Articles:
Britain can’t Afford to Ignore Italy’s New Clown

Brits and Italians have one thing in
common: they like to dismiss Italian politics, and especially elections, as
being irrelevant to them, albeit for different reasons. Ha ha, we want to say,
after the clown Silvio Berlusconi they now have the hairy comedian Beppe
Grillo: same old ridiculous opera buffa,
turning its comedic attention now to the horrible euro. Omiodio, Italians say, our politics is in a right old self-serving
mess, with all personalities,  no
policies and no hope, but that’s just Italy for you: no chance of changing it.

As
reactions to the country’s stunning election result on February 25^th,
those are both understandable ways of hiding from its implications. But to do
so would be wrong. There are serious dangers in the result, both for Italy and
for Europe (which, note, does include Britain), but there are also
opportunities and important lessons.

The biggest
lesson from the success of Grillo’s Five Star Movement in rising from zero to
grab a quarter of the national vote and more than 160 seats in the two houses
of Parliament is that in times of crisis and alienation the most powerful—and
necessary—political message is that of change. It is only a modest exaggeration
to say that in our 1997 election Tony Blair won his landslide on that basis, by
virtue of having captured the simple word “new”.

All
of the Italian political establishment, which sadly includes last year’s
saviour, Mario Monti, succeeded brilliantly in ignoring the hunger for change
and held on tightly to the simple word “old”. So did Silvio Berlusconi, but at
least he was listening to his voters and so offered the simple, old and
appealing promise of a cut in the country’s most unpopular tax, what Lib Dems
would call a “mansion tax”. That is why he confounded his political obituarists
by doubling his pre-campaign share of the vote.

Neither
Monti nor the pre-campaign favourites, the Labour-equivalent Democratic Party
led by Pier-Luigi Bersani, managed to offer voters any real sense of hope.
Monti lost his image as an outsider-with-integrity by allying himself with old,
discredited centrist groups and the Catholic Church, which meant that he had no
real hope of shaking off the idea that he was all about raising taxes and
forcing sacrifices on people. Bersani is as dull a communicator as Monti, but
anyway made no effort to show that he would ever be able to break with the old
left’s love of trade unions, a big state and high taxes. He just thought he
would sail into office as if it was his party’s birthright.

The
opportunity now must be to learn that lesson but also exploit the desire for
renovation that Grillo has identified and kindled. Change is what politicians now
need to offer, especially for a country like Italy that is stuck in recession,
with unemployment above 11% and incomes falling, with young graduates
emigrating in droves (even to flat-lining Britain) to find better opportunities,
with a hugely costly political class that is considered to be the problem, not
the solution.

First
must come a haggle about how to form a government, even a temporary one. Nonetheless,
the prize in that haggle will go to those leaders willing to align themselves
in some way with Grillo’s agenda for change; and it will go to Grillo if this
balance-of-power-holder manages to focus constructively on a small but pointed series
of reforms, probably chiefly to the political system itself—the electoral law,
the number of MPs and local political posts, the size of MPs’ salaries and
pensions—that serve to keep his own MPs loyal and lay good ground for a second
election, which will most likely come within a year at most.

The
bigger opportunity, however, will then be to re-position parties and messages
for that next election. And it is an opportunity and a lesson with implications
for other euro-zone members but also for Britain. Sticking to the status quo,
avoiding change, is a recipe for failure. But also the one-dimensional,
obsessive focus on austerity, deficit-reduction and debt-reduction just for their
own sake and regardless of the consequences is suicidal.

Gordon
Brown used to talk about “prudence with a purpose”, and it wasn’t a bad line.
The austerity message in the eurozone and in Britain has gone too far, because
it is digging the economic hole ever deeper, but also it has anyway become
politically maladroit. If it is to retain support it needs to be joined to a
convincing sense of purpose, a language of hope and opportunity.

In
the Italian context, the people who most need to learn this lesson are Bersani
and Monti. Bersani’s chief internal party opponent, the 38-year-old
Blair-admiring mayor of Florence, Matteo Renzi, has recognized that as well as
symbolizing change and youth he and the Democratic Party need to find a
language of liberalism that is not punitive or didactic: he talks of making
Italy “simpler” by removing bureaucracy and other barriers.
Either the 61-year-old Bersani needs to embrace such messages and modernize his
party, or he will be overthrown by Renzi. But Monti too needs to find this
language and not make liberalism sound like a form of sado-masochism.

Will
it happen? It might, for the shock of Monday’s result has been huge. But there are
dangers too, and such dangers are shared by all of us in Europe. Frustrated
anger and blocked demands for change lead directly to extremism. For who else
is there to vote for if the mainstream parties offer nothing? In Italy, if
Grillo’s movement now disappoints and the old parties fail to change, new, more
extreme populist movements will rise up to fill the gap. Protest, so far
remarkably calm and peaceful, could easily turn violent.

British
commentators like to focus on the threat of all this to the euro, which is
real—Grillo has called for a referendum on the currency—but not at present all
that serious, unless Italy lurches back towards bankruptcy, which doesn’t look
likely. The bigger threat is the evidence Grillo’s vote reveals of political
volatility, of a desire for alternatives. That volatility and that desire exist
in Britain too, just as they do elsewhere in Europe. We ignore it at our peril.