The End of the Berlusconi Era
Silvio Berlusconi has been around for so long that it is hard to imagine Italian politics without him occupying the center stage. The end of his era is nigh, however, to the relief of his opponents as well as many of his erstwhile supporters. Berlusconi announced on Tuesday night that he would resign as Prime Minister as soon as the Chamber adopts a new financial stability law that will include an EU-imposed austerity package, probably within two weeks.
Only hours earlier Berlusconi had lost his parliamentary majority after Umberto Bossi, leader of the Northern League and his key coalition partner, called on him to resign. After meeting him for an hour on Tuesday, President Giorgio Napolitano said the Prime Minister had understood the implications of the vote and accepted the “urgent need” for the country to respond quickly to the demands from Brussels for legislative action in line with the European Commission diktat. The immediate challenge for his successors will be to put together a stable enough government—possibly led by non-party technocrats—able to apply sweeping EU-dictated austerity measures in a country that has had, on average, about one government a year since the Second World War.
The Italian political class is breathing a collective sigh of relief, but it seems clear that no domestic combinazioni could have forced Berlusconi to go so soon. Only weeks ago he seemed impregnable. The immediate cause of his pending departure is the pressure from Berlin and Paris to make Italy take a hefty dose of the bitter medicine already prescribed to Greece, and the loss of faith in Berlusconi’s ability to administer it. This is the first time a major European country, and a founding member of the Six at that, has had its domestic political arrangements so decisively impacted by the dominant EU powers.
A century and a half after Italy shook off first Austrian rule and then French tutelage and became independent, it is still vulnerable to the vincolo esterno, the external constraint. The pressure started in late August when Jean-Claude Trichet, President of the European Central Bank, and his Italian successor, Mario Draghi (who took over the ECB on November 1), jointly warned Berlusconi that “pressing action by the Italian authorities is essential to restore the confidence of investors.” Over the ensing two months, however, he did little to demonstrate Italy’s ability to reduce its massive public debt and stimulate growth. The concern in Brussels and Berlin was unsurprising: Italy’s economy is three times the size of Greece, Ireland and Portugal combined. The EU would be unable to raise enough capital to bail her out if it were to default on its debt payments. A failure of any kind in Italy would finally destroy the eurozone as a whole.
On October 23, at the first of two most recent Euro-summits dealing with the eurozone crisis, Berlusconi was told by Angela Merkel and Nicolas Sarkozy to bring a convincing reform blueprint to the next EU gathering which was scheduled in Brussels only three days later. Their smirks and contemptuous treatment of the Italian premier prompted even his political foes back in Rome to start murmuring Euro-skeptic heresies. (The humiliation also prompted Berlusconi to make some unprintable remarks about Chancellor Merkel’s appearance and feminine charms.) He returned to Brussels on October 26 with a hastily drafted package of measures to boost growth and cut Italy’s public debt, but Frau Merkel is said to have been underwhelmed by more promises of future measures. Her decision that Berlusconi should go—with Sarkozy merely pretending to count in the making of that decision—is probably some two weeks old.
This is the end of an era for Italy and the end of a mercurial and ultimately disappointing career. Personal idiosyncrasies that may have seemed relatively harmless and politically irrelevant in the 1990s, or even a decade ago, have turned grotesque, with il Cavaliere at 75 seemingly losing all vestiges of self-control in his personal life. The Roman Catholic Church, once a quiet supporter, has turned against him. Famiglia Cristiana, an influential weekly, deplored Italy’s “moral emergency” last summer and accused Berlusconi’s friends of “defending the indefensible.”
His bunga-bunga parties, as we now know, were not vicious rumors spread by vile reporters, but real-life events that make decent Italians blush. His resulting legal problems have severely curtailed his ability to function as an effective chief executive.
The real problem is that he has been ineffective all along. Berlusconi’s rise on the ruins of the corrupt old system—managed for decades by the Christian Democrats and their smaller satellites—was based on the twin promise of “clean hands” and managerial efficiency. Being the richest Italian alive seemed a solid credential regarding the latter: he was supposed to be “Italy’s Thatcher.” He was Prime Minister in 1994-1995, then for five full years starting a decade ago (2001-2006), and currently since 2008, making him the longest-serving leader of a G-8 country and second only to Mussolini at the helm of Italy. He has enjoyed comfortable parliamentary majorities and unique media influence—in part thanks to his Mediaset empire—that should have enabled him to enact and apply a bold vision of Italy for the 21st century.
Berlusconi has failed; worse, he has not really tried. His private peccadilloes and often dubious business practices (which have also created a never-ending stream of lawsuits) could have been overlooked had he not left Italy, after almost ten years in office, in no better state than he found her in 1994. The economy is grotesquely over-regulated, yet the old system of corrupt government contracts and phony jobs for the well-connected is alive and well. The central bureaucratic machine is as bloated and inefficient as ever. An estimated third of potential tax revenues remain uncollected. Italy is, in terms of growth, the sick man of Europe: only Zimbabwe and Haiti had lower GDP growth than Italy in 2000-2010. The public debt, at $2.6 trillion, is 120% of GDP. A quarter of Italy’s under-30s are unemployed and another quarter is subsisting on dead-end, 1,000 euros-per-month jobs in mamma’s care, thus contributing to a demographic collapse far worse than that in Central and Northern Europe. There was no improvement in productivity under Berlusconi: Italy’s international competitiveness has actually declined over the past decade. Public spending has been outstripping growth for years; since 2009, it has accounted for more than one-half of the GDP. There is no way—on current form—that the country can bring its finances in order and stimulate serious growth at the same time. There is equally no way it can be bailed out by others.
Italy is still one of the most civilized countries in the world and one of the most pleasant to live. To remain that way, Italy needs to find a formula to remain herself, while adjusting to the financial and economic realities of the Old Continent by quitting the euro, devaluing, and managing her own interest and exchange rates. It was time for Berlusconi to go because he has not been able or willing to make a difference. Among his many memorable quips—some of them funny, some just plain embarrassing—the most absurd by far is his 2006 boast, “I am the Jesus Christ of politics. I am a patient victim. … I sacrifice myself for everyone.” This is nonsense. Berlusconi sacrificed nothing and served himself. Italy deserves better.
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Would a Greek expulsion scare the Italians into getting their house in order as Sinn thinks, or is the fate of the euro inevitably at most a common currency of France, Germany and BeNeLux (with maybe Austria and Finland)?
The latter, with Slovakia and the Baltic trio staying as well -- small and fiscally responsible
Secession might work. After all, Italy has only been around since the 1870s -- roughly the same amount of time as artificial Germany. It's either that, or a complete repeal of fascist laws that drove half of Italy's productive capacity on to the Black Market, and have remained to this day.
Balkanization (please excuse the metaphor, Dr. T) of Italy is not an altogether idiotic idea, and if memory serves me correctly is the secret ideology underlying - though not always explicitly - the Lega Nord. The only sane justification for Italian unification (i.e., the only justification that did not originate in the longing of some twit to recreate the pagan Roman Empire with a non-Roman as the head of state and a form of provincial vulgar Latin as the official language) was to ward off French and German hegemony, but after this final round of Merkel/Sarkozy versus Berlusconi it is quite clear that even a unified Italy can no longer adequately serve this end.
If Italy were divided into Northern, Central and Southern/Sicily sovereign portions with Florence, Rome and Naples as respective capitals, the North might conceivably stay in the E.U. The Mafia and its various peninsular counterparts would have effective control of Southern Italy and they would be forced to transform themselves into a legitimate state and stop the stupidity.
Foreseeable to overcome include popular opinion, the succession of the public debt and especially the not improbable reopening of the Vatican Question.
By the way, though, it wasn't the fascists who enabled the criminal rackets. On the contrary, Mussolini did a pretty good job of nearly wiping them out until the U.S. came in and made use of the Mafiosi for their own mission.
I think there is a good reason for government officials to deliberately turn a blind eye to the informal economy.
Often times, the informal off-the-books economy comprises a set of activities that wouldn't have been so rigourous out in the open, and it is what keeps the formal on-the-books economy better stimulated with a good number of people well-employed and well-earning in order to actually purchase anything in the formal sector.
If we have to ask "For whom? For what?" for every act of actually enforcing the law, we may find that there is no point in enforcing authority if it hurts the livelihood of people engaged in the trade and if it hurts the people who only have those channels available to them for getting things they need.
And yes, the authorities involved in monitoring such activities may need kickbacks to remain quiet in the existence of an informal economy. It's not that kind of corruption that ever bothers me, because it is important to distinguish between corruption that allows narrow interests to benefit at the expense of most people, and corruption that simply functions as a social currency of surviving in a particular set of circumstances.
Yes, Prateek, I mostly agree, but that is not really applicable to the situation in the former Kingdom of the Two Sicilies. The reason is that:
1. the "informal economy" in question, in Southern Italy and Sicily, consists almost entirely of socially and economically parasitical activities: monopoly brokering, union manipulation, racketeering and intimidation, and of course cocaine dealing; and
2. an unduly large proportion of the regions' economies are filtered through these shadow states.
Thanks for the correction!
I guessed that the mentions of the informal economy that Italy's government fails to tax referred to organizations just like businesses in Third World slums that deal in basic supplies, over the counter and off the books. I assumed something along the lines of olive oil sellers who don't bother paying taxes or something.
Not a problem. Understandable confusion. The sorts of things you mentioned go on all the time and that even in the First World there are plenty of under-the-table transactions--especially in a country such as France, where the greedy UMPS government would tax walking if it wouldn't get its throat cut. Generally speaking, the more taxes a government pulls, the more ubiquitous the tax evasion.
Have you seen The Godfather? I also recommend Goodfellas and The Valachi Papers; these two but especially the latter are more accurate cinematic depictions of the American Mafia. Historian John Dickie also has an excellent book--probably the first great treatment of the subject in the English language, though I'm not sure I agree with all his inferences on certain people's motives--on the original Sicilian Mafia called, "La Cosa Nostra: A History of the Sicilian Mafia."
I saw The Godfather, like every other billionth person who saw it!
That movie annoyed me with Don Corleone's hypocrisy, to be perfectly honest.
Corleone objects to selling drugs to children. Oh, how moral! He doesn't, however, object to threatening to kill fathers of children and husbands of wives to extort them, which would obviously affect the children of the people extorted. He doesn't object to murdering threats to his power, which would again obviously affect the children of those people. He doesn't object to invading a man's premises and butchering his personal property. And he especially does not object to killing any woman in bed with the man on whom he orders hits. But ignore all of that; Corleone is a magnanimous creature, because he would not sell drugs to children.
Pardon me, but I find this faux-morality shown in movies about American Mafia to be highly irritating. They are not people with a code of honour or rules, as they claim to be, but only people who make a few concessions to decency now and then to keep a good image to the politicians they meet. When Al Pacino's character says, "Who is being naiive, Kate?", I don't think he appreciated that he was the one being naiive. Presidents only order killings under the mandate of a legislature and the established law; Mafiosi do so for themselves.
EDIT: The first sentence came off as sarcastic, but I was only joking.
I thought you might've seen the Godfather; no prob. That's why I recommend Goodfellas and The Valachi Papers. The Godfather trilogy, much as I find it entertaining, is an unrealistic portrayal of the mafia for several reaaons. First of all, as you suggest, it never really ventures far outside the insular world of the mafia to force the characters to confront the legal, moral and social reality outside of the Shadow States they have erected. Second, it walks a fine line very nearly taking the mafia code word "crime family" literally--and this is decidedly inaccurate.
Goodfellas and The Valachi Papers, on the other hand, are both based on true stories and both of them better depict not only the reality of the mafia politics and transparent hypocrisy of the mafioso character but also the moral and social realities of straddling between the real world and the Shadow State.
But don't think government officials don't order people killed in covert operations, either. Michael's line didn't reveal him to be naïve so much as to have mistaken cynicism for sophistication.
I have a couple of mafia-related stories, both based on hear-say, not direct observation.
A very good high-school friend married an Italian girl and they moved into a "protected" neighborhood in Milwaukee. He told me that Blacks from surrounding/nearby neighborhoods would not even walk through that area; they would take the long way around. There was virtually no "observable" crime in this neighborhood (robberies, break-ins, etc.)
My wife is Italian on her father's side. The husband of my wife's slightly younger cousin cheated on her and treated her badly. One day, my wife's uncle (her cousin's father) answered his door to greet a "connected" relative who offered to take out the offending husband as a courtesy. My wife's uncle politely declined the offer. My wife says that her grandfather's brother was in the mafia and her grandfather would have nothing to do with him, saying that "he lived in the gutter and he would die in the gutter."
Both of these stories are rooted in the early- to mid-1970s.
Quite unsurprising. Keeping in mind the connections that people forge and the strong tendency at least until the last fifty or so years for Americans to marry within their own ethnic group (not just their own race and religion) it is not at all unthinkable that a few decades ago a majority of Italian-Americans might have at least a first or second cousin who, while perhaps not a "made man," has at some point to one degree or another dealt willingly with one of the syndicates, even if the vast majority wanted nothing to do with them. (A Bronx Tale is another good movie about the effects of the Shadow on ordinary persons.)
Your story about the "protected" enclave of Milwaukee does call to mind stories I've heard about Bronxville and the quieter neighborhoods within the Bronx but closer to the Westchester border.
Berlusconi: mediocrity personified, so? Isn't that democracy writ large? We don't have Aristophanes anymore to make it obvious. Maybe they do in Italy, the land of political-plumbers compared to the Greeks or at least the ancients, I don't live in Italy, can't really say. When you realize we just had Bush, now of a darker hue Obama, Berlusconi seems innocently perverse, refreshing, -elegant- well, maybe that's a stretch. To my knowledge, at least he's not jewish, is he?
Mr. Yurick, how would it matter if he is Jewish? I think it's a very strange statement on your part.
Binyamin Netanyahu is Jewish after all, and he is easily in the top 10 leaders of the world as far as service to his country goes - a former special forces commando who rescued hostages from terrorists, a leader in the 1990s who once shot his political career in the foot by suing for peace on unequal terms in the name of the greater long-term good, and a man who still engaged in violence in Gaza despite his earlier pacifist leanings once he exhausted all options with talks and trying to siege/blockade the enemy threat.
In other words, he is no Berlusconi now, is he?
“Papandreou had to leave office the moment he suggested the referendum on the debt package. Berlusconi had to leave office the moment he said that Italians had become poorer under the euro,” John Laughland.
http://rt.com/news/eurozone-crisis-greece-italy-119/
It would matter because zionism is judaism today is jewish and although a 2% minority of the population as a tribal bloc occupies all of the west's important pinch points, media, finance, politics, education. My point is it's almost moot whether or not he's 'jewish' per se, but if not it's sort of a humorous consolation prize for christians or in your perception 'gentiles'. See? Check out the perspective of Brother Nathanael and ex-Jew Greek Orthodox Christian monk. I think if you google Brother Nathanael Foundation.org/videos he speaks more nearly the truth of these times. At least from our western perspective and not from your jewish perspective.
This article is a fine summary of Berlusconi's career and the current situation. It omits, however, one important consideration, which may leave a somewhat less negative assessment of Berlusconi's legacy. Those of us who were present in 1993 (including a majority of Italian voters, who have continued to support Berlusconi), remember the situation well. The communist supporters in the Italian judiciary had destroyed all of the parties in the center-right government (Christian Democrats, Socialists, Social Democrats, Liberals, Republicans) through a series of investigations of corruption (those charges were mostly true, this was Italy, after all). These parties, which had represented 45-55% of the Italian voting public were gone - not weakened - completely destroyed, out of business. There was literally no credible opposition to the (former) Communists taking over the government, fulfilling a 50 year dream. It was, in every sense, a coup. Sig. Berlusconi performed a near miracle by creating, in an instant, a credible center-right party - Forza Italia, and cementing an unlikely coalition with the centralizing Alleanza Nazionale party and the decentralizing Lega Nord. This coalition defeated the neo/former/post Communists in the general election. The left, and its lackeys in the media and the judiciary have never forgiven Berlusconi for robbing of them of their triumph. If for no other reason than this, offering a credible alternative to Communist rule of Italy, I have a certain fondness for il Cavaliere.