John Lloyd

The great Italian caricaturist Altan had a cartoon on the front of La Repubblica last week, in which an Italian is sinking below the waves, shouting: “I’m drowning!” On the beach, a fat man whose swimsuit sports the German national colors, says: “Zat is how you learn, zpendthrift!”

This in a left-of-center daily that is supportive of the crisis plan of Italian Prime Minister Mario Monti and has set its face against anti-German populism. The press of the right has been less restrained: A recent front-page photo of German Chancellor Angela Merkel showed her with a hand upraised, perhaps to wave — but vaguely reminiscent of Adolf Hitler’s minimalist Nazi salute, with the headline “Fourth Reich.” The article claimed that two world wars and millions of corpses were “not enough to quiet German egomania”. This in Il Giornale, a Milan daily owned by the Berlusconi family.

I smiled at the Altan cartoon on an Italian beach, where I was last week, looking about for signs of desperation. They were not dramatic, but observable. Simply, fewer people came. The soaring cost of petrol, which went over the 2-euro mark for a liter, was generally held to be the main culprit for the reduction in the annual hunt for the sun. It was little problem to hire a beach umbrella, to book a table for dinner, even to park. While most summers the political news is absent or silly, this year the Italian papers chronicled, daily, the fever chart of the Italian and European economy, and it was febrile indeed — now a spurt of optimism, now a stab of doom.

The technocratic government led by Mario Monti, distinguished economist and former European commissioner, has seen little of the beach. The elected politicians, free from the usual business of government or opposition, were active, too: The political scene is as boiling hot as the climate. The left remains fractured and struggles for alliances and unity. The new populists, led by the comedian Beppe Grillo’s Five Stars movement, remain attractive to many because of Grillo’s attacks on a partly corrupt political class. Yet he calls for an end to parliamentary politics, having run a blog column with a picture of Benito Mussolini, the prewar dictator, that evoked with approval his description of parliament (which he dissolved) as “deaf and gray.”

In the center, a loose coalition of Christian Democrats and secular liberals invoke the spirit and memory of Alcide de Gasperi, Italy’s long-serving postwar premier — who presided over the rapid recovery of the economy in the fifties and positioned Italy as a founding member of what became the European Union. It seeks to tempt Monti into heading the Christian Democrats and running for elected office after his temporary mandate ends next April.

On the right, the immortal Silvio Berlusconi again dominates attention. The near-universal assumption, one that I shared, that his resignation last November, amid jeers and a collapse in the support for his Forza Italia party, meant his political end underestimated his will for power. Or, say the many cynics, it didn’t take into account his fear that if he does not retain some measure of political power he will finally enter the maw of the justice system, which has tried to nail him for a quarter of a century. He has been addressing the still-faithful around the country, secure (he says) in the love of the people and in his country’s need of him. He is on trial in Milan for encouraging underage prostitution, and this past weekend a German model, Sabina Began, told the daily Il Fatto Quotidiano that he had impregnated her, and that she lost the child in a miscarriage (he denies it). But this is still a country for old men, and at 75, this old man has the money and the media and evidently the stomach for another fight.

For the moment, though, Italy is Monti’s charge and care, and though he cuts and cuts, warns of hardships to come, and has no charisma in any conventional sense, he remains popular among an electorate desperate for him to succeed. And not just with the people: Both Moody’s and Fitch rating agencies lauded him last week, the latter saying he was “credible” and that if and when he leaves the scene, greater risks return. No hint of a scandal has attended him, and nothing serious of the kind in his cabinet, composed mainly of high-end academics. The political circus around him can look tawdry.

But the beasts in the political circus were chosen by the people. Pierluigi Bersani, leader of the main center-left party, Partito Democratico, said in an interview with Repubblica last week that Monti had done a fine job but must stand aside in the spring — for “if the idea catches on that politics is not able to take us out of the crisis, we will put ourselves on the margins of the democracies.” Bersani sometimes struggles to present himself as a credible premier if the left were to win the next elections, but he spoke well here. For Italy to continue under the tutelage of the professors would both further weaken the party system and raise deeper doubts than ever that it could produce an elected, efficient, clean ruling class.

But suppose the political class of any color really is incapable of taking the country out of the crisis? In a speech last week in Rimini to a Catholic youth group, Monti spoke about the need to restore Italians’ faith in the state — a faith that can be regained only if the many Italians who now cheat the taxman cease to do so, and others, including the public broadcaster RAI, stop regarding the avoiders as merely crafty, even admirable, for being so. The country, he said — in a rare flash of drama, even melodrama — was “at war” with the tax cheats. “We can’t broadcast, even subliminally, the degraded values which are destroying our society”

The belief that he seeks to invoke is less in the state and more in a citizenship where everyone exercises mutual responsibilities. This unelected, precise, rather lofty man presents the nature and obligations of democracy better than any elected Italian politician I have heard. Many of these will, indeed, share this thought, but the daily battle for power and attention in a political system as complex and fragmented as the Italian, which gives so many privileges to the elected, leaves too little time and will for the observance of democratic ideals.

Italy has put in place a dictator-expert to make politics safe for elected politicians once more. The paradox is that he is better at articulating democratic necessities than the latter have been. The capacity for these politicians to rise to his level and to make politics serve the electorate, through the bad times which will roll on after Monti, is the test of tests before this country — even, given its size and importance, before Europe. The signs that they will are, as yet, fragile: The shadows of doubts about the future fell across the scorching beaches this summer, and are likely to remain.

The great Italian caricaturist Altan had a cartoon on the front of La Repubblica last week, in which an Italian is sinking below the waves, shouting: “I’m drowning!” On the beach, a fat man whose swimsuit sports the German national colors, says: “Zat is how you learn, zpendthrift!”

This in a left-of-center daily that is supportive of the crisis plan of Italian Prime Minister Mario Monti and has set its face against anti-German populism. The press of the right has been less restrained: A recent front-page photo of German Chancellor Angela Merkel showed her with a hand upraised, perhaps to wave — but vaguely reminiscent of Adolf Hitler’s minimalist Nazi salute, with the headline “Fourth Reich.” The article claimed that two world wars and millions of corpses were “not enough to quiet German egomania”. This in Il Giornale, a Milan daily owned by the Berlusconi family.

I smiled at the Altan cartoon on an Italian beach, where I was last week, looking about for signs of desperation. They were not dramatic, but observable. Simply, fewer people came. The soaring cost of petrol, which went over the 2-euro mark for a liter, was generally held to be the main culprit for the reduction in the annual hunt for the sun. It was little problem to hire a beach umbrella, to book a table for dinner, even to park. While most summers the political news is absent or silly, this year the Italian papers chronicled, daily, the fever chart of the Italian and European economy, and it was febrile indeed — now a spurt of optimism, now a stab of doom.

The technocratic government led by Mario Monti, distinguished economist and former European commissioner, has seen little of the beach. The elected politicians, free from the usual business of government or opposition, were active, too: The political scene is as boiling hot as the climate. The left remains fractured and struggles for alliances and unity. The new populists, led by the comedian Beppe Grillo’s Five Stars movement, remain attractive to many because of Grillo’s attacks on a partly corrupt political class. Yet he calls for an end to parliamentary politics, having run a blog column with a picture of Benito Mussolini, the prewar dictator, that evoked with approval his description of parliament (which he dissolved) as “deaf and gray.”

In the center, a loose coalition of Christian Democrats and secular liberals invoke the spirit and memory of Alcide de Gasperi, Italy’s long-serving postwar premier — who presided over the rapid recovery of the economy in the fifties and positioned Italy as a founding member of what became the European Union. It seeks to tempt Monti into heading the Christian Democrats and running for elected office after his temporary mandate ends next April.

On the right, the immortal Silvio Berlusconi again dominates attention. The near-universal assumption, one that I shared, that his resignation last November, amid jeers and a collapse in the support for his Forza Italia party, meant his political end underestimated his will for power. Or, say the many cynics, it didn’t take into account his fear that if he does not retain some measure of political power he will finally enter the maw of the justice system, which has tried to nail him for a quarter of a century. He has been addressing the still-faithful around the country, secure (he says) in the love of the people and in his country’s need of him. He is on trial in Milan for encouraging underage prostitution, and this past weekend a German model, Sabina Began, told the daily Il Fatto Quotidiano that he had impregnated her, and that she lost the child in a miscarriage (he denies it). But this is still a country for old men, and at 75, this old man has the money and the media and evidently the stomach for another fight.

For the moment, though, Italy is Monti’s charge and care, and though he cuts and cuts, warns of hardships to come, and has no charisma in any conventional sense, he remains popular among an electorate desperate for him to succeed. And not just with the people: Both Moody’s and Fitch rating agencies lauded him last week, the latter saying he was “credible” and that if and when he leaves the scene, greater risks return. No hint of a scandal has attended him, and nothing serious of the kind in his cabinet, composed mainly of high-end academics. The political circus around him can look tawdry.

But the beasts in the political circus were chosen by the people. Pierluigi Bersani, leader of the main center-left party, Partito Democratico, said in an interview with Repubblica last week that Monti had done a fine job but must stand aside in the spring — for “if the idea catches on that politics is not able to take us out of the crisis, we will put ourselves on the margins of the democracies.” Bersani sometimes struggles to present himself as a credible premier if the left were to win the next elections, but he spoke well here. For Italy to continue under the tutelage of the professors would both further weaken the party system and raise deeper doubts than ever that it could produce an elected, efficient, clean ruling class.

But suppose the political class of any color really is incapable of taking the country out of the crisis? In a speech last week in Rimini to a Catholic youth group, Monti spoke about the need to restore Italians’ faith in the state — a faith that can be regained only if the many Italians who now cheat the taxman cease to do so, and others, including the public broadcaster RAI, stop regarding the avoiders as merely crafty, even admirable, for being so. The country, he said — in a rare flash of drama, even melodrama — was “at war” with the tax cheats. “We can’t broadcast, even subliminally, the degraded values which are destroying our society”

The belief that he seeks to invoke is less in the state and more in a citizenship where everyone exercises mutual responsibilities. This unelected, precise, rather lofty man presents the nature and obligations of democracy better than any elected Italian politician I have heard. Many of these will, indeed, share this thought, but the daily battle for power and attention in a political system as complex and fragmented as the Italian, which gives so many privileges to the elected, leaves too little time and will for the observance of democratic ideals.

Italy has put in place a dictator-expert to make politics safe for elected politicians once more. The paradox is that he is better at articulating democratic necessities than the latter have been. The capacity for these politicians to rise to his level and to make politics serve the electorate, through the bad times which will roll on after Monti, is the test of tests before this country — even, given its size and importance, before Europe. The signs that they will are, as yet, fragile: The shadows of doubts about the future fell across the scorching beaches this summer, and are likely to remain.

Italy, one of the founders of the European Union, is now in the most critical of situations. If many different things do not go well for the bel paese in the next year, it may attract the use of the word “founder” in its other, more sinister meaning: to sink.

As the euro zone crisis – which has traumatized Greece, put painful squeezes on Ireland and Portugal, and now engulfs the banks and the economy of Spain – laps around the beaches of Italy’s peninsula, the mood has soured.

In the past week, interviewing some of Italy’s leading journalists for a book on journalism in Berlusconi’s Italy, the country I found was one of profound doubt. Italian journalists are not the least cynical of their profession and often greet new events with a we’ve-seen-it-all-before shrug. Not now. Now they follow and record and comment on the news with journalism’s customary hyperactivity. But they admit they have no notion of what will come – or even how their country will be governed. What might come is, by large consent, possibly, even probably, bad.

Mario Calabresi is the editor of La Stampa, the liberal daily published in the northern city of Turin and owned by the Agnelli clan, who control Fiat. He’s young for an Italian editor, at 42, and is seen as one of the profession’s brightest stars. He’s also the son of Luigi Calabresi, an officer in the Carabinieri who was murdered in Milan in 1972 at the age of 34 by far-left terrorists. Calabresi says, “I must be an optimist,” but he doesn’t sound like it:

This is a temporary government, and the true issue is what comes after. Unfortunately there aren’t many people with whom to have a debate about the future because there aren’t many real political players. There’s a large risk that next year there will be a trend towards populism, attracting protest votes rather than parties having a proper reformist agenda.

At a quite different place, but with the same lack of optimism, is Vittorio Feltri, in his late sixties, slim, white-haired, and courteous. He has been the doyen of Italian journalism of the right for the past 20 years, bringing some of the techniques of tabloid reporting into the world of Italy’s heavily political newspapers, attacking enemies on the left with both a scalpel and a bludgeon. Speaking in his office in Milan’s Il Giornale daily – owned by the Berlusconi family – he says:

There is no credible political force now; the right is disorganized and split, the left is weak, the center nowhere. Populism is the vogue. What comes after Monti is simply unknown; at present there is nothing.

When Mario Monti took over as prime minister in November, Silvio Berlusconi had lost all credibility with his peers in Europe, and had seen a once-secure base erode over two years of scandal and hollow assurances that all was fine when it was not. Berlusconi pledged the support of his People of Freedom party to Monti, as did the center-left Democratic Party. But now that support wavers as the parties’ power-seekers find it popular to distance themselves from, or even oppose, Monti’s politics of austerity.

Monti himself, in public as precise and calm as ever, talks up the problem rather than disguises it. In an interview last week with the Catholic magazine The Christian Family, he said previous governments had racked up huge debts that had “put a burden on Italians who were then children, or had not even been born – that’s the great harm that was done to families … eighty per cent of our time is taken up trying to secure a country devastated by irresponsibility.”

His government, he said, was in an unprecedented situation: having to impose “very harsh measures, necessary to remedy the failures of the past.” No greater contrast could be imagined between the baroque bluster of Berlusconi and the dispassionate dryness of Monti, in both style and substance. Italy switched, in a day, from a showman to a puritan. Yet whatever relief originally came with the country being in the hands of a grownup, albeit a gloomy one, now dissipates.

This leaves the temptation of populism. The roly-poly figure of Beppe Grillo is its manifestation. A comedian of great talent in his mid-sixties, Grillo’s exasperated incredulity at the corruption and uselessness of the political class has now made its way into politics. In local elections last month, his “Five Stars” civic movement confounded the skeptics, broke through, garnered some 15 percent of the vote nationally and won the mayoral seats of several towns.

Both right and left are transfixed by ”Grillismo”. Some of the up-and-coming figures of the left are pressing for an alliance with Grillo, or the creation of their own “civic lists” of ordinary, non-party people who will enter politics without the taint of a failing party system. Berlusconi is widely reported to be examining the possibility of becoming “Grillismo” of the right. He’s rallying those in the working and lower-middle classes who had been enchanted by his own brand of populism for nearly two decades. He believes, it is reported, that they can be roused once more by a leader who, at 75, seems still to have the heart, and certainly has the money, for a fight.

This in spite of yet another trial, now under way in Milan, in which he is accused of having sex two years ago with a then-underage girl, Karima El-Mahroug, a Moroccan known as Ruby Heart-Stealer. The weekly Espresso last week printed an interview with the Brazilian Michelle Conceicao, who claimed she was one of the “harem” paid by Berlusconi to attend his parties. She swears, and says she will do so again in court later this month, that Ruby had sex with the premier, and received 5,000 euros – apparently the going rate – for the coupling. A spokesman for Berlusconi dismissed the claims; as has, in the past and repeatedly, El-Mahroug herself.

Thus Berlusconi still titillates his country and the world from beyond the political grave. He still seems to be having fun, his trademark brilliant smile flashing in photographs and TV clips – while a dour Monti struggles in the coils of the Italian political serpent, a fearsomely powerful beast. Beauty, charm and creativity have done much for Italy in the decades since the war; it is now the turn of discipline, austerity and grind, and no one knows how it will take to that.

ILLUSTRATION: Elsa Jenna/REUTERS

Organized workers of the world are united on at least one big thing: that the recession which has settled over much of what was once called the developed world (and if we are not wise and active, may soon be better called the “undeveloping world”) should not load more onto the burdened backs of the working class.

But it will. Politicians everywhere see little choice.

In the United States, right-to-work laws are being pushed hard in those states with Republican leadership. The laws stop unions from forcing non-union workers to obey union decisions in plants where they have contracts. And when these laws are on the books, the unequivocal result is that union organization and membership slump. More controversially, those who support these laws claim that investment in the state grows – thus increasing the number of jobs and sometimes the level of wages.

In France, President Nicolas Sarkozy is preparing a package of measures, due to be outlined on Jan. 18 at a meeting with employers’ and union leaders, that he hopes will allow companies to reduce working hours and pay in slack times, with increases at a time of full demand. No one expects an agreement soon (if ever), and since the President faces a re-election battle in the spring, he is politically vulnerable to disruption. But even if Socialist candidate François Hollande, ahead now in the polls by some 10 percent, were to win, he would be trying something of the same, since French companies’ competitiveness is tending to fall.

In the UK, large if brief public sector strikes have disrupted transport, customs inspection and schools, as David Cameron’s Conservative-led coalition government seeks to impose cuts in public sector pensions and to stretch working life: a double whammy that the unions have regarded as unacceptable.

But it is in Italy, the largest of the European states now in the economic fever ward, that the struggle over the conditions under which working people sell their labor is most acute. The technocratic, unelected government of the former European Commissioner, former Bocconi University economics professor Mario Monti, increasingly finds itself drawn into a confrontation with the country’s three big union confederations – especially the CGIL, led by Susanna Camusso. And emerging at the heart of the confrontation is the defining element of the coming clash, at once symbolic and concrete: an article, number 18, of the 1970 Labor law, saying that sackings or layoffs of workers in any company employing more than 15 workers must, if challenged, be approved by a judge before they can go ahead. Employers hate it; the unions see it as a large achievement. The CGIL, professing itself ready to negotiate on many issues, has said in advance that Article 18 is “not for discussion.”

Italy, after the war, became not a socialist but a “social” republic: The first clause of its constitution says that its republican existence is “based on work.” For much of the post-war period into the early 1990s, a powerful left was mostly organized by the Communist Party – the biggest in the West – and by the trade unions.

The Communist Party was in a permanent if large minority. But it held city and regional power in the central “red belt” of the long peninsula, and the unions, with the CGIL to the fore, commanded the shop floor in the big factories of the north.

To be sure, governments into the 1980s were always dominated by the Christian Democrats, more or less strongly anti-communist. But if the left took its lead from a revolutionary Marx, the Christian Democrats based their domestic vision and policies on the social teachings of the Vatican – which was itself only a little less anti-capitalist than it was anti-communist. The result was legislation and customs that favored both workers’ and social solidarity, with unions and professions organizing networks of associations and clubs that acted as their power bases – strongly defended by them and largely untouched by governments.

The intricate balances of this polity worked well – very well, economically – in the decades after the war, but they fell apart in a flurry of corruption allegations, charges and convictions in the eighties. After a period of Socialist-led rule, politics came, from the early- to mid-1990s, to be dominated by one figure above all others: Silvio Berlusconi, whose media, money and chutzpah allowed him to create a coalition of the right that exercised power for most of the years since 1994, when he first won office. The sheer power of the Berlusconi package, coupled with the passivity and disorganization of the left, meant that a majority continued, till last year, to allow themselves to be seduced into the belief that all was fine, or would be fine — until suddenly it wasn’t. Berlusconi resigned, and Professor Monti and his fellow technocrats, appointed by the President with the main parties’ acquiescence, took over with a plan called — with equal measures of hope and desperation — “Save Italy.” To them has fallen the dreary task of taking, and trying to enforce, the decisions at which the elected politicians balked.

They have inherited a country with a huge public debt, a stalled economy, a leaping unemployment rate, and a poor and mafia-ridden south. And a rigid labor market: much discussed, the subject of many proposals for reform – but in its essentials untouched since better times. Within that rigidity, Article 18 now emerges as the core issue, carrying the weight of the industrialists’ complaints that they cannot be masters in their own plants and that Italy’s low rate of foreign investment and high incidence of strikes are all due to laws that give overweening power to militant unions.

Italy’s most famed and largest company, the vehicle maker Fiat (now the owner of Chrysler), has broken with the employers’ organization, Confindustria, so that it can make – or break – the national union contracts the organization has traditionally negotiated. Most of its production is now abroad – in Brazil and Poland – where it can get higher productivity. Mario Carraro, whose company makes transmission systems and who heads the Confindustria in the Veneto region, said in an interview in Corriere della Sera that “when Article 18 was written, the world was one in which people believed the myth of a stable job and wanted to work in a factory. The world has changed.”

These signs point to a great struggle ahead, in Italy and in much of the rest of the West. It brings together the terrible dilemmas of a European continent now facing, especially in its most pressurized countries of the south, a root-and-branch reconstruction of its welfare systems, its public provision of health and education, and its labor laws and customs. And though these have, in the past decades, produced relatively generous outcomes, most working people are still not too many months of unemployment away from a hard time. More, they see in the media and in the streets the rich and super-rich, often with salaries and bonuses still growing, revving up their Ferraris and able to accelerate out of the swamp in which many within the majority find themselves. They will tend to object.

In Italy – and in Greece – the matter is aggravated by the fact that the government, though ruling with the consent of the elected, does not itself have an electoral mandate. It has been hired to do the dirty work, and the work is becoming dirtier by the day. Italy is strongly group-oriented, with too little sense of a national community – as many of its intellectuals have lamented. Its groups are now closing ranks to defend what they have won. For an example of this behavior, the unions need only look to the parliamentarians: the best paid in Europe, now facing quite modest proposals for a diminution of their income and this week fiercely defending that income.

Everywhere, the decisions now being taken with the aim of increasing the country’s productivity and jobs will run into the basic question: Do the groups recognize the national need to adapt to globalization’s demands? Or will they fight to the death to keep what better times brought?

Solidarity, of either the Marxian or the Papal sort, is now seen, as Mario Carraro put it, as part of an old world, now irrevocably changed.

Modern economies need flexibility, and that means individuals, not groups, willing to move, retrain, come and, above all, go. This week began, on New Year’s Day, with messages from the world’s leaders: In Europe, at least, they warned of a hard year to come. Hardest, likely, for the workers.

PHOTO: Italian Prime Minister Mario Monti gestures as he attends the television show “Che tempo che fa” in Milan, Jan. 8, 2012. REUTERS/Stefano Rellandini