Italy’s President shows his country the way

Press, 20 April 1982, Page 20

Italy’s President shows his country the way

From

the “Economist,”

London

Who is Western Europe’s most effective statesman? Margaret Thatcher, King Juan Carlos, eVen the battered Helmut Schmidt have their claims. But consider the case for a frail 85-year-old whb looks as though he should be in carpetslippers surrounded by adoring great-grandchildren.

President Sandro Pertini has been Italy’s Head of State for nearly four years. It has been a time, of. political and social confusion rarely matched in the country’s post-1945 history. Six different Governments have held office; scandals have turned from a stream into a river; there has been a bombardment of terrorism from both Left and Right. The earthquake of November, 1980, was Italy’s worst natural calamity in 65 years. Despite all this, most people abroad seem to think better of Italy than they have done for years. If the credit can go to any single person it goes to this old incorruptible of a President. Sandro Pertini is among the last survivors of a nobler, generation of Italian politicians, forged, by the resistance to fascism and then to the Nazi occupation. A life-long Socialist who in the twilight of his life has climbed out of the narrow cockpit of party politics, President Pertini has few real powers under Italy’s Constitution. Yet in a country where real power is so fragmented, he has shown ihat personal authority can count for much. His influence stems from his honesty and outspokenness, and the growing popularity which these qualities have won for him, especially among young people in Italy. The political parties have reduced many Italian institutions to mere appendages of their patronage machines. Prisoners of the system they have created, most politicians now speak only to each other in a weird coded language meaningless to 95 per cent of the population. For Mr Pertini, a spade , remains a spade. His temper can be short, as was shown by his stinging television indictment of the chaotic first

relief efforts by the Government after the 1980 earthquake. ... ' ■ ; On such occasions' jealous lesser men accuse him of “presidentialism,” claiming that Mr Pertini is usurping powers not constitutionally his and that he hankers after a Gaullist solution to Italy’s problems. This is nonsense. He is too old to want to be a de Gaulle. He is profoundly anti-authoritarian. A man whose ■ keenest pleasures are reading, a small collection of modern Italian paintings and an assortment of •200 well-tried pipes is no dictator?

He excels at the telling gesture, as France’s President Mitterrand found on a recent ecounter. Italy’s. President knows France well, and still has a tiny apartment in Nice, the city where he lived after leaving Italy in 1926 to organise resistance to Mussolini. The

meeting between the two Socialist Presidents was emotional. But at the time, as it happened, French winegrowers were destroying boatloads of Italian wine. So Mr Pertini offered Mr Mitterrand two cases of Rapitala, an excellent white wine from western Sicily, whose growers have suf-' fered most from French hostility..

That gift ’ probably changed little. A more permanent legacy may be Mr Pertini’s decision last June to ask Mr’ Giovanni Spadolini, the deader of the tiny Republican Party, to form a Government and thereby become the first nonChristian Democratic Prime Minister for 36 years. In Italy, too, the political mould may be starting to crack. There has been no more potent symbol of the changing times than President Pertini.