Professional politician

Date: 19/11/1998

MASSIMO d'Alema has come a long way since he was chosen at the age of six from the Communist youth 'pioneers' to present party leader Palmiro Togliatti with a bouquet of flowers before a congress of the Italian Communist Party.

The young Massimo so impressed the eminent leader with the confident and clear delivery of his speech that Togliatti is said to have exclaimed: “This lad will get ahead in life.”

Get ahead he did, becoming the first former Communist politician to enter Palazzo Chigi - the Italian prime minister's residence - following the collapse of Romano Prodi's government.

In a country where the church still has a strong influence, 48-year-old D'Alema is also the first premier to have made a public admission of atheism on state television.

Born and bred a Communist, although he has now fully embraced a centre-left free-market creed, the head of Italy's 56th postwar government will be under pressure to demonstrate his left-wing credentials in a minefield of slowing growth, stubbornly high unemployment and the tight public finance requirements of economic and monetary union.

Last month, the government revised its growth forecast downward for the third time this year, to 1.8&percent;, and it recently acknowledged that even this may be unattainable. Unemployment stands at 12.2&percent;, and rises to more than twice that figure in some depressed southern regions.

D'Alema concurs with Germany's new Finance Minister Oskar Lafontaine in maintaining that Europe should have no qualms about considering softening the Maastricht Treaty rules on budget deficits and launching an all-out campaign for job creation.

The new prime minister is backed by a patchwork coalition of his own party, the Democratic Party of the Left (PDS), Communists, Greens and the centrist Democratic Union for the Republic (UDR) led by former President Francesco Cossiga.

Winning over the UDR, formed from opposition centre-right renegades, was the trump card which enabled D'Alema to form a government. But maintaining harmony in such a crowded hen-house may prove difficult.

D'Alema's ministerial team reflects his desire to tread cautiously. He has stated that he will not change any of the public finance goals set by the previous administration and has reappointed its key ministers. The respected Carlo Azeglio Ciampi has stayed on as treasury minister, and Vincenzo Visco, Pierluigi Bersani and Lamberto Dini have kept their finance, industry and foreign policy portfolios.

A conscientious man of great ambition and thoughtful intelligence, D'Alema apparently impressed Bundesbank president Hans Tietmeyer and former Chancellor Helmut Kohl when he visited Germany earlier this year.

The Vatican has been less quick to 'forgive' his Communist roots. In scathing editorials which reportedly expressed the views of the Pope himself, the city-state's daily newspaper Osservatore Romano attacked D'Alema's appointment as premier, claiming his government was illegitimate as it had mustered a majority with the help of the UDR and had not passed an electoral test.

The new prime minister is a professional politician, born into a family with great Communist traditions.

His father Giuseppe was a Communist deputy and a prominent party official, and his mother's family was well-known in Rome's left-wing circles. After serving in the Scout-style Communist pioneers as a boy, D'Alema joined the Italian Federation of Communist Youth.

He first entered the Communist Party in 1968 at the height of the student movement. Seven years later, he was chosen by party leader Enrico Berlinguer to head the Communist Youth Association and became so involved in politics that he abandoned his philosophy studies at the University of Pisa.

Despite passing his examinations with flying colours and attending the highly prestigious Normal School in Pisa - a breeding ground for the Italian ruling élite - D'Alema never graduated as he failed to complete his final dissertation.

His university professor Nicola Badaloni remembers him well. “He was very good, an excellent student ... although he wasn't too regular in attendance, as he was already very involved in politics,” he says.

After climbing through the internal party hierarchy, D'Alema was number two when it transformed itself into the Democratic Party of the Left. He took over the helm of Italy's largest centre-left party in 1994 when he defeated his colleague and rival Walter Veltroni in a leadership contest.

The two disagree over the party's future direction, with D'Alema seeking to turn it into a social-democratic entity along the lines of Germany's SPD or the UK's Labour Party while Veltroni favours a broad US-style democratic coalition comprising all the country's centre-left forces.

Known for his standoffish ways and cutting tongue, which supporters put down to his “shyness and reserve”, D'Alema and his closest aides have made an effort to revamp his style in recent months.

Gone are the tired-looking grey suits and worn shoes, replaced by clothes of a more youthful cut, lively shirts and ties. He has visited centres for the elderly and opened the doors of the 17th century Palazzo Chigi to journalists - a group he has said he despises - for regular Monday press conferences and to schoolchildren every Tuesday.

A lover of fine food, he has also appeared on RAI state television complete with apron and gloves, although his favourite chef Gianfranco Vissani joked afterwards: “Judging by how he cooked that risotto on TV, he hasn't learned much from me.”

The new prime minister's efforts to build a friendlier image were also assisted by pictures of him in the national press last summer, with his wife at his side, sailing the 15-metre Baltic yacht he part-owns with two friends. More holiday snapshots of the family were released, with the two children Giulia and Francesco and the family Labrador Lulu, at Gallipoli in Puglia where the D'Alemas have a small summer villa.

Although it might not have been apparent from the smiling photographs of him at the helm of the Ikarus, D'Alema had suffered a major blow in June when he was forced to announce that attempts to overhaul the country's constitution - a project in which he had invested a great deal of energy and personal prestige - had failed.

These political reforms were intended to give Italy greater political stability, and more modern, efficient institutions - a point D'Alema pressed home in his recent books The Great Occasion and A Normal Country. He put a brave face on their failure, expressing the hope that some of the work of the special bicameral committee which he headed could be salvaged.

Former Prime Minister Prodi will be remembered for having squeezed Italy into the euro, a feat which many judged impossible at the beginning of his mandate. But it may prove harder for D'Alema to leave his mark.

He has already announced that he intends to shake up the economy, to give it “fresh impetus,” and cites lower labour costs as a prime government goal.

During his short time in office, although the country has been beleaguered by a worsening economic outlook, crippling transport strikes, and tension over illegal immigrants, D'Alema's cabinet has already projected the image of a more decisive, no-fuss mode of governing.

Despite the delay caused by the fall of Prodi's administration, his successor is determined to get the budget approved by both houses of parliament by 31 December, to avoid the need for provisional 'emergency' arrangements to regulate public spending at the start of next year.

He initialled the draft of the 1999 budget law presented by his cabinet last week, which included more welfare measures such as an increase in the lowest state pensions, and the government has set an agenda for deregulating Italy's electricity market. D'Alema has also moved to address growing alarm over the number of immigrants pressing upon Italian shores, although an announced amnesty, in which 38,000 permits to stay were handed out, produced endless queues of distressed hopefuls.

D'Alema appears determined to survive until the natural end of his mandate in spring 2001 and has set himself the daunting task of transforming Italy into a “civilised and normal country” in a Europe which pays as much attention to job creation as it does to fiscal rigour. He may be just the man to carry it through.

BIO