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Amanpour

Berlusconi Backs Down; Defending the Arab Spring; Imagine a World

Aired October 02, 2013 - 14:00   ET

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.

CHRISTIANE AMANPOUR, CNN HOST: Good evening, everyone, and welcome to the program. I'm Christiane Amanpour.

And tonight a tale of two political insurgencies, the United States government remains shuttered for a second day, costing the country an eye- popping $12.5 million per hour.

The American people are furious at the handful of Republican troublemakers who are holding the country hostage over their dislike of ObamaCare, which is the president's signature health care legislation.

While across the Atlantic, it was a red letter day for the leader of another republic, Italy, Prime Minister Enrico Letta was faced by just one troublemaker, albeit a very prominent one, the former prime minister Silvio Berlusconi, who has threatened all week to bring down the government by putting his own interests ahead of his country.

Berlusconi wanted to pull his party from the ruling coalition in part to stop it from taking away his Senate seat because of his tax fraud conviction.

Now in July, I spoke with Prime Minister Letta here in London and I asked him whether this move was something that he was worried about.

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ENRICO LETTA, ITALIAN PRIME MINISTER: I'm very confident the political situation will be stable because we know very well that the internal stability, political stability would be very important for the Italian recovery.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

AMANPOUR: So, of course, Letta was shocked by Berlusconi's move last weekend. But perhaps he's had the last laugh. When Berlusconi own party turned against him at the last minute, forcing him into a U-turn and backing Letta in a confidence vote which happened earlier today.

So the fragile government survived while Berlusconi's political days are numbered. He's soon meant to be starting to serve his sentence.

And Italy, of course, can ill afford any more instability as it struggles to drag itself out of the worst recession it's had since World War II.

And nobody knows a Berlusconi power play quite like the former prime minister, Mario Monti, a distinguished economist, who ran Italy during the thick of the financial crisis, Monti's government was also threatened by Berlusconi who wanted to topple it. And Mario Monti joins me now from Rome.

Mr. Monti, thank you very much for being with me. Welcome again to this program.

So do you think that Letta called Berlusconi's bluff?

MARIO MONTI, ITALY'S FORMER PRIME MINISTER: Well, it was a widely perceived threat ,the one raised by Mr. Berlusconi. Certainly Italy cannot afford a government crisis at this time.

So the solution is a bit torturous but good, namely a part of Mr. Berlusconi's party split from his leadership and pledged to support the government.

And in order to avoid coming out publicly with this split in the very end of the parliament debate, they, Mr. Berlusconi himself declared, speaking to the vote of confidence to the Letta government so that he, in a sense, put up a brave face. The PDL party is united again, but certainly everybody got the sense that Mr. Berlusconi lost out.

AMANPOUR: Well, let me ask you, you know, Italy can ill afford these kinds of political shenanigans. What has the instability, the turmoil already, cost the country in terms of not just voter confidence but investor confidence and all the things that need to happen to keep Italy's economy on the rails?

MONTI: Well, instability has cost Italy a lot. That was particularly the case a couple of years ago on (inaudible) the last Berlusconi government, one should say the last Berlusconi government so far, maybe. But I think that was really the last one -- when the financial situation of Italy was a real mess and Italy was risking bringing down the whole of the Eurozone.

Then we put in place a very tough austerity program and my government, and now Mr. Letta's government is doing well in shifting gradually to a less restrictive policy and introducing some structural reforms. The pace of introducing these structural reforms, like in the labor markets or liberalization is not fast enough, in many ways, although we support the Letta government.

Certainly we could not afford in Italy to have weeks, if not months lost in terms of complete policy actions, quarreling about Mr. Berlusconi's position vis-a-vis the government.

AMANPOUR: Well, let me ask you, because that's -- let me just ask you a quick question.

Sorry, Mr. Monti. I was struck by what you said. Maybe the last Berlusconi government or so far.

So are you actually thinking and suggesting that he may have a future again as head of a government?

Do you not think that he's going to serve his sentence? Which apparently is either a year under house arrest or community service.

MONTI: No. I don't believe that he will again be in government. And I must say it was my government which introduced the law taking away from parliament before we had received certain time to serve or other measures of restrictions because of corruption and other crimes.

So I definitely do not believe that this time around Mr. Berlusconi can escape his fate. But I will think that just because he has been pronounced defeated and out of (inaudible) many, many times in the past, he has given proof of an incredible resilience. But I believe this time he will not.

AMANPOUR: Let me just talk now about one of the most serious things that's threatening Italy and also the Eurozone in general, in terms of employment.

If I point to this map, you can see the catastrophic unemployment figure for Italy amongst the youth, which is just over 40 percent and if I point again, all these figures pop up, showing that around the Eurozone, look at the youth unemployment, 52 percent in Croatia, 61 in Greece; Spain, it's 56. Of course, in Germany, it's fantastic. It's only 7.7 percent.

I want to play you something that Prime Minister Letta told me about youth unemployment when I talked to him in July.

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LETTA: The main nightmare really is the future of our youth, to see how many Italians are going out of Italy, the sort of exodus, a great generation leaving my country.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

AMANPOUR: So that, he said, is his nightmare. And I'm sure it's everybody's nightmare. Even the pope today spoke about that, but saying basically the young need work and hope, but they have neither one nor the other, and they have been crushed by the present.

Mario Monti, as a technocrat who is in there, charged with fixing your government and fixing the economy, what can you say to give young people even a smidgen of hope when it comes to employment?

MONTI: Well, this is a response that the whole of Europe has to work out and rather quickly, I must say. We definitely need more growth in Europe and with that also more growth in Italy.

But in the case of Italy and a few other countries, there are more specific structure of problems that prevent youth employment even on those years when there is a pickup in demand and economic activity.

That is, we have a system of labor laws and practices which is sort of overprotective vis-a-vis those who do have a job, who are in the labor market and thus making entrance into the labor markets by the excluded in particular the youth, even more difficult than elsewhere.

So I think the two problems in which Italy needs to focus, to give complete responses to the youth who are without a job are, number one, changes in the structure of the labor markets and its laws; and then a huge focus on increasing the country's competitiveness, because well before the financial crisis of the last few years, it's about 15 years that Italy grows at only half the growth rate, already more (inaudible) of the whole of the Eurozone.

And that is because our competitiveness is not enough.

AMANPOUR: Mr. Monti, you know, you talk about these reforms that have to be solidified. Do you think that this political crisis and now that the government has survived, offers a fresh start? Or are we going to see what we've seen over and again, people like yourself, people like Prime Minister Letta, who have tried to do their best, tried to institutionalize these reforms?

And yet been entangled over and again by vetoes from the coalition partners and resistance from the opposition?

MONTI: Well, the advantage of a grand coalition like the one which I've been working and the one which Mr. Letta chairs, the advantage of that is that all the main parties are in it, in particular the PD, the main party on the left, and the PDL, Mr. Berlusconi's party, in this case the main party on the right.

But I think the prime minister who runs such a grand coalition needs to be pushing on the political parties. He needs to present them with packages of measures which are good for the country even though they displease both constituencies, on the right and on the left.

And I strongly hope that Mr. Letta, now that he has brilliantly overcome this difficult trap that Mr. Berlusconi was -- had been preparing for him, will become more forthcoming, more daring , more ready to expose to the public opinion in the country the tricks and delaying games that the two main parties too often make use of.

AMANPOUR: Mario Monti, thank you so much for joining me from Rome tonight.

MONTI: It was a pleasure.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

AMANPOUR: And while Italy tries to stitch its coalition government back together, the United States Congress has been coming apart at the seams, as we've said, for want of cooperation and compromise.

What if I told you that these two struggling democracies should look to the North African nation where the Arab Spring began? Peaceful, political compromise in Tunisia, President Moncef Marzouki has overseen it and he'll tell us how Tunisia beat the dysfunction odds when we come back.

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AMANPOUR: Welcome back to the program.

Now the United States may be the world's most powerful democracy, but the government shutdown shows how far Congress has veered away from the path of political compromise. Incredibly, that idea has been easier to implement in the very crucible of the Arab Spring, Tunisia, where a street vendor set himself on fire and lit the struggle for democracy across the region.

It faced a constitutional crisis after the assassination of secular leader Chokri Belaid and, of course, chronic economic problems.

But last weekend, as troublemakers in the United States and Italian governments were careening off a cliff, Tunisia's Islamist led government resigned and in return the opposition ratified a new Tunisian constitution that their opponents had labored over for a year and a half.

That is the kind of compromise and political maturity that neighboring Egypt and Libya can only admire. And presiding over this peaceful move was President Moncef Marzouki, who's a doctor and a human rights activist.

So how did Tunisia manage to achieve consensus? I asked him when he attended the United Nations General Assembly in New York.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

AMANPOUR: Mr. President, welcome. Thank you for joining me.

MONCEF MARZOUKI, TUNISIAN PRESIDENT: Thank you for your invitation.

AMANPOUR: Let me ask you because Tunisia does seem to have escaped the kind of worst problems that are plaguing your neighboring Arab Spring countries, whether it be Libya, Syria of course, Egypt.

How do you think Tunisia has managed to hold the line so far?

And keep basically all sides of the political equation in conversation rather than splitting apart?

MARZOUKI: Well, I think the situation in Tunisia is much easier because, first of all, we have a homogenous society; this is extremely important. We have a strong civil society; even under the dictatorship we used to have very strong civil society.

I am confident. I am confident because it engenders a lot of resilience. But I think that we are really targeted because -- well, I can tell you that inside the country and outside the country there are a lot of forces that don't want the Arab Spring to succeed in Tunisia. They don't want to a succeed story in Tunisia.

AMANPOUR: How does the situation in Libya, for instance, affect you? I spoke to the prime minister last week and, you know, he said to me, it's not that we're a failing state; we're not a state yet. We're fragmented; we have militias all over. We have weapons all over.

How does that affect you?

MARZOUKI: Of course, there is a huge impact. But let me remind you that under Gadhafi -- remember Gadhafi was not just a dictator. I think he was a crazy guy. And he forbid everything that society had to organize itself.

So after the revolution, I can understand how difficult it is now to have a state and to have a civil society and so forth. They had really to begin from nothing.

Now all the terrorists coming, they come from Libya. There is a smuggling of arms coming from Libya. And this is why we are working very closely with our Libyan brothers to control the frontiers, like we are working also very hard with our Algerian brothers.

AMANPOUR: Do you have enough to control the frontiers?

MARZOUKI: No, no. Not enough. It's a huge task. This is why we're asking for support from outside. We badly need this help from outside because really we feel for the first time feel that we are threatened in Tunisia by the terrorists.

AMANPOUR: The situation in Egypt, the now -- the expulsion of the Muslim Brotherhood, the expulsion of their first democratically elected president, the fact that the army has entered the political arena again, what is your reaction to that?

And how does that affect Tunisia?

You have managed to escape without having the army in politics.

MARZOUKI: As I told you, we have a professional army, never involved with politics, and it's independent. But you know, I'm very worried by what's happening in Egypt, I would say, as a democrat before being as a head of state, also as a democrat, because what's happening in Egypt is extremely dangerous.

I'm very surprised; and even I can say I'm very shocked by the fact that you have so-called liberals, so-called human rights activists and so forth, backing the ouster of an elected president, crackdown on political parties, accepting this level of violence against a civil population. That's extremely shocking for me as a democrat.

But the important part of this liberal, I think they betrayed democracy.

But on the other hand, I am also very, very afraid that, you know, Muslim Brotherhood is the center part of this wide spectrum of the Islamists. On the other hand, you have the Islamists, the new Islamists who fill this vacuum.

There's a guy who would say never again with democracy. So we're going to have this confrontation between secularists, extreme secularists and extremist Islamists. And this will be extremely dangerous, not only for Egypt but for the whole region.

This is what we're trying to avoid in Tunisia.

AMANPOUR: You're obviously going to cause a lot of controversy with those statements.

Do you buy what the Egyptian liberals say, which is that the Muslim Brotherhood pushed the envelope, was actually not moderate enough, was too extremist, called its opponents infidels and was not willing to have a political dialogue? It was sort of my way or the highway.

MARZOUKI: I'm not defending Muslim Brotherhood. I do believe that, you know, their policy was not a good one. They should have done the same thing in Tunisia, keeping the dialogue with opponents and so forth.

But once again, my problem is not the Brotherhood. My problem is democracy. And as I told you, what happened is extremely dangerous for democracy. I hope that democracy will resume (ph) in Tunisia, but I'm afraid that it will take a long, long time.

AMANPOUR: Does the Al-Shabaab attack from Somalia into Kenya have any ramifications as far away as Tunisia?

MARZOUKI: Oh, no, no. I think that's -- there is a link. I do believe that all this -- there is a huge network of Salafists, of jihadists, working together. You know, the people -- now my main problem is Syria. Syria is becoming an internal problem, Tunisian internal problem, because we have about between 500 or 800 young people, Tunisian young people, going there for jihad.

And I guess some of them, let's say 200 or 300, has come back home and then they could be a threat. And we have had also the same phenomenon in Mali. We have a lot of Tunisian have been there in Mali.

AMANPOUR: And just finally, in your own country, obviously, obviously, you know, a lot of the Arab Spring, well, frankly the Arab Spring started in your country. And it was about the economy mostly, a young vendor set himself on fire. And the economy is something that you all have to really worry about.

A new Pew poll said that 54 percent of Tunisians now view democracy favorably. That's down from 63 percent last year. And a majority say the country is worse off without the previous dictator.

What is your reaction to that and the fact that they feel that they're not getting their economic gains?

(CROSSTALK)

MARZOUKI: Before being a head of state, I had been professor of public health, I know how -- this is not serious. These kind of polls are not serious. You know, I can assure that a Tunisian would stick to democracy because they know what dictatorship means.

Of course they are a little bit deceived, because you know, after a revolution, the level of expectation is very, very high. And we have to explain to them that now they got freedom, freedom of expression, freedom of faith. And this is very, very important.

But we have also -- I am explaining all the time to the people that, you know, we had this heritage for more than five decades of corruption and so forth. And we're not going to solve the problem, the economic problems overnight.

And the problem is that all three challenges are linked. The more we wait, you know, the more we have economic failure because people would not invest in a -- before having a stable government and so forth. This is why we're fighting on three, you know, on three fronts and that -- but once again, I'm very, very confident. I think the Arab Spring which started in Tunisia will not die in Tunisia.

AMANPOUR: President Marzouki, thank you so much indeed for joining me.

MARZOUKI: It's my pleasure. Thank you.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

AMANPOUR: So if Tunisia's emerging democracy has something to teach its neighbors, imagine a woman with a doctorate in biology who taught the world how to cook and eat authentically Italian. The legacy of Marcella Hazan when we come back.

And meantime, someone else who continues to leave his mark, the elusive graffiti artist known as Banksy, a legend here in the U.K. has made his first splash of spray paint in the United States. For the next month, New Yorkers can expect to see his unique artwork, which is a mix of illusion, social commentary and just plain fun, out of doors.

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AMANPOUR: And finally tonight while the United States waits for President Obama and the Congress to put some shutdown busting menu on the negotiating table, imagine a world where one remarkable woman set the dining room table and the taste for millions of Italian food lovers.

Marcella Hazan may not be as famous as Julia Child, but her influence as chef, teacher and author may be even greater, not only in her adopted country of America, but throughout the world.

Before she came onto the scene, this is how most Americans thought of Italian cuisine, spaghetti and meatballs on a red checked tablecloth adorably shared one bella notte by Disney's "Lady and the Tramp."

Or else they brought Italian food prepackaged in boxes and cans as hawked on TV by Chef Boy-Ar-Dee.

Marcella Hazan changed all of that with the publication of the classic Italian cookbook. That was in 1973. She emphasized natural ingredients, simple recipes and attention to detail, whether chopping onions or stirring risotto, she was definitely ahead of her time.

And over the next 40 years, a kitchen full of acolytes, like super chef Mario Batali, would follow in her footsteps, stirring the pot with delicious ragouts. And even the glamorous Italian superstar Sophia Loren would join the celebration of la bella cucina showing off her pasta making skills and even writing her own cookbook.

Marcella Hazan died this past weekend at the age of 89, and she leaves behind pages of well-loved cookbooks splattered with her sauce Bolognese, and her gift of great Italian food is on the tip of the tongue of people who never knew her name.

We might well think about that as we watch the shenanigans around the Italian government.

And that's it for our program tonight. And remember, you can always contact us at amanpour.com and follow me on Twitter and Facebook. Thank you for watching and goodbye from London.

END