A Look at Italy's Political Financing Corruption

Recent scandals have exposed the problems of public financing going on with Italian political parties. In 1974, the “Piccoli Law,” named after its main proponent Flaminio Piccoli, introduced public financial assistance to political parties represented by the Italian Parliament. The intention of the law was quite noble: to protect the Italian political system from the lobbying pressure and possible blackmail that could arise from politicians accepting contributions from private individuals or economic groups. In reality, the flow of money was more often used for other purposes than for what had originally been intended. In 1993, following a referendum where 90.3% of voters said they were against it, the law was repealed. But, as it happens often in the Italian political scene, a loophole was almost immediately found. The public financing of political parties, which should have no longer existed following the referendum, was replaced in a 1994 law with “electoral reimbursements.” By 2002, such repayments became annual, with a decrease in the percentage of votes required to get reimbursement from 4% to 1%, while a political party needs to get at least 4% of the vote to be represented in Parliament. In 2006, it was finally decided that the reimbursements should last for all five years of a political term, regardless of how long a politician stays in office. So even in cases where a politician is removed from his position before completing his term, he can still collect reimbursement money. Some figures to indicate the kind of deals we're talking about: In 2010, the Italian parties received 285 million Euros, compared to 133 million received by the Germans and 80 million received by the French - in the latter two countries this figure is the maximum public reimbursement for the political parties, a limit which does not exist in Italy - while in the United Kingdom this type of contribution is intended only to go to the opposition parties. In the 2006 elections, according to the reports of the Audit Court, the parties had received contributions totaling about 498 million Euros (over the five years of the legislature's term), compared with 117 million Euros of actual expenditures incurred by election campaigns, letting the political system walk away with an extra 381 million Euros (equal to 325% of their costs), completely against the spirit of the law and without any public control. This leads to occurrences like a case in 2006 where the Italian Communist Party received 5.8 million Euros in reimbursement compared to the Party's 194,000 Euros of actual expenses for that year, a difference of 2,950%. Another case was in the 2004 election, when the leader of the Pensioners' Party spent 16,453 Euros on his campaign and received 3 million Euros from the state as reimbursement, a difference of 30,000%. According to a recent document from the Council of Europe, between 1994 and 2008, Italian political parties received three times more money than their total costs incurred - 2.25 billion versus 570 million. Now we come to current scandals related to this issue. Luigi Lusi, the treasurer of the now-dissolved centrist party Democrazia è Libertà – La Margherita (“Democracy is Freedom - The Daisy”), improperly collected between 18 and 20 million Euros as public reimbursement and mostly transferred them abroad through the Canadian company Filor Ltd., which Lusi and his wife have connections to. Recently, the federalist/regionalist party Lega Nord (“Northern League”), which won victories on a platform of going after corruption in the Italian political system with its famous slogan Roma ladrona (loosely translated as “Rome big thief”), has been embroiled in a scandal involving treasurer Francesco Belsito, who is accused of using some of the money obtained as electoral reimbursement to cover personal expenses of party leader Umberto Bossi and his family. Corruption seems to increasingly be a feature of Italian politics. Besides the primitive belief that winning is the only thing that matters, it is fueled by the excessive bureaucracy, with consequent hindrances to the speed of the process and necessary “monetary interventions” to “remove obstacles,” and continuous breaches of laws and referendum results because of other laws made for the sole purpose of avoiding obstacles to illicit deeds. Until this rampant malpractice comes to an end, any request for legislative action to break this barrier against the modernization of public administrations will be destined to fall on deaf ears. And those who can take advantage of this broken system will continue to collect ill-gotten gains and have no motivation to change the situation.