Italy: The Church Re-enters Politics, Dividing the Left

[The following is the latest report from DIRELAND's Rome correspondent, Judy Harris.  A longtime ex-pat journalist who has lived in Italy for decades, Judy -- who was the Wall Street Journal's Italy correspondent for ten years -- delivers just for DIRELAND readers a dissection of what's been going on in the runup to Italy's coming elections.]

Robert Browning's stately home stood on a hillside in Asolo, a town in the fat-cat Italian Northeast roughly an hour's drive from Venice -- and so languidly elegant that only the richest and most knowledgeable can find it on a map or spell it. Here the poet ogled a passing silk weaver named Pippa, and then penned a giddy ode ending:

God's in His Heaven,

All's right with the world.

Look out the window anywhere in Italy, and so it would seem. The cafes are thronged, the skies are sunny, and inflation and the bureaucrats are no worse than usual. God, however, is not in his heaven; he is definitely back -- and in the political arena. As if an invisible hurricane had swept through Italy, all around lie the ruins of secular politics. What¹s raising the storm is the fact of evil-twin elections, slated for next Spring.

Twin #1 is a national general election to determine a new Parliament and hence who, among a dozen parties, will run the new show. No one can win 50% of the vote, and so the trick will be to cobble together a coalition able to obtain the vote of confidence needed to install a new premier and cabinet.

But that is only part of the story. In Twin #2, a two-thirds majority of the new  Parliament will elect a president to succeed the respected octegenarian Carlo Azeglio Ciampi, who has valiantly tried to keep a brake on Premier Silvio Berlusconi for the past six years of the seven-year presidential term. In short, the voters elect a Parliament, and then the Parliament elects the president of the nation, whose principal power is the right to dissolve Parliament. This coincidence of the calendar renders the elections six months hence far more important than any in years.

Behind the maneuverings (which include a brutal and so far unsuccessful right-wing effort to rewrite the election laws), there has been one obvious, if self-appointed, candidate to replace Ciampi: Premier Berlusconi himself. It is interesting that,  despite his strangle-hold on the media from TV to movies and publishing, billionaire Berlusconi¹s popularity is sagging, and his rightist coalition is running scared for the first time since he entered politics. A poll released September 26 by the respected SWG research institute showed Berlusconi's Forza Italia party with just 17.5 % of the vote -- the party's lowest score since it swept to power in 2001 with a 29.4 % share.

At the moment the principal Berlusconi allies in the Casa della Libertà (House of Freedoms) coalition are three strange bedfellows: the racist and anti-immigrant Lega Nord (Northern League), which is led by the demagogic orator Umberto Bossi, and has been often criticised, in Italy and abroad, for being too similar to a fascist party, having also organised a paramilitary group of "green shirts"; the South-based Alleanza Nazionale (built on the ruins of the old neo- fascist Italian Social Movement), and headed by one-time neofascist  youth leader and current Berlusconi Vice-Premier, Gianfranco Fini); and a Catholic wing led by Carlo Casini (head of Italy's anti-abortion Movement for Life) and Rocco Buttiglione, the man whom the European Commission rejected last October as its Justice Commissioner for his reactionary views on gays and women, and who is now Berlusconi's Minister of Culture.

The polls confirm that Premier Berlusconi¹s personal image impovements (hair transplants and face-lifts and  pancake makeup), and his skin-of-his-teeth removals  from criminal procedures haven't helped him, according to the SWG poll, which gives a large popularity lead to Romano Prodi --  the centrist leader of the progressive (well, sort of progressive) opposition coalition, previously known as the Olive Tree coalition but rebaptised L'Unione for the 2006 elections.  This poll gives Prodi a whopping 54% against Berlusconi¹s 40%. This ought to mean that Italy¹s perennially splintered left will make a Cinderella come-back and knock out the Berlusconi coalition. But the road to a left-center victory has proved exceedingly bumpy so far. Here's why:

For four decades after the end of WWII, the Catholic Church wielded power in Italy through the Christian Democrats, so thorougly discredited by corruption scandals that the party was dissolved in the early 1990s after its last Premier, Giulio Andreotti, was found by a court to have extensive Mafia ties. But now, following 15 years of enforced slumber, the Roman Catholic Church has made the decision to relaunch the Church in Italy as a political force -- and all signs are that it will work. And even as the front-running Prodi campaigns up and down the Italian peninsula from a proletarian yellow bus, the Vatican -- with a vintage1950 political ideology and strategy -- has moved into higher gear too.

Other events that should be getting attention are being stifled by the press: the Italian-version of an Enron trial, that of giant food multi-national Parmalat's founder, Calisto Tanzo, and 15 other Parmalat execs, started Wednesday in Milan, as tiny articles on inside pages testified. Similarly neglected was the serious wrestling match which pits the Governor of the Bank of Italy Antonio Fazio -- who was caught playing dirty pool and is under investigation for abuse of office by Rome prosecutors, but is backed by the secretive and powerful, Vatican-favored Opus Dei cult -- against those in Italian and international banking who are demanding he resign.

Instead, day after day, the big headlines are going to the Church -- for example, to a debate over whether  high school and university students in Siena had a right to boo the Cardinal Primate of Italy, the austere Cardinal Ruini, for saying that he opposes "de facto marital unions," meaning unwed heterosexuals as well as gay couples. In this September 23 incident, 40 students ousted from the hall where Riuni was speaking then congregated outside, waving placards like, "Free love in a free State," and "We are all homosexuals."

Ruini subsequently announced that he has not only the right, but an obligation to speak out on issues which concern the Church. Then Ruini went further, suggesting that a proposed law permitting legal recognition of civil unions between unmarried heterosexual couples and gay couples would be unconstitutional. Momentarily, at least, the fact that a cardinal spoke on the constitutionality of proposed Italian legislation put the cat among the pigeons. Curiously, what is now emerging is a groundswell of growing support for the Church and, tacitly, for what his opponents call Ruini¹s meddling.

The left is divided over whether it sides with Ruini, or with the concept of a secular  state. L'Unione's leader Prodi -- a former Christian Democrat --  is a devout Catholic who schizophrenically supported both the proposed law and Ruini. ("I am an adult Catholic," Prodi says) This ambiguity gave conservative anti-clericals a chance to portray Prodi as an opportunist sucking up to the Vatican (a recent front-page cartoon in the daily La Stampa by the all too witty and discerning Forattini, the cartoonist of choice of the Italian left, showed Prodi dressed as a priest).

The flames of internecine controversy over whether the left should be secular were further fanned when Piero  Fassino, leader of the PDS --  or Party of the Democratic Left (the renamed Communist party, and the largest party in the opposition coalition) -- declared, "I am a believer." At this, Fassino's PDS began to quarrel about whether he would have done better to avoid such unhappy turns of phrase. And  Fassino's god-bothering declaration was quickly followed by one from  Fausto Bertinotti, the head of the more radical Rifondazione Comunista (originally a split from the "reformist" ex-Communists of the PDS) in which Bertinotti declared, "If you had asked me if I was a non-believer when I was 20, or even when I was 30, I would have replied without hesitation 'yes.' But today, while not being a believer, I would avoid such a definite reply ... I have attended religious ceremonies, not without a sense of shared emotion."

To this inventory of Catholic controversies dominating the Italian press must be added the Vatican's decision to conduct a witchhunt of U.S. seminaries to insure that no gays are present and purge them if they are.

The Church's current politician of choice in Italy is the Catholic Pier Ferdinando Casini -- president of the Chamber of Deputies -- whose personal popularity rating of 6% is on the rise. He already bests the rating for the engaging (and more secular) rightist Gianfranco Fini, whose popularity has plummeted from about 10% of the electorate to only 5%.

Meantime, the Jurassic left continues to do what it has been doing ever since Bettino Craxi destroyed the Socialist party, which is to make itself irrelevant. Much of the Italian left almost perversely elects to ignore the fact of evolution, including not only of Italy¹s role in Europe and the rest of the world, but any chance of its own evolution  toward a united, secular front against the Church's aggressive re-entry into Italian politics.

Read Judy Harris's previous Letters from Rome for DIRELAND: July 22 -- Judges On Strike Against Berlusconi; June 13 -- Italy's Referendum a Fiasco; June 11 -- Italy's Referendum: It's Really About Abortion.