Italy’s De Mita: A Life That Mirrors Modernization of His Nation

In the ruins of World War II, the southern Italian province of Avellino mirrored national misery and backwardness. Ciriaco De Mita remembers his town: 6,000 inhabitants and one car; houses with no electricity or running water. There were not enough schools, and little to eat.

“Forty years ago we had a country that was destroyed, communications broken; no production, a population divided,” De Mita recalled. “I was a student, and, I think, a good one, without any chance of getting to school. My personal life is the story of Italy’s evolution.”

De Mita, now 60, eventually earned a law degree, but he never did learn to drive. It was a brother who bought the De Mita family’s first car in the 1950s. Today, in thoroughly modern Avellino, there is one motor vehicle for every two people, and people worry about eating too much.

When the pensive De Mita arrives today for a three-day visit to Los Angeles, he comes as prime minister of a European nation that has probably changed as much in the past 40 years as in the previous 400. Italians today earn more and live better than the British, by the reckoning of the economic community that unites them.

Startling Modernization

Crucial to the startling modernization was the U.S. Marshall Plan, which pumped $1.5 billion into Italy’s postwar recovery, and the decision of Italian governments led by De Mita’s Christian Democratic Party to join the Atlantic Alliance and to help forge the European Common Market. The result--De Mita will be able to say Tuesday when he addresses a Los Angeles conference commemorating the Marshall Plan--is a solidly based democracy with a thriving economy.

In a wide-ranging conversation with The Times on the eve of his departure, De Mita reflected a national optimism that is tempered by the recognition that Italy needs internal reforms. Like its European Communities partners, Italy is gearing up with expectation and trepidation for 1992, when Western Europe plans to scrap national frontiers.

“We have two serious problems: government finances and the improvement of public services,” De Mita said. “The former is more urgent at the moment: We have a big public debt and a large government deficit. Our program is to do away with the deficit by 1992. We have already taken the first steps.” The steps include a ceiling on public spending.

Organized Crime

In the drive toward a united Europe, Italy seeks also to defeat organized crime, a longstanding national headache. Referring to the Mafia and other regional criminal organizations as “probably the most acute social problem we have,” De Mita said: “We are working with great commitment to repress them.”

Although De Mita is sensitive to criticism of Italian public services, they are a national scandal--from hospitals to railroads to telephones. The private sector fears these structural flaws will hurt Italian competitiveness in an open Europe. Today, for example, to avoid the vagaries of the Italian mail, many Romans use the Vatican Post Office for outgoing letters. In the north, some companies send daily couriers into Switzerland to mail correspondence there.

“We are committed to a modernization of services, but this worries me less, because we Italians tend to act and modify situations more under the dictates of necessity than desire,” De Mita said. “In the 1950s, when we were debating whether to join the Common Market, everyone said membership would cause us problems because we were backward, especially compared to countries like (West) Germany and England. Today, the Italian economy is strong and competitive.”

A sign of the times: After competitive bidding, the Belgian government last week chose an Italian manufacturer to build 46 combat helicopters worth $305 million. Indeed, Italy’s emerging economic brawn is sometimes as surprising to outsiders as the premiership of De Mita is to some Italians.

Behind-Scenes Maneuvering

De Mita, who says with a smile that he became a politician at age 7, is foremost a party official, more accustomed to maneuvering behind the scenes than on center stage.

Elected in 1982 to head the Christian Democratic Party, Italy’s largest, De Mita came to governmental power eight months ago at the head of a five-party coalition. As a result of the coalition’s balance of power, De Mita in effect governs at the pleasure of his more polished and urbane ally/rival, Bettino Craxi, Socialist Party leader and prime minister for almost four years until March, 1987.

“Craxi is De Mita’s greatest friend and his biggest enemy,” said Ernesto Galli della Loggia, a specialist in political parties at the University of Perugia. “I don’t think De Mita will fall anytime soon, but if Craxi decides tomorrow to stop Socialist Party collaboration, the government is finished.”

A recent poll by the magazine Panorama found the charismatic Craxi more popular than De Mita among Italians, who also consider the Socialist Party leader more decisive. By contrast, the respondents by far reckoned De Mita to be the more serious and reserved of the two.

The son of a small-town tailor, De Mita is proud of provincial, lower-middle-class roots that he is at no pains to hide. His Italian has a strong southern regional accent; he speaks no English. To relax, he plays cards for an hour or two each day, a lightning kind of peasant bridge called Tressette in which bragging rights, not money, is the principal stake.

‘Southern Intellectual’

Described by Fiat Chairman Gianni Agnelli as “a southern intellectual,” De Mita is more cerebral than emotional in his public persona. Aides say he is a shy man, most comfortable among small groups.

Yet De Mita brought a “boss” label to power with him. Galli della Loggia notes that he hails from a part of Italy near Naples where “bosses dominate a party mechanism built on corruption and favoritism.” In Avellino, one Italian magazine observed wryly, it takes a recommendation from the Christian Democratic Party even to get a child into nursery school. The Avellino area is nationally known as the best place in Italy for a healthy person with flexible scruples and good connections to wrangle a government disability pension.

It is as a reformer, nonetheless, that De Mita took power in April. Under the combined De Mita-Craxi weight this fall, Parliament abolished its right to a secret vote that had often been used to screen renegades voting against their own party’s proposals. The abolition makes for greater parliamentary speed and efficiency. Legislators can still vote as they like, but now they must stand up and be counted.

De Mita also favors reforms that would reduce the present, time-consuming duplication of effort between the Senate and the Chamber of Deputies. To combat widespread political cynicism among Italian voters, he calls for electoral reform that would force parties to publicly align with coalition partners before the voting begins and not in smoke-filled rooms afterward.

‘Few Accomplishments’

“De Mita’s program is good, but his accomplishments are few. He calls for parliamentary reform, but he is not prodding the Parliament to enact it. He is supposedly committed to electoral reform, but I don’t believe he really wants one,” said Gianfranco Pasquino, a professor of politics at Johns Hopkins University’s Bologna Center who serves in the Italian Senate as an independent leftist.

Other De Mita critics say his lack of experience in foreign affairs is a severe burden at a time when Italy’s international clout falls short of its standing as the world’s fifth or sixth economic power.

“De Mita still has to win credibility and consensus in international affairs. He has no foreign policy of his own. It’s (Foreign Minister Giulio) Andreotti’s policy,” said Claudio Ligas, a foreign affairs specialist for the Italian Communist Party. “His recent Moscow visit was not a brilliant event. Reaction from the Russians was that he is not a great statesman.”

The Soviet Union looms large for De Mita, who journeyed to Moscow in October to open an Italian trade fair with President Mikhail S. Gorbachev. The Communists are Italy’s second-largest political party and have been the Christian Democrats’ chief--and always unsuccessful rival--for national power since the war. Warily watching the domestic Communists on the one hand, De Mita believes on the other that it is good politics and good business sense to support Gorbachev’s openings. The Italian government is offering Moscow $775 million in export credits, and a multibillion-dollar Italian-Soviet joint venture is proposed to build 1 million Fiat cars a year in the Soviet Union.

“If you ask me if I think Gorbachev wants to carry out the policy he is pointing to, I would say ‘yes.’ If you ask me whether he can do it--honestly, I don’t know; the task is very difficult,” De Mita told The Times. “International relations are built not only on military balance but also on the development of cultural and economic exchanges. What can the West gain from standing passively by?”

sh U.S. Ally

Under De Mita, Italy remains one of the firmest U.S. NATO allies, preparing to accept a wing of F-16 fighter-bombers booted out by Spain. De Mita disagrees, however, with the American decision not to deal with the Palestine Liberation Organization.

“Our positions are close on the Palestinian question; quite close if you agree that the conflict cannot be resolved by military means and that a political solution must be found,” De Mita said. “The dividing point comes if one believes that there can be a Palestinian representative body today which is not the PLO. The PLO is a fact. That reality cannot be ignored.”

De Mita sidestepped the question of whether Italy would grant diplomatic recognition to the recently proclaimed Palestinian state.

From Los Angeles, the Italian leader goes to Washington on Wednesday for a courtesy call on President Reagan--”a sign of respect and friendship to such an outstanding symbol of America.” He will also meet President-elect George Bush.

“I think De Mita will inquire if Bush feels obliged to follow the same reasoning as Reagan on the Palestinian question,” said Francesco D’Onofrio, a Christian Democratic senator and De Mita adviser on foreign affairs.

Said De Mita: “In our good relations with the United States, there have been, there are, and probably there will be, differences of opinion. The important thing is to continue to be allies knowing that differences of opinion have their importance within a common position. Experience has taught me this.”