Weekend bee: Japan, the Olympics and the right question to ask about Italian politics
Releasing two bees from my bonnet, about my beloved Japan and Italy
1. The fate of the Tokyo Olympics
There’s a strange chorus of doom surrounding the Tokyo Olympic and Paralympic Games, which were postponed from 2020 and are due to open on July 23rd. The Asahi daily newspaper, which is an “official partner” of the Games (whatever that means for a media company), has just come out in favour of cancellation, a move apparently supported by somewhere between 60-80% of the population, depending on your reading of the opinion polls. So have various groups of medics, who argue that holding the Games will put unacceptable pressure on the health system at a time when the Covid-19 pandemic is still raging. As if to confirm this sense of crisis, the Japanese government has just extended the current states of emergency in force in 10 prefectures, including Tokyo, Osaka and Kyoto, until June 20th.
So why is this strange? Mainly because it makes it sound as if Japan is going through some sort of terrible coronavirus crisis, when it plainly isn’t. Japan is not like India, or Brazil. On May 27th this nation of 120 million people reported 4,227 confirmed cases and 98 deaths. That daily case figure has declined from a peak in the latest wave of 6,460 on May 14th; the daily death figure peaked on May 23rd at 113. By way of comparison, Italy on May 27th reported 4,187 cases and 139 deaths, and it is way down from its spring peaks and is now reopening to international travellers. The United States had 23,000 new cases on that day and 666 deaths. Japan’s total cumulated death toll for the entire pandemic is 12,691, roughly one-tenth of Italy’s and about one fiftieth of America’s.
This doesn’t of course mean that Japan should blithely go ahead and host the Olympics, come what may. Inviting in 60,000-plus sportspeople and entourages from overseas is plainly a risk, just as it was a risk for Augusta, Georgia, to hold the US Masters golf major in early April, amid much higher US infection rates and in front of crowds of spectators, or for Kiawah Island to host the US PGA in similar conditions last week. Japan’s baseball league has been continuing to hold games even during the state of emergency, some with spectators, some without. For those reasons, Olympic-related alarm at Japan’s state of emergency, which is anyway a misnomer since Japanese law does not permit the government to assume the sort of emergency powers that have commonly been adopted in Europe, needs to be kept in proportion. The state of emergency basically means that bars and restaurants cannot open very long in the evening, department stores are a bit constrained, and everyone is advised to be as careful as possible. Life in Japan is a lot more normal than in Europe.
Moreover, given the lack of Covid cases and deaths in Japan, the claims of hospitals hitting capacity are also rather strange. What they mean is that in some cases, hospitals have been nearing full occupancy of the number of beds and ICUs they have chosen to make available for Covid patients. That choice has, however, reflected the country’s fairly low rate of infection, sickness, hospitalisation and death from the virus. If they had to find more capacity, hospitals would be perfectly capable of doing so. Japan’s health system is publicly financed but largely privately run, which does make central ordinances about capacity more difficult than in Britain’s NHS, for example. There have been some scandalous cases of Covid patients being turned down and then dying at home, thanks to this capacity choice, but as the overall mortality numbers indicate, they have not been numerous. Unlike most other advanced countries, Japan has actually seen fewer deaths during the past 18 months than in normal times, as people have been more careful and have travelled less than usual.
The point is that contrary to appearances it will not be the presence or absence of a Covid crisis in Japan that will determine the fate of the Tokyo Olympics. If it wants to, Japan can adapt and cope. In the circumstances, Japan would be capable of receiving the tens of thousands of competitors and their entourages and keeping them insulated from the population. Doing so, and running the Games without spectators, might seem pointless to some, but it would be possible.
The Japanese government therefore seems to me to be very unlikely to request a cancellation, for to do so would be a national humiliation: on this issue at least, it doesn’t have a reverse gear, and contractually Japan and the Tokyo Metropolitan Government would be liable to pay damages if they were to insist on a cancellation against the wishes of the International Olympics Committee. The Games will be cancelled, in my humble non-sporty opinion, only if athletes and their national delegations force the issue by refusing to travel and to compete. So my bet is that the Games will go ahead, like it or not, just as the IOC and the Japanese government are saying they will.
2. In Italy, ask about Letta, not Draghi
My second bee is about Italy, or rather Italian politics, which does sometimes seem like an alternative universe. The Italian media has been obsessed during the past couple of weeks by one question: does Mario Draghi, the former European Central Bank head who has been prime minister since February this year, want to leave his job early next year in order to be elected the new President of the Republic by parliament, swapping Palazzo Chigi for the much grander former papal palace, the Quirinale? This would be in succession to Sergio Mattarella, whose seven-year term comes to an end and who seems to have indicated that he does not wish to stand again. But this is the wrong question to ask. The better question is this: why did Enrico Letta choose to return to Italian politics earlier this year to take up the leadership of the Democratic Party? For this is what is likely to hold the key to Mr Draghi’s decision.
A brief explanation is in order. Enrico Letta was Italy’s prime minister from April 2013 until February 2014, at which point his then party colleague Matteo Renzi engineered a party coup against him and took his place. Mr Letta then left parliament, politics and indeed Italy to become Dean of the School of International Affairs at Sciences Po in Paris. Although he appeared from time to time in the national and international media, while in Paris he played no visible role in the Democratic Party and its machinations. Yet, when Nicola Zingaretti suddenly resigned as party secretary in March of this year, Mr Letta surprised many by agreeing to be a candidate to replace him and was then elected unopposed. Why?
Let us put aside any idea that Mr Letta, excellent and thoughtful fellow that he is, decided to return from Paris to Rome out of idealism. The Democratic Party, along with the whole of Italy’s left, is riven by factionalism and tensions. No one would come back to deal with that, for a second time, simply out of duty. There is really only one plausible explanation for Mr Letta’s decision. This is that he thinks he has an imminent chance of again being Italy’s prime minister.
The reason Mr Letta’s chance could come up again in February 2022 is that if Mr Draghi were to become president, he would not be obliged to submit to demands from the centre-right’s leaders, Matteo Salvini and Giorgia Meloni, to call early general elections. Under the constitution, elections are required at the latest by June 2023, but there is no obligation to hold them sooner, and Mr Draghi is not someone who would agree to any conditions attached to his candidacy as president. So if elected, his first move would be to see whether anyone else in Parliament is capable of assembling a majority for a new government. The only possible candidate for that role is Mr Letta.
Hence, the most important question in Italian politics is whether, next February, Mr Letta would in fact be capable of forming a new coalition government to succeed Mr Draghi’s grand coalition. In principle, the arithmetic is there: the same coalition that collapsed in February this year, ending the prime ministership of Giuseppe Conte and leading to the arrival of Mr Draghi, is in theory available to be re-formed. The constituent parts are the Five Star Movement, now (sort-of) led by Mr Conte; Mr Letta’s Democratic Party; his old rival Matteo Renzi’s Italia Viva, which pulled the plug on Mr Conte; and the small leftist group LeU (free and equal, in Italian). There are also a few members and senators in a further splinter group, Azione, led by Carlo Calenda, another former Democratic Party minister, potentially persuadable to join the gang. The numbers are tightest in the Senate, but there are sundry independents and solo-artists available too, especially given that at the next election the number of Senate seats will be reduced by one-third making plenty of senators keen on an extra year’s pay and benefits.
Can Mr Letta bring this fissiparous lot together again? It is too soon to say, which is perhaps why that isn’t the question currently being asked, but it should be and most likely eventually will be. For it is the real background behind the issue of whether Mr Draghi will go to the Quirinale. The choice for Mr Draghi has always been one of whether to serve for one year as prime minister or a little over two, and he will not repeat his predecessor-outsider Mario Monti’s mistake by forming his own party and trying to win the 2023 elections.
To become President of the Republic would give him a place in public life and some influence for a much longer period than a mere two-year prime ministership, and in recent times the presidency has become much more influential than it once was — almost a chairman’s role, to the prime minister as chief executive.
Without wishing to indulge too much in what in Italian politics is known as dietrologia, the search for hidden motives, I would be willing to place a bet that a telephone call will at some point this past spring have taken place between Mr Draghi and Mr Letta, once it became clear that Mr Zingaretti was going to create a vacancy. Or if the idea of such a call is too much of a speculation, let us think of it as an understanding, between two men who know each other well. If anyone can re-form that coalition of the centre-left, it would be Mr Letta; and if anyone could be considered suitable to carry on Mr Draghi’s reformist task for a further year, while reassuring EU partners and the financial markets that the EU’s €210 billion Next Generation Fund is in safe Italian hands, it is Mr Letta.
So to return again to the right and wrong questions in Italian politics, there is no real point in asking whether Mr Draghi would like to be President of the Republic. Of course he would. The real issue is whether by doing so he would put at premature risk whatever reforms he has begun and the safe spending of all that EU money, by being forced to call early general elections, which might risk the formation of a government containing Brothers of Italy, the one big party which has opposed his grand coalition and which is now the country’s most anti-EU group. The key issue is therefore whether, during the rest of this year, Mr Letta can and will put himself into a position to form a new government, if invited to do so by President Draghi. If that looks impossible, Mr Draghi will likely stay as prime minister for a further year and somebody else will go to the Quirinale. Watch Mr Letta and, of course, the ever-chaotic Five Star Movement.