Articles by: Judith Harris

  • Facts & Stories

    Farewell Rita Levi Montalcini: "I Am the Mind"


    ROME - For us Romans, Italy's famous scientist Rita Levi Montalcini, who died peacefully and quietly in Rome on Dec. 30 at age 103, was a familiar figure. She had won a Nobel Prize in 1986 for medicine for her discovery and identification of a growth factor in nerve fibers. She held five honorary degrees from foreign and Italian university and had received countless awards including from Brandeis and Columbia Universities. She was a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences as well as of Italy's Accademia Nazionale delle Scienze and the Accademia dei Lincei. She was also well known as a strong supporter of the women's movement in Italy. And after 2001 we watched with admiration her carefully coiffed and well-dressed appearances in the Senate, to which Italian President Carlo Azeglio Ciampi had named her for her lifetime.

     
    Most of us also knew the dramatic backstory of her graduation in 1936 from the University of Turin with highest honors in medicine and surgery. Only two years later a Fascist law was passed that prohibited Jews from any role in politics, government, the military, entertainment, journalism and schools. Up to that point there had been little anti-Jewish sentiment in Italy, but now there was. Co-signed by ten Italian scientists, the law categorically excluded Levi Montalcini from continuing her post-graduate studies in neurology and psychiatry. For Levi Montalcini was a Jew, the daughter of an electrical engineer and mathematician named Adamo Levi and an artist, Adele Montalcini. As such she was ousted from the university.
     
    Besides Hitler's influence, today's experts like Francesco Cassata, author of La Difesa della Razza 1938-1943 (Turin: Einaudi, 2008), consider this law an element in the creation of an artificial domestic enemy, promulgated in order to help the regime dodge the era's real problems. As of August 1938, the law was further justified in a bi-weekly magazine of that same name, La Difesa della Razza (The Defense of the Race). Edited by Giorgio Almirante, the magazine spread the word to its 85,000 subscribers that they were to avoid "biological contamination."
     
    But Levi Montalcini had had to fight with her father in order to attend university at all, and neither sexism nor the era's rampant racism could stop her. Still at home in Turin, Levi Montalcini simply set up a scientific laboratory in her bedroom. There she conducted her research until 1941 when Turin was bombed by the Allies so extensively that the family fled into the Italian countryside. In the mountains near Asti, she recreated her miniscule bedroom laboratory and continued her research until 1943, when that area became the battleground between the Allies and the Germans. At that point the family fled once more, in a harrowing voyage southward to Florence and the home of a friend of Levi Montalcini's twin sister, Paola.
     
    In 1944, after Florence was liberated by the allies following bitter fighting (and the Levi family had a close call), Rita went to work in an Allied military hospital. By that time, say historians, at least half of Italy's Jews had been deported and some 8,000, murdered. After the end of the war she spent three decades in universities in the United States before returning to Italy.
     
    Levi Montalcini was a member of the Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei of Rome, whose president, Prof. Lamberto Maffei, had been one of her students. Speaking of her this week he called her, "A very noble woman who had a fragile look but was a giant in science has left us. Her research, which won the Nobel Prize, has dominated the minds of thousands of scientists who have carried on her research in laboratories throughout the world, and have brought to the study of the nervous system new knowledge and an epochal paradigm change." Today's students are applying her teachings to the prevention and cure of senile dementia and in particular to the study of Alzheimer's. "No one can forget her continued dedication to the development of scientific research and in particular her commitment to young researchers, and the great help she has given to the improvement of the condition of women, especially in Africa."
     
    In fact, together with her sister Paola she created the Fondazione ONLUS Rita Levi-Montalcini, a foundation whose aim is to foster education particularly for women. (For information and donations, see: http://www.ritalevimontalcini.org.) "I decided to do this," she stated, "out of an awareness of the need to deal with the most serious problems that weigh upon the African populations: women's lack of access to education. Certainly it is a drop in the ocean in consideration of the other great suffering in Africa, but I am convinced that helping women to win the right to education will help them achieve the freedom of growth and development of the individual within their own society and in the global world."
     
    Levi Montalcini was buried in a Jewish ceremony in Turin Jan. 2.
    Among the tributes pouring in from the world over was that of Italy's caretaker Premier Mario Monti, who called her "a charismatic woman who honored our nation." Nichi Vendola (left-wing politicianand currently the President of Apulia) said that, "With her we lose one of the most crystalline and noble voices of democratic Italy."
     
    To see an interview in Italian made in the year 2000, in which she explains her research, go to >>>. In another video, made for her 101st birthday two years ago, she tells interviewer Riccardo Luna, in an oft-quoted phrase, that, "I am the mind. The body will do whatever it wants.... I lived so many years abroad, and when I returned I was so pleased with all Italy had to offer in terms of human capital. The human capital of the young people is the wealth of our country." See: >>>
     
     
     
     
     
  • Op-Eds

    Ups and Downs of Moving Onto the Playing Field


     The outgoing Premier Mario Monti, in announcing his formal entry into politics after 13 months as a technical or non-political leader, made the point that he is going "up" onto the playing field. This was a dig at his predecessor Silvio Berlusconi, who has made it his custom to speak, again and again, of going "down" onto the playing field or, in Italian, scendere in campo. And in a very real sense this is the choice facing Italy at the dawn of a new year: to move upward into a new form and practice of politics or to sink further down into the same old swamp.



    What swamp? Corruption plays a part, and in our little village north of Rome a candidate for regional office has already mounted posters promising an end to the corruption embodied, and heftily, in the regional official known as "Batman," who was today released from three months in prison. But corruption is hardly the whole, in a new year that threatens to offer an even tougher uphill slog than did 2012. It has already been announced that train tickets, auto insurance rates and autostrada tariffs will surge, and even traffic fines will rise by 6%. These and other soaring costs over which citizens have no control, including household utilities and taxes for local services like garbage collection, are estimated to cost over the year each and every family E1,500 ($1,977). For many families this is the rough equivalent of an entire month's salary.

     

    In the South, some 330,000 jobs in Southern Italy have already been lost during the course of the past year, and 16,000 businesses went under. Throughout the nation industrial unrest is a certainty even as turnover and orders fell over the year by 4.7%, according to ISTAT, the national statistics-gathering agency, on Dec. 19. Significantly, food sales - which economists traditionally considered inelastic - slumped by 1.3% in just one month (the latest statistic, for October), bringing the total drop in retail and food purchases in the course of a year to 2.8%.

     

    An uphill climb onto the Italian political field will therefore not be easy, but Monti has won the support of the Vatican, for one, with the Osservatore Romano lauding his formal entry into the political race as "noble." In a signed editorial in Avvenire, the official daily of the Italian bishops, Cardinal Angelo Bagnasco of Genoa, who presides over the bishops' conference, observed that, "There is widespread recognition of Monti's honesty and capability... Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but we truly desire that policy makers chosen in the forthcoming elections will be those reflecting politics of the highest level--those who seek the good of the nation."

     

    An infuriated editor of the a pro-Berlusconi daily accused the Church of having been bought by Monti, whose government failed to impose the stringent real estate taxes upon Catholic properties which some had desired.

     

    But the polls continue to tell the story. They suggest that Monti commands the support of one out of every five voters, or 20% of the potential electorate for the national general elections slated to take place in late February. Polls show Berlusconi at about the same amount, but the sense is that Monti already has sufficient backing to challenge the couple the political analysts have taken to calling, in jest, "B & B" - that is, Berlusconi on the right with his troubled Freedom Party (PdL) and Pier Luigi Bersani on the left with his still powerful (he can expect at least 35% of the vote) Partito Democratico (PD). For both B & B, defections are already a problem. Along with his meetings with potential allies in the Catholic world and with sympathetic industrialists, Monti has spent most of this holiday week with politicians from other parties who are jumping onto the Monti bandwagon.

     

    For the PD the most devastating defection is that of Pietro Ichino, a bland-looking but skilled PD leader who reportedly drafted much of his old friend Monti's program (already known as the "Monti agenda"), presented just before Christmas. Ichino explains that Monti's staff merely drew upon Ichino's Internet musings on the economy, but the busy bloggers of Dagospia say that Ichino was the primary author of Monti's program proposals. PD leaders were particularly irritated because Ichino was campaigning for the PD at the same time that he was, presumably in secret, drafting Monti's agenda, which challenges the PD itself. Ichino moreover is himself the head of a faction of bright young things within the PD who will meet with Monti in Orvieto on Jan. 12. Reportedly Ichino will also organize Monti's election campaign in the wealthy northern region of Lombardy, where the vote for a new regional assembly will take place contemporaneously with that for the national general elections.

     

    In interviews Ichino has ventured challenging opinions, such as that the program of Florence's young mayor Matteo Renzi was on the lines of Monti's. This was a clear nod to Renzi's followers to shift alliances from Bersani. Elsewhere Ichino has said, pointedly, "If we consider the Monti operation with the eyes of young people, of women, of the over-55s who are already excluded from the labor market and of all the other outsiders, I would dare to say that the Monti agenda is closer to the weak and the least than is the program of the Partito Democratico."

     

    But not everyone in the centrist camp agrees that Monti can successfully climb the political hill upward. "We all had high hopes for Monti," one Milanese voter told me. "But the result is that whoever paid taxes before simply pays more taxes now [because] we are identifiable.  Most who had more than their fair share still do. But the evaders still seem to be evading. And in a recession when spending should be encouraged, Italian savings are being scooped up and transferred to unproductive uses."



    Agreed. But if not Monti, who? 
  • Facts & Stories

    Peeking into Italy's Christmas Stocking


    ROME - The first and perhaps most important gift is the reduction in the spread (the comparative interest rate difference between German and Italian 10-year bonds). On New Year's Eve of 2011 the spread stood at 519. At this writing it has shrunk to a manageable 288, the lowest since 2010. The drop in the spread confirms that Premier Mario Monti's 13 months in office have restored confidence in Italy itself and have avoided bankruptcy or an exit from the Euro.
     
    The second of this year's gifts of Christmas is that Premier Mario Monti remains exceptionally popular, with 33% preferring him to any other politicians as premier. Monti has yet to state that he will run to succeed himself in next year's election, but he has admitted that he does not intend simply to sit back and enjoy life (and a salary) in his cushy role as senator for life. He is expected to toss his hat into the ring on Christmas Eve while the announcing of new national general elections, already decided for February 22, will be formalized on New Year's Eve. If so, these will be important gifts of certainty, and, as President Giorgio Napolitano has pointed out, it is best at this point to cut short the election campaign, which is already well underway despite the uncertainties of timing and candidates both. Monti is expected to become the head of a centrist group. If so, this will plunge him into a three-way race of direct competition with both Pier Luigi Bersani's Partito Democratico (PD) on the left and with Silvio Berlusconi's party - whatever it will be called - on the right. On the outskirts, Beppe Grillo remains the fourth main player.
     
    Fortunately, politics do not tell the whole story, which is of a society that is still generous, talented and kind, including, increasingly, to the newest Italians--the immigrants. A third gift, therefore, is the letter written to the editor of an Italian daily to recount the author's gratitude that his lost wallet was found and returned by an Albanian immigrant worker, who morever did not want to accept a reward for his courtesy. According to the preliminary findings of the 2011 census, out of a total population of almost 60 million, 4 million are foreign nationals, or about 7% of the population.  Two-thirds live in the North. An estimated half million work on farms, where many are treated poorly and grossly underpaid. However, "Immigrants are an important part of Italy's population, contributing their work and vital energey to an aging society," to quote President Napolitano. This is all the more true because of Italy's twin problems of an aging population and low birth rate. In the past decade the foreign population has almost tripled.
     
    A fourth gift is, once again, the good work of Italy's Guardia di Finanza (tax police) and the fine arts sleuths in the paramilitary Carabinieri Corps in preserving the Italian heritage from looters. On December 6, during what was described as a "casual" check, the tax police found in the back of a truck a cache of stolen archaeological objects including, most importantly, a fine ancient Egyptian sphynix over 4 ft. long carved of stone. Imports to Italy of Egyptian materials began in the 1st C. AD and were common during the following century, especially after the cult of the Egyptian goddess Isis was spreading throughout the Italian peninsula. It is believed the valuable sphynx was from a hilly area near Viterbo, at Monterosa. (To see a video of the find, go to: http://multimedia.gdf.gov.it/video/Attivita%20operativa/2012/recuperata-sfinge-egizia-di-eta-tolemaica-iv-i-sec.-a.c./)
     
    A fifth gift to Italy is the extraordinary contribution which orchestra conductor Antonio Pappano has made to building the worldwide prestige and popularity of the Santa Cecilia Symphony Orchestra in Rome. Pappano's Italian parents, who hailed from Castelfranco in Miscano near Benevento, lived in Great Britain before moving to the U.S.A. His father trained singers, and from childhood Antonio accompanied these singers on the piano. He is now Sir Anthony, and passes his time between conducting at Covent Garden and at Rome's bustling Auditorium, where he is always dressed in a loose-fitting black smock. He was the youngest conductor ever to lead the orchestra of the Royal Opera House in London, and his audiences always include many young people as well as the more traditional audience for classical music. (See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antonio_Pappano)
     
    Sixth among the stocking gifts is the work of the Sant'Egidio Roman Catholic Community in fostering peace in troubled war zones and in helping the poor in Italy and elsewhere. Forty-five years old in February 2013, the Community of lay men and women is just now opening a boutique in Rome where volunteers can bring quality vintage clothing - preferably with high fashion label - for sale for the benefit of AIDS victims in Africa. The Community was born in 1968 in the U.S. Today the Italian Community, whose chief churches in Rome are at Santa Maria in Trastevere and in St. Bartholomew's Church on the Tiber Island, is also concerned about the increase in poverty in Italy itself.
     
    Seventh, Fabiola Gianotti, 40, holds a PhD in experimental sub-particle physics from the University of Milan and has been described by none other than the magazine New Scientist as "the woman in charge of the world's biggest experiment." This November she was awarded Milan's Gold Medal for her work and on Dec. 11 she received the Special Fundamental Physics Prize for 2012, awarded for her work on the Higgs Boson, known as the "elusive particle" because scientists had been hunting it for half a century. Time magazine has described her as "legendary" and named her as "runner-up for Person of the Year: Fabiola Gianotti, the Discoverer." (See: http://poy.time.com/2012/12/19/runner-up-fabiola-gianotti-the-discoverer/) She manages a 3,000-member team of researchers and colleagues at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN). Working under her leadership, the team made a worldwide sensation in science for at last discovering the particle, whose function is to catapult construction of the mass of other particles. She shares the prize with colleagues Joe Incandela and Rolf Heuer. "It was the work of thousands of scientists," she said this week.... The prize was to Italy."
     
    And with this, best wishes for a Happy Christmas to all our readers.
  • Facts & Stories

    ROME> A Meeting of the Mind(er)s: Monti and Napolitano


    ROME - After a four-hour meeting at the Quirinal Palace, President Giorgio Napolitano and the once and perhaps future Premier Mario Monti shook hands, but without any formal statement that would let Italy, not to mention the rest of Europe, know Monti's future plans. Monti himself is said to be troubled and uncertain as to what is the wisest course, and this was today's agenda, with the two expected to discuss four possible scenarios.


    Because this is the most crucial political decision to be taken before year end, here are the options, one by one:
     
    1. Monti was given an extraordinary welcome at last week's meeting of Euro leaders in Brussels, where he was praised him to the skies, and begged to run for premier in national general elections, expected to be held in mid-February, two months ahead of schedule. If Monti heeds their pleas to run as a candidate to succeed himself, he is likely to have the support of the Catholic Centrists around Pier Ferdinando Casini; the moderates around the Chamber President Gianfranco Fini; the businessmen behind industrialist and political activist Luca Cordero di Montezemolo; the top authorities of the Italian Catholic Church; and even - it is surmised - a significant chunk of the Members of Parliament who support Florentine Mayor Matteo Renzi over Bersani himself, and hence Monti. The Italian bishops council (CEI) is openly plumping for Monti, a Catholic who attends mass regularly with his attractive, middle-aged wife Elsa Antonioli Monti, head of the women's section of the Red Cross in Milan and deeply committed to work in other charities. Monti protected Church interests in a revised tax law. Skeptics add that the reason for the bishops' support of Monti is to block the secular leftist Pier Luigi Bersani.
     
    2. Monti could decide to remain entirely out of the fray in exchange for an almost certain election for president of Italy to succeed Napolitano; the sole other candidate who can challenge him is Romano Prodi. Monti in the Quirinal Palace is the scenario favored by Bersani, who said this explicitly to Monti himself in a meeting December 15, according to the respected commentator Marco Politi, writing in Il Fatto Quotidiano. Monti's reply, which was quoted in the Italian Church daily L'Avvenire, tended to the negative, however: "There is work to finish, for which I feel responsible. The reforms have to go into port." "I was there and I heard the conversation," says Politi. Bersani favors a Monti succession to Napolitano for a half dozen reasons. Even though Bersani's Partito Democratico (PD) is almost certain to cop the greatest number of votes at an election, Monti's running independently would make formation of a governing coalition more difficult. The outcome could well be a duel between Monti and Bersani.
     
    3. Monti could be the candidate for premier backed by none other than former premier Silvio Berlusconi. This was the suggestion of Berlusconi himself, saying, "If Mario Monti is a candidate and holds together the moderates of the center-right, guaranteeing them victory, then I would be disposed not to be a candidate." At the same time he also suggested two as a candidate for premier the long-suffering secretary of his Liberty Party (PdL), Angelino Alfano. In any case Monti declined to head what would be a center-right coalition in no uncertain terms. The offer was made during the presentation December 12 of a book by Bruno Vespa. Berlusconi spoke vigorously for an hour but rambled and contradicted himself, to the point that skilled observer Massimo Franco, editorial writer for Corriere della Sera, sentenced, "Never had I seen such a state of confusion." This was not the only confusion at the presentation, where the book had the least of it. When the auditorium was full, three young demonstrators dressed as mummies appeared bearing placards that quoted some of Berlusconi's own words. While some observers thought this was a skillful satire, others thought it was in solidarity with Berlusconi, as in "We are all mummies."
     
    4. With the backing of the PD, Monti could he premier for a time under Bersani's tutelage. In a campaign the PD would benefit from Monti's prestige and then, in exchange for a speedy boost upstairs into a senior post in Brussels, Bersani would replace him. At the moment, however, the PD's grand old man Massimo D'Alemma is furious with Monti, whom he accuses of failing to support the party which has been, throughout the past difficult year, Monti's strongest and most loyal ally. D'Alemma is not the only one to share this resentment of an allegedly ungrateful Monti.
     
    For the moment it is still wait and see, but, hinting at his intentions, Monti said, "I shall never be a man taking only one side, I will never be a member of any party or of any political ideology."
     
    Others playing the waiting game are those already jumping ship from the PdL. They include many of Gianfranco Fini's former allies in the right-wing Alleanza Nazionale, who had fused with the PdL, but also a delegation of PdL loyalists disappointed at their party's cancellation of primary elections. Among the angriest: the PdL's young firebrand Giorgia Meloni, whose reaction was to announce she is creating her own party. The motivation: the PdL's shrinking in the polls from 38% to a mere 15%.
     
    Elsewhere there is also dissension. In Beppe Grillo's Movimento Cinque Stelle (M5S), heretics are being banned, and criticism of his autocratic methods is mounting. Gabriele Martini of the daily La Stampa of Turin interviewed 120 of Grillo's future MPs - "i Grillini" - and found them "ready for a good fight and chomping at the bit, but with rather confused ideas." Examples he cited: let's have the United States of Europe right now, but no, better Italy outside the Euro. We have to solve the problem of public debt by cutting costs, but, no, we can just not pay it. The tax on houses [a luxury tax of sorts] should be abolished, but, no, it should be kept. His interviewees were from all over Italy and every walk of life.
  • Facts & Stories

    Election-shock: Monti Bows Out



    On Friday Berlusconi announced that he will return as leader the center-right. "I play to win," he added. "I always have." But so does Monti, and within twenty-four hours he was at the Quirinal Palace to inform President Giorgio Napolitano that his year-old emergency government will exit by the end of this month, albeit only after Parliament approves the government's budget, known as the "financial stability law." National general elections, slated to take place at the end of the normal five-year mandate next spring, will therefore be anticipated, perhaps as early as February.

     

    Lacking a miracle, the elections will take place under the old Porcellum (piggish) law. Promoted by Berlusconi and adopted in 2005, this law makes selection of candidates the exclusive prerogative of the party bosses, and awards a generous premium of members of parliament to the winning coalition, or 340 guaranteed seats out of 630. The very real possibility, moreover, is that President Napolitano will similarly speed up his resignation so that the newly-elected assembly will be the one that will choose the new president.

     

    The unexpected news of Monti's swift and "irrevocable" decision came as a shock. Many in business and political Italy are already expressing deep concern at the demise of the Monti government for its implications for the Italian economy when the markets reopen Monday. Even before Berlusconi trumpeted his return, the political atmosphere had turned sour, and on Thursday the markets were already reacting negatively. During his difficult year in office, Monti has been able to reassure international markets and restore some of the Italian prestige tarnished by the previous years of political scandal, both personal and financial. "Greatly destabilizing," was the comment on Berlusconi's announcement in the financial daily Il Sole-24 Ore. Although few had entirely counted Berlusconi out, even fewer had believed that Monti would react so swiftly and incisively.

     

    The polls help to explain why. The pollsters employed by Il Popolo della Liberta' (PdL) claim that their consensus stands at around 27% vis a vis the 26.1% of Pier Luigi Bersani. But most others disagree and put the PdL figure at as low as 13%, partly because in the course of the past two years Berlusconi's party has alienated its original bedfellows in the Northern League as well as those in Alleanza Nazionale led by the president of the Chamber of Deputies Gianfranco Fini. At the same time, as commentators like Claudio Tito of La Repubblica have warned, Berlusconi is the sole figure capable of reassembling the center-right alliance which first put him in power in April 1992. The latest poll, announced by Gad Lerner last week, has Bersani's PD at circa 33%; Beppe Grillo's Movimento Cinque Stelle (M5S) at 17% and Berlusconi's PdL at around 15%, slightly higher than in previous weeks. All other parties - and they include potential allies for both Bersani and Berlusconi - fall well below.

     

    If the pollsters are correct, and if elections take place under the Porcellum law, as is likely at this point (in five years Bersani & Co. have failed to impose its revision),  the left coalition would trump the center-right easily. The PD can probably count on 263 seats and Nicchi Vendola's SeL, 49. Under the generous terms of the Porcellum, their total of 311 seats would be magically multiplied to 340 seats, a handy majority in Parliament. The Catholic-oriented UDC of Pierferdinando Casini moreover has 30 seats and is another potential coalition partner. This analysis is by Donato De Sena in Giornalettismo, who claims that Berlusconi therefore cannot win, see: http://www.giornalettismo.com). On the other hand, the complex Senate rules for the Senate show an entirely different picture, and Berlusconi's playing to win is presumably aimed at the Senate rather than the Chamber, where a Bersani victory can, at this writing, appear inevitable.

     

    In fact, when the PdL nominal party chief, Angelino Alfano, addressed Parliament last week, he announced that Italy's debt, unemployment and tax rates had all risen even as the economy sank like a stone because Monti had taken over from Berlusconi as premier of a non-elected cabinet. In short, it was Monti who had taken the country into near-bankruptcy, rather than saved it. Berlusconi's role therefore will be to present himself as saviour of the nation.

     

    One man's unseemly but understandable reaction in Parliament was to hurl a cushion at Alfano. So is there anything to cushion this new situation? It may be that time is the cushion, explaining why Monti sped up his departure. The government's unpopular economic measures are inevitable, and employment statistics will continue to bring anguish. The longer Monti stays in office, therefore, the longer his government will be a target for Berlusconi and his backers, eager to foster what political scientists call 'a negative coalition" of disgruntled businessmen, unaccustomed to paying taxes, and a confused electorate ready and willing to believe that the Euro is responsible for their problems. Most importantly, his gesture frees Monti for his own political future.

     
  • Facts & Stories

    Light at the End of the PD Primaries Tunnel

    ROME - Yes, Pier Luigi Bersani has triumphed, walking away with 63.45% of the votes in Sunday's primaries run-off for leadership of the Partito Democratico (PD). "What a splendid day for democracy," crowed Bersani. If so, ironically, this was in good part thanks to Bersani's far younger rival, Matteo Renzi. Although Renzi won only 36.48%, his style and presence has changed the very nature of Italian political discourse. It was not only that Renzi, 37, showed - better, flaunted - his youthful mind- set by conceding to 61-year-old Bersani in a Twitter message. Here are instances of other important changes in a political horizon more accustomed to stagnation:

    Although the Partito Democratico, born out of the ashes of the old Communist party (PCI),held a liberal and social democratic element from the outset, it had drifted backward in the direction of the old-style synergic coalition of hard-core labor flanked by serious post-Marxists and leftist Catholics. Sensing this, at the keenest point of their rivalry Bersani commented slyly (and disapprovingly) that Renzi declined to attack the "Destra" (the Rightists). But elsewhere commentators found this praiseworthy, because, they said, the PD will never be the same again: its base of support has been broadened to incorporate the heirs of the wartime Partito d'Azione and its progressive heritage in the postwar era. This, perhaps the most important result of the PD primaries, should make that party more appealing in the coming national general elections, even to some of those who had previously backed Silvio Berlusconi.

    The democracy factor - the generally civilized public exchange of points of view between adversaries of the same party - was almost universally noted, with admiration. Bersani had the merit of having chosen a tough road; he was willing to hold the primaries against an adversary who was running to win, and might have. "The primaries showed great vitality," boasted the Piedmontese PD regional secretary, Gianfranco Morgando, while also admitting his pleasure that the last-minute petty squabbles between the more conservatice, traditional Bersani and the more innovative Renzi did not damage the outcome.

    Not least, Beppe Grillo's shout them down and shock'em strategy worked for a time, but Renzi's more reasonable, and more democratic, protests, aired in public in a rational fashion, captured the limelight and the political imagination. "Until now we've seen two types of protest," said Dario Franceschini, a PD leader. "There's the anti-system abstentionism advocated by Grillo, and there's the complete renouncing of interest in politics, to be left to the technicians. The primaries showed the existence of another way to react to the disappointment and lack of confidence that have been characterizing Italian politics." Let's hope the Partito della Liberta' (PdL) gets the message, he added.

    That party too is slated to hold primaries, but continues to be split between those touting for them, led by Angelino Alfano, the PdL party secretary. AP called that party a "shambles," and that is the correct word. Alfano is at odds with Berlusconi one day and best friends the next. Berlusconi is still hostile to primaries, which Alfano and others want, and is still agonizing over whether or not to create a new party. He is also still threatening to bring down the emergency government led by economist Mario Monti.

    Given the meltdown of Berlusconi's once-mighty PdL, Bersani's PD is counted upon to prevail in future elections for Parliament, with a fair chance that Bersani himself may succeed Monti as premier. However, depending upon the shape of the still unreformed election law called, insultingly, the "Porcellum" (Pig Law), the PD may need coalition partners. The most likely in that case is Pier Ferdinando Casini, leader of a centrist Catholic-oriented party. As for Monti himself, he is being cagy about the future - but no one is counting him out of the picture; while not a politicians he has brightened Italy's reputation in the rest of the world and remains the single most popular public figure in Italy. Polls last month showed that, although his popularity has dropped from the 60+% of last year, it is now around 50%, exceptionally high after thirteen months in office. As YouTrend points out (see: www.youtrend.it/fiducia-mario-monti), when the spread between Germany interest rates on long-term bonds drops, confidence in Monti surges upward and vice versa.

    Predictions are that, if Monti does not succeed himself as premier or accept a top slot in a future Bersani cabinet, he will be boosted upward into an important job within the European political firmament, where Mario Draghi already holds the keys to the European Central Bank. Just as Monti has softened European and U.S. views on Italy's capacity to ride out the recession, Draghi has initiated policies recognized as having improved euro money market conditions and eased tensions on the financial markets. There may het be light at the end of the tunnel and, if so, Monti and Draghi are holding the floodlights while Bersani and Renzi, who are almost obliged to continue in tandem, are bringing more light into the picture.
  • Facts & Stories

    PD Primaries: A Vote for Democracy

    ROME - The ballot box at the primary elections held by the Partito Democratico (PD) on Sunday, November 25, held a welcome surprise. For months the walkup has been of corruption scandals which have left no party untouched, not even the PD.

    Not all the scandals involved politicians, of course: in the North cynical doctors on pharmaceutical company payrolls are accused of using patients as guinea pigs to test new products; one patient died. But the scandals have especially smeared politicians and their clientele, and party leaders and pundits have feared that voters are so turned off by politics that the PD primary turn-out would sink to half that of the previous primary vote, to 2 million instead of 4 million. Instead, over 3.1 million turned out to vote, with many waiting hours in line. Some of the 9,232 improvised polling stations, all staffed by volunteers, remained open into the late evening to allow as many as possible to vote. It was, in the end, a vote for democracy itself, and not only PD party leaders and activists rejoiced at this.

    At this writing not all the votes were counted, but it was already clear that next Sunday's run-off will pit the top front-runners against each other: party secretary Pierluigi Bersani, who is walking away with almost 45% of the vote (1,393,990) , and his young rival, Matteo Renzi, with around 36% (2,203,790). (For more results, see: www.italiabenecomune.it) Although a PD Bersani faction crowed today that in Sunday's run-off "Bersani will win 60%," it is not a certainty that Bersani is a shoo-in, and Renzi has already promised to redouble his campaign efforts. The conservative daily Il Giornale's comment was that, "Bersani may have come first, but Renzi has already won the challenge."

    And perhaps more than that. Nichi Vendola, preferred by some 16% of the voters, was third, but he will be courted by both Bersani and Renzi and will carefully negotiate to whom he throws that healthy chunk of the electorate Sunday. The other candidates - Laura Puppato with 2.6% and the leftist Bruno Tabacci, l.4% - fared less well, but if Bersani and Renzi are close enough in a head-on clash, how Puppato and Tabacci advise their voters will also matter.

    "The vote was evenly distributed all over the country," declared a PD spokesman today, alleging that voters showed little difference between the North and the South, and that young people did not particularly prefer Renzi over Bersani. But others disagree, pointing out that throughout the Red Belt - Tuscany, Umbria and part of Emilia, where Bersani was born in a mountain town near Piacenza in the Emilia-Romagna Region) - Renzi surged well ahead of Bersani, with around 50%. Not surprisingly, in Florence, where he is mayor, the Renzi vote was 52%. "From [Bersani] Renzi snatched a good part of the red zone, even in Emilia-Romagna. And now he'll go out fishing for Vendola's votes," sentenced Il Giornale. Renzi's own supporters are optimistic because, they say, the voters for both Renzi and Vendola share a desire for the new; theirs was a protest vote.

    In both Lombardy in the North and in the Italian South, Bersani forged solidly ahead at 45.7% while at the same time claiming around 50% in the South of the Campania, Calabria, Sardinia and Sicily. In the Abruzzo, Molise and Puglia, Vendola outperformed Renzi.

    In addition, some 15,000 Italians living abroad also voted. Brussels topped the list so far with 1,312 participants. There the victory went to Bersani (37%) followed by Vendola (28%), with Renzi third (26%). In Paris, where 860 voted (twice the number in 2005), Vendola was well ahead of the others (40.6%) followed by Bersani (28.6%) and Renzi (23.3%).

    While the PD results were monopolizing the headlines, the struggle over whether to hold or not to hold their own primary election has left the Partito della Liberta' (PdL) in chaos. The rift between former Premier Silvio Berlusconi and the party secretary he had personally selected,Angelino Alfano, has burst into the open as never before. Alfano, with strong backing in the PdL, is promoting the holding of a primary election in early December, as the party has already decided, but Berlusconi now opposes the primary on grounds that it is costly, and that he knows a good call center which could handle the primary via telephone. As a result of this cavalier attitude, a number of Berlusconi's former faithful, including ex-minister Giorgia Meloni, have quit his faction in the party he created. In front of the PdL headquarters on Via dell'Umilta' in Rome, Alfano's supporters held a sit-in Monday in defense of the primary. Another group demonstrated in front of Berlusconi's Roman residence. "I am not a candidate for premier," Berlusconi just announced, but elsewhere he speaks of launching a new party or reviving the old Forza Italia.

    And in the meantime the emergency Premier Mario Monti is making it clear that he is available in the future as needed. This past week President Giorgio Napolitano said in no uncertain terms that Monti, as a life senator, cannot run for office at present. This may sound rigid, but at the same time amounted to a proposal that Monti be available after the forthcoming elections (perhaps - still perhaps - to take place in March) either to succeed himself on grounds of a political stalemate or to succeed Napolitano himself.
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    In Politics Money Talks (or Maybe Whispers)

    ROME - Just over a year ago the then Premier Silvio Berlusconi remarked that Italy was not in recession, and the proof was that the restaurants are full--or at least the ones he frequented were. Today, with the nation's estimated gross national product down almost 3% this year (in the South, - 3.5%) no one can pretend that Italy, along with the rest of Europe, is not in a recession. Yes, stupid, it is all about the economy, down to and including the date when national general elections will be held.
      

    Slated for springtime, the vote will create a new Parliament which in turn will elect a new  
    president for a seven-year term. However, pressures are mounting for earlier elections because of corruption scandals that have rocked the governments of Italy's two most important regions: Lazio, whose capital is Rome, and Lombardy, whose capital is Milan. Both regional governments have been brought down by shock waves of financial misdeeds, which have forced Lazio Regional governor Renata Polverini and Lombardy Regional governor Roberto Formigoni to resign.

    New regional elections must be held therefore, but estimates are that holding them will cost taxpayers anywhere from E 50 million to E 100 million. Therefore I sympathized with the many Italians who have lobbied for postponing elections to the new regional assemblies until the date for national general elections to save money; April or perhaps as early as March were being discussed as the most likely date for the dual election. The point is that few here want to anticipate national general elections because the country is in severe economic distress. Almost belatedly, and dangerously, this stumbling economy is being translated into social unrest, with battles this psdy week in the piazzas between police and angry citizens of all ages, as per Greece and Spain.  

    Premier Mario Monti, brought in to handle the economic and political emergency, just celebrated his first full year in office, and, given the sense of emergency here, few with any sense of responsibility are eager to see him leave office just now. On the contrary, President Giorgio Napolitano is making every effort to keep to the election schedule without a government breakdown. In this he is supported by a powerful industrialist, Luca Cordero di Montezemolo, who announced this week that he is spearheading a new political movement to keep Monti in office in future to allow time for creation of a "government for national reconstruction."   

    The aggravating problem involves postponing regional elections in Lazio and Lombardy, as publisher (La Repubblica) Eugenio Scalfari pointed out Sunday. "At a time like this, to have a government crisis would be suicidal for the general interests of the nation so, to avoid it, the date for the regional elections must be postponed." However, as he went on to warn, the problem is that the outgoing Lazio Regional governor Polverini "remains for another four months in her role with a regional council that is already defunct but that continues to be paid while they stay at home while she continues to waste the money at her disposal but handing out contributions to improbable associations and is naming new administrators in municipal offices."

    Both Polverini and Formigoni represented center-right alliances. In Lombardy, Formigoni continues to tough it out but faces a challenge from the acting leader of the Northern League , Roberto Maroni, who has just announced his candidacy to succeed Formigoni. "For a Federalist," he said in an interview with Corriere della Sera, "the greatest ambition is to be able to govern one's own region. I would be honored and can add that for me it would be more important than being a minister in a national government." In fact, Maroni was a cabinet minister in two governments. Formigoni's government collapsed under the weight of link with the Sicilian Mafia and the Calabrian 'Ndrangheta, who managed to weasel their way into the obtaining lucrative Lombard construction contracts. Regional councilman Domenico Zambetti was arrested in October for pay-offs to the 'Ndrangheta is a swap for votes.

    The evidence of such widespread corruption, affecting both Lazio and Lombardy, is all the more painful at a time when most Italians are tightening their belts. Consumer purchases are down by 3.2% at least this year over last. Apparel purchases have dropped by 4.7% and purchases of furniture, down 5.2%, according to the national statistics-gathering agency ISTAT. Publishing is hurting, with newspaper, magazine and book sales slumping by 5%. The hardest hit sector: children's toys, whose sales have fallen by 5.6%. Nor are the restaurants full, needless to say.

    At the same time prices for gas and electricity are on the rise, approaching historical peaks. Indeed, the dramatic piazza clashes of the past week were triggered by the pressure between the rising cost of living and the lack of jobs and, for young people, of job prospects.

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    Peeking Through the Thick Election Fog


    ROME - No one can be certain when the elections will take place, save that they will be before mid-2013. No one knows for certain who the candidates will be, or - Heaven forbid - their programs. No one knows what shape a governing coalition will assume, although this is an all-important question in a country where no single party can hope to obtain a majority of the votes cast, or even 30%. No one knows what premier will emerge from the vote. Not least, no one yet knows under what rules the elections will take place because the parties today in Parliament, which are the only ones entitled to make that decision, continue to quarrel among themselves.

     
    To break this impasse, the so-called technical (i..e., non-political) government of "experts" under the leadership of the economist Mario Monti has proposed April 7 for national general elections. These are important elections: the winners will subsequently elect a successor to Italy's good shepherd president, Giorgio Napolitano, whose seven-year stint is coming to an end. Premier Monti proposes, in addition, to save state coffers as much as one hundred million euros by postponing elections to regional governments in Lazio, Lombardy and Molise, currently slated for late January, to the same April 7. But even this suggestion, which sounds eminently sage, generates controversy among the unlikely bedfellows whose votes in Parliament have kept Monti in power for a year now: the rightist Partito della Liberta' founded by Silvio Berlusconi but now run by Angelino Alfano (PdL) as Berlusconi's clout fades; the centrist Catholic Union of Christian and Center Democrats (UDC) of Pier Ferdinando Casini and the left-leaning Partito Democratico (PD) led by Pier Luigi Bersani.
     
    The panic over revising the rules governing the national general election is palpable. At the moment the "Porcellum" (pig law), as the election law voted in 2005 is quite rightly called, hands the winning coalition (not the single party) a premium of extra members of Parliament so that the winners automatically control 55% of the votes on any legislation. Individual candidates are not elected; the parties choose the list in the smoke-filled back room. Today, with the body politic hacked into bits, the law still holds.
     
    The problem is that the vote two weeks ago in Sicily showed just how many votes the renegade, boistrous, angry comedian Beppe Grillo can command. Founded only three years ago, Grillo's Movimento Cinque Stelle (M5S) participated in last May's local elections in Parma, Genoa and Verona, where the M5S bested Berlusconi's once-powerful PdL. At local elections in Palermo that same month, Grillo's movement fared poorly, commanding a mere 4% of the vote. But only five months later, in the pan-Sicilian vote just two weeks ago, the M5S bounced up to claim 15% of the vote - more than any other political organization in Sicily - in a campaign, moreover, costing just E25,000.
     
    The prospect that Sicily is showing the way, and that the M5S just may become the single largest party in Italy, has scared rival politicians of every stripe witless. Should Grillo become the big winner in the coming national general elections, the dread Porcellum with its gift box of members of Parliament would automatically kite Grillo into pole position for premier, as he well knows. To ward off such a specter, this week the jittery powers-that-be finally rushed into a committee meeting in Parliament to revise the Porcellum. Their consensus was that the best way to avoid a lone cowboy party from walking away with the freebie collection of votes would be to set the minimum vote at the polls  at 42%, which just might be rounded down to 40%. Grillo was not pleased. "This is a coup d'etat," Grillo protested, or rather, shouted. At the moment, it is not; the proposed revision remains stuck in committee. For the moment, the Porcellum is still valid.
     
    Meantime Grillo, comic by profession turned piazza political orator,  himself has come in for flak from a few of his own supporters. It may not be fair play, but "grillo" means "cricket" in English, and indeed the angry outsider Beppe Grillo is a rasping, noisy cricket, and  the only one allowed to chirp. None of his M5S supporters is allowed to make comments on TV or elsewhere, and when the lissome Federica Salsi, who represents the M5S in local politics in Bologna, appeared on a TV talk show, Grillo furiously derided her for having "a media orgasm.... Your friends and relatives back home applaud as they share your excitement at a fleeting moment of celebrity."
     
    Salsi struck back, calling Grillo a male "chauvinist," but to scant effect. The shaggy-haired Grillois a consummate media manager whose highly emotional piazza monologues are regularly shown on TV at no cost to himself. Between social network activism and free media coverage, his virulent attacks on the political party leaders, down to and including insults to Premier Mario Monti, win an immense amount of free publicity even as he skillfully refuses to give interviews, and participates in no debates in which his ideas and program can be challenged.. His two-hour swim across the Straits of Messina, and mini-rally on the beach at its completion, successfully launched his movement's political campaign in Sicily last month.
     
    Grillo's posture remains that of the official outsider--the guarantor for all those who want to protest. And yet, just as rival party leaders fear him, he seems to be  positioning himself for a seat at the power table. If realized, his potential alliance with Antonio Di Pietro's Italia dei Valori (Italy of Values, or IdV) would legally turn Grillo's movement into a party. The alliance has more or less been denied, and Di Pietro himself has come under criticism for allegedly owing a large number of apartments; when asked about this he stuttered without, however, explaining how he came into the funds permitting such acquisitions. For the moment, in the deep fog, anything is possible.


     
     
     
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    Grillo's Sicilian Splash-Down

    ROME - When Beppe Grillo (see his blog >>>) emerged from the waves on a Sicilian beach after swimming from the Italian mainland across the 1.86 treacherous miles of the Straits of Messina, Italian pundits jokingly compared his feat with a famous long-distance swim by Mao Tse-Tung. Grillo's exploit Oct. 10 was the official launch of his party, Movimento Cinque Stelle (M5S), into the Sicilian regional election fray. In the event, Grillo had the last laugh, for when the Oct. 28 ballot boxes were opened, they showed that M5S has bounced up from zero to 14.7%, to become the single largest party in Sicily, well ahead of such rivals as Pier Luigi Bersani's Partito Democratico (PD) on the left and Silvio Berlusconi's Partito della Liberta' (PdL) on the right.

    With 13.5% of the vote, Bersani's PD slipped slightly but significantly below Grillo's. The PdL fared far worse, slumping to a mere 12%, almost one-third of the 34% Berlusconi's party commanded in the last regional election, held in 2008. As predicted, however, the real majority party was composed of the skeptics and the disaffected who simply stayed home, in a region where an election turn-out of 80% and more was not unusual in the past. A bellwether of warning to Rome is that this week's turnout of 2,203,885 voters, out of a population of 5.1 million, meant that less than half (47.42%) of Sicilians entitled to vote bothered to do so.

    The count for the individual candidates who campaigned for the presidency of the regional assembly, which meets in Palermo's historic Palazzo dei Normani, was slightly different. Here Rosario Crocetta of the PD, with the backing of the Pier Ferdinando Casini's Unione dei Democratici Cristiani e di Centro (UDC), swam away with the presidency, with a total vote of 30.5%. In case anyone missed the significance of this on the national level, Italian TV viewers were, as a result, treated to endless footage of Bersani and Casini grinning and hugging each other; together, they had, through their victorious candidate Rosario Crocetta, managed to trump the candidate of the shaggy-haired, politically scary Beppe Grillo. "With my election," Crocetta told the media, "I really believe that the history of this country is being changed. A rubber wall has been broken down. For the first time a center-left candidate who has run on fundamental values like the fight against the Mafia has won.... There's new and clean air here."

    Even here, however, Grillo's people may have the last laugh, or at least a giggle, for the question now is what comes next. Crocetta is personally interesting and highly regarded. He began his working life as a chemist in the oil-refinery Southern Sicilian town of Gela. He is openly gay, he speaks four languages, he bag political life with the Communist party and later with the Greens and he has published a book of poetry. He survived a Mafia murder attempt in 2003, and ever since has been in real danger for his attacks on the Mafia. As regional president, his coalition of moderate Catholics and leftists represents less than one-third of the electorate, meaning that he lacks the majority needed to run the region and to pass legislation. Crocetta and company will therefore require a governing partner, and the most suitable is obviously the Grillo candidate, Giancarlo Cancelleri, who walked away with 18% of the vote for regional president.

    But the Grillo crowd are in no hurry to join any government. "Go ahead, seduce us," Cancelleri taunted Crocetta. "Tame us." But then he added that matrimony with Crocetta's bi-party coalition was out of the question: "We're old maids, old shrews," he specified, sending reporters to their editions of Shakespeare so they could flesh out their post-election pieces with long quotes about taming shrews. "Anyway, Crocetta needs others for allies, and he can find some besides ourselves," he added mischievously, knowing very well which shrew Crocetta would prefer to tame. Cancelleri, who says that the Grillo party in Sicily will support Crocetta only on individual issues, case by case, is equally interesting. Because a M5S goal is to reduce the cost of politics in Italy, Cancelleri promises that his party's neophyte regional assemblymen will renounce three-quarters of their monthly stipend, making do with around $3,000. The savings will be devoted to launching small business enterprises in Sicily, he said. 

    The other possible ally for the Bersani-Casini alliance, Sicilian version, is theoretically Gianfranco Micciche', 58, leader of a locally based Sicilian party, Grande Sud. Born in Palermo, Micciche' became a manager with Berlusconi's publicity company Publitalia '80 and, transferring to Forza Italia, served as Berlusconi's Minister for Development. Micciche' made headlines when he commented that, if one had to wait for the defeat of Mafia bosses before public works contracts were awarded, "then we would never get moving." He also reportedly objected to renaming the Palermo airport to honor the Mafia victims Judges Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino because it would give those arriving a poor impression of Sicily. His personal party, Grande Sud, occupies a centrist position in the Sicilian firmament and accounts for some 15% of the island's votes. "He could guarantee stability for Crocetta, but at what price?" asks the conservative daily Libero.

    Unfortunately for anyone considering Micchiche' as a possible ally for Crocetta, he is considered close to Raffaele Lombardo, the disgraced former regional president, as well as to Berlusconi. This October's election of a new regional assembly was caused by Mafia scandals that precipitated Lombardo's resignation under a dark cloud. He had replaced Salvatore Cuffaro, who is now serving a seven-year prison term for Mafia association. The Sicilian election is therefore of more than usual interest, with reports in the media from the Guardian in London and the Wall Street Journal in New York and to China's CRIEnglish.com.

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