The Knight and the Prodi who made the feat

It seems that millions of Italians have, simultaneously, in the last thirty years, seen and known two different men with the same name and identical features: Doctor Jekyll and Mister Hyde; the benefactor and the bandit; the man with the sun in his pocket and the black knight. In this schizophrenic kaleidoscope, Berlusconi has centrifuged everyone. And maybe he even fooled everyone. Because everyone today considers it "divisive", but no one realizes how "unifying" it really was.

In fact – despite having represented the arch-enemy of the left and of the “communists” – he was their complement. To understand this you have to look at the laws and check the dates. Silvio takes the field in 1994, when a white coup has just ended in Italy punctuated by some epochal passages: Tangentopoli and the scrapping of the five-party; the dismemberment of the immense public assets that took place on the deck of the yacht Britannia; the law number 35 of 29.01.92 which established the privatization of the economic public bodies and the disposal of the state shareholdings from which the substantial privatization of the Banca d'Italia quotas held up to then by public credit institutions will derive; the law n. 82 of 02.07.92 with which Bankitalia was exempted from the obligation to agree on the discount rate of the money with the Ministry of the Treasury; the signing of the Maastricht Treaty of 02.07.92 with which Italy entered the European Union. In practice, an earthquake of the tenth degree on the Mercalli scale with which the country was handed over, helpless, to the arbitrariness of the markets and finance, its monetary sovereignty crumbled, while its political sovereignty "unloaded 2,000 kilometers from the Italian Parliament" (as hoped Beniamino Andreatta in an interview from the early 1980s).

Berlusconi entered the political arena soon after the rules of the "game" (as he liked to say) had been subverted, but the "game" evidently suited him. He never denounced the hidden ends of that authentic "guillotine" from which the Republic had just been beheaded, he did not set up an antagonistic, truly popular and democratic movement. In short, he didn't make a pleat. He limited himself to saying (and doing): Forza Italia.

And yet, the most pyrotechnic magic of His Broadcaster was precisely that of presenting himself as "divisive". Convincing the Italians (right and left) of an amazing tale; and that is that the good fight was still that of the previous fifty years: the liberal perspective against the communist one. Which dissipated the energies, time, trust, good faith, hopes of his compatriots in a furious phony confrontation, in a Sicilian puppet theater, in a papier-mâché Barletta duel between "conservatives" and "progressives". In short, ours convinced everyone (opponents included) that the fault line on which to confront was still the chromatically captivating one of the good blues against the bad reds.

In his narration, the trench to be defended was the same one Alcide De Gasperi had fought on in 1948; while the altar where to officiate the rites of public affairs was the same one on which, in 1978, Aldo Moro was sacrificed. Berlusconi may have been guilty of a myriad of faults (as well as having countless merits in his name), but the only truly unforgivable one is precisely the political one: never unmasking (as he could have, since he had known and understood it) the work agenda in deed. And that is the deadly timetable with which the tricolor state was being desovereignized to dissolve it in the muriatic, but sweet, acid of a supranational superstate with a new all-blue flag. A place where the markets would always have the upper hand over the people, the foreigners never elected over the Italian voters, the technocrats in grisaille over the ox people.

The Cav never told us that that seductive Union of "brothers" peoples was forged in the crucible of a subversive, elitist and para-democratic project as well as "merged" on a neoliberal and anti-constitutional cast. Nor that, from then on, from treaty to treaty, the Keynesian political, social, economic model designed by the founding fathers of 1948 would be dismantled, brick by brick. Just as he did nothing at the beginning, when the demolition "works" had just begun, Berlusconi did nothing afterwards either.

The founder of Forza Italia, on the other hand, propitiated or endorsed – without saying a word, or even praising it – all the successive stages of the national via crucis towards the current Golgotha. 25.03.11 arrived with the establishment of the MES, the so-called "State Saving Fund"; and on 04.01.2012 with the constitutionalisation of the balanced budget and the modification of articles 81, 97, 117 and 119 of the Constitution to bring the public finance system into line with the principles of European economic governance; and, again, on 23.07.2012 with the law ratifying the Fiscal Compact and the commitment for the Italian State to communicate ex ante to the Council of the European Union and to the European Commission its public debt issuance plans and to guarantee corrections automatic with specific deadlines; and then on 24.12.2012 and the law number 234 establishing the obligation, for Italy, to transpose, by and no later than 28 February of each year, the directives and wishes of the European Union; and finally law number 243, of the same date but "reinforced", which can be modified only by an absolute majority of the members of each House, implementing the constitutional principle of balanced budgets.

All this happened (almost) without Berlusconi realizing it or showing it. The only time, in 2011, that he showed any sign of impatience, or even dissent, another "throb" of the financial cannon put him back in his place. And from that place, the star man never moved. Indeed, he proved that he had learned the lesson of the spread imparted by the rod of the European Commission and by the monitoring discipline of the markets.

Properly "educated" and justly tamed, the man from Arcore soon returned to proving to be more "popular" than ever, more "Europeanist" than ever and, obviously, it goes without saying, more liberal and " anti-communist” than ever. Without realizing, or without showing it, that the so-called communists had always been just as "European" (and perhaps even more liberal than him). In this sense, Berlusconi was by no means the antipodes of Prodi, but his necessary complement. Just as the Ulivo was not the antithesis of the Polo delle Libertà, but just another showcase from the same workshop. Or another tail from the same whip, if you prefer.

The First Republic did not fall for corruption, but because it was too autonomous and independent to "function" in the new neo-colonial context in sight; in an era (ours, unfortunately) in which the orders would have been issued from Brussels, the money would have been disbursed, at its discretion, from Frankfurt, the "rules" would have been written by Strasbourg.

Ergo, Berlusconi was perhaps "divisive" from an ethical, aesthetic, and cosmetic point of view: they loved him because he was the champion of "freedom" and hated him because he was a-moral or even immoral; they revered him for his thirty-two-carat smile and detested him for his master's double-breasted suit and godfather's toupee; they exalted him because he wanted to impose his "blue" optimism on everyone and deprecated him because he hated "red".

But, in reality – and so we end where we started – the iconic leader of the center-right, from a political point of view, was absolutely "unifying": he put himself at the head of millions of Italians allergic to the PCI and the left and he brought them to the same promised land where Prodi and D'Alema and Rutelli and Bersani and Renzi were already leading, or would soon be grazing, their troops. A single immense people ferried from a theoretically and juridically sovereign Republic to a practically and juridically submissive Possession. Prodi and the Cavaliere – as well as all the subsequent heirs of the first and temporary adversaries of the second – were actually inseparable snack companions. The Knight and the Prodi who made the feat.

Francis Carraro

www.francescocarraro.com

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The article The Knight and the Prodi who did the business comes from Scenari Economici .

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This is a machine translation of a post published on Scenari Economici at the URL https://scenarieconomici.it/il-cavaliere-e-i-prodi-che-fecero-limpresa/ on Sat, 17 Jun 2023 18:05:47 +0000.