Menu
Ireland's political and cultural magazine
foreign
I
T’S been a tumultuous three months in Italian politics since the elec-
tion. The morality tale is well-known: spring election was held to return
Italy to meaningful democracy after months of rule by dull Mario
Monti. Mr Monti had been installed at the EU’s prompting in a bid to
solidify Italy’s finances after a sovereign-debt crisis forced philandering
spendthrift Silvio Berlusconi to resign in November .
Monti himself fared poorly in the election, gaining .%, not helped by
his well-meaning insistence on re-introducing a hated household property
tax. After a colourless campaign led by a lacklustre leader, the centre-left alli-
ance spearheaded by Pier Luigi Bersani’s Democratic Party bagged .%.
The centre right, led by Berlusconi’s Freedom Party, came in with .%.
The real shock was the performance of ex-comedian Beppe Grillo’s -star
movement which captured .%. Others got .%.
Boosted by a huge seat bonus for larger parties, Bersani would have
been able to control Italy’s lower house. But he fell a long way short of con-
trolling Italy’s important upper chamber, the Senate.
The upshot was that Bersani needed to form a coalition with either Grillo
or Berlusconi. Bersani’s overtures to Grillo met constant rebuffs and he was
never at ease with the notion of dealing with the slug Berlusconi. The uncer-
tainty trundled on through March and into April.
Italy’s -year old president, Giorgio Napolitano, then eased things by
agreeing to serve a another term in return for the two largest parties com-
mitting to “do their duty”, to stop pirouetting and get on with it.
Bersani resigned after Napolitano’s re-election, and Enrico Letta, sec-
ond in command of the centre-left Democratic Party was sworn in as Prime
Minister on April. Letta appointed Angelino Alfano from the Freedom
Party as his deputy. Offputtingly, Alfano is regarded as a loyal protegé of
Berlusconi.
Just how loyal was shown in Letta’s inauguration speech. The new Prime
Minister promised to make jobs his top priority but he also pledged that the
next instalment of the property tax due in June would not be levied, though
he stopped short of committing to scrap it.
The property tax was re-imposed somewhat crudely by Monti, relying
on out-of-date valuation figures. In a bit of naked vote-buying, Berlusconi
had snakily promised during the election campaign to repay what Monti had
collected. The tax is in the order of € to € per average home.
May has seen Letta focus on reforming the property tax – and precious
little in the way of job creation. This rankled with protesters in Rome dur-
ing May. Like some considerably to the West of the Eternal City, they feel
the focus should be on more important matters.
And they have a case. Italy’s unemployment rate is dauntingly high.
Nationally, around .m are out of work (around %) and, as in Spain,
joblessness is most keenly felt by the young with close to % of -
year olds out of work. To underline the pressure faced by many ordinary
Italians, recent figures from the country’s national statistics agency show
that close to million have pared back spending on home heating and buy-
ing meat, or both.
Italy’s banks too look more wobbly than before, affected not so much by
mortgage debt, but by over-exposure to trading and bond buying, some of
it in Italy’s own state borrowing. Its third largest lender, Monte Paschi, has
said that its own troubles might not be an isolated case. The bank is look-
ing for €bn in state loans to plug various holes caused by bond deals and
other derivative trades that have turned sour.
Berlusconi retains the power to pull the plug on Letta but any election
could see him relegated to the same position as Bersani, pumped up by a
majority of seats in the lower house but still unable to govern without the
centre left. He also is appealing a four-year jail sentence for tax fraud and a
verdict is due in June on his trial for having sex with an underage prostitute.
As usual, prosecutors want him banned from public life.
After all his misjudgments how does Berlusconi retain so much influence
and % of the vote? There is little mystery really. In a country characterised
by low newspaper readership and tv fetishism, the media tycoon controls
most of what Italians watch. With so many television channels doing his bid-
ding, demonising his political rivals as communists is no problem.
In fact the ‘cult’ of Berlusconi is somewhat overplayed in international
press reporting: the reality is that every significant geographic consistu-
ency has a local ‘strongman’, a ‘mini-Berlusconi’ wheeling and dealing in
the murky business of political preferment and patronage, and sometimes
tantalising with a beguiling bit on the side.
Something else that may hold Berlusconi back is his reported longing to
one day be recognised for his Presidential decorum, replacing Napolitano,
who is seen as unlikely to serve out a term that runs to .
But to most ordinary Italians this is a narrow game of political intrigue,
the preserve of the same people that have ruled Italy for decades. General
political and economic disillusion, alongside restricted household budgets,
are setting the tone on the strada.
james nix
Inertia and intrigue in Italy
While property tax distracts from tackling unemployment the slug Berlusconi
ruminates on an apotheosis, or a jail sentence
