The Italian writer and painter Carlo Levi once famously compared the enigma of Italy to an artichoke, saying that every leaf hides another, that every layer covers another layer that is “jealously hidden”. This week, however, a knife has sliced through the artichoke in one go. The subtleties and secrets of the peninsula have been ruthlessly cut away to reveal, at the artichoke’s heart, an economy and a political system that are in very deep trouble.
Perhaps not surprisingly, that knife was wielded by “the markets”. Silvio Berlusconi tried one last attempt to persuade everyone that things were fine: “The restaurants are full” was his jaunty analysis. But no one’s buying his bull any more, especially wily investors. Yields on Italian 10-year bonds peaked at 7.28% this week and, by the time you read this, that peak will almost certainly have been surpassed. The country is now at precisely the stage at which Ireland, Greece and Portugal all had to reach for the begging bowl.
The political system, too, has been shown to be completely doolally. For years the thugs of the Northern League have propped up the personality cult of Berlusconi, allowing him to win more than 50 votes of confidence. Despite the epic pomposity of that far-right coalition, absolutely nothing was done to address the country’s acute economic woes. Berlusconi chased teenagers, Umberto Bossi puffed on expensive cigars, Ignazio La Russa ranted about Inter Milan … there wasn’t a decent, honest leader among the lot of them. They simply partied while the country edged ever closer to the abyss.
Picking up the pieces is going to be very slow and painful, and Italy may become a very different country in the process. Austerity measures will kick in, meaning taxes and unemployment and poverty will rise. But in many ways, it’s hard to imagine how things can get any worse than they are already. It’s not as if this week signalled the end of the party. For most Italians, the party ended a very long time ago: growth over the past 15 years has been a slovenly 0.75%; unemployment currently stands at 8.3%; the influential Catholic charity Caritas estimates that 8 million Italians are now living in poverty. If the country isn’t yet at rock bottom, it’s hard to think there’s much further to go.
In fact, rather surprisingly, some people think that things may now actually start looking up. Economically, it’s obviously going to be tough, but the cost of many products and services might actually come down. Anyone who has been on holiday to Italy recently will know that the country is astonishingly expensive: a short taxi ride in a tiny town can cost more than a cab across London; the price of clothes is eye-watering; pharmaceutical products are often double or treble what they are here. Insurance, notaries, postage, domestic bills – you name it, they are pricey.
Life is expensive because protectionism is rife. Many professions have an ordine, an “association”, that effectively fixes prices. Various governments have tried to introduce competition, most notably Romano Prodi’s, but they have often found it a vote-loser. They have bottled and made compromises before the effect – fair prices – trickled down to voters. In most countries, taxis queue to pick up punters; in Italy, it’s the reverse. Just look what it’s like next time you step out at Milan’s central railway station. You might be waiting half an hour for a cab because they restrict entrance to the “association” and fight ferociously against the introduction of licensed mini-cabs.
An incoming government might be able to face down those vested interests because a “technocratic” government – the most likely solution at time of writing – will be apolitical. It doesn’t have to worry about the vengeance of voters. That’s what happened under Carlo Azeglio Ciampi in the early 1990s: the former governor of the Bank of Italy could dose out the right medicine without worrying about his political career.
It might be wildly optimistic, but reforms might even introduce the one thing for which, more than anything else, the country is desperate: meritocracy. Everyone knows that it’s almost impossible to get a job in Italy on merit alone. One needs a raccomandazione, a recommendation or referral. You have to be a figlio di…, a son, or daughter, of some big wig. All of which means there has been an incredible brain-drain from Italy in recent decades: bright youngsters have fled the country looking for a job and a salary that match their skills. If, in tight economic times, performance suddenly becomes more important than who your relations are, some of those emigre brains might book a return ticket.
And that might mean that service improves. If you have flown Alitalia recently, or tried to deal with Telecom Italia, you’ll know that the customer service isn’t exactly a strong point of the Italian workforce. I used to get weary of the UK’s “have-a-nice-day”, American-style service until I moved to Italy in the late 1990s. Suddenly, I saw the alternative: a sourpuss at the railway station sat behind glass so thick you couldn’t hear a word he said; the jobsworth at the post office who shrugged at the news that a package had gone missing. I finally understood why the great writer, Norman Douglas, had once been so damning of Italian bureaucrats: their “only intelligible expression”, he once wrote, “is one of malice striving to break through a crust of congenital cretinism”. If reforms mean that jobs-for-life disappear, some public servants might realise who they’re supposed to be serving.
Austerity might also strengthen the most well-known building block of Italian society: the family. Many foreigners are rather sneering when they observe extended families living in the same block of flats, if not the same flat. It creates childish, immature grownups, they say. It’s not usually true at all, and what those criticisms fail to realise is not only the fact that living together is very often an economic, rather than an emotional, choice (wages are extraordinarily low: the average monthly pay packet is €1,286 [£1,100] net); they also ignore the fact that the strength of the family is the reason that Italy’s social fabric is so much better knitted than Britain’s. And there are useful economic consequences: almost every successful business is built upon the family. Benetton, Fiat, Ferrari, Panini – all were created by many siblings, or many generations, of one family. If austerity means relatives have to huddle once again under the same roof, it might be claustrophobic, but at least it might mean that Italy, once again, resists the disintegration of the family unit.
Also, the optimists say, the situation may not be anything like as bad as it appears: Italy’s debt is clearly massive: €1.9tn euros. But that’s only 120.5% of GDP compared with, for example, 162.8% for Greece. And while the public debt is large, the level of private debt isn’t. Unlike in the UK, Italians are savers rather than borrowers. Almost every family, even those with very modest means, has a second house in the country somewhere. The times ahead might be tough, but Italians know better than most how to arrangiarsi, how to “get by”.
Most importantly, the decline of Berlusconi may coincide with a concerted assault on organised crime in the country. The impetus won’t only be moral but financial: the black economy in Italy is estimated to be as much as 20%, a colossal figure that could be tapped and taxed if the state were sufficiently courageous to tackle Cosa Nostra and all the other mafias.
That, at least, is the optimistic view. The more pessimistic, possibly realistic, one is that Berlusconi won’t even really be out of power. He’ll no longer be the prime minister but, with his epic media empire still intact, he’ll always be the king-maker, able to make or break a government. He will effectively hold a veto on all major decisions. In recent years his TV channels and newspapers and magazines have hammered anyone, including Gianfranco Fini, who dared to criticise him. There’s no doubt that the same will happen to anyone who threatens his empire and, especially, his immunity. He will always be the elephant in the room.
There’s also a danger, as has happened before, that he will cleverly be in opposition while the tough decisions are made and will then romp to victory once they’re complete. Romano Prodi was, like Ciampi, a serious economist who forced unpopular medicine on the electorate; Berlusconi sat it out for a couple of years between 2006 and 2008 and then won another landslide. Unless he definitively leaves the scene, there’s always a chance that, like a fading but greedy boxer, he’ll keep coming back for more, exciting and disappointing everyone who watches him.
An alternative consequence of austerity measures might not be the strengthening of the family, but the introduction of the kind of rootlessness and mobility that Italy has, until now, largely avoided. The vast majority of Italians stay in the town or city where they grew up: an ambitious careerist can remain in, say, Turin or Bari because it’s a much less capital-centric country than most. If “precariousness”, as Italians pejoratively call working flexibility, really becomes the employment norm, the luxury of living for ever near your childhood friends might become increasingly rare. And with that might go one of the most attractive sides of the country: the leisurely pace and gentle rhythm. It’s no surprise that the Slow Food movement, and associated go-slow off-shoots, started in Italy. It’s a place where people don’t, on the whole, run for buses and it has so far, thankfully, avoided the freneticism of Britain. If working hours and commutes start getting longer, that may be a thing of the past.
But perhaps most worryingly, the country has a long history of extremist violence. Hopefully, the anni di piombo, the so-called “years of lead” from the late 60s to early 80s, are a thing of the past, but it wouldn’t be a surprise to see extra-parliamentary protests once again turning nasty. There are plenty of disaffected voters on the far right and far left who are fed up with their old leaders reinventing themselves as sober centrists and who would rather return to the heady days of muscle and truncheon, if not worse. In addition to that, there are many outside the mainstream who struggle to understand why Italians had to put up with austerity measures in the late 1990s to enter the euro, and are now having to introduce them again to stay in it. Parties such as the Northern League have long expressed contempt for the European project and if other parties find it politically convenient to be anti-European, there’s a remote chance that Italy will find itself seceding from the euro. The country that aspires to be taken as seriously as France and Germany may find itself once again compared with Greece and Portugal.
That, perhaps, will be the longest lasting effect of this crisis: Italy has always had a problem of self-esteem. One of the most common sentences you’ll hear in bars throughout the peninsula is: “The problem with our country is …” Throughout literature, Italian writers have compared the country to a prostitute, beautiful and enticing, but also ageing, possibly dodgy and with no self-respect. Berlusconi has always been very wily at toying with that inferiority complex, portraying himself and Italians in general as victims of snooty, finger-wagging foreigners (Mussolini, incidentally, used the same tactic). Were the country to leave the euro, or even become part of a second tier, that fragile self-esteem would take another hit.
Nor, sadly, will the decline of Berlusconi necessarily mean the end of mafia links to parliament. Before Berlusconi there was Giulio Andreotti, a seven-times prime minister who had proven links to Cosa Nostra; and after him there will, probably, be another politician who casts a wistful eye towards Sicily and the south, eager for the votes, and majorities, that certain organisations seem able to deliver. And if that happens, the politician will have to cut a deal. Things will become murky once more. The first victim will, as in warfare, be the truth. And after a brief glimpse at the heart, the artichoke leaves will once again hide and disguise what’s really going on. – source – Tobias Jones – The Guardian
An adroit, painfully accurate analysis for the most part — but missing a significant point. In his general lambasting of contemporary Italian society, Tobias Jones asserts that the celebrated Italian family is the nation’s final and greatest strength. What this overlooks is the remarkable decline of the family here, in absolute size as well as social role. Over the past twenty years, Italy has had one of the lowest birthrates in the world — indeed, in history! The resultant ageing of the population poses an additional heavy burden on a nation already struggling with grossly dysfunctional government bureaucracy and crumbling infrastructure.