Chinese Circus
You’ll marvel, you’ll tremble, you’ll shake with laughter!
If clocks and calendars can still be trusted, Italy’s next elections are 33 days, 16 hours and 26 minutes away. As we have subtly attempted to suggest with our choice of an illustration, the confusion is great and the absurdity level somewhat higher than usual.
Before we really get into that though, we need to touch briefly on a little update. Faithful readers will know that “Upper Italy” did not much admire the former Minister of Justice, Mr. Clemente Mastella, a classic “machine” politician about whom we said when he was sworn in (here) that his principal legal qualification was on the practical side, having mostly to do with experience in staying out of jail.
Then we mentioned (here) that he had been sand-bagged by a group of “crusading” magistrates who arrested his wife for political corruption and announced that their Minister (the Ministry of Justice exists largely to, ah, administer justice) was under investigation for related crimes.
Mastella, rather understandably, then picked up his political marbles and left the game, causing the Prodi Government to fall (here), which appears to have been the point of the exercise – or was at least the practical and predictable outcome.
Now that Mastella is gone, the papers today announced that the most sensational of the charges against him have been formally quashed because, ah, er, there was no evidence to support them. Some other, lesser, investigations of his actions are still open; they will eventually come to nothing.
We pretty much called this one, having said (here): “Since the question is almost entirely political, very little information is available on the nature of the case against Mastella and his wife. It might be fairly said in fact that their actual guilt or innocence in relation to the charges is not a question of much interest.”
But if we got that one right, we may have been less clever about the new Partito Democratico when we commented (here) about a year ago that it looked like a non-starter and suggested that it was “more likely to be a new label for a coalition than a political party in the conventional sense.”
Whether we were really completely wrong is something that will emerge over time, but for the moment the new “Democratic Party,” with its leader Walter Veltroni, is one of the two main protagonists of the upcoming elections and is so far holding together surprisingly well.
Mr. Veltroni is a “zero content” man after the fashion of American politics, something Italy finds a refreshing change. In practice. he says nothing whatever about how the Country is to be governed should his side actually win the next elections. This is part of his appeal since, at least, he appears not to be lying about anything of substance.
His is a campaign entirely built out of sound bites and symbolic gestures of one kind or another. He has taken not leaves but entire chapters from the book first written in Italy by his opponent, former Prime-Minister Silvio Berlusconi, and has thus far done a surprisingly good job of rendering conceivable, if not a victory for his team, at least a decent showing.
The unification of the more or less moderate Left into the Partito Democratico (PD) has paved the way for simplification on the Right as well, allowing Berlusconi to fold some allies – while discarding others – into a new and newly unified party called the Popolo della Libertà – which might be rendered a bit too literally as “People for Liberty” – and whose acronym is “PdL.”
This is intellectually satisfying; it is much more entertaining to watch a “PD” and a “PdL” go at each other with hammers and tongs than to study the more usual worm wrassle of many dozens of little parties writhing together in the mud.
On the other hand, neither of the two new formations are solid enough to survive electoral defeat – and may turn out to be just as vulnerable to a success, if it comes to that.
These are parliamentary elections, but the actual parliamentary candidates matter hardly at all since voting is purely by party lists. Mr. Berlusconi underlined this quite clearly the other day when he explained that in the event of obtaining a majority, he only really needed “around thirty real parliamentarians, all the rest need only to do what they are told.” This interesting comment was reported but – symptomatically – did not attract much attention.
Though many things are wrong in some ideal way with all of this, the foundations have been laid for one of the most interesting Italian elections in a good while. It is art rather than science; two men, with all the resources either can muster, are painting impressionist pictures of what they are about and the crowd will then be allowed to choose which canvas it likes better.
Up to this point, and to the surprise of many, Walter Veltoni and his organization have seemed to be doing the better job at this. Berlusconi looks and sounds tired – he is in his seventies – and has been remarkably quiet. This may in part be strategy, since at the moment it is looking very much like the Left has peaked too early. “Il Berlusca,” as he is popularly known, may simply and more efficiently be waiting to score all his points in a single rushed month. We’ll see.
The papers here almost universally favor Veltroni – or perhaps it might be better said that they are almost universally terrified of Berlusconi and would prefer any alternative at all. They have even been pretending that the former Mayor of Rome – Veltroni’s last job – is charismatic, a conception which requires a very considerable stretch of the imagination.
On the other hand, all this makes relatively little difference. The relation between things written in the press and public opinion is even more tenuous in Italy that it is in the rest of the West. Newspapers are not much read and are on the whole even less trusted.
And Berlusconi has done himself some damage. In the past he has enjoyed considerable female electoral support, at least partially because of his self-promotion as a virile tombeur de femme – a “layer of women,” though the expression, ah, sounds better in French. But as he has finally begun to age less gracefully, some of this has transmuted image-wise into “dirty old man.”
Further, though Italians expect wealthy and powerful men to play around, and indeed would wonder a bit if they did not, Mr. Berlusconi has been sloppy about this and has broken an unwritten law. You can screw around as long as your signora is not placed in conditions that require her to take notice, but he forgot that. His very public drooling over women with large breasts has caused considerable embarrassment to his wife, Veronica, who finally had to take pen in hand and write an open letter inviting him to straighten-up.
She sent this to the leading leftist daily, Rome’s La Repubblica, which splashed it across the front page. This was of course irresistibile, so we’ve already gone over it (here).
Well, that’s fine, but who is going to win? The leftist government which has just fallen, that of Romano Prodi, did such an appalling job and so thoroughly terrified the Italian electorate that it would require nearly a suspension of natural law for them to get in again.
The truth though is that Berlusconi’s side is not much more popular. Still, no credible alternative exists and we are probably going to get these people back, if perhaps by a narrower margin than might be expected.
But there is objective information about all this, serious stuff from an impeccable source. British bookies have been taking bets on the outcome, as they usually do. They of course do not depend on dubious opinion polls or the opinion of pundits to set odds. These are fixed mathematically by laying off the bets of very large numbers of concerned experts – the bettors – who feel they know enough to reliably pick a winner.
At the moment, one euro on Silvio Berlusconi will bring you €1.35 if he is victorious. Walter Veltroni instead is going at 4 to 1 against. That is money where mouth is…