The Fever Breaks
The Economist, summing up on the cover of its European edition
As anyone who cares enough to read “Upper Italy” certainly knows, the Italian elections have delivered an unusually clear verdict and Mr. Silvio Berlusconi has won in a walk-away. “The Economist,” which does not like him much, celebrated his victory with an unpleasant cover on its European edition, a savage leader and a long and violently negative article. The “World” cover instead just carried the subtle teaser “God help Italy.”
“Italians may come to regret electing Silvio Berlusconi once again,” the paper thunders, introducing its editorial. That is very likely true. The Economist itself usually comes to regret the politicians it admires, most recently the English Prime Minister Tony Blair.
Italy’s once and future Premier probably laughed himself silly when told about the comment. He walked up and down the backs of his Center-Left opponents with – roughly, we are simplifying, but you don’t want to know why or how – 47 per cent of the popular vote to a slender, not quite 38 per cent taken away by the other side.
With a lesser but significant exception that we’ll get to down the page, all this went very much as we expected – though you’ll have to take our word for that since, aside from pointing out that “il Berlusca” was an odds-on favorite, we never came right out and said he was going to win and by “X” margin.
We were especially clever in counting on the “Lega Nord” – the “Northern League” xenophobes (relatively mild ones) – to do well. Most observers had written off its chances since the party’s charismatic leader, Umberto Bossi, suffered a debilitating stroke a few years ago – that’s (here). The League took 8.3 per cent nationally (though it is not actually present in most of the country) and in some parts of the North is now the dominant party.
But if we got the elections right, we completely failed to call the aftermath. Something very strange and, for us anyway, utterly unpredictable has happened.
The fever has broken.
We expected the Left to scream like eagles (an Italian figure of speech) about how the election had been “stolen,” to claim that Berlusconi had unfairly used his great wealth and private television empire to pull the wool once again over the eyes of the Italian public. That was, by the way, more or less the Economist’s take on the matter.
We expected shouting, jumping up and down and much gnashing of teeth, stories in the papers about people lining up at immigration offices to leave the country forever and mime troupes in the streets acting out Berlusconi’s possible assassination. We expected the Right to threaten every kind of “take no prisoners” purge and to rattle on endlessly about how it has saved the country from the red menace. We expected, in other words, all the usual trappings of Italian political dialogue.
Instead the nearly universal reaction has been, both among Berlusconi’s fans and not: “Oh well, at least somebody won. Let’s hope he does a better job this time. Shall we slip out for a coffee?”
Very nearly all of Italy’s most unpleasant politicians – and not just on the Left – have been completely swept away by the tide and, though these people have the lives of a cat, many are likely not to return.
That is the thing we got wrong. We didn’t foresee the disappearance from Parliament of the “Refounded Communist Party” – “Rifondazione comunista” – which failed to make the cut-off of five per cent of the vote necessary for representation. It’s likeable if fatuous leader, Mr. Fausto Bertinotti, will retire. His detestable deputy, Franco Giordano, who publicly believed his “pacifism” required Italian forces in Afghanistan not to go to the aid of any allies – he cited the British – who came under fire, is now simply unemployed.
The very sleazy Alfonso Pecoraro Scanio, a “green” politician (and Minister) who would say anything at all that came into his broad mouth so long as it got him into the papers, is gone, along with Clemente Mastella, the former Minister of Justice whose early training consisted of staying out of jail. Mr. Francesco Storace, a neo-fascist politician who makes Mussolini look like a dangerous liberal, did not make the cut, though his personal political machine in the Rome area will probably keep him employed in some capacity.
We’re not even going to tell you about a person named Oliviero Diliberto.
Mr. Pierferdinando Casini, a Christian Democrat sort of politician (by which we mean an especially shameless hypocrite) and a former ally of Berlusconi who felt that the Boss was jealous of his personal beauty – that’s (here) – scraped his way back into Parliament, but has been reduced to irrelevance.
It is kind of a shame to see the departure of Mr/Ms Vladimir Luxuria, the country’s leading transvestite politician, since he/she lent a note of color to parliamentary proceedings – (here) and (here) – that will be missed. Sometimes though the baby just has to go out with the bath water.
All this is very heartening, and that is not even the complete list. We don’t want to bore you with a lot of names you have – very appropriately – never heard before.
What happened is that the electoral law everyone has been grumbling about – we did too – worked exactly as it was supposed to. It delivered a clean majority.
Now all that’s needed is for this to matter. As we have pointed out often enough, Silvio Berlusconi is a brilliant campaigner but he is not very good at actually governing. We are all hoping – the whole country is, Left and Right – that having got his personal legal problems out of the way the last time around, he may now wish to concentrate on attempting to get into the history books not as a bizarre footnote, but as “Silvio the Wise” or something like that.
Since seeing Italy become reasonable overnight about politics is something we certainly never expected, wisdom from Silvio Berlusconi cannot be completely ruled out. It is merely unlikely.