A crisis is an ordinary state of affairs (March 1996)
One of my first memories of trying to understand Italian politics goes back to 1979. I had been living in Italy for two or three months and although my conversational Italian was more than enough to get by on, it still took a great deal of effort at that point to understand the subtleties of Italian politics reported on the evening news programs. As I was seated at the dinner table with the two Counts of Bologna who were my hosts, I asked them if they could shed light on what I was sure had been a misunderstanding on my part of the current political events of the time. According to my understanding, the government was in the midst of a “crisis” and the various political factions were making every effort to resolve their differences in order to avoid the fall of the government, and eventually, the necessity of early elections. Up until then, what I heard seemed logical and understandable. What seemed less comprehensible was my understanding that, although they were using every means possible to come to an agreement, all parties hoped that their efforts would fail. When I said to my hosts that I had evidently misconstrued what I had heard, they said, “No, Giovanna. Bravissima! You’re understanding is perfectly correct!”
My hosts did not offer further explanation, but I remember being left with a strong impression of incongruity within the paradox. That the situation was an anomalous one seemed evident enough. The definition of the word crisis as a state of emergency implies that the situation was all but ordinary. However, that government representatives would use all of their energy to try to do something in the hopes that they would not succeed, was totally beyond every effort on my part to fathom. I could understand art for art’s sake, and even work for the sake of itself, but what they were trying to do seemed to me to be an exercise in masochism, a perfect waste of their time, not to mention that of the taxpayers’ money.
What I didn’t realize at that time was that “crises” in the Italian government are everything but extraordinary. There have been 19 governments in the 17 years that I have lived in this country. With those statistics one can hardly call a crisis something exceptional.
After the fall of the system and most of the men who were part of it, due to the “Clean Hands” trials, many of us allowed ourselves a touch of optimism that things in this country would finally change. A great deal of hope was offered by Silvio Berlusconi’s arrival on the scene. As a dynamic businessman with the entrepreneurial sense of “time is money,” one was certain that he, at least, would not be one to try to patch things up just to kill time. Evidently, Italian politicizing is a very contagious disease. Since Dini’s resignation at the end of December, we have been witness to one televised debate after another with Berlusconi, as leader of the Liberty Pole and his antithesis, Massimo D’Alema, leader of the former Communist Party, PDS, and the Left coalition. There was no hiding the suffered strain in their efforts to demonstrate to the public that they were doing their best to find an accord so as to make the constitutional reforms so badly needed. Because Silvio Berlusconi is the gentleman he is, he often came across as the loser in these debates. D’Alema is much more skilled in the art of interrupting or talking over the enemy until the enemy yields.
Although I would still give Berlusconi the benefit of the doubt that he was acting in good faith in trying to come to an accord, his efforts have probably done more harm than good for the country as well as the political organization he leads. Had he continued to insist on going to elections, we could have avoided another month and a half delay. As it is, it seems that we will be having elections at the end of April, two months before the end of the Italian Semester as Presidency of the European Union. His reasons for making an effort to compromise with the opposition have created a great deal of perplexity among those who supported him. And quite frankly, I’m one of them.
Maybe there is, after all, an explanation for Berlusoni’s attempt to come to an agreement with his adversaries, although it is a rather Machiavellian one, which is not his usual style. For the last year, he and his allies have been insisting incessantly on the need for elections. President Oscar Luigi Scalfaro, Prime Minister Dini, and the opposition members of parliament were against them. When Berlusconi agreed to try to come to a settlement in order to pass the constitutional reforms, he probably knew that the opposition would not come to terms with certain basic premises which were essential to the center right, such as direct election by the people of either the premier or the president. If a miracle occurred and the reforms were able to be made, all the better. However, the accord proved to be impossible and this time it was Scalfaro and the opposition who began insisting that elections were inevitable. Berlusconi got his adversaries to insist on doing what he wanted to do. If that isn’t a technique straight from The Prince, I don’t know what is! As I said, this is not at all his typical “say what you mean and mean what you say” manner, but rather a classic case of: “If you can’t beat them, join them.”
March 1996
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