Italy: Carbonara Copy

Once more, with feeling

Having seen 41 governments come and go in the past 37 years, Italians are pretty blasé about their politics. Still, those who took time off from their vacations last week to glance at a newspaper were not quite prepared for the official photograph of their new government. Man for man and portfolio for portfolio, it consisted of the same 28 ministers who had posed for the ritual picture in June 1981. True, Prime Minister Giovanni Spadolini appeared to have put on a few pounds, and Treasury Minister Benjamino Andreatta had shifted from the far left to the far right. Otherwise, as Italians quickly noted, it was a “photocopy government.”

Why then had Italy’s politicians subjected the country to a 17-day political crisis? The explanation was typically Florentine. Four weeks ago, Spadolini’s five-party centrist coalition tried to push through parliament part of a new austerity program designed to boost industrial production, reduce the balance of payments deficit and curb inflation. A renegade group of Christian Democrats broke party discipline and rejected a government proposal aimed at squeezing more tax revenues from the oil industry. Charging that the country was “ungovernable,” Socialist Leader Bettino Craxi withdrew his party’s seven ministers from the Cabinet. Given Craxi’s barely concealed ambition to become Italy’s first postwar Socialist Prime Minister, the crisis had all the earmarks of a Socialist power play.

But Craxi miscalculated. Interrupting his vacation in the Dolomites, Italian President Sandro Pertini, 85, rushed to Rome and asked Spadolini to form a new government. A lifelong Socialist, Pertini then reportedly reminded Craxi that in Italian politics the party that precipitates early elections usually suffers the most at the ballot box. Ultimately, Craxi appears to have been influenced by an equally persuasive fear: that the Communists would abstain in key parliamentary votes, allowing a minority government without the Socialists to stay in power.