How Silvio Berlusconi is helped by having a fragmented and weak opposition
FOR the daughter of a penniless immigrant, Karima el-Mahroug (otherwise known as “Ruby the Heartstealer”) has had quite an impact on her adoptive land. The Moroccan runaway-turned-dancer’s friendship with Italy’s prime minister, Silvio Berlusconi, has put him in a perilous fix. Prosecutors in Milan are expected soon to seek his indictment on charges of paying an under-age prostitute and abusing his position to hide the fact—offences that in Italian law could carry a combined jail sentence of as long as 15 years.
The scandal over Ms el-Mahroug and her suspected presence at allegedly dissolute “bunga-bunga” parties at the prime minister’s villa has also changed Italy’s economic policy. Or rather, given it one. On January 31st, after nine years as prime minister, Mr Berlusconi at last spoke like the liberal he has often claimed to be. He said he wanted to drop from the constitution a clause imposing social obligations on entrepreneurs. He promised tax breaks and deregulation for Italy’s lagging south. Less liberally, he also vowed to bring together representatives of employers, trade unions and local authorities to debate an action plan to secure annual growth of 3-4% over five years. As a first step, he offered co-operation with the opposition.
Nice words. But do they mean anything? Mr Berlusconi announced his plan without consulting, or even informing, senior ministers. It seemed to have been conjured up just to dispel the impression that his government has been paralysed by sex scandals. The opposition parties flatly rejected his offer. But in doing so they allowed Mr Berlusconi to brand them as churlish, something they can ill afford.
Pollsters agree that the “Ruby” affair has eroded the prime minister’s already battered standing. One sounding for larepubblica.it, a website, found his approval rating down a full five points in January, to 35%. But the polls also suggest that Mr Berlusconi’s flagging popularity is translating neither into less support for his party nor into more backing for the opposition.
Large numbers of Berlusconi voters disapprove of him (13%, according to a poll forCorriere della Sera, a newspaper). Yet few seem ready to desert his People of Freedom movement. This is particularly striking now that they have the alternative of a centre-right opposition as well as the centre-left: a tentative alliance between followers of Mr Berlusconi’s former lieutenant, Gianfranco Fini, with Pier Ferdinando Casini’s Christian Democrat Union of the Centre, and a smaller party led by a former mayor of Rome, Francesco Rutelli.
But the creation of a broader opposition has only accentuated what voters identify as its main weakness: its heterogeneity, and thus susceptibility to disunity if it were ever elected. Together, the parties ranged against Mr Berlusconi account for almost 60% of voters’ preferences. But at one extreme they offer post-fascism, and at the other Marxism blended with environmentalism and feminism.
The recurrent problem of the opposition has been that not enough Italians are willing to vote for a party of the moderate left like those that have held power for long periods in other European countries. Italy’s Socialist party was largely destroyed by the corruption scandals of the early 1990s, so the centre-left is nowadays represented by a fundamentally unnatural coalition of former progressive Christian Democrats with former Communists, who not surprisingly find it hard to agree on clear common policies. Their joint party, the Democratic Party (PD), has proved incapable of rejuvenating its leadership and breaking free of the cronyism that blights Italian politics. The PD is heavily influenced by two men, Massimo D’Alema and Walter Veltroni, who have (like Mr Berlusconi) been in leading positions since the mid-1990s. The party leader, Pierluigi Bersani, who was Mr D’Alema’s candidate, is a personable, capable man. But he seems to lack the magic ingredient that enables politicians to break through to a wider electorate.
This is not his only problem. On January 26th Mr Bersani called off a national assembly due the next weekend after claims that the winner of a ballot to choose the PD candidate for mayor in Naples had been helped by local organised crime (with Chinese immigrants paid €5, about $7, a vote). This will scarcely persuade Italians that there is an alternative to the tarnished, ineffectual Mr Berlusconi.
http://www.economist.com/node/18073418?story_id=18073418&CFID=155309372&CFTOKEN=24092953
Nessun commento:
Posta un commento