Federica Mogherini – Italy’s scapegoat

Even for a politician who has built a career around delivering grace under pressure, the intensity of the campaign against Federica Mogherini mounted over the past few weeks will have been unsettling. The youngest foreign minister in Italy’s republican history has been attacked for her politics (too left-wing), her views on Ukraine (too pro-Russian), her CV (too thin) and even the writing style on her blog (too naïve).

Yet those close to Mogherini say her bid for the European Union’s top diplomatic post, that of High Representative for Foreign Affairs, is far from over. For a country which coined the term dietrologia – the study of that which ‘lies behind’ the official version – there is a growing consensus in Italy that the 41-year-old foreign minister’s failure to secure the job at a recent EU leaders’ meeting was about more than her resumé.

“It was a tactical position,” an Italian diplomatic source said, suggesting that at the leaders’ meeting itself there was no anti-Mogherini animosity on display. “It was about some member states using this as leverage to get a better deal for their own commissioners,” the source added. “They were asking for the European Council to take a step forward, not for Italy to take a step back.”

The problem for those who believe Mogherini is not the right person for the job is that Italy’s prime minister, Matteo Renzi, has invested too much in her candidacy to back down. What is more, the Italians now feel aggrieved, arguing that Renzi provided the Council with a candidate who ticks all the boxes: a woman, a Socialist and a southern European. Which is why Italy may still try to brush aside mutterings about Mogherini’s lack of experience and step up the campaign in the coming weeks.

“To attack her on the grounds of not being experienced enough is just dumb,” says one prominent Italian MEP who has known Mogherini for years. “If they are saying she is too young to have the job, then they are also telling Renzi, who is younger than her, that he can’t be prime minister. Comments like that drive him up the wall.”

Yet views expressed by Poland and EU Baltic states accusing Mogherini of being too “pro-Kremlin” have resonated in Brussels. One Italian foreign policy expert said that Mogherini’s apparent cosying up to Russian leader Vladimir Putin during a recent state visit, in which she ruled out a “military solution” to the Ukrainian crisis while urging “respect for [Russian] minorities”, makes her a bad choice to replace Catherine Ashton as the EU’s top diplomat.

“Everyone in Italy is taking this as an issue of national pride and no-one is actually asking whether Mogherini is up to the job,” the analyst told European Voice. “By outlining a policy towards Russia which was at odds with that of the EU, she undermined Europe’s position.”

However, the senior Italian MEP who spoke to European Voice said Mogherini had become a scapegoat. “Italy’s foreign policy on this has not changed one bit over the years,” he said. “If the eastern Europeans have an axe to grind with Russia, this has nothing to do with Mogherini.”

At the heart of the controversy is Rome’s Russia policy, which has long been protective of Italian business interests. Italy is Russia’s second-biggest EU trading partner and Italy’s state-controlled power company ENI is a major investor in the South Stream gas pipeline project. Italian bank Unicredit is also a major player in Russia. Mogherini’s supporters say her stance on Russia simply reflects this state of play.

As for the foreign minister ticking the right boxes, Italian critics argue that other female politicians would have brought even greater gravitas to the role – for example, former foreign minister Emma Bonino or former under-secretary Marta Dassù. “The problem with them is that they would have been too independent – Renzi would not have been able to control them,” the analyst said.

Why Renzi chose to campaign so hard for Mogherini is itself unclear, given that they are not natural allies. Renzi is a former Christian Democrat who emerged from local politics in his native Tuscany, while Mogherini’s first political step was to sign up to the Italian Young Communist Federation in 1988 (although the word ‘Communist’ does not appear in the minister’s often-disparaged ‘Blogmog’ blog – one entry simply talks about joining the local “branch” in Rome’s north).

In a blistering Wall Street Journal opinion piece (titled ‘Have Passport, Will Appease’), writer Sohrab Ahmari accused Mogherini of having “journeyed from the radical left to the mainstream”. Even assuming that the move from Italy’s radical left to its mainstream requires much of a journey, there is remarkably little on the public record to suggest Mogherini was anything more radical than a straight-A student.

The daughter of film director Flavio Mogherini, Federica went to a local high school with a focus on languages (she speaks French, English and some Spanish). She went on to complete a degree at Rome’s Sapienza University, her thesis on Islam earning her top marks. She also spent time in France on an Erasmus scholarship – something that fits in nicely with Renzi’s occasionally mocked claim to represent the “Erasmus generation”.

Mogherini then became a party apparatchik, working for the Democratic Party (or its earlier post-communist incarnations) in a foreign policy unit, which at the time was dominated by a strongly pro-Palestinian worldview. However, those who knew her back then are adamant that she was closest to the party’s pro-Western stream, of which Italian President Giorgio Napolitano was a leading light. Mogherini’s name pops up in two Wikileaks cables, revealing that she was engaged in constructive talks with American diplomats.

It was around this time that Mogherini met Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat – the widely republished photo of the encounter has been held up as evidence of her far-left politics. It is an assessment that is dismissed as “contemptible” by Gianfranco Fini, who between 2006 and 2008 was the Berlusconi government’s foreign minister. “Which European politician did not meet Arafat at some stage?” Fini said to European Voice. “He had won a Nobel Peace Prize and you couldn’t avoid him.” It was at this time that Mogherini met her husband Matteo Rebesani, who was head of the international office of then Rome mayor and PD powerbroker Walter Veltroni. The couple have two young daughters, Caterina and Marta.

Mogherini’s rise through party ranks was swift and in 2008 she was elected to the Italian parliament. Chiara Moroni, a centre-right MP, got to know her well. “She was always on top of her brief, she had always done the reading,” Moroni says. “Federica is something rare in Italian politics: she got to where she is entirely on merit.”

Yet while Mogherini managed to steer clear of factional brawls by remaining cautious in her public utterings, her relationship with Renzi was marred by some quite disparaging remarks on Twitter. A year before the 2013 “primaries” in which Renzi claimed the party’s leadership, Mogherini tweeted that he “needed to study a lot of foreign policy” adding the hashtag #terzaelementare – the implication being that Renzi’s understanding was that of a third-grader.

Yet, in spite of the bad blood, Renzi wasted little time in awarding Mogherini the foreign ministry. “There is no doubt she is very capable and she represents, in age and outlook, the personality of the new government,” Fini said. Yet the former foreign minister is puzzled that the campaign to secure the high representative’s office should be causing Renzi so much angst. “The role is an empty shell: the EU has no foreign policy,” he said. “If you look at the situation in Ukraine and the Middle East, the EU’s position is the last thing people care about. This job does not really matter.”