Dear Director,
I must thank you for giving me the opportunity to share a reflection on Carlo Azeglio Ciampi, ten years after his passing, and to do so in the newspaper of his city. I will try to say things with extreme clarity, “in the Livornese way,” as the president would have liked.
Read more Ten years without Ciampi: «I will tell you who my father was»
As you know, I participated with Ciampi in the adventure of his political-institutional roles, having been his spokesperson when he was president of the Council between 1993 and 1994; Minister of the Treasury from 1996 to 1999; President of the Republic between 1999 and 2006. Ciampi wanted me with him without consulting any of his friends, taking a risk because I was very young and had only been an economic editor at Il Messaggero for a few years, and I have always wondered why. In reality, there was a reason, and it did not depend on the common studies at the Scuola Normale di Pisa, but on the fact that Guido Carli had chosen me as the author of his memoirs, and therefore on his deep bond with the authoritative governor, later minister, the one who signed the Maastricht Treaty in February 1992 and who died three days before the birth of the Ciampi government.
The unusual element of Ciampi’s personality remains, in my opinion, his loyalty, not only to the institutions, the soldier’s loyalty to the tricolor, but also a rarer humanistic loyalty to the people who worked with him, a loyalty that translated into the ability to listen, in the certainty that if he made a commitment, that was it. In the Levantine and ambiguous Italy, he still appears to me today as an exception.
Ciampi, although a Normale student, was not an intellectual but a man of action. As President of the Republic, he remained in the memory and heart of that generation for the revival of the symbols of Italian identity, of the common history, for having made the National Team players sing the Mameli anthem, for the restoration of June 2nd. But since he was also the minister who managed to get Italy to participate in the single currency, and who fought fiercely to obtain the most favorable parity possible between the lira and the euro for Italy, sometimes this coincidence seems strange, as if they were two different people. Before asking ourselves whether the euro was a good or bad idea, it must be said that the patriotic republican Ciampi and the Europeanist Ciampi who pushed Italy into the monetary union are the same person. The common origin was his extreme concern for the risks the country faced due to the secessionist preaching of the Lega and other disintegrative tendencies of the national state. The European choice was based on national interest and not vice versa. So much so that when there was a risk of being sidelined, precisely during the Ecofin council on Sunday, November 24, 1996, which had to define the lira-euro parity, Ciampi had also considered the hypothesis of a euro without Germany to be built bilaterally with France, or to blow up the table by exploiting the veto power then guaranteed by the unanimity mechanisms.
In a very difficult meeting with the German government in the basement of the Watergate Hotel in Washington – September 28, 1996 – I saw with my own eyes Ciampi shouting at his friend Theo Waigel who revealed for the first time the proposal to change the cards on the table of the Maastricht Treaty with what was later called, with involuntary irony, the Stability and Growth Pact. He proposed a mechanism that seemed crazy to Ciampi: sanctions for countries with excessive deficits and non-interest-bearing deposits unless there was a recession greater than 2% of GDP. Exactly the same proposals that Germany imposed in 2012.
Read more Ten years without Carlo Azeglio Ciampi, he never stopped feeling part of a community
And here it should be noted that the weak point of his strategy was his excessive optimism.
If we asked Ciampi today to tell us himself what his greatest success was, I am sure he would mention neither the euro nor republican patriotism, but the agreement on labor costs of July 1993. The sliding scale had just been suspended, and the fundamental idea to replace it was the Modigliani-Tarantelli model, the pact between government, unions, and industrialists aimed at guaranteeing real wages by containing nominal wages and with them inflation. Entry into the euro would have enhanced the reduction of interest rates, favoring a phase of capital accumulation and investments. And here lies the failure of that strategy. I believe the president would have been shocked by reading working paper no. 1/2026 released by the UPB on July 21, which shows that Italy is the only European country where gross real wages have decreased by 6.6% from 1990 to 2024 against average increases of 35%. How is this possible?
Having made the euro, Ciampi thought the government should launch a “phase two” dedicated to an injection of public and private investments and a new policy of intervention in the South. Containing current spending was functional to increasing investment spending. Moderate wages, low interest rates of the new currency would have kept industrialists tied to the fate of the country’s development. Ciampi presented this strategy in an interview in August 1998, but it was very badly received. In October, the Prodi government fell. And at that point, Ciampi hoped to become prime minister because the work was left halfway. He would have preferred Palazzo Chigi to the Quirinale. But it did not go that way.
Meanwhile, as minister, he had recounted in detail the contents of the labor cost agreement to the German chancellor during a beer festival in Bonn. Kohl initially listened distractedly, but at a certain point, he turned to the Italian minister and said: “Listen, can I invite you to explain this agreement well to my parliamentarians?” Thus, a counter-strategy was studied in Germany, the wage deflation of the four Hartz packages. And the productivity advantage gained with the 1993 agreement dissolved. Moreover, as minister, Ciampi hoped that the German industry would reserve a share of its demand for us, which instead took the path to China just readmitted to the world trade system. Third disappointment, he had imagined that the renunciation of Italian state holdings could be compensated by the construction of some Italian-German and Italian-French groups with public participation. He tried with the German Telecom. But the meeting took place in a hotel in Berlin while the NATO decision to bomb Belgrade arrived, and Italian politics took other paths.
* Section president of the Court of Auditors, former spokesperson of President Ciampi
