Tag Archives: berlusconi

Comparative Politics, United States

Toward a pink-blue coalition: how House Democrats can rescue Boehner’s speakership

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Last week, I noted that German chancellor Angela Merkel succeeded in achieving the post-partisanship in Germany that US president Barack Obama had hoped to achieve when he ran for president in 2008.USflag

While that’s somewhat of an unfair comparison given the collegiality and consensus that’s developed in Germany’s postwar politics, there’s perhaps a lesson for US politicians to learn from the example of German politics in resolving the current standoff that has shut down the federal government of the United States and threatens to precipitate a sovereign debt crisis later this month over the US debt ceiling.

Even after Merkel’s center-right Christian Democrats won a once-in-a-generation landslide victory, she remains five seats of an absolute majority in Germany’s Bundestag (the lower house of the German parliament) and well short of a majority in the Bundesrat (the upper house), so she’s locked in negotiations — likely for the rest of the year — to form a viable governing coalition with either her rival center-left Social Democrats or the slightly more leftist Green Party.

Contrast that to the United States, where a minority of a party that controls one-half of one branch of the American government has now succeeding in effecting a shutdown of the US government.

In the US House of Representatives today, speaker John Boehner (generally) operates on the ‘Hastert rule.’  He’ll only bring bills to the floor of the House that are supported by a ‘majority of the majority’ — a majority of the 232-member Republican caucus.  So even if 115 Republicans and all 200 Democrats in the House support a bill, such as a clean ‘continuing resolution’ to end the current shutdown, they won’t be able to do so if 117 Republicans prefer to condition a continuing resolution upon a one-year delay of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, popularly known as ‘Obamacare.’

It’s not uncommon in parliamentary systems for the ‘loyal opposition’ to sometimes lend their support for an important piece of legislation.  Earlier this year in the United Kingdom, British prime minister David Cameron passed a marriage equality law only with the support of the opposition Labour Party in the House of Commons in light of antipathy within a certain segment of the center-right Conservative Party to same-sex marriage.

In country after country in Europe, including Greece, Ireland and Latvia, traditional rivals on the left and right have sucked up the political costs of austerity and voted to accept difficult reforms, tax increases and tough budget cuts in the face of rising unemployment and depression-level economies in order to avoid the further tumult of being pushed out of the eurozone’s single currency.  If Italy’s left and right could support former prime minister Mario Monti’s technocratic government for 15 months, it’s not outside the realm of democratic tradition to believe that Boehner could form a working coalition in the US House to resolve a crisis that threatens not only American political credibility in the world and the American economy, but the entire global economy.

But as Alex Pareene at Salon wrote earlier today, the United States doesn’t have a parliamentary system, it has a presidential system where an opposition party that controls one house of Congress can cause a crisis if it wants to do so:

An American parliamentary system with proportional representation wouldn’t immediately or inexorably lead to a flourishing social democracy, but it would at least correct the overrepresentation of an ideological minority, and cut down on intentional tactical economic sabotage. The reason we’re in permanent crisis mode isn’t “extremism,” but a system of government that guarantees political brinkmanship.

There’s a bit of ‘grass is always greener’ mentality to that counterfactual.  Parliamentary systems come with their own set of difficulties, and governments in parliamentary systems can wind up just as paralyzed as the current American government seems to be — former Italian prime minister Silvio Berlusconi is causing a political crisis this very week in Italy that will culminate in a vote of no confidence on Wednesday against the fragile coalition headed by center-left prime minister Enrico Letta.  Though the government’s been in power for just five months, Italy could face its second set of elections in 12 months if Letta’s government falls.  Belgium famously went without a government for 535 days between 2009 and 2011 because no majority coalition could form a government.  Moreover, minority governments in parliamentary systems often lurch from crisis to crisis, with individual lawmakers willing and able to ‘hold up’ the government’s legislation.

But the United States need not change its entire system of government to take away a few lessons from Merkel and from Germany.

Juliet Eilperin and Zachary A. Goldfarb at The Washington Post suggested earlier Tuesday that Boehner make a push to become the first truly bipartisan speaker:

[T]he press tends to trumpet two unflattering themes: that Boehner can neither manage his own conference nor make a credible deal with the White House. As a result, the narrative runs, Americans are left careening from fiscal crisis to fiscal crisis, and Congress can’t even tackle popular initiatives such as immigration reform. A host of other potential changes supported by huge swaths of both parties — from tax and entitlement reform to infrastructure spending — are also left on the table just because of the fallout Boehner faces from a few dozen, ultra-conservative Republicans.

At least that’s the rap against Boehner, whose speakership so far has been defined by blocking Obama’s priorities rather than producing significant laws. But that could all change if he were just to decide to say to House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.): “Let’s enter a grand coalition. Democrats will vote for me for speaker as long as Republicans hold a majority. And we’ll do a budget deal that raises a little bit of tax revenue and reforms entitlements. We’ll overhaul the tax code for individuals and businesses. We’ll pass immigration reform and support the infrastructure spending that the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and labor unions want.”

Call it a pink-blue coalition — the moderate Republicans and the Democrats.  (Or maybe the donkey-rhino‡ coalition). Continue reading Toward a pink-blue coalition: how House Democrats can rescue Boehner’s speakership →

Italy

Does this week’s political crisis in Italy represent Berlusconi’s last stand?

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The United States isn’t the only country in the world hurtling toward a governance crisis this week.Italy Flag Icon

On Saturday, former Italian prime minister Silvio Berlusconi pulled the five center-right members out of the governing coalition that’s been headed for five months by center-left prime minister Enrico Letta (pictured above, right) and called for snap elections.  The Italian stock market plunged this morning, Italian debt yields are already slightly rising and, once again, Italy, despite the best efforts of president Giorgio Napolitano, may well be headed to its second set of elections within 12 months — a move that would introduce new uncertainty within the eurozone at a time when most European leaders and global investors hoped the worst of the European economic crisis was over.

The big question is whether this truly marks the onset of another government collapse in Italy’s long-running political drama.  There’s reason to believe it’s more the last gasp of a disgraced former leader than a principled stand over competing visions for Italy’s budget and finances.  Berlusconi will shortly begin a year-long prison sentence (though due to his age, it’s likely to be house arrest or community service) after exhausting his appeals of a tax fraud conviction stemming from his leadership of Mediaset.  Berlusconi also faces appeals for conviction on charges of paying for sex with a minor and abuse of power in trying to cover it up that carries a seven-year prison sentence.  Most immediately, however, Berlusconi is angry that Italy’s parliament hasn’t lined up to lift a public service ban that now applies to Berlusconi in the wake of his tax fraud conviction.  At age 77 and 19 years after he first become Italy’s prime minister, Berlusconi faces the indignity of being stripped of his senatorial seat in October and being banned from the next election.

It’s never smart to bet against Berlusconi, whose wealth, media power and longevity in power makes him easily the most influential political leader in Italy — even today.  In the February parliamentary elections, he boosted the Italian center-right (centrodestra) coalition to within a razor-thin margin of defeating the center-left (centrosinistra) coalition.  But it’s not hard to see the latest political moment as Berlusconi lashing out in order to pull one last rabbit out of his magical political hat.  Earlier today, Berlusconi accused Napolitano of colluding with Italian judges against him.

If Berlusconi can bluster his way to early elections, he could potentially bring about a new parliament, especially with the center-left fractured ahead of a leadership election on December 8.  But that’s a big ‘if,’ and as Monday closed in Rome, there were signs that members within Berlusconi’s ranks were none too pleased with his strategy.

The center-left Partito Democratico (PD, Democratic Party), which narrowly won February’s parliamentary elections, holds a strong majority in the Camera dei Deputati (House of Deputies) due to election laws that provide a ‘winner’s bonus’ to the party with the most support.  It’s more chaotic in the Senato (the Senate), where seats are allocated on a state-by-state basis and where no party holds an absolute majority:

senato

Realistically, that means no government can form without the Democrats, but that the Democrats alone cannot govern without allies in the Senate.  When the protest, anti-austerity Movimento 5 Stelle (M5S, the Five Star Movement) refused to enter a governing coalition with the Democrats, the only potential coalition was a ‘grand coalition’ between the Democrats and Berlusconi’s Popolo della Libertà (PdL, People of Freedom).  Berlusconi has since rechristened the PdL as Forza Italia, the name of his original center-right political party in the 1990s.

So Berlusconi assented and Letta formed the government in May after a gridlocked spring when Italy had merely a caretaker government and its parliament failed numerous times to elect a new president — it ultimately reelected Napolitano to another seven-year term.  For good measure, five regional senators and 19 centrist senators from the coalition headed by Mario Monti (the former pro-reform, technocratic prime minister between 2011 and 2013) joined the coalition.  That gave Letta a coalition in the upper house that includes 233 out of the 315 elected senators.

But the coalition has never been incredibly stable, as you might expect.  On the surface, the current crisis revolves around the budget (just like in the United States) — Letta and the Democrats want to allow Italy’s VAT to rise from 21% to 22%, and Berlusconi prefers to find savings within the budget to keep the VAT from rising.  The failure to find those savings last Friday precipitated Berlusconi to pull the PdL’s ministers out of the government.  The risk is that the budget deficit will rise above 3% of Italian GDP, violating the European Union’s fiscal compact and potentially causing a rise in Italian debt yields. Continue reading Does this week’s political crisis in Italy represent Berlusconi’s last stand? →

New York, United States

Is Michael Bloomberg the Silvio Berlusconi of U.S. politics?

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If you’re not familiar with U.S. politics, you may not have realized the huge decision that came down on Monday from the federal Southern District of New York declaring that the ‘stop-and-frisk’ approach of the New York Police Department is unconstitutional.newyorkUSflag

But the judge, Shira A. Scheindlin, found that the Police Department resorted to a “policy of indirect racial profiling” as it increased the number of stops in minority communities. That has led to officers’ routinely stopping “blacks and Hispanics who would not have been stopped if they were white.”

The judge called for a federal monitor to oversee broad reforms, including the use of body-worn cameras for some patrol officers, though she was “not ordering an end to the practice of stop-and-frisk.”  In her 195-page decision, Judge Scheindlin concluded that the stops, which soared in number over the last decade as crime continued to decline, demonstrated a widespread disregard for the Fourth Amendment, which protects against unreasonable searches and seizures by the government, as well as the 14th Amendment’s equal protection clause.

It’s a landmark decision, as far as trial court decisions go, that acknowledges the inherent racism of the NYPD’s stop-and-frisk program, which took off in 2002 under the Bloomberg administration.  Essentially, the practice allows the police to stop hundreds of thousands pedestrians annually, the majority of which are African-Americans and Latinos, and to frisk them for weapons (or, of course, drugs) without probable cause — or, under a landmark U.S. Supreme Court case from 1968, Terry v. Ohio, ‘reasonable suspicion’ that the person to be frisked is armed and dangerous.

New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg was decidedly not pleased, and he lashed out in a press conference that was more befitting a toddler than the mayor of the largest city in the United States:

To one journalist — but really to all of them and any critic of stop-and-frisk, however moderate — Bloomberg exclaimed, “You couldn’t be more wrong!”

Bloomberg, who will leave office in January 2014 after 12 years as mayor of New York City, argued fiercely for the benefits of stop-and-frisk, downplayed the concerns over civil liberties, refused to make any changes in the NYPD operating procedures anytime in the near future and even implicitly accused the ruling of leading to future citywide deaths at the hands of criminals who would otherwise slip through the NYPD crucible.  Bloomberg also pointed to a 30% reduction in violent crime since he took office, though the fact of the matter is that New York’s crime dropped even more precipitously in the 1990s under Giuliani, who had his own civil liberties controversies, including the NYPD’s high-profile sodomizing and assault of Abner Louima and the fatal shootings of Amadou Diallo and Patrick Dorismond.

But Bloomberg’s performance on Monday afternoon, however, was less reminiscent of Giuliani than another longtime player in world politics — former prime minister Silvio Berlusconi.  And not just because they are apparently summer neighbors on ‘millionaire’s row’ in Bermuda. Continue reading Is Michael Bloomberg the Silvio Berlusconi of U.S. politics? →

Italy

Berlusconi verdict plunges Italian right (and everyone else) into uncharted uncertainty

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Although Italy’s highest court upheld a one-year sentence against former Italian prime minister Silvio Berlusconi today, the longtime center-right leader made it clear that he intended to remain in the thick of Italian politics for the next year and then some.Italy Flag Icon

Berlusconi’s legendary legal troubles outdate even his nearly two-decade political career, but today was the first time that Italy’s Corte di Cassazione (Court of Cassation) upheld any of Berlusconi’s multiple criminal convictions.  The decision upheld Berlusconi’s conviction for tax fraud and upheld the four-year sentence, though the actual sentence has been reduced to one year, thanks to an amnesty passed into law by former center-left prime minister Romano Prodi back in 2006.  But Berlusconi is unlikely headed to prison anytime soon, due to his advanced age (76) and the fact that this is technically his first final conviction — Berlusconi has successfully appealed previous convictions or otherwise evaded jail time due to immunity while in public office or through the expiration of the statute of limitations.

Furthermore, the court remanded for review by the lower appeals court in Milan a previous five-year ban on holding public office, which the court ruled should not last five years, but instead between one and three years.  Berlusconi’s public service ban will therefore need to be confirmed by the upper house of Italy’s parliament, the Senato (Senate).

That creates an immediate tripwire for prime minister Enrico Letta’s ‘grand coalition’ government that has brought Berlusconi’s Il Popolo della Libertà (PdL, the People of Freedom) together with the center-left Partito Democratico (PD, Democratic Party).  Together, the two parties hold a majority in the Senate, but the PdL holds just 98 out of 315 seats.  Berlusconi’s ally, the Lega Nord (Northern League), holds an additional 18 seats, even though it’s chosen not to join the current governing coalition.  So in order to evade the public office ban, Berlusconi will need the support of the Letta and the Democrats, and there’s a real danger that Berlusconi will threaten to bring the Letta government down unless they back him.

But that’s assuming the Letta government even makes it that far, in light of an economy that shrank by 0.6% in the first quarter of 2013 alone and  a generation-high unemployment rate of 12.2% as of May 2013.  Despite Letta’s hopes to reform Italian finances, the PdL campaigned on reversing an unpopular property tax levied by the previous technocratic government of prime minister Mario Monti last year, so Berlusconi and his allies are pushing to scrap the property levy and to prevent a proposed 1% increase in the highest bracket of Italy’s value-added tax.  Meanwhile, Berlusconi’s top lieutenant, deputy prime minister and interior minister Angelino Alfano is under fire for the swift deportation of the wife and six-year-old daughter of Kazakh dissident oligarch Mukhtar Ablyazov in May.  Letta’s minister for integration, Cécile Kyenge, and Italy’s first black government minister, has faced a barrage of racial slurs — most recently, an opponent threw bananas at her during a speech last week.

Monti, who formed the centrist, pro-reform Scelta Civica (Civic Choice) in advance of February’s election, and who, alongside other centrist allies, forms the third and smallest bloc in the governing coalition, is allegedly so frustrated that he was ready to resign as leader of his own party yesterday.

Beppe Grillo, the leader of the protest Movimento 5 Stelle (M5S, the Five Star Movement), which finished a strong third-place in February’s elections and who has refused to ally with either the Italian right or the Italian left, compared the Berlusconi conviction to the 1989 fall of the Berlin Wall at his popular blog earlier today.

The volatile Berlusconi is also appealing a preliminary conviction of paying for sex with underaged Moroccan dancer Karima el-Mahroug and of abuse of office after trying to pressure local authorities to release the dancer after an alleged theft.

After today’s verdict, Berlusconi lashed out in a television address (pictured above) against what he called an irresponsible judiciary, as he’s done so many times before — he attacked the judiciary as a dangerous and unelected branch of government that began with the judicial investigations of the Tangentopoli (Bribesville) scandal in 1992 and 1993 that so thoroughly wiped out the longstanding Italian political order that it marks the unofficial designation between Italy’s ‘first’ and ‘second’ republics.  Berlusconi reiterated plans, unveiled just last week, to change the name of his party back to its original name, Forza Italia, in a bid to attract younger voters, renewing speculation that he may be preparing to pass his political baton to his 46-year-old daughter, Marina Berlusconi.

So Berlusconi may well just try to roll the dice by bringing the coalition down immediately and move for early elections now.

He would do so knowing that the Democratic Party itself remains hopelessly divided and leaderless — Letta, though he is prime minister, remains the deputy prime minister of the party, pending a still-unscheduled leadership election later this year.  Though 38-year-old Florence mayor Matteo Renzi is the most popular politician in the country, having harnessed the frustration of Italians with the entire spectrum of current political leadership, his potential leadership of the party remains controversial.  It could well result in the disintegration of Italy’s Democratic Party, which formed in 2007 after a gradual melding of former moderate Italian Communists and former liberal Christian Democrats.

The latest polls show, essentially, a toss-up: the centrosinistra would win 33.7%, the centrodestra would win 34.3%, Grillo’s Five Star Movement would win 20.6%, and Monti’s centrists would win just 6.1%.

As the always-sharp Alberto Nardelli concluded earlier today:

It’s impossible to make predictions on what will happen next as we’re in unchartered territory, but what is certain is that today was one of the most significant events in Italy’s recent political history and the consequences and risks could be dire however you look at it. Continue reading Berlusconi verdict plunges Italian right (and everyone else) into uncharted uncertainty →

Italy

Italy’s problem with racism goes far deeper than recent slurs against Cécile Kyenge

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It seems like barely a week goes by without another story coming out of Italy about another racial slur hurled at the Mediterranean country’s first black government minister, Cécile Kyenge. Italy Flag Icon

This week’s row comes from Roberto Calderoli, a member of the Lega Nord (Northern League), the autonomist right-wing party that has in the past allied itself with Silvio Berlusconi, though it’s not part of the current ‘grand coalition’ led by center-left prime minister Enrico Letta.

Calderoli, speaking over the weekend, railed against Kyenge, arguing that her success encourages ‘illegal immigrants’ to come to Italy, that she should be a minister ‘in her own country,’ and added this gem:

“I love animals – bears and wolves, as everyone knows – but when I see the pictures of Kyenge I cannot but think of, even if I’m not saying she is one, the features of an orangutan,” Mr Calderoli said in a speech to a rally in the northern city of Treviso on Saturday.

Calderoli’s comments were unthinkably crass but, unfortunately, they are not atypical in the three months since Kyenge came to power, nor are they incredibly out of the norm for a political culture that has long treated racism with a wink and a smile, such as when Berlusconi himself described Barack Obama, the first black president of the United States, as particularly ‘suntanned.’

Kyenge (pictured above with Letta), an Italian citizen who was born in Congo, came to Italy in 1983, when she set up a practice as a doctor in Modena, in the central Italian region of Emilia-Romagna.  Earlier this year, she was first elected to Italy’s Camera dei Deputati (Chamber of Deputies) as a member of Italy’s center-left Partito Democratico (PD, Democratic Party).  Letta appointed her as the government’s minister for integration, in part due to the work Kyenge has done since founding DAWA, an association designed to promote multicultural awareness in Italy and to foster cooperation between Italy and Africa.  Prior to becoming an Italian deputy, Kyenge served as a provincial councilor in Modena for four years, and she’s a proponent of a jus soli, a law that would grant citizenship to those children of immigrants who are born in Italy.

In short, Kyenge personifies a new kind of 21st century success story for first- and second-generation Europeans in a world where globalized ties are now bound to blur ethnic, racial, national and cultural borders.

It’s worth bearing in mind that this isn’t the first time Calderoli has been accused of racism or insensitivity.  He was forced to resign as a minister in a previous Berlusconi government in 2006 after purporting to wear a t-shirt showing the printed cartoons of a Danish newspaper depicting the prophet Mohammed.  (Having returned to a subsequent Berlusconi government a few years later, it was Calderoli who drafted the election law that now virtually everyone in Italy agrees is worthless).

Nor is it the first time Northern League politicians have made controversial statements about Kyenge — one of its local politicians earlier in June called for Kyenge to be raped, so she would understand how victims feel, and in April, another European Parliament member, Mario Borghezio, called her part of a ‘bonga, bonga government’ and argued that she wanted to ‘impose her tribal traditions from the Congo.’

Kyenge has accepted Calderoli’s begrudging apology, but it’s not even the only incident this week — members of the far-right Forza Nuova (New Force) party held an anti-immigration protest featuring nooses in Pescara in central Italy.

In the long run, it may well be that Kyenge’s graceful responses to unacceptably mean-spirited and racist comments convince more Italians that there’s no place for racism in Italian public discourse — she has the power to turn ugly incidents like Calderoli’s slur into what Obama himself might call a ‘teachable moment.’

But that task is made equally difficult by the integration portfolio that Kyenge holds, which means that she is responsible for policymaking on immigration and the nearly 4.5 million foreign residents who live in Italy.  Even as Kyenge tries to deflect tensions, Calderoli and other Northern League politicians may be using outbursts about Kyenge as a deliberate strategy to inject racial resentment as a potent political wedge issue.

Although migrants have been coming to Italy since the 1970s, which makes immigration to Italy a more recent phenomenon than in other European countries, about two-thirds of Italy’s current foreign residents have arrived in the past decade.  The net result is a country that hasn’t had time to develop the political or cultural institutions to cope with a very rapid influx of foreigners, let alone to develop the vocabulary of multiculturalism in a country that can be sometimes quite insular in a way that’s both profound and provincial, troubling and quaint Continue reading Italy’s problem with racism goes far deeper than recent slurs against Cécile Kyenge →

Italy

Don’t read too much into Marino’s center-left victory in Roman mayoral election

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The center-left candidate in Rome’s mayoral election runoff, Ignazio Marino, has overwhelmingly defeated the incumbent, Gianni Alemanno, by a margin of about 64% to 36%.Italy Flag Icon

That’s not surprising, given that Marino (pictured above) won the first round by a wide margin and fell just 7.5% short of the absolute majority threshold necessary to secure outright victory.

Marino’s landslide win is welcome news for prime minister Enrico Letta, as is the fact that the Partito Democratico (PD, Democratic Party) won in all of the major municipalities holding elections over the weekend.  Letta, who leads a tenuous coalition with Silvio Berlusconi’s center-right Popolo della Libertà (PdL, People of Freedom), will certainly be delighted to see the local elections concluded, which augured tense competition between the PD and the PdL, despite their governing alliance in Italy’s parliament.

While Marino’s win is the top prize for the center-left, it is not necessarily an indication that the Italian left is out of trouble after its spectacular collapse.  That collapse started when it only narrowly won February’s parliamentary elections, despite expectations of a much wider victory, and it accelerated with the inability of former PD leader Pier Luigi Bersani to form a government or push through his top choices for the Italian presidency.  The reelection of Giorgio Napolitano as Italy’s president and Bersani’s subsequent resignation as PD leader cleared the path for the current Letta government.

But the PdL and its center-right allies have now held a consistent national polling lead over the PD and its center-right allies, especially as Italian voters become increasingly disenchanted with Beppe Grillo’s Movimento 5 Stelle (M5S, the Five Star Movement), which has found that it was better as a protest vehicle than as a responsible participant in government, where it has refused to play any role in governing with either the left or the right.  The PD itself remains divided ahead of a leadership battle that will likely take place in October, so despite the fact that Florence mayor Matteo Renzi remains the most popular choice to be Italy’s prime minister (more so than Berlusconi, Letta or Bersani), Renzi is not necessarily assured of assuming the PD leadership later this year.

Though the PdL’s losses in local elections make it less likely that Berlusconi will trigger another round of elections, Italian politics will remain incredibly murky and fluid for the foreseeable future.

Alemanno, a stridently right-wing candidate with ties to the neofascist Italian right, came to power on a law-and-order platform, though he was never an incredibly good fit for politically moderate Rome, and his loss owes in some degree to local corruption scandals that have happened on his watch and to the perception of his government’s mismanagement of responding to last year’s snowstorm, Rome’s public transportation and other municipal woes.  In addition, Lazio province has been fertile ground for the center-left recently — the province elected the PD’s Nicola Zingaretti as its regional president in February by a double-digit margin against former regional president Francesco Storace, even while Bersani’s center-left coalition only barely won the national vote.

Marino came to politics only in 2006 with his election to Italy’s Senato (Senate) following a career as an organ transplant surgeon, though his election as Rome’s mayor should launch him into the top echelon of the PD’s future leaders.  Two former center-left Roman mayors, Francesco Rutelli and Walter Veltroni, have both led the center-left into national elections over the past decade.

The defeat should end Alemanno’s potential national aspirations, however.  Although he had been mentioned as a potential successor to Berlusconi as the PdL’s leader in the future, that role seems increasingly likely to go to Angelino Alfano, who as deputy prime minister and interior minister is the highest-ranking PdL official in Letta’s grand coalition.

Italy

Rome mayoral race heads to tense June runoff between center-left, center-right coalition partners

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If you’re were the United States and you’re like me, you spent your Memorial Day partying like it was the next Cinco de Cuatro.Italy Flag Icon

But in Italy, citizens were once again headed to the polls in local elections, and the most significant among the races is the mayoral race in Rome, Italy’s capital, and the ‘eternal city’ that so many centuries ago served as the center of the vast empire that stretched from Central Asia to Great Britain.

Today, while the scope of SPQR is more limited, it’s nonetheless the top municipal prize in the country.  Moreover, in the fractured world of Italian politics, it’s become an even more significant prize following February’s inconclusive national elections, and the weekend’s result will lead to more political tension over the next fortnight as the top two candidates face off in a June 9-10 runoff.

With a fragile ‘grand coalition’ government between the center-left Partito Democratico (PD, Democratic Party), Silvio Berlusconi’s center-right Popolo della Libertà (PdL, People of Freedom) and former prime minister Mario Monti’s Scelta Civica (SC, Civic Change), the PD’s Ignazio Marino (pictured above) and the PdL incumbent, Gianni Alemanno, will spend the next 14 days in a direct contest between the two dominant parties of Italy’s government.

While the mayoral race has been viewed as a test of Berlusconi’s enduring popularity, the campaign has focused more on local issues and the personalities of the two major candidates, Marino and Alemanno.  The more significant effect is that while prime minister Enrico Letta looks to his second month as Italy’s premier, and the coalition government attempts to craft a new election law, its two largest parties will be fighting against each other in a high-profile election for the next two weeks.  It’s hardly a recipe for good governance in a country with little recent experience of consensus-driven ‘grand coalitions,’ like in The Netherlands or Germany.

In early results, Marino had won around 42.60% of the vote, with Alemanno trailing at 30.27% support.  Marcello De Vito, the candidate of the opposition Movimento 5 Stelle (M5S, the Five Star Movement), was far behind in third place after a disappointing result for the protest movement in many of the weekend’s local elections.

Marino is somewhat of a rising star within the Democratic Party — a former organ transplant surgeon, Marino came to politics in 2006, winning election as an Italian senator.  Since then, Marino has become one of his party’s chief voices on national health care.

With Marino just 7.4% short of outright victory last weekend, Alemanno seems unlikely to emerge from the runoff victorious, though he’s certain to spend the next two weeks fighting a vicious campaign for reelection.  Alemanno, with ties to Italy’s far right, was always somewhat out of step with Rome’s centrist electorate after two two-term stints by moderate leftists, Francesco Rutelli and Walter Veltroni.

Alemanno won a narrow 2008 election victory against Rutelli by emphasizing law-and-order issues, and his victory was somewhat marred by the support of supporters who chanted ‘Duce! Duce!‘ upon his victory five years ago, highlighting his ties to the neo-fascist right.  Since taking office, he passed an ordinance banning prostitution on the streets and has emphasized deporting illegal immigrants who commit crimes, while receiving criticism for segregating Roma minorities in camps far beyond the city’s center.  He’s also faced the slings and arrows that accompany any big-city mayor — less money to fund municipal services in an era of economic recession and austerity, criticism that his government didn’t respond adequately to Rome’s 2012 snowstorm and attacks that Rome’s burdened subway system is falling apart.  Continue reading Rome mayoral race heads to tense June runoff between center-left, center-right coalition partners →

Bulgaria, Cyprus, European Union, France, Germany, Greece, Italy, Spain, United Kingdom

What Iceland’s election tells us about post-crisis European politics

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Iceland was supposed to be different.Iceland Flag IconEuropean_Union

In allowing its banks to fail, neo-Keynesian economists have argued, Iceland avoided the fate of Ireland, which nationalized its banks and now faces a future with a very large public debt.  By devaluing its currency, the krónur, Iceland avoided the fate of countries like Estonia and others in southern Europe trapped in the eurozone and a one-size-fits all monetary policy, allowing for a rapid return to economic growth and rapidly falling unemployment.  Neoclassical economists counter that Iceland’s currency controls mean that it’s still essentially shut out from foreign investment, and the accompanying inflation has eroded many of the gains of Iceland’s return to GDP growth and, besides, Iceland’s households are still struggling under mortgage and other debt instruments that are linked to inflation or denominated in foreign currencies.

But Iceland’s weekend parliamentary election shows that both schools of economic thought are right.

Elections are rarely won on the slogan, ‘it could have been worse.’ Just ask U.S. president Barack Obama, whose efforts to implement $800 billion in stimulus programs in his first term in office went barely mentioned in his 2012 reelection campaign.

Iceland, as it turns out, is hardly so different at all — and it’s now virtually a case study in an electoral pattern that’s become increasingly pronounced in Europe that began when the 2008 global financial crisis took hold, through the 2010 sovereign debt crisis in the eurozone and through the current European-wide recession that’s seen unemployment rise to the sharpest levels in decades.

Call it the European three-step.

In the first step, a center-right government, like the one led by Sjálfstæðisflokkurinn (Independence Party) in Iceland in 2008, took the blame for the initial crisis.

In the second step, a center-left government, like the one led by Jóhanna Sigurðardóttir and the Samfylkingin (Social Democratic Alliance) in Iceland, replaced it, only to find that it would be forced to implement harsh austerity measures, including budget cuts, tax increases and, in Iceland’s case, even more extreme measures, such as currency controls and inflation-inducing devaluations.  That leads to further voter disenchantment, now with the center-left.

The third step is the return of the initial center-right party (or parties) to power, as the Independence Party and their traditional allies, the Framsóknarflokkurinn (Progressive Party) will do following Iceland’s latest election, at the expense of the more newly discredited center-left.  In addition, with both the mainstream center-left and center-right now associated with economic pain, there’s increasing support for new parties, some of them merely protest vehicles and others sometimes more radical, on both the left and the right.  In Iceland, that means that two new parties, Björt framtíð (Bright Future) and the Píratar (Pirate Party of Iceland) will now hold one-seventh of the seats in Iceland’s Alþingi.

This is essentially what happened last year in Greece, too.  Greece Flag IconIn the first step, Kostas Karamanlis and the center-right New Democracy (Νέα Δημοκρατία) initially took the blame for the initial financial crisis.  In the second step, George Papandreou and the center-left PASOK (Panhellenic Socialist Movement – Πανελλήνιο Σοσιαλιστικό Κίνημα) overwhelming won the October 2009 elections, only to find itself forced to accept a bailout deal with the European Commission, the European Central Bank and the International Monetary Fund.  In the third step, after two grueling rounds of election, Antonis Samaras and New Democracy returned to power in June 2012.

By that time, however, PASOK was so compromised that it was essentially forced into a minor subsidiary role supporting Samaras’s center-right, pro-bailout government.  A more radical leftist force, SYRIZA (the Coalition of the Radical Left — Συνασπισμός Ριζοσπαστικής Αριστεράς), led by the young, charismatic Alexis Tsipras, now vies for the lead routinely in polls, and on the far right, the noxious neo-nazi Golden Dawn (Χρυσή Αυγή) now attracts a small, but significant enough portion of the Greek electorate to put it in third place.

The process seems well under way in other countries, too.  In France, for examFrance Flag Iconple, center-right president Nicolas Sarkozy lost reelection in May 2012 amid great hopes for the incoming Parti socialiste (PS, Socialist Party) administration of François Hollande, but his popularity is sinking to ever lower levels as France trudges through its own austerity, and polls show Sarkozy would now lead Hollande if another presidential election were held today.

It’s not just right-left-right, though. The European three-step comes in a different flavor, too: left-right-left, and you can spot the trend in country after country across Europe — richer and poorer, western and eastern, northern and southern. Continue reading What Iceland’s election tells us about post-crisis European politics →

Italy

Letta unveils government short on Berlusconi allies, long on economists

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White smoke from Rome — Italy has a new prime minister and a new government, just over two months after Italy’s inconclusive election results at the end of February.Italy Flag Icon

Just three days after Italian president Giorgio Napolitano invited Enrico Letta, deputy leader of the Partito Democratico (PD, Democratic Party), to form a new government, he has done so.  As widely expected, it’s a broad ‘grand coalition’ with the Popolo della Libertà (PdL, People of Freedom) of Silvio Berlusconi, and it leaves both the PD’s electoral ally, the more leftist Sinistra Ecologia Libertà (SEL, Left Ecology Freedom) and the PdL’s autonomist ally, the Lega Nord (Northern League), in opposition along with the movement led by Beppe Grillo, the Movimento 5 Stelle (M5S, the Five Star Movement).

So what does the Letta government’s composition tell us?

The most initial word upon the government’s announcement is that of its relative youth and the record number of women.  That’s very important, of course, especially in Italy, which has long seemed like a country governed exclusively by old men.  Napolitano himself is 87 years old and Berlusconi, age 76, first won power in 1994.

The most striking thing is the extent to which the new cabinet members come from Letta’s own party or otherwise come from — or wouldn’t seem too out-of-place in — the government of outgoing technocratic prime minister Mario Monti, who ran in his won right in the February elections as a force for centrist reform.

Monti himself will not be a minister in the  new government, but Anna Maria Cancellieri, Monti’s minister of the interior and widely regarded minister mentioned as both a potential prime minister and even as president, will become Letta’s minister of justice.  Mario Mauro, a former PdL senator who resigned from the PdL to join Monti’s Scelta Civica (SC, Civic Choice), will be the new secretary of defense.  Enzo Moavero Milanesi will remain as Letta’s minister for Europe, the same role he played in Monti’s government.

Perhaps the most important pick is Italy’s new finance minister, Fabrizio Saccomanni (pictured above), who like Monti before him, is a technocratic economist and the secretary general of the Banca d’Italia, which makes him essentially the deputy head of Italy’s central bank.  Joining him as the minister of labor is Enrico Giovannini, since 2009 the director of Italian Statistical Institute, formerly director of statistics at the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development from 2001 to 2009.  Their appointments signal that Letta’s government will attempt to be more than just a short-lived placeholder before new elections in the autumn, and expect that they will push more reforms — perhaps even greater economic reforms than Monti’s government was able to enact.

Flavio Zanonato, mayor of Padua, a former member of the Italian Communist Party, and a strong supporter of the PD’s outgoing leader Pier Luigi Bersani, will become the minister for economic development.

Maria Chiara Carrozza, minister of education, and Andrea Orlando, minister of environment, are both up-and-coming PD deputies.

The Congo-born Cécile Kyenge, minister for integration, will be Italy’s first-ever black minister, and Josefa Idem, a West German-born and former Gold medal Olympic sprinter, will be minister for sport.

Berlusconi’s top deputy and the prime ministerial candidate of the centrodestra (center-right) in the prior elections, Angelino Alfano will take the largest PdL role in the new government as deputy prime minister and secretary of the interior, trading portfolios with Cancellieri — Alfano served as Berlusconi’s justice minister from 2008 to 2011. Maurizio Lupi, a reliable Berlusconi ally and a former Christian Democrat from Milan, will be secretary of defense.  Nunzia De Girolamo, a young rising star in the PdL — she’s not even 40 — will be the new minister of agriculture.

One face I didn’t expect to see in the government was that of Franco Frattini, Berlusconi’s former foreign minister, though as one of the most respected ministers of Berlusconi’s former cabinet, I would not have been surprised to see him emerge.  He’s currently trying to win the post of secretary general at NATO in 2014.

Emma Bonino, a women’s rights and human rights champion, who was also mentioned as a candidate for the Italian presidency, a longtime member of the Italian Radical Party in the 1980s, a European commissioner for health and consumer protection in the 1990s and the minister for European affairs and international trade in Romano Prodi’s government from 2006 to 2008, Bonino will be a welcomed choice for foreign minister both in Europe and beyond.

Italy

Who is Enrico Letta?

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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

Napolitano’s in (again), Bersani’s out, and Italy’s as dysfunctional as ever

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So after a humiliating Friday that saw Italy’s centrosinistra (center-left) revolt over the prospect of electing former prime minister Romano Prodi as president, Pier Luigi Bersani, the leader of Italy’s main center-left party, Partito Democratico (PD, Democratic Party), has resigned — effective of the selection of Italy’s new president.Italy Flag Icon

Italy got that president on Saturday on the sixth and final ballot, when the centrosinistra and the centrodestra (center-right) led by Silvio Berlusconi joined together to back the reelection of Giorgio Napolitano, who won handily.

But Napolitano’s reelection — at age 87 — to a new seven-year term isn’t a sign of the political health of the country.

Beppe Grillo, the leader of the Movimento 5 Stelle (M5S, the Five Star Movement), a movement that had supported legal scholar and former leftist parliamentarian Stefano Rodotà since the first ballot termed Napolitano’s election a coup, calling for a large rally in protest later today in Rome.

While Napolitano’s reelection isn’t a coup, it is unprecedented, and Grillo is right to suggest that it represents a victory for the traditional left and the traditional right in Italian politics — in many ways, the sixth ballot represented a return to Bersani’s first-ballot strategy whereby he attempted to join his centrosinistra forces with Berlusconi’s to elect former Senato president Franco Marini with a massive two-thirds majority.  When that strategy failed, largely on the revolt of many on the left, including Puglia regional president Nichi Vendola, who leads the minor party in Bersani’s coalition, the Sinistra Ecologia Libertà (SEL, Left Ecology Freedom), and Firenze mayor Matteo Renzi, who challenged Bersani in the centrosinistra primary to determine its candidate for prime minister in the February 2013 elections.

So what comes next?

Most immediately, Napolitano will turn to finding a way out of the political impasse.  With Bersani gone from the PD leadership, it seems likelier now that some PD deputies will join with Berlusconi’s Popolo della Libertà (PdL, People of Freedom) to form a short-lived government under, perhaps, another technocratic prime minister.  We’ll see over the coming days what Napolitano proposes, who will support it, and what agenda that government might submit.

Although he’s just been reelected, it’s hard to see Napolitano serving much beyond the next parliamentary elections, let alone a full term until he reaches age 94, so I would view the election today as more of a one-year or two-year extension of Napolitano’s term than the promulgation of a head of state for the next seven years.  That means, of course, whoever wins the next elections would stand a good chance of electing the next president.

There will be some procedure to determine who replaces Bersani, at least on an interim basis.  Without Bersani at the helm, it’s difficult to see any kind of discipline among a group of legislators that runs from former Christian Democrats to democratic socialists.  In the longer term, however, Renzi certainly seems the smartest choice to lead what remains of the Italian left following Bersani’s implosion — he’s by far the most popular politician in the country.  But it’s not clear that Vendola would accept a Renzi-led left nor is it clear that Renzi would be elected by acclamation, given the potential candidacy of others.

That includes Fabrizio Barca, a rising star who served in prime minister Mario Monti’s cabinet as a minister for territorial cohesion and a former protégé of former Banca d’Italia president and Napolitano’s predecessor, Carlo Azeglio Ciampi.  Barca joined the PD last week with a plan to reform both the PD and Italian government.

Italy

Prodi emerges as united center-left’s presidential candidate in Italy

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So with the third ballot completed in the election of Italy’s new president, the centrosinistra (center-left) has a new candidate for the fourth ballot — which can be won by a simple majority — former prime minister Romano Prodi.Italy Flag Icon

Prodi is no doubt the most successful member of the Italian center-left in postwar history, winning the 1996 and the 2006 elections, though he failed to serve out the full terms in either case.

On the one hand, Prodi is a superb, even canny, choice — he has much more international credibility than Franco Marini as a former president of the European Commission, he has a lot of goodwill for pushing through a limited set of reforms in the mid 1990s to prepare Italy for entering the eurozone, and he’s generally an even broker.  It’s a much safer bet for the leader of the Partito Democratico (PD, Democratic Party), Pier Luigi Bersani, who will have re-united his coalition after so damagingly supporting Marini on the first ballot as a consensus candidate who won the backing of Silvio Berlusconi and his centrodestra (center-right) that drew howls from within Bersani’s own party.  Both Florence mayor Matteo Renzi and the leader of the more leftist Sinistra Ecologia Libertà (SEL, Left Ecology Freedom), Nichi Vendola, will support Prodi, and the centrosinistra seems likely to rally around Prodi.

But it’s left Berlusconi angry and further apart than ever from Bersani, which means elections are likelier sooner rather than later.  It’s a much more blatantly political choice than many of the past Italian presidents:

  • current president Giorgio Napolitano was a former Communist, but widely respected and out of the political fray upon his election in 2006;
  • his predecessor Carlo Azeglio Ciampi was a former president of the Banca d’Italia, Italy’s central bank, and a former short-term technocratic prime minister when he was elected in 1999;
  • his predecessor, in turn, Oscar Luigi Scalfaro, was a former Christian Democrat and magistrate, elected in 1992.

Prodi’s candidacy will also rankle members of the Movimento 5 Stelle (M5S, the Five Star Movement), not to mention the fact that, despite his absence from frontline politics since 2008, Prodi still represents much of the old fights of the past 20 years in Italian politics.

Berlusconi’s Popolo della Libertà (PdL, People of Freedom) will cast blank ballots on the fourth vote, and the Five Star Movement will continue to support former leftist parliamentarian and legal scholar Stefano Rodotà.

Although the center-left controls nearly a majority of the seats in the electoral college, it will still need a handful of additional votes for Prodi to win on the fourth ballot, and that’s provided that none of the centrosinistra breaks ranks in what is a secret ballot.  So Prodi’s election is far from certain — if he fails, it’s not certain what will happen on the fifth ballot.

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Italy

Presidential vote returns Italian politics to high operatic drama

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Voting began earlier today to select the new Italian president among the electoral college that’s gathered for that express purpose, and it’s left Italian politics once again in disarray, this time by revealing a split among the centrosinistra led by an incredibly powerless Pier Luigi Bersani after two ballots failed to elect a successor to Giorgio Napolitano who, at age 86, is not running for reelection for another seven-year term. Italy Flag Icon

The Italian president, whose role remains essentially ceremonial, is not elected directly, but through an electoral college that includes the members of both houses of Italy’s parliament, plus a special group of electors that includes three members for each region (except for the Valle d’Aosta, which has just one) that total 1,007 voters.  A president can be elected on the first three ballots only with a two-thirds majority; on the fourth ballot, a simple majority can elect the president, as happened in 2008 with the election of Napolitano.

At the end of last month, I highlighted some of the potential technocratic prime ministers that outgoing president Giorgio Napolitano might appoint.  In the interim, he’s chosen to continue talks and keep prime minister Mario Monti in place to tend to day-to-day government affairs while the presidential vote proceeds.

One of those potential consensus candidates was Stefano Rodotà (pictured above), who finished tops in the second ballot just held by the Italian presidential electoral college this afternoon with 230 votes to just 90 for former Turin mayor Sergio Chiamparino, 38 for former prime minister and foreign minster Massimo D’Alema and a bare 15 for the former first ballot leader Franco Marini, who originally had not only Bersani’s support, but the support of Silvio Berlusconi as well, leading to a howl of ‘corrupt bargain’ accusations.

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The result is a disaster for Bersani — The Economist blasted it as the failure of an ‘inciucio,’ a Napolitano word meaning ‘stitch-up,’ and Alberto Nardelli has brutally written that Bersani’s deal with Berlusconi reveals that he’s putting his own career over the interests of Italy:

Bersani (who says he doesn’t want to form a government with Berlusconi) is happy to deal behind closed doors, and in attempting an agreement on the presidency, the PD leader is hoping that the PDL will then not obstruct the formation of a government. The goal isn’t a ‘government of change’, it’s landing the job – the mask has slipped.

This is (Italian) politics at its worse – career ahead of country and leading via back room deals in the style of country fairs where livestock is exchanged. And many still wonder why Beppe Grillo is so popular.

How Bersani blew it

Marini’s collapse was a predictable blunder, and it goes to the heart of why Italian politics is in the dysfunction state that it’s in.

Bersani, who leads not only the center-left Partito Democratico (PD, Democratic Party), but the broader center-left coalition that also contains the more socialist Sinistra Ecologia Libertà (SEL, Left Ecology Freedom), led by Nichi Vendola, agreed to support Marini on the first ballot, who also received the support of the centrodestra coalition dominated by Silvio Berlusconi’s Popolo della Libertà (PdL, People of Freedom) and Monti’s centrist, reformist allies.

The center-left in Italy contains essentially two strands — those who came out of the world dominated by Democrazia Cristiana (DC, Christian Democracy) that controlled Italian government in the post-war period through 1993, and those who came out of the tradition of the Partito Comunista Italiano (PCI, Italian Communist Party), consistently in opposition to the hegemonic and increasingly corruption Christian Democracy (and their various allies), who were mostly wiped out of office after a series of scandals in 1992 and 1993.  Napolitano, for instances, comes from the Communist background.

But Marini, age 80, comes not only from the Christian Democratic world, he was a member of Democrazia Cristiana since 1950, the leader of the Confederazione Italiana Sindacati Lavoratori (CISL, Italian Confederation of Trade Unions), the trade union arm of Christian Democracy in the 1980s, and minister of labour to Giulio Andreotti, who was thrice prime minister between the 1970s and the 1990s and is synonymous with the Catholic right wing of Christian Democracy.  Marini was the president of the Senato from 2006 to 2008, however, when Romano Prodi governed Italy, but he lost his senatorial seat in February’s elections.  As Florence mayor Matteo Renzi said, Marini comes from ‘the last century’ of Italian politics, and his failure to win reelection makes him a poor choice to represent vital Italian democracy in 2013.

All of which would have made Marini a poor choice for the presidency, but Berlusconi’s endorsement made Marini all but toxic.  Bersani had previously refused to make any deal with Berlusconi over a governing coalition (despite Berlusconi’s repeated offers for a ‘grand coalition’).  So his volte face immediately caused alarm even within his own ranks.  That includes not only much of the SEL, but significant portions of Bersani’s own Democratic Party, including Renzi, all of whom refused to support Marini.  Theoretically, the centrosinitra and centrodestra could have pooled enough votes to win on the first ballot, but Marini’s 521 first-ballot supporters were just barely a majority, opening a wide schism in the centrosinistra, and strengthening Renzi, a popular, young mayor who, at age 37, who lost last November’s primary contest to Bersani to led the centrosinistra in the February election.

Rodotà and the politics of change

Renzi, who’s called for a new generation of leadership on both Italy’s left and right, is the most popular politician in the country.  If a second election is called, and the centrosinistra is dumb enough to stick with Bersani as its leader, it will lose.  But if the centrosinistra chooses Renzi to lead it into the next election, it will probably win in a landslide, because Renzi’s message blends the best of both the center-left and that of the Movimento 5 Stelle (M5S, the Five Star Movement), a diverse, largely anti-austerity protest group led by blogger, comedian and popular activist Beppe Grillo into power as the third force of Italian politics on a platform of more transparency and better governance, among other priorities.

The deal between Bersani and Berlusconi personifies the kind of old-school back-room dealing that Renzi has decried and that powered the Five Star Movement into the spotlight.  So the Marini candidacy gives both Renzi and the Five Star Movement even more evidence that the barons of the center-left and the center-right still don’t understand the way that Italian politics changed after February’s election.

Rodotà, who placed second on the first ballot with 240 votes, is the candidate of the Five Star Movement, which held an online ballot to determine its preferred candidate for the presidency.  Although its top two choices declined to stand for the presidency, its third-place candidate was Rodotà.  Though Rodotà, too, is just shy of 80 years old, he’s a former deputy who stood against the Christian Democratic-dominated oligarchy in the 1980s, and he was one of the first leaders of the Democratic Party of the Left that emerged as the more moderate wing of the old Italian Communists and is a predecessor of the Democratic Party that Bersani today leads.  A legal scholar based in Rome, he’s spent much of the past decade as an activist for electronic privacy rights in Italy and the European Union.

What’s most amazing about all of this mess is that after the next ballot, which will be held tomorrow, the united centrosinistra will likely be able to push through their own candidate on the fourth ballot, which will be held either tomorrow or Saturday at the latest — they’ll be just a handful of votes short of a simple majority.  So Bersani could have probably just allowed a free vote on the first three ballots, then pushed for the consensus candidate of the center-left acceptable to Vendola and the SEL, on the one hand, and Renzi, on the other.  Instead, Bersani has weakened what’s already an amazingly weak position as the Democratic Party leader by attempting to broker a deal with Berlusconi to install an unpopular remnant of Italy’s First Republic in the presidency.  It seems incredibly difficult to see how Bersani will remain the Democratic Party leader for much longer.

What comes next?

chiamparino

Chiamparino, at age 64, (pictured above) is a popular leftist from the old Communist tradition who’s a popular former mayor of Turin, gained votes between the first and second ballots, and he could well become the consensus candidate of the centrosinistra in advance of the third and the key fourth ballot, both of which will be held tomorrow — Renzi has indicated that Chiamparino is his first choice.

Other candidates likely include former prime minister Giuliano Amato, but he’s seen as a throwback to the First Republic as well.  D’Alema and Prodi remain potential candidates, though both are seen as insiders and electoral losers, though Prodi perhaps has a better shot as a former European commissioner and a two-time former prime minister who led the center-left to victories in 1996 and in 2006.

I still think that Emma Bonino, a longtime human rights champion and good-government Radical Party senator since the 1980s, would make a wonderful choice for the center-left because she has the kind of appeal that transcends ideology, which makes her very much like Napolitano, the outgoing president.  She would also be a historic choice as the first woman to become Italy’s head of state.

Another option is for the left to simply join forces with the Five Star Movement and back Rodotà, of course.

We’ll know a lot more in the hours to come.

Italy

Seven people who could be appointed Italy’s next technocratic prime minister

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With the failure of centrosinistra (center-left) leader Pier Luigi Bersani to form a government after a week of talks, Italian president Giorgio Napolitano now faces a tough 24 hours of consultations with the other key players in the Italian parliament.Italy Flag Icon

The path now becomes perilous — for Napolitano, above all, who remains just about the only respected public official left in Italy:

  • Of course, as I noted earlier today, upon further consultation with the various players on Friday, Napolitano could give Bersani, the leader of the Partito Democratico (PD, Democratic Party), more time to cobble together a government.  That doesn’t seem so incredibly likely to succeed.
  • Napolitano could also appoint Bersani as prime minister to try to win a vote of confidence in the upper house of the Senato, essentially daring Silvio Berlusconi’s centrodestra (center-right) coalition to reject him, though it seems unlikely that Napolitano would do so if there’s a chance Bersani would lose the vote.  If Bersani loses, he’ll be left as a discredited caretaker prime minister, and Napolitano will have suffered a political defeat as well, limiting his future maneuverability.
  • Another option is simply to leave prime minister Mario Monti (pictured above shaking hands with Italian senator Emma Bonino) in place as a pro forma caretaker — this is the ‘Belgian’ option: a parliament with no real government.  That could well cause Italian bond yields to rise or otherwise call into question Italy’s capability for long-term reform.  That’s especially true if you think the eurozone is primarily a political crisis rather than an economic one.

Another option, of course, would be for Napolitano to appoint a new technocratic prime minister, though that carries risks as well, especially coming after the political rejection of Monti’s pro-reform, centrist coalition in the February elections.  Monti was appointed as a technocratic prime minister in November 2011 with the support of both the PD and Berlusconi’s Popolo della Libertà (PdL, People of Freedom).  In late 2011 and early 2012, Monti’s government instituted reforms to reduce tax evasion, increased taxes, pension reform that reduces early retirement, and he instituted some modest labor reforms as well, though they’ve not had the sweeping effect Italy’s economy may need to revitalize its labor market.

But Monti’s government stalled and Italy went to early elections in February when Berlusconi and the PdL pulled its support from Monti’s government, and Berlusconi and Beppe Grillo, leading the protest Movimento 5 Stelle (M5S, the Five Star Movement) actively ran against Monti’s reforms and attacked Monti as little more than an errand-boy for Brussels and Berlin.

So if neither Bersani nor Monti appear workable choices, to whom could Napolitano turn in the event of yet another technocratic government?  Such a government would have a very limited mandate for, say, electing a new president (which the new parliament must accomplish in May 2013 before new snap elections could even be held), carrying out the execution of Italy’s 2013 budget and perhaps even overseeing a change in the election law.

Here are seven potential candidates to keep an eye on in the days ahead: Continue reading Seven people who could be appointed Italy’s next technocratic prime minister →

Italy

Italian government now rests in hands of Napolitano, Italy’s president

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After a week of consultations with the various factions in Italy’s parliament, Pier Luigi Bersani, the leader of the Partito Democratico (PD, Democratic Party) and of the broader centrosinistra (center-left) coalition, has failed to form a government, Bersani informed Italian president Giorgio Napolitano earlier today — although his coalition controls an absolute majority of seats in the lower house of Italy’s parliament, no one controls a majority in the Senato, the upper house.Italy Flag Icon

The deadlock has resulted for two main reasons.

First, Bersani refuses to join a ‘grand coalition’ with Silvio Berlusconi, the leader of the Popolo della Libertà (PdL, People of Freedom) and the broader centrodestra (center-right) coalition — this week, Bersani again turned down the offer of a ‘grand coalition’ that would have made Bersani premier and Berlusconi’s top lieutenant, former justice minister Angelino Alfano, vice premier.  In exchange for the center-right’s support to prop up his premiership, however, Berlusconi has essentially demanded that the next president be a moderate or conservative acceptable to Berlusconi (don’t rule out the notion that Berlusconi conceivably meant Berlusconi himself).

Second, Beppe Grillo and his populist Movimento 5 Stelle (M5S, the Five Star Movement) refuses to join a coalition with either the centrosinistra or the centrodestra, either formally or informally.  The best that the Five Star Movement legislators have offered is to provide their support on an issue-by-issue basis, though Grillo called both the right and the left ‘whoremonger fathers’ on his blog yesterday.  This isn’t a man who wants to compromise.

An exasperated Bersani was already calling for a ‘government of miracles‘ on Tuesday (obviously not a good sign) and yesterday joked that only someone insane would want to lead Italy’s government.

Those lines have essentially been drawn since the immediate result of the election became clear.  So there was never much optimism that Bersani would succeed.

So the big question now is: what happens next?

All eyes on Napolitano

The key player at this point is Napolitano (pictured above), who will now spend the next 24 hours talking to the parties to see if they really, really won’t support a Bersani government.

Although he hasn’t unlocked a deal over the past week, Bersani has not yet renounced the mandate that Napolitano gave him last Friday to form a government, and he could convince Napolitano to appoint him prime minister anyway in order to the parliament in an attempt to try to squeak through a vote of no confidence.

But as Open Europe noted yesterday, a failure would leave Bersani in place as the default caretaker prime minister:  Continue reading Italian government now rests in hands of Napolitano, Italy’s president →