The Dark Heart of Italy (33 page)

Within a week, the European governments met for another summit, this time at Laeken in Belgium. The Italian contingent was, again, cantankerous. The Italian government pulled out of the military transport project, refusing to finance the purchase of any of the A400M aircraft. (Germany had purchased 73, France 50 and Spain 27.) The summit was also intended to decide the destination of various European agencies, but even agreement on that couldn’t be reached since Italy vetoed any distribution of the agencies that didn’t guarantee Parma, the ‘food capital of Europe’, the seat of the European Food Safety Agency. Helsinki had been the rival for the food agency, and Berlusconi was quick to ridicule Finnish cuisine: ‘They don’t even know what
prosciutto
is. I gave a strong “no”. I even had to raise my voice.’ The summit finished amidst bitter recriminations. The Italian Mario Monti (European Competition Commissioner) said that the Italian government’s behaviour had been ‘adolescent’.

The rise in Italian patriotism, previously such an unseen sentiment across the peninsula, clearly meant that the country’s leader had begun to distance himself from the European Community only weeks before the vital launch of the Euro. Many suggested that the shift in policy had, paradoxically, been prompted by the rabid Northern League (a party which is actually opposed to the Italian nation state, and whose opposition to Europe is therefore entirely political, rather than patriotic: it’s simply too left-wing). The one government minister of truly international stature, Renato Ruggiero (former head of the World Trade Organisation and Foreign Secretary under Berlusconi) had repeatedly made
clear his concern about Italy’s new-found Euroscepticism (called by the government ‘Eurorealism’). At the beginning of January 2002, after months of fractious criticism from his own colleagues, Ruggiero resigned in dismay. Berlusconi immediately appointed himself Foreign Secretary, the head of Italian diplomacy: ‘Who better than me?’ he asked journalists, who obviously didn’t offer any alternative suggestions.

By then, even Gianni Agnelli appeared edgy. He had consistently defended Berlusconi in the run-up to the election, rounding on foreign journalists who used phrases like ‘banana republic’. Once ‘his man’ in the government, Ruggiero, had been humiliated, Agnelli said: ‘Banana republic? Italy doesn’t even have bananas. All we’ve got here are prickly pears.’

Italy, it was obvious, was subtly changing. The best barometers of the change, as always, were the politicised plaques, memorials and graffiti. Throughout 2001 there was clearly a new symbolism emerging as an assiduous renaming of streets began (one to Benito Mussolini in Catania, two to Giorgio Almirante, the historic leader of Italy’s post-war Fascism). In Friuli, in the north-east of the country, a plaque bearing the Fascist slogan outside a secondary school was restored to its former glory: ‘Believe, Obey, Combat’ it read. In Benevento, the name of the central square, Piazza Matteotti (Matteotti was a socialist MP murdered by Fascists in 1924) was changed to Santa Sofia. All the mayors responsible for the new urban appearances were from the ranks of the National Alliance. As was the mayor from Latina (a town built from scratch by Mussolini), who decided to replace the marble plaque on the town’s modern bell-tower (it had been removed after the Second World War): ‘Peasants and rural people should look at this tower which dominates the plain and which is a symbol of the power of Fascism’. It all reminded me of a paragraph from Moravia’s
The
Conformist
:

Little by little the landscape of the country was altering. The changing of the political guard didn’t imply only new policies, it implied the complete overhaul of every institution: the magistrature, the television, the street names, the syllabus. Even the dignified President of the Republic, Carlo Azeglio Ciampi (in what could only be interpreted as an attempt to maintain the fragile sense of national unity), said publicly that the ‘
Ragazzi di Salò’
, those Fascists who fought the civil war to the bitter end in 1945, at least had the merit of fighting for a unified Italy. He was rounded on by the left, who accused the former resistance fighter of offering yet another
sdoganame
nto (‘customs-clearance’) for Fascism.

The strange thing is that, despite the hysteria, the government of ‘black shirts’ and ‘white collars’ isn’t about the return of Fascism. It’s about something much more subtle, much more amorphous. It’s about a style of government based upon crude power, using as its motto the old Sicilian proverb
potere è meglio
di
fottere
(‘power is better than screwing’). It’s nothing to do with ideology, with Fascism or anti-Communism, it’s simply about power and realpolitik. One of Mussolini’s political slogans used to be ‘ideas not men’. It expressed the idea that policies were more important than the politicians. Contemporary Italian politics, though, is the inversion of the slogan. For all the talk about Fascists and Communists, it’s really about ‘men not ideas’. The culture is one of
clientelismo
, the habit of mutual backscratching. A politician sits at the top of his pyramid of clients, looking after their needs as he tries to out-manoeuvre opponents. It’s an organic supply-and-demand of favours that, given the size of the public-sector work force and the reach of political appointments, runs through all levels of society. A new government implies a clean sweep through the ranks of RAI, it implies new magistrates and new teachers, all chosen upon the basis of their personal allegiances.

That’s why any notion that one might voluntarily remove a conflict of interests is anathema. It goes counter to every notion of realpolitik. Days before the General Election, Berlusconi had melodramatically signed his ‘contract with the Italian people’. He promised that within one hundred days of entering office, he would resolve the anomaly of a politician whose telecommunications empire dominated domestic broadcasting. Eight months later, and nothing had been done. The conflict of interests had become blatant that autumn when an American offer of 800 billion lire for a 49% interest in the RAI infrastructure was bluntly turned down by the government’s Minister for Communications. As soon as the lucrative deal fell through, Mediaset shares soared on the stock exchange.

In fact, rather than resolving the RAI-Mediaset conflict by selling Mediaset, Berlusconi was instead attempting to colonise RAI. One Sunday afternoon in December 2001,
Quelli Che Il
Calcio
(a football programme on RAI 2) ran a satirical sketch about the ‘post-Fascist’ Minister for Communications, Maurizio Gasparri. As everyone knew, Gasparri was about to sack the head of RAI (present in the studio) because he represented the old-guard appointed by the former left-wing government. As soon as the sketch (a very gentle parody about political interference in television) was finished, the Minister for Communications unintentionally proved the point. He was immediately on the telephone, his booming voice interrupting the live broadcast of the country’s favourite television programme. The studio fell silent, everyone looked nervously at their shoes as the Minister berated them. He didn’t, he said, approve of the wrong kind of satire, and he hinted darkly that RAI should have known better since he, Gasparri, was now effectively its boss. That is just one, mundane example of Italy’s ‘vertical’ structure, in which power drips imperiously from above, rather than surges from below.

January 2002. I was in a bar watching a late-night football match. In one corner I recognised a blond guy I had taught almost two years before. Marco was one of those silent types who very rarely
spoke in the lecture hall. When he did, it was normally a memorable put-down to one of his fellow students. He wasn’t superior, just very studious, a little sarcastic and aloof. I liked him a lot, though I didn’t really know him.

‘Zio Tobia!’ He called me over to his table and I sat down opposite him. ‘Are you still writing that book?’ he asked.

‘I’m afraid so,’ I replied.

‘What are you writing about now?’

‘The government.’

He looked at me and went quiet. Then he began shaking his head, grimacing. ‘
Ma tu, non ti rendi conto?
’ he hissed. (‘Don’t you get it?’ said as if he were accusing me of something.) And he was accusing me of something, however indirectly. ‘You foreign journalists are so facetious and condescending. You only write about how terrible our country is.’

‘But I’m only repeating what you all tell me. And it’s true, it is terrible.’

‘I know. But that’s exactly why you foreign journalists fuck me off. You come here and laugh at the farce, not realising that for us it is a tragedy. You come here with your British patriotism and laugh at us peasants before going back home. If you want to stay here, you mustn’t laugh anymore,’ he said. ‘This is a terrible country and Berlusconi is a tragedy for Italy. It’s all an unbelievable tragedy. Italians are
coglioni
[pillocks] who elect the first person they think will make them richer. Berlusconi only speaks to the
pancia
[the belly]. But you mustn’t laugh about anything anymore. You must write that there’s another side to Italy.’ He was exceptionally angry, tears rolling down his cheeks as he prodded his finger against my chest. ‘You must write that there’s a completely different country which hates Berlusconi and all his corrupt
giannizzeri
[flunkeys]. Life for us will be very difficult from now on. You don’t understand, but you will…’

We sat in silence for five minutes, ignoring each other and just pretending to watch the game. He was right, of course. By then, after three years abroad, I longed to go back home. I was sickened not just by what was going on, but by the acceptance of it all.
Saturated by Mediaset television, everyone seemed indifferent. I, by contrast, was feeling vitriolic and very foreign. It didn’t even feel like I was living in a democracy anymore. Marco, though, somehow knew that I would be staying, and he knew that there was still ‘a different country’, one outside the reach of
Il
Cavaliere
, which I had ignored.

He caught me looking at him and began to apologise. ‘Excuse me, Zio Tobia,’ he said finally. ‘Excuse me. It’s just that Berlusconi brings so much shame upon our country, and you mustn’t add to that. You must write about the other country, about the resistance.’

‘I will. I promise, Marco, that’s what I’ll write next. And I didn’t mean it’s all terrible here. I love it here, it’s just that…’

‘It’s terrible,’ he nodded, smiling.

Writing a book, however obliquely, about Silvio Berlusconi is rather like going to Britain to write about hooliganism or like going to Ireland to write about ‘the troubles’: there’s a danger that, as you try to explain a tragic phenomenon, a very nasty niche of the country comes to obscure all else. Admittedly, having given myself the task of taking the temperature of Italy’s body politic, I couldn’t then fudge the issue and pretend that that body wasn’t suffering from a very serious and unappealing infection. And yet, identifying Berlusconi entirely with his country is an unnecessary compliment to the former, and definitely an unkind slur on the latter. Italy is not a single entity but rather a country of two opposing sides. The country is, in fact, probably as divided now as it was during the civil wars of the 1940s or the 1970s. There’s the same visceral loathing between two halves of the country. This mutual hatred and disdain might not have overspilled into another civil war, but there is once again a very obvious civil stand-off in which one half of the country looks with absolute contempt at the other. That cleavage within the country is as obvious to Italians as it is to a foreigner. As Angelo Panebianco, a journalist for
Corriere della Sera
, wrote in January 2002:

I don’t suppose that in the preceding chapters I have particularly disguised my own position as regards that division. Yet in writing almost exclusively about that ‘wickedness and illegality’ I recognise that I have narrated only one, small part of the country. There obviously exists, within the physiology of the peninsula, a completely different heart: one disdainful of oligarchical football presidents, critical of corruption and unbounded construction, dismissive of a Prime Minister who now controls six out of the seven national television channels. It’s hard to underline the passion and vehemence with which they talk: some begin to cry, others bang their fists on the table. Most, like Marco, look around at their fellow countrymen (the other half) and spit out the word
coglioni
, ‘pillocks’.

Throughout the spring of 2002, the stakes between the two halves of the country were exponentially raised. For the first time, commentators started talking about the ‘regime’ and the ‘resistance’. In January, at the opening ceremony for the new judicial year, the
Procuratore Generale
of Milan and former head of the Clean Hands pool, Francesco Saverio Borrelli, took the microphone. The reduction of protective escorts, the attacks on the magistrature, the new laws which interfered with on-going court cases – all, said Borrelli, carried the stamp of an authoritarian regime. He urged his colleagues and the Italian public in general to ‘resist, resist, resist’ Berlusconi’s government. Having invoked the Resistance, he then also invoked Italians’ brave First World War defiance on the Piave front. His rhetoric was warmly applauded, and magistrates removed their ermine and red robes to mourn in black ones instead. Gerardo D’Ambrosio, the Milanese
Procuratore
, echoed the sentiments. About Berlusconi’s government, he said ominously: ‘This is the night of Italian democracy.’

A month later, on the tenth anniversary of the start of the
Clean Hands revolution, a huge rally was held by the legal lobby in Milan. 40,000 took part, holding candles for justice, carrying banners demanding that the law be ‘equal for all’. The crowd was mostly middle-aged and middle-class. It was one of a number of spontaneous protests that had emerged across the country. They were called
girotondi
(ring-a-ring-a-roses); they were simple gatherings of Italian citizens who held hands around buildings whose independence appeared threatened by the new government (mostly courtrooms and television studios).

The response from the regime was swift. Two days after the Milan rally, a bomb exploded in the middle of the night on one of the streets outside the Home Office in Rome. Mopeds were blown across the road, green plastic skips were torn apart. Berlusconi, linking the attack with the gathering of the legal lobby in Milan and the snowballing opposition movement, said that the left should ‘lower the tones’ of its meetings, because terrorism was the result of incautious criticisms. Other government ministers said that the phrases used by the legal lobby were ‘words of lead’, an obvious suggestion that any criticism of the government would be construed as terrorist talk akin to the
anni di piombo
. At the same time, the regime began deploying its one, invincible argument to defend the government’s incursions into all corners of the state. Berlusconi was democratically elected, and therefore his actions were the expression of the wishes of the people. He was – like Thatcher before him – a beacon of democracy, audaciously attacking left-wing cartels within the media, the unions and the judiciary. An equally important weakness of the resistance was the fact that, after a decade of exceptionally complicated legal wrangling, most people outside the legal lobby dreaded hearing the word ‘justice’. It was Berlusconi’s good fortune to be involved in court cases so complicated and so boring that most Italians switched off from the debates and switched on their televisions instead.

Television, in fact, became the next theatre of the encounter between the regime and the resistance. When the conflict of interests bill was finally introduced to parliament, politicians
once again screamed abuse at each other. ‘Shame’ or ‘Pinocchio’ chanted the left, standing and shouting like a group of football fans before abandoning the parliament in a walk-out. The tone of the editor of
Oggi
was more sober: ‘This law on the conflict of interests isn’t honourable. It’s laughable. In fact, it’s disgusting.’ The main cause for complaint, days after Berlusconi had appointed a new ‘advisory commission’ for RAI, was the bill’s second article. It stated that ‘mere ownership’ of a business wasn’t sufficient to preclude taking up governmental office. The conflict of interests existed, effectively, only for those concerned with the day-to-day running of the business. Berlusconi wasn’t even subject to the legislation.

Days later, Roberto Benigni, the Oscar-winning actor and comedian, made a live appearance on the closing night of the San Remo music festival. Millions of people watched Benigni’s scatty, clever performance. He was part-clown, part-sage as, quoting Dante, he began taunting the government. He ridiculed Berlusconi and his supposed resolution of the conflict of interests. ‘Please Berlusconi,’ urged the actor, ‘please do something that, when we go to bed at night, will make us all proud to be Italians.’ The implication was that
Il
Presidente
had prompted only shame, rather than pride, amongst most citizens.

By April, it was becoming obvious that criticisms of that sort would no longer be allowed. When on an official visit to Bulgaria, Berlusconi began listing the journalists who he wanted to see sacked from RAI. He mentioned three in particular who had been ‘criminal’ in their use of the state channels. All three – Daniele Luttazzi, Michele Santoro and Enzo Biagi – had cast doubt upon his integrity in the previous year’s election. ‘The precise duty of the new management,’ said Berlusconi, ‘is to make sure that this doesn’t happen again.’ It’s difficult to exaggerate the impact of those comments: from Sofia, the man who doubled as both Prime Minister and Foreign Secretary, someone who owned three TV channels and had just appointed the management committee for the other three, was publicly listing inconvenient journalists who should be sacked. The mention of Enzo Biagi was particularly
odd. A hugely popular, owlish man in his mid-80s, Biagi presents a ten-minute evening slot on RAI 1 debating the issues of the day. His only crime had been to interview Roberto Benigni on the eve of the 2001 election, allowing the comic to make a few jokes at Berlusconi’s expense.

In an article on the Sunday after Berlusconi’s outburst, the normally measured Biagi made a comparison with Hitler on
Corriere
della Sera
’s front page. Even
Il Foglio
, a bizarre newspaper which is in part funded by Berlusconi’s wife, called the Prime Minister’s comments ‘a political error and an abuse of power’, and conceded that Berlusconi ‘seriously risks compromising his political career’. Another of the threatened journalists, Michele Santoro, opened his weekly programme on RAI 2 by singing
Bella Ciao
, an old song from the Resistance.

By the end of April all the new directors of the RAI channels had been appointed. Only RAI 3 remained in the hands of the left-wing opposition. RAI 1 was headed by Fabrizio Del Noce, a
Forza Italia
stalwart; RAI 2 went to Antonio Marano (Northern League). The news programmes on those channels were to be headed by Clemente Mimun (
Forza Italia
) and Mauro Mazza (National Alliance). The sister of the leader of one of the Catholic parties in the Pole of Liberties coalition was given responsibility for all local news. Even the most pessimistic hadn’t expected Italy’s notorious spoils system to be used so ruthlessly. Umberto Eco, days later, wrote about the only type of resistance left: ‘To a new form of government,’ he wrote in the pages of
La Repubblica
, ‘a new form of political reply. This really would be an opposition …’ It was the kind of proposal that, from the outside, seems surreal: Eco was proposing a veto of all the products advertised on Mediaset channels:

But by far the most serious and sad conflict was over Article 18.
It was, in some ways, Article 18 that had started Italy’s cycle of violence more than three decades ago. Guaranteeing various work-place rights, Article 18 was written and passed in 1969. That legislation was perhaps one of the reasons for reactionaries to plot the brutal bombing at Piazza Fontana. Now, years later, a sinister symmetry emerged: the attempt to repeal the legislation caused more terrorism, and further loss of life.

Marco Biagi, a university professor who had written the government’s White Book of proposed changes to employment law, was shot and killed at point-blank range as he returned to his house in Bologna. The scene under the arches outside his house presented a familiar picture: puddles of blood, the Red Brigade’s five-pointed star etched onto the wall, numbered cards propped up on the asphalt where the bullets had been found. It was the one side of the resistance that everyone, especially those in the peaceful opposition, had dreaded. The killing was claimed, in a 26-page manifesto sent to an internet news agency, by the BR-PCC, the ‘Red Brigades–Combatant Communist Party’.

‘After such a terrible event,’ said the speaker of parliament’s lower house, ‘we need to rediscover a spirit of concord.’ Instead, the murder brought all the poison of Italian politics to the surface. Berlusconi has said that the killing was the result of ‘the chain of hate and lies’ aimed at himself and his government. ‘I won’t yield to the pistol and the
piazza
,’ he later said. ‘Democracy is being blackmailed,’ replied an editorial in the left-wing
La Repubblica
.

Many, in fact, claimed the government was partly to blame for the murder: in reducing protective escorts, it had left one of its most controversial figures dangerously exposed. Nor was the danger unexpected. Only one week before, Berlusconi’s magazine,
Panorama
, had cited an intelligence leak which suggested that Biagi was high on the terrorists’ hit-list. ‘My husband was terrified,’ Biagi’s widow said. ‘He knew he was a target.’ She bitterly refused the offer of a state funeral in protest at the way her husband had been abandoned to his fate.

To many, then, the death seemed almost foretold. The Employment Secretary Roberto Maroni, Biagi’s boss, said wistfully
after the murder: ‘I can’t say I’m surprised.’ ‘It’s an endless chain of blood,’ said Romano Prodi, one of Biagi’s closest friends. ‘It’s a long obscure line which has been with us for many years.’ In fact, in 1999, another governmental advisor on labour reform, Massimo D’Antona, was also killed (by, it now emerges, the same pistol which killed Biagi). As always, conspiracy theorists went to work, especially when the man investigating that previous murder was himself found dead days after Biagi was killed. It looked like suicide, but many had their suspicions.

One of the biggest unions, CGIL, duly organised a protest – against both the repeal of Article 18 and against terrorism – in Rome. Two million turned out. Red flags made the Circo Massimo, site of the Roman chariot races, look like an ocean full of masts and sails. The flags bobbed up and down in the sun, billowing and then going slack. The city even sounded like a marina: that sound of cloth twisting and clapping in the wind. ‘We are here to join the fight against terrorism and to defend our rights,’ said Sergio Cofferati, leader of the union.

I spent the afternoon wandering across the capital. Every hilly street was crammed with flags and banners against Berlusconi. Small bands played music on street corners. Kids kicked footballs from pavement to pavement. People were passing round flasks of wine. Everyone had their own theory of what was going on. ‘Italy,’ one wizened old man told me, ‘has always been like this: one third ruled by the Vatican, one third by foreign powers, and one third by our home-bred tyrants. But the reason we have tyrants is the reason we survive them: we’re completely lawless.’