onhap News Agency/YNA, via European Pressphoto AgencyIn the past week, a steady drumbeat of dissent from within the prime minister’s own center-right coalition has crescendoed, reaching a crisis that analysts say is expected to bring down the government within weeks — and most likely result in early elections.
“The government has in effect already fallen,” said Stefano Folli, a political commentator at the financial newspaper Il Sole 24 Ore. “It could hold up until they pass the budget, but that’s a formality; on a political plane, the crisis has already begun.”
The confidence vote has not been scheduled, but analysts said it would most likely be the vehicle that would bring down the government as soon as Parliament approved the 2011 budget.
In the past week, the mood in Italy has shifted markedly from political-theater-as-usual to End of Empire.
“This is an important moment,” said Giuliano Ferrara, editor of the newspaper Il Foglio, and a longtime occasional adviser to Mr. Berlusconi. “There’s a sense that his reign is ending.” (The right-wing daily newspaper is partly owned by Mr. Berlusconi’s wife, Veronica Lario, who filed for divorce last year, adding an inheritance battle to his woes.)
The new crisis is the result of complex factors, not least that Italians have grown weary of the prime minister’s raucous private life’s appearing to distract from the country’s problems.
But it also stems from a simple political fact: Mr. Berlusconi lost his majority in Parliament in July when he expelled a key ally, Gianfranco Fini, from the coalition. Mr. Fini is a co-founder of the prime minister’s People of Liberty party and a former Fascist now seen as a moderate.
Mr. Fini, the speaker of the lower house, has recently become emboldened, sensing an opportunity to bring down Mr. Berlusconi, even if he does not have the power to replace him.
Last week, Mr. Fini repeatedly called on Mr. Berlusconi to resign, but he refused. Mr. Fini has said that he will withdraw his two ministers from the government on Monday. The instability comes at a time when world markets are particularly attentive to the euro.
If Mr. Fini does bring down the government, multiple outcomes are possible in the parliamentary system, including one in which Mr. Berlusconi could resign and form a new government without new elections.
But that is looking increasingly unlikely, given Mr. Berlusconi’s plummeting popularity. Instead, various center-right blocs are furiously making deals and courting a centrist party to form a new majority.
Since he was first elected in 1994, Mr. Berlusconi, 74, whose mandate extends to 2013, has dominated Italian public life, owing to his political savvy, popularity with voters, ability to read the national mood and a private media empire that helped shape public opinion. These helped keep him aloft through scandals and political crises that would have sunk politicians elsewhere.
But the current crisis has been precipitated by news reports that Mr. Berlusconi called a Milan police chief last May to inquire about the detention of Karima el-Mahroug, a 17-year-old dancer nicknamed Ruby Rubacuori, or Ruby Heart-Stealer, who had attended parties at his house and whom the police had arrested and accused of theft.
According to Italian media reports, Mr. Berlusconi said that the Moroccan dancer was a relative of President Hosni Mubarak of Egypt. While details of the episode remain hazy, critics accused Mr. Berlusconi of abuse of office.
The mood was perfectly captured on Monday, when a left-leaning channel on state-run television drew its largest audience share in years with a program in which the comedian Roberto Benigni delivered an hourlong monologue skewering Mr. Berlusconi. Mr. Benigni joked that a leading center-left politician, Rosy Bindi, 59, whom Mr. Berlusconi has repeatedly insulted, should use her feminine wiles to get ahead.
“Say you’re Zapatero’s sister-in-law,” Mr. Benigni joked of Ms. Bindi. “Fidel Castro’s grandmother.”
He also mocked Mr. Berlusconi for routinely accusing magistrates, the president and the Constitution of being left-wing. “If only the left were left-wing,” he cried.
Mr. Berlusconi still governs without a significant center-left opposition, and the center-right is still projected to win the next elections — with or without him.
A version of this article appeared in print on November 13, 2010, on page A4 of the New York edition.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/13/world/europe/13italy.html?scp=2&sq=Berlusconi&st=cse
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