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__NEWS__Italy_________________________
A Watershed Vote
The clear-cut victory of a center-right coalition shows the enduring strength of the
Catholic vote, and furnishes the opportunity for an effort to “re-Christianize” Italy.
By Alberto Carosa
For one day, Italy looked like Florida. That was the comparison being made by observers watching the chaos that reigned over the country’s national elections, with countless voters waiting long hours in line at polling stations across the country.
The polls were scheduled to close at 10 pm on Sunday, May 13, but some had to stay open. In Naples the voting continued until 1:30 in the morning; in Rome until 2:15. In Reggio Calabria, one polling station was open until 4:00 on Monday morning.
The chaos was produced by three factors working together. The voter turnout was higher than usual. The number of voting stations had been reduced—from 90,000 to 60,000 nationwide—as a result of a budget in which the outgoing center-left government made a bid to slash spending. And the complex voting system, which in some localities involved five different ballots for national and local elections, caused voters to spend extra time puzzling over their options.
Unlike last year’s drawn-out drama in Florida, however, the looming cloud of confusion in Italy was quickly dispelled by the huge margin of victory won by the center-right coalition. The Polo delle Liberta, also known as the Freedom Front, finished ahead of the rival center-left Olive Tree coalition by over 5.3 million votes. For purposes of comparison, the Polo had finished ahead by a margin of 210,000 votes in the previous general elections of 1996, but those elections were nevertheless “won” by their Olive Tree opponents, thanks to the perverse effects of an awkward electoral system which seems to have been designed to make winners into losers and losers into winners.
(In the present Italian voting system, 75 percent of the seats in parliament are decided by straight “first past the post” votes in individual districts. The remaining 25 percent of the seats are meted out in a scheme of proportional representation, which ensures that smaller parties will have some representation even if they are unable to win head-to-head contests. Thus the leaders of small parties are able to secure seats even when they are soundly rejected by the voters in their own constituencies.)
In this year’s voting, the oddities of the voting system were overshadowed by the magnitude of the center-right victory. The Polo coalition, led by media magnate Silvio Berlusconi, won a clear-cut decision. The bloc won 18.5 million votes, gaining absolute majorities of 177 seats in the 324-seat Senate and 368 seats in the 630-seat Chamber of Deputies. In percentage terms, Berlusconi’s coalition garnered 49.5 percent of the vote, while the Olive Tree coalition won 35 percent.
An unprecedented switch
Having virtually wiped out the minor political parties that had once played an important role in the formation of governing coalitions, the Italian electorate showed that it favors a “bi-polar,” or two-party system. And the Catholic vote, which went overwhelmingly for the Polo, again played a crucial role in the outcome.
An effort to revive the Christian Democratic (DC) party (for the umpteenth time), under the guidance of seven-time premier Giulio Andreotti, failed miserably, falling short of the 4 percent minimum required for parliamentary representation. But that failure does not mean that Catholics, to whom the DC candidates appealed, have become politically irrelevant. Rather, the Catholic voters have finally come to the realization that the DC party of previous years systematically betrayed the very principles that the party had claimed to support. Divorce, land reform, and abortion were all enforced under DC-led governments; the nation’s abortion law bears Andreotti’s signature.
As a matter of fact, due to the ever-more-rapid secularization of Italy, in all likelihood practicing Catholics no longer account for the majority of the voting population. But their number is still enough to tip the balance of any election, especially in the head-to-head contests. This much was evident in the 1996 elections, when Catholic voters provided important support for the leftist Olive Tree coalition—following the more or less overt lead of most clergymen.
This year, however, the situation was different; the clergy and the Church hierarchy adopted a much more genuine neutral stance, which was taken by many Catholics as tacit permission for a vote on behalf of the Freedom Front. The change in the attitude of Church leaders may have reflected the extremely poor record that the Olive Tree government coalition compiled with regard to issues on which the Church takes a strong stand, such as the defense of life, the protection of the family, equitable funding for (mostly Catholic) private schools, and the fight against poverty.
Many commentators have compared these elections to those of April 18, 1948, when the Italian people were called to choose between the free Western world and the Soviet bloc, and overwhelmingly chose the former. The Wall Street Journal saw the result as “an epic event for Italy, probably a turning point for Europe.”
The emergence of the Polo as a majority party, with the accompanying sound defeat of the Olive Tree government, was quite literally an unprecedented result. Paolo Mieli, the former editor of the daily Corriere della Sera, made the observation: “For the first time, a new majority is taking over from the previous one.” Writing in Il Giornale, Mieli explained:
We were the only democratic country where, from the inception of the unitary state in 1861 until now, never—I stress, never—had a majority government chosen by the voters been replaced after an election by another majority from the other side.
Another columnist writing in Il Giornale, Antonio Socci, observed that the break from “Italy’s historic anomaly” could have a devastating effect on the morale of the political left. He wrote:
What in any other country is recognized as the law of nature—the possibility of losing an election and becoming the opposition, fairly acknowledging the opponents’ legitimacy to govern—is being suffered by the prevailing political, intellectual, journalistic, and generally nepotistic establishment as the very demise of democracy.
In other words, the Italian “establishment” saw the outcome of the elections as if it were the end of the world. In Socci’s opinion, this reaction reflects the original Marxist background of the Italian left, and its consequent tendency to see opponents as “enemies of the people” who must by definition be morally infamous. That analysis would help to explain the relentless campaign of demonization employed against Berlusconi during the electoral campaign.
Selective prosecution?
Instead of being criticized on the merits of his political platform, Berlusconi was accused of being unfit to govern because of his vast personal wealth and questions that surrounded it: questions about his extensive holdings in television and other media, and about his past trials on corruption charges. The vilification campaign by the Italian media was supported by reports from elsewhere in Europe, notably in France and the United Kingdom. But the results suggest that the campaign backfired, perhaps even winning more votes for the
Polo coalition. Unimpressed by the sorts of accusations that have dogged Berlusconi throughout his political career, Italian voters apparently shrugged off concerns about his potential conflicts of interest, and listened sympathetically when he complained that he was the victim of an orchestrated plot among left-wing judges and journalists.
The political left accused Berlusconi of building up his political fortunes by using the three private television networks that he controls, whereas his political rivals have no such media power. The London-based Financial Times worried that if he became prime minister, “Berlusconi would be perceived to be in charge of almost the entire broadcasting system in Italy.” But these complaints cannot be taken at face value. As American commentator George Will pointed out, the critics who worry about the influence of Berlusconi’s media outlets “are notably less worried about the leftist tilt of Italian state television.”
Ever since its inception some 40 years ago, the national government-controlled RAI television network has been dominated by left-of-center influences. The resulting ideological bias (which at one stage Berlusconi termed as “military occupation”) could not have been more blatantly evident than it was in the months prior to the elections, with one program after another probing Berlusconi’s alleged ties to the Mafia. A top RAI official defended the network’s campaign coverage by saying that producers “aimed to give equal access to both sides, while taking into account the fact that one of the contenders had an advantage thanks to the possession of three TV channels.”
Berlusconi was also roundly criticized for having set up his television empire in partnership with the former Socialist leader and premier, Bettino Craxi, who has subsequently been disgraced by convictions on corruption charges. But is there anything wrong, in principle, with a broad-based bid to break up the television monopoly of a secular state? By working together with a sometime political opponent, Berlusconi provided an expansion of freedom for all Italians. (If the moral tone of his own television stations leaves much to be desired—and does not square well with his pledge to support the family and uphold public morality—that is another question.)
As for the allegations of corruption, Berlusconi has been accused of money laundering, tax evasion, bribery, and complicity with the Mafia. The Financial Times reported that “for seven years he has been hounded by public prosecutors seeking to have him jailed on charges of bribery and tax evasion relating to his business activities.” In fact, after those years of scrutiny Berlusconi has a clean slate; his three convictions of corruption-related charges were overthrown by an appeals court (four separate charges are still pending), while he was cleared of Mafia involvement in February 1997 and of money laundering in December 1999.
But then again, for the purposes of the campaign the final record of guilt or innocence was less important than the general impression that Berlusconi had engaged in questionable enterprises. One might even say that prosecutors have shown an inordinate interest in his alleged financial irregularities, and have only themselves to blame for the fact that they have been unable to produce a lasting conviction.
Some analysts would go further in criticizing the prosecutors. The Daily Telegraph charged that in Italy “the judiciary is strongly politicized, and many prosecuting judges have formed an alliance with the left.” Nor is the Telegraph alone in that opinion. In his book The Italian Guillotine, the American analyst Stanton Burnett writes that the Milan-based team of magistrates who became known as the Clean Hands alliance were essentially engaged in a political ploy when they launched a sweeping corruption probe ten years ago. Their goal, he says, was to undermine the moderate parties—beginning with the Christian Democrats—so that the Communists could take control. The former Russian dissident Vladimir Bukovsky also remarked, “The ‘Clean Hands’ helped the Italian Communists ascend to power.” It is certainly a fact that the Communist Party and its ideological successors have formed the only part of the Italian political establishment that survived intact through the corruption investigations of the early 1990s, so that they could become an important part of the Olive Tree coalition.
Gramsci’s strategy
The influence being wielded by judges who are aligned with the political left should not come as a surprise to anyone familiar with “Gramsci’s lessons.” Antonio Gramsci (1891-1937), Italy’s most important Marxist theorist, argued that in the West, in order for Communists to seize and maintain power, it was absolutely necessary to win what he termed “cultural hegemony” in civic society at large: the control of institutions, media outlets, public and private corporations, professional associations, labor unions, and universities. Under the influence of Gramsci’s teaching, in the aftermath of World War II Communist leader Palmiro Togliatti maneuvered to become the justice minister in Italy’s first post-war government.
For more than 50 years the hard-line Italian left has been building up its power in the nation’s institutions, exploiting the reluctance of the moderate parties—especially the Christian Democrats—to engage in open ideological combat. Historian Roberto de Mattei has noted: “The center is ideologically and psychologically inclined to compromise—inclined to a kind of moderation which has nothing to do with the Christian virtue of moderation.” He adds: “The mistake of the center is the mistake of political modernism: it is the rejection of doctrinal firmness, unwavering principles, and consistent ideals.”
Once again, the prescient Gramsci saw how Communists could profit from the moderates’ penchant for compromise. In fact he hailed the establishment of the Popular Party, the precursor of the Christian Democrats. The bitterly anti-Catholic Gramsci wrote: “The establishment of the Popular Party is as important as the German Reformation. It is the unconscious, compelling explosion of the Italian Reformation.”
But Gramsci did not predict the destruction of the Christian Democrats by the Clean Hands probe, and he might have been surprised to learn that even after the virtual disappearance of the Christian Democrats, the conservative Catholic political base on which that party was originally formed still remained intact. In dismay, the French Nouvel Observateur pronounced its surprise that Italy “is still so incredibly imbued with religious sentiment.” And the Rome daily La Repubblica pointed out that the center-left coalition lost a critical element of support in the summer of 2000, when the Italian bishops were “humiliated” by the “challenge, insult, and blasphemy” of the Gay Pride festival in Rome. Many leaders of the Olive Tree coalition were at the head of the parade in that festival—a fact that Catholic voters did not forget.
But the center-right Polo coalition could have won by an even bigger margin had it pulled more vigorously on the ideological string. Avvenire, the semi-official mouthpiece of Italy’s bishops conference, noted how heavily the most militant secularists and anti-clericalists were punished by the voters in the head-to-head contests. The most resounding case was that of the outgoing minister of the environment, Willer Bordon, who distinguished himself for his virulent campaign against Vatican Radio. (See Follow Up, page 24.) Badly defeated in his own constituency, Bordon retained a seat in parliament only by virtue of his Green Party’s proportional quota.
Defeat for Radicals
Equally noteworthy was the voters’ verdict on the firebrand Emma Bonino, a former European Union commissioner, and her Radical Party ticket led by Marco Pannella. The Radicals hardly mustered just 2 percent of the vote—well below the 4 percent needed to secure a place in parliament. As Panella lamented, the Radicals were “for the first time since 1975 thoroughly wiped out.” Bonino said that she felt she had been “thrown out by my own country.”
The Radicals were the leaders of the referendum battles in the 1970s that resulted in the legalization of divorce and abortion. More recently they have been campaigning for homosexual rights, as part of a broader campaign to eliminate discrimination against any sexual orientation whatsoever. The Radicals are probably the only political party in the world to have a porn star (Hungarian-born Ilona Staller) elected to represent them in parliament.
Now Panella and Bonino are at the forefront of a movement to advance an aggressively libertarian, or “anti-prohibitionist,” agenda. Their ideological concerns include such familiar issues as legalization of drugs, euthanasia, homosexual unions, and genetic experimentation. But they have gone further, pushing for the “new civil rights” that include even the rights of pedophiles. They pursue their goals through action on two fronts: efforts to eliminate any legal censorship or restriction whatsoever on sexuality, and attacks on those who are most prominent in the fight against pedophilia.
Among those most readily identified with the opposition to pedophilia are a Catholic priest, Father Fortunato di Noto, founder of Telefono Arcobaleno (the “rainbow help line”) and the Associazone Famiglia Domani, led by Fabio Bernabei. It was Bernabei who called the Radicals to account in a hard-hitting study entitled “Does the Radical Party Promote Pedophilia?” In that work he relies not on speculation but on recorded facts. For example, a national leader of the Radical Party, Daniele Capezzone, defended his party’s stance in a debate by saying:
Pedophilia, like any other sexual orientation . . . may not be viewed as an offense per se. It might become so when it translates into patterns of behavior which harm others. But the criminalization of pedophilia as such —as a category, and not because of possibly violent conduct—is intolerable.
Capezzone was making a distinction between violent and non-violent pedophilia. But Fabio Bernabei argued that pedophilia is always violent—in psychological if not physical terms. “The legitimization of sexual intercourse between adults and children,” he argues, is part of “a process of dissolution of Christian principles and institutions.”
In Italy the scourge of pedophilia is protected and promoted by a powerful political lobby. Father Di Noto (who had to temporarily close down his organization because of death threats) points out that the Radical Party was able to arrange a polite debate on pedophilia—under the guise of a discussion on Internet censorship—in Italy’s upper house of parliament, the Senate. Remarkably, the proceedings did not result in a condemnation of pedophilia. On the contrary, the sponsors of the debate contended that “being pedophiles, proclaiming oneself to be a pedophile, or supporting the legitimacy of pedophilia may not be regarded as criminal offenses in a state based on the rule of law.” A public prosecutor who has been in the vanguard of the fight against pedophilia, Alfredo Ormanni, reported that he had been shocked to realize that during that Senate debate, “the attitude of many participants was not adverse to pedophilia.” He termed Capezzone’s distinction between violent and non-violent pedophilia as simply “appalling.”
The death threats against Father Di Noto cannot be dismissed lightly, either. Police in Rome recently broke up a group that called itself the Pedophile Liberation Front, which had set up an armed wing to carry out terrorist raids on their enemies. These enemies—according to a manifesto saved on the computer of one member of the organization—include priests, judges, police officers, and all others who firmly oppose the sexual abuse of children. “If in order to educate Italians I have to kill 1,000, 10,000, or 100,000 of those enemies,” the anonymous ideologue wrote, “for me it’s OK, I’ll do it.” Police in Rome emphasize that these were not merely idle boasts nor lunatic ravings; the would-be terrorists had already drafted plans for the use of chemical weapons.
The Catholic moment
When Berlusconi first won the general elections in March 1994, Catholic analysts made a few observations that still apply today. The fall of a leftist coalition is more important than the victory of the center-right alliance. The latter is only the first step on a path that could possibly lead to the moral and material recovery of Italy. The ultimate goal, as expressed by the president of the Italian bishops’ conference, Cardinal Camillo Ruini, must be to “re-Christianize Rome.” But just as he broke the state monopoly in television, Berlusconi has now broken the left’s grip on political power. Thus he has paved the way for Catholics to be duly represented in the national political scheme.
In 1994 it took only six months for the left to undermine Berlusconi’s ruling coalition. In that earlier effort, the media tycoon and his allies had been voted into power, but their “cultural hegemony”—their control of the actual centers of power in the media and the courts of public opinion—was not sufficient to keep them in place. Gramsci’s lessons were useful once again. Is the same sequence of events likely to be repeated?
The situation in 2001 appears different, in several important respects, from that of 1994. The center-right coalition is much more unified; the center-left is much more divided. Certainly the leaders of the Catholic Church in Italy have seen a new opportunity for constructive change. Just hours after the votes were counted, Pope John Paul II—echoing what the Italian bishops’ conference had said a few days earlier—called for the abolition of the country’s 1981 law legalizing abortion; he also reiterated the Church’s opposition to euthanasia. “A commitment in favor of families cannot be separated from the defense of human life, from conception to its natural death,” the Pontiff said.
Such calls for a rollback of liberal secular initiatives were rarely made while Christian Democrats were in power in Italy. As one analyst, Father Baget Bozzo, remarked, “The Church’s requests were thought to be incorporated in the party platform. They were not.”
The bitterness of this year’s electoral campaign may therefore be explained by the fears on the political left that if Berlusconi ascended to power once again, he could finally put the country’s Catholics in a position to make their influence felt, slowly but surely implementing the vision outlined by Pope Pius XII a generation ago, gradually reversing the steps that have been taken to eliminate Italy’s Christian identity.
Alberto Carosa is an Italian journalist.