A man with a mission

Date: 24/04/1997

A PROFILE of Italian Prime Minister Romano Prodi risks being an only slightly premature political obituary.

For there is a growing feeling in political circles that his one-year-old government may already be on its last legs, worn down by the constant need to appease the hard-left Communist Refoundation Party whose support it needs to muster a parliamentary majority.

“There is a sense in the party that the post-Prodi phase is about to begin, maybe as early as June. People are already jockeying for position,” says one senior member of the largest government party, the Democratic Party of the Left (PDS).

Prodi himself seems bent on burning his bridges.

He is prepared to step down if the Communist Refoundation prevents radical welfare reform being included in the government's 1998 budget, or if Italy is excluded from the first wave of monetary union.

But his ability to survive should not be underestimated, nor his demise taken for granted.

Angelo Tantazzi, who together with Prodi founded the Bologna-based economic research institute Prometeia and has known the premier for 30 years, lists “determination and tenacity” among the qualities which have so far enabled him to successfully hold together a ruling coalition ranging from unrepentant Communists to former central bankers.

“When you are the penultimate of nine children you need to be pretty tough to make your voice heard,” says Tantazzi affectionately.

This is echoed by Silvio Sircana, Prodi's press aide during his time as chairman of state industrial holding company IRI and in last year's election campaign. “People are fooled by his joviality. It is not false, but it is absolutely secondary to his tenacity and political toughness,” he says.

In office, Prodi has been flanked by the deft political skills of his faithful cabinet under-secretary Enrico Micheli, whom the premier brought with him from his IRI days. Micheli has spent much of his time mediating between a political force which shares none of the government's goals - Communist Refoundation - and the rest of the ruling 'Olive Tree' coalition.

Prodi's detractors acknowledge the man's determination, but claim he has made survival his only real goal, refusing to 'face down' the Communists and adopt the tough but necessary economic measures vital to ensure Italy's qualification for membership of the euro-zone.

They sneer that deep down, Prodi is still a typical Christian Democrat - a reference to his brief membership of the defunct party which ruled Italy uninterrupted for nearly 50 years, turning permanence in office into an art form and an end in itself.

Before becoming prime minister, Prodi served two stints as IRI head, from 1982-1989 and from 1993-1994, and was briefly industry minister in Giulio Andreotti's Christian Democrat government from November 1978 to March 1979.

An industrial economist by training and a former university professor, he won many plaudits at IRI, where he was responsible for a sweeping privatisation programme.

Prodi boasts that in his first stint there, he turned the industrial giant's fortunes around, transforming huge losses into an operating profit when he left seven years later.

However, like so many others who held senior office during Italy's so-called 'First Republic', even the avuncular, devoutly Catholic Prodi was unable to escape the attention of Italy's prosecuting magistrates, who last November requested his indictment on charges of abuse of office and conflict of interest stemming from his second IRI spell.

Given the painful slowness of the Italian legal system, 57-year-old Prodi's political fate may be sealed long before a decision is made on whether he must stand trial.

When he won the election in April last year, ushering the Italian left into power for the first time in history, he was greeted by national euphoria and a largely benevolent press.

The jovial, self-effacing economics professor, often photographed bicycling around the hills of his native Emilia-Romagna, compared favourably in the popular imagination with multi-millionaire media magnate Silvio Berlusconi.

Prodi took the train rather than travel by private helicopter. He went cycling on Sundays instead of watching his own football team (as Berlusconi did). During the election campaign, he and Sircana even arrived at press conferences by taxi, rather than in an official car with accompanying police escort.

After a brief honeymoon period, however, public disenchantment has grown steadily, with most recent polls indicating only around 30&percent; of Italians are satisfied with the premier's performance.

So what has gone wrong? In an age of sound bites, when effective television performances are considered vital to political success, Prodi's communication skills are acknowledged to be a disaster. He mumbles, rambles and often gives the impression when he starts a sentence of having no idea how it is going to end.

“There is clearly a deficit in his communication skills,” admits Sircana, while Tantazzi remembers wistfully that he was “superb” at explaining economic theory at university and industrial conferences.

Prodi's renowned optimism can also cost him credibility, including his constant reassurances since last August that the country's sluggish economy “is now picking up” in the face of ample statistical evidence to the contrary.

In an interview with the International Herald Tribune last November shortly after the government had lowered this year's deficit target to 3&percent; of gross domestic product, Prodi stunned everyone by saying he expected a deficit of 3.3&percent;.

He 'clarified' the blunder by saying the European Commission had just forecast a 3.3&percent; deficit, which was therefore the number he felt the IHT's readers would be “most familiar with”. Similar examples abound.

But communication is not the main problem. The government has succeeded in alienating both the trade unions, angered by its inertia in tackling unemployment, and the traditionally pro-government employers' group Confindustria.

The industrialists argue that Prodi's excessive pandering to Communist Refoundation has meant his efforts to meet the Maastricht deficit target of 3&percent; of national income have largely taken the form of cosmetic or one-off measures - often at the expense of business interests - instead of the fundamental pension reform they and the International Monetary Fund say is needed.

However, perhaps the most renowned dissatisfaction with Prodi is that of PDS leader Massimo D'Alema, who accuses the premier of weakness in handling Communist Refoundation and suspects he has offered a 'special relationship' to the Communists as a way of reducing the influence of both the PDS and D'Alema on the government.

But Sircana, perhaps optimistically, believes the relationship between the two has now improved.

“It is like a couple who, having fought throughout their whole marriage, decide to patch things up for the sake of the children or, in this case the government,” he says, although he admits that “the odd betrayal can still never be ruled out”.

Prodi naturally highlights his government's economic successes, most notably in reducing inflation, interest rates and, in recent months, the budget deficit.

Inflation has fallen from an annual rate of 3.9&percent; in June last year to 2.2&percent; this March, while the interest rates the Italian government has had to pay investors to hold its debt have fallen sharply over the same period, reflecting Italy's revived hopes of joining monetary union from the start.

After mushrooming out of control last year, the budget deficit amounted to just 12 billion ecu in the first quarter of this year, a little over half the total accumulated in the same period of 1996.

Despite these achievements, Prodi's friends acknowledge he is now fighting a desperate rearguard action.

“He has got the press and everyone else against him. They are showering him with insults and he is being forced to take too much,” says Sircana. “But nobody should write him off. When he is convinced he is on the right track, he is terribly difficult to budge.”

Prodi's vulnerability, however, lies in the fact that his fate is, to a large extent, out of his hands.

It has been said he is “in office but not in power” because he is reliant on political parties he does not lead and cannot control, and Italy's EMU destiny is probably dependent as much on German domestic politics as on his own government's economic performance.

It is commonly acknowledged that the next three months, likely to be dominated by friction over the government's promised welfare reforms, will be crucial in determining whether Prodi can hang on - and keep alive his 'mission' of taking Italy into EMU.