Falling from No Great Height
A certain sense of freedom, but…
It is a sucker’s game to pontificate on short-term outcomes which are, after all, either going to happen or not. We prudently did not bother in our last note to point out that Italy’s Government was about to fall, but it is fair to say this was very widely expected – by most of the country and not just by us.
The Government went down in the worst possible way, done in by scandals and incompetence to the last squalling moment. Prime Minister Romano Prodi – “out of coherence, not bloody-mindedness” – decided to force a no-confidence vote that everyone but he understood he would lose. He did. He deserved to.
Forcing a confidence vote that you cannot win is substantially like playing out a chess game with your King hopelessly in check rather than simply – and much more elegantly – conceding defeat. In essence, it happens for the same reason. One of the players is simply too dumb to figure out that in four moves the game is all over. Sometimes, in parliamentary politics at least, it is also done for revenge, just to create more bad feelings than are really necessary, a mechanism more nobly described as “making people face up to their responsibilities.”
Romano Prodi is not a clever politician. He is also small-minded and vindictive, so both motivations probably came into play here. It is as well likely he was made to understand he would not be asked to attempt to form a new government – his chances of managing to do so were probably below zero – so he may have felt that creating as much confusion and political pain as possible might allow him to lengthen somewhat that interregnum where he will stay on to handle day to day affairs until a new executive can either be formed or, if necessary, elected.
So Italy now has a government whose highest exponent has been shown to be a complete fool and who has the confidence of no part of the political spectrum, including what is nominally his own side.
Attempts will be made to replace the Prime Minister and his Cabinet with a “technical” or “institutional” government, a theoretically apolitical construct intended to stay in office just long enough to work out a new electoral system so that disasters like the Prodi executive can be avoided in the future.
We of course will eventually see what really happens, but at the moment the odds are against this solution. The only reason it might work is that it is now exceedingly clear that the Italian electorate feels a deep and visceral hatred for politicians of any stripe – including those of the opposition, very widely considered to be no better than the present lot. There is no telling at all what might occur if the populace is given a chance to express this opinion in the voting booths.
It is worth remembering that the present electoral code, which will be blamed for much of what has taken place, was the result of utterly incompetent attempts by the preceding Berlusconi Government to gerrymander its way to political survival…