An Ode to Berlusconi
I doubt I’ll ever find as much entertainment in a political figure as that I get out of Italy’s prime minister, Silvio Berlusconi. Besides the soap opera that is the man’s family life, his brushes with the law and his ownership of nearly all of the nation’s commercial television channels which epitomizes the phrase ‘conflict of interest’, he is clearly unfit for office. However, for a country in such a dire recession, with such a self-serving jester skyrocketing political risk as a leader, the man remains startlingly popular.
When analyzing political risk in Italy, one can at least be assured, as similar to that in Zimbabwe, that Berlusconi will find a way to remain in power. And indeed, his political grip is secure.
On the right he is unchallenged, even though by September he will be 73 years old. The centre-left opposition has, according to many sources, made little headway. In short, Berlusconi is more powerful than ever before.
And Italy suffers because of this ‘par for the course’ mentality that has left his leadership in government. The IMF forecasts that Italy’s GDP will shrink by 4.4% this year, more than in Britain, Spain and France. Italy is the only G7 rich country in which productivity has fallen in the past ten years. This hinders the competitiveness of other euro countries such as Germany.
And despite these statistics, reform in Italy will simply not occur. Although this should be a golden opportunity for Italy’s prime minister, besides helping fix the Naples garbage crisis, Berlusoni’s overall record is neither a liberal reformer or a believer in healthy competition, but a businessman continuing to be out for his own affairs, not to advance the cause of Italian business on the whole.
The turnaround of Fiat, which may now be taking over Chrysler, is but one example of Italian ingenuity adapting to a new geopolitical market. The people of Italy must now turn to a new leader in 2013 in order to boost an economy raring to compete out of today’s moral and economical ambivalence.
I am Italian and I thank you for your suggestion about what I should vote for in 2013. But let me tell you that the situation is a little bit different from what is said in the articles foreign journalists use to write about our president.
Reading your post one might think that the economic situation in Italy is caused by Berlusconi’s zimbabwean way of governing the country. Well, Italy cannot be compared to Zimbabwe and I think that your vision is partial and ill-informed.
Italy’s economic decline goes back to the eighties and is due to government overspending. Political leaders in Italy have learned early on how to exchange votes for privileges favouring only some groups of people and this practice has gradually reduced market competition in our country. This has also made really difficult to reform the social security system and the public sector (the greatest burdens in terms of national debt) in order to privatise and liberalise extensively. Every time a politician talks about cuts to be made in the public sector or the social security, strikes and protests begin. But Berlusconi is the Italian leader that so far has done the most for the reduction of public debt. Not enough surely, but at least he is trying to use his vast popularity to make some changes: see his fiscal policy, the effort to make the burocracy more efficient, the program for the construction of new towns aimed at giving young people the opportunity to buy a house, the agreement with Gheddafi, the project to strengthen the executive and so on.
Then look at what Prodi’s government has done regarding the retirement system. I am not saying that Berlusconi is the best leader we can have, he is old and always looking for general consensus, and he failed to do reforms in the past, but at this moment the Opposition is even worse. I am talking about a left party that has never modernized its message and simply cannot leave ideology aside and talk about real problems. What happened in the UK with Blair has still to happen in Italy and this is a big issue. As for the conflict of interest, I do not watch TV but I can assure you that newspapers as well as radio are totally free in Italy, and all this gossiping about Berlusconi and all the alleged scandals should prove that in the end mass media are not so servile and under control.
Many thanks for commenting. Just want to add that the man who called himself the “Jesus Christ of politicians” is currently in charge of Italy’s worst recession since WWII.