ITALY has sent for “Super Mario,” as his fans call him — the EU’s former banker-in-chief is now Prime Minister.
Mario Draghi is not a politician, and by summoning him President Sergio Mattarella signals that Italy’s long-running political crisis is far from over.
Draghi does not even succeed a politician — Giuseppe Conte, who had to resign last month, was a professor of law who was asked to form a government precisely because there was no political figure able to muster a parliamentary majority.
Last month’s upheaval wasn’t even the first time Conte’s government had collapsed.
His first administration fell when the hard-right League party of Matteo Salvini pulled out.
That was staved off by the unlikely alliance of the other partner — the Five Star Movement, an anti-Establishment party that topped the polls in the 2018 general election but whose lack of any consistent political programme has seen its popularity plummet in office — with its former nemesis, the Democratic Party it had previously denounced as the very Establishment it defined itself against.
It was transparently a bid to avoid an election, and unstable from the start.
In immediate parliamentary terms, it may even have been stabilised rather than rocked by the coronavirus pandemic that swept Europe in 2020, with the public health emergency giving coalition partners a national interest narrative to cling to.
But with mass vaccination now under way, even if we remain at the height of a deadly third wave, politicians are looking to their post-pandemic positioning.
Italy’s political class has not emerged much better than Britain’s from the crisis. The country has the second-highest death toll in Europe, the sixth in the world, just behind Britain.
It was the first European country affected and the lack of solidarity from other EU states last spring was noticed: Foreign Minister Luigi di Maio posted videos on social media pointedly thanking China for assisting with doctors and medical supplies, while its ambassador to the EU was even blunter: “Not a single EU country responded [to requests for assistance]… only China responded bilaterally,” Maurizio Massari declared in March.
Power-brokers in Rome are well aware that voters are less likely to reward ministers for steering them through a crisis than blame them for the truly appalling death toll, and this in a country where public confidence in them was non-existent even before the virus.
A new face at the top might postpone the reckoning a bit longer. And in turning to Draghi, as a decade ago when “technocrat” Mario Monti was picked to administer savage spending cuts following the financial crisis, they hope to kill two birds with one stone: to let politicians off the hook for deeply unpopular policies by having them imposed by someone with no party allegiance, while signalling to Brussels that Italy’s commitment to the European project remains total whatever its internal turmoil.
Draghi, after all, got his Nintendo-themed nickname for “saving the euro” as European Central Bank president from 2011-19 — a period that saw the institution impose crippling spending cuts and privatisation drives on Greece, Ireland, Portugal and Spain with a commitment to neoliberal orthodoxy so ferocious that the International Monetary Fund cried foul.
These manoeuvres maintain the status quo, for now. But direct rule by a banker will only deepen the crisis of legitimacy engulfing the ruling class, while the ugly xenophobic nationalism of Salvini is further boosted by evidence of the anti-democratic game that Italian politics has become.
Italy’s left needs to mount a real challenge to this broken model — one that breaks with an unaccountable EU whose neoliberal straitjacket has deprived its people of democratic choice and its politicians of democratic legitimacy.
Beyond Italy, liberals buoyed by Joe Biden’s win in Washington and the retreat of the socialist left should take note. The political, social and economic crisis shaking the West has not gone away.
