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Berlusconi suffers local election wipeout

by Open-Publishing - Monday 11 April 2005
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Elections-Elected Governments Italy

By Peter Popham in Rome

Silvio Berlusconi has suffered the gravest electoral
rout of his political life this week, with his centre-
right coalition losing power in 11 regions from the far
north of the peninsula to the heel of the boot.

The regional elections appeared to have been blotted
out of the nation’s consciousness by the death of the
Pope, but in the event turnout was high at 71 per cent.
And the result was freely admitted to have been a
disaster by commentators on the right as well as the
left.

Mr Berlusconi, closeted in Villa Arcore, his palatial
home outside Milan, blamed everyone but himself.

"Now I really want to see," he was quoted as growling
down the phone to a close ally, "how my two deputy
premiers are going to explain themselves! It was their
fault that we didn’t play as a team. Self-criticism?
It’s the others who have to explain why they behaved in
this fashion!"

It was a remarkable upset for the media billionaire who
transformed Italian politics by launching his Forza
Italia party 12 years ago, and whose government has
ruled for longer than any other Italian government
since the war. Mr Berlusconi has discovered that
domination of 95 per cent of the nation’s television
output - enabling him to appear on talk shows that are
in effect three-hour political broadcasts for himself -
was not enough to quench growing dissatisfaction with
his government’s performance.

The "House of Liberties" coalition has now lost three
regional and European elections in a row, each more
decisively than the one before. The next general
election is scheduled for the spring of 2006. Tony
Blair’s strongest European ally will need to move
heaven and earth if he is to avoid a wipe-out.

The only consolation for the centre-right was that the
candidate of the secessionist Northern League, a
partner in the coalition, managed to hang on to
Lombardy by a slender margin. Elsewhere the pattern was
uniformly bleak.

Massimo Giannini of La Repubblica newspaper saw the
loss of the other prosperous region, Piemonte, as bad
news for Mr Berlusconi. The professionals and factory
owners of the region, he said, "had entrusted Italy’s
keys to ’the Entrepreneur’ [Berlusconi], convinced he
would open the gates to an economic Eldorado". The loss
of the region, he said spelt "the end of the dream".

Italy’s economy has been stagnant for months; the only
firms to have benefited from four years of Berlusconism
are those controlled by his family.

But the news from the far south, traditional heartland
of the post-Fascist Alleanza Nazionale, was no more
cheering. In Puglia the winner was Niki Vendola, a
Catholic gay communist and member of the Rifondazione
Comunista, one of Italy’s two communist parties.

The fact that Mr Vendola’s triumph is also a potential
long-term problem for the centre-left - crucially
ditched by the Rifondazione the last time they were in
government - does not detract from the embarrassment of
his triumph. Mr Berlusconi is a visceral enemy of
communists, attacking them at every opportunity. After
the Puglia result came in, Gianfranco Fini, leader of
Alleanza Nazionale and the second most important man in
the government, said: "If we want to return to win, we
must give up this crusade against communism."

The rest of Europe may have left communism behind years
ago, but Mr Vendola proved it is still a force to
reckon with in Italy.

Mr Berlusconi’s leaked comments make it clear that he
hopes to use the defeat to read the riot act to his
coalition allies. The problem with this strategy is
that his own party, Forza Italia, has fared far worse
than the others in the coalition. As James Walston,
professor of politics at the American University in
Rome, put it: "It’s more likely that they will read the
riot act to him."

The result was "an earthquake, it’s extraordinary. It’s
a serious wake-up call to Berlusconi and his people",
Professor Walston said.

"It shows the depth of dissatisfaction, which until now
no one had understood. It’s not the style of
Berlusconi’s government that is the problem but the
substance: the fact that it hasn’t delivered. My
suspicion is that he’s close to his sell-by date."

http://news.independent.co.uk/europe/story.jsp?story=626816

Forum posts

  • Recall the domino theory of the Vietnam era that the militarists were so fond of...

    First, Spain, next Berlusconi, Blair, Bush. The B’s maybe should take up backgammon as the dominoes are stacking up against them.