Fool Italia

Last Wednesday, Italy's richest citizen and prime minister Silvio Berlusconi tended his resignation, effectively collapsing the government. He quickly re-formed his base on Sunday the 23rd, but in Italy – a country where the instability and fecklessness of the government is a national joke – for their longest-serving prime minister to be in such danger is quite an event.

First of all, everyone knows Italy is one of the world’s greatest manufacturer of elections, but just why is Italian politics such a mess? The system for electing members of parliament has single-member districts for 75% of the seats; the remaining 25% are allotted on a proportional basis. This results in a confusing hodgepodge of parties and organizations on Left, Right and Center, as the cutoff point for a parliamentary seat is very low and practically anyone can get into the Chamber of Deputies (in 2001, no less than a dozen parties had seats) Who ends up in the government can seem almost random, as everyone scrambles to form some kind of government. Not surprisingly, these partnerships rarely last long, and Italy has had 60 governments in the 60 years since the end of World War II.

Berlusconi came to power in 2001 with the Forza Italia (Hooray for Italy) party, forming a governing coalition called the Casa della Liberta (House of Liberty). He’s lasted a surprisingly long time; longer than any other Italian government since Mussolini. But now it looks like his days are numbered.

Times have been tough for Silvio. He was already under fire for his conservative views, support of the Iraq war, and the conflict of interest between Berlusconi being head of the government and his ownership of major Italian media, but then there were the massive corruption charges and legal battles, including (but not limited to):
- perjury
- false accounting
- embezzlement
- tax fraud (oh, but who in Italy doesn’t cheat on their taxes?)
- bribing a judge
- bribing a member of the Italian financial police
- various and sundry Mafia ties

The courts even went so far as it convict Berlusconi of several of these charges and sentence him to prison, but the convictions were overturned on some complicated legal issue relating to him being Prime Minister. Still, people said it was only a matter of time before the Berlusconi name would become more of a curse than a blessing, and his supporters would start to abandon him.

And that’s precisely what happened. Recently, his party (and those allied with it) lost 12 of 14 regional elections to the Left bloc know as the Olive Branch (I’m not sure if that pun works in Italian), spreading doubts about whether Berlusconi can hold together much longer. Then the Union of Christian Democrats, the smallest party in the governing coalition, defected, breaking the House of Liberty majority in parliament. We’ll just have to wait and see if the Left can have a government that lasted as long as Berlusconi’s did, or whether this will simply start the yearly cycle of governmental collapse Italy is used to.

I never thought old Silvio had much of a chance; Italy is a very left-wing country, and while they were willing to elect a conservative government in return for some order and stability, his heavy-handed way of doing things was just too much. The same was true in Spain a few years ago, and, in fact, it remains true in most of the democratic world. Some kind of Danger arises, the Right promises to battle it and either does or does not deal with the issue better than the Left, but once the Danger is over people yell “Throw the rascals out!” and the Left comes back in. Of course, there is always more Danger (and more frequently, an Issue or even a Problem), otherwise the government would never change. Democracy is a beautiful thing.