martedì 28 settembre 2010

A Week Can be More Than Seven Days in Italy


The Bible says it took God seven days (including one to rest) to create the world. It is taking Italy considerably longer to find a new industry minister.

At the very start of September Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi said he would name a new industry minister “next week,” filling what was, at the time, a four-month void.

On July 23, the premier said the new minister would be named “by the end of next week.”

When former Industry Minister Claudio Scajola stepped down on May 4 to prepare his defense amid allegations of an improper real estate deal, Berlusconi — who took over the responsibilities on an interim basis — said a few hours later he would replace him within “days.”

At a time of high unemployment — especially among the young — and companies complaining of little government support in slashing red tape and fiscal bills to better compete internationally, not having an industry minister is taking its toll.

Labor union leaders and company bosses, in a rare show of unity, have found common cause in complaining over the matter. Recently, controversy-shy Italian President Giorgio Napolitano said he will “spread the word around [for possible candidates]” for the ministerial post as a hint to the government to speed up its decision.

The lack of direction is most evident in the country’s nuclear energy drive. Berlusconi’s government energy policy centers on a nuclear energy comeback, following a 1987 referendum that banned atomic power.

The government wants construction work on the first reactor to start before the next general elections due in 2013, so has to have a facility running by 2020. It has boasted that it ultimately wants a quarter of Italy’s electricity to be generated from nuclear facilities, reducing the strong reliance on imported fossil fuels.

A bunch of energy companies rushed to the local atomic bandwagon.

The pack were led by Italian utility Enel, which set up a venture with nuclear behemothElectricite de France. The two are ready to build four EPR plants in Italy for a total cost of about €18 billion.

However, a few days ago Giancarlo Aquilanti, the main Enel official in charge of nuclear affairs, said that unless the ball starts rolling again the company won’t be able to meet the 2013 construction target.

The newly established key nuclear safety agency exists essentially only on paper as it isn’t operational and there’s nobody to head it.

Without that figure, the agency won’t issue the rules that will allow companies to be able to select sites. The new industry minister will select who will be in charge of the nuclear safety agency.

The government has just decided to postpone the list of where nuclear waste can be deposited, preferring to first have the nuclear agency up and running, meaning that thanks to the snails-pace permit approval procedure, it will be even further down the line.

It feels very much like when you end up going back to square one in board games after landing in the wrong space.

For a country that has waited more than two decades for a nuclear renaissance, a “week” might be just too long.

http://blogs.wsj.com/source/2010/09/28/a-week-can-be-more-than-seven-days-in-italy/?KEYWORDS=Berlusconi

lunedì 20 settembre 2010

The Truth About Italy

One of Europe's most dynamic countries deserves praise, not petty insults.

BY GIULIO TERZI | SEPTEMBER 17, 2010


(Ambassador to the United States Giulio Terzi responds to James Walston).

To put it simply, the recent article by James Walston, whose title I will avoid mentioning so as not to spread its vulgarity, is a clear example of faziosita' (factiousness). And Waltson's choice of Dante's quote may well be a Freudian slip, since Dante himself experienced the tragic and painful effects of the fight between fazioni in XIII Century Florence, being eventually banned from his native city and exiled.

Anyone has the right to express his own opinions, even when they are blatantly biased as in Waltson's case. But I am very surprised that an important publication which is dedicated to foreign policy and bears on its front page the name of its illustrious founder, Samuel P. Huntington, chooses to host such an acrimonious and false story based on domestic gossip, with a lack of balance and seriousness one could expect at the lowest levels of tabloid sensationalism.

I am even more surprised since it's on foreign policy that, over the years and in particular under the current government led by Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, Italy has given more and more evidence of its worldwide credibility, strong commitment, and resolve, as is proper for a founding member of the European Union and a leading country within the G8.

For coming issues of Foreign Policy, I dare suggest a few stories about Italy that may be of some interest to your readers all over the world. For an Afghan audience you might run a story about the 4,000 Italian troops helping secure the country against the Taliban threat and strengthen local communities together with the United States and other Nato allies. Your readers in Lebanon, the Balkans and in Africa will most probably be happy to see some pictures of those 7,500 Italian peacekeepers they meet every day in their towns and villages and that make Italy top contributor to U.N. missions among G8 countries. As for those in the United States who are particularly worried about the well-known effects of unregulated financial markets, it could be useful to learn more about "Lecce Framework", a set of common principles and standards for propriety, integrity and transparency proposed during the Italian G8 presidency last year, or the proposals Italy has put forward on commodity speculation for the upcoming G20 Summit in Seoul (Speaking of the economy, Waltson might want to reconsider his figures about Italy's growth and take a look at more recent public data showing an annualized rate of 1.3 percent).

http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2010/09/17/the_real_italy

(after reading the ambassador's embarassing reply, please read the readers' comments, much more interesting)

The Bordello State


MAURICIO LIMA/AFP/Getty Images
Ahi serva Italia, di dolore ostello, nave sanza nocchiero in gran tempesta, non donna di province, ma bordello!

Italy's descent under Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi.



BY JAMES WALSTON | SEPTEMBER 14, 2010

Quoting Dante is, I admit, the last resort of a scoundrel or at least the indolent scribe. But this one, from Purgatorio,* is too apposite not to use. Roughly translated, it reads, "Alas enslaved Italy, inn of sorrow, a ship without a helmsman in a great storm, not a queen of her provinces, but a whorehouse." It was also the title of a book by Paolo Sylos Labini published posthumously in 2006; Sylos Labini was not only one of Italy's most distinguished economists, but a man of absolute integrity who consistently and very openly refused to compromise with Power (even "power" with a small "p"). His last work described, analyzed and criticized the Italy of five years ago. "Why have we sunk so low?" he asked. "I exhort my fellow citizens to carry out an unflinching critical examination of our civic consciousness if we want to rise from the abyss." His appeal was more or less an economist's defense of the market economy and its rules, which defend the community against unbridled economic and political power. Italian prime minister and billionaire Silvio Berlusconi's massive conflicts of interest have made a mockery of these rules.
Today's Italy has been battered by even more internal storms, as well as the obvious international economic ones; since then, the prime minister's residences have become brothels -- and not just metaphorically. Above all, the ship of state is close to being rudderless. So I am not the only person in Italy quoting Dante these days.

There has been a lack of clear leadership since the end of July, but over the last fortnight the lack of direction has become paroxysmal. For most of August, Berlusconi threatened elections in order to bring Gianfranco Fini, the rebellious former ally who broke with the prime minister in July and formed his own party, and his followers to heel. Then, as polls showed that the only real winner in an early vote would be Umberto Bossi and the Northern League, which favors autonomy for Italy's north -- and, worse, that there was a good chance that Berlusconi would not win a majority in the Senate -- he started backpedaling. These last few days, his public statements once again refer to "three more years in order to carry out the Great Reforms." The immediate aim is to pass a motion supporting a five-point plan concerning the economy, the South, fiscal federalism, justice, and security. The most controversial issue is "justice," which for Berlusconi means giving the himself immunity from prosecution ("in order to get on with the job of governing," he says). Devolved spending powers are fundamental for the Northern League, but others in the center-right are worried that poorer parts of the country will lose support.

Berlusconi boasts constantly that his personally run foreign policy is the envy of Europe, but the reality is different and as counterproductive as much of his domestic policy. Last week, he used his presence at the Kremlin-organized Global Policy Forum in Yaroslavl, Russia, to take a swipe at Fini (without naming him), saying there were some who had created "little political businesses" (aziendine) in Italy; then he made the nth complaint that "communist judges" were stopping him and his people from governing; and finally, to cap his effusive welcome to Libyan dictator Muammar al-Qaddafi two weeks ago, came the remarkable statement that his hosts Prime Minister Vladimir Putin and President Dmitry Medvedev were "God's gift to democracy" (pity that the Economist had beat him to it with a cartoon showing Putin's real love of democracy and the press). More embarrassing still was the news that one of Libya's Italian-donated coast guard launches had machine-gunned an Italian fishing boat.

Meanwhile, Berlusconi's domestic woes are multiplying. The editor of one of his own papers, Vittorio Feltri in Il Giornale, criticized the prime minister this week for being indecisive and lacking leadership. Worse, his personal approval ratings are at 37 percent (down 4.9 percentage points since June), with his People of Freedom Party below 30 percent (down from 33.2 percent in June and 37.4 percent in the 2008 elections), according to an early September Demos poll. We will know whether the "three more years" proposal has any chance whatsoever at the end of the month when the Chamber of Deputies, Italy's lower house of Parliament, debates Berlusconi's five-point plan and votes on it. In the meantime, the prime minister appears to be on a shopping spree, hoping to pick up independents to make up the loss of defectors to Fini -- he needs 19 to have a secure majority.

If anyone can pull off this feat, it's Berlusconi. Given his financial and media resources along with other forms of political patronage, there is little that he cannot offer. He has experience in convincing parliamentarians to come over to his side, as recent revelations about the so-called P3 are showing. (The P3 is an alleged secret cabal whose members were active three years ago in trying to promote Berlusconi's public and private interests through underhanded means. One allegation holds that in, late 2007, in another political shopping spree, the P3 began throwing around money and favors in an effort to bring down the left-leaning government of Romano Prodi; his coalition duly fell apart in January 2008.) But the revelations of its moves to oust Prodi are themselves proof of the changes in Italian politics since then. Unlike on similar occasions, when indicted politicians were very tight-lipped, it seems that most of the accused are singing as if they were in La Scala -- and suggest rats fleeing from a sinking ship.

It's a shame Berlusconi is so preoccupied with his own survival, because his country is in big trouble. Italy's relative decline began almost 20 years ago, when it became clear the economy was not able to face the new challenges of globalization, but every year production figures go down with respect to Europe, and of course China and the other emerging economies. Last week, the OECD -- the developed world's think tank -- calculated that the country's GDP would decline 0.3 percent in the third quarter (making Italy the only G-7 country with negative growth) and grow by a miserable 0.1 percent in the fourth quarter. The World Economic Forum reckons that a real recovery has not begun and puts Italy in 48th place for global competitiveness, just behind Lithuania and ahead of Montenegro. Youth unemployment grew to 29.2 percent in May, up 4.7 percentage points from May of last year. Berlusconi's minister for economic development resigned four months ago and still has not been replaced. And as the school year begins, teachers are on the warpath over budget cuts, as are the police. There are plenty of real issues, but Italy is nave sanza nocchiero, "a ship without a helmsman."

So is Italy once again "enslaved," as Dante lamented 700 years ago? And is Italy a brothel instead of queen of her own provinces? A new book by a Princeton University scholar argues that Italy is very much the bordello. In La libertà dei servi, Maurizio Viroli writes that Italy has succeeded "in the political experiment of transforming, without violence, a democratic republic into a court which has at the centre a feudal lord surrounded by a plethora of courtesans admired and envied by a multitude of people with a servile spirit."

In Verdi's Rigoletto, the protagonist curses the courtesans with his wonderful aria "Cortigiani, vil razza dannata!" but today it is the courtesans who are in control. Even Fedele Confalonieri, probably Berlusconi's best friend and closest associate, described him in 2004 as "an enlightened despot … agood Ceausescu, but decidedly anomalous as a democratic politician." Six years later, with a changed electoral system that makes all parliamentarians beholden to him and a new, enlarged party completely under his control, the quote is even more apt.

Last week, a center-right deputy in Fini's group accused some of her fellow MPs of having prostituted themselves to get into Parliament. She withdrew the statement immediately (even though a deputy from Berlusconi's party said that he saw nothing untoward if anyone had), but in any case Veronica Lario, Berlusconi's second wife, and the Fini think tank FareFuturo had made the same point in April of last year. The real point, though, is that the problem is not that some women got into Parliament through a bedroom; it is that men and women, journalists and professionals, have given up their minds and principles rather than their bodies.

Dante is oft quoted here for good reason.

* The original version of this article stated that the quote at the top of this article was from Dante's Inferno.

James Walston is professor of international relations at the American University of Rome. He blogs atitalpolblog.blogspot.com, where an earlier version of this article appeared.

http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2010/09/14/the_bordello_state?page=0,1


mercoledì 1 settembre 2010

Italy

Published: August 30 2010

ChartIt is one of the glories of Europe that Italy’s economic model survives its catastrophic politics. Government after ineffectual government comes and goes, yet Italian companies successfully navigate an enormous public debt, lack of structural reforms, the erosion of their competitive advantages, and intense export competition to keep the country in the Group of Seven. The model’s success, however, is largely an illusion: Italian real gross domestic product grew 10 percentage points less than the eurozone average in the past decade, according to Capital Economics.Now another hot political autumn is in store. In the national tradition of dysfunctional government, the coalition of prime minister Silvio Berlusconi is self-destructing. Many hope he will lose out. Yet the potential winners – his erstwhile allies Giulio Tremonti, finance minister, and Gianfranco Fini, a long-time nemesis – have little new to offer. There is no hint that anyone’s agenda includes the structural reforms to labour, education and administration that Italy needs. This internecine fight on the right of Italian politics may lead only to further economic stagnation.Investors should be worried, although not by the 120 per cent ratio of government debt to GDP. That is well managed, and mitigated by modest levels of private sector and household debt. Italy’s problems are in the real economy. UniCredit calculates that, relative to Germany, its competitiveness in unit labour costs has deteriorated 26 per cent since 1999. In that period, eurozone productivity rose 7 per cent – and fell 6 per cent in Italy.Investors can count the cost of exposure to this environment. In the decade to the end of 2009, Italian stocks underperformed the FTSE Eurotop 300 index by 11 percentage points. Confindustria, the business lobby, warns that Italy’s fate without reform is long-term decline, a process that may be already under way. Italy needs a political revolution, not a passing political crisis, to rediscover its economic mojo.

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2010.

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/3/9f46eb92-b456-11df-8208-00144feabdc0.html