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Renzi’s first goal as mayor of Florence is to run an effective administration which delivers efficient services. He has called for an end to state financing of political parties; he aims to slash the grossly inflated number of publicly funded university professorships; he hopes to remove the medieval restrictions on competition in the middle-class professions, and he is prepared to tackle pension reform. Such aims may sound pedestrian, but in Italy they are almost revolutionary.
His enemies claim that, while Renzi’s good ideas are not very new, his new ideas are not very good. True, he has a tendency to hop on politically correct bandwagons: the green economy, votes for 16-year-olds, a single-chamber Italian parliament. No one, however, doubts his ambition. He was quite prepared to jump the queue and run for election as mayor of Florence, despite the fact that his party leaders had told him to wait a few years.
Moreover he has charisma and good looks, which make him an appealing television performer. Don’t knock it: it worked for the young Tony Blair. To draw another comparison, he is what another mayor wishes he was: the thinking woman’s political crumpet. Eat your heart out, Boris!
Yet, as an outsider seeking to leapfrog from provincial affairs to Italian national politics, Renzi faces an enormous challenge. He does not have the advantages of Berlusconi, who could use his enormous wealth to create his own party and to persuade the electorate that he would bring successful business practices into government.
Now, though, no one in Italy has any confidence that a version of Berlusconi’s coalition can introduce the spending cuts and structural reforms which the EU is demanding as the price of shoring up Italy’s sagging economy. No one believes the leadership of the left can do it either.
Berlusconi’s failure could be Renzi’s opportunity. Italians are braced for austerity, odd though that sounds. They know that sacrifices are required, and are looking for someone capable of implementing and enforcing the necessary economies in a way which is fair and does not shelter powerful interest groups from pain. The stakes are high. While a Greek default would do only limited damage to the rest of Europe, if Italy sinks in its sea of debt, it will pull the whole eurozone down with it.
Salvation will not be achieved by waving a magic wand and whisking Signor Renzi from Florence to Rome. There has to be a process. Virtually the only institution which retains credibility, apart from the Bank of Italy, is the country’s presidency, which commands great prestige notwithstanding its lack of real power. Italians are looking to President Napolitano, a sober and cerebral ex-communist and the complete antithesis of Berlusconi, to move into the leadership vacuum and appoint a non-political government of experts to devise a recovery programme. That is the essential step, which the politicians have shown themselves incapable of taking.
Once a coherent programme is in place, there would have to be early elections to confer democratic legitimacy. That would be the moment to remove the sclerotic political leadership in Rome and to introduce Renzi as the new face of Italian politics, capable of commanding confidence not merely at home, but more widely in Europe and among international banks and financial institutions.
This would be asking a lot of Renzi, to be sure. Already he is being savaged by the political establishment, including his own party, as infantile, just a pretty face, a fount of facile policy proposals, an ambitious whelp. Suspicions are being voiced about a secret meeting he held with Berlusconi at the latter’s notorious Arcore villa. Certainly there are many politicians all too aware that their careers would be wiped out by the forceful tide of a new political generation.
In the end, Renzi may prove to be just another meteorite flashing through Italy’s political atmosphere before disappearing into the void. But I’m betting otherwise. Unexpected changes bring unexpected leaders. Or as the British say: ‘Cometh the hour, cometh the man.’
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