Meet Italy’s answer to Boris

23 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

Like Sarkozy, Alemanno is pro-American and pro-Israel. But it is precisely here that his political discourse becomes radical for a British ear. He has made ‘zero tolerance’ his slogan and says the former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani is a role model for Rome. He also says that the fight against fundament-alism, and the defence of the rights of the individual, are key for Italy even though it has few Muslims. ‘We need a Right based on both tolerance and the protection of identity — national identity.’ He even chairs a body called Kadima World Italia, a friendship association for the political party created by Ariel Sharon. ‘Are you a neoconservative, then?’ I ask, and he replies that American categories cannot be applied to European politics. But he has multiplied his overtures towards Israel and the Jewish community in Rome (as well as receiving the Palestinian leader), and says, ‘To defend Israel is to defend the values of the West.’

So perhaps it is Italy which is showing the way for Europe, rather than following its model. At certain points in European his-tory, the apparent political backwater of Italy has in fact been in the avant-garde — without Cavour, no Bismarck. At the end of our talk, Alemanno takes me out on to the balcony next to his office, which commands a breathtaking view over the Roman Forum, from the Arch of Septimus Severus baking in the July heat hundreds of feet below, to the Colosseum and the Palatine Hill in the distance. ‘When you stand here, you feel that you are at the centre of the world,’ he says. He may well be right.

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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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