Italy’s Hard-Right Government Gets Soft on Crime

While Italy congratulates itself for finally locking up one of its most ruthless mafia bosses, Matteo Messina Denaro, after a 30-year search, Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni’s hard-right government is mulling a reform that critics say could make it much more difficult to investigate organized crime and other serious offenses.

Italian Justice Minister Carlo Nordio is determined to tighten restrictions on police wiretapping, which members of the judiciary consider essential but which conservatives say has gone way too far in breaching citizens’ privacy. The issue is reviving long-simmering tensions between Italian magistrates and right-wing politicians—tensions that already flared in the 1990s and 2000s under the governments of former Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, a tycoon with nearly permanent legal woes who accused “red robe” judges of wanting to take him down for political reasons and whose conservative Forza Italia party is currently a key member of the ruling coalition.

“Italy is not made up of prosecutors,” Nordio said as he addressed Parliament in January. “And this Parliament must not be supine and acquiescent to those positions.”

The minister argues that wiretapping is too widespread, intrusive, and expensive, and that transcripts are leaked too frequently to the press—including names and private details that are caught up in the recordings but are often irrelevant to the case.

“This is about limiting the arbitrary manner in which this tool is being employed,” said Pietro Pittalis, a Forza Italia parliamentarian. “No one is denying that wiretaps are indispensable. The problem is their abuse, what has been done with [recorded] conversations that have destroyed lives and careers.”

An example often mentioned by wiretapping critics is the media lynching of former Economic Development Minister Federica Guidi, whose private quarrels with her romantic partner, a businessman under investigation for trying to take advantage of her position, appeared in many Italian newspapers in 2016. She resigned shortly after, despite being never formally accused of any wrongdoing. The probe never resulted in a trial.

The details of the new measures are still being hammered out. The justice minister insists that the rules won’t change for probes into mafia-related crimes and terrorism, but his insistence that too many phones are being tapped compared to the number of cases actually prosecuted is ruffling feathers in the judiciary.

“If politicians want to elevate privacy to an absolute right, at the expense of the need for collective security, they should say so,” one prominent prosecutor lashed out.

Funding for police wiretapping has already been cut this year, and many people worry that fewer resources and stricter rules will end up hampering the fight against other serious crimes and, indirectly, against the mafia itself.

“It’s very rare to receive complaints of mafia behavior from the start. To bring to light a criminal organization that operates in a territory in secret, taking advantage of a code of silence, you need to begin by investigating other offenses,” said Giuseppe Santalucia, president of the National Association of Magistrates.

At times, Nordio has underplayed the usefulness of wiretaps even for mafia investigations, claiming in December 2022 that “a real mafioso doesn’t speak on the phone.” A few weeks later, Messina Denaro was caught with a cellphone on his person and another in his car, largely thanks to clues that his close circle had let slip in recorded phone conversations.

Despite his arrest, mafia organizations like the Sicilian Mafia (known as Cosa Nostra), the Calabrian ‘Ndrangheta, and the Neapolitan Camorra still thrive in Italy’s south and beyond. Direct turnover of their illegal activities has been estimated at 10.7 billion euros (around $11.5 billion) per year. Increasingly business-oriented criminal cartels have infiltrated large swaths of the economy and can often count on the support of crooked public officials. Asked who’s winning the battle between the state and the mafia, Catanzaro chief prosecutor Nicola Gratteri, a high-profile target of the ‘Ndrangheta who’s been living under heavy police escort for three decades, answered that at the moment, “it’s a draw.”

To keep it that way, let alone to start winning, magistrates say they need every tool in the box. But it’s not only on organized crime that the government is being accused of going soft.

Since taking power last October, the ruling coalition has approved a series of measures that, according to critics, amount to giving white collar criminals a free pass. For offenses like corruption and embezzlement, the government has softened punishments and is preparing to ban the most invasive forms of electronic surveillance—particularly the use of malware that turns the suspect’s phone into a microphone, allowing police to record what happens in its immediate surroundings. Another controversial step was to raise the limit for cash payments from 2,000 euros to 5,000 euros ($2,200 to $5,400), which critics say will benefit money launderers and tax cheats in a country where almost one-fifth of taxes due are evaded.

The governing majority said it wants to defend people’s freedom and privacy and that corruption is best tackled by simplifying administrative procedures rather than through harsh punishments. The opposition isn’t buying it.

“It’s as if when it comes to corruption and other economic or fiscal crimes, there was a higher level of forgiveness, as if those were not serious offenses because they are committed by white collars, by businessmen, by the wealthy,” said Federico Cafiero De Raho, a parliamentarian with the Five Star Movement and a former national anti-mafia prosecutor.

Each year, Italy loses an estimated 13 percent of its GDP to corruption, or 237 billion euros ($254.9 billion)—the highest figure in the European Union in absolute terms. Corruption is also widely blamed, at least in part, for the sky-high cost of building infrastructure. Italy’s annual spending on infrastructure as a share of GDP is 43 percent higher than in France, whose surface area is almost twice as big.

Illegality often reaches the very top of the country’s institutions. Italy’s entire political system was swept away three decades ago by a massive investigation into illegal party financing, and politicians in trouble with the law, especially on the right, remain common currency.

“There is a long list of high-profile and local figures from that camp who have ended up in prison. Therefore, the center right has never liked the work of the judiciary,” said Piero Ignazi, a political scientist at the University of Bologna. After many attempts to alleviate his legal problems during his stints in power, Berlusconi was ultimately convicted of tax fraud in 2012 and barred from office for several years. As recently as of mid-December 2022, a former Forza Italia senator and former undersecretary at the Interior Ministry, Antonio D’Alì Jr., was sentenced to six years in jail for complicity in mafia crimes.

Not everybody on the right has the same attitude toward the justice system though. Meloni’s Brothers of Italy party is rooted in a post-fascist tradition that has historically been tougher on crime than Forza Italia, insisting that convicted offenders should serve their sentences with no shortcuts, said Marco Tarchi, a professor of political science at the University of Florence. Both Meloni and Matteo Salvini, whose far-right League party is the third main component of the ruling coalition, have struck a relatively conciliatory tone toward the judiciary in recent weeks.

Meloni rejected Berlusconi’s initial pick for justice minister and installed her own man—but one well known for his views, which echoed those of Forza Italia. Meloni appears thus to have preserved a patina of independence while largely giving in to Berlusconi and Forza Italia’s approach in an area that’s always been one of the tycoon’s top priorities.

“The question is whether it’s an actual concession or a tactical move,” Tarchi said, meaning Meloni could talk reform to woo her partners but try to limit the real impact over time. “It’s too early to tell.”