Tag Archives: alfano

Italy

Who is Enrico Letta?

2 Comments

letta

Earlier today, newly reelected Italian president Giorgio Napolitano appointed the deputy leader of the Partito Democratico (PD, Democratic Party), Enrico Letta, as Italy’s newest prime minister.Italy Flag Icon

Letta will now seek a ‘grand coalition’ government with Silvio Berlusconi and the Popolo della Libertà (PdL, People of Freedom).  Former centrosinistra (center-left) leader Pier Luigi Bersani repeatedly refused previous attempts at a ‘grand coalition’ in post-election talks since February.  While it means more short-term stability for Italy and it likely means Italy won’t return to the polls this summer or even perhaps this year, it seems unlikely that the Letta-led coalition will endure for a full five-year term, which means that Italian government will proceed with one eye looking toward the next elections.

So who is Letta and what would a Letta-led government mean for Italy?

The basics are rapidly becoming well-known: he’s from Pisa, he was a European affairs minister in the government of Massimo D’Alema in the late 1990s, he was first elected a member of Italy’s lower house, the Camera dei Deputati (House of Deputies), in 2001, and he was a European Parliament MP from 2004 to 2006.  He was a candidate for the leadership of the Democratic Party when it was first established in 2007, though he lost that race to the wide favorite, former Rome mayor Walter Veltroni.  His uncle, Gianni Letta, is one of Berlusconi’s top advisers, and was himself the PdL candidate for the Italian presidency back in 2006 when Napolitano was first elected. 

As OpenEurope writes this morning, Letta’s both pro-European and apparently anti-austerity, making him a good bridge between outgoing prime minister Mario Monti and the more populist elements in the PD, the PdL and the Movimento 5 Stelle (M5S, the Five Star Movement).

In other words, Napolitano has appointed a Prime Minister with solid European credentials and who can credibly argue for an easing of austerity in the EU. Quite smart.

At age 46, he would be the second-youngest prime minister in post-war Italy, much younger than Giuliano Amato, the 74-year-old who led center-left (largely technocratic in nature) governments in 1992-93 and 2000-01.  Amato had been mentioned as Napolitano’s favored candidate since Napolitano’s reelection as president on Saturday, and Florence mayor Matteo Renzi had also been thought to be a contender for prime minister.  Letta, in contrast, was a bit of a surprise, though his appointment is not incredibly outlandish.

In many ways, Letta melds the best of both an Amato appointment and a Renzi appointment.

Like Renzi, he’s part of a new generation of Italian leadership, but Berlusconi apparently scoffed at the elevation of the most popular center-left politician in Italy, and Renzi himself is probably relieved not to have to lead a coalition government that will leave much of the center-left disillusioned and that could still lead to the disintegration of Italy’s still-young Democratic Party.

Although Amato once served as my professor in Italy, I believe he would have been a problematic choice for a ‘technocratic’ government for two reasons.

The first is that Italy has already had a technocratic government since November 2011, and the intervening February 2013 election results should clearly inform the creation of the next government.  No one voted for Letta, perhaps, but his government will be political, not technocratic, and it will have a political cabinet and an agenda hammered out between the two largest forces in the Italian parliament.  Despite what remains a very wide gulf between Berlusconi and the centrosinistra, the German ‘grand coalition’ example remains a best-case lodestar for the newly minted Letta government.

The second is that Amato, fairly or unfairly, remains a link not only to Italy’s past, but to the collapse of its first republic. Though he’s one of the few members of Italy’s old Socialist Party to make a successful transition to the second republic (he served as the minister of the interior in the late 2000s under prime minister Romano Prodi), his appointment would symbolize so much of what’s wrong about Italian political leadership.  As the septuagenarian prime minister of an octogenarian president, I fear Amato — no matter how competent a prime minister — would have highlighted the rule of an Italian gerontocracy that refuses to leave the stage after decades in power.

So what’s next?  Continue reading Who is Enrico Letta? →

Italy

Does Pier Luigi Bersani believe in miracles?

Leave a comment

 

UPDATE, March 26, 8 a.m. ET: So with a day left to form a government, Bersani is set to meet Berlusconi’s allies today.  Governments of miracles do, in fact, sometimes happen for those who want to be prime minister enough. 

* * * * * 

The latest on the attempts by centrosinistra (center-left) leader Pier Luigi Bersani to form a government:Italy Flag Icon

Bersani expressed the urgency of Italy’s dilemma.

“The situation is dramatic. We need a government. In fact we need a government capable of performing miracles,” he told reporters at parliament where he was meeting union leaders, seeking support for modest economic reforms.

And so the coalition courtship continues, even as the eurozone goes through another wrenching crisis over a country with 0.2% of the eurozone GDP that controls about half of its internationally recognized territory.

Bersani blew off yet another attempt by centrodestra (center-right) leader Silvio Berlusconi to form a ‘grand coalition’ with Bersani as premier and former justice minister Angelino Alfano as vice premier in exchange for choosing a candidate for president amenable to Berlusconi’s allies when current president Giorgio Napolitano’s term ends in May.  Despite predictions of oblivion, Berlusconi came within 0.4% of beating Bersani’s coalition in elections last month, so of course it’s in the once-again ascendant Berlusconi’s interest to demand either entering government or new elections, which polls show Berlusconi would now win.

Silvio, you sexy thing.

Napolitano gave Bersani a mandate to form a coalition government on Friday (here’s my bleak take on some of Italy’s options over the weekend).  Beppe Grillo, the leader of the Movimento 5 Stelle (the Five Star Movement), has ruled out even an informal alliance to prop up a Bersani-led government — Bersani and the center-left have a majority in the lower house of the Italian parliament, but not in the upper house.

Did Bersani watch the same near-disaster in Nicosia and Brussels that I did over the weekend?

All he’s got in his arsenal is to talk about a government of miracles?

If that’s really all Bersani has in his quiver at this point, it’s not surprising that Italians believe he doesn’t deserve to be prime minister.  What a mess.

Something tells me that Florence mayor Matteo Renzi will be replacing Bersani as the leader of the Partito Democratico (PD, Democratic Party) — in hours or days, not weeks.

Italy, Lazio

Zingaretti victory in Lazio caps subdued election for Italy’s far right

1 Comment

zingaretti

Although relatively more attention has been on Italy’s general election and its aftermath and on Roberto Maroni’s victory in the Lombardy regional elections, Nicola Zingaretti’s victory as the next regional president of Lazio has launched the career of a new face of the next generation of Italy’s political leadership while delivering a stinging defeat to one of Italy’s most prominent far-right figures. Italy Flag Iconlazio

Zingaretti (pictured above), the candidate of the center-left Partito Democratico (PD, Democratic Party), won a whopping victory over Lazio’s former regional president Francesco Storace, leader of La Destra (The Right), a nationalist conservative party in Italy, Davide Barilliari, the candidate of the Movimento 5 Stelle (M5S, the Five Star Movement) and Giluia Bongiorno, who led a centrist coalition in the election.

laziopresident

The result leaves the center-left in control of 28 seats in Lazio’s regional parliament, with 13 for the center-right, seven for the Five Star Movement and just two for Bongiorno’s centrists.

Zingaretti, elected to the European Parliament in 2004 and thereafter elected as president of the province of Rome in 2008, is the latest center-left star to emerge out of Roman politics, and he could well use the Lazio presidency as a springboard into a future in national politics.  Former Rome mayor Francesco Rutelli (unsuccessfully) led the center-left in the 2001 general election and subsequently served as prime minister Romano Prodi’s minister of culture and tourism.  Rutelli’s successor as Rome mayor, Walter Veltroni, helped found the Democratic Party in Italy, and thereupon led it (again, unsuccessfully) in the 2008 general election.

Zingaretti’s first task will be to restore integrity to regional government in Lazio, Italy’s third-most populous region.  The outgoing incumbent, the PdL’s Renata Polverini, resigned early after being implicated in a funding scandal whereby public officials were using government funds for private use.  Her predecessor, the center-left Piero Marrazzo, lost reelection after he was blackmailed over a video recording of Marrazzo engaging the services of a transsexual prostitute.

More immediately, however, the strength of Zingaretti’s campaign may well have helped Pier Luigi Bersani’s centrosinistra (center-left) coalition win victory in the senatorial contest in Lazio — Bersani’s coalition won just 32.3% against former prime minister Silvio Berlusconi’s centrodestra (center-right) coalition, which won 28.8%, a much smaller margin of victory than Zingaretti posted over Storace.

The landslide defeat is a setback for Storace, president of Lazio from 2000 to 2005, and one of the most well-known members of Italy’s nationalist right.

But it’s also a setback for Italy’s nationalist conservatives after a campaign saw Berlusconi shared some kind words for Italy’s former fascist dictator Benito Mussolini, and whose party, the Popolo della Libertà (PdL, People of Freedom), includes Mussolini’s granddaughter, Alessandra Mussolini, a former Playboy model, was elected to Italy’s upper house, the Senato (Senate) over the weekend.  Continue reading Zingaretti victory in Lazio caps subdued election for Italy’s far right →

Italy

Where Italy goes from today’s elections: a look at four potential outcomes

4 Comments

pierluigi

Although we still don’t know exactly how the results of the weekend’s Italian election will turn out entirely, we know enough to say that Italy’s short-term future will be beset with gridlock.Italy Flag Icon

We know that, unless there’s a major change among the final results (very unlikely at this point, but still a possibility — La Repubblica‘s latest count shows a 0.4% gap between the two major coalitions), Pier Luigi Bersani will have led his broad centrosinistra (center-left) coalition to a victory in Italy’s lower house, the 630-member Camera dei Deputati (House of Deputies).  That’s because the national vote winner of the lower house elections automatically wins at least a 54% majority of the seats in the lower house.

We know that, whatever the final result, both Bersani’s centrosinistra coalition and the centrodestra (center-right) coalition led by former prime minister Silvio Berlusconi will each hold between 110 and 120 seats or so in Italy’s upper house, the Senato, which is composed of 315 elected members and, currently, four additional ‘senators for life.’ (That’s because the majority ‘seat bonus’ is awarded to the winner of each regional vote rather than on a national basis like in the Camera dei Deputati).

It doesn’t really matter who holds the greatest number of senatorial seats, because no group or party will control enough seats in the Senato alone to form a majority government, including Bersani’s coalition.

So given Bersani’s lead in the lower house, whatever government emerges — if a government emerges — will have to include Bersani’s center-left bloc, with presumably Bersani heading the government as prime minister.  In the short term, that puts Bersani in the driver’s seat but not, perhaps, for long.

None of Bersani’s options, frankly, are very stable, for either his center-left coalition or for Italy.

Given the ongoing eurozone sovereign debt crisis, the pressure will be on Bersani and on the entirety of Italy’s political elite, which now must be said to include Beppe Grillo and the leaders of the Movimento 5 Stelle (the Five Star Movement).  Right now, Italy’s 10-year bond rate is 4.49%, much lower than the 7%-and-higher rates that led to the downfall of Berlusconi’s government in November 2011.  But that could change — and fast — if Italy’s political leadership seems unable to form a government.  Grillo and his allies are now stakeholders in ensuring that Italy doesn’t unravel.

If Bersani succeeds in forming a government at all, it will be less stable than any government in Italy’s so-called ‘second republic’ — i.e., the period from the early 1990s to the present that’s been characterized by the downfall of the former Christian Democrats during the 1992 Tangentopoli (‘bribesville’) scandal that implicated virtually all of Italy’s political elite, the emergence in 1994 of Silvio Berlusconi as the head of the mainstream Italian right, and the increasing consolidation of the mainstream Italian left through what’s now become the Partito Democratico (PD, Democratic Party).

Any Bersani-led government, at this point, will not only be less stable than Berlusconi’s governments, but even less stable than the four notoriously rocky governments of Italian prime ministers Romano Prodi, Massimo D’Alema and Giuliano Amato from 1996 to 2001 and Prodi’s short-lived and troubled return to government from 2006 to 2008.

In light of that bleak background, here are the four potential outcomes over the coming days that you should watch for:

Continue reading Where Italy goes from today’s elections: a look at four potential outcomes →

Italy

Making sense of today’s Italian election results

3 Comments

beppe

UPDATE, 7:30 p.m.: Here’s an additional piece on where Italy goes from here — a look at four potential outcomes to watch for in the days ahead.

* * * * *

The election results from Italy’s general election have largely been counted, and they’re backing up the exit polls (not the initial instant polls from the preceding hours leading up to the election) that show a hung parliament — leaving the short-term future of Italy’s government unclear.Italy Flag Icon

Right now, it certainly looks like Pier Luigi Bersani’s centrosinistra (center-left) coalition will win a majority in the elections for Camera dei Deputati (House of Deputies), Italy’s lower house, while former prime minister Silvio Berlusconi’s centrodestra (center-right) coalition will win a majority in the elections for Italy’s upper house, the Senato (Senate).

Nonetheless, the big winner is the Movimento 5 Stelle (M5S, the Five Star Movement), the protest group of blogger and comedian Beppe Grillo (pictured above), which has significantly outperformed polling expectations and may well become the single largest ‘party’ in the Italian parliament.

Bersani leads in Italy’s lower house

In the 630-member lower house, the latest projections show Bersani’s centrosinistra with a small lead of around 29% or 30% to just 28% or 29% for the centrodestra, and a whopping 25% or 26% for the Five Star Movement.  Far behind in fourth place is prime minister Mario Monti’s centrist coalition with around 11%.  The communist, green, anti-corruption Rivoluzione Civile (RC, Civil Revolution) headed by antimafia magistrate Antonio Ingroia has won barely over 2%.

If that result holds, it means Bersani will command an automatic majority in the lower house — the winner of the largest share of the votes wins 54% of the seats in the Camera dei Deputati, so Bersani is likely to hold 340 seats.

Berlusconi leads in Italy’s upper house

In the Senato, however, seats are awarded proportionally on a regional basis, with a regional ‘bonus’ — the winner of the largest share of the votes in each region automatically wins 55% of the seats in that region.

It’s too soon to tell whether Bersani or Berlusconi will win the greater number of votes nationally in the senatorial elections, but it’s likely that Berlusconi may emerge with the greatest number of the 315 seats up for election today (though far short of a majority) — the latest projections show the centrodestra with 114 seats, the centrosinistra with 113 seats, the Five Star Movement with 57 and Monti’s coalition with 17.

Berlusconi wins Piedmont, sweeps southern Italy in senatorial elections

When you look at the results region-by-region, you begin to see just how amazing the comeback has been for Berlusconi.

Right now, it appears that Berlusconi’s coalition has not only won Piedmont and Veneto in northern Italy, but also Lombardy, Italy’s most-populous region, by what appears to be a whopping 38.0% to 29.5% victory.  That doesn’t bode well for the centrosinistra in regional elections in Lombardy, where the centrodestra is trying to hold onto power under its candidate for regional president, Roberto Maroni, since 2012 the national leader of the Lega Nord (Northern League).  Maroni faces a tough challenge from the leftist candidate, Umberto Ambrosoli.  Exit polls showed a very close regional race. 

In southern Italy, where the centrosinistra was hoping to break through with a credible chance at sweeping the south, Berlusconi’s coalition has apparently won each region, excepting Basilicata.  That includes Campania and Sicily, Italy’s third- and fourth-most populous regions, respectively.  Berlusconi leads 37.2% to 29.1% in Campania and by 33.2% to 27% in Sicily (where Grillo’s Five Star Movement, not typically strong in the south, won 29.5%).  It also includes Puglia, the home of twice-elected regional president Nichi Vendola, the leader of the socialist Sinistra Ecologia Libertà (SEL, Left Ecology Freedom) that is part of Bersani’s coalition.  Although SEL won nearly 7% in Puglia, its best result nationwide, it wasn’t enough to power the centrosinistra to victory, where it was trailing with 28.3% to the centrodestra‘s 34.5%.

Grillo is the biggest winner, Monti the biggest loser

All in all, the result is a victory for Grillo — his movement outpolled Berlusconi’s party (though not his broader coalition), the Popolo della Libertà (PdL, People of Freedom) and it’s still too soon to tell, but there’s a chance the Five Star Movement outpolled Bersani’s party, the Partito Democratico (PD, Democratic Party) as well.

Going down the list of senatorial results, it looks like the Five Star Movement outpolled both the PD and the PdL in Veneto in the northeast, Liguria in the northwest, Marche, Abruzzo and Molise in the center of Italy, and Sicily and Sardinia as well, with Grillo’s movement winning around 30% in some of his strongest regions.

Monti, by contrast, appears to have finished in fourth place — and a far-off fourth place — in every region.  Despite his alliance with the Christian Democrats — long-dominant in Italy’s south — Monti polled worst in Italy’s south, and did best (winning double digits of up to 12%) in the northern industrial regions like Piedmont, Lombardy, Friuli and Veneto.

That means that, even if they could find a way to build a coalition, Monti and Bersani are unlikely to have sufficient strength in Italy’s upper house to form a coalition.

Other winners and losers Continue reading Making sense of today’s Italian election results →

Italy

What kind of Italian prime minister would Angelino Alfano make?

9 Comments

alfanopremier

Due to electoral law considerations, Italy hasn’t seen any new election polls in 12 days, but when the polling blackout began, one thing seemed certain — former prime minister Silvio Berlusconi had cobbled together a strong centrodestra (center-right) coalition that had narrowed the once insurmountable lead of the centrosinistra (center-left) to within single digits.Italy Flag Icon

It still seems unlikely that Berlusconi could pull off a comeback that would return the centrodestra to power, but if he actually does, he has agreed not to return as prime minister in the next government.

In a bid to bring the autonomist Lega Nord (Northern League) into his coalition, Berlusconi pledged to the Lega Nord‘s leaders in January to put forward former justice minister Angelino Alfano as a candidate for prime minister instead — that now looks like a wise move, given that the coalition has come within striking distance of the centrosinistra only because of the relative strength of the Lega Nord‘s supporters in northern Italy.

In particular, the centrodestra remains essentially tied to win the Italian senatorial elections in the region of Lombardy, Italy’s wealthiest and most-populous, on the strength of the Lega Nord.  Although Lombardy leans right in most years, Berlusconi’s unpopularity has put the region in play; in simultaneous regional elections, the Lega Nord‘s national leader Roberto Maroni is running a spirited campaign to become regional president.

Notwithstanding his pledge, Berlusconi, as the leader of the Popolo della Libertà (PdL, People of Freedom), has led a characteristically spirited anti-austerity and populist campaign.  Unlike the PdL and the main center-left party, the Partito Democratico (PD, Democratic Party), the Lega Nord never backed the technocratic government of prime minister Mario Monti in November 2011.

In a world where everyone has expected that Pier Luigi Bersani will lead the next Italian government, what would it mean if Alfano were suddenly in line to become Italy’s next prime minister?

First and foremost, you should expect that even if Berlusconi isn’t technically heading Italy’s government, he won’t be too far away from the thick of things.  He’s said that he would serve in government as Alfano’s finance minister (of all posts, you’d think Berlusconi wielding power over Italy’s finances would terrify investors and bondholders, to say nothing of German chancellor Angela Merkel).

So there’s a chance that Alfano would serve as the Dmitri Medvedev to Berlusconi’s Putin — that’s something you might expect in Russia, but it’s not quite best practices for a thriving democracy or for Europe’s fourth-largest economy.

Alfano currently serves as party secretary of the PdL and, when Berlusconi stepped down as prime minister in November 2011, he indicated he would leave frontline politics and quickly anointed Alfano — over older figures like former finance minister Giulio Tremonti or the more staunchly conservative Rome mayor Gianni Alemanno — as his preferred successor.

Berlusconi being Berlusconi, of course, Italy was subject to an on-again, off-again Hamlet act from Il cavaliere, who gave contradictory indications about a return to politics before confirming in December 2012 that he would lead the PdL into the next general election.

So what of Alfano himself? Continue reading What kind of Italian prime minister would Angelino Alfano make? →

Italy

Five reasons Berlusconi returned to run in the upcoming Italian election

2 Comments

After leading a symbolic ‘walk-out’ among his center-right Popolo della Libertà (PdL, People of Freedom) from the Italian senate on Thursday in opposition to the austerity measures and other reforms of caretaker prime minister Mario Monti, Il Cavaliere himself, Silvio Berlusconi (pictured above), today announced that he will lead the PdL as its candidate for prime minister in the upcoming Italian general election against a broad center-left alliance anchored by the Partito Democratico (PD, Democratic Party).

So much for a ‘third republic’ in Italian politics — with the selection of the Italian left’s old-guard’s candidate, Pier Luigi Bersani, in the center-left’s broad primary earlier this month against Florence mayor Matteo Renzi (the latter remains Italy’s most popular politician), Italy remains, for now, stuck in the same-old politics as before.

Indeed, a Berlusconi-Bersani face-off would not have raised eyebrows a decade ago.

This time around, though, Berlusconi will face none of the political luck or goodwill that’s marked most of his career — he left office in November 2011 with Italian 10-year bond rates at an unsustainable 7% amid a growing financial crisis that threatened not only Italy, but the entire eurozone.  In addition, Berlusconi has little to show for his stint in office in the way of policy accomplishments, was convicted (subject to appeal) for tax evasion earlier this autumn, and he’s been shamed by accusations of sex with underage women at the now-famous and much derided ‘bunga bunga’ parties and using his influence for the benefit of at least one of those women, a Moroccan immigrant.

So his return to office in many ways would be met with not just disdain, but outright hostility, from outside investors and much of the European political establishment, including the leaders of the European Union, French president François Hollande and German chancellor Angela Merkel.

Berlusconi’s return has been met with chilly responses across the Italian political spectrum.  Monti, who is not contesting the election but has indicated he would be available to lead a second government in the event of a hung parliament, cautioned against populism and warned that Italy must avoid returning to a position whereby Italy’s finances threatened trigger the eurozone’s wider implosion.  Beppe Grillo, a blogger and social critic, as well as the leader of the populist and anti-austerity Movimento 5 Stelle (M5S, the Five Star Movement), savaged what he called Berlusconi’s ‘exhumation.’

Berlusconi’s one-time ally, Gianfranco Fini, who served as deputy prime minister, foreign minister and a former president of Italy’s lower house, the Chamber of Deputies (Camera die Deputati), and who is running under the newly-formed Futuro e Libertà per l’Italia (FLI, Future and Freedom), also sounded alarm, noting that the PdL decision exposes Italy to additional risks.

Given the long odds — the PdL stands far behind the center-left coalition in every poll conducted for next year’s election (and sometimes behind the Five Star Movement, too) — why would the 76-year-old Berlusconi make a bid for a fourth term as Italy’s prime minister?

Here are five reasons why he could be making the race.

Continue reading Five reasons Berlusconi returned to run in the upcoming Italian election →

Italy

Bersani routs Renzi in ‘centrosinistra’ primary to lead Italian left next spring

3 Comments

Florence’s brash, young mayor Matteo Renzi and his campaign to lead the Italian left threatened to remake Italian politics at a time of upheaval and uncertainty greater than at any point in the past two decades.

But the rank-and-file of the Italian left chose the more familiar path on Sunday, elevating instead the familiar, older and more staid, even boring, president of Italy’s largest center-left party, the Partito Democratico (PD, Democratic Party), Pier Luigi Bersani (pictured above, enjoying a post-election beer).

The 61-year-old Bersani easily defeated the 37-year-old Renzi with around 61.1% of the vote (with just 38.8% for Renzi) — a victory so complete for Bersani that Renzi was winning only in Tuscany, the central Italian region that’s home to Florence, and even there, only with about 55% of the vote.

For many reasons, I argued last week that Bersani’s victory was very likely: his control of the PD party machinery, Italian cultural values that respect longevity (i.e. can you think of anyone in the past 50 years that could be described as ‘Italy’s JFK’?), close ties to Italy’s largest union, the Confederazione Generale Italiana del Lavoro (CGIL, General Confederation of Labour) and support from the candidate who placed third in the first round of the primary election, Nichi Vendola.  Vendola is the openly-gay, two-term regional president of Puglia, a more leftist candidate who is the leader and founder of the Sinistra Ecologia Libertà (SEL, Left Ecology Freedom), which will join with a handful of other small leftist parties in supporting Bersani as a candidate for prime minister in Italy’s general election, scheduled to be held on or before April 2013.  Vendola memorably said, on the same day as his endorsement, that Bersani’s words were ‘profumare di sinistra‘ — perfumed with leftism.

Current technocratic prime minister Mario Monti is not running in the upcoming election.  Monti has shepherded labor reforms, budget cuts and tax increases through the Italian parliament since the PD joined with the main center-right party, the center-right Popolo della Libertà (PdL, People of Freedom) in November 2011 to appoint Monti in the midst of a public finance crisis that resulted in Berlusconi’s resignation.

So what happens next?

Continue reading Bersani routs Renzi in ‘centrosinistra’ primary to lead Italian left next spring →

Italy

Bersani leads as Italian ‘centrosinistra’ primary heads to Sunday runoff

1 Comment

After last weekend’s first round of the primaries to choose the Italian center-left (‘centrosinistra‘) candidate for prime minister in advance of expected national elections in April, the current leader of Italy’s largest center-left party, the Partito Democratico (PD, Democratic Party), Pier Luigi Bersani looks like a favorite — even if just slightly — to win the runoff this Sunday.

Bersani (pictured above) won 44.9% of last weekend’s primary vote of around 3 million Italian voters, while the youthful mayor of Florence, Matteo Renzi, placed a close second with 35.5%.  The two faced off in a television debate earlier Wednesday, although the two candidate disagree more on tactics and broad themes than individual policies.

The regional president of Puglia — Italy’s southeastern corner — Nichy Vendola, who is openly gay and the most leftist of the three candidates, as well as the founder and leader of the more radical Sinistra Ecologia Libertà (SEL, Left Ecology Freedom), placed third with 15.6% — the SEL and a handful of other small parties have agreed to unite behind the winner of the centrosinistra primary as the prime ministerial candidate of the broad Italian left.

So with the centrosinistra primary set to end with the December 2 runoff between Bersani and Renzi, it appears that Bersani will win, despite the momentum behind Renzi’s candidacy and his promise to bring a new generation of leadership to Italy.  Vendola, earlier today, endorsed Bersani after indicating earlier that Bersani’s words were more ‘profumare di sinistra‘ — perfumed with leftism — than Renzi’s.

The battle between Renzi and Bersani is less ideological than generational — at 61, Bersani personifies the boring and staid leadership of the past 20 years of the Italian left.  At age 37, however, Renzi is something quite new in Italian politics.  His campaign’s theme is essentially that Italy is in need of a new generation of leadership — namely, Renzi’s, on the basis that a Renzi premiership would open a new and more productive era in Italian governance.  He’s not only called for an end to the era of former prime minister Silvio Berlusconi, but for a clean sweep of the Italian left as well.  Renzi’s even picked a fight with Sergio Marchionne, the CEO of Italian carmaker Fiat.

Both Renzi and Bersani have pledged to continue the era of budget discipline enacted by Italy’s current ‘technocratic’ prime minister Mario Monti, who took office in December 2011.

Monti has consistently refused to run for prime minister in his own right in the upcoming elections.  Monti, however, has indicated that he would be available to serve as technocratic prime minister again in the event of a hung parliament, and business leaders overwhelmingly favor a second Monti government to see through the budget cuts, labor reforms and tax increases that have brought Italy back from the brink of financial crisis.

Both candidates, too, have pledged to pursue more growth-oriented policies, even though it remains unclear exactly what either candidate could actually accomplish in an era of austerity throughout much of Europe.

That doesn’t mean there aren’t ideological differences between the two.

Bersani, with greater ties to Italy’s largest union, the Confederazione Generale Italiana del Lavoro (CGIL, General Confederation of Labour), comes from a stronger social democratic tradition than Renzi, who has styled himself as a modernizer not unlike former UK prime minister Tony Blair.  Bersani, the son of a mechanic, served as regional president of the leftist region of Emilia-Romagna in central Italy in the 1990s and as minister of economic development under former prime minister Romano Prodi from 2006 to 2008, where he tried to liberalize the Italian labor market.

Renzi, however, has refused to consider a potential governing coalition with the Unione di Centro (UdC, Union of the Centre), a small centrist group led by Pier Ferdinando Casini.  The UdC essentially represents the remnants of the long-dominant Italian Christian Democrats and, while Casini and the UdC would likely find overlapping interests on economic policy, the UdC, with its ties to the Vatican, remains socially conservative (e.g., it opposes same-sex marriage).  Bersani, although he is seen as slightly more leftist than Renzi, has nonetheless remained open to a coalition with Casini’s centrists.

Ultimately, it’s hard for me to believe that Renzi will actually win on December 2.  The ‘primary’ itself seems skewed in Bersani’s favor — he’s already the leader of the PD, has the support of much of the ‘old guard’ of the Italian left (such as former prime minister and foreign minister Massimo D’Alema), and accordingly, he has access to the left’s strongest party machinery, not to mention the benefit of his CGIL ties.  He now apparently has Vendola’s support from the SEL as well.

Furthermore, in a country that shows perhaps more respect for its elders than anywhere else in Europe, it seems unlikely that Italy will anoint as a potential prime minister someone so incredibly young.  The contest is especially meaningful because the PD looks set to win the upcoming elections (although the contest remains exceptionally fluid and unpredictable, even by the sometime operatic standards of Italian politics).

Continue reading Bersani leads as Italian ‘centrosinistra’ primary heads to Sunday runoff →

Italy, Sicily

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

3 Comments

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 →

Italy, Sicily

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

2 Comments

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 →

Italy

Berlusconi convicted of tax fraud, sentenced to four years in prison

2 Comments

It took ten years, but former prime minister Silvio Berlusconi was convicted today of tax fraud and sentenced to four year in prison (although reduced to just one year under a 2006 amnesty law).

Italy’s appeals process is lengthy and complex, so there’s a very real possibility that Berlusconi’s conviction, already ten years in the making, will be overturned.  Although today’s tax fraud conviction is more serious than Berlusconi’s prior convictions, he’s evaded final justice in Italy before.  A perjury conviction in 1990 was set aside under a prior amnesty law and a conviction for illegal financing Berlusconi’s political party in 1997 was set aside after the statute of limitations expired before Berlusconi had exhausted his appeals.

For today, it seems very likely that the conviction will prevent Berlusconi from reversing course on his announcement, made earlier this week, that he will not seek to lead Italy’s center-right into the next general election, expected in April 2013.  It was thought that Berlusconi has enough money and control over Italy’s media to reverse his decision — and conceivably still could, although I think it’s now virtually impossible for Berlusconi to make anything like a successful comeback in time for 2013.

In addition to the tax fraud trial, Berlusconi remains in the crosshairs of various Italian prosecutors, including for abuse of power charges, such as the use of state flights for personal use and for printing wiretapped conversations.  Most sensationally, though, Berlusconi is being investigated for prostitution charges stemming from a sexual relationship with a Moroccan teenager, named ‘Ruby Rubacouri’ in the Italian media.  Generally, Berlusconi has become a laughingstock for the allegations of ‘bunga, bunga‘ parties while in office lavished on Italian VIPs featuring orgies with young women.

Ironically, notwithstanding the energy and time that Berlusconi’s various governments spent passing immunity laws designed to shield Berlusconi and his allies from prosecution in Italian courts, the 2006 amnesty law that would reduce Berlusconi’s sentence to just one year was passed by the center-right government of former prime minister Romano Prodi.

In brief, Berlusconi has been convicted for inflating the costs of certain TV rights by his media company, Mediaset, in order to offset his tax bill.  Essentially, at the time Berlusconi created his media empire in the late 1970s and 1980s, Italy featured only public television channels nation-wide.  In building his media empire, Berlusconi bought local stations and broadcast simultaneous content, essentially cobbling together many local channels with synchronized programming, thereby establishing Italy’s first private television networks.

As such, Berlusconi commanded an incredible amount of control over Italy’s media, from his first successful campaign in 1994, through today.

With the 2013 Italian election approaching, Berlusconi’s conviction is yet another blow for the Italian center-right.  His apparent withdrawal from active participation in Italian politics has made the outcome of those elections incredibly uncertain, with most Italians satisfied with the current government headed by technocratic reformer Mario Monti, who’s said he won’t run on his own behalf in the upcoming elections.  Berlusconi has hinted he might support the continuation of Monti’s government for a full term if the 2013 elections are inconclusive, and certainly most of Italy’s business elite prefer Monti to Berlusconi or any of the various leftist or populist alternatives. Continue reading Berlusconi convicted of tax fraud, sentenced to four years in prison →

Italy

Is Italy headed into a post-Berlusconi ‘third republic’ era of national politics?

8 Comments

Silvio Berlusconi this week all but conceded that he would not run as the main center-right candidate for prime minister in Italy’s upcoming elections, due to be held before April 2013 — and he even hinted he could support a moderate coalition in favor of continuing the economic reforms of current technocratic prime minister Mario Monti (pictured above).

I’m not convinced this is the last we’ve heard from Il Cavaliere, though, and I’m pretty sure this isn’t his last word on whether he’ll run in 2013.

Berlusconi has been the central figure of Italian politics since 1994, so if he changes his mind tomorrow, or next month, or next year, he has sufficient money and control over Italian media to play a huge role in the upcoming election.  Current polls indicate, however, that most Italians are ready to turn the page on Berlusconi.

Many political scientists and Italians alike consider the period from 1945 to around 1993 Italy’s ‘first republic’ — a period where Italy’s Christian Democratic party (and various allies) essentially controlled the government continuously, through less-than-stable coalitions that often split and re-formed in various permutations of the center-right and center-left.  Despite consistently strong opposition from Italy’s Communists, the Communists never had enough strength — or were permitted to gather enough strength — to enter government.

After the Tangentopoli (‘Bribesville’) scandal that implicated essentially every major politician in Italian public life in the 1990s, Italy entered its ‘second republic’ — an era that’s been dominated by Berlusconi and has featured somewhat more stability — Italian politics since the 1994 general election can be seen as a struggle between a largely rightist coalition and another largely leftist coalition (despite Italy’s reputation for pizza topping politics).  Governments have been more stable, but media freedom has in some ways regressed, in large part due to Berlusconi’s overweening control of private (and sometimes public) media in Italy.

If Berlusconi indeed remains on the sidelines in the upcoming election, however, we could see a tectonic shift in Italian politics that represents yet another era — a new ‘third republic’ — one where Italy continues to develop even more engrained democratic norms and stronger liberal freedoms.  Even if that somewhat overstates the case, 2013 is set to become as much a transformative year in Italian politics as 1994.  What’s striking is that, no more than six months before the next general election, what we know about the future of Italian politics is massively outweighed by what we don’t.

The latest poll, as of October 9 from Ipsos, currently shows Berlusconi’s center-right Il Popolo della Libertà (PdL, the People of Freedom) winning just 18.0% of the vote, to 28.5% for Italy’s main center-left party, the Partito Democratico (PD, Democratic Party) and the Movimento 5 Stelle (M5S, the Five-Star Movement), a populist protest vehicle of popular comedian and blogger Beppe Grillo, with 17.4%. Those numbers, however, are very likely to change between now and the election.

At the risk of dumping a laundry list of minor parties at my readers, it’s important to note the other actors in Italian politics and where they stand:

  • the rump of Italy’s once-dominant Christian Democrats, led by the highly respected Pier Ferdinando Casini, the Unione di Centro (UdC, Union of the Centre) wins 6.4%;
  • the centrist, anti-corruption Italia dei Valori (IdV, Italy of Values) of former Tangentopoli prosecutor Antonio Di Pietro wins 6.0%;
  • the socialist Sinistra Ecologia Libertà (SEL, Left Ecology Freedom) of the popular — and openly gay — president of Puglia, Nichi Vendola, wins 5.6%;
  • the separatist Lega Nord (LN, Northern League), under the new leadership of Roberto Maroni following a corruption scandal involving former longtime leader Umberto Bossi, wins just 4.9%;
  • no other party wins more than 3% of the vote — the most notable of the smaller parties is the newly-formed free-market liberal Futuro e Libertà (FLI, Future and Freedom) of former foreign minister Gianfranco Fini, a former Berlusconi ally who once headed the neofascist National Alliance party (although he worked to move it from the fringes to the center).

With all of that in mind, consider exactly everything we don’t know about an election ostensibly just six months away: Continue reading Is Italy headed into a post-Berlusconi ‘third republic’ era of national politics? →

Italy, Sicily

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

2 Comments

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.