Taking Out the Trash

Veltroni, at 52, would be the youngest prime minister ever elected in postwar Italy, but his look is gray with glasses, a little disheveled, shy and professorial. But Veltroni is no neophyte. His career in politics goes back 30 years, beginning as a young activist in the Italian Communist Party and developing into a full-blown apparatchik. After the collapse of the Soviet Union discredited the message, Veltroni saw centrism as the key to his political future. Compared with the previous leader of the left, the soporific Prodi, Veltroni appears animated even when he's understated. Like any shrewd politician he tries to turn his opponent's strengths against him. "For the past 15 years," he tells a crowd in the Sicilian town of Caltanissetta, "politicians have focused on TV and advertising as if these are the real issues in the country." But Veltroni is not above borrowing, quite blatantly, from the mediagenic campaign of a star in the United States. His slogan is pure Barack Obama: "Si può fare"—"Yes we can."

What would it take to turn "yes we can" into "Silvio and I can"? Conventional wisdom holds that if there were to be a grand coalition, it would come together mainly for electoral reform and then, in relatively short order, everyone would be back at the polls. Yet the basic agenda for Italy may be better addressed by keeping that coalition together. Much of what needs to be done is painful. A weak government can't make it work, and the country's two leading politicians could conclude they're better off taking joint responsibility rather than shouldering the blame for the pain alone. Perhaps most crucial are welfare and labor reforms. Unemployment is low, but so are salaries, trailing behind Spain and Greece. One reform on which both candidates could agree would be to encourage work by lowering taxes on overtime, as the French are doing. Both candidates also recognize the need to make provisions for workers employed on short-term contracts. Their incomes are too low to live on, and they have no income at all when their contracts run out. Equally urgent is the need to reform public administration. The Italian state costs the taxpayer more than the German state does, but provides considerably less. Berlusconi wants to reduce public expenditure by one point every year. Veltroni would do the same, but wants to wait a year before beginning.

An issue that rankles the electorate is the high salaries and seemingly limitless perks of Italy's political class. Again, only a grand-coalition government would stand a prayer of cutting those perks and salaries. And when it comes to taxes, and it always does, both Veltroni and Berlusconi want them reduced. Berlusconi would like to see the total burden on income taken below 40 percent, down from 44 percent now. Both want to spur tourism by reducing the value-added tax on things like travel-agency bookings. The Prodi government halted or canceled several big public works and infrastructure projects that Berlusconi had begun. He wants to restart them. So does Veltroni. The only major difference is whether to build a bridge across the Strait of Messina between the mainland and Sicily. Berlusconi wants it. Veltroni's core constituents on the island aren't so enthusiastic.

In the town of Caltanissetta, deep in Sicily's hinterland, 75-year-old pensioner Emilio Serra listened to Veltroni's calls to escape the old chaos of multiple parties with a certain bemused wonderment. "It is more an American way of thinking," says Serra. "I don't see why that wouldn't work here, but I don't think the politicians will allow something so sane." If they do not, then Italy's mad decline will only continue—and that would be something to fear indeed.

© 2008