Fri, Nov 19, 2010 page6

• Berlusconi era may be nearing end

  • NY Times News Service, ROME
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  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.
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