Strikes in France, Austria, and Germany were also organized June 3. The Austrian strike was reportedly the biggest in the country’s post-World War II history. Workers condemned the government’s plan to cut retirement pensions by 11 percent. The French strikes, too, were organized to protest proposed cuts in pensions.

The Italian government’s attacks on retirement benefits and rights have also roused opposition from the country’s labor movement. Italy’s three major trade union federations have said they will organize a strike on the issue after June 8, when a second and final round of voting in regional and local elections will be completed. “If the government doesn’t address our concerns, we will have to resort to a strike,” said Morena Piccinini, a leader of the General Confederation of Italian Workers (Cgil), the largest federation.

Italian prime minister Silvio Berlusconi attacked the European actions during the meeting in France of the G-8, which comprises the governments of the seven largest imperialist powers and of the Russian workers state. “Structural reform is necessary where each one must take on his own responsibility for being productive and stay off work for strikes which could affect national economic results,” he said. Imperialist Italy is the fourth largest power in the European Union, behind Germany, France, and the United Kingdom.

The House of Liberties coalition government led by Berlusconi’s Forza Italia (Forward Italy) party is pushing through a series of attacks on pensions designed and initiated by previous governments. They include the promotion of private pension schemes and the use of financial incentives to push workers to entice them to work past the official retirement age, which stands at 65 for men and 60 for women.  
 
Propaganda around pensions
Arguing in favor of such steps—and frequently calling for stronger measures—capitalist propagandists raise the alarm about the growing proportion of retired people in the population. “The structure of the population in Italy is starting to resemble that of Florida,” Franco Pavoncello, a professor at the John Cabot University in Rome, told the BBC. “You have a lot of very old people. At the same time, the level of fertility is constantly decreasing, so there aren’t enough people who are starting to work who are going to sustain the system.”

At the G-8 meeting, Berlusconi said, “there is a general European problem of aging populations. An older population results in a decrease in consumption.”

In his annual speech on the state of the economy May 31, Bank of Italy governor Antonio Fazio urged Berlusconi to “enact structural reforms—particularly to the overburdened public pensions system—that will cut spending and bolster growth,” reported the International Herald Tribune.

Fazio also bemoaned the impact of the fall in the value of the U.S. dollar against the euro, which has made Italian exports more expensive.

The arguments and proposals on cutting pensions have been at the center of cuts by successive governments in the social wage through the 1990s, as the capitalist rulers moved to shift the burden of their growing economic crisis onto the backs of working people. In December 1994 one million people marched in Rome against the increase in the retirement age from 56 for women and 61 for men to its present levels. Those cuts were enforced by a coalition government also headed by Berlusconi, who had been elected in March of that year in his first-ever campaign.

At the time, Stefano Micossi of Confindustria, the Italian industrialists’ association, gloated, “I scarcely believe that this government has dared to do what no one else has dared to do—structural cuts in pensions and health systems.”

Nine years later, Berlusconi faces a new stage of the economic crisis. On May 15 his government announced that the economy had shrunk by 0.1 percent in the first three months of the year. The news raised the specter of further layoffs and an upward push on the unemployment rate, which stands officially at 9 percent. In the less industrialized south, the jobless rate reaches 20 percent.  
 
Threats of EU-wide recession
The news from Rome coincided with similar statements from Berlin and Amsterdam. The contraction of the latter two economies has now spanned six months, placing them officially in recession. With the minimal growth rates recorded by France and many other countries in the European Union, the big-business media is now speculating that an EU-wide recession may be underway.

Berlusconi, who is in line to take over the EU presidency in the second half of this year, called on the European Central Bank to lower interest rates. “Europe has to do its part to help the economy,” he said.

Trumpeting his government’s program of tax cuts, Berlusconi said, “Obviously this is not enough. If we don’t want to increase our [budget] deficit, we have to intervene with other measures we are now considering.”

Meanwhile, the automaker Fiat, Italy’s largest industrial company, has called for new investment—or “recapitalization”—and appealed to General Motors bosses to pick up part of the bill. GM, which owns a one-fifth stake in the embattled company, has not responded.

Fiat has reported a succession of annual losses and has laid off 15,000 workers in one Turin plant alone over the past three years. The layoffs prompted protest strikes and demonstrations by workers in Sicily, Milan, and Turin in the closing months of 2002. Capitalist pundits in the United States criticize Rome for its protectionist barriers to foreign investment and ownership of the auto industry. Unlike their competitors in Europe and North America, the Italian capitalists have so far not permitted foreign carmakers to produce vehicles on Italian soil. The country’s auto production fell by almost 10 percent last year.

Deputy prime minister Gianfranco Fini said the government would not join in any bail-out of Fiat, which is closely identified with the Italian state. “We have replied to Fiat that they should sell the family jewels and make more appealing cars,” he said. “We are for the policy of competition between owners.”  
 
Elections in late May
The developing crisis in Italy and elsewhere in Europe was the backdrop for the May 25-26 regional elections. Up for grabs were the governments of some 500 towns and two regions. In the 12 provinces where voting took place, the coalition led by the Democratic Party of the Left (DPS) won five and Berlusconi’s Forza Italia won four. The DPS, the former Italian Communist Party, has taken part in a number bourgeois coalition governments since World War II.

Several of Forza Italia’s five governmental coalition partners fared worse, however. The Democratic Union of the Center, which is a remnant of the former Christian Democratic Party, lost out in the Rome election to the DPS candidate. So did the rightist National Alliance Party. The leaders of both parties claimed that potential supporters in the city had been frightened off by their association with the Northern League, another coalition partner. Northern League leader Umberto Bossi had attacked Rome for “draining wealth from the northern regions that form his electoral base,” according to the Financial Times.

In addition to scapegoating homosexuals, Muslims, and immigrants, the Northern League calls for the separation of the more industrialized northern regions from the agricultural and less developed south—from Sicily through to Naples.

The National Alliance and the Northern League were both partners in Berlusconi’s first government, which held office for three years until it broke apart amidst a corruption scandal centering on Berlusconi and his business concerns.

Like Berlusconi himself, these parties have risen to prominence amid the rubble of the conservative Christian Democratic Party, which dominated a string of coalition governments for almost five decades after World War II. At times the Christian Democrats would cede first place to the Italian Socialist Party. Both these twin parties of capitalist rule were victims of the capitalist crisis that first began to hit in the mid-1970s. The fall of the Christian Democrats was more spectacular, as leaders and prominent associates were toppled in the middle of ongoing bribery scandals.

Seizing this situation in the 1994 campaign, Berlusconi presented himself as an uncorrupted “outsider” in Italian politics who would use executive power to “clean up” Rome. At the time capitalist commentators in the United States drew parallels between Berlusconi and Ross Perot, the businessman and Bonapartist politician who received nearly 20 percent of the vote as a third-party candidate in the 1992 U.S. presidential elections.

Berlusconi came to power as the deepening capitalist crisis started breeding radical attitudes that initially put wind in the sails of the right before it precipitated massive class battles—that is, before a working-class radicalization during which growing numbers of workers become more receptive to class-struggle proposals and communist ideas. Berlusconi tapped into the conviction of millions that the established bourgeois politicians were incapable of addressing the social crisis, unfit to be in office.

In power, Berlusconi has acted as a mainstream capitalist politician. His program has been determined less by the rhetoric of the rightists on his flanks than by the drive of the Italian rulers to increase their profit rates and cut social programs.

At the same time, Berlusconi’s interventions in the recent election campaigns had a characteristic edge of demagogy, red-baiting, and self-promotion. Without his role as the country’s savior, he told the New York Times on May 9, “there would be no freedom in Italy.”

“If I left political life right now,” he added, “Italy would fall into the hands of Communists.” Berlusconi gives his anti-communism a personal twist, blaming “Communist judges” for corruption investigations into his business affairs.The coalition government lined up with Washington and London in their invasion of Iraq, in defiance of the larger powers of Berlin and Paris, which saw the U.S.-dominated military action as a blow to their own oil contracts and other imperialist designs in the Middle East.

At the June 2-3 G-8 meeting in France Berlusconi announced that Rome would contribute 3,000 troops to the occupying armies.

“We are the third country in the world, after USA and UK” in the deployment of active-duty military forces abroad, he said. According to the Italian government, some 55,000 Italian troops are engaged or on stand-by for such imperialist “peace-keeping” missions in Kosova and elsewhere.  
 
 
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