Italy: The Unfinished Revolution

Matt Frei

Matt Frei's book is an excellent history of the Italian political scene in the period during and immediately after mani pulite. That it is already out of date (it was first published over five years ago) bears witness to how fast things have moved in Italian politics since 1992. Reading Matt Frei's conclusions, for example, you would assume that Silvio Berlusconi's brief period as PM in 1994 was a never to be repeated experiment. That both he and the country would have had their fingers too badly burned to try again. Instead, as we all know, he is back in the hot seat in 2002.

The best part of the book is the first third which gives a comprehensive background to the tangentopoli scandal, how it broke (and who broke it) and why. Matt Frei's analysis is excellent. I had assumed that the reason the partitocrazia fell apart in 1992 was due in most part to the end of the cold war. No longer needed as a bulwark against the PCI the DC and its allies found their misdeeds vulnerable to the kind of investigation which would have been impossible to carry out before 1989.

But Frei uncovers a range of additional compelling economic factors. One of his main arguments is that by 1992 the greed of the governing parties had simply got out of hand. The scale of the bribes and backhanders vastly increased in the 1980s and Frei especially fingers the PSI and Craxi as the newest and greediest kids on the block. According to Frei recession hit Italian businesses simply got sick of the price they were having to pay. And they had good reason to worry. By the beginning of the 1990s something called the Moody index in America had downgraded Italy from its top AAA rating to the economic equivalent of Serie B. In 1992 the lira dropped out of the ERM. It also looked as if Italy would be unable to meet any of the seven criteria for monetary union established at Maastricht in 1991. This was a tough wake up call to the Italian political and business classes.

Frei's last few chapters deal with the rise of Berlusconi. Berlusconi's rise to power has its roots, of course, in the political upheavals of mani pulite but it's an interesting story in its own right. Trying to follow the tangentopoli scandal from a distance, and through books like Frei's, you soon begin to despair of its complexity. Perhaps everyone in Italy was playing the game and no individuals were to blame. It seems Italian voters started to feel weary of the scandal anyway. And so it was that Berlusconi was able to get elected even though his brother and business associate, Paolo, admitted keeping a two-million-dollar slush fund for bribing the Guardia di Finanza. His lawyers stated "Paolo was the victim of a system of corruption from which neither he nor any other entrepreneur could escape" or as Frei puts it: "universal corruption neutralises personal culpability". And it all become so very circular; the Guardia di Finanza - the main arm of the anti-corruption operation - itself had seventy officers arrested in 1994.

Aside from the corruption issues, Frei is good at setting out the problem of a country electing as Prime Minister its most prominent and powerful business tycoon. Although he's talking about Berlusconi's first term in office the arguments are all still applicable today.

All in all, it's a book which should be on the shelf of any Italian political junkie. The only problem I had with it was a feeling that one or two filler chapters had been shoved into the middle. There are chapters on neo-fascism and on the mafia which are interesting enough but which don't really fit in with the main narrative. Amazon.com's own editorial review even calls it a book about the "mafia" which it absolutely is not. Not everything rotten in the state of Italy is mafia linked. Indeed, the conclusion I came away with from Frei's book was that by the 1990s the mafia was the least of Italy's problems.