The great white hope of the Italian Left is a gay former Communist poet. That says almost all you need to know about the state of the opposition in Silvio Berlusconi’s Italy.
As new phone taps are published almost daily detailing the Prime Minister’s alleged “bunga bunga” sex parties, his governing People of Freedom party is still riding high in the polls.
The last opinion survey found that, despite the snowballing sex scandal, support for Berlusconi’s party has shot up almost three points to 30.2 per cent since December, making it probable that his Government would win any early election.
His culture minister, Sandro Bondi, who was blamed for recent collapses in the ruins of Pompeii, easily survived a no-confidence motion in parliament on Wednesday.
Now Mr Berlusconi’s party and its Northern League coalition partner have turned their sights on Gianfranco Fini, a former protégé who tried unsuccessfully to topple the Prime Minister in a no-confidence vote in December.
The Berlusconi loyalists, out for revenge, are trying to force Mr Fini to resign as speaker of the lower chamber of Parliament.
As ammunition, they are using a scandal about the secret sale of a house in Monte Carlo to Mr Fini’s brother-in-law.
Nichi Vendola, the earring-wearing gay ex-Communist Governor of Apulia in the heel of Italy, and head of the Left Ecology Freedom Party, has a maverick outsider appeal. In personal popularity, he scores higher than Mr Berlusconi.
But he is an easy target for Mr Berlusconi’s camp. Il Giornale, the Berlusconi family newspaper, this week ran a front-page photograph of Mr Vendola being tongue-kissed in the ear by a man at a gay pride march. The headline: “Can this man claim to teach us morals?”
Some detected a veiled attack on Mr Vendola when Mr Berlusconi told a motorcycle industry trade show, in the midst of the sex scandal, that “it’s better to like beautiful girls than to be gay”.
Mr Berlusconi derives his amazing staying power from the continued strength of anti-Communist coalition that existed in Italy during the Cold War, keeping the Christian Democrats in power for decades.
Rather than focus on opposing politicians, the billionaire tycoon attacks leftwing journalists and supposedly Communist magistrates he calls the “Red Robes”.
Il Giornale, the family organ, this week declared that the “real opposition” to Mr Berlusconi came from three TV talk shows —Annozero, Ballaro and L’Infedele — which the media tycoon does not control.
Mr Berlusconi occasionally telephones in to these shows unannounced to vent his anger, as he did this week on L’Infedele. The host, Gad Lerner, called him a “boor”.
The prosecutors have no political mouthpiece. But a new newspaper,Il Fatto Quotidiano, has won over 100,000 readers by focusing on news of Italy’s myriad corruption investigations and sex scandals.
Mr Berlusconi is now more threatened by his own current and former allies on the Right than he is by the Left.
The Northern League, a regionalist party that wants the richer North to stop paying for the crime-ridden South, could pull the plug on the coalition Government at any time. Polls show that it would emerge from a snap election as the kingmaker.
Centre-Right politicians are in a quandary. Many are happy with the conservative Government, but just want to get rid of the embarrassing Mr Berlusconi.
Pierferdinando Casini, of the Union of the Centre (UDC), who was in Mr Berlusconi’s last coalition Government until 2006, this week proposed a new Centre-Right ruling coalition without Mr Berlusconi.
“The UDC is ready to enter into a Centre-Right majority but with a government that is not run by Silvio Berlusconi, who should quit after the Ruby case,” he told La Stampa.
The proposal, which could have lifted Italy out of its political paralysis, received short shrift from Mr Berlusconi’s side.
“When the honourable Mr Casini proposes a government with the People of Freedom he reveals at best that he has not understood what Berlusconi represents in Italy’s political life, what moderate Italian voters think, and what the People of Freedom has become,” said Mr Bondi, the culture minister.
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