FOREIGN FOCUS

Italy looks towards the East

CRABRO

Britain is not the only country in western Europe which is going to the polls this month. On Sunday something like nine out of ten Italian adults will be voting for the first time to elect twenty regional councils. The theme of this reform, promised for many years and frequently deferred (largely be- cause it was feared that the chief benefactors would be the Communists), is the fashionable one of 'participation': its protagonists be- lieve that it will decentralise Italian bureau- cracy and reduce its remoteness. In practice the new regional councils will not make much difference in the regions. Where they may make a difference is at the centre.

To all intents and purposes the Italian nation has known only three regimes since its inception : Liberal until the first world war; Fascist between the wars; and Christian Democrat since the war. The Christian Democrats are now in trouble, and some Italians believe that the elections on _Sunday could sound their death-knell.

This is not because they stand to lose a substantial share of the 12+ million votes they won at the last parliamentary elections. They don't: in fact they may well gain votes at the expense of the Socialists, who are in hopeless disarray. Rather it is because they are deeply divided about the possibility of alliance with the Communists at some future date, and the establishment of the regional councils may make it impossible to maintain a facade of unity any longer. For in some regions the local Christian Democrat bosses will want to coalesce with the Communists whatever the central party machine may say. The majority of the parliamentary party will then denounce the collaborationists, a denunciation the minority will never accept.

The Italian 'establishment' (if such a useful cliché is permissible with reference to a country which has always suffered from the lack of a first-class civil service and profes- sional elite) argues that a popular front is un- thinkable. For all their appearance of independence from Moscow, for all their demonstrations of moderation during the industrial troubles which have beset Italy over the past year, and notwithstanding the increasingly middle-class nature of the party leadership, one is told, they are still at heart 'separatists' (as de Gaulle used to call their French comrades). In other words they still take their orders from the Kremlin; they are just more sophisticated at disguising the fact.

This may well be true: it is difficult to say. But whether it is true or not, if I had to make a prediction it is that Italy will in due course produce the first popular front government in western Europe since the 1940s. And the process will be begun by Sunday's vote, al- though it may take months or years to com- plete. That, at any rate, is what logic would suggest.

How so? Well, first, it is often overlooked that Italy has already travelled further along the road to a collectivised economy than any other country in western Europe. The state sector accounts for one-quarter of the national product, and—what matters more— there is really no limit on its growth. This is 743

because the two para-statal giants, IR1 and EN!, have a completely open-ended mandate. The one was originally established to pick up the pieces after the collapse of a number of banks in the 1930s, while the other was set up under the late Signor Mattei to exploit Italy's deposits of natural gas. But in recent years both corporations have diversified aggres- sively. Professor Petrilli has taken IRI into engineering, shipbuilding, electronic equip- ment and even such improbable consumer goods industries as haute couture; EN!, under Professor Mattei and his successors, has branched out into newspapers and textiles. Meanwhile the private sector is starved of capital. Italians complain that the rentier in Italy is intolerably penalised. That this is hardly the case by current British standards is neither here nor there. Italians believe it and prefer to place their savings abroad.

A secondary consideration is that both the public and the private sectors of Italian industry have forged important new links with eastern Europe in recent years. Fiat took the lead with its deal to make motor cars for the affluent Russian in Russia; EN1 followed up with its negotiation of a longterm contract for the supply of Russian natural gas. The two deals are said to be entirely unconnected. and Fiat believe that the Russian decision to award them the car manufacturing contract in competition with Renault (and to a lesser extent British Leyland and Volkswagen) was motivated by purely commercial considera- tions. The fact remains that important sec- tors of Italian industry are now closely com- mitted to the Russian market.

There is also growing evidence of Italian disenchantment with the Common Market. Italy has claimed that it is Giovanni's turn to hold the Presidency of the Brussels Commis- sion, and her partners have acquiesced. But none of the obvious Italian contenders for the job—neither Colombo, the Finance Minister, and veteran of many years of negotiations in Brussels, nor Carli, doyen of European central bankers, nor PetriIli himself (a pas- sionate federalist of long standing)—would look at it and the Italian government has had to fall back on a worthy ex-minister of posts.

This incident is symptomatic. For most Italian leaders, direct elections to a European parliament were always looked upon as the precondition for real progress within the European Community. Hopes have faded sharply in recent years, and today one feels that while the Italians are certainly as enthusiastic for British participation in the Community as ever they were, they some- times ask themselves whether the game is really worth the candle any longer.

The Catholic Church, still a political force to be reckoned with, seems to point in the same direction. It tends increasingly to sub- scribe to the accusation that the Community is a 'rich man's club'. It is more interested in 'the third world'—and also in relations with eastern Europe. We in Britain are inclined to look upon the present Pope as a cautious man who is trying to withdraw the Church from some of the more exposed positions taken up by John xxtv—particularly towards the East. There are many critics of the Pope in Italy, but this is not the commonest charge against him—rather the reverse. It is cer- tainly not to be taken for granted that the existing incumbent would look unkindly on a Christian Democrat-Communist alliance.

Finally there is the effect of the very absence of a numerous elite. With something of a political power-vacuum, and lacking the

sort of self-confident bureaucracy which ran fourth republican France, Italy has been led through an astonishing industrial trans- formation in the past few years by a handful of highly-gifted men—Mattel, Petrelli, Carli and the Agnellis of Fiat. Either they are com- mitted to the state sector, and inclined to be contemptuous of capitalist motivations, or, too often, if they are working in the private sector, they have been liable to behave in a manner which gives aid and comfort to critics of the capitalist system. Thus Fiat brought tens of thousands of workers up from the south to work in their factories in Turin. They assumed that the Turin muni- cipality would house them. It didn't. The results produced splendid copy for Uniia.

Of course none of this proves that the Communists are on the way in from the cold in Italy. The majority of the Christian Demo- crats are fiercely opposed to any such idea. So are the Social Democrats, the party of the President of the Republic. So, to be fair, are a substantial proportion of the Communists themselves (they don't want the responsi- bility). Non-communist protagonists of the Popular Front talk darkly of the threat of a right-wing coup eretar—but there is no one with anything approaching the prestige needed to carry it out.

We must wait and see what happens on Sunday. If the Christian Democrats do un- expectedly well then what many Italians regard as 'the threat to democracy' will have receded. If the Communists do unexpectedly well it will have advanced. If—perhaps the most probable result—both Christian Demo- crat, and Communists pick up votes from the Socialists the status quo will have been reinforced. But whatever happens Italy is looking eastwards.