Italia Riforma

President Sergio Mattarella of Italy, one of the quiet successes of international politics, delivered a subtle and stinging reproach to Boris Johnson’s claim that Britain was doing badly in handling Covid against Italy and Germany because of the freedoms and democracy Brits developed in the past 300 years. The clear implication is that Italians and Germans do not enjoy such a legacy.

Quite apart from PM’s comic cuts approach to history, Mattarella said that the British Prime Minister misunderstand the meaning of liberty in modern society. “Freedom implies restraint,” the Italian President told an in formal gathering – and paraphrasing John Stuart Mill, added: “Freedom is not to make others ill.”

“The perplexity of the British public is rising, “ wrote Thomas Kielinger, a well-known anglophile, in Germany’s Die Welt: “It’s government appears to be stumbling through a forest of lunacy. It’s dawning on many that Boris Johnson is the wrong man to cope with an emergency.”

The issue of how well local authorities in Germany and Italy have managed Covid tracing was raised in the Commons by Ben Bradshaw, the Labour MP for Exeter. He had a point. Germany and Italy have benefited from strong regional governments. In Italy they were responsible for a remarkable turn-around in reducing the Covid-19 outbreak last spring.

The sudden appearance of the virus round Lodi in Lombardy in late February triggered near panic as hospitals across Northern Italy were overwhelmed. Patients were left on beds in corridors to die – and this was happening in some of the most renowned hospitals in Europe, such as in the city of Bergamo.

On February 21st the citizen of the municipality of Vò, on the borders of Veneto and Lombardy, died – the second recorded fatality from Covid-19 in Italy this year. The municipality shut down for two weeks. The Veneto Region and the Red Cross surveyed and tested the entire 3,275 population of Vò twice. The first round revealed 89 positives and only six on the second round. Subsequent reports brilliantly laid out the issues of testing and tracing, isolation, family transmission, false positives, asymptomatic carriers in a long list.

It was pretty plain what to do – and such initiatives have continued under local and regional authorities. The follow-up report, available in English on the internet, spells out the needs and problems of tracking and tracing – which Lady Harding and her crew still seem to find hard to grasp. The report was available in May, and published in Nature magazine. It was sponsored and supported by the Veneto Region, the International Red Cross and the UK’s Medical Research Council – whose efforts are handsomely and generously acknowledged in the text.

Hands up all those in Downing Street and the Cabinet Office who have read the Vò report.

It’s been a good week for local and regional politics and democracy in general Italy — much better than my more cynical Italian friends are prepared to admit. Last weekend voting was held for the assemblies and presidencies of seven regions. At the same time a referendum was run on streamlining the national parliament , cutting the seats by one third to 200 in the Senate, and to 400 in the Chamber of Deputies.

On a modest but respectable turnout of just under 60 % , the referendum motion was won by around 70% of the votes cast. The reform is significant, but needs to be complemented by a more coherent electoral method. Currently two thirds are chosen by proportional representation, and one third by first past the post. There is a lot of unfinished business before the next general election, due in 2023 at the latest.

The regional vote was a surprise in that the nativist right of La Lega under Matteo Salvini, who has campaigned in and out of office against migrants, only made modest gains. He had threatened to ‘sweep the board’ – in particular in ‘red’ Tuscany , always left leaning since the second world war, where it was the core of a communist-led resistance in what for Italy by then was a very nasty civil war.

It has not been the week to quote WB Yeats’ gloomstering about ‘things falling apart’, and ‘the centre cannot hold.’ The centre did hold in three out of the seven regions up for election – Campania and Puglia as well as Toscana . In a way this was a direct vote of thanks for the incumbent Democratic Party – PD — councils and presidents for the handling of Covid. The PD emerged from moderate Communists, Socialists and Republicans, and on projections from last weekend’s vote is now the largest party. It is led by Nicola Zingaretti, brother of the Luca Zingaretti , aka Inspector Montalbano. Wisely, Nicola, hasn’t taken a seat in the government – and is managing matters, more successfully than most credit, from the wings.

He has a tough gig. The government of PD and its populist ally of the 5 Star Movement – which did badly and is now in rapid decline – have a serious agenda to tackle before the next general election. First, they have to manage Covid. Second they have to handle the € 200 billion bailout loan/grant from the EU central fund for reconstruction – an area in which Italy has a bad record with legendary cases of malfeasance , corruption and sheer incompetence in the past.

The economy has been hit hard – infrastructure , especially in transportation , is in need of urgent overhaul. Tourism is on life support, under a tenth of the usual 90 million foreign visitors have sojourned in Italy this year. And there is eternal problem of illegal immigration across the Mediterranean – a task of Sisyphus in which European allies in and out of the EU have been reluctant to help.

The good news is that this autumn has brought a stunning harvest – vendemmia – across the well-known regions of Tuscany, Veneto and Puglia – and producers are much less gloomy about sales and exports than their French counterparts.

There is also a story of quiet political competence by two of the principals in Italy’s current political theatre. President Sergio Mattarella and Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte display an unstated subtlety and capability that , I fear Donald Trump and Boris Johnson simply couldn’t understand. Conte’s measured pronouncements , in parliament and through the media, have been important in calming the waters and offering reassurance in the bad times of the Covid outbreak. Mattarella, an academic lawyer and judge by profession, is the quiet referee. His brother Piersanti was murdered by the Mafia when he was president of the Sicily region.

Italy has been well served by several recent presidents, an office of influence but almost no power – among the them Carlo Azeglio Ciampi , former Governor of the Bank of Italy, and Giorgio Napolitano. The braggart Berlusconi, Italy’s Trump populist prototype, craved the office but no one wanted him. Salvini of the League, La Lega, who also enjoys a fair share of Trump traits, no doubt would also like to take residence in the Quirinale Palace.

But though his Lega gained one region in the recent vote, there are signs of decay in his fortunes. He was outshone in Veneto by the personal vote for Luca Zaia as president , and he is now seen as the next leader of the League, and in the not too distant future. Salvini is also outflanked to the right. The smaller Marche region, wedged between the solidly red Emilia-Romagna , Tuscany and the Adriatic, was taken by Brothers of Italy, I Fratelli d’Italia, even more raucous, nativist and Xenophobic than la Lega. The brothers led by a raucous sister, the frighteningly magnetic Giorgia Meloni.

This brings us back to the tangled tale of constitutional and parliamentary reform. The constitution of the Italian Republic, which was born in 1948, is a story of high principle and convoluted, and at times chaotic, execution. The guiding thought for many of the constituent assembly that drafted the constitution was that Italy should never be at risk of another Fascist dictatorship. Checks and balances were laid down, and any attempt to rebuild a Fascist movement is outlawed.

The problem was that the new blueprint has been focused on the past as much as the future. The problem was that many of the new parliamentarians were deemed ineligible for government as they were Marxists of the Socialist Party and even more belonged to the Communist Party of Italy, the PCI, the largest of its kind in western Europe. The wartime leader Palmiero Togliatti agreed to play by western rules in what was deemed ‘la svolta di Salerno’ the about turn of Salerno in the 1948 general election. One of his charismatic successors as PCI leader , Enrico Berlinguer, even agreed to Italy staying in Nato. It was no good; the PCI could operate successfully in local and regional government, they were banned from national government. President Kennedy agreed the Socialists could join government coalitions, provided they renounced Marxism.

For forty years and more Italian governments were led by the Christian Democrats, powerful, inefficient, cunning and corrupt by turns. The only thing most members had in common was nominal loyalty to the Catholic Church. It had more than seven main factions, some strong in the South and others concentrated in the North East, round Veneto. One particularly bright group focused on Bologna – led by the likes of Romano Prodi a successful industrialist, academic , prime minister and president of the European commission. His circle numbered Benigno Zaccagnini , a doctor who became one of the successful and respected party secretaries, and the author of the Name of the Rose, Umberto Eco.

One of the most powerful faction leaders and eight time prime minister was Giulio Andreotti, who later was tried for Mafia association. His protégé Salvo Lima, a former mayor of Palermo, was protected later by parliamentary privilege by membership of both the Rome and Strasbourg parliaments. He was shot dead by Mafia hitmen on a motorcycle outside Palermo in 1992.

The Christian Democrat years were hit by two major crises – the red Brigades terror campaign – and the ‘Clean Hands’ corruption prosecutions that essentially finished the party off from 1992. The low point of the ‘years of lead’ of terrorism was March 1978 when the former prime minister Aldo Moro was kidnapped and murdered by the Red Brigades after 50 days of captivity. It is a murky tale ,and many of the crucial details are simply unknown. There is a whiff of the assassination of Salvador Allende in Chile in 1973, complete with dark rumours of CIA interests, about the episode. Three convicted of involvement were released in the 1990s. It is the most complex, baffling, and unsatisfactory major story I have ever covered.

Aldo Moro was firmly believed to be contemplating orchestrating a soft alliance in government with Berlinguer’s PCI communists. The suspicions grew in 1977, the year before his death , earning the opprobrium of the likes of Henry Kisisnger and David Owen, then UK foreign secretary. He was kidnapped on March 15, the Ides of March – also the date of Caesar’s death – as he was being driven to parliament to discuss a voting pact by which the Communists wouldn’t vote against the government in confidence motions, wouldn’t take government ministries, but would have a say in the government programme and policies. It was known as ‘La Non-Sfiduccia’, the ‘non- no confidence.’

It sealed Moro’s fate. We know who his killers were, by name. But who was really behind them, Italian and foreign, remain very deep waters, as Sherlock Holmes would put it.

The “Clean Hand” or Tangentopoli “Bribesville’ was a straightforward story of massive corruption and bribery. It broke when the manager of a Milan care home refused to pay a hefty bribe for a new cleaning contract to the Socialist Party authorities. A vigorous prosecution campaign led by a cop turned magistrate Antonio di Pietro brought the whole house of cards crashing down. The Christian Democrats and Socialists slowly wound up. With the end of the Cold War, there was no point on them.

They had been beneficiaries of Italy’s status as a ‘blocked democracy’ a parliamentary system in which the opposition – the Communists – could never gain office. They were condemned by the taint – real and imaginary at times – with friendship with Soviet ‘evil’ empire.

With the Communist tendency, and its successors including parts of the Democratic Party, being out of quarantine, the parliamentary system still had its difficulties. Matteo Renzi, who modelled himself on Tony Blair, tried a reform referendum on 2016. He made the mistake of making it a personal vote of confidence – and the Italians said no.

A lot of the new reform in the referendum makes sense. The two chambers had roughly equal powers – so new legislation could be introduced in either. This led to some spectacular car crashes of parliamentary sequencing programming. The Senate has a slightly different electorate by age and distribution. It is supposed to be a chamber for the regions, liaising with the powerful network of regional governments which only got going in 1971 – though already in the architecture of the 1948 constitution.

Now Italy is to have 250 fewer parliamentarians overall than the number of peers entitled to sit in Boris’s bloated House of Lords. According to the critics, like my diplomat friend Francesco, the reform only works if there is a major overhaul of the voting system. “It should have happened before the referendum to reduce the seats. As it stands , it means the factions will dominate.” Matteo Renzi had proposed changing the hybrid methods of PR – vote by proportion from lists – and first past the post.

The constitutional amendment to voting should only be led by the head of state, President Mattarella. He is due to end his seven year term in 2022,and he has said he won’t stand for a second term.

The new reform could be yet another of his quiet successes.

He must know that, this week at least, something in Italy is going right.