It’s not every day that you see a pope paying tribute to a former communist – but it happened this week in Rome. By the same token, it is a surprise to hear one of the church’s most senior cardinals make an affectionate and generous address at the same communist’s strictly secular, defiantly non-religious, funeral – at which attenders included Emmanuel Macron – but these things, no less unusually, happened this week, too.
But then Giorgio Napolitano, who died a week ago aged 98 and whose funeral took place in Rome on Tuesday, was no ordinary president of Italy and no ordinary communist either. A lifelong member of the Italian Communist party until it dissolved in 1991, Napolitano was elected president in May 2006. He was also, very reluctantly, the first Italian president to be re-elected to serve a second term in 2013. Until the current president, Sergio Mattarella, overtakes him in a few days’ time, he was Italy’s longest serving head of state since 1945.
All of which may imply that, for all his distinctions, Napolitano is now a figure from the past. In one sense, that’s obviously true. But there was a lot more to him than even his presidential years. And all of it still has a lot to teach about how to think about and to do progressive politics in the 2020s and beyond, not least in Britain.
I was able to meet Napolitano for the first time in Rome in 1989 while I was covering an Italian Communist party congress for the Guardian. I was supposed to be interviewing him, but it quickly turned the other way around. We sat down in the middle of a vast hall, and he immediately asked my views (he spoke excellent English) about Neil Kinnock’s Labour party. Since he knew somehow or other that my father was a Communist literature professor, he also asked me for my views about the novels of Joseph Conrad, which he was reading at the time. I was on reasonably strong ground about Kinnock, but had to busk a hasty answer on Conrad. I suspect it showed, though Napolitano was too polite to say so. As soon as I got home I made sure to read as much Conrad as I could lay my hands on.
As Italy’s president, Napolitano was in due course to prove the most politically adept holder of what had been a largely ceremonial office. He repeatedly needed those skills. A divided Italy was lucky that he did. The obligation to hold the country together was thrust upon him by a volatile combination of the global financial crisis, the fragmentation of Italian politics and the rise of populism. But he would mostly prove equal to the challenge.
His achievements were not small. In 2011, he oversaw the departure of Silvio Berlusconi from the prime ministership. In 2013, he orchestrated a new grand coalition of non-populist parties, which managed to remain in power until he stepped down with relief two years later. A lesser public figure might not have achieved these things. “Italy was certainly fortunate to be guided in difficult times, among obstacles of all kinds, by a man like that,” commented no less a witness than the late Pope Benedict.
Napolitano was a tall man, cerebral and dignified, and with a benign patrician manner, sometimes likened to Victor Emmanuel III, the last prewar king of Italy. He was an unashamed political intellectual, with vast cultural knowledge and a huge love of the arts. But what really marked him out was his status as one of the European left’s most prominent and committed moderates. As a lifelong communist, he struggled, too slowly perhaps, but without giving up, with the need for his party to adapt to the changed postwar world.
He was wrong about some things – his support for the Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956 haunted him throughout his life until, as president, he laid a wreath on the memorial to the martyrs of the uprising 50 years later. His once-famous 1970s interviews with his friend the historian Eric Hobsbawm, which seemed so refreshing at the time, now show a stubborn belief in the reformability of the Communist movement, which would not survive the events of 1989.
But the reason why the Napolitano of those years still matters today in spite of these things is that he was always willing to reason, to adapt and to compromise. He was a key player in the postwar moves of the Italian Communist party – Europe’s largest and always, in Washington’s cold war eyes, its most threatening – towards parliamentarism, alliances with more moderate parties and, increasingly, for support for the European Union. His own lifetime trajectory was towards reformism, gradualism, toleration and the importance of democratic institutions.
Pope Francis expanded on this theme when he came to the Italian parliament to attend Napolitano’s lying in state last Sunday: “I appreciated the humanity and foresight in making important choices correctly, especially in delicate moments for the life of the country, with the constant intention of promoting unity and harmony in a spirit of solidarity, animated by the search for the common good.”
They were well-chosen words. They provide useful clues to Napolitano’s qualities. Many politicians in many countries invoke pieties like the common good, social harmony, national unity and difficult political choices. Very few are good at both embodying them and at putting them into practice. Napolitano, remarkably, managed both.
It’s the reason why the Catholic hierarchy – rightly – took Napolitano seriously and why Cardinal Gianfranco Ravasi spoke so well at the funeral. It was a questioning role that Napolitano inherited from his remarkable pluralist mentor Giorgio Amendola and also, he would always argue, from Italian Marxism’s most iconic figure, Antonio Gramsci. It is surely no coincidence that Napolitano rests in the same secular Rome cemetery as Gramsci – and John Keats.
Experts will have to judge whether Amendola and Napolitano have left a beneficial mark on Italian life and politics or whether, in the end, they were attempting to reform the unreformable. For many across Europe, though, their writings and careers helped to drive a stake through the heart of much that was already anachronistic and unsupportable in far-left politics and practice. Napolitano’s rejection of Leninism and of revolutionary violence were major steps along the way. But in the end, and as his presidency showed, he also accepted the abandonment of socialist utopianism itself.
Open-minded, progressive politicians like Napolitano, who were willing to compromise and adapt, learned the hard way that utopianism does not work, is unpopular and becomes repressive. That’s more than can be said for others, then and now, in Italy and elsewhere, for whom leftwing politics is still more about dogma than practicality. At least, in Napolitano’s case, there was a result to his long and fruitful journey away from dogmatism. It can’t be dismissed as selling out. On the contrary. It provided him with the skills and the wisdom to preserve the Italian republic and the unity of his country. And that isn’t a bad outcome.
Martin Kettle is a Guardian columnist
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