The Craxi Foundation promoted in Turin, a city that for years led, for better or worse, the industrial relations of large factories, a seminar to deepen the work of Gianni De Michelis as Minister of Labor in the governments led by Bettino Craxi between 1983 and 1987. The same Foundation had previously organized a similar initiative, attended by numerous academics, on the intense years of De Michelis at the helm of the Farnesina between 1989 and 1992.
The originality of this event lies mainly in the space dedicated to public finance trends in that ninth legislature which coincided with the experience of the first socialist-led government. Craxi is positively remembered for having supported Italian growth after the terrible period in which very high inflation and economic stagnation combined. Just as recently his defense of national interest during the Sigonella crisis was evoked. But a persistent lie has spread the belief that his government caused the explosion of Italian public debt.
Gianni De Michelis will be remembered above all as the de facto member of the true financial troika of those years, together with Treasury Minister Goria and Finance Minister Visentini. He was certainly the protagonist of the Pact on the sliding scale that removed the crazy indexations of the 1970s, the source of double-digit inflation, through the programming of the growth of wages, administered prices, and tariffs according to desired targets. Not by chance, the intuition of this “anticipatory” mechanism came from Ezio Tarantelli of the Cisl and Renato Brunetta, who was De Michelis’s main advisor. But the socialist minister was nonetheless the protagonist of an ambitious project dedicated to redesigning our generous social model according to objectives of cleaning up the too many promises of the previous decade and introducing a criterion of selective universalism by income brackets, starting with health tickets. The seminar particularly wants to recall the overcoming of disability pensions granted according to the socioeconomic context parameter that legally created false invalids. Even today, in absolute value, we spend less than then. Also analyzed is his pension reform project which would have anticipated the Dini law by ten years with great public finance savings.
The author was a rapporteur of the financial laws for 1984 and 1987. I perfectly remember the political and social climate that accompanied them: very harsh protests from the left and tensions within the majority itself defending some spending expectations but no, I emphasize no, request for greater rigor either from political circles or from business ones. The Bank of Italy itself, through the final considerations of Governor Ciampi, always expressed appreciation. In fact, the critical judgment on the debt trend in the 1980s confuses in a homogeneous simplification the “Craxi” period with the first three years which were the tail of the reckless 1970s and the more than two following years in which it was thought to soften, for consensus reasons, the excessive rigor of the previous four years. It should also be remembered that the Treasury-Bank of Italy divorce wanted by Minister Andreatta in 1981 caused the explosion of spending for public debt financing. In the exercises governed by Craxi, the primary deficit (without interest costs) fell significantly.
At that time, intervening in the PSI central committee, De Michelis said: “we are lucky, unlike Mitterrand, not to have an absolute majority so we can legitimately disregard many of the bullshit we promised.”
