Meet Italy’s answer to Boris

John Laughland

26 July 2008

Gianni Alemanno, Rome’s new right-wing mayor, tells John Laughland that it’s time for the Eternal City to adopt a ‘zero tolerance’ approach

There are few people, I imagine, who could make Boris Johnson jealous, but Gianni Alemanno is probably one of them. Two days before Boris’s election as Mayor of London, the conservative Alemanno conquered Rome after the Italian Left had held the city for a decade and a half. His victory was part of a dramatic overall national victory for the Italian Right, whose no-nonsense political discourse may now set the tone for European politics as a whole.

While Boris governs London from a hideous blob of glass and steel, Alemanno reigns over the Eternal City from an exquisite palace on the Capitoline hill. The square outside was laid out by Michelangelo around the great equestrian statue of Marcus Aurelius — it says SPQR in huge letters on the doormat; inside the City Hall there are carved Roman bathtubs and statues of Romulus and Remus (and plenty of Madonnas and crucifixes). In the council chamber itself, glowering down from the wall behind the Speaker’s chair, stands a enormous statue of Julius Caesar, just yards from the spot where he was stabbed to death in one of the earliest regime-change operations in human history. If anyone would appreciate or envy the profound historical resonance of this place, it is surely Boris — the enthusiastic classicist and architect of a noted TV series on Ancient Rome.

But the new Mayor does not look happy. Alemanno’s brow is furrowed; he does not smile; he is tense, late and very busy. Slight and wiry, no doubt because of the mountain climbing which is his passion, Alemanno has conquered one of the great peaks of Italian politics only to find that he has ascended a pile of rubble. The previous administration left the city on the verge of bankruptcy. With E8.5 billion of debt, an emergency loan of E500 million had to be advanced by the Italian state to enable the city to pay its legions of employees, 27,000 in total. (When I asked if this total could be downsized, his press attaché looked at me as if I were a fool.)

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Wilhelm

July 25th, 2008 9:37am Report this comment

lovely piece

carole chapman

July 25th, 2008 1:24pm Report this comment

How refreshing to read a piece about Italy telling it like it is and without the mewling PC whinges of the majority of the UK press. I live in Italy and the lack of PC is so refreshing, as is the lack of CCTV, speed cameras, intrusive council busybodies. Italy may have its problems but it could teach New Labour a thing or three.

Richard Bates

July 27th, 2008 6:46pm Report this comment

Alemanno is actually one of the brighter members of the right-wing establishment, and one of the few ministers in the previous Berlusconi government to be even half-way competent. But your correspondent is being less than candid in describing him simply as the former head of the youth wing of the post-fascist party. I think you'll find he has a much more colourful past than that, and if the left tends to demonise its opponents, it has to be said that their opponents go out of their way to give them an easy job of it. If the same stigma does not attach to Gianfranco Fini that is mainly because of the unremitting blandness and banality of everything he says.
But there is nothing remotely normal about the political scene of a country with a Prime Minister whose past (and present) is even more questionable, and who would simply be unelectable anywhere else.
And can your correspondent really mean it when he says: "there is a liberty in Italian political discourse which is refreshing after the stifling political correctness of Britain"? To find equivalents in mainstream Brtish political life for many of the statements made by leading members of the Northern League, one would have to go back to the 1963 Smethwick by-election - though along with the relentless obscenities and insults addressed to the Roma, to Africans and foreigners generally, there is also the occasional variant of good old-fashioned anti-Semitism as well - which, in its way, is, I suppose, part of the European mainstream.

Chris Andersen

July 28th, 2008 5:27am Report this comment

Wonderful article. Too bad such forthright reportage is so rare, and I have to access a U.K. publication to find it. The U.S. press, both right and left, are incapable of such a simple piece and must, instead, put an American slant on everything they write, appropriate or not.

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