MAFIA AND ITALIAN
POLITICS
A brief history
19th Century
• The Sicilian mafia during the nineteenth
century took advantage of the weakness
of the newly-built Italian central state and
was able to a considerable extent to
substitute itself for the state authorities,
providing functions of protection,
mediation and repression.
Mafia and Fascism
• In 1925, Benito Mussolini initiated a campaign to
destroy the Mafia and assert Fascist control over
Sicilian life.
• The Mafia threatened and undermined his power
in Sicily, and a successful campaign would
strengthen him as the new leader, legitimizing
and empowering his rule.
• Although he did not permanently crush the Mafia
as the Fascist press proclaimed, his campaign
was nonetheless very successful at suppressing
it.
• Many mafiosi fled to the United States
WW2
• In 1943, nearly half a million Allied troops invaded Sicily.
Crime soared in the upheaval and chaos. Many inmates
escaped from their prisons, banditry returned and the
black market thrived.
• During the first six months of Allied occupation, party
politics in Sicily were banned. Most institutions, with the
exception of the police and carabinieri were destroyed,
and the American occupiers had to build a new order
from scratch.
• As Fascist mayors were deposed, the Allies simply
appointed replacements. Many turned out to be mafiosi,
They could easily present themselves as political
dissidents and their anti-communist position gave them
additional credibility.
• In the post war period the relationship changed
in emphasis. The modernization of southern Italy
and Sicily meant that the state became stronger
and the mafia lost many of the functions that it
had performed in the old rural society.
• But just as it found new economic opportunities
in drugs and building construction, it found new
political opportunities in collusion arrangements
with the dominant political parties (first the
Christian Democrats and then Berlusconi’s
Forza Italia) in Sicily, guaranteeing them votes
and unchallenged political influence in return for
protection from prosecution by the police and
judicial authorities.
1948-1990: Anti-Communism
• Italy had a very strong Communist Party.
The Italian CP was the strongest in
Western Europe and it had built up a good
reputation in the struggle against the
Mussolini fascist regime which ruled Italy
from the 1920s until 1943 and which took
Italy into the second world war as an ally
with Hitler and Nazi Germany.
COLD WAR
• Inside Italy the conservatives used the cold war
threat ‘if you vote communist Italy will be taken
over by the Soviet Union’ etc. The main
conservative party was the Christian Democrats
(in Italian this is Democrazia Cristiana or DC for
short). They ruled the country almost
continuously from 1948 until the early 1990s.
When one party is in government for such a long
period, corruption is almost inevitable.
• The mafia saw immediately how to benefit
from this new situation by offering itself as
an ally to the ruling political elites in the
struggle against Communists and
Socialists.
• Between 1945 and 1955 43 socialists and
communists were murdered in Sicily, often
at election time.
• In other words, at the beginning of the
cold war the DC entered into an
unspoken contract with the mafia in
which the latter would keep the
socialists and communists weak in
Sicily – by threats and assassinations
and by using its influence to pressure
people into voting DC at elections –
and the DC in turn would use its
influence to ensure that the police and
judicial system did not put too much
pressure on the mafia and interrupt its
profitable activities in the drugs trade
and the building industry.
• This relation of collusion was a major
feature of Italian politics from the end of
the second world war until the early 1990s.
It is not possible to grasp the enormous
power and influence of the mafia and the
failure of all attempts to curb its power
unless this political relationship is
understood.
A “NEW POLITICAL PADRINO”
But it was precisely at this time, the early years of the 1990s that things
became to come apart a little. Three fundamental changes were
at work
1. The cold war ended. In 1990 the Berlin Wall came down, the
Soviet Union fell apart and the need to keep Italy as a ‘front line’
state in the NATO alliance became less important.
It thus became less important for the US and Western Europeans to
keep the Italian communist party (which had now renamed itself
PDS (Partito Democratico della Sinistra – Democratic Party of the
Left) out of government at all costs. The enthusiasm for keeping
corrupt DC governments in power waned. More and more
individuals started to ‘spill the beans’ about corruption in high
places.
2. In 1992 Italy was engulfed in a wave of corruption scandals
which revealed the extent to which large numbers of powerful Italian
multi-national companies had been paying massive backhanders to
the political elite for public contracts etc.
Their activities dwarfed those of the mafia’s building and construction
activities in Sicily and the South of Italy. We were now talking about
massive undertakings like the building of the Milan metro system
(the tube lines). It was all coming out into the open and that
generations of corruption and sleaze was now beginning to come
out into the open.
All these developments were of course to the disadvantage of the
mafia (at least in the short run). Their political friends in Rome
were now on the defensive and their power to ‘fix’ things was
being drastically reduced.
FORZA ITALIA
• Christian Democrats party dissolved
• Mafia on the lookout for new political
alliances
• Recently in Italy, two convicted criminals
have stated during court hearings that the
Forza Italia party was the product of an
agreement between Berlusconi and the
mafia.
Berlusconi’s Fabulous Fortune
• Nobody understands just how Silvio
Berlusconi amassed such a large fortune,
nor is it clear from where, or from whom,
the funds for his Milan estate
developments and media empire actually
came.
Sicilians Voted for Forza Italia in
1994, 2001
and again in 2012
• Fuelling suspicions of links between
Berlusconi and the mafia is the fact that in
the 2001 elections, Berlusconi’s party won
more seats via Sicily than via any other
Italian region aside from Lombardy up in
northern Italy. Now why would
impoverished under-developed Sicilians
go and vote for a right wing party?
Friend or Mafioso?
• Marcello Del’Utri, an Italian senator, is a
Berlusconi associate and, according to
both the mafia stroke criminal turncoats, is
the person who brokered the deal with the
mafia which led to the setting up of the
Forza Italia party.