mercoledì 12 agosto 2009

«E' UNA PERSECUZIONE»



L'avvocato del premier Niccolò Ghedini annuncia azioni giudiziarie contro il quotidiano inglese.(Daily Mail)
Perché la pubblicazione delle foto «concretizza un reato» e quindi «se ne assumeranno la responsabilità». Questi scatti «riprendono un momento familiare», e poi ormai si è «alla persecuzione». «Gli inglesi - sottolinea - pensano di dare lezioni di legalità agli italiani, ma poi sono i primi a non metterla in pratica». Ghedini confuta la teoria dei paparazzi, che lunedì sera sono stati fermati e denunciati, secondo i quali per il pontile (essendo in concessione) la legge sulla privacy non si applica come per una abitazione privata. «Questa è una felice idea dei fotografi per difendersi. Ma per montare e smontare il pontile viene pagata una costosissima concessione, quindi è a tutti gli effetti pertinenza dell’abitazione». E poi aggiunge: « Come si può vedere non c’è nulla di male negli scatti. Ma è una questione di principio, quelli sono momenti di vita familiare. Qui ormai siamo alla persecuzione. C’è la teoria del diritto e la pratica dell’abuso».
12 agosto 2009

http://www.corriere.it/politica/09_agosto_12/berlusconi_daily_mail_6f2c7b56-874e-11de-a53e-00144f02aabc.shtml

Berlusconi in a bathrobe: Silvio dresses down as he holidays on yacht in Italy... surrounded by armed guards

By Mail Foreign Service

The sun was shining, it was a beautiful day...
But thankfully Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi didn't take that as his cue to bare the flesh as he headed for a yacht while holidaying in Italy.
Instead the 72-year-old covered up in a white robe in a surprisingly modest turn for the womanising politician.


Time to relax: Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi (left) dressed in a bathrobe as he headed for a luxury yacht while holidaying in Italy

The lothario is currently on a three-week break where he is due to spend time with his family and celebrate the birthday of his daughter Marina.
Perhaps he decided to dress down after pictures emerged of Peter Mandelson on holiday in Corfu dressed in a series unflattering overly casual outfits, including linen drawstring trousers.
As Mr Berlusconi made his way on to the yacht, armed guards were pictured surrounding him.


Protection: Armed guards were seen surrounding the politician on Sunday

Earlier this week the politician said he had nothing to apologise for over the sex scandals that have surrounded him.
His reputation has been battered by often explicit disclosures about his womanising and instead boasted about his support among Italians.

'Nobody can blackmail me and I have no skeletons in the closet. I have nothing to apologise for in my private life,' he said at a news conference.

Mr Berlusconi's wife Veronica Lario said in May that she wanted a divorce over his relationship with a teenage girl from Naples.

Mr Berlusconi said earlier this week he had nothing to apologise for over the sex scandals that have surrounded him


The disclosure was followed by stories of escorts spending the night at his home and reports of intimate conversations secretly taped by one woman, Patrizia D'Addario.

Mr Berlusconi, who denies ever paying for sex, has acknowledged he is 'no saint'.
But at the news conference he denied accusations of chauvinism, fuelled by his sexist jokes and preference for pretty women for political posts.

'The foreign press has written that I hate women,' he said. 'If there is one thing I adore, it is women.'

An opposition senator said it was a 'sad spectacle' to see Mr Berlusconi saying his government was the best while Italy was mired in recession.

He was pictured earlier in the day arriving at the airport in Italy

venerdì 7 agosto 2009

The smart choice for summer: staycations

Gordon Brown has opted for the Lakes rather than a long-haul trip this summer – and he's not alone. Most leaders don't want to be seen abroad in a recession
.........
Berlusconi: Whipped into shape
Most people in high profile, high pressure jobs like to let their hair down a little come holiday season.
But after all the partying with young starlets and call girls, Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, inset, probably feels he has done all that. This year, to the relief of his frazzled PR people, he has opted for a more ascetic summer break.
Of course, with 18 properties, staying at home isn't quite so boring for Mr Berlusconi as it is for the rest of us. The libidinous media mogul is retreating to his villa in Arcore, right, outside Milan, and is relying on a disciplinarian Austrian lady to whip him into shape. During their 10-day stay in Arcore, Frau Gertraud Mitterrutzner von Guggenberg and her team, from a private clinic in the mountains of South Tyrol, will subject the 72-year-old Mr Berlusconi to a strict daily routine of muesli and sit-ups. The official line: the stay will "allow him to slim down and reactivate his metabolism".
The notoriously vain Prime Minister is concerned about the extra pounds he's put on as a result of steroid injections needed for his neck pain. "I'm doing 10 days of sporting therapy, because with the cortisone that I've taken I need to burn off a bit of weight," he told reporters. The Von Guggenberg clinic, which espouses a strict diet and hydrotherapy, has proved a favourite of Italian celebrities past and present, from fashion designer Ottavio Missoni to actor and "Dolce Vita" star, Marcello Mastroianni. After the lurid headlines of recent months, Mr Berlsuconi will hope the treatments reinvigorate him for the fray.
But there will be extra pressure on Frau Mitterrutzner von Guggenberg to work miracles in the purification department now the Prime Minister has decided to shelve his pilgrimage to the shrine of Padre Pio. The trip was cancelled when it became obvious such a PR stunt was more likely to incite Catholic anger than appease it.
For the rest of August, the resilient, but politically wounded, Prime Minister will spend time with his grandchildren in Arcore, no doubt praying the ladies in his life don't produce more nasty surprises.

Michael Day

Tuesday, 4 August 2009
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/politics/the-smart-choice-for-summer-staycations-1766948.html

Berlusconi has overseen Italy’s decline

From Mr. Bill Emmott

Sir, Franco Frattini (Letters, August 4th) is surely correct to lament the resort to stereotypes when writing about Italy. But, as Italy’s foreign minister, he in turn should avoid trotting out the standard lines laid down by his prime minister about his country's economy when a mere glance at the facts will show them to be utterly false.

Contrary to his claim that Italy “is exhibiting remarkable resilience and vitality during the current global financial and economic crisis”, the International Monetary Fund’s latest forecasts suggest its real gross domestic product will contract this year by 5.1 per cent, with a further (if tiny) contraction in 2010, making it second only to Germany among the European Union’s big economies in terms of economic shrinkage. Forecasts can, of course, turn out to be wrong, but Mr Frattini should note that in 2008, too, Italy had a bad year, suffering a 1 per cent GDP contraction when all the other big European economies managed to grow.

One cannot blame everything on Silvio Berlusconi: even with Viagra, he is not that potent. But perhaps Mr Frattini could let us know how Mr Berlusconi’s “ability to govern the country and address national emergencies” can be squared not just with the latest economic data but also with the comment by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, in its recent survey of Italy, that relative to other rich nations the country “began to fall back quite abruptly after 2000”. Mr Berlusconi has been prime minister for seven of the past nine years.

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2009
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/df01ae80-821f-11de-9c5e-00144feabdc0.html

Sex Scandals Could Finally Fell Italy's Berlusconi

In Europe, the sex lives of politicians rarely create scandals the way they do in the U.S. But the continent's lenience may have finally hit its limit in Silvio Berlusconi's latest antics. The Italian prime minister has shrugged off all sorts of tawdry allegations during his three terms in office, from mafia collusion to bribery. Voters have also turned a blind eye to his former rumored affairs, so a sex scandal seemed like the last thing that would fell the media mogul. But when Berlusconi's wife started divorce proceedings against him this past spring, after he attended the birthday of an 18-year-old lingerie model, the first chinks in his reputation appeared. Then came incriminating photos of orgies at his Sardinian villa and testimony from high-priced call girls that Berlusconi promised them political power in exchange for sex. The trashy details of their leader's libido are starting to grate on ordinary Italians. For the first time, Berlusconi's official approval ratings have dropped below 50 percent. The Vatican has also strongly rebuked him, and the opposition is thundering for his resignation. Looks like Berlusconi's finally crossed a line for tolerant Europe.

Barbie Nadeau Monday, August 03, 2009

http://blog.newsweek.com/blogs/wealthofnations/archive/2009/08/03/sex-scandals-could-finally-fell-italy-s-berlusconi.aspx

giovedì 6 agosto 2009

It's all too easy to gang up on Radio 1

Wednesday, 5 August 2009

Ed Vaizey, the culture spokesman of a party long on political ambition but short on policy, must have been delighted with this week's bright idea. A Conservative government, he has said, would consider forcing the BBC to sell off its Radio 1 franchise and waveband to the private sector.
This profoundly silly and wrong-headed idea has been launched in a typically cack-handed manner, but is politically cunning enough on several counts to gain traction over the coming months. It will be one in the eye for the fat-cat villains of the moment, the BBC. It could raise £100m for this year's all-purpose victim, the British taxpayer. It would be a small but juicy morsel of privatisation to throw to the drooling free-marketeers in the Tory party, and yet will not lose votes on the more liberal side of the party. How many Conservative voters, after all, are regular Radio 1 listeners?
Vaizey's argument for sale is fairly pathetic. The BBC has too much power, he says. Radio 1 "is not fulfilling its obligations to its audience. Its median age is those in their thirties when it should aim more at teenagers and (those in) their twenties." The commercial sector would cover this market more effectively.

On the question of age, the BBC might be thinking that they can do nothing right. A couple of days ago, Ed Vaizey's opposite number, Ben Bradshaw, was warning the Corporation that it should be wary of the "cult of youth". Yet, in a sense, both the culture secretary and his shadow are right. The BBC is now so bullied and beleaguered that there is a growing tendency to produce programmes for that powerful, vocal lobby of listeners in their thirties and forties.
Only this week, the sudden and unexpected departure of Malcolm Laycock, who had presented a Radio 2 programme of dance music from the 1930s and 1940s for 14 years, has given force to strong rumours that something of a cull of minority music, particularly that from the first part of the 20th century, is taking place at the BBC.
The middle-aged and the middle of the road are in the ascendancy at Broadcasting House.
The way to halt this slow drift towards lowest-common-denominator broadcasting is not, of course, to threaten to sell off Radio 1 or 2. The commercial market is the problem, not the solution.
Meddlesome politicians, not to mention press commentators who happen to work for organisations which would benefit from a weakened BBC, need to be reminded that the Corporation's great strength is that it does not have to chase ratings. It is for that reason above all that it has become an unrivalled champion of new music and musicians.
In the area of live music, the BBC plays to its strengths, covering mainstream and esoteric performances at major festivals on Radio 1 and 2, or inviting new acts to play in small studios of local radio stations. At a time of musical change and richness, when the Government's idiotic Licensing Act is restricting live performances, this cultural role of encouragement and discovery is more important than ever.
No sane person could seriously suggest that a commercial radio station will have either the will or the capacity to encourage music in this way. In spite of the pressures on it, the BBC's musical policy remains something of which we should all be proud. Careerist politicians meddle with it at their peril.

Look a bit more closely next time, Ryan

It has been a tricky summer for those of us who like to defend the right of the ageing and the downright old to misbehave with much younger women. Ever since Silvio Berlusconi appeared at the 18th birthday of one of his little friends, he has given geriatric randiness a bad name.Jack Nicholson, whose mighty bulk suggests that he is preparing to star in a biopic of Marlon Brando, has been snapped cuddling up with various women who are a third his age and body weight.
The season's champion in his dotage must surely be Ryan O'Neal. Attending the funeral of his long-term partner Farrah Fawcett, the 68-year-old attempted to engage with a young blonde woman who appeared to know him. Only when he proposed a drink did the woman break it to him that she was in fact his daughter, Tatum, who he hadn't seen for many years. "He was always a ladies' man, a bon vivant," the actress rather sportingly commented later.

Nappy scandal? It must be the silly season

Hardly a day goes by without the appearance of another despairing story about the general hopelessness of young people today. Now a fresh angle on this familiar story has been discovered.
It seems that even toddlers are letting us down. Primary school teachers are reported to be "appalled" by the number of children who have been arriving at school still wearing nappies. Such is the crisis that the little-known charity Education and Resources for Improving Childhood Continence has been running courses. Parents have been giving first-hand accounts in the press of how their darlings occasionally have "little accidents".
The Great Nappy Scandal touches on several favourite topics of whinge. The villains of the piece are surely working parents, who are too busy and self-absorbed to toilet-train their young. Then there is the role of local councils, who have been warning non-nappy-changing teachers that they are contravening the Disability Discrimination Act – yet another case of political correctness gone mad. The children are a worry, too. So cosseted are they by comfortable modern nappies that their all-important bladder-brain connection remains undeveloped.
It is the perfect silly-season story for a long damp summer.

Terence Blacker
http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/terence-blacker/terence-blacker-its-all-too-easy-to-gang-up-on-radio-1-1767267.html

Former ally says Silvio Berlusconi has 'whoring attitude' to women

A former senator from Silvio Berlusconi's party has publicly branded the Italian prime minister "a real pig" with a "whoring attitude of contempt towards women".
Writing on his blog, Paolo Guzzanti, a right-wing politician who resigned from Mr Berlusconi's party six months ago, said the reason he withdrew his long-term support was his "whoring attitude of contempt towards women".
He went on to call the 72-year-old "un gran porco" (a real pig) "who has corrupted Italian femininity, opening unthinkable careers to pretty girls who have learnt only how important it is to give it to the right person at the right time", the Times reports. The website was not working yesterday afternoon, but his comments were reproduced by the weekly newspaper L'Espresso, and its sister publication, the daily newspaper La Repubblica.
Mr Guzzanti, 69, is the former head of the parliamentary commission looking into Soviet spying in Italy, and used to be a senior executive on Il Giornale, the newspaper owned by Mr Berlusconi's family.
In his blog, Mr Guzzanti referred to transcripts of tape recordings, which he claimed emerged during an unspecified inquiry in Naples and were "then destroyed in Rome".
In the tapes, he claims, "people who now hold very high office discuss among themselves terrible things which decency and charity towards my country prevent me from writing".
When asked to explain, Mr Guzzanti described a culture of sexual favours within Italian politics.
"I say, and I confirm, that the things that were recounted to me by many sources are absolutely disgusting.
"The day when a magistrate wants to interrogate me to find out from whom I have this information, and who was the journalist who supplied the reading material, I will do my duty and I will name names."
Mr Berlusconi, who is on holiday, denied paying women for sex after the prostitute Patrizia D'Addario claimed that she spent the night with him in return for help with a building project.
His office did not return calls seeking a response to Mr Guzzanti's comments yesterday.
Published: 06 Aug 2009
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/italy/5981127/Former-ally-says-Silvio-Berlusconi-has-whoring-attitude-to-women.html

Money can't buy you loyalty, Silvio

....Money, as Silvio Berlusconi has discovered, can buy you an awful lot of things. It can buy you beautiful palaces and beautiful girls. It can buy you hair and teeth. It can buy you influence – lots and lots of influence. What it can't buy you is unstinting loyalty from your children. The man who recently made the shock announcement that he is "no saint", and who owns, and therefore controls, most of the Italian media – the man, in fact, who knows a thing or two about vanity – has just been castigated by his own daughter, in Vanity Fair.

"Political representatives, who are expected to govern well, [and] make the community prosper, are also expected to safeguard the values that it expresses, possibly to raise them," says Barbara Berlusconi. "I do not believe therefore that a politician can permit himself a distinction between public and private life." In a country which excuses the rich and famous pretty much everything, and in which family ties override most moral and legal concerns, and in which principles like equality of opportunity and a free press are as exotically alien as the American man with a tan darker than Berlusconi's, this is feisty stuff. Bravissima, Barbara! Now, all you have to do is say you don't want the dosh.

Christina Patterson
Thursday, 6 August 2009
http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/christina-patterson/christina-patterson-the-price-of-this-war-keeps-going-up-1767747.html

domenica 2 agosto 2009

Boastful Silvio Berlusconi buys off his party rebels

Photograph: Luca Bruno/AP


Sex scandals still dog Italy's prime minister, but cash handouts have quelled revolt in his ranks
John Hooper in Rome - The Observer, Sunday 2 August 2009

Before they could slip away for the summer recess, Silvio Berlusconi called about 30 of his MPs to a meeting in his 17th-century Roman palazzo, where an "escort", Patrizia D'Addario, claims to have recorded her pillow talk with him.
According to an account in the newspaper La Repubblica, as the meeting was about to break up, Italy's prime minister, who recently admitted he was "no saint", asked his followers: "Have you heard the latest one about La D'Addario?" Egged on by their denials, he is reported to have added: "She says Berlusconi may not, in fact, be a saint. But he fucks like a god!"
As millions of Italians yesterday packed for their holidays and prepared to forget politics till the autumn, their endlessly controversial leader never looked less like resigning. Newspapers worldwide may have written off his chances of surviving a double-barrelled scandal that would long ago have felled even the most revered statesman elsewhere. But Berlusconi seems bullet-proof.
He could, of course, fall to new revelations. In an apparent reference to her night with the Prime Minister, Patrizia D'Addario said on Friday night : "At those parties in which I took part worse things happened, I can assure you."
But if a 72-year-old married grandfather can get away with refusing to explain his relationship with a girl of 18 and then survive the dissemination of a recording in which he purportedly discusses orgasms and masturbation while in bed with a prostitute, it may be wondered what could possibly bring him down. The last seven days, moreover, have seen Berlusconi's position shored up on two fronts.
On Thursday, Italians were given a dramatic reminder that the investigation that brought to light their prime minister's relationship with D'Addario and other "escorts" was not directed at possible wrongdoing on the right but the left. Police in Bari raided the offices of five opposition parties. They were armed with warrants issued by prosecutors looking into suspected illegal party funding over a period from 2005 to the present. Bari is the capital of Apulia, a region governed by Nichi Vendola, one of the left's few charismatic figures.
The suspicion is that politicians in his administration steered health service contracts to suppliers in exchange for kickbacks to their parties' coffers. Among the prosecutors is one attached to the organised crime department - indicating the possible involvement of Apulia's mafia.
Vendola has denied wrongdoing and no charges have been laid.
But, for some, the raids put a different slant on the Berlusconi scandals. "It is to be asked whether the fierce attacks by the entire opposition front on the prime minister and his undoubtedly questionable behaviour might not perhaps have sought to cover up fears of what the inquiry could bring to light," wrote a Corriere della Sera commentator, Antonio Macaluso.
Apulia was not the only part of the south on Berlusconi's mind last week, as he sought to put down a rebellion in his party. His Freedom People movement is allied to two regional groups: the Northern League and a smaller group, the MPA, which seeks broader self-government for Sicily.
Exasperated by what he saw as the prime minister's repeated concessions to the League, a junior minister, Gianfranco Miccichè, threatened to lead a group of fellow rebels out of the Freedom People and link up with the MPA. The aim was to create a new "Party of the South" that would enjoy the same leverage as the League, on which the government relies for its majority.
By yesterday Berlusconi had neutralised the threat in the time-honoured fashion of Italian prime ministers - by throwing money at the Mezzogiorno. He promised to unblock some €4bn of development funds for Sicily, start talks on extra financing for other southern regions, and create a new government agency and public bank for the Mezzogiorno.
But the speed with which the revolt was stifled diverted attention from two facts that could foreshadow trouble for Italy's ebullient leader when politics return to normal in the autumn. This was the first internal party revolt Berlusconi has faced. The scandals may not have finished him, but they have weakened him.
It was perhaps no coincidence that when the most senior member of his cabinet, finance minister Giulio Tremonti, was interviewed on television on Friday, he was asked if he considered himself Berlusconi's heir. Tremonti replied that it was difficult "to imagine succeeding such an extraordinary person". Which was not quite a denial.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/aug/02/italy-silvio-berlusconi-sex-scandals

Silvio Berlusconi ignores protesters on visit to quake town L’Aquila

Josephine McKenna
From The Times July 31, 2009

Silvio Berlusconi ignored protesters when he toured the earthquake-hit town of L’Aquila yesterday and boasted that projects to rehouse those made homeless were superior to those everywhere else in the world.
In a carefully managed visit to the town in the Abruzzo region the Italian Prime Minister appeared to sidestep almost all contact with the 20,000 people living in 140 tent communities.
His entourage invited only TV cameras and photographers to follow at a discreet distance as he greeted building workers in Bazzano on L’Aquila’s outskirts, where construction of apartments is taking place.
Mr Berlusconi was reported to have been met by 70 angry residents when he visited the city council offices while journalists were kept waiting for him several miles away. The devastating earthquake in April killed 300 people and left 50,000 homeless.
Mr Berlusconi was said to have been met by around 70 angry residents when he visited the city council offices unaccompanied by media, while journalists were kept waiting for him several miles away.
Mr Berlusconi said that construction was on target and that 30,000 people would have housing by mid-November or, at the latest, by the end of year.
“This kind of extraordinary operation has never happened anywhere else in the world,” he said. “Not with Katrina [the hurricane that struck New Orleans], or with earthquake reconstruction in Japan or China.”
Accompanied by the head of the Civil Protection authority, Guido Bertolaso, Mr Berlusconi shook hands with construction workers and raised the Italian flag. He claimed that 15,000 apartments would be completed by the end of September and 4,000 damaged homes would be repaired by the end of September.
Sara Vegni, a spokesman for protest group 3.32, named after the time that the April earthquake took place, said too many people would be forced to remain in the tents.
It was Mr Berlusconi’s first visit to L’Aquila since he presided over the G8 summit in July. He had pledged to visit every week to ensure the completion of building projects.
The mayor of L’Aquila, Massimo Cialente, said that the Government had not done enough to help the homeless and although the city of L’Aquila had received €20 million (£17 million) for housing reconstruction, another €120 million was still required.
As Mr Berlusconi toured L’Aquila, he faced some of his strongest criticism yet from the Catholic Church.
Monsignor Riccardo Fontana told the Italian daily, La Repubblica, that average Italians were disgusted by “excessive transgressions” that had allegedly occurred recently and that any form of adultery was unacceptable.
“You can never justify adultery,” Monsignor Fontana told the Italian daily. The Archbishop appeared to be responding to complaints on the letters page of the Catholic bishops’ daily newspaper, Avvenire, that the Catholic Church had failed to respond adequately to allegations about Mr Berlusconi’s sexual encounters with Patrizia D’Addario and liaisons with other women.
In L’Aquila, 1,500 construction workers are trying to complete the housing promised by Mr Berlusconi and another 1,000 are expected to arrive soon.
In April the Italian Cabinet set aside €8.5 billion for reconstruction in Abruzzo, €1.5 billion of which was allocated for emergency measures.
Giuseppe Ruocco, a computer engineer from Pile, near L’Aquila has been living in a tent with his wife, two children, his parents and mother-in-law since the earthquake. He said that more government funds were needed to remove the rubble and to help families return home.
Professor Emanuele Tondi, an earthquake expert from the University of Camerino, north of L’Aquila, warned that there could be more serious earthquakes in the region in the next few months.
Professor Tondi said that there were signs that an earthquake measuring at least 5 or 6 in magnitude could strike north of L’Aquila and the towns of Montereale, Cittareale and Campotosto, were particularly vulnerable.
The L’Aquila earthquake was the most deadly in Italy since 1980, when more than 2,500 people were killed near Naples.

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/europe/article6734070.ece

Italy’s problems do not end with Berlusconi

The now daily revelations about Silvio Berlusconi’s sex life suggest to many a leader unfit to govern. Yet in the extensive coverage in the international press and the growing condemnation of the Italian prime minister’s behaviour, bigger problems are being missed that go to the heart of Italy’s decline and which will not be remedied solely by his removal from office.
The central issue in the background is the extent of corruption at the heart of the government, and the lack of transparency and accountability that bedevils efforts to deal with it. There is a culture of illegality that runs through Italian politics and extends to society, from habitual tax evasion and Mafia involvement in building contracts – including, many suspect, ones currently being negotiated in earthquake-ravaged L’Aquila – to the fixing of football matches. Italy has easily the highest proportion of MPs found guilty of criminal offences in Europe. Mr Berlusconi has faced down many court cases of his own, successfully avoiding prosecution merely by virtue of parliamentary immunity legislation introduced by his own government.
There are two main reasons why this situation has been allowed to continue. First, Mr Berlusconi presides over a regime built through his media empire, which includes the ownership or control of almost the entire television network and significant publishing ventures. Even Rai, the public broadcaster – which has faced much political interference from Mr Berlusconi – has refused to carry any coverage of the allegations linking him to the escort girl Patrizia D’Addario on its main news channel.
The second reason is the continual failure to open up Italy’s political system following the “Tangentopoli” corruption crisis of the early 1990s, which brought down the ruling Christian Democrats. The Italian left has gone through a severe crisis of identity and several name changes in recent years, and has failed to develop the reforming agenda that this moment of opportunity demanded.
Perversely, it has been Mr Berlusconi who has benefited most from this political vacuum. Since his arrival on the scene in 1994, he has reshaped Italian political culture and values in his own image. The merging of his Forza Italia with the post-fascist National Alliance last year into the People of Freedom Party only consolidated his control, as his allies depend on his patronage, power and popularity with voters. Even the Northern League, which brought down Mr Berlusconi’s first government in 1994, depends on his leadership.
The opposition is currently having its own leadership dilemmas, as it attempts to find someone capable of what seven centre-left leaders – with the exception of Romano Prodi – have failed to do: defeat Mr Berlusconi. The decision of the last incumbent, Walter Veltroni, to resist what he called “anti-Berlusconism” merely allowed the prime minister’s conflict of interests to remain unchallenged. The failure of Italy’s political class to reform itself over many decades has meant Mr Berlusconi’s populism has been able to address some of the everyday fears of Italians, however incongruous this may seem to outsiders.
The situation has become so serious that Antonio Di Pietro, leader of the Italy of Values party who led the “Clean Hands” anti-corruption movement in the early 1990s, recently placed an advertisement in the international press calling on foreigners to help “save Italian democracy”. Shortly after, the comic blogger Beppe Grillo decided to stand for the leadership of the Democratic party, the main opposition party. Both developments are symptoms of the same problem, namely that there is neither an alternative leader nor a strong movement for change at home capable of delivering credible government.
Even when Mr Berlusconi does finally leave – and despite some fall in support there is no reason to believe his departure is imminent – there is little hope that the cross-party collaboration needed to introduce a new electoral system, more public accountability, greater media independence, and more competition to open up markets, will follow. The international condemnation of the Italian premier’s behaviour has at least brought the early beginnings of national self-examination. We will wait to see whether this will lead to further introspection, or the energy to drive a new spirit of reform in the future.

The writer is staff tutor in politics at the Open University and the author of "Not a Normal Country:Italy after Berlusconi"

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2009


http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/f602c272-7d38-11de-b8ee-00144feabdc0.html