Newsgroup: it.politica
Titolo: Don Coglioni

http://snipurl.com/ou9h
 

per chi conosce l'inglese, allego articolo pubblicato ieri
dal Wall Street Journal
per chi non lo sa preciso che Don Coglioni sarebbe Silvio e
che l'articolo termina cosě : "Ci sono in Italia abbastanza
coglioni da credere ancora a lui e alle sue parole?"
DON COGLIONI
By MATTHEW KAMINSKI
April 7, 2006; Page A12
MILAN -- For sheer kitsch and bawdy fun, this Italian campaign 
rivals the worst of them. The main themes in the two-day 
parliamentary election starting Sunday appear to be botany and 
soccer. The dozen parties in the center-left Olive Tree 
Coalition include the Daisy party and the Rose in the Fist. The 
Communist Refoundation, not to be confused with the Italian 
Communists -- a separate Olive party -- employs a large green 
marijuana leaf against a red background, as inspired by its drug 
legalization agenda. Its posters here in the financial capital, 
in a sweet bit of irony, can be found hanging next to the 
gleaming face of Alessandra Mussolini, il Duce's granddaughter 
and a neo-Fascist pol. On the center-right, the "three forwards" 
bloc is led by Forza Italia (Go Italy!), named after a chant of 
the soccer pitch, and closely associated with the AC Milan team.
The substance, such as it is, of campaign debate is shaped by 
the country's one notable achievement of recent years: its 
replacement of Germany as the "sick man of Europe." Italy's 
minuscule growth and, more troubling for this hot-blooded 
society, fertility figures, are dissected daily, mostly by the 
resurgent Olive opposition. The favorite in this race, according 
to opinion polls conducted before a March 24 blackout, is il 
Professore, the charmless Romano Prodi, a professor of 
industrial policy who is a former prime minister and European 
Commission president, back home from Brussels to lead the 
Italian center-left.
And yet for all this noise and color, the election is not about 
any issue or party but rather a man known as il Cavaliere, the 
knight. For the fourth time in 12 years, Italians will vote up 
or down on Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, who is loved and 
despised with equal intensity. Author Beppe Severgnini calls 
this weekend's main event a referendum. Mr. Berlusconi, Italy's 
richest man (net worth: $12 billion) and its longest-serving 
postwar leader, has divided, inspired, appalled and entertained 
not only Italy but Europe. No one dares count out the country's 
greatest ever salesman, but his troubles in this race are the 
result of his failure to deliver on the chief promise of his 
landslide victory in 2001: a changed Italy.
Five years on, the country's politics still beg not to be taken 
seriously. The scandal of the moment, a lead story even on the 
Berlusconi-owned news networks, involves coglioni, a jarring 
slur, implying stupidity, derived from the Italian word for 
testicles. As in this Berlusconi comment from last Tuesday: "I 
have too much respect for the Italians to think there are that 
many coglioni around who'd vote against their own interests." 
The opposition was shocked, shocked. Silvio-bashers gleefully 
predicted this latest vulgarity would push the undecideds into 
the Prodi camp. Of course, what the prime minister claimed was 
meant ironically may turn out, if the vote swings his way, to be 
more proof of his instinctive feel for what Italians want to 
hear, or buy.
The coglioni affair is a high/low point of a long race. In 
Monday's second debate, which was in theory held under Teutonic 
rules on speaking times and decorum, Mr. Prodi characterized the 
prime minister as a "drunkard clinging to a lamppost." Mr. 
Berlusconi, in turn, called his opponent "an idiot," and 
throughout the campaign has managed to hog attention by simply 
being himself.
On the day that Mr. Prodi put out Olive's campaign program, Mr. 
Berlusconi stole the headlines by styling himself "the Jesus 
Christ of politics"; Napoleon, previously invoked as a 
historical mentor, was apparently no longer grand enough. The 
soon-to-be 70-year-old prime minister has vowed to refrain from 
sexual activity until after the elections; few believe him. He 
did find time to poll telephone sex operators. Seven out of 
nine, he claims, plan to vote for him. And so on.
Mr. Berlusconi may look foolish but he's no fool. In this 
election, with little achievement from the past five years to 
sell, he has reverted to the role that, as a tycoon and two-time 
prime minister, he would seem ill-suited to play: the outsider. 
Somehow it fits him. Mr. Berlusconi is a self-made man whose 
nouveaux-riche tastes and manners offend the smart set, which 
naturally tilts left, as well as the old business families, 
which don't. Another highlight was his screaming match at a 
meeting with the employers' association. The press roundly 
mocked him but many ordinary Italians cheered him on -- as crazy 
as it seems -- for standing up to the fat cats. These are the 
same Italians who also smile when their prime minister wears a 
bandana after another hair transplant or performs his own 
ballads at his villa on Sardinia.
In his remarkable business career, launched by seed capital of 
uncertain origin, Mr. Berlusconi succeeded by challenging and co-
opting the establishment, first in real estate and then to pry 
open TV to commercial stations in the 1980s. Fond of TV chat 
shows and soccer, Italians are equally grateful to him for 
turning AC Milan, an also-ran before Mr. Berlusconi took it 
over, into a premier European club. "Silvio Berlusconi 
revolutionized Italy as a CEO, not as a prime minister," says 
Christian Rocca of the Milan daily Il Foglio, part of the 
Berlusconi media empire.
Many explanations are offered for his disappointing five years. 
One is the system of concertazione, literally concert, which 
refers to the country's messy coalition politics. Another is 
repeated assaults from prosecutors dredging up old corruption 
allegations. Yet another is Mr. Berlusconi's reluctance to 
dismantle the cozy guilds that protect professions, from taxi 
drivers to journalists; as a businessman, he doesn't seem to 
believe in open competition as a good in itself. But he did 
loosen up labor codes, in a fashion that French leaders can only 
dream of, and lowered unemployment.
His greatest failure, his "read my lips" moment, is on taxes. He 
won an unprecedented mandate in 2001 to lower and simplify 
rates, and could have. He didn't. Having broken that pledge, his 
core constituency of small private entrepreneurs is not so much 
turning to Mr. Prodi as staying home.
Italy's pathologies are serious. Its crushing debt burden (at 
108.5% of GDP in 2005), demographic crisis and uncompetitive 
industries pose the gravest apparent danger to the euro, which 
many Italians want to drop for the old lira. Mario Monti, former 
EU competition commissioner and now president of Milan's Bocconi 
University, describes the euro-zone's third-largest economy 
as "self-inflicted strangulation." It need not be so grim. In 
contrast to the furies on French streets these days, Italians 
are protective of their perks but not hostile to capitalism 
itself. "The French are the only ones who have an alternative 
model in mind," Mr. Monti says. Italy could show Germany and 
France a way out of the woods.
Only this election seems unlikely to shake things up. A new 
electoral law, whose constitutionality -- in a little Italian 
twist -- is in some doubt, will produce a less stable 
government. A hung parliament could force a rerun of this circus 
in a few weeks. Assuming a clear winner emerges once polls close 
on Monday morning, Italy will be the only country in Europe, 
except for Lithuania, led by a prime minister born before WWII.
If that man isn't Mr. Berlusconi, it won't be because the latter 
backed the war in Iraq or considers George Bush a friend. Iraq 
wasn't an issue in the campaign; the alliance with the U.S. is a 
plus in a country that's tried, mostly in vain, to join the big 
league ever since Mussolini invaded Abyssinia. And it won't be a 
rebuke of Mr. Berlusconi's nominally free-market ideas, which 
were never seriously implemented, or his various business 
conflicts of interest, which everyone is aware of, or even of 
his legal troubles, since prosecutors are politically tainted.
For 600 years, points out Beppe Severgnini, Italians have put up 
with being ruled by i Signori -- grandees -- who in power are 
permitted to look after their own interests provided everyone 
else benefits as well. Reviving the winning formula of his last 
campaign, Mr. Berlusconi in Monday's debate pledged, out of the 
blue, to abolish the hated property taxes. To deploy the prime 
minister's own indelicate musings earlier this week: Are there 
enough coglioni in Italy to take him at his word again? Or to 
risk ignoring him?
Mr. Kaminski is editorial page editor of The Wall Street Journal 
Europe.
URL for this article:
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB114437419143719636.html
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Alex52
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 coglioni da credere ancora a lui e alle sue parole?"
Glielo dici tu che sono circa 25.000.000 ? 

 coglioni da credere ancora a lui e alle sue parole?"
L'avevo già letto.
Purtroppo ci sono + coglioni che credono al ciccione.
Italia: paese con 56 milioni di coglioni...