Garvan Walshe is a former national and international securitiy policy adviser to the Conservative Party
An entertainer died last week at the age of 86 – survived by several wives, known for excess, wealth and personal friendship with dictators. He was also four-times Prime Minister of Italy.
The orgies, which he called “bunga-bunga” parties, are not new. Paolo Sorrentino’s marvellous Il Divo, which tells the story of one of Berlusconi’s predecessors, Giulio Andreotti, opens with a sex party and ends with an allusion to Andreotti’s mafia connections.
Andreotti, as prissy as Berlusconi was uncontained, had dominated the Italian centre-right through the Christian Democrats, which imploded in corruption scandals in the 1990s. Its factions ended up with Berlusconi’s Forza Italia in alliance with the successors of Mussolini, which would evolve into the Fratelli d’Italia led by the country’s current Prime Minister, Georgia Meloni.
They’ve all been specialists in the politics of escapism, and the escape they offered was from economic reality. Italy industrialised late, benefiting from a postwar boom that left it with the second-most powerful industrial base in Europe after what was then West Germany. Massive internal migration from the south to the north fuelled these industries, which took full advantage of European economic integration.
But while the north boomed, the south did not. Despite huge transfers of public money and private remittances, it stayed poor. It is too simplistic to claim the money was stolen by the mafia or corrupt local elites, though they certainly helped themselves to this “redistribution” of which Andreotti was one of the main instigators.
The cause is deeper and even more difficult to address: Italy’s agrarian south had no economic purpose. It might have supplied grain since to Roman empire, but changes in transport technology meant that food could be got more cheaply elsewhere from the nineteenth century on. Tourism was a partial replacement, but notwithstanding the treasures of Naples, Palermo and their surroundings, the competition from the rest of Italy (for culture) and the coasts of Spain and Greece (for sun) was fierce.
This prevented Italy from developing a centre-right in the normal European sense, based on support for business and moderate cultural conservatism. Such a party could do well in the north but would struggle beyond (indeed, the secessionist Lega Nord would become exactly such a party in the 1990s).
To stay competitive nationally, the right needed to expand beyond this base, and both the original Christian Democrats and then Berlusconi’s Forza Italia were vehicles for this expansion. They mobilised for the Church and against the left (in one famous 1940s election poster, the Christian Democrats observed “Stalin can’t see you in the voting booth, but God can”).
Berlusconi railed against the communisti, and redistributed government money through patronage. Weak tax collection was supplemented by borrowing, which was high, but mostly domestic. This put pressure on the currency – which devalued (resulting in all those zeroes on Lira notes) – and domestic politics. Though the Christian Democrats dominated post-war politics, they occasionally fell, to be replaced, in essence, by brief interludes in which technocratic economists tried to clean up the mess.
This might have gone on indefinitely — devaluation made export-oriented industry more competitive, and allowed (nominally) large funds to be handed out to underdeveloped regions — had Italy not joined the Euro. Now, its public debt would be supervised by the European Commission and Central Bank and its economic policies put under scrutiny. Worse, from this perspective, devaluation was not an option. In 2011, Berlusconi was unable to withstand pressure from France, Germany and the financial markets, and was replaced by a technocrat, Mario Monti.
Optimists had hoped that this discipline would finally force Italy to reform. Discipline was much in demand in a country where vested interests were prepared to use force: as recently as 2002, an adviser in charge of labour reform was gunned down by the Red Brigades. Discipline was not Berlusconi’s strong suit. Technocratic governments attempted to supply it, but were usually voted out when their medicine proved unpopular.
Italy’s most recent technocratic government, led by the former ECB chief, Mario Draghi, took advantage of the pandemic to negotiate an economic package with the EU that would outlast its term in office. It relies on money connected to the EU’s Recovery and Resillience Plan that is to be disbursed over the next few years. Meloni is stuck with its implementation.
Despite comparisons to Margaret Thatcher, Meloni appears to have few economic ideas of her own (the main ones to emerge from her administration have been bans on artificial meat and Chat GPT, and an attempt to block electronic payments and return to cash).
Keeping the economy off the agenda also suits her coalition, which would otherwise be beset by division between the Lega (though it dropped the ‘Nord’ from its name, it has also returned to its northern base), which wants to keep money where it was earned, and her own party, which needs to redistribute it to the south. This would leave her free to concentrate on a culture war against her main left-wing opponent, Elly Schlein, who seems equally determined to avoid economic policy.
Berlusconi may have died, and his flamboyance rests with him in his personal mausoleum, but his Andreotti-style governance is very much alive.