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Holding Italy hostage

10/09/2013

Vote me out of jail, or I will bring the country down with me. This, essentially, is the message Silvio Berlusconi—four-time prime minister, owner of the country’s three main commercial TV channels, criminal defendant many times over—has just sent to the Italian government, one that clarifies at last the exact nature of what is at stake in Italy at the present moment: is this a modern state where the rule of law prevails or is it the fiefdom of an institutionalized outlaw? At present there is no way of saying which vision will carry the day.

After a dozen trials, many of which have gone through all three levels of Italian justice (primary trial, appeal, counter appeal), after making ad personam laws to have his crimes de-penalized, or using delaying tactics to have trials thrown out because the crimes alleged in them are time-barred, or facing guilty verdicts at one level and acquittals at another, Berlusconi has finally received a definitive and unappealable criminal sentence at the highest level, for tax fraud in the region of €7 million ($9 million) and for the creation of a slush fund of some €280 million ($375 million). Sentenced to four years in prison, he has benefited from a pardon aimed at emptying the country’s jails, which has reduced the sentence to one year—this despite the fact that, being over seventy, he will be allowed to serve his sentence at one of his various luxury homes. However, as an elected member of the senate, he enjoys immunity from arrest and cannot be forced into confinement until the senate approves his expulsion, a vote that could take place in September. He has now made it clear that if that vote goes against him he will bring the whole house down.

 

That Berlusconi can indeed cause havoc is evident. He runs, in a sense owns, one of the two large parties in the present coalition government, which is struggling to introduce major reforms to stop the now dramatic decline in the Italian economy and finally inspire some confidence among foreign investors. If Berlusconi withdraws his party from the coalition, as he has threatened, it seems unlikely that another government could be formed with the present hung parliament. That would mean new elections, based on an electoral law (brought in by Berlusconi himself in 2005) almost guaranteed to create another hung parliament. The fear is that such an outcome will paralyze the country, taking Italy straight back to where it was two years ago, when pressure from financial markets seemed on the point of forcing it to seek an EU bailout or consider immediate exit from the euro. At present about 40 percent of the country’s young people are unemployed, while manufacturing output is 26 percent below its 2007 level.

 

If Nixon had refused to accept impeachment and had tried somehow to hang on to power, he would have been summarily removed. The same goes for any leader in Europe’s main democracies. Most will step down at the first sign of a serious criminal charge against them, aware that their parties will not support someone who damages their cause. The truly disquieting aspect of the present situation in Italy is not so much Berlusconi’s brazenness, but that his blackmail is possible and credible, that he has such complete control over such a large political party, and that he still commands considerable popular support. Astonishing as it may seem to those not familiar with the country, even serious newspapers and respectable commentators seem reluctant to insist on the enforcement of law, rarely mentioning the details of his crimes and actually giving credence to the argument that removing Berlusconi from the political scene would amount to disenfranchising the millions of voters who supported him at the previous election, as if there was no autonomous party in parliament to represent their views, as if they were not free to choose another leader before the next election.

 

How did this come about?

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Tratto da www.nybooks.com