Italy – the sick man of Europe
‘A BASKET case’, the new ‘sick man of Europe’… whatever name
you give it, Italy seems unable to overcome a downward spiral in its economic
position.
The latest OECD report shows the economy shrinking by 0.6%
this year. The least competitive in the euro area, it comes 47th in a global
ranking compiled by the World Economic Forum. Italy’s large companies – like
Fiat and Alitalia – are struggling to survive and small industries which make up
a large part of the economy are hard hit by the massive increase in imports to
Europe from China of cheap shoes and clothing.
Italy’s budget has been badly in the red for all four years
of Berlusconi’s government and no more una tantum or ‘one-off’ special
measures can be used to balance (fiddle) the books. Predicting Italy’s deficit
to be 3.6% of GDP this year and 4.6% in 2006, the European Commission is
preparing some kind of sanctions for Italy’s persistent failure to implement
harsh spending cuts. (Taxes on the rich have been lessened by €6bn – almost
exactly the same amount as the savings being made through pension ‘reform’.)
Public debt at 106% of GDP is the third largest in the world by value after
Japan and the US.
In spite of promising to turn things round and bring
prosperity to all, Italy’s longest serving prime minister since the war has been
unable to get through the radical, anti-working class ‘reforms’ he promised. His
attacks on job protection within the labour law met huge resistance and failed.
His government’s pension reform proposals also provoked general strike action.
Attempts to cut back on the pensions – proportionately the highest in Europe –
were stymied and only the pusillanimity of the trade union leaders allowed the
age for retirement to be increased from 57 to 60.
In May this year, those ‘leaders’ were again forced from
below to threaten general strike action. This time it was in pursuit of a pay
rise for the country’s three million public service workers, held pending for
seventeen months in the face of constantly rising prices. The head of the
Italian employers’ organisation, Confindustria, made an unprecedented
intervention in the dispute, condemning any rise of over €100 a month that would
set a pattern for the private sector and eat into profits. This provoked even
moderate trade union general secretaries to talk of bringing out private as well
as public sector workers in a countrywide general strike. In the event, they
preferred to sign an agreement over the heads of the workers, which was short of
the claim, assisting the bosses and the government to avoid a major conflict
they might not have been able to win.
Montezemolo, the Confindustria president, is also head of
the Fiat empire he ‘inherited’ from the Agnelli brothers. In the early days of
the second Berlusconi government, they opposed Berlusconi’s confrontational
politics which were provoking mass strike movements. Montezemolo favours a
‘social contract’, including severe wage restraint, to be agreed with the union
leaders and, preferably, a ‘centre left’ government, to do the dirty work of
holding back the demands of workers. But, with his intervention over public
sector pay, he has already shown his true colours.
Workers should take this as a clear warning of why a real
alternative is needed to any kind of coalition with capitalist parties. The
Financial Times, in its campaign for harsh neo-liberal ‘reforms’ in Italy as
elsewhere, cites an estimate that, to lift productivity in Italy, 500,000 jobs
out of the five million in manufacturing, must be slashed. Another period of
neo-liberal policies being pursued by an apparently more sympathetic government
will be bringing Italian workers even greater hardships.
If and when another centre-left government led by Romano
Prodi, the former head of the European Commission, takes over the reins of
government, things could be very different from the last time round. Then the
‘Olive Tree’ governments were given an easy ride by workers, convinced that they
were run by parties much more sympathetic to their needs than Silvio Berlusconi.
(This billionaire businessman has tripled his personal wealth in eleven years in
politics and is 25th on the Forbes list of the world’s richest
people!). This time round, with workers being asked to shoulder the burden of an
economy in worse difficulties, memories will be revived of the privatisations
and cuts carried through by the Olive Tree governments of the 1990s, and
workers’ opposition to capitalist ‘solutions’ could develop more rapidly.
In spite of surviving longer than any other prime minister
since the second world war, Berlusconi’s government appears constantly on the
verge of collapse. The ruling coalition – the House of Liberties – now controls
only four of the country’s 20 regions. The centre left gets around 54% in
opinion polls and the regional elections in April produced a twelve-to-three
victory over the right, with the prime minister’s Forza Italia faring worse than
its coalition partners, polling just 18%. The resultant squabbling between the
constituent parties forced Berlusconi to resign and put together a new cabinet.
Berlusconi’s plans to coalesce the allies in his coalition
into one party have come to nought. But one other factor working in his favour
is the similar difficulties Prodi is encountering in forging a solid alliance of
the left and centre parties who would be expected to be pressing home their
electoral advantage and demanding Berlusconi’s resignation. After patching up
disagreements over troops for Iraq and obtaining, through its leader, Fausto
Bertinotti, the participation of the left-wing Rifondazione Comunista (RC) in
his Grand Democratic Alliance, Prodi was then forced to drop the unpopular
acronym GAD and devise a new name for his alliance – ‘The Union’.
New differences, apparently now resolved, arose over how the
alliance’s programme and leadership should be chosen. The Margherita (Daisy)
party led by Rutelli, was insisting on its right to stand separately in the
party list voting (which accounts for 25% of parliamentary members, the other
75% being elected from constituencies).
Differences were also revealed over attitudes to the June
national referendum on fertility legislation. Rutelli came out for maintaining
the reactionary changes passed earlier this year while even the ex-fascist
right-wing National Alliance Party’s leader, Fini, trying to appear as a
‘progressive’ bourgeois, came out for the proposed changes which would greatly
assist infertile couples to start families. The new Pope, predictably, endorsed
the recommendation of the leader of Italy’s bishops, Cardinal Ruini. He
cynically advised his flock to abstain in order to get the result invalidated by
a less than 50% turn-out. With just 25% voting, the attempt to get these reforms
has been scuppered, at least for the time being.
After four years of Berlusconi government, workers want to
see the maximum unity forged between opposition parties to get him out!
Bertinotti, at the head of the RC, strikes a chord with many, who imagine his
involvement in ‘The Union’ will guarantee victory and could increase the RC’s
support at the next election.
But the 40% of delegates at the RC’s recent congress who
voted against participation in a centre-left government or electoral alliance
reflect a growing layer of workers who have drawn lessons from past experience.
They correctly fear that a centre-left government will, like the last ones
between 1996 and 2001, attack the gains of the Italian working class on behalf
of a rapacious capitalist class.
Hopefully, the working class base of the RC, now in its
thirteenth year, can pull the party back to its genuinely communist and
anti-Stalinist founding ideas. But only a determined ideological and
programmatic struggle could now reverse the trend. Its leader, Bertinotti,
chooses to base himself on the ideas of the pacifist Gandhi rather than those of
Karl Marx. He refers to the principles of Bad Godesburg, meaning those adopted
by the German Social Democratic Party (SPD) in 1959 when its congress rejected
class struggle, accepted the market and spoke of socialism only as a distant
goal.
There are already workers who have seen local examples of
elected Rifondazione members implementing neo-liberal policies and cannot see
the RC as their party. In Venice, for example, a group of workers stood
independently in recent elections after elected RC members participated in the
privatisation of water, refuse collection and education.
On the other hand, Bertinotti himself has felt obliged to
come into open conflict with the DS (ex-‘communist’ Democrats of the Left,
co-members of ‘The Union’) in Bologna. He has clashed with the former trade
union leader, Cofferati, who is now mayor of the city, over a campaign against
squatters who occupy empty buildings as homes. He has had to oppose Cofferati’s
policy of sending in police to break up demonstrations. (The police themselves
have recently been on strike and demonstrating in the city in pursuit of their
own wage claims!).
The real test for the RC must be whether members who
implement anti-working class and anti-youth policies are kept within the ranks
of the party or expelled. At the April congress, no such disciplinary measures
were discussed. In addition, the majority around Bertinotti strengthened its
grip on the party by passing an amendment to the party’s constitution abolishing
places on its national leadership body for the internal factions according to
their strength.
Opposition to the leadership within the RC has grown in
numbers, but remains weak and disparate. If a coherent opposition to the class
collaborationist policies of the present leadership is to be forged, aiming to
win a majority within the party before it is too late, it must be done on the
basis of a clear alternative programme and strategy. It must express confidence
in the capacity and will of Italian workers to fight and in the possibility of
winning a majority in society for an anti-capitalist alternative to Berlusconi
and co.
If Rifondazione fails to do this, and to regain the trust of
workers who feel once again let down, it will act as a negative example for all
those – in Europe and elsewhere – who are looking for a new mass party to take
up the struggle against capitalism and for socialism.
Clare Doyle
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