Rome Letter: Renzi still grappling with same old problems

When Italy's dynamic 39-year-old prime minister Matteo Renzi first appeared on the international scene this year at EU, G20, Nato and other summits, he immediately generated a positive reaction. Heads of government accustomed to dealing with predecessors who ranged from controversial 78-year-old media tycoon Silvio Berlusconi to 71-year-old former EU commissioner Mario Monti were clearly relieved to see a bright, young Italian face.

Judging from this summer’s European elections where his party returned a massive 40.6 per cent of the vote, that sense of relief was also shared by the Italian electorate. Expectations for the former mayor of Florence, who took control of Italy’s centre-left Democratic Party in December 2013 (with 67.6 per cent of the 2.8 million strong vote),were extraordinarily high.

The "Demolition Man" was going to clean out every broom cupboard in sight and, in the process, instigate a hugely ambitious, badly needed programme of institutional, constitutional and electoral reform. True, he had worked his way into government, not by the ballot box but rather by an inelegant, old-fashioned palace coup last February which unceremoniously dumped party colleague, Enrico Letta. Only days earlier, he had tweeted, "Don't worry, Enrico" ("Stai sereno, Enrico") in an apparently supportive message.

The problem is that – surprise, surprise – the Renzi reform process is making slow progress. Worse still, his ten months in office have been marked by a series of public administration scandals, involving organised crime, which would suggest that, when it comes to reform, he might just be tweeting up the wrong tree.

Stagnant economy

For much of this year, Renzi has argued that his reforms are essential in order to attract foreign investment into a stagnant Italian economy, marked by minus-zero growth, 13.2 per cent unemployment and with a 132.6 per cent debt/GDP ratio in 2013. To that end, his government has spent huge political capital promoting Senate, electoral and labour reform packages.

Yet is it not the case that foreign capital is much more worried by Italy’s chronic organised crime problem than by its labour laws and its anachronistic Senate? Renzi’s “Jobs Act” labour reform was approved in early December but that did not stop Standard & Poor’s downgrading Italy to a “BBB-” rating or Transparency International ranking Italy 69th in its world index, all in the same week. (Denmark, by the way, tops that index and Ireland ranks 17th).

Worse still, even as the Jobs Act was going through parliament, Italy was being rocked by yet another Mafia scandal as Roma, Caput Mundi became Roma, Caput Mafia. Some 37 people – most of them working in administrative roles in the capital – were arrested for Mafia-type crime, including bribery, usury, extortion and money-laundering.

The initial investigation appears to confirm what many have argued for years, namely that organised crime, allied to the extreme right, has infiltrated the city administration, cynically making money out of everything from public transport to running shelters for migrants and asylum seekers.

Worse for Renzi was the consideration that even if the city’s PD mayor, Ignazio Marino, was totally extraneous to the organised crime misdeeds, many Rome PD party members were not.

Mafia protagonist

Furthermore, media reports suggest that at least one of the Roman godfathers attended a Renzi party fundraising dinner in November. That remains to be confirmed but what we do know is that a photograph showing Giuliano Poletti, minister for labour in the Renzi government, having dinner with one of the main Mafia protagonists, Salvatore Buzzi, has been widely published. Buzzi, for the record, is the person who sent out a 2013 new year’s text message which read: “Here’s hoping that 2014 will be a year full of the homeless, migrants, refugees, minors, rubbish . . . long live the social services.”

Unfortunately for Renzi, this was the third major city scandal during his ten-month watch following those relating to Expo 2015 in Milan (where the ‘Ndrangheta is involved) and to the MOSE dyke project in Venice. In response, he has appointed a new anti-corruption “czar” in the person of former magistrate Raffaele Cantone, but will that achieve anything significant?

Has Renzi concentrated too much on securing his power base, on making a questionable secret pact with Berlusconi and on his Twitter account?