Red Flags in the Sunset
San Giovanni in Laterano. The flags were supposed to be red…
Something possibly important happened yesterday evening in Italy. For the first time in just about forever, perhaps since Mussolini’s twenty year run ended, somebody besides the “Left” has managed to fill a very large Roman piazza with a huge political crowd of perhaps a million people.
The Center-Right organizers say over two million people showed up and the police estimate seven hundred thousand. The truth is somewhere in between, but the precise value doesn’t matter very much.
They were there – “there” is Piazza San Giovanni in Laterano, in Rome – to protest against the Prodi government’s deeply flawed budget bill (here). Their leader – “prophet” may be a better word – was Silvio Berlusconi, but we’ll get to that later.
Is is difficult to explain to the rest of the world how remarkable it is that this has happened. Gigantic street demonstations are part and parcel of Italian political life and have been through all of modern history, but there has been a kind of sea change here.
Readers will likely have seen film clips of Benito Mussolini addressing enormous crowds, usually in Piazza Venezia to, oh, declare war or something. Fascist propaganda always described these gatherings as “oceanic” and that is not such a bad word to capture the sensation generated by a million people getting together to roar out slogans.
But since Il Duce met his bad end, the huge crowds, the masses showing their muscle – or someone’s muscle, anyway – have always belonged to the Left, mostly because the allied labor union organization was so effective at bringing them out.
Now, against what should have been all likelihood, the Center-Right has broken the monopoly. Worse, depending on your point of view, they did it in Piazza San Giovanni, which in modern political tradition “belonged” to the labor movement just the way Piazza Venezia did to the Fascists. Then, worse than worse, the Left hasn’t been able to get that very large square anywhere near so full in years.
This is hugely embarrassing. The Left has always claimed that its one-time massive turnouts were a demonstration of the genuine popular will. It cannot now easily backtrack. This was evident in Prime Minister Romano Prodi’s uneasy comment about the event: “I believe that street demonstrations are an integral part of democracy, so I find nothing strange about it, nothing special. These things are part of the democratic system”.
The “nothing special” event Mr. Prodi describes is however going to scare the wee out of the coalition he attempts to lead. To a degree, everyone always believes his own propaganda. In the decades when it used to lose, the Left managed to convince itself that filling Piazza San Giovanni was about as important as filling ballot boxes. In fact, those crowds never really translated into votes, but it looked like they ought to and that was enough for the whole thing to become an article of faith.
That the parties on Mr. Prodi’s side finally began to win national elections only as they stopped being such a draw in the piazzas was too much a paradox to truly sink in – and in fact it has not. Massive public demonstrations have always been used as living proof of supposed democratic support even when, as one totalitarian regime after another has shown, they were nothing of the sort. But they look good and everybody has quite a lot of fun.
Unfortunately, the man basking in the glow of a million admirers was not the present Prime Minister or even one of his cleverer henchmen. It was the arch-enemy, Mr. Silvio Berlusconi. There is no way at all around the fact that this was an enormous personal triumph for him.
Though “Upper Italy” continues to believe it is not likely he will again be Prime Minister anytime soon, Berlusconi has once more demonstrated that, while he is not able to govern Italy himself, he can usually make sure no one else does.
This is the lesser stuff, the tactical side. What is really important is that the most unpredictable of all political creatures, the “silent majority,” has been scared onto the streets. At this point, just about anything can happen, and probably will.
Political power is always more about perception than solid fact. In the most obvious way possible, through the presence of megatons of human flesh in a public demonstration, the leftist assertion of predominance in speaking for “the people” has been put into doubt.
This is likely to have a number of immediate – and self-contradictory – effects within the governing coalition. First of all, it will reinforce the already strong suspicion that participation in the Prodi government is dragging the parties involved to their electoral deaths. That will further stimulate the “every man for himself” confusion that already characterizes its actions. On the other hand, actually allowing Prodi to fall greatly increases the odds of having to go to the polls, something the Left now has much reason to fear.
The two phenomena are in direct contradiction and the paradox will generate the hysterical background on which a third element must play out: the idea that the Left may now have very little time to exact whatever revenge it can and to “orient” public opinion before it is tossed out of office.
The perception of undefined urgency and the sense of having seen the handwriting on the wall rarely counsel wisdom. They are likely to further reduce the already poor quality of governance the Prodi government has so far expressed.
Oddly perhaps, things are hardly better on the other side. Berlusconi’s allies long dragged their feet over the idea of taking the Center-Right into the streets. They did so for two reason: the first being that there was a potential for disastrous failure and the second because success would personally reinforce Silvio Berlusconi.
Berlusconi’s particular and peculiar mix of talents create another near paradox. He is a brilliant campaigner and truly awful at actually governing. Many of his supporters, even those who feel personal affection for him, rather wish that, having created the Center-Right, he would now find a way to elegantly fade into statesmanship.
Even many of his most sincere supporters hope his hands can be kept from the actual reins of government. But easing him gently out of the way will take time. A recent fainting episode caused some excitement and speculation in the press about his “legacy”, but his underlying health still seems relatively solid. There is also a shortage of other positions to put him in. He is too divorced to become Pope and too white to replace Kofi Annan at the UN. Italy is probably stuck with him.
Some parts of his side just can’t wait. The “risk” of success has already spooked a first and most ambitious partner, Mr. Pierferdinando Casini and his Christian Democratic Union (UDC) party, into jumping ship, perhaps a tad early.
Up close, Silvio Berlusconi is more “simpatico” than intellectually impressive. He is poorly informed, rarely has done his homework and has the attention span of a mayfly. He says, thinks and appears to actually believe a range of silly things that simply have no place in reality. In other words, to know the man is to underestimate him, something his enemies and even most of his friends always do.
But his intuitive understanding of the Italian public mind is unparalleled. In these matters he is far more often right than wrong. This is almost certainly not luck, but whether it is or not doesn’t matter. He has once again created the perception that his is the winning bandwagon – and his countrymen have a long tradition of leaping to acclaim the victorious, hoping some crumb will fall from their table later on.
Couple that with the fear and general unease the Prodi government has foolishly managed to generate. Both the carrot and the stick would now, at least for the moment, seem to be on Berlusconi’s side.