The result would have been inconceivable without the Italian economy being
stagnant for a decade. By next year, the country’s economy will have
contracted by a tenth from its peak. Youth unemployment is at a staggering
37 per cent. Last year, disposable income fell by 4 per cent. The country is
in a depression, and with the previous PM, Mario Monti, appearing to deepen
that depression through the increase and introduction of taxes, the time was
ripe for revolution.
Beppe Grillo at Vaffa Day rally (EPA)
The results also show something about the way Italians like their politicians.
For two decades foreigners have been wondering what on earth they saw in
Berlusconi. The answer is that they like a charismatic, red-blooded kind of
guy. Against a backdrop of verbose, patrician MPs, Berlusconi seemed like a
man of the people. Though politically his opposite, Grillo has the same
appeal: he gets angry, he swears, he jokes.
The way he harangues the piazza, and whips the crowd up into a kind of enraged
hysteria, isn’t so different to one of his less savoury political
predecessors.
In many ways, though, he’s the inheritor of a strange political movement which
began in 1944 called Qualunquismo: it aimed to do away completely with
political parties by appealing to the ordinary man, the “uomo qualunque”.
Given the ubiquity of organised crime and corruption, there appears, in
every generation, a ground-level qualunquismo that promises to sweep away
the political “crooks”.
Grillo has relentlessly campaigned for a “clean parliament”, purged
of those with criminal records. The irony is that, having a manslaughter
conviction for killing three passengers in a car in 1981, Grillo has said
that he himself won’t take up a seat in parliament.
Silvio Berlusconi and Umberto Bossi in the Italian parliament (AFP)
Usually what happens to the qualunquismo movements is that the new broom gets
stuck in the “marmellatona” – the “massive jam” –
of Italian politics, and the broom gets dirty rather than parliament clean.
It’s hard to remember, but Silvio Berlusconi and Umberto Bossi, the
disgraced former leader of the Northern League, were supposed to do away
with the “thieves” in Rome. They ended up at the centre of a
political cabal that was constantly accused of corruption.
Each time the newcomer disappoints those expectations, the anger, and yearning
for a new party, is increased. And the result is that every successful
political party has to present itself as the outsider to the political
elite. That happens in most countries, but only in Italy do politicians
reinvent and rename their parties and coalitions so regularly, often going
so far as to present themselves as the enemies of the machinery of state.
In Italy the state is portrayed as the problem and, consequently, the country
has precious few statesmen (“a statesman,” said De Gaspari, one of
the Republic’s founding fathers, “thinks not about the next election,
but about the next generation”).
The election also reflects the fact that the Italians are instinctively
anarchic. It’s hard to imagine another country in which a political rally
could be called “**** Off day”. The V in Grillo’s “MoVimento”
is upper case because it recalls the obscenity.
Grillo has learnt from Umberto Bossi that Italians warm to a leader who turns
the air blue and regularly performs the “umbrella gesture”
(smashing a flat palm into the inside of the elbow). The fact that Grillo
claims not to be a leader at all, but merely a guarantor or facilitator,
endears him to the idealistic outlaws in his ranks.
Mario Monti, nicknamed ‘Rigor Montis’ by Grillo (AFP)
That anarchism was especially apparent with regard to Europe. The more German
politicians and European bureaucrats urged Italians to swallow the medicine
of austerity offered by Mario Monti – nicknamed “Rigor Montis” by
Grillo – the more Italians became determined to put up two fingers to
foreign interference.
The reason 55 per cent of Italians voted for either Grillo or Berlusconi,
dubbed the two “clowns” by last week’s Economist, was that,
bluntly, they don’t like being told what to do by Berlin or Brussels.
There is, as they say, history here. The last time Italy had a technocratic
government, under Carlo Azeglio Ciampi in the early 1990s, acute austerity
was introduced in order to squeeze it inside the economic requirements for
joining the single currency. That austerity was sold with the line that,
once inside, it would all be milk and honey. There has been an economic
slump ever since. And now, for the last year, Italians have once again
endured austerity introduced by an unelected technocrat who they perceive is
remote-controlled from abroad. It simply doesn’t make sense to them.
So there’s now a tangible feeling that Italy, more than Greece, represents a
threat to the stability and unity of the European Union. Both Berlusconi and
Grillo were explicitly critical of Europe throughout the campaign: Grillo
has urged a referendum on whether Italy should leave the euro, and has
spoken of the need to restructure Italy’s €2 trillion-plus debt. Both have
battered Monti for his fidelity to foreign masters.
No government is possible without bringing at least one of those “clowns”
into coalition. And once that happens it seems likely that they would begin
a game of high-stakes poker with Brussels. Both sides think they have strong
bargaining positions. Italy has to raise €420 billion this year, and so is
acutely vulnerable to perceptions that it’s not a reliable debtor. If the
European Central Bank decides to stop propping up the Italian bond market,
the cost of borrowing will soar far beyond sustainable levels.
But, as Grillo and Berlusconi know, Italy also has some aces up its sleeve.
They believe that the Italian economy is strong enough to go it alone, that a
devaluation and return to the Lira would make the country competitive once
more.
Although it's often said that the Italian economy is weak, there's actually €9
trillion of private wealth. Economic experts, including Ambrose
Evans-Pritchard in the pages of The Daily Telegraph, have suggested that an
Italian exit from the euro is conceivable, even economically coherent. Only
yesterday, Grillo insisted that "if conditions do not change", Italy "will
want" to leave the euro.
What’s certain is that there’s currently a power vacuum in Italy. Not only is
there no Pope, there’s no government and the current head of state, Giorgio
Napolitano, steps down next month. The great writer Ennio Flaiano once
quipped that “Italy is the country where the shortest line between two
points is an arabesque”. Before Italy gets some new leaders, there’s a
lot of dancing to be done.
Tobias Jones’s book about the Italian deep south, Blood on the Altar, has just
been published by Faber in paperback.
Source:
http://www.news.ezonearticle.com/2013/03/03/this-election-shows-why-italy-remains-europes-most-dangerous-basket-case/
0 comments:
Post a Comment