After 12 years in the midst of the cut and thrust of Italian politics, Tana De Zulueta is bowing out, but remains fiercely critical of corruption in her adoptive country
'Hai fatto i bagagli? (Have you packed your bags?)" For Tana De Zulueta, this was one of the worst moments in her 12 years in Italian politics. "This" was an anonymous phone caller "inviting" her, as a non-Italian, to leave the country. Worse still, the call to her home had been answered by her teenage son, Tom.
"I remember thinking, I'm putting my family at risk now." When Italy goes to the polls next month, the name De Zulueta will be missing from the electoral lists. She is dropping out of "parliament, if not politics", not because of incidents like the above anonymous phone call, but more because of a sense of not having achieved her original goals.
Born in Bogóta, Colombia to a Spanish father and English mother, married to an Italian, De Zulueta never has been your run-of-the-mill politician. A Cambridge graduate in anthropology and archaeology, someone who works comfortably in four languages (English, French, Italian and Spanish), De Zulueta was a journalist prior to entering politics in 1996. As the Rome correspondent for first the Sunday Times and then The Economist, she had earned herself a reputation as a cogent, hard-hitting foreign correspondent.
Six feet tall, soft-spoken and seemingly retiring, De Zulueta did not necessarily seem tailor-made for the cut and thrust of Italian politics. Yet appearances can be deceiving. For a start, she won a seat in three successive elections. For a second, whether it be leading an EU mission in Zimbabwe or presenting a complaint to the European Commission about Italy's violation of European law in relation to the treatment of migrants and asylum seekers, she quietly battled away at some very "hot" issues.
The above "anonymous" phone call was almost certainly prompted by an interview she had given to the BBC TV programme Hardtalk a few days earlier. By way of answer to typically insistent Hardtalk questions, she had expressed reservations about then Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi (the interview took place in July 2003).
Referring to Berlusconi's now-infamous Nazi jibe at German MEP Martin Schulz during an address to the Strasbourg parliament, De Zulueta had expressed her concern about the then prime minister. She also spoke of Berlusconi's media empire, arguing that it gave him "powers of persuasion that no other leader in the world has".
BACK HOME IN Italy, the interview prompted a major polemic, with centre-right figures accusing her of being "unpatriotic". Even the centre-left (at the time she was a Democratic Left senator) went quiet on the subject, with only one senator defending her during a subsequent senate debate.
When she says she has failed to achieve her original goals, she is thinking of many issues, but one of them certainly is the Berlusconi factor. Is it acceptable, in a modern Western democracy, that the country's richest man, owner of a vast commercial TV empire with three channels, should "take to politics"? Is there not an all-too-obvious conflict of interests? Said or unsaid, that question has dominated the last 14 years of Italian politics. Back in 1996, when De Zulueta first entered politics as a candidate for Romano Prodi's new group, L'Ulivo, the question was searingly hot. Commentators spoke of the "Berlusconi Emergency", an emergency in terms of democracy.
Twelve years and two centre-left governments later, we still have the "Berlusconi Emergency". Effectively, nothing has changed: an ever-richer Berlusconi still has control of his powerful media empire as he steps out to the crease to contest his fifth general election.
Rightly or wrongly, and many would say he is right, centre-left leader Walter Veltroni has chosen to fight a softly, softly campaign which eschews head-on confrontation with and accusation against his main rival, Berlusconi. Veltroni seems to have concluded that it really is the economy, stupid, that matters to voters. Opinion polls would seem to bear this out, with people being more concerned about income levels and taxation than ethical issues. The result is, however, that the bull in the china shop tends to get ignored: "In Italy as it is, I don't think you can have a campaign in which the issues of corruption, conflict of interests and the media are ignored . . . This is a very corrupt country by European standards and there is nothing worse than people feeling they have to live with that corruption," says De Zulueta.
Your correspondent well recalls being out on the campaign trail with De Zulueta back in 1996. Her candidacy in the Roma 1 single seat constituency had attracted a lot of curiosity and attention. She said then that her decision to enter politics had "emerged naturally" out of a series of contacts with the centre-left leader and later European Commission president Romano Prodi. (She later moved to the Greens.) That day, in the streets close to the Coliseum, she had gone door-to-door, listening to complaints about the parking, the lack of public toilets, the lack of pedestrian crossings and even a request from one woman who wanted to know if De Zulueta could help her out with her "sfratto", or eviction order.
That type of campaigning no longer exists. Berlusconi wiped that out with new legislation in 2005 that switched the system back to 100 per cent proportional representation. De Zulueta regrets the passing of the single seat system: "In that campaign, my opponent [ Giulio Maceratini] and I had public debates, in the constituency and on the radio . . . With this current list system, the districts are so big that people do not even know who represents them. There are 33 deputies for Tuscany but I cannot believe that there is a single Tuscan voter who knows all their names . . . Two weeks after the last election [ in 2006], there were still something like 200 seats that had not been assigned to anyone because of the multiple candidacy system, 200 seats that had become the object of party horse trading."
AS SHE LOOKS at the current election campaign, De Zulueta predicts a much closer contest than originally expected by many, with Berlusconi emerging the winner, but not "by a landslide". In the meantime, down the road she sees problems for Italy, ranging from an ever-sluggish economy through to the risk of EU sanctions for its failure to honour commitments on issues such as the environment and the Lisbon Process.
As for De Zulueta herself, there is obviously the temptation to go back to writing. Florence-based history professor Paul Ginsborg once implored her: "Tana, I do hope you are keeping a diary, historians would never forgive you." Historians can rest easy. She kept the diary. One day, it will make for fascinating reading.
"This is a very corrupt country by European standards and there is nothing worse than people feeling they have to live with that corruption