Italy sends in the clowns
by Conrad Black https://www.conradmblack.com/837/italy-sends-in-the-clowns In the incomprehensible stock market flutter that followed the result of the Italian elections, the singular service that France and Italy have paid the world by their political initiatives in the last year seem to have gone unrecognized. Canadians tend to take politics seriously, and up to a point, so do British and Americans. In all but the most gripping circumstances, such as World War I, the French know better, and the Italians threw in that towel after the reign of Constantine I (AD 306-337 ), if not before. And so it is to France and Italy that we must turn our weary eyes, thirsty for entertainment from our public men and women. Italy's election last weekend produced a refreshingly preposterous result. The slightly left-of-centre Democrats and their allies came first with just under 30% of the vote, and thus get a majority in the lower house under Italian electoral rules, followed within half a point by the coalition led by the utterly ineffable Silvio Berlusconi, the wealthiest and most outrageous figure ever elected to lead a large democratic country, less than two years after being turfed out more or less in disgrace. He managed this by using his dominance over private-sector television to tout himself ad nauseam, and capped it with the delivery to every household in the country of a rebate of its property tax, a grandiose electoral gambit that in most advanced countries would have infringed campaign financing rules. But the star of the piece is the third candidate, comedian Beppe Grillo, a hirsute gadfly who polled 25.5% of the vote at the head of his Five Star Movement, the country's largest single party. He has a genuinely heroic CV as a crusader against corruption in Italian affairs. It is 25 years since he helped drive out socialist prime minister Bettino Craxi for corruption, causing him to flee to Tunisia, where he could not be extradited. In 2007, he famously said on his television program that the most crime-ridden district of Naples, Scampia, which has the highest crime rate of any urban district in the European Union, had a lower crime rate than the Parliament of Italy. He has used the Internet and his widely read blog to mobilize his followers. With his commendable crusade for cleaner government there goes a taste for bombast and salacity that strains toleration, even in Italy. He had to pay a substantial libel award in 2003 to Rita Levi-Montalcini, a 94-year-old senator and winner of the Nobel Prize for Physiology and Medicine, whom he had described on his television program as an "old whore." In 1980, he was found guilty of manslaughter for being criminally negligent in causing a car accident that killed three people. In the 1990s, he was regularly banned from television, and finally banned completely for some years, but when he finally returned to the airwaves after one lapse, in 1993, he attracted about 40% of the entire population above the age of 12. In September 2007, he organized, by blog, a "V-Day celebration." The "V" stands for "vaffanculo," Italian for f— off. More than two million Italians participated in this rally, though Italy is no more given to this level of coarse language than the main English-speaking countries are. While Grillo is an endearing character and is apparently sincere, Five Stars does not seem to go much further than rail against corruption and espouse environmental causes. But between the Democratic leader, Pier Luigi Bersani, Berlusconi, and Grillo, as the Senate is severely splintered between those and other parties, they have created an apparently intractable parliamentary farce: Vanished, with the illusion that Italy was ready to sign on to the professorial tutelage of the desiccated and apolitical Mario Monti, is the delusion of public support for an austerity program. France, unlike Italy, is an intermittently politically serious country. And unlike Italians, the French do take themselves quite seriously. Last year, in response to the antics of the hyperactive Nicolas Sarkozy, the French did something almost Italian in its perversity, and elected Francois Hollande as president. He is a man from a small town, short, dumpy, with no uplifting qualities, whose career has essentially been a creeping advance within the cadres of the French Socialist Party. Six years ago, he was abruptly side-swiped as party nominee by his long-time unmarried companion and mother of his four children, Segolene Royal, who put up a peppy campaign in mini-dresses and exiguous trousers and tops, but had no grasp of the issues. However, she benefitted from French gallantry in avoiding a severe defeat by Sarkozy. (Mr. Hollande and Ms. Royal have parted company.) As the last election approached, Hollande was assisted by the lawless prosecutors of America, who spuriously threw the leading Socialist contender and head of the International Monetary Fund, Dominique Strauss-Kahn, into the teeming cesspool of the Rikers Island criminal detention center on the complaint of a chamber maid in his New York hotel (who is eight inches taller than he is). The charges were dropped after the normally terminally rabid prosecutors realized that the complainant might be an "unreliable witness," but Strauss-Kahn paid her $6 million to be rid of her civil suit, a pretty good turn for that kind of work. (Strauss-Kahn may be back; consider that Socialist icon and former president Francois Mitterand came back from simultaneously aiding the Communists and the Nazis during the Occupation and from a faked assassination attempt.) In office, Hollande has been dogged by relentlessly rising unemployment (10.5%). His tax increases and rhetorical attacks on the wealthy and effusions on behalf of France's Marxist labour movement have produced 25 billion Euro monthly capital departures. Actor Gerard Depardieu, saying that he had paid 189 million Euros of income tax to the French government in his career, though officially reviled as "a drunken, incontinent windbag," was widely approved for seeking Belgian and Russian citizenship; and on acceptance by Moscow, he praised Vladimir Putin's "great democracy." Hollande is so clumsy, he even managed to unite all sides against him on the gay-marriage issue. He back-pedalled on complete marital liberty under pressure from France's beleaguered Catholic community after Paris's cardinal archbishop pitched his opposition to gay marriage on the rights of children. The cardinal whistled up a demonstration of a third of a million people in protest, a respectable-sized mob even in Paris, and Hollande then climbed down and left it as a matter of conscience to the municipal mayors who perform civil marriages. But then he resurrected his initial bill when the Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, and Transsexual Alliance came snorting out to assert itself. The president enjoyed a slight rise when he sent a brigade of 3,000 men to liberate Timbuktu from terrorists, but beau geste military derring-do are rarely durable poll-lifters. France elected a bonze to the great monarchical office created by Charles de Gaulle (for himself), as a gesture of perversity, and Italy has given the balance of power to a "clown prince" as a protest. Neither step will accomplish much that is useful, but they should remind us that, in all our sobriety and earnest, Canadians have much to be thankful for. © 2024 Conrad Black |
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© 2024 Conrad M. Black |