Category Archives: Sicily

The role of Italy’s south in this weekend’s election

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Although Lombardy in Italy’s north has been called the ‘Ohio’ of Italian politics — it’s a huge prize, given that it’s the most populous and richest region, and one of the few regions currently too close to call — Sicily might well be the ‘Florida’ of Italian politics.Italy Flag Icon

It’s the fourth-most populous region of Italy, after Lombardy, Lazio and Campania, and with 27 seats in the Senato (Senate), it’s quite a prize.  Like Lombardy, Sicily is essentially a toss-up in this weekend’s Italian general election.  Voting is underway today and will continue throughout Monday.

In addition to Sicily, the election remains close in three additional southern regions, in Campania (29 seats), Puglia (20 seats) and Calabria (10 seats) — polls, as of mid-February, showed the centrosinistra (center-left) coalition headed by Pier Luigi Bersani with a very narrow lead.  Taken together, the four regions boast 86 seats, representing more than half the seats Bersani will need to form a senatorial majority — a far larger prize than even Lombardy’s 49 seats.

Taken together, the four regions are Italy’s poorest, nearly one-half as wealthy as Lombardy, and plagued by widespread unemployment, even before the latest European financial crisis — the four regions receive funds from the European Regional Development Fund to stimulate economic growth and modernize their economies.  Since Italian unification in 1865, southern Italy never fully integrated into the rest of Italy, and governments for the past century have tried to develop plans to bring southern Italy’s economy up to a level more commensurate with northern and central Italy.

In addition to their economic and cultural gap with the rest of Italy, the regions are hampered by their links to organized crime — the Mafia / Cosa Nostra in Sicily, the Camorra in Campania, the ‘Ndrangheta in Calabria and, to a lesser degree, Sacra Corona Unita in Puglia. That, in turn, has led to greater amounts of political corruption, cresting in 1992 with the murders of anti-mafia magistrates Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino.

Despite the south’s central role in the election, there’s not much indication that any government would necessarily do much for the south, especially in an era of budget cuts.

All four regions typically favor the center-right in Italian politics — former prime minister Silvio Berlusconi’s centrodestra (center-right) coalition won all four regions in 2008 and even in the 2006 elections, when center-left prime minister Romano Prodi returned to power, his coalition lost both Sicily and Puglia.  Despite the strength of the autonomist Lega Nord (Northern League) in northern regions, such as Veneto and Lombardy, there’s not much of a counterpart in the mezzogiorno.  To the extent there’s a separate ‘southernist’ autonomist movement in the southern regions, it’s split among a group of shifting regional parties that routinely aligned with the centrodestra, and that continues to be the case in this election — a patchwork of southern parties, Grande Sud (Great South), has joined Berlusconi’s coalition, making them, oddly enough, electoral allies of the Northern League.

The winner in each region is important under Italy’s election rules — in each region, the party or coalition that wins the greatest number of votes is guaranteed 55% of the senatorial seats from that region.  So in a highly fragmented election like the 2013 elections, Bersani’s centrosinistra coalition could win 30% of the vote and still take 55% of the seats in a given region.

In the Italian parliament’s lower house, the winner of the national vote is guaranteed 54% of all seats, and polls show that Bersani is very likely to win the national vote.  In contrast, however, the regional rules for the upper house mean that he’s far from guaranteed a majority in the Senato, and so may be forced to form a government with prime minister Mario Monti’s pro-reform centrist coalition.

In this weekend’s election, however, the left has hope that if it can sweep Lombardy and the key southern regions, it will have a shot at winning a clear senatorial majority: Continue reading The role of Italy’s south in this weekend’s election

Crocetta to become Sicily’s first openly-gay, first leftist president

I wasn’t entirely sure he could pull it off, but the unlikely Rosario Crocetta will become Sicily’s first openly-gay regional president and likely the first leftist to have won a clear mandate in one of Italy’s most culturally and politically conservative regions.sicily flag

According to preliminary results, the center-left coalition backing Crocetta has won 30.48% and 39 seats in Sicily’s 90-member regional parliament, giving it a plurality of seats, but something short of an absolute majority.

Crocetta’s victory in Sicily makes the former Gela mayor Italy’s second openly gay regional president — he joins leftist Nichi Vendola, the president of Puglia (also in southern Italy).  This is a bit of a shocker given Sicily’s incredibly conservative bent, and the region has been consistently governed by center-right politicians and centrists alike, but never by a former Communist Party member.

Through the early 2000s, Crocetta was a member of the Partito della Rifondazione Comunista (Communist Refoundation Party).  Although many PRC members joined moderate social democrats and centrists to form what’s now Italy’s largest center-left political party, the Partito Democratico (PD, Democratic Party), in 2007, Crocetta certainly comes from the more radical leftist tradition.  Interestingly enough, so does Vendola, who was elected as Puglia’s regional president in 2005 from the PRC and subsequently reelected.  Vendola, who has future national political hopes, and who seems likely to play a  role in Italy’s upcoming national elections in early 2013, has formed his own leftist party — Sinistra Ecologia Libertà (SEL, Left Ecology Freedom).

Not only is Crocetta’s victory a watershed moment for Italy’s left, it’s a victory for Sicily’s courageous anti-mafia forces.  In a region where politics and organized crime are often two sides of the same coin, Crocetta was an anti-mafia crusader as the former mayor of Gela, Sicily’s sixth-largest city, working to convince local businesses not to pay protection money to the Sicilian mafia.  In fact, he was such a stridently anti-mafia mayor that he’s been the subject of several assassination plots and has been living outside of Gela since 2009.

Meanwhile, the center-right coalition led by European Parliament member Nello Musumeci has won just 25.73% and 21 seats.

The surprisingly strong third-place winner was the new anti-austerity protest party, the Movimento 5 Stelle (M5S, Five Star Movement), led nationally by the comedian and blogger Beppe Grillo — who swam across the Strait of Messina from the Italian peninsula to Sicily to kick off the party’s regional campaign.  Giancarlo Cancelleri, the presidential candidate backed by the Five Star Movement, won 18.18% and the party won 15 seats.

A center-right ‘Sicilianist’ coalition, essentially the coalition to which outgoing president Rafaelle Lombardo belongs, under the candidacy of Gianfranco Micciché won just 15.50% and 15 seats.  Lombardo resigned in July in the wake of charges of corruption and complicity with the Sicilian mafia, forcing early elections.

Although the Sicilian autonomist and center-right parties have governed together before, they won’t together command a majority of seats in Sicily’s regional parliament, meaning that the center-left will govern with a minority, likely with the outside support of Five Star Movement legislators, or even from the Sicilianist autonomists.  Continue reading Crocetta to become Sicily’s first openly-gay, first leftist president

Incredibly low turnout in Sicilian election

Counting hasn’t yet started in Sicily’s regional elections.

But the one thing we know so far is that the electorate was far from enthusiastic for Sunday’s vote — just over 47% of eligible voters turned out for the Sicilian elections, a decline from the nearly 67% turnout at the last election in 2008.

We’ll have some firm results on Monday.  In the meanwhile, check out the background on Sicily’s elections here.

Four key elections underway today in Ukraine, Italy, Lithuania and Brazil

It’s a quadruple-threat Sunday for world elections!

Ukraine: parliamentary elections. In Ukraine, voters will go to the polls for legislative elections to select 450 members of the unicameral parliament, the Verkhovna Rada.  The elections will be a key test for Ukraine’s fledgling democratic institutions eight years after the ‘Orange Revolution.’  Pro-Russian president Viktor Yanukovych, whose support is based in the eastern half of the country, is hoping to win an outright majority in a campaign that has been far from free and fair.  Two center-right groups are vying for the opposition vote — a bloc led by former prime minister and presidential candidate Yulia Tymoshenko, who has been imprisoned on politically-motivated charges and a new anti-corruption group led by heavyweight champion Vitaliy Klychko.  Unlike in the previous 2007 parliamentary elections (which were fully by proportional representation), today’s elections will be determined one-half by proportional representation and one-half through direct single-member districts.  That means the anti-Yanukovych vote could splinter, allowing the government to consolidate its control over Ukraine.  The election result will likely determine whether the former Soviet republic of 45 million people will continue its turn toward Europe as a potential European Union member.

Lithuania: parliamentary runoff. Nearby, in another former Soviet republic of just over three million people — Lithuania, voters return to the polls for a runoff after a vote two weeks ago that saw the triumph of two leftist parties: the populist Darbo Partija (DP, Labour Party), led by Russian-born Viktor Uspaskich, won 19.96% and the more center-left Lietuvos socialdemokratų partija (LSDP, Social Democratic Party of Lithuania) won 18.45%.  The governing Tėvynės sąjunga – Lietuvos krikščionys demokratai (TS-LKD, Homeland Union — Lithuanian Christian Democrats)  of prime minister Andrius Kubilius won just 14.93%, a defeat for Kubilius after a difficult campaign that reflected the realities of four years of grinding austerity and difficult economic conditions.  Half (70) of the seats in Lithuania’s unicameral parliament, the Seimas, were determined by the October 14 vote, while 71 more seats are determined in single-member districts, and many of those will be determined in today’s runoff vote. It’s virtually certain that the Social Democrats and Labour will form the next government, likely under the leader of the Social Democrats and former finance minister, Algirdas Butkevičius rather than the corruption-plagued Uspaskich, although either the Social Democrats or Labour may ultimately wind up with more seats after today’s vote.

São Paulo: mayoral runoff. In Brazil’s largest city, São Paulo, home to nearly 11 million people, voters will choose a mayor in a contest that will have implications for Brazil’s national politics.  Voters will choose between the top two candidates from the Oct. 14 vote: Fernando Haddad, the candidate of the Partido dos Trabalhadores (PT, Workers’ Party) of Brazilian president Dilma Rousseff and former president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, and a former education minister in Lula’s administration; and José Serra, the candidate of the center-right Partido da Social Democracia Brasileira (PSDB, the Brazilian Social Democracy Party), who lost the Brazilian presidency to Lula in 2002 and, more narrowly, in 2010 to Rousseff.  Serra, himself a former mayor of São Paulo from 2004 to 2006, when he won election as the governor of São Paulo state, despite a pledge to serve his entire term as mayor,  Serra led the vote two weeks ago with 30.75% to 28.99% for Haddad.  Serra and Haddad edged out Celso Russomanno, a famous television consumer advocate in the 1990s, with support from the evangelist Universal Church of the Kingdom of God, who had been the frontrunner throughout the campaign, who finished with just 21.6o%.  Polls show Haddad with a double-digit lead over Serra, however, which could effectively end Serra’s hopes for a third run at the presidency.

Sicily: regional parliamentary elections.  Finally, in the southern Italian region of Sicily, voters will select the 90 members of Sicily’s unicameral regional parliament.  Three parties are vying for the largest share of the vote, and 80 seats are awarded by proportional representation: a center-right coalition led by European parliament member Nello Musumeci and backed by former prime minister Silvio Berlusconi (who was convicted Friday for tax fraud) and his Popolo della Libertà (PdL, People of Freedom); a center-left coalition led by Rosario Crocetta (pictured above, top), the openly gay mafia-fighting former mayor of Gela (Sicily’s sixth-largest city); and the new anti-austerity protest party, the Movimento 5 Stelle (M5S, Five Star Movement) of blogger and comedian Beppe Grillo, who kicked off his party’s Sicily campaign by swimming across the Strait of Messina.  Radical leftists and a conservative Sicilianist/autonomist coalition are also expected to win significant support. The election is a significant test in advance of national elections expected to come in April 2013 following the technocratic government of prime minister Mario Monti, who has pledged not to run in his own right.

Today’s Sicilian elections showcase potential party strength before 2013 Italian election

Today, one of Italy’s most iconic regions — Sicily — goes to the polls to elect the 90 members of its regional legislature and, indirectly, a new regional president.

For all the beauty of its landscape, the majesty of its architecture and the divinity of its food and wine, Sicily, the home of the well known Cosa Nostra, the Sicilian organized crime group that has become synonymous with the word mafia, is not the world’s model showcase for good governance.

Sunday’s elections come six month early after the resignation on July 31 of regional president Raffaele Lombardo, who was elected overwhelmingly in 2008, but stepped down under a cloud of corruption — depressingly familiar charges of complicity with the Sicilian mafia.  The election also comes as a bit of a dress rehearsal for Italy’s expected upcoming general election (along with early elections expected soon in Lombardy as well) — just a couple days after former prime minister Silvio Berlusconi’s conviction in a Milan court for tax fraud.

Rosario Crocetta (pictured above, top), the leading leftist candidate for president and the mafia-fighting former mayor of Gela (Sicily’s sixth-largest city) would be Sicily’s first openly-gay regional president and has campaign marks the best chance of the center-left in a generation to govern Sicily.  But polling nearly as well as the broad center-right and the center-left is the new anti-austerity protest party, the Movimento 5 Stelle (M5S, Five Star Movement) of blogger and comedian Beppe Grillo — he made a splash by swimming across the Strait of Messina from the Italian peninsula to Sicily at the beginning of the campaign (pictured above, bottom).

In one way or another, each of the five main parties competing in today’s election in Sicily will be able to pull lessons from the result in advance of national elections that, although just six months away, remain incredibly fluid.

Italy’s technocratic prime minister Mario Monti, who was appointed in November 2011 to push through budget, tax and labor reforms in the midst of an Italian sovereign debt crisis, remains popular, but has said he won’t run in his own right for election (although could remain available to head a future technocratic government).

Berlusconi had pledged as recently as last Wednesday that he would not run for prime minister as the leader of his own center-right Popolo della Libertà (PdL, People of Freedom), though the unpredictable former prime minister has already said he plans on staying in politics to some degree.  Yesterday, in a Nixonesque, hourlong rant, the enraged, newly-convicted Berlusconi hinted he might even try to bring down Monti’s government to bring forward a snap election even sooner, lashing out at Monti, German chancellor Angela Merkel, former French president Nicolas Sarkozy, and a ‘judge-ocracy’ that he says is ruling Italy.  With plenty of money and control over Italy’s private media, he’ll be able to influence politics as long as he wants.  Currently, the PdL secretary is Angelino Alfano, a 41-year-old former justice minister who is from Sicily and rising star who’s thought to be the leading contender to lead the PdL into the next general election.

Meanwhile, the center-left Partito Democratico (PD, Democratic Party) expects to choose its candidate for prime minister in November.

With 5 million people, Sicily features just around 8.5% of Italy’s total population.  Despite a national GDP per capita of around $31,000, Sicily’s is something like $19,000, vying for Italy’s poorest region with a handful of other southern provinces — it’s nearly half the GDP per capita of the richest province, Lombardy (around $39,000).

In the prior regional elections in 2008, Lombardo led a center-right coalition that included the PdL, the Unione di Centro (UdC, Union of the Center), remains of what used to be the once-formidable Christian Democratic party and his own regionalist Movimento per le Autonomie (MpA, Movement for Autonomies) and together won 65.4% of the vote and 61 of the 90 seats in Sicily’s regional parliament.  A PD-led leftist coalition, headed by Anna Finocchiaro, won just 29 seats at 30.4% of the vote.  The vast majority of the seats (80) will be chosen by proportional representation, with a 5% threshold for winning seats; an additional 10 members are elected with a block-voting system.

In today’s regional elections, though, there are five coalitions/parties, each fielding its own candidate for regional president — polls are hard to come by, but it’s a bit of a free-for-all.

Near the top of the polls is the PdL coalition, headed by Sebastiano ‘Nello’ Musumeci.  Musumeci, a member of the European Parliament, is himself a member of a small autonomist right-wing party in Sicily, Alleanza Siciliana (Sicilian Alliance), having his roots in the now-defunct National Alliance, a stridently right-wing party which had neofascist roots.  Although he’s not actually a member of the PdL, a broad win for Musumeci would bolster the PdL nonetheless and, in particular, boost Alfano’s chances of leading the PdL into the next elections — despite record-low polling for the PdL nationally, Alfano would be attempting to become Italy’s first Sicilian prime minister since Mario Scelba led the Italian government from 1954 to 1955.

Also at the top of the tolls is Crocetta’s PD-led coalition (also supported by the UdC).  Crocetta’s election would be historic in at least two ways.   Continue reading Today’s Sicilian elections showcase potential party strength before 2013 Italian election

Il ritorno del Berlusconi — why his re-emergence in Italian politics is completely logical

There will be plenty of time to think about the next Italian general election if, as is likely, current prime minister Mario Monti is permitted to carry on with his technocratic government until April 2013, the last date upon which the next general election must be held.

It’s worth taking in two important stories from last week:

The Economist points us to reports in the Italian press that Silvio Berlusconi (pictured above, right), the éminence grise (well, surprisingly jet black) of Italian politics since about 1994, is likely to lead the center-right in the upcoming election and is taking an increasingly critical position against Monti’s government.

Italy’s federal government, a technocratic government formed under Monti, an economist and former European Commissioner, with a mandate to reform Italy’s sclerotic economy and shrink its bloated public sector — with the support of Berlusconi’s own center-right Il Popolo della Libertà (PdL, the People of Liberty) and the main opposition center-left Partito Democratico (Democratic Party), has managed to keep a skittish bond market at bay, which has been spared, for now, the same fate as Spain in the bond market last week.

Meanwhile, The New York Times last week showcased the fiscal problems of Sicily, which is tottering further on the edge of a debt crisis than Italy itself.  Monti’s government recently sent €400 million to Sicily to forestall a potential default by a region that has long been plagued by low growth, outsized government patronage and abuse of its considerably autonomous power — to say nothing of the Mafia corruption issue.

Today, in fact, Sicily’s regional president, Rafaelle Lombardo resigned following an indictment for corruption — elections follow for October 28 and 29 of this year.

Since November 2011, when Berlusconi stepped down, more or less in disgrace, he has kept a fairly low profile.

But everyone knows as long as he’s around, he would have been the chief behind-the-scenes power of Italy’s center-right.  So when he seemed to designate a successor in November in former justice minister, Angelico Alfano (pictured above, left), now the secretary of Berlusconi’s PdL, it seemed difficult to believe that Il Cavaliere, as Berlusconi is known in the Italian press, was really stepping aside.

Alfano, who is Sicilian, has not managed to recover any ground for the PdL (formerly — and potentially again in the future — known as Forza Italia) — one poll from SpinCon released on July 19 shows the PdL winning just 18% of the vote to 27% for the Democratic Party and 14% for the newly formed Euroskeptic and populist party of comic and blogger Beppe Grillo, the Movimento 5 Stelle (Five Star Movement).**

Italian politics have long been fragmented, but like Greece earlier this year, Italian voters seem to be fragmenting even further under the weight of austerity measures introduced by Monti’s government. Monti himself has said he will not run for election in his own right under any banner.

But above all, Berlusconi’s ace is that he still has more media power than anyone else in Italy.  He also remains the most charismatic leader among a political class of bores — for instance, has anyone outside of Italy even heard of Pier Luigi Bersani, the main center-left opposition leader?

Berlusconi practically invented Italian television in the 1980s by buying TV stations across Italy and harmonizing their content at a time when RAI (Italy’s public television network) was supposed to hold a monopoly on national stations.  He still holds an incalculable political advantage because of that power — it’s what helped him burst onto the political scene in 1994 and what helped him keep power in much of the 2000s, even through the last days of sordid accusations of his cavorting with underage girls and prostitutes at ‘bunga, bunga’ parties.

It’s not clear that Italian voters are willing to turn back to those days (a strong majority of voters say they refuse to back Berlusconi ever again), but if anyone can pull it off, it’s Berlusconi.

Also, for a premier who spent a significant amount of legislative time in the 2000s crafting immunity bills to protect himself from prosecution relating to all sorts of seamy dealings, Berlusconi is likely tempted by the shield from prosecution that yet another stint in office would bring — or at least tempted by the opportunity to parlay a political comeback into a term as Italy’s president in the future.

And at age 75, Berlusconi is a fairly young man by the standards of Italian institutions; Alfano was born in 1970. Italy is a country of old men — to have a forty-something prime minister is unheard of. (Recall that the 93-year-old Giulio Andreotti, a former prime minister in the 1970s and 1980s, now an Italian ‘senator for life’, was instrumental in bringing down the short-lived leftist government of Romano Prodi just six years ago.)

But Alfano’s Sicilian heritage raised an eyebrow in November and it does so especially now, with Sicily’s finances in the headlines and yet another Sicilian president resigned under ties to the omni-present curse of Mafia infiltration.

It’s worth remembering that “Italy” as a national concept really only emerged in the 1860s — and even today, just over 150 years after “unification,” it’s hard to think of Italy as a true country, even if you don’t believe that nationhood in Italy is really a myth-laden fluke.  You have to go back to the mid-1950s to find a Sicilian who has served as Italy’s prime minister — Mario Scelba.  No Sicilians have served as president of Italy in the current republic.  No Sicilians have served as president of Italy in the current republic.  That may not be so surprising, given that Sicily is so far away, not just geographically, but culturally from Rome, to say nothing of Milan or Florence or Turin.  Although Sicilian votes essentially enshrined Italy’s old Christian Democrats in power until the 1992 Tangentopoli (‘Bribesville’) scandal that, in effect, wiped clean Italy’s political slate, Sicilians have rarely held the highest office in Italian politics.

So with Sicily’s finances and its corruption in global headlines, the “Sicily question” is yet another for Berlusconi to sideline Alfano as the 2013 elections approach — for the time being, at least.