Articles:
Matteo Renzi: as Thatcher, rather than Blair

For someone who claims to want to
emulate Britain’s Tony Blair, Matteo Renzi has made a strange start
in national politics.  When I interviewed him on camera for
“Girlfriend in a Coma” he cited Blair as wisely saying he loved
Labour Party traditions, except their tradition of always losing
elections—but now Renzi has split his own PD by his sudden putsch
against Enrico Letta. 

And as I wrote in L’Espresso in
December last year, one of Blair’s key tactics was patience: he
took three years to get full control of his party before winning the
general election of 1997. President Renzi is not a patient man. 

So what should we think of Italy’s
young, ambitious and impatient leader? Most of all, we should judge
him by what his government actually achieves, so we will have to wait
for that. Dreams and inspiring words about radicalism and revival are
good and needed, but they will count for nothing without decisive
actions.

The comparison with Tony Blair has
been overdone. Yes, it made some sense to look for inspiration to
another European country in which a bright young leader took over as
head of a big left-wing party and shook it up. But the circumstances
of Britain in 1997 and Italy today are too different to make the
comparison useful. 

For a start, Britain was not in an
economic crisis when Blair won his first election in 1997: it was in
its fourth year of quite strong economic growth. And Blair took power
after a general election in which he had won a big parliamentary
majority, and after nearly 18 years of rule by the right-wing
Conservative Party. That situation made a lot of bureaucrats and even
business leaders support the idea of a moderate centre-left prime
minister. For now, Renzi can only dream of such political strength. 

No, if my own country of Britain is to
be used to provide comparisons for the emergence of Renzi, a much
better one can be found in 1979, when Britain did have an economic
crisis. It is the arrival in 10 Downing Street in that year of
Margaret Thatcher. I am not saying that Renzi resembles Thatcher in
ideological terms. But the resemblance lies in the political
situation and how he needs to deal with it.

When Thatcher took power, admittedly
with a clear, but not strong parliamentary majority, she presented
herself as much more of a radical outsider than Blair did. It is hard
to remember it now, but she too claimed to have dreams to fulfill,
quoting St Francis of Assisi on the day of her victory. But the big
point is this: like Renzi, Britain’s revolutionary first female
prime minister was opposed by much of her own party, was opposed by
most leading bureaucrats, and was widely expected to fail.

During Thatcher’s early period as
prime minister, she struggled, in two main ways. She struggled to
define her own strategy, to work out what it was she really wanted to
do. And she struggled to keep control of her own government, as so
many of its members preferred their agendas and ideas to hers.

So what are the lessons of Margaret
Thatcher for Matteo Renzi? One is to find and enact a few key reforms
to define your purpose, rather than rushing around trying to do a lot
of smaller measures. Second, to do as she eventually did, making it
totally clear that she was not going to change course or give way
under pressure from her opponents.

All Britons who were adults in the
early 1980s remember a speech of hers at her party’s conference
when she declared that “the lady’s not for turning”, meaning
that she was not going to reverse her course. Whether they liked her
policies or not, Britons suddenly knew they had a prime minister who
really meant what she said.

That is what President Renzi is going
to need to do: choose some clear, memorable priorities, ones which
the public can understand, and which show that he means what he says
and is not going to back down or compromise.

There is, in addition, one lesson from
Tony Blair that must be repeated from my December article: Renzi
should make a reform that clearly helps poorer workers, as Blair did
when he introduced Britain’s first ever minimum wage. If he wants
to win support for his Jobs Act, he will need to show that he cares.