The Dark Heart of Italy (28 page)

He was promising to untie the red tape, slash taxes, reform labour laws. As a man whose business acumen has never been doubted, Berlusconi appealed even to the traditionally ‘red’ areas of Italy, in the richest parts of the centre and the north. His slogan was the ‘three i’s’ –
internet,
inglese
, and
impresa
(business). New English words began peppering the political debates, as both sides tried to show how Anglo-Saxon (and therefore Thatcherite) they were: words like ‘flexibility’ and ‘new economy’. All of which only made Berlusconi more indignant when he came under attack from those organs – the
Financial
Times
and
The Economist
especially – who he thought shared his business vision.

And for all the criticisms of Berlusconi, he certainly has vision. His leadership is extraordinary and magnetic, and the fierceness with which people defend him bears witness to his charisma. His closest friends, lawyers from the 1970s or his pianist from the early cruise ship days, are still sworn allies and are now in parliament or heading arms of the business empire. His political offices are so slick that I almost forgot, phoning them occasionally to check facts or quotations, that I was really in Italy: they were polite, efficient, always helpful. That,
Forza Italia
voters kept telling me, was all they wanted from the Italian parliament: quick decisions, clarity, less red-tape. Berlusconi, they said, was good for business. ‘He’s on our side.’

Another appeal to the electorate was a bizarre, entirely Italian affair. The leader of
Forza Italia
was presented as a
garantista
, a defender of civil rights against the witch-hunts of the Italian judiciary. Having suffered first hand the legal attacks, Berlusconi promised a complete overhaul of the magistrature. Whatever Berlusconi’s motives, it was a winning line. Everyone knows that the legal system is excruciating here. 40% of those in prison are still awaiting trial; not just for a few days, but for years. The accused, according to one book by a
Forza Italia
deputy, are being
effectively sentenced even before their trial. Thus the country warmed to a politician who promised radically to reform the whole judiciary. (The irony, of course, was that the perception of judicial corruption cut both ways: for Berlusconi’s admirers the judges were corrupt because they were persecuting Berlusconi; for his enemies, they were corrupt because they believed Berlusconi’s personal lawyer, Cesare Previti, had corrupted them with hefty bribes, an accusation for which he is currently standing trial in Milan).

Berlusconi’s other great vote winner was the immigration issue. Italy, for decades one of the world’s largest exporters of human beings, had in the space of a few years become a net importer. The country has invariably been the first port of call for refugees from the Balkans, Eastern Europe and North Africa. For a society which is so homogenous (socially, if not politically), and one with, significantly, the lowest birth-rate in Europe, the sudden influx had been traumatic. The problem of immigration was compounded by the much more serious problem of ‘illegal immigration’: the number of
clandestini
in the country was estimated to be nearing half a million, and every day more
extracomunitari
were arriving, thrown out onto the shores of the Adriatic from inflatables.

None of which, however, was really mentioned. Berlusconi, as the journalist Montanelli had realised, had become the ‘millstone that paralyses Italian politics’. Issues and ideas weren’t even debated. The election had become, in the words of Umberto Eco, nothing more than a ‘moral referendum’ on the leader of
Forza Italia
. It was simply a case of ‘for’ or ‘against’ one man. It was an experiment in saturation advertising: the brand was Berlusconi and the simple slogans were ‘liberty’ and ‘democracy’. By late spring few were in any doubt about the ‘morality’ of Silvio Berlusconi. It only remained to be seen whether the electorate even cared; whether –as
The Economist
had predicted – the public would acquit
Il
Cavaliere
and thereby vote him into office.

April 2001. Little more than a month to go until the election and another two bombs appear. The first explodes in the early hours
in Rome, outside the offices of the Institute for International Affairs and the Office for American–Italian Relations. Half a kilogram of TNT had been detonated by a mobile telephone: the door is blown away and its steel jambs left twisted like crossed fingers. Another bomb, which didn’t go off, was placed outside the former offices of Fiat in Turin.

The bomb in Rome is claimed by the ‘Nuclei of Revolutionary Proletarian Initiatives’ in a 36-page message emailed to newspapers via a mobile-phone modem. ‘With this attack,’ the group explained, it was ‘taking up a position with the strategic objective of constructing a combative anti-imperialist front.’ The targets at the Rome address where the bomb went off were chosen because ‘they orient positions of bourgeois imperialism…’ For pages and pages it continued, invoking the proletariat against ‘war-mongers’ and ‘landowners’, and warning that a Berlusconi government would ‘represent the substantial identification between state institutions and land-owning interests.’ The document was dedicated to four members of the Red Brigades killed by police in 1980.

Both bombs were minor but there was, not for the first time, a neurosis that Italy was witnessing a return to her dark, terrorist past. Giovanni Pellegrino – President of the Slaughter Commission and by now a rentaquote for opinions on Italian terrorism past and present – claimed that elections are like a ‘little wind which rekindles the flames’. And, absurd and inconsequential as the new terrorist groups seemed, they were strangely mimetic of party politics, fractured into tiny groupings of alphabet soup, each using pages (36 in all) of pompous prose to explain themselves.

Then, days before the electorate went to the polls, Berlusconi produced a brilliant piece of theatre. Sitting at an elegant, cherry-wood desk in a (RAI) television studio, he signed a contract with the Italian people. He promised to create a million new jobs, to increase pensions. He assured voters he would walk away from politics if at the end of his first term his promises hadn’t been met.

* * *

The day of the election, and the weeks that ensued, were tragicomic. Everyone had expected a low turn-out, a lot of disillusioned absenteeism from the voters on the left. Instead people flocked to the polls. Italy has always had one of the highest voter turn-outs in the west. During the electoral show-downs between Communists and Christian Democrats, voters were well-drilled and turnout was invariably about 95%. The 2001 election was like a return to the old days. People clearly felt strongly and overwhelmed the polling booths. Thus, when closing time was supposed to be called at 10 p. m., there were still thousands of voters, impatiently waiting in queues which snaked around entire suburbs. The (soon-to-be-out-going) Minister of the Interior duly went on television to say that the ‘urns’ would remain open into the small hours. It was all very familiar. It was like so many scenes I had seen during previous years: the queueing, the slowness with which things move, and, most of all, the changing of the rules half way through the game. ‘But this never happens,’ said my ‘betrothed’, offended that I was laughing at the chaos. ‘This is honestly the first time there have ever been queues at an election.’ The advantage, of course, was that whatever the result, the country’s new Prime Minister would have an overwhelming democratic endorsement.

Berlusconi won by a landslide. The interregnum was over, the restoration complete. The tactic of demonising Berlusconi had badly misfired. The more he was seen as under attack from pointy-heads on the left and financial journalists on the right (especially foreign ones), the stronger and more patriotic he appeared. In the ‘moral referendum’ the majority had chosen the ‘immoral option’.
Forza Italia
was voted for by almost 30% of the electorate. The left was decimated (only Rutelli’s ‘Daisy’ coalition didn’t wilt, claiming 15% compared to 9% five years earlier), and the few independent parties (Di Pietro’s ‘Italy of Values’ party, the ambiguous Radicals) failed to make the 4% minimum required for a parliamentary seat from the allocation of PR votes. Even so the election might have been a close finish had the Refounded Communists, full of pomp and principle, been allied to the
‘Olive’. In the new, two-coalition politics, the Communists’ 5% of the vote would almost have guaranteed a hung parliament. Outside the coalition, however, that 5% simply translated into eleven inconsequential seats in the lower house.

There were, of course, anomalies: Parma and its province, centre of ‘communist-chic’, returned five out of five candidates from the Olive coalition. The night after the election result, I was invited to the studio of a local TV station in Parma. The presenter was a staunch
Forzista
, and asked in all seriousness if there existed a conspiracy of foreign journalists aligned against Berlusconi. I denied it, and the assembled heads of all the left wing parties smiled at me and nodded in agreement. The next question was what the British press made of the result. ‘The feeling is that it won’t last,’ I stuttered. With Italy having had 57 or so governments since the war, it seemed like a safe reply. But all the big-wigs, the entire horseshoe of local politicos around me shook their heads, either with glee or despair. The feeling was that Berlusconi was set to remain
Il
Presidente
for a very, very long time.

The Italian election, then, was on 13 May. The British one was on 7 June, almost a month later. Yet the new British government was chosen and sworn in before its Italian counterpart. That gives an idea how long it takes for things to move. Once elected, it wasn’t enough for Berlusconi to pay a visit to the President of the Republic and get to work. There had to be ‘consultations’, everyone had to speak to everyone else. Deals had to be cut. Defeated powers had to be received and soothed by Ciampi. Berlusconi had to choose which ‘armchair’ to give to which party. For weeks there was speculation about who would get what. Finally, the team was assembled: the
Leghista
Roberto Maroni went to the Welfare Ministry; Maurizio Gasparri, a man who to my eyes behaves like a barking Fascist, was given the job of Minister of Communications (the ideal candidate to ‘clean up’, as predicted, RAI channels); Pierferdinando Casini, former Christian Democrat and now of the Catholic CCD, became the speaker of the lower house. To keep things ‘in the family’, Letizia Moratti, the cousin of the
President of Inter Milan football team, became Minister for Education; although Count Montezemolo, head of Ferrari and favoured son of Agnelli, turned down the offer of an armchair. (Another trusted Agnelli stalwart, Renato Ruggiero, became Foreign Secretary.) Umberto Bossi, leader of the Northern League, became the Minister for Reforms. Gianfranco Fini, boss of the National Alliance, was the government’s vice-president.

The priorities of the new government quickly became obvious. Most things take years and years in Italy but, when there’s something of overwhelming importance, it’s done with lightning speed (
direttissima
is one example, when petty criminals are speed-sentenced within days of the crime, in sharp contrast to the grinding progress of ‘sensitive trials’). By the summer, one of Berlusconi’s first significant acts of legislation had been proposed. It directly affected his own business manoeuvres. The crime of
falso
in
bilancio
, of cooking the books, was decriminalised. The legislation was, admittedly, begun under the previous government, but the new amendments which suddenly emerged were tailored to Berlusconi like a bespoke suit. The very crime of which Berlusconi had so often stood accused was, in his first foray in government, turned into a minor infringement (or, in the technical phraseology, it was changed from being a crime of ‘danger’ to a crime of ‘damage’).

Basically, in future, corrupt businessmen will face fines instead of prison and only if denounced by their own shareholders. It was a perfect example, according to the defeated left, of what is called a
colpo di
spugna
, a clean-up job with the ‘sponge’. As always with Berlusconi, the only thing to admire was the audacity. At the same time that extremists from the Northern League were talking about their idea of making
clandestinità
(illegal immigration) a full-scale crime, Berlusconi’s government was giving accounting irregularities the all-clear. Thus, an impoverished immigrant risking his life to reach the shores of the Italian peninsula might face jail, whilst multi-billionaire businessmen who fiddle their tax returns will, from now on, simply face a fine or, more probably, a pardon. According to the left, it was
salva
-
ladri
(save-the-thief)
law-making at its finest. (Berlusconi had pulled a similar stunt during his first, brief period in power in 1994. As prosecutors were on the verge of arresting several executives from his Fininvest empire, and as Italy was absorbed in the World Cup in America, his government hurriedly tried to pass through parliament the
Decreto
Biondi
, making it impossible to arrest defendants accused of white-collar crimes.) The actual amendments were conceived by the Judicial Affairs Committee. The Chairman of the Committee, Gaetano Pecorella, and another of its members, Niccolò Ghedini, both double as defence lawyers for Berlusconi in various trials.

The false-accounting legislation had two very clear implications: since prison terms were drastically reduced, the Statute of Limitations – the practice whereby a crime is no longer a crime after a certain period – was reduced from fifteen years to seven and a half. That simple amendment would mean that all those white-collar crimes dogging Berlusconi, from Clean Hands to Dirty Feet, would be washed away, no longer subject to legal investigations or prosecutions. The second implication was even more far-reaching and more indicative of the new
Presidente
’s intentions. Since false accounting was only a crime if denounced by affected parties (a shareholder or creditor), it was obvious that something as mundane as the state, trying to impose taxes on company profits, would be impotent. For me, it was the first indication that the country was now at the service of
Il
Cavaliere
, rather than vice versa.