Italians did not just expect Mario Draghi to lead the government — they wanted him to save the country.
In February, when the former European Central Bank head was selected as prime minister of Italy, people hoped he would leverage his legendary reputation to accelerate a slowly rolling vaccination plan, mitigate the economic downturn, negotiate with the European Union on the recovery package from a position of strength and reform one of the most tenaciously irreformable political systems around.
But great expectations often lead to great disappointments. In little more than two months, Draghi seems to have lost momentum, failing to capitalize on the rare spirit of national unity that surrounded his nomination.
Italy, one of the countries hit hardest by the pandemic, is still lagging behind in administering vaccines. On March 13, the newly appointed commissioner for the covid-19 emergency, Gen. Francesco Paolo Figliuolo, presented a plan to begin administering a daily average of 300,000 doses per day, up to 500,000 doses by mid-April. None of these goals was ever met.
Worse, it turned out that Italy has been largely vaccinating the wrong people, while leaving behind the elderly. This failure helps explain why Italy had a higher death rate in recent months compared with its neighboring countries.
On April 20, the commissioner for the emergency said the most vulnerable categories “are not covered by the vaccine in a proportion that guarantees their safety”. Yet the government still ordered the reopening of most economic activities on April 26. The decision was a “calculated risk” based on available data, Draghi said, though the government has not specified what that evidence is. “It’s an historic act of foolishness”, said Andrea Crisanti, professor of Molecular Parasitology at the Imperial College in London.
The obvious reason behind the reopening is political. The far-right League, a crucial ally of Draghi’s government, has been pushing to relax the restrictions, channeling the anger of restaurant owners and small-business owners who protested against lockdown and clashed with the police. Draghi, a quintessential technocrat, made a point of not forming a technocratic government, but a political one. That left him siding with the populist party led by Matteo Salvini, while the other two major forces supporting the government in Parliament — Five Star Movement and the Democratic Party — are lost in their own internal squabbles. Draghi is now entangled in old-school political maneuvering and is being pushed around by agitated allies and local leaders. “Something is wrong”, wrote Gianni Del Vecchio in a scathing op-ed in HuffPost Italy criticizing Draghi’s indecisiveness.
The way Draghi handled the AstraZeneca case also highlighted the distance between expectations and reality. Despite evidence that severe cases of blood clots are “very rare” and the “benefits of the vaccine in preventing covid-19 outweigh the risks of side effects”, Italy decided to suspend its administration for a few days, fueling reluctance toward the vaccine in a country that was already seeing vaccine hesitancy. An undersecretary in the Ministry of Health estimated that up to 20 percent of the Italian population will eventually refuse the AstraZeneca vaccine.
To be sure, several European countries, including Germany and France, temporarily suspended the AstraZeneca vaccine for the same reasons. But the point of choosing Draghi was for his ability to make independent, evidence-based decisions, without bowing to political pressure or Italy’s powerful neighbors.
Then there is Draghi’s position on cross-national issues. Recently, he unexpectedly called Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan a “dictator”. While the bold statement may be commendable in principle, antagonizing a NATO ally might not be wise in the long run. For now, it’s hard not to read it as a strategic distraction from domestic concerns.
The recovery plan negotiated with the European Commission, which was just approved by Parliament, also seems to fall short of what’s needed. Italy’s economy shrank by 9 percent in 2020, and the country is the biggest beneficiary of the Next Generation EU recovery fund. But realistically, 222 billion euros, topped with 30 billion of its own borrowing, will hardly reboot the country. The government estimates the economy will grow 3.6 percentage points by 2026 and employment will rise by 3.2 percentage points, which will likely mean Italy will continue to be in second-to-last place in the European Union in terms of employment, just above Greece.
In his long career, Draghi specialized in the art of leading from behind, cultivating a strong preference for carefully creating the conditions for his preferred outcomes without having to take political responsibility for them. When he served as director general of the Treasury in Italy, he was reportedly known among cabinet members as “Mario elsewhere”, a former government official told me.
He is now at the very center of the political scene. He cannot be anywhere else. He has to deal with the most trivial and mundane dimensions of politics and negotiate with the international partners, all the while projecting confidence to one of the countries most severely hit by the pandemic.
Draghi, the man who saved the euro, seems like he’s not particularly at ease in his role as Italy’s savior.
Mattia Ferraresi is the managing editor of the Italian newspaper Domani.