I’m just back from a week in Italy where a grand political comedy playing in Rome has at least been some compensation for the poor weather and the general economic gloom. Giorgio Napolitano, the 87-year-old former communist who had been looking forward to retiring after his seven-year stint as President of the Republic, was not only denied a farewell visit from the Queen of England because of her tummy bug, but was denied retirement as well. With the parliament, which elects the president, unable to agree on a successor, its members insisted that he continue in office for an unprecedented second term which, if he sees it out, will make him 94 when he is finally allowed to step down.
At his second swearing-in ceremony in parliament, Napolitano made plain his anger and contempt for the politicians who had spent the two months since an inconclusive general election squabbling among themselves instead of forming the government that Italy desperately needed if it was to avoid catastrophe. He called the political parties ‘ineffectual’ and ‘self-indulgent’; he said they were guilty of ‘unforgivable’ procrastinations and mistakes; he told them they had let the country down in its darkest hour. And the ruder he was to them, the more they clapped and the louder they cheered in a bizarre display of masochism.
It’s the president’s job after an election to invite a politician to try to form a government, and Napolitano surprised everyone by choosing a man young enough to be his grandson, Enrico Letta, who at 46 is the same age as David Cameron. In Italy old men usually hold the power, so the Italian press has made much of Letta’s relative youth, of his being a child of the 1980s, a fan of Dire Straits and U2, and a still keen player of table-top football. But he is also very nearly bald, a trait that he has in common with both Napolitano and the former prime minister, Silvio Berlusconi, who is 30 years his senior. This may help them to feel comfortable with him, added to which he happens to have an uncle, Gianni Letta, who has long served as Berlusconi’s right-hand man.
Unlike his uncle, who is firmly on the right, Enrico Letta belongs to the left-of-centre Democratic party. But anyone hoping to see the end of Berlusconi will be disappointed, for the left-of-centre Enrico Letta has formed the only possible government in this hung parliament, a ‘grand coalition’ of right and left over which the old libertine, while not himself a minister, has great influence. While the formation of a government has generated a degree of optimism in the country, this is not shared by the hirsute comedian Beppe Grillo, whose ‘Five Stars Movement’, a new party whose only policy is hatred of all established politicians, won an astounding quarter of the votes in the election. He calls the new government ‘a heap of rubbish worthy of the best bunga bunga’ (the phrase made famous by Berlusconi in reference to his alleged sex parties).
Meanwhile, across the Tiber at the Vatican is unfolding another comedy, for the new pope is causing great consternation with his ostentatious informality. It is a long time since popes were fanned with ostrich feathers or were carried aloft in a gestatorial chair, but even Pope John XXIII, noted for his humility, was a stickler for protocol and custodian of traditional papal rituals. But the Argentinian Pope Francis cares not a fig for Vatican traditions. He makes his own telephone calls on his mobile, cooks his own meals, and has even moved out of the luxurious apostolic palace, in which popes have always lived, into the Domus Santa Marta, a sort of workaday Vatican hotel built recently to house visiting clergy and Vatican bureaucrats.
According to L’Espresso magazine, he resides in Room 201 and breakfasts in the communal dining hall, where he takes whatever seat happens to be free. As a consequence, the other residents of the Domus no longer feel able to relax or dress informally off duty because they are constantly at risk of bumping into the head of their Church. He likes chatting with people, but then usually takes his own decisions without consulting or informing anybody, to the huge alarm of his security people. The traditionalists in the Curia are said to be desperate. According to one of them, quoted by L’Espresso, ‘Pope Francis is driving us mad, he’s upsetting everything, we can’t cope any more.’ These must be very jolly times in Rome.
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