How Mario Draghi’s Italy escaped the blame for not doing enough for Ukraine
In the last months, Germany was front stage in the news for its apparent reluctance in helping Ukraine. While eastern Europe and the Anglosaxon world rushed money, weapons and a barrage of tough words towards the invaded country, Merkel’s successor, the social democrat Olaf Scholz, bundled from one embarrassment to the other.
It got to the point that Zelensky refused to meet with the German president and then Scholz in retaliation refused to go to Kyiv. Such was the mess in which Germany was embroiled, that the fact that Italy had done quite similar things completely flew under the radar.
Mario Draghi’s Italy has arguably a worse record than Germany in helping Ukraine, but its government completely escaped any kind of national or international blame for not doing enough. Zelensky personally thanked the Italians multiple times.
At the same time, Italy is portrayed by the mainstream international media as the propaganda soft underbelly of Europe. A nest of politicians on Kremlin payroll and media infiltrated by FSB stooges. How can those two realities coexist?
First thing. Despite its wild media environment, Italy is no more infiltrated than France or Germany and probably less than Britain, where the Russian oligarchs basically bankrolled the Conservative party for years.
It’s true that on Italian tv networks you’ll see Russian politicians and propagandists treated like honorable guests. But it’s only a show. Nobody is going to listen to a fight between a Kremlin propagandist uncertainty dubbed in real time and some middle aged Italian pundit and going to vote for a politician that asks Ukraine to surrender.
If the polls show a good chunk of Italian public opinion leaning towards Russia, it’s simply because being pro-Ukraine is the position of the establishment, and in a country where wages actually fell between the last two working age generations, you cannot expect any establishment held position to be popular.
But the country is as firmly set into the Atlantic alliance as anyone else. When the whiff of populism threatened even the most trivial aspect of Italy’s geopolitical place, the Italian deep state signaled that democratic policy has clear delimitations.
Membership of the Eu and Nato are not the kinds of things that Italians could have a choice about. The politicians, even the wildly populist like Matteo Salvini, who have lost any kind of capabilities of governance without the silent legion of powerful bureaucrats, duly comply.
But the point is, which kind of member of Nato — and the EU — is Italy? What do the deep state and the priests of high bureaucracy think about what’s going on? The answer is that they think that this war has gone too far and they think it from day one.
Historically, Italy has been one of the more dovish countries in Europe. Look for a crisis around the Mediterranean basin, the area that Italy regards as something like “his area of influence” and you’ll find the country always on the side of compromise and peace.
It is a tradition dictated, not by humanitarian considerations, but by the realization made by the Italian ruling political élite out of the WW2 experience, that playing the Great power game for a small country like Italy could have a very bloody price.
So, in winter 2022 they didn’t believe the war was coming and they were stunned when tanks rolled across the border. Until the last hours before the invasion, Italy was still trying to de-escalate with the rest of the central European powers, like Germany and France.
While the high bureaucrats and public servants recovered from the shock they let the hawks among them brandish the big stick. In the first two months of the war, the italian liberal media, the centrist pundits, the so called “moderate” politicians all donned their war color.
For more than 80 days, the Italian public sphere was in a war fever. The main newspapers run 18 to 24 pages of war reporting. News casts opened with news of the war every hour, every day. It was hysteria. Eurobarometer polls showed that the Italians were the most worried and exposed to news from the war.
But despite the bellicose rhetoric displayed in the media, the deep state never really got their hands off the steering wheel. On february 22, two days before the invasion, Italian diplomatic sherpa in Bruxelles were still trying to exempt luxury items, like clothes and prosecco, from the list of sanctions. Two days later, when rockets started to fall on Kiev, the Italians — and the Germans — were still making objections to the package of sanctions. But only the latter took the blame.
Later, German chancellor Scholz was under fire for his “nein” to the export of heavy weapons. In the end, he conceded and authorized a shipment of anti aircraft guns, while training Ukrainians in the use of German guns.
Italy followed a similar course. The bloated but material-starved Italian army sent the bare minimum of modern equipment. The military press celebrated the shipment of an unknown number of old reserve artillery pieces saying that the Italian generals “successfully defended” the more modern self-propelled artillery.
After recovering from the shock, the Italian doves started to reassert themselves. In the grand diplomatic theater, Draghi strongly signaled the need for a compromise without a winner in Ukraine. If you put Orban’s Hungary aside, the official position of the Italian government and his high functionnairs, is as pro-Russia you could be while being in Nato.
But while German politicians get regularly excoriated by Ukrainians and their supporters, what the Italians do passes in silence. Ukrainian journalists walk out from Italian TV shows and criticize its toxic media environment, but they have not much to say about its government’s position.
The reason for this silence derives in no small part from the immense prestige that Mario Draghi still holds among his peers. No one dares to criticize the savior of the euro, the only man who apparently could hold Italy from falling into the abyss in which it could bring the rest of Europe.
By his virtues and by keeping quiet, Mario Draghi has done everything Germany has done, and even less, without a hint of criticism.
The other evident reason for the silence is that Italy is seen by Ukraine as the softbelly of the core European nations which are growing skeptical of the prosecution of the war. By hitting Germany and caressing Italy, the Ukrainians are hoping to nudge Draghi to their side.
They are making assumptions not so different from the one a lot of people in Russia made in the last couple of decades. By its continuous political instability, Italy looks vulnerable to foreign influence. Certainly more so than monocratic France or consensus-loving Germany.
The Russians spent money and influence to make friends among the Italian radicals, especially on the right. They got to Salvini himself. But they forgot that he was using them as much as they were using him.
Salvini and his peers are as willing to play the bad boy who is friends with the shunned autocrat as long as they are in the opposition and free to make a show. But as soon as they get close to levers of power, they are not willing to lose a political inch to please Mr. Putin.
In 2018, when Salvini formed a government with the arch-populist Movimento 5 stelle, the eminent Presidente della Repubblica made clear that the foreign policy would be run by his own men, Salvini meekly acquiesced. He had much bigger fish to catch than immolating himself forcing a veto on Russian sanction.
In the end, dragging its feet like Germany, Italy has done its share for Ukraine. But Ukrainians shouldn’t mistake the war fever in the media and the noble statement by MPs and even ministers for a Baltic-like commitment to their cause. The Italian public is getting tired of the war, the government looks at the polls and at the incoming economic crisis.
Draghi has one more year in government and whichever future he desires for himself, it’s not going to be determined by his policies in Ukraine. More quietly than in Germany or France, but also the Italian clock it’s ticking. And soon time is not going to be in favor of the Ukrainians anymore.
