Italy at the crossroads

The election of billionaire Silvio Berlusconi as prime minister of Italy for the third time brings together an extreme right-wing coalition at a time of severe economic problems for the country, even before the global credit crunch hits home. These conditions are certain to create a nationalist-racist, authoritarian regime and, at the same time, deepen the crisis of a decrepit and corrupt Italian parliamentary state.

Berlusconi’s government is made up of his own sinisterly named People of Freedom Party, which last year absorbed Gianfranco Fini’s extreme right National Alliance. Fini himself was once a leader in the fascist MSI movement but now proclaims himself a “post-fascist”. Joining them in government is the separatist, anti-immigrant Northern League, led by Umberto Bossi, which was the big winner in electoral terms. Bossi wants the richer north to abandon the poorer south and for the Italian navy to shell people trying to enter the country by boat. Bossi’s party won 8.7% of the 47% cast for Berlusconi’s coalition. His movement runs neighbourhood patrols aimed at intimidating immigrant communities.

Italy's morale has been battered by the struggle to find a buyer for loss-making airline Alitalia, a rubbish crisis in Naples, a health scare over mozzarella cheese and gloomy economic news. The International Monetary Fund forecasts barely any growth this year for Italy, which has the third highest public debt in the world in absolute terms. The Mafia is said by Confesercenti, an association of small businesses, to control 7% of Italy's annual output, while the Spanish economy last year overtook Italy’s. A former British ambassador to Italy says: “It is no wonder that, during a recent visit to the US, I heard doubt being expressed in more than one quarter as to whether Italy still deserves its place at the G7, the capitalist top table.”

Berlusconi himself is, of course, Italy’s richest man by far and owns most of commercial TV, a massive publishing empire and will dictate to state television when he takes office. In 2001, the Economist magazine conducted a long investigation into his finances and declared him “unfit to govern Italy”. Berlusconi has evaded court action only by using his 2001-2006 government to change the statute of limitations and abolish the charge of false accounting with which he was faced. During this campaign, Berlusconi proposed that all prosecutors and judges should be given sanity tests in a verification of his total disdain for the rule of law.

For the first time since 1946 there are no socialist or former communist representatives in parliament. The only opposition to Berlusconi comes from Walter Veltroni’s Democratic Party, which won 38% of the vote and whose policies are hard to distinguish from those of the actual victors. One would-be voter on Sunday channelled his frustration by tearing up and eating his ballot before being led away from a polling station in the southern town of Sorrento by police. "What future are we preparing for our children? Who should I have voted for? Something has to change," said 41-year-old Ciro D'Esposito.

For some time, the Italian left has focused its efforts solely on trying to win control of parliament in the illusory hope that they could bring about change in this way. Following the dissolution of the once powerful Italian Communist Party in 1991, the Democratic Party of the Left (PDS) embarked on a project for the building of a "new left". Their failure once in government to make any headway, most recently within Romano Prodi’s administration, has seemingly ended this particular Italian road to nowhere.

Italy’s 1948 constitution is now under impossible strain. The absence of any left opponents in parliament will add to the endemic resentment towards the Italian state, which will abandon what’s left of its democratic credentials as it seeks to impose Berlusconi’s corporate agenda. The social and political struggle in Italy must now assume an increasingly extra-parliamentary dimension, in which the remaking of the constitution to break the power of the country’s economic and political elites is on the agenda.


Paul Feldman
AWTW communications editor

Coup plotters still at it

The revelation that Britain and NATO considered staging a coup in Italy in 1976 to prevent the Communist Party (PCI) from forming a government fits with what is already known about a whole series of actions by the state intended to destabilise that country and maintain the status quo. These merged with the aims of a long-term operation throughout Western Europe put together by the US and Britain at the end of World War II.

In Italy, the operation went under the codename Gladio and was a secret NATO "stay-behind" operation after 1945, ostensibly intended to counter a Warsaw Pact invasion of Western Europe. Arms caches were hidden, escape routes prepared, and loyal members recruited, mainly hard line anti-Communists, including many ex-Nazis or former fascists, whether in Italy or in other European countries. As the fantasy of a Soviet invasion faded, locally-recruited forces turned their attention to internal subversion against the left.

In the 1970s, with PCI electoral support growing, the Italian ruling class turned to the “Strategy of Tension”, in which Gladio would be deeply involved. This involved bombings, assassinations and military plotting against democratic institutions. In October 1990, the right-wing Prime minister Giulio Andreotti finally acknowledged the existence of Gladio and spoke of a "structure of information, response and safeguard", with arms caches and reserve officers.

In 2000, an Italian parliamentary commission concluded that the “strategy of tension” had been supported by the United States to "stop the PCI … from reaching executive power in the country". The report, stated that "those massacres, those bombs, those military actions had been organised or promoted or supported by men inside Italian state institutions and, as has been discovered more recently, by men linked to the structures of United States intelligence”.

The report claimed that US intelligence agents were informed in advance about several rightwing terrorist bombings, including the December 1969 Piazza Fontana bombing in Milan and the Piazza della Loggia bombing in Brescia five years later, but did nothing to alert the Italian authorities or to prevent the attacks from taking place.

In 1976, after years of corrupt Christian Democratic-party led rule in Italy, the PCI and its allies seemed to be heading for electoral victory. The PCI was led by the moderate Enrico Berlinguer, who had turned the party into a party prepared to make what he called an “historic compromise” to win political power. This was coded language for the abandonment of any semblance of revolutionary perspective in favour of accepting the legitimacy of capitalist rule.

Nevertheless, the prospect of a victory for the PCI was too much for Britain and the US to stomach. A secret Foreign Office memo dated 6 May 1976, entitled “Italy And The Communists: Options For The West”, unearthed in the National Archives by an Italian researcher, suggested one course might be "action in support of a coup d'etat or other subversive action". The memo admits: "By its nature, a coup d'etat could lead to unpredictable developments." But it added that, in theory at least, "it could be promoted. In one way or another, the force of the right could be counted on, with the support of the police and the army". In the event, the PCI finished second in the election.

Just to remind ourselves, the coup plotting in 1976 took place under a Labour government, which itself was clinging to power during a period of social and economic upheaval throughout Europe as the post-war boom collapsed. The lack of political stability brought forward plans for a military coup in Britain itself, as well as internal plots against prime minister Harold Wilson. The period we have entered in 2008 bears a number of similarities to that of 30 years ago and you can be sure that the modern versions of Gladio are at it as we write.

Paul Feldman

AWTW Communications editor