If anyone can, Letta can

He must try to hold together the pieces of his centre-left Democratic Party, which imploded.

To select the cabinet that he presented to President Giorgio Napolitano of Italy, prime minister Enrico Letta, the new head of government, relied on what are widely acknowledged as his consummate skills: an ability to negotiate and a gift for building bridges, even between forces that barely speak to each other. By all accounts, his new post will sorely test these talents.

Letta, who was sworn in Sunday, must steer a government that has the bipartisan – if reluctant – support of the two largest opposing political forces in Parliament during an exceptionally difficult moment for Italy, which is buffeted by economic and social unrest.

At the same time, he must try to hold together the pieces of his centre-left Democratic Party, which imploded after national elections in February that left Italy without a governing majority. Letta comes from the moderate wing of the party, but a significant left-wing faction is openly bridling at Letta’s compromise government.

Friends and colleagues say that if anyone can pull it off, Letta can. “He’s the person Italy needs now,” said Massimo Bergami, a friend and dean of the business school at the University of Bologna, pointing to Letta’s institutional experience, background in international affairs and ability to “talk with people with different backgrounds, and understand different positions.”

Firm credentials

Letta must also address the demands of the European Union to stay the course of fiscal responsibility in the face of the Italian public’s widespread animosity toward austerity measures. His European credentials are firm, both as a former member of the European Parliament and through a network of contacts and relationships cultivated over the years from his associations with various research groups.

The new prime minister “is a committed Europhile” who believes that “Italy has no future outside of the European Union,” said Lucio Caracciolo, the editor of the bimonthly Italian geopolitical magazine Limes, who has written two books with Letta.

At the same time, Letta is not deaf to the country’s growing malaise. “I think he’s realised very clearly that we have to fight a battle inside the European Union against the austerity policies that have led to the deindustrialisation of our country and those on the periphery,” Caracciolo said.

At 46, Letta is the third-youngest prime minister since World War II. His age works in his favour in a nation where demands for change and generational renewal are resonating as the battle cry of the disenfranchised, and largely unemployed, youth.
Born in Pisa, Letta studied political science at the city’s university and did graduate work in international law at the prestigious Sant’Anna School of Advanced Studies there.

His political roots lie in the once powerful Christian Democratic Party, felled by corruption scandals in the early 1990s. Even as the party was collapsing, Letta served as president of the European Young Christian Democrats for four years, strengthening connections with parties throughout the Continent that are still in place today.
Letta stayed through various incarnations of what is now the Democratic Party, becoming its deputy secretary in 2009. He was first elected to Italy’s Parliament in 2001 and to the European Parliament in 2004, serving two years.

But his political career has been defined by his association with Beniamino Andreatta, a Christian Democrat economist and the founder of Arel, a research group where Letta now serves as secretary general. When Andreatta became foreign minister in 1993, Letta was his chief of staff.

Letta comes by his reputation as a mediator through personality and perseverance, people who know him say, but also by way of example: An uncle, Gianni Letta, is among the most trusted advisers of former Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, the centre-right leader, and has for years been Berlusconi’s principal ambassador in thorny political negotiations.

Both Lettas have held the important office of secretary of the council of ministers, handing off power to each other in successive governments. “He’s very serious, competent, sober, almost austere in his manner,” said Alessia Mosca, a Democratic Party lawmaker who also worked at Arel and has known Letta for years.

Letta is a firm believer in the welfare state while supporting pro-business, open-market policies, said Carlo Alberto Carnevale Maffe, a professor of strategic management at the Bocconi University School of Management in Milan who counts Letta as a friend. “He is more corporation than union,” following the “logic of supporting economic forces, finding a way to support business needs” while preserving social welfare, he said. “The key element is negation, finding the middle ground.”