Aliens Drinking and Driving
Warning! Visual Metaphor
It is sometimes said that a picture is worth a thousand words. “Upper Italy” hopes that’s true because we’re about to get something approaching a thousand words out of the interesting image above.
The perception that this is the kind of “crop circle” that would be left behind by aliens on psilocybin is not far off the mark. The snap, from a Dutch police helicopter, shows the traces left in a corn field by a drug user who was attempting to escape from police in his father’s automobile. The man had been using substantial quantities of cocaine, as is perhaps evident. According to news reports, four patrol cars were damaged – not to mentioned what happened to a lot of corn – in the attempt to keep the coke-head off the public highway. The chase finally ended when he ran his car into a ditch.
Well, after a huge amount of useless bobbing and weaving, of aimlessly driving around, Italian Prime Minister Romano Prodi has now run into a ditch and has become – more or less officially – a lame duck.
As is so often the case, he did this to himself. We have already mentioned, slightingly – (here) – his ill-considered attempt to build himself a political base with the creation of a “Democratic Party” – “Partito Democratico” – to operate as a unified electoral vehicle on the Left.
Mr. Prodi had expected to dominate this, but in a perhaps excessive display of democracy also explained that the members of the new party would be allowed to choose their secretary through a system of primary elections.
He appears to have had in mind the kind of party secretary that Americans are used to, a semi-anonymous functionary whose job is to keep the organizational wheels turning while the “real” leaders are off governing the country and wheeling and dealing in the halls of Parliament. The more usual model is of course that the leader of the winningest political party gets to become Prime Minister. This is the picture in most of the larger European parliamentary democracies and now seems to be the way Prodi’s own coalition partners are seeing things as well.
Mr. Prodi has been blind-sided by the emergence of a candidate for the leadership of the new party who is far more popular than he is. That is Mr. Walter Veltroni, the Mayor of Rome. Being more popular than Prodi is no great accomplishment at the moment, but the Prime Minister apparently failed to appreciate how really terrified the parties in his coalition are of the political grave he has been digging for them. The mere mention of Veltroni’s name seemed to suddenly coagulate the internal opposition to Prodi and Rome’s mayor was immediately and universally acclaimed as a shoe-in for the job. That is, at least for the moment…
So here is Prodi’s problem: If the Left gains any significant support out of the use of the Veltroni name, as the polls appear to suggest, that success will be Mr. Veltroni’s and a distressing display of lack of faith in the Prime Minister. If it does not, the failure will instead continue to be that of Romano Prodi. Either way, Prodi – whose enthusiasm for the process seems to be waning – cannot now back away from all this because it was his idea.
We said above that Mr. Prodi – who is not a particularly clever politician – did this to himself. That is true. On the other hand, he certainly had help. The architect would appear to be the cunning and dangerous Foreign Minister, Mr. Massimo D’Alema, who has already dramatically betrayed Prodi in the past – see (here). D’Alema, whose eternal defect is that he is always too clever by half, may think he is killing two birds with one stone by sandbagging Prodi while simultaneously tying his own main competitor for the leadership of the Left, precisely Mr. Veltroni, to a sinking ship.
This last observation depends on the fact that in the present mood of the country even the affable Mayor of Rome is not likely to save the governing coalition from the vendetta of the unhappy electorate when the Government finally is allowed to crumble into its constituent pieces. D’Alema’s is a dangerous gamble though. He has either finally dealt himself out of the big game – that’s if Veltroni pulls off a miracle – or he has helped his own side stumble to a new defeat in case the Roman mayor does not manage his trick.
The “last man standing” approach to political competition is one of the primary defects of the Italian system, which believes politics is about choosing leaders rather than choosing and executing policies. Massimo D’Alema may well come out of it all still on his feet, but if he does it will be over the cadavers of Left “moderates” like Veltroni and Prodi.