Manacles on ‘Clean Hands’? : Magistrate’s resignation could set back Italian corruption inquiry

Antonio di Pietro, the Milan magistrate who has set the pace in Italy’s long-running “clean hands” investigation into government corruption, abruptly announced his resignation Tuesday. He claimed he was being abused both by those who wished to interfere with his investigation and those who wished to use it for their own political ends. It was time, he said, to “depersonalize” the investigation by ending his association with it.

Di Pietro has undeniably personified the “clean hands” investigation for millions of Italians, inspiring a country in which political corruption has been regarded as inevitable with his own bold conviction that there need be nothing inevitable about it.

After Di Pietro’s announcement, newspapers in Italy were reportedly deluged with faxes urging him to reconsider. The popular fear, and we share it, is that a deeply salutary development in Italian political life may now be at risk.

Di Pietro and his colleagues seemed on the point of truly changing the course of Italian history. A politician may defeat another politician, but this magistrate and the many for whom he was the leader and symbol defeated an entire political party and overthrew a political regime. The Christian Democratic Party, dominant in Italy since the end of World War II, was so ruined by exposure of its pervasive corruption that the path was clear for a fresh start.

Ironically, the biggest beneficiary of “clean hands” may now have become its worst enemy. Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi’s newly formed party, Forza Italia (the name means, roughly, “Go, Italy!”), came to power by promising an end to the politics-as-usual that “clean hands” had exposed. However, as the continuing investigation has brought Berlusconi’s giant Fininvest company and, finally, the prime minister himself under scrutiny, he has suddenly discovered the virtues of “normality . . . in the administration of justice.”

If Di Pietro is quitting, has Berlusconi won? Like so many Italians, we hope not. Italy has celebrated Di Pietro because his investigation did not shrink from indicting even Bettino Craxi, formerly prime minister, now a fugitive from justice.

Berlusconi may well have done nothing wrong, but Di Pietro’s departure must not be allowed to mean that the old Italy has defeated the new, or that the prime minister is above the law.