Meet Italy’s answer to Boris
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
‘The Left always demonises its enemies,’ says Alemanno, and he knows what he is talking about. In the 1980s he headed the youth wing of a party originally founded on the ruins of Mussolini’s regime after the war, and he has been attacked for it ever since. Curiously, the same stigma does not attach to his current party boss and immediate predecessor as youth leader, Gianfranco Fini, the former deputy prime minister who is now speaker of the Italian parliament and who is regularly apostrophised in the eminently establishment Financial Times as ‘a centrist’.
Alemanno insists to me that the Italian political scene has now evolved towards European normality. He says that Silvio Berlusconi’s two main right-of-right coalition partners, the National Alliance, to which he belongs, and the Northern League, are comparable to other mainstream European parties — respectively to the People’s Party in Spain prior to the election of José-Maria Aznar as leader, and to the Bavarian CSU. He also welcomes the modernising work of David Cameron in Britain. And when I ask him which European politician he most admires, the answer comes immediately — ‘Sarkozy’.
Nonetheless, there is a liberty in Italian political discourse which is refreshing after the stifling political correctness of Britain. Just as Italy is the only EU state in which a serving government minister (Umberto Bossi, the head of the Northern League) has ever publicly called the EU a ‘Stalinist organisation’, so the Italian Right tackles political issues with a frankness and sometimes a mischief which sends the Left into orbit — for instance when Silvio Berlusconi boasted that his female ministers were the prettiest in Europe (they are). While the British remain circumspect about even mentioning immigration and crime in the same sentence, despite the spate of knife murders in London, the Italians discuss such matters openly.
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Wilhelm
July 25th, 2008 9:37amlovely piece
carole chapman
July 25th, 2008 1:24pmHow 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 6:46pmAlemanno 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 5:27amWonderful 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.