Italian politics has failed to put out its garbage

By Martin Rhodes

Published: January 20 2008 17:15 | Last updated: January 20 2008 17:15

Poor Romano Prodi. The year began badly for Italy’s slightly dishevelled but quietly effective prime minister, hit by two adverse events, both from the southern region of Campania: a vesuvian eruption in the ongoing crisis of Neapolitan refuse collection, and the resignation of Clemente Mastella, justice minister, after he and his wife were hit by corruption allegations concerning appointments at a state hospital near Naples.

The first provides an extreme illustration of sclerotic government. The Naples garbage crisis goes back nearly two decades and has seen multiple, expensive but futile efforts to resolve it in the face of Camorra mob control of the trucks and dumps. Mr Prodi’s new “Trash Tsar” is the ninth to try to tackle it. The second event – which threatens Mr Prodi’s razor-thin parliamentary majority – is symptomatic of Italy’s failure to deal with rampant corruption, 15 years after the tangentopoli (bribe-city) scandals brought down the ruling political establishment.

Despite the promises of the new, so-called “Second Republic” launched in the early 1990s, Italy remains the least well-governed country in Europe. Mr Prodi’s team – including the fiercely-competent ministers of finance and the interior, Tommaso Padoa-Schioppa and Giuliano Amato – has made a few great strides. Since returning to power in April 2006, Mr Prodi has stitched together an improbable patchwork coalition of nine squabbling parties, including communists, greens and Catholics, and recovered from a no-confidence vote in early 2007; Mr Padoa-Schioppa, faced with the legacy of the fiscally-irresponsible Berlusconi government has begun to regain control of public finances; Mr Amato has presided over headline-grabbing successes against the various southern mafias.

These are small spots of sheen on an otherwise heavily tarnished system. In the early 1990s, the bad old Italy of politicians on the take and mafiosi on the make was supposedly pushed aside by a new generation of political reformers, led by crusading anti-graft, anti-crime judges. However, a new analysis of reform over the last 15 years uncovers little real progress. The anti-Mafia struggle and employment policies have both delivered results. But the Naples crisis (and rampant southern extortion rackets) reveals that the war against crime is far from won: resurrected in the 1990s under Mayor Antonio Bassolino (now governor of Campania), Naples quickly fell victim to party patronage and corruption. While unemployment has fallen from double-digits to about 7-8 per cent, this is mostly due to an explosion of part-time jobs, unprotected by the generous welfare benefits of full-time workers.

Elsewhere, immobilismo reigns. Badly needed constitutional and institutional reforms have foundered on bickering between the parties and their ego-centric leaders. That dynamic is fuelled by a highly proportional election system, the dysfunctions of which were exacerbated by Silvio Berlusconi’s attempt only months before the last election to change the rules in his favour. Both left and right-wing coalitions have impeded the anti-corruption revolution and little has been done to improve the quality of public expenditure: infrastructure and education systems remain shambolic, and decades of periodic devaluation and deficit spending have left the economy structurally weakened.

Italian politicians are not just masters of trasformismo (a chameleon-like ability to reinvent and present themselves anew to voters), but of stratificazione, or “layering”, the introduction of new policies and institutions without replacing those that preceded them. The result is a damaging mix of obsolete and contradictory legislation, the product of bargaining over reform by chronically weak governments in a veto-ridden polity. The outcome – immobilismo – is a system in which all parties, and democratic government itself, are steadily losing legitimacy.

New proposals and referendums for reforming Italy’s electoral rules – the root cause of its querulous politics and bad governance – have been launched, and some reform should be approved this year. But opinion polls reveal an Italian public disillusioned with “hyper-politics” – the frenetic but often fruitless activity of its over-paid politicians (due to high salaries and perks, they cost the taxpayer two-to-three times as much as their French, British or German counterparts). Although a good first step, it will take more than electoral reform to give Italians confidence in their broken political system.

The writer is professor of comparative political economy at the University of Denver and was a professor at the European University Institute in Florence