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Italy's centre-left

Appeasement

Jun 12th 2008 | ROME

From The Economist print edition

Walter Veltroni risks being too nice to Silvio Berlusconi

IN HIS first speech to Italy's new parliament, Silvio Berlusconi declared that he and his colleagues were “breathing in deep this new air”. The prime minister was not talking of his big majority, but of the constructive engagement of the opposition leader, Walter Veltroni.

The legislature that emerged from the election in April has a tidier, British look. On the right is Mr Berlusconi's People of Freedom alliance, linked to the Northern League and a smaller Sicilian party. On the left is Mr Veltroni's Democratic Party (PD), yoked to a small anti-corruption party. In place of Britain's Liberal Democrats stands the Catholic Union of Christian and Centre Democrats. Mr Veltroni even has a Westminster-style “shadow cabinet”.

Yet Mr Veltroni's idea of opposition does not appear British at all. He has passed up a string of opportunities to embarrass the government, thereby helping to boost Mr Berlusconi's popularity, which has risen since the election. One chance came when a journalist, Marco Travaglio, reminded television viewers that Mr Berlusconi's choice for Senate speaker, Renato Schifani, was once a business partner of people later convicted of Mafia involvement. Far from demanding more details, the PD's Senate leader, Anna Finocchiaro, called the remark “unacceptable”.

Then there is Alitalia. Mr Berlusconi promised to find an all-Italian consortium to save the airline. More than two months later—and €300m ($465m) poorer after a state loan to Alitalia—the country is still waiting. Yet this has scarcely been mentioned by the PD. The party has been just as restrained in attacking the government's harsh measures to deal with immigration and security, which have raised eyebrows in Brussels (and in the Vatican). Nor has it fussed about Mr Berlusconi's plan to ban most police phone-taps.

What is going on? Mr Veltroni says he is keen on “dialogue”. The advantages for Mr Berlusconi are clear: he can slough off his partisan image and re-emerge as a consensus man, perhaps a candidate for the presidency. But the benefits for the left are less evident. Even before the election, Mr Veltroni said he wanted to co-operate with Mr Berlusconi on electoral and constitutional reforms to make Italy easier to govern. A noble aim, except that it has been tried before, with disastrous consequences.

In the 1990s, at the insistence of Massimo D'Alema, leader of the biggest left-wing party, the centre-left government held off passing laws to break Mr Berlusconi's virtual monopoly on private television. Mr D'Alema hoped to win Mr Berlusconi's support for political reform. But Mr Berlusconi then torpedoed the project—and returned to power in 2001 with his media empire intact.

Yet appeasement has a strong appeal to Mr Veltroni, who is in a vulnerable position. One reason why the centre-left government of Romano Prodi began to flounder was that the PD's leader sought to distance himself from it after being chosen last autumn. His election strategy largely failed: he rejected an alliance with parties to the left, insisting that the PD must run alone. And his choice of candidate for mayor of Rome proved woefully wrong. Francesco Rutelli, who had already run the city twice, managed to reduce the centre-left's vote from 62% to 46%.

Dialogue, with its promised role in building a new Italy, precludes the tortured post-mortem that a defeated party might otherwise hold. Yet that may be what the left needs. Rooted in a discredited creed, Eurocommunism, and a discredited movement, Christian democracy, its main leaders—Mr Veltroni, Mr Rutelli and Mr D'Alema—have been rejected by voters, outwitted by Mr Berlusconi or both. The risk is that Italy may get not a shadow government, but a phantom opposition.