HERE in Italy, when our good neighbour Carlo invited us to a feast in the village square, it seemed a good idea to accept.

Carlo, a retired bus engineer, is “assessore” to the commune and was elected on the non-partisan citizens’ list organised by our mayor Simone.

Carlo had organised a table, and from our little borgata of half a dozen houses down the hill from the village centre, there would be seven of us.

Our curiosity had been aroused by Carlo’s oddly insistent invitation, and we were confounded to find the piazza adorned in portraits of Matteo Salvini, the leader of the Lega party, junior partner in Giorgia Meloni’s new right-wing government.

Just as food and drink were about to be served, the heavens opened and the tables were deluged. Sheltering in a tent I extracted a laugh from Simone’s father with the crack that “Dio e comunista” (God is a communist).

With this blessing from God, we thus repaired to a cafe to feast on Piedmontese delicacies and an agreeable Nebbiolo wine, while a local folk band cracked out the songs of the region.

A desultory flurry of applause greeted the arrival of the local Lega bigwigs, while our communist neighbour Eliana tried to provoke me into a few choruses of the anti-fascist song Bella Ciao.

It was clear that the mayor had leant on Carlo to get a good turnout so he could impress the Lega’s provincial leaders, and our neighbour was both anxious to satisfy the village’s first citizen and apologise for his small deception.

No problem. It was clear that most people at the “festa” were there for the craic or out of social or family obligation, but a day or so later, while trying out the home-made ice cream of our neighbour, the matriarch of the family pointedly reminded us that we had been at the Lega event.

In an Italian village there are no secrets, and as we explained the circumstances she volunteered that she too did not like the Lega, and stated flatly: “They are racists,” before trying to get us to attend a concert in the village Church of San Lorenzo.

This little event demonstrates the fluid nature of local Italian politics. There is little organised right-wing activity locally; in the elections, the fascist candidate got just one vote, and a study of voting patterns shows communist and Democratic Left victories in every election up to and beyond the dissolution of the Italian Communist Party in the 1990s and mostly nominally non-partisan administrations since. The key fact being that the same family names dominated the elections year after year.

At a national level, Meloni’s Fratelli d’Italia dominates the government and has cannibalised the votes of both Lega and the late Silvio Berlosconi’s much-reduced party Forza Italia.

With its origins in the successor party to Mussolini’s fascists, Fratelli d’Italia has widened its electoral base beyond the perennially dissatisfied Italian petty bourgeoisie.

Alongside the dominance of big monopolies and the banks, Italian economic life is characterised by a very large number of small and medium-sized enterprises in the industrial and commercial branches of the economy, and an interlocking series of professional sectors that are fiercely protective of their privileges and prerogatives.

In the south in particular, small and medium business viability at the margins is shored up by very low pay and endemic tax evasion.

Finding herself in charge of an ailing Italian economy which shrunk by 0.3 per cent in the last quarter — exceeding even the most pessimistic forecasts — Meloni has a budget problem that became a serious political problem when she cut welfare payments to thousands of Italians.

Meloni campaigned to end the minimum income support policy on a spurious rhetorical promise to replace welfare with work.

Late last month nearly 200,000 Italian families received a text message notifying them that their benefits were about to be terminated.

This “reddito di cittadinanza” (citizens’ income) is a monthly allowance for the unemployed and families and individuals with low incomes, introduced by an earlier administration.

The real imperative for such cost-cutting measures arises from the stability regime “negotiated” with the EU and the European Central Bank (ECB).

These are the foundational verities of Italian politics and are as inescapable even for a party as nominally opposed to finance capital as Meloni’s post-fascists as it was for the centre-left (or centre-right) administrations headed before by former ECB boss Mario Draghi.

Meloni’s room to manoeuvre is thus heavily circumscribed, but she saw an opportunity to exploit the windfall profits of the Italian banks arising from the ECB-induced interest rate charges and the differential rates which bank customers suffer

It took just 24 hours for the decisive actors in Italian politics and economy to reverse the policy by the transparent expedient of limiting windfall taxes to just a maximum of 0.01 per cent of bank assets.

Barely a word of criticism escaped the banks. Rather “market forces,” expressed partly through a stock exchange collapse of sorts, put Meloni in her place before a host of Establishment experts rushed in to explain how the policy was mistaken.

It was as if the lessons in realpolitik that were taught to the Liz Truss-Kwasi Kwarteng regime were lost on the Meloni government, while the channels through which this exercise in power was exercised ran precisely between the bank bosses and the ministry of finance under Giancarlo Giorgetti, who is also deputy national secretary of Lega.

The Italian banking sector and the really big corporations are, not surprisingly, the main centres of political power in Italy, and the conformity of Italian politics to the fiscal rules and market regulation of the EU, straddling both nominally left and right wings, is rarely challenged and invariably enforced by a bipartisan approach that closely mirrors the market-managed consensus of British politics.

Except that in Britain, this is not so much the business of Brussels but rather the Bank of England and the City.

This rather demonstrates the falsity of the facile criticisms once made by parties like Meloni’s Fratelli d’Italia or our own Nigel Farage that nation states are subjects of the EU.

Rather, it is that our various ruling classes mostly, and conveniently, contracted out the regulation of their economies to the EU’s unaccountable bureaucracies as a strategy to deflect domestic criticism and buttress the idea that the EU market regime is the natural order of things. Where our ruling class was divided over this question, today, a bargain has been quietly struck.

Qatargate scandal continues to unfold

“IL CANARINO continua a cantare” — the canary continues to sing. According to the latest Qatargate revelations, Pier Antonio Panzeri, allegedly the ringleader of a corrupt network of EU politicians, Brussels insiders and global trade union figures, received €200,000 over three years from Mauritania. He has struck a deal with prosecutors and the revelations continue.

Former trade union functionary and Partito Democratico MEP Panzeri transmuted his role as chair of the EU’s human rights commission into a global role as head of a Brussels-based human rights NGO Fight Impunity. And his account — that in 2019 both he and his colleague Francesco Giorgi received €50,000 each from Mauritania — draws his Fight Impunity colleague closer to the scandal.

In 2019, before he joined Panzeri at Fight Impunity Giorgi worked for Socialist and Democrats MEP Andrea Cozzolino, who has denied corruption charges in the continuing scandal.

Last month a house and other locations connected to MEP Maria Arena — Panzeri’s successor as chair of the EU human rights body who was forced to resign earlier this year — have been searched by Belgian law enforcement bodies.

Last year the Belgium federal police identified her as an important suspect in their Qatargate corruption investigation.

It was the confession by ex-Italian Labour Union (UIL)  leader and International Trade Union Confederation (ITUC) leader Luca Visentini that he received €50,000 from Fight Impunity for his election campaign to become ITUC general secretary which led to his removal.

And because some of this money passed through the ITUC machinery, the internal investigatory commission concluded: “We also found serious deficiencies in the decision by deputy general secretary Owen Tudor to accept this cash contribution to the ITUC.”

In June this year, the Commonwealth Trade Union Group reported that it had agreed to appoint Owen Tudor as its secretary.

Minimum wage row

A BID BY an unusually united parliamentary opposition to raise wages in Italy’s scandalously low-wage sectors by introducing a legally enforceable minimum wage has degenerated into a procedural squabble with contradictory messaging from the majority parties and repeated bids to delay and divert the discussion.

Even the modest call for a minimum wage of €9 an hour — unchanged from when proposed last year even in the face of runaway inflation — is denounced by people in the Meloni majority as “Soviet” in character.

While performative parliamentary procedures allow the opposition to parade their official anxieties, the extra-parliamentary left gathered around the Unione Popolare and the rank-and-file “base unions” demand a €10 hourly rate.

The present below-poverty-line wage rate of €640 per month is, in fact, the product of a collective agreement signed by the CGIL and CISL union confederations.

And existing so-called “collective agreements” provide for €5 an hour for security guards; €6.50 for contract cleaning work, €7 in the textile industry and €7.80 in the tourism sector.

Meloni’s bid to muddy the waters of the debate by suggesting that a statutory minimum wage “risked creating worse conditions” got little traction, although the ultra-reformist UIL union centre declined to join the CGIL and CISL in backing the parliamentary left proposal.

The (re-formed) Italian Communist Party summarised the situation: “The rule imposed by the dominant thought is easily understood: poor work is not only allowed but is encouraged by forcing those who work to suffer blackmail and to accept exhausting working hours and shifts (well over eight hours a day) to arrive at a salary that allows just survival.

“A way to make work increasingly precarious, less guaranteed, tiring and, consequently, dangerous for the health and very life of those who work.

“A ‘rule’ that plunges those who work into poverty cannot be tolerated.”

Nick Wright blogs at 21centurymanifesto.wordpress.com.