words ELENOIRE LAUDIERI DI BIASE (our correspondent in Italy)
The unexpected feats of Italy’s accidental Prime Minister
S
ince becoming a republic in 1946, Italy has had 28 Prime Ministers which is by far the largest number recorded by any Western democracy in the same period. It is politics Italian-style, which means never letting anyone become established at the helm of government. Many suggest this is due to Italians having suffered the dreadful consequences of Fascism when Mussolini was allowed to settle in as Prime Minister, and given time to entrench himself in power. This theory however is contradicted by the fact that before Fascism, the trend was the same. From its birth as a unified nation in 1861 to 1922 when Mussolini became prime minister - the same lapse of time (sixty-one years) from the proclamation of the Italian Republic until today - Italy had an even greater number of Prime Ministers, thirty to be precise. Apart from the animosity and factionalism of Italian politics, there is a contributing factor for this frequent turnover. In Italy, political power has traditionally been used to bestow favours on one’s supporters, relatives and friends as opposed to carrying the load of a responsible government. As a result, this has generated a constant rivalry for the Prime Ministership. The problem though is that such positions tend to be inherently vulnerable because it creates more enemies than friends, hence the long sequence of prime ministers in the relatively short history of Italy as a nation. There have of course been exceptions to this rule with the case of the recently appointed Italian Prime Minister Paolo Gentiloni, who got the coveted job by accident, so to speak. Despite his long-standing public career, he has never shown any inclination or ambition to rise to a position of great power. He is a reserved, low-key, six-
12 FROM ITALY
ty-three year old politician who has always preferred working backstage rather than in the spotlight of politics. Commenting on his Prime Ministerial appointment on 12 December last year, a BBC reporter described him as: “reminiscent of the butler in the novel Remains of the Day, whose greatest ambition was to be in a room without anyone noticing he was there.” He is a descendant of an aristocratic family from Tolentino in the central eastern Italian region of Marche. One of his ancestors, Vincenzo Ottorino Gentiloni, was the originator of the so-called “Patto Gentiloni,” which in 1913 put an end to the Vatican policy sanctioning the abstention of Italian Catholics from voting in parliamentary elections. Paolo Gentiloni is a journalist by trade who ran a Green magazine in the 1980’s before becoming press secretary to then Rome mayor Francesco Rutelli in 1993, and later communications minister in Romano Prodi's centre-left 2006-2008 government. When Renzi eventually worked his way up from leader of the Democratic Party to Italian prime minister in 2014, Gentiloni was called to head the Ministry of Foreign Affairs after his short-lived predecessor, Federica Mogherini, became the EU high representative for foreign affairs and security policy. On account of his lack of international experience, many political analysts argued that his designation was a reward of sorts for being a reliable and unthreatening supporter of Renzi. But he soon proved them wrong by effectively handling, both with firmness and diplomacy, highly sensitive cases including two Italian marines forcibly kept in India under the unsubstantiated accusation of intentionally killing two Indian fishermen, and the brutal murder in Cairo of the student Giulio Regeni deceitfully accounted for by the Egyptian police as a road accident. Without him aiming for it, he was recruited for the role of Prime Minister, after the constitutional referendum defeat
TOP Paolo Gentiloni at the Quirinale Palace on the day of his appointment as Prime Minister by the president of the Italian Republic ABOVE Paolo Gentiloni and his wife Eleonora Mauro posing for a photo with China’s president Xi Jinping and his wife Peng Liyuan at the opening ceremony of the “Belt and Road Forum”
