Over the years, Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi has marveled Italians with his Houdini-like powers to escape the trickiest political traps and bounce back when all odds were against him.
But this time around, as a political crisis deepens and looks poised to bring down the government within weeks, something is notably different in Italy.
How can one tell? Because his former loyalists, who did not abandon him when he lost power in 2006 but who sense political weakness the way a dog smells fear, have visibly begun repositioning themselves for the next chapter — when Berlusconi is unlikely to be the leading man.
“It’s an old Italian tradition that the tenor is idolized until people start booing him,” said Beppe Severgnini, a longtime Berlusconi critic whose latest book tries to explain the Italian leader to foreigners.
FINAL CHAPTER?
This month, the booing has begun. It started at the top, with Gianfranco Fini, the cofounder of the center-right People of Liberty party, who withdrew four Cabinet members on Monday. That move formalized a crisis that began when Berlusconi kicked him out of the coalition in July, costing him his parliamentary majority.
However, every day, the defections — or perceived defections — multiply. Last week, Vittorio Feltri, a longtime Berlusconi loyalist and the editor of Il Giornale, a newspaper owned by Berlusconi’s brother, gave a peculiar interview to a rival publication in which he criticized Berlusconi.
“He’s tired and confused,” Feltri said in an interview in Il Fatto Quotidiano, an upstart left-wing daily. “He didn’t do a lot of things that he should have done.”
For years, critics of Berlusconi stayed skittishly off the record, worried about jeopardizing their futures in a patronage society. That fear extended into government, where Berlusconi routinely accused Fini and others who called attention to Italy’s problems of disloyalty.
That, too, has begun to change. Today, politicians and other public figures who until this month were puzzlingly silent about Italy’s lack of competitiveness, high debt, brain drain, low productivity and tax evasion, among many other issues, have begun to speak openly.
“Inside the PDL” — Berlusconi’s People of Liberties party — “there’s a widespread sense that Berlusconi has reached the end of the line,” said Pier Ferdinando Casini, the head of the Union of Christian Democrats, a Catholic party that was allied with Berlusconi in past governments but not the current one.
NO JULIUS CAESAR
“An empire’s an empire, but Julius Caesar is different from Caligula,” Casini said, making a reference to Berlusconi’s many sex scandals.
Casini is being courted furiously both by Fini and by the center-left Democratic Party. Each wants his votes — estimated at 5.8 percent in a recent poll in the newspaper Corriere della Sera — to help form a majority.
However, while there is a growing sense that Berlusconi is on the way out, no one, including veteran political analysts, has any clear sense of who is on the way in.
Ever since Berlusconi was first elected prime minister in 1994, he has helped make Italian politics personality driven, with a right that orbited around. He also helped create an illusion that Italy had a two-party system, with the help of a 2005 change to the electoral law, which allowed a coalition that received less than 50 percent of the popular vote to have a parliamentary majority.
Casini and others want to change the law to create a new centrist grouping, most likely with Fini, Francesco Rutelli, a popular former mayor of Rome, and possibly Luca Cordero di Montezemolo, the president of Ferrari and a former president of the Italian Industrialists’ Association.
KEY DATES
The moment of truth for Berlusconi will come in the middle of next month. Both houses of parliament are scheduled to vote on next year’s budget on Dec. 10. Berlusconi is scheduled to appear before both houses on Dec. 13 — and he will face a confidence vote in both houses on Dec. 14. That same day, the Constitutional Court is expected to rule on whether a law that grants him immunity from prosecution is constitutional.
Thousands gathered across New Zealand yesterday to celebrate the signing of the country’s founding document and some called for an end to government policies that critics say erode the rights promised to the indigenous Maori population. As the sun rose on the dawn service at Waitangi where the Treaty of Waitangi was first signed between the British Crown and Maori chiefs in 1840, some community leaders called on the government to honor promises made 185 years ago. The call was repeated at peaceful rallies that drew several hundred people later in the day. “This government is attacking tangata whenua [indigenous people] on all
The administration of US President Donald Trump has appointed to serve as the top public diplomacy official a former speech writer for Trump with a history of doubts over US foreign policy toward Taiwan and inflammatory comments on women and minorities, at one point saying that "competent white men must be in charge." Darren Beattie has been named the acting undersecretary for public diplomacy and public affairs, a senior US Department of State official said, a role that determines the tone of the US' public messaging in the world. Beattie requires US Senate confirmation to serve on a permanent basis. "Thanks to
UNDAUNTED: Panama would not renew an agreement to participate in Beijing’s Belt and Road project, its president said, proposing technical-level talks with the US US Secretary of State Marco Rubio on Sunday threatened action against Panama without immediate changes to reduce Chinese influence on the canal, but the country’s leader insisted he was not afraid of a US invasion and offered talks. On his first trip overseas as the top US diplomat, Rubio took a guided tour of the canal, accompanied by its Panamanian administrator as a South Korean-affiliated oil tanker and Marshall Islands-flagged cargo ship passed through the vital link between the Atlantic and Pacific oceans. However, Rubio was said to have had a firmer message in private, telling Panama that US President Donald Trump
‘IMPOSSIBLE’: The authors of the study, which was published in an environment journal, said that the findings appeared grim, but that honesty is necessary for change Holding long-term global warming to 2°C — the fallback target of the Paris climate accord — is now “impossible,” according to a new analysis published by leading scientists. Led by renowned climatologist James Hansen, the paper appears in the journal Environment: Science and Policy for Sustainable Development and concludes that Earth’s climate is more sensitive to rising greenhouse gas emissions than previously thought. Compounding the crisis, Hansen and colleagues argued, is a recent decline in sunlight-blocking aerosol pollution from the shipping industry, which had been mitigating some of the warming. An ambitious climate change scenario outlined by the UN’s climate