The Italians (38 page)

Where this culture of reciprocal favors mixes with the prevalence of favoritism and nepotism is in the
raccomandazione,
also known as a
spintarella
and by various other, more innocent-sounding names such as an
indicazione
or
segnalazione.
In its widest sense, a
raccomandazione
can cover any intervention by one person with another on behalf of a third. There are plenty of more or less innocuous examples: the mayor who calls a local garage, for example, to ensure the son of a friend who has just arrived in town gets good service at a fair price. Significantly less innocuous is the widespread practice of influential people intervening on behalf of their relatives, associates or clients to get them moved up hospital waiting lists or given preferential access to public housing.

So ubiquitous is the
raccomandazione
in this wider sense that politicians sometimes openly admit to practicing it. It has even been endorsed, albeit somewhat grudgingly, in a sentence of the Supreme Court. The judges declared, “The search for a
raccomandazione
is now so deeply rooted in custom and practice as to appear in the eyes of most people to be an indispensable instrument, not only for obtaining that to which they have a right, but for restoring an acceptable degree of functionality to inefficient public services.”

In its narrower and more commonly used sense,
raccomandazione
applies to the procuring of jobs. There was a time when this too was pretty innocent. Indeed, it could be argued that until the 1960s the system of
raccomandazioni
made a positive contribution to labor mobility and making Italy into a fairer, more meritocratic society. Typically, a villager who had decided to seek work elsewhere would turn to the parish priest or mayor for a
raccomandazione
that could be presented to prospective employers. This would say that he or she was of good character, with no criminal record, and would perhaps add some other details. It was what today would be called a character reference. In some cases, the
raccomandazione
might be addressed to someone with whom the priest or local official had influence. But for the most part the only possible exercise of power was negative—the local priest or mayor could deny a
raccomandazione
to someone either out of spite or because of a genuine conviction that he or she was undeserving.

As the parties gradually emerged as the most powerful institutions in Italian society, it was politicians who emerged as the key
raccomandatori.
In a society where now not only the jobs but the job seekers were largely urban, Christian Democrat bigwigs replaced parish priests as the key arbiters of who was, or was not, worthy of being hired. Several had assistants whose sole task was to collate requests for
raccomandazioni
and decide whether they should be acted upon. Giulio Andreotti’s sidekick Franco Evangelisti was a legendary dispenser of patronage on behalf of his master.

But the criteria that he and others like him applied were significantly different from those that had been used, or were meant to have been used, by priests and local officials. The key requisite for getting employment was no longer moral rectitude or the absence of a criminal record, but loyalty to a particular party. What is more, in pretty much every case, the politician or his assistant—unlike the rural priests and police chiefs who once handed out
raccomandazioni—
had the means with which to exert overwhelming influence on the person who was in a position to provide the job or favor requested.

The Clean Hands investigation curbed drastically the power of the parties. But politicians continue to dole out patronage in the form of
raccomandazioni,
as do a slew of interest groups. Various surveys in recent years have concluded that up to half of all Italians owe their jobs to
raccomandazioni
. One of the most detailed investigations was carried out by a publicly funded employment research body, Isfol.
⁵
It found that 39 percent of those interviewed had gotten their jobs through contacts of some kind—relatives, friends, acquaintances or existing employees of the firm. Another 20 percent had found work in the public sector by way of open competition. But what stood out in the results of the poll was how few Italians had used the recruitment channels that are considered normal in other societies. Only 16 percent had found their jobs by writing in with a CV, while a mere 3 percent had responded to advertisements in the press.

Some years ago, the newsmagazine
L’Espresso
discovered that the Italian postal service kept a database specifically for
raccomandazioni,
complete with the names of the
raccomandati
and their corresponding
raccomandatori
. Among the latter was a Vatican cardinal.

Raccomandazioni
are inherently unfair. They stand in the way of a more meritocratic society and spread demoralization. I personally know Italians who have worked hard at their jobs only to be overtaken—or, in some cases, supplanted—by
raccomandati
. In one instance, the
raccomandata
who led to my acquaintance’s dismissal was the mistress of the incoming chief executive.

Raccomandazioni
lead to people being put into jobs for which they are unqualified. They lead to contracts being placed with companies that are not the best suited to fulfilling them. They shut out foreign investment. And they encourage corruption: someone who owes his or her livelihood to the munificence of another is in no position to refuse if that other person one days asks for an illicit, or maybe even illegal, favor.

Corruption also holds back the economy and keeps Italians poorer than they need be—a point overlooked by those Italians who shrug at the mention of graft. Just to take one example, a country in which the cost of bribes is routinely added to public contracts is one that is going to have to raise that much extra in the form of taxes. That in turn reduces disposable incomes, lowers consumption, cuts demand and thus limits growth. Corruption deters competition, making the economy less productive and efficient.

Evaluating the cost of graft is an even more hazardous enterprise than making international comparisons. But according to the latest estimates of Italy’s national audit court, corruption costs Italy enough to meet the entire cost of the interest payments on its vast public debts. Ironically, they themselves are, at least in part, the outcome of excess government spending intended to generate
tangenti.

If we accept Transparency International’s view that in the 2000s Italy became steadily more corrupt relative to other countries, there are three possible explanations. One is that the other countries became progressively less corrupt while Italy remained the same. A second explanation—a variation on the same theme—is that Italy improved, but that elsewhere in the world the improvement was greater. And finally there is the possibility that Italy simply became more corrupt during those years. Unfortunately, there are reasons for thinking that this last explanation may be the correct one.

It is notable that Italy’s ascent of Transparency International’s table ended in the year that Silvio Berlusconi was elected to office and at the beginning of a ten-year period in which he was to dominate the affairs of his country. His leadership unquestionably changed the atmosphere.

It was not just that, during his premierships, he was constantly on trial or under investigation for an array of suspected or alleged white-collar offenses, including the bribing of judges (of which he was acquitted in 2007) and tax fraud (of which he was convicted in 2013). It was also that from time to time Berlusconi said things that were taken to mean that his view of sleaze was relative. On one occasion, commenting on allegations that the defense firm Finmeccanica had bribed its way to a contract in India, Berlusconi declared: “When big groups like Eni, Enel and Finmeccanica negotiate with countries that are not complete and perfect democracies, there are conditions that have to be accepted if they are to sell their products.”

Under Berlusconi’s governments, moreover, the law was changed more than once in a way that made it more difficult for the courts to indict, or convict, him. Those changes have also made it harder to bring to justice ordinary Italians involved in corruption in the wider sense of the term. In 2002, for example, his government slashed the maximum sentence for false accounting from five years to two and limited the circumstances in which charges could be brought so that businesspeople who cooked the books could be put on trial only if the amount involved was more than 1 percent of the firm’s assets or 5 percent of its profits. Berlusconi was also prime minister when parliament brought forward the points at which various offenses, and particularly white-collar crimes, were “timed out” by statutes of limitations. Because of the slowness of Italian justice, it has meant that many trials for such offenses have been guillotined before a verdict could be reached.

Some of Berlusconi’s own trials ground to a halt because of changes to the relevant statutes of limitations introduced by his government. That much is known outside Italy. But what has been less widely publicized is the effect that this tampering with the law has had on society as a whole. Resigning from the prosecution service in 2007, Gherardo Colombo, one of the former Clean Hands prosecutors, said Italy was witnessing a “renaissance of corruption.” By then, numerous trials for white-collar offenses were being held in the full knowledge of all concerned that they would have to be abandoned before they were concluded. The result was to send a message to Italians that they could commit corrupt acts with little fear for the consequences.

Berlusconi justified his changes to the law by saying that he was being unjustly hounded by left-wing prosecutors seeking to achieve through the courts what his political adversaries had repeatedly failed to achieve by means of the ballot box: his removal from the public life of Italy. For over twenty years, in fact, ever since the billionaire media proprietor entered politics and began to voice that claim, the issue of justice has been central to the life of the nation.

CHAPTER 18

Pardon and Justice

“Se noi riconosciamo,” pensavo, “che errare è dell’uomo, non è crudeltà sovrumana la giustizia?”

“If we accept,” I thought, “that to err is human, then is not justice superhuman cruelty?”

Luigi Pirandello,
The Late Mattia Pascal

Perdonando troppo a chi falla, si fa ingiustizia a chi non falla.

By forgiving too much he who errs, you do an injustice to he who does not.

Baldassare Castiglione,
Il cortegiano
(
The Book of the Courtier
)

I
f Italy had a navel it would be the Piazza Venezia. On one side looms the grandiose structure that foreigners know as the Victor Emmanuel Monument, but the real name of which is Altare della Patria, or Altar of the Fatherland. To the right of the Altare—and where else but in Italy, you may ask, would a secular monument be called an altar?—is a road that runs through the Forum to the Colosseum, Italy’s most instantly recognizable tourist sight. On the left is the balcony from which Mussolini ignited the patriotic fervor of the masses. And standing directly opposite the giant white marble Altare is a less well-known fragment of Italy’s rich past: the palazzo in which Napoléon’s mother, Maria Letizia Ramolino, lived out her days after her son was sent into exile on Saint Helena.

“It’s all there,” said an Italian fellow journalist as he stared meditatively at the square through one of the tall windows of Palazzo Bonaparte. He was holding a bag of chips and dipping into it from time to time as he waited for his expenses to be dealt with in an office that, in those days, was adjacent to mine. At first, I assumed he meant all those richly symbolic buildings visible from the window.