Hitler’s
minimalist Nazi salute, with the headline “Fourth Reich.” The
article claimed that two world wars and millions of corpses were
“not enough to quiet German egomania”. This was in Il Giornale,
a Milan daily owned by the Berlusconi family.
I smiled at the Altan cartoon on an Italian beach, where I
was last week, looking about for signs of desperation. They were
not dramatic, but observable. Simply, fewer people came. The
soaring cost of petrol, which went over the 2-euro mark for a
liter, was generally held to be the main culprit for the
reduction in the annual hunt for the sun. It was little problem
to hire a beach umbrella, to book a table for dinner, even to
park. While most summers the political news is absent or silly,
this year the Italian papers chronicled, daily, the fever chart
of the Italian and European economy, and it was febrile indeed
— now a spurt of optimism, now a stab of doom.
The technocratic government led by Mario Monti,
distinguished economist and former European commissioner, has
seen little of the beach. The elected politicians, free from the
usual business of government or opposition, were active, too.
The political scene is as boiling hot as the climate. The left
remains fractured and struggles for alliances and unity. The new
populists, led by the comedian Beppe Grillo’s Five Stars
movement, remain attractive to many because of Grillo’s attacks
on a partly corrupt political class. Yet he calls for an end to
parliamentary politics, having run a blog column with a picture
of Benito Mussolini, the prewar dictator, that evoked with
approval his description of parliament (which he dissolved) as
“deaf and gray.”
In the center, a loose coalition of Christian Democrats and
secular liberals invoke the spirit and memory of Alcide de
Gasperi, Italy’s long-serving postwar premier — who presided
over the rapid recovery of the economy in the fifties and
positioned Italy as a founding member of what became the
European Union. It seeks to tempt Monti into heading the
Christian Democrats and running for elected office after his
temporary mandate ends next April.
On the right, the immortal Silvio Berlusconi again dominates
attention. The near-universal assumption, one that I shared,
that his resignation last November, amid jeers and a collapse in
the support for his Forza Italia party, meant his political end
underestimated his will for power. Or, say the many cynics, it
didn’t take into account his fear that if he does not retain
some measure of political power he will finally enter the maw of
the justice system, which has tried to nail him for a quarter of
a century.
He has been addressing the still-faithful around the
country, secure (he says) in the love of the people and in his
country’s need of him. He is on trial in Milan for encouraging
underage prostitution, and this past weekend a German model,
Sabina Began, told the daily Il Fatto Quotidiano that he had
impregnated her, and that she lost the child in a miscarriage
(he denies it). But this is still a country for old men, and at
75, this old man has the money and the media and evidently the
stomach for another fight.
For the moment, though, Italy is Monti’s charge and care,
and though he cuts and cuts, warns of hardships to come, and has
no charisma in any conventional sense, he remains popular among
an electorate desperate for him to succeed. And not just with
the people: Both Moody’s and Fitch rating agencies lauded him
last week, the latter saying he was “credible” and that if and
when he leaves the scene, greater risks return. No hint of a
scandal has attended him, and nothing serious of the kind in his
cabinet, composed mainly of high-end academics. The political
circus around him can look tawdry.
But the beasts in the political circus were chosen by the
people. Pierluigi Bersani, leader of the main center-left party,
Partito Democratico, said in an interview with Repubblica last
week that Monti had done a fine job but must stand aside in the
spring — for “if the idea catches on that politics is not able
to take us out of the crisis, we will put ourselves on the
margins of the democracies.”
Bersani sometimes struggles to present himself as a credible
premier if the left were to win the next elections, but he spoke
well here. For Italy to continue under the tutelage of the
professors would both further weaken the party system and raise
deeper doubts than ever that it could produce an elected,
efficient, clean ruling class.
But suppose the political class of any color really is
incapable of taking the country out of the crisis? In a speech
last week in Rimini to a Catholic youth group, Monti spoke about
the need to restore Italians’ faith in the state — a faith that
can be regained only if the many Italians who now cheat the
taxman cease to do so, and others, including the public
broadcaster RAI, stop regarding the avoiders as merely crafty,
even admirable, for being so. The country, he said — in a rare
flash of drama, even melodrama — was “at war” with the tax
cheats. “We can’t broadcast, even subliminally, the degraded
values which are destroying our society.”
The belief that he seeks to invoke is less in the state and
more in a citizenship where everyone exercises mutual
responsibilities. This unelected, precise, rather lofty man
presents the nature and obligations of democracy better than any
elected Italian politician I have heard. Many of these will,
indeed, share this thought, but the daily battle for power and
attention in a political system as complex and fragmented as the
Italian, which gives so many privileges to the elected, leaves
too little time and will for the observance of democratic
ideals.
Italy has put in place a dictator-expert to make politics
safe for elected politicians once more. The paradox is that he
is better at articulating democratic necessities than the latter
have been. The capacity for these politicians to rise to his
level and to make politics serve the electorate, through the bad
times which will roll on after Monti, is the test of tests
before this country — even, given its size and importance,
before Europe. The signs that they will are, as yet, fragile:
The shadows of doubts about the future fell across the scorching
beaches this summer, and are likely to remain.
