Berlusconi is taking revenge cursing everyone around him

Silvio Berlusconi is taking revenge cursing everyone around him

http://www.economist.com/news/europe/21565674-silvio-berlusconi-taking-revenge-cursing-everyone-around-him-bribesville-ii?fsrc=nlw|hig|11-1-2012|4003157|106923250|AP

Nov 3rd 2012 | from the print edition

ITALIAN politics has come full circle since the day in 1994 when Silvio Berlusconi announced that he would enter politics: “The old Italian political class has been overwhelmed by events and overtaken. The self-destruction of the old rulers, crushed by the weight of public debt and the system of illegal financing of political parties, left the country unprepared and uncertain in the difficult time of renewal and the transition to a new Republic.”
The footage of the dashing entrepreneur promising hope, renewal and good government now seems surreal. These days it is Mr Berlusconi who, having dominated Italian politics for nearly two decades, personifies a tired old political class. He is even more discredited by scandal than his predecessors. He has only added to Italy’s burden of debt. And he leaves a wreckage that hampers Italy’s recovery from its financial and economic crisis. The “second republic” that he embodied is dying; the third republic that will follow is uncertain.
Though he surrendered the prime ministership last year to a technocratic government led by Mario Monti, Mr Berlusconi poses a danger in his political death-throes. In his latest TV appearance, a waxen-faced Mr Berlusconi (some thought he resembled Egypt’s ailing former president Hosni Mubarak) cursed all around him. Just a few days earlier he had announced he would not stand for election again, to help the creation of a grand centre-right alliance. In private he had even asked Mr Monti to lead it. Now he denounced Mr Monti for bringing recession; and Germany for its hegemony. Above all, Mr Berlusconi took aim at the judiciary, after a court had sentenced him to four years in prison for tax fraud. As with his previous three convictions (two overturned on appeal and one lapsed thanks to the statute of limitations) he is unlikely ever to go to jail. He still faces another trial on charges of paying an under-age girl for sex. What especially offended Mr Berlusconi was the judges’ view that he had “a natural capacity to commit crime”. Mr Berlusconi certainly has a knack for grabbing headlines and causing trouble. He warned that his People of Liberty (PdL) party could vote down Mr Monti, in effect disowning his senior PdL lieutenants who had been trying to regroup under the aura of the respected professor. The talk in Rome is that Mr Berlusconi may launch a new and more Eurosceptic party, reclaiming the old name of “Forza Italia” (some mock it as “Forza Silvio”). If so, expect a season of bitter infighting. Italian politics is thus returning to the chaos of the early 1990s when the ruling class was shattered by corruption scandals. Then, as today, Italy faced a financial crisis and crashed out of the euro’s precursor, the Exchange Rate Mechanism. Then, as today, Italy sought salvation in a technocrat, Carlo Azeglio Ciampi, the governor of the Bank of Italy. At least there are no mafia bombs now.
The 1990s Tangentopoli (Bribesville) scandal had been mostly about financing political parties using kickbacks for public contracts; now it is more about private enrichment with taxpayers’ money. In the 1990s the ex-communists offered an alternative, and Mr Berlusconi espoused a free-market alternative to the feared left. These days the opposition Democratic Party, heir to the communists, is less implicated in scandal but hardly immune. It is in decline, not least because of its internal power struggles and its unwillingness to dump more radical allies.
The election on October 28th in Sicily was a warning of wider fragmentation. The PdL, once unchallenged there, came third in the ballot for the regional assembly and, in a separate vote, its candidate for the governorship came second. More than half the voters abstained. Of the ballots cast, the biggest number (15%) went to the Five-Star “movement” of a comedian, Beppe Grillo, whose web-fired campaign denounces all parties and promises not to ally with any of them. Mr Grillo is alarmingly thin on policies and wants a referendum on leaving the euro. Some call his movement the “anti-party”; others the “Fuck Off party”.
Monti descends from the mountain
Amid disgust and disintegration, the softly spoken Mr Monti seeks to bring some sobriety. Despite austerity and other unpopular reforms, opinion polls show many Italians give him grudging support. Mr Monti says he has defied the curse of Jean-Claude Juncker, the prime minister of Luxembourg, who famously noted: “We all know what to do, we just don’t know how to get re-elected after we have done it.”
Yet Mr Monti’s popularity is partly due to the fact that he does not intend to run in the general election, scheduled for April. He, too, is an anti-party figure of sorts. And the rise of Mr Grillo raises the chances of Mr Monti staying on after the election, if not as prime minister then perhaps as president of the republic. Enlisting Mr Monti again may reassure markets and European partners, but it would be another indictment of Italian politicians.
Restoring Italy to health will be long and hard, requiring the legitimacy of a proper government. A better option would be for mainstream parties to show that politics can work. They should commit themselves to preserving, and indeed furthering, the “Monti agenda” of fiscal discipline and liberalising the economy.
Mr Monti will soon have to take a big decision: should he trigger the European Central Bank’s offer to help push down Italy’s borrowing costs by applying for a euro-zone bail-out and submitting to an externally monitored EU reform programme? Like Spain, Italy fears humiliation and the prospect that markets will see it as even more of a problem. But such is the uncertainty that many leading figures, across the spectrum, think he should take the risk as the best way of enshrining the “Monti agenda”. Even sensible Italian politicians worry they cannot be trusted to reform on their own.
^{Economist.com/blogs/charlemagne}