The Public is Stupid
Mortadella throw rug. The green spots are meant to be pistachios.
The popularity of Romano Prodi’s center-left government has fallen off a cliff. Research commissioned by the Rome daily “La Repubblica” – a paper that is supposed to be very close to Prodi – shows that its “trust” rating among the Italian public at large has collapsed from 63% in July to around 45% in mid-October. It appears to be still spiralling downward.
Most of this has to do with a botched budget and tax bill which was imposed on Mr. Prodi – who has no personal political base of his own, and so only the weakest “internal” defenses – by the labor unions and by the more leftist parties of his wobbly coalition.
This legislation was announced in terms of “social justice.” It was time, the bill’s more radical supporters proclaimed, to “make the rich cry too.” That would have been, perhaps, OK, but then quite a large section of Italy’s population – including the part that thought it belonged to the middle class – discovered to its very great surprise that it too had been redefined as “rich” and all hell broke loose.
Mr. Prodi’s main alliance partners are now more or less pretending that they didn’t, ah, er, actually have much to do with the bill – or if they did that their position has been misinterpreted and that what might have been thought to have been their unquestioning support for it was actually a rather critical view and that of course they’d be quite willing to reconsider the whole question.
Prime Minister Prodi has, in other words, mostly been left twisting in the wind by his allies.
Not one of course to take such a thing laying down, he then mumbled an interview to the Spanish paper “El Pais” explaining that he was the object of a plot – he did not say on the part of whom – and that the press was “out to get him.”
Unfortunately, the memory that these were also the two main themes of Center-Right premier Silvio Berlusconi whenever he got into trouble was still too fresh. Prodi’s explanation for his difficulties inspired more laughter than sympathy – particularly because it is fairly clear that, to the degree that it can, much of the press is leaning pretty nearly backwards to try to give the man a break. Unfortunately he is largely hopeless.
However all that may be, Mr. Prodi has topped himself. In an attempt to dimiss the poor survey results we mentioned at the top of this note, he has now explained – and we quote very carefully – that: “Public opinion is more intelligent than it looks, and I am absolutely tranquil about this”.
Since the Prodi government exists on the basis of a razor thin parliamentary majority – and since a certain number of rats are visibly jockeying to abandon the sinking ship – the conviction that the new government’s days are already numbered is spreading.
Though we may be wrong, “Upper Italy” has another take on this situation. It’s true that the Prodi government appears to be dead in the water, but we really can’t quite see who has an interest in bringing it down. Silvio Berlusconi might want to, but his main allies are not at all in agreement. They would like to see the Left looking even worse than it does now when they finally go to elections and, perhaps above all, they would like to see Mr. Berlusconi himself mostly out of politics by the time that happens.
Prodi’s own unfaithful allies are in no real hurry to get themselves into the same kind of trouble he is already in. Many of the problems he is facing are not of his own making – and in too many cases have no real solution. If someone has to take the heat, then let’s leave that to the mortadella – see (here) – they appear to think.
There is a nice and not quite translatable figure of speech in Italian that goes: “Vai avanti tu, che mi viene da ridere”. Literally, it means “You go first, I can’t stop laughing.” The sense is ironic…