David Broder - First They Took Rome: How the Populist Right Conquered Italy

FIRST THEY
TOOK ROME

How the Populist Right Conquered Italy

David Broder

First published by Verso 2020

David Broder 2020

All rights reserved

The moral rights of the author have been asserted

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Verso

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Verso is the imprint of New Left Books

ISBN-13: 978-1-78663-761-1

ISBN-13: 978-1-78663-763-5 (UK EBK)

ISBN-13: 978-1-78663-764-2 (US EBK)

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A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress

Typeset in Adobe Garamond Pro by Hewer Text UK Ltd, Edinburgh
Printed and bound by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon CR0 4YY

Contents

AN Alleanza Nazionale (National Alliance; postfascist, 19942009)

CDU Christlich Demokratische Union (Christian Democratic Union; centre-right, 1945present)

CSU Christlich-Soziale Union (Christian Social Union; centre-right, 1945present)

DC Democrazia Cristiana (Christian Democracy; big tent, 194294)

DP Democrazia Proletaria (Proletarian Democracy; far-left, 197591)

DS Democratici di Sinistra (Democrats of the Left; centre-left, 19982007)

FdI Fratelli dItalia (Brothers of Italy; postfascist, 2014present)

FI Forza Italia (centre-right/Berlusconian, 19942009, 2013present)

IdV Italia dei Valori (Italy of Values; centre-left, anti-corruption, 1998present)

LeU Liberi e Uguali (Free and Equal; centre-left, 2017present)

M5S Movimento Cinque Stelle (Five Star Movement; big tent, anti-corruption, 2009present)

MSI Movimento Sociale Italiano (Italian Social Movement; neofascist, 194695)

NAR Nuclei Armati Rivoluzionari (neofascist, 197781)

NCD Nuovo Centrodestra (centre-right, 201317)

PaP Potere al Popolo (Power to the People)

PCI Partito Comunista Italiano (Italian Communist Party, 192191)

PD Partito Democratico (Democratic Party)

PdCI Partito dei Comunisti Italiani (Party of Italian Communists; communist, 1998present)

PdL Popolo della Libert (People of Freedom, centre-right/Berlusconian, 200913)

PDS Partito Democratico della Sinistra (Democratic Party of the Left; centre-left, 199198)

PRC Partito della Rifondazione Comunista (Communist Refoundation Party; communist, 1991present)

PSDI Partito Socialista Democratico Italiano (Italian Democratic Socialist Party; centre-left, 194798)

PSI Partito Socialista Italiano (Italian Socialist Party; centre-left, 18921994)

RC Rivoluzione Civile (Civic Revolution, far-left, anti-corruption, 2013)

SEL Sinistra Ecologia Libert (Left Ecology Freedom; centre-left, 200916)

SPD Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands (Social Democratic Party; centre-left, 1875present)

UU Uniti nellUlivo (United in the Olive Tree; centre-left, 200407)

As an English resident of Rome, I never cease to hear middle-class Italians singing the praises of a normal country Britain. Seen from Italy, ours is a land of efficient bus services, friendly locals offering up trays of tea and cakes, and earnest professionalism in public life. When one recent Italian president came under criticism in a wiretapping scandal, the countrys leading newspaper lamented the absence of the businesslike respect that supposedly characterises exchanges in the House of Commons.

This isnt the only curious model. As Italy prepared to join the eurozone, one leading editor at La Repubblica issued a book entitled Germanizzazione, characterising the single currency as a German takeover but saying this was a good thing. Mario Monti, who became prime minister in 2011, concurred that if Italy was to become a normal country it would require some external bind what he called denying our own selves a little. What seemed least of all normal in such comments was their obsession with foreign models.

Perhaps we should instead question the idea that Italy is really so unusual. Studies of Italian political history often present it as a patchwork of cultural peculiarities, the anomalous result of late national unification and its position on the periphery of Europe. Yet, in the age of Brexit and Donald Trump, the volatility and fragmentation of Italian public life no longer seem unique. Today, its institutional turmoil is rather less a mark of backwardness and more like a vision of our own future.

Former Trump aide Steve Bannon recognised this in October 2018 when he chose to site his populist academy at a monastery near Rome what he called the centre of the political universe. He came to Italy to learn from Matteo Salvini, the latest leader to turn the countrys politics upside down. After almost three decades in which democratic institutions have withered, Salvini has not just turned his Lega into an all-Italian force but polarised the entire political field around his nationalist agenda.

The last thirty years of turmoil have, indeed, made volatility the new normal in Italian public life. Its parties change names constantly; leading political personnel are prone to outrageous antics; and Italians love to talk about the idiosyncrasies that supposedly make this country beyond comparison. Yet, underneath the noise and colour is a simpler reality a major industrialised power, with deep-rooted democratic traditions that has, in recent decades, sunk into profound economic stagnation and political tumult.

Some commentators tell us that things were always like this that Italy was forever backward and dysfunctional, that it never got over fascism, or that this land of functional illiterates has been prey to demagogues ever since Caesar. Yet what is happening today really is new. In the postwar decades, Italy enjoyed such rapid economic growth that it even surpassed British GDP per capita; its anomaly was precisely that it had a permanent party of government as well as the Wests largest Communist Party, in opposition.

Yet, if this was the normality even into the 1980s, today the opposite holds true. The Second Republic inaugurated after the end of the Cold War has instead seen one of Europes best-performing economies turn into among the weakest, with dismal investment, withering infrastructure, and around a third of young people neither in work nor study. This shift is also reflected in political turmoil, with no force able to impose itself in an enduring way.

In the 1990s, many insisted that the modernisation of Italy relied on the external bind provided by the European project. Italy was, at that point, one of the most federalist countries, seduced by the prospect of becoming a normal country. Back then, not only the liberal centre-left but the Lega Nord and Silvio Berlusconi held up the EU as a force that would heal Italys public finances and improve its political culture. Yet, in 2020, Italians Euroscepticism today rivals even that of their British counterparts.

Europe can little withstand a mounting climate of Italian disaffection. The third-largest eurozone economy, an Italian default or exit from the single currency would spoke wide-scale turmoil. Yet the necessary relief through debt cancellation would jeopardise the eurozones most fundamental dogmas. Both Too Big to Fail and Too Big to Save, Italy is instead condemned to a permanent crisis-management regime, outright collapse forever kicked a few months down the road.