Newsgroup: it.politica
Titolo: Re: [AP (Alt Politica)] 1.100.000 SCHEDE IRREGOLARI!!!

Italy's election  
 
Basta, Berlusconi 
Apr 6th 2006  
From The Economist print edition 
Italians have a rotten choice to make, but it is time to sack Silvio
Berlusconi 
FIVE years ago, this newspaper declared that Silvio Berlusconi was unfit
to lead Italy. Mr Berlusconi was (as he still is) the head of Forza
Italia, a political party that he had created only seven years earlier,
and as such he was the centre-right's candidate to become prime
minister. Despite our declaration, Italians voted his coalition into
power in May 2001 - and Mr Berlusconi has been Italy's prime minister
ever since. Now, in the election on April 9th and 10th, he is seeking a
fresh term of office. He does not deserve one. Our verdict against Mr
Berlusconi in 2001 rested on two broad considerations. The first was the
glaring conflict of interest created by his ownership, via his biggest
company, Mediaset, of the three main private television stations in
Italy. The second was the morass of legal cases and investigations
against him and his associates for a wide variety of alleged offences,
ranging from money-laundering and dealing with the Mafia to false
accounting and the bribing of judges. We concluded that no businessman
with such a background was fit to lead one of the world's richest
democracies. That view stands: we continue to think that Mr Berlusconi
is unfit to be prime minister, both because of the conflict of interest
arising from his media assets and because of his continuing legal
travails (he may shortly go on trial yet again for alleged bribery, this
time of a British witness, David Mills, who happens to be married to a
minister in Tony Blair's cabinet, Tessa Jowell). But five years on we
have a new and even more devastating reason to call for Mr Berlusconi's
removal from office: his record in power. As we predicted in 2001, his
premiership has been disfigured by repeated attempts, including an
avalanche of new laws, to help him avoid conviction in legal trials. He
has devoted much time not only to changing the law to benefit himself
and his friends, but also to besmirching Italy's prosecutors and judges,
undermining the credibility of the country's entire judicial system. It
is not surprising that tax evasion, illegal building and corruption all
seem to have increased over the past five years. And, again as we
predicted, he has done little to resolve his conflicts of interest:
instead, he has shamelessly exploited the government's control of the
state-owned RAI television network. Directly or indirectly, Mr
Berlusconi now wields influence over some 90% of Italy's broadcast
media, a situation that no serious democracy should tolerate.
 
The failed reformer Italian voters knew most of this in 2001, of course.
Yet they still chose to give Mr Berlusconi their backing, for quite
another reason. They hoped that he would deploy the business skills that
had helped to make him so rich to reform their weak economy, making all
Italians richer as well. On this count, however, Mr Berlusconi's
government must be judged an abject failure (see article and article).
Italy now has the slowest-growing large economy in Europe. With wages
still rising even though productivity is not, and with currency
devaluation no longer possible now that Italy is in the euro, Italian
business is fast losing competitiveness. Many of the country's
traditional producers in such industries as textiles, shoes and white
goods are under devastating attack from lower-cost Chinese competitors.
The Berlusconi government has also undone much of the improvement to the
public finances made by its predecessor: the budget deficit and the
public debt, the world's third-biggest, are both rising once more. It
would be unfair to assert that Italy's economic difficulties are all Mr
Berlusconi's fault. In truth, its problems are similar to most of
Europe's, although they seem worse in Italy than anywhere else. As in
France and Germany, their roots stretch back for decades, not years. To
cure them will require the adoption of many tough reforms; and, as
France has just demonstrated so graphically, implementing such changes
is politically challenging, to say the least. But where the Berlusconi
government has really let Italy down is in failing even to begin the
process. Apart from a few sensible labour-market and pension reforms, it
has done too little to press ahead with market liberalisation, with more
privatisation and with the promotion of competition in what is one of
Europe's most overregulated economies. The conclusion from these five
years is that Mr Berlusconi is not and never will be a bold economic
reformer of the kind that Italy desperately needs.
 
Prodi's test 
Unfortunately there are reasons to doubt whether his centre-left
opponent, Romano Prodi, would be a lot better. The former economics
professor grasps the need for change in Italy more clearly than Mr
Berlusconi, who has spent much of the campaign denying that the country
has any economic problems at all. Moreover, Mr Prodi made a fair stab at
initiating reforms when he was prime minister in 1996-98 - and he also
succeeded in getting the country into the euro. But neither then nor in
his later stint as president of the European Commission did he show
himself to be a forceful leader, still less an unwavering advocate of
economic liberalism. Most worrying of all, if Mr Prodi wins the election
he seems certain to be dependent on the support of coalition partners
who are actively hostile to reform, particularly the unreformed
Communists who are led by Fausto Bertinotti. In foreign policy, too,
some of Mr Prodi's instincts may be unwelcome. He is a faithful believer
in a European federal superstate; Mr Berlusconi's more sceptical
approach to Brussels is one of his better points. Mr Prodi's plans to
withdraw Italian troops from Iraq are no longer controversial - indeed,
there is little difference between him and Mr Berlusconi on this issue -
but he is likely in general to adopt a rather less friendly attitude to
America than his rival. It is the economy that will remain the critical
test. Sadly, most Italian people do not yet recognise how sick their
economy has become. For that reason they may not be ready for the pain
of reform. Mr Berlusconi is certainly not going to push them - and he
remains unfit for the office in any event. Italians should accordingly
vote for Mr Prodi, not il Cavaliere.
 
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 scoperto che in italia stava per andare su la sinistra
Italy's election  
 
Close, but no cigar 
Apr 12th 2006 | ROME  
From The Economist print edition 
 
Romano Prodi wins by the tightest possible margin - and certainly not by
enough to pursue a bold agenda of reform
FOR several hours, as the votes were being counted deep into the night
after the Italian election on April 9th and 10th, it looked as if it
might produce the worst possible result: a split parliament, with the
two opposing coalitions each having a majority in one of Italy's equal
chambers. By April 11th, however, it seemed probable that Romano Prodi's
centre-left Union would control both houses, but with a wafer-thin
margin in the Senate. That this outcome is still only probable reflects
calls by Silvio Berlusconi's centre-right House of Liberties for a
recount that could create weeks of confusion, echoing Florida in 2000.
Noting that the two alliances were separated by a mere 25,000 votes in
the election for the lower-house Chamber of Deputies, Mr Berlusconi
demanded a re- examination of some 43,000 spoilt ballots. He also
contested the tally for Italians abroad that decided the outcome in the
Senate, saying it revealed "many irregularities". Far from conceding
defeat, he attacked his opponent and claimed victory. His intransigence
could yet spell trouble for Mr Prodi. If the result stands, the
centre-left can at least look forward to a substantial majority in the
lower house. Thanks, ironically, to the new electoral system imposed by
the outgoing government, the winning coalition gets a "winner's bonus"
that automatically gives it at least a 50-seat majority. But in the
Senate, a different system applies, making for a tighter margin of only
158 to 156 for the centre-left, with one independent. Most of the seven
senators for life lean to the left, however, so Mr Prodi should be able
to count on a majority of five or six in the upper house. In any other
country, this would create a delicate enough situation. But with Italy's
economic position deteriorating fast, the outcome is even more serious.
The economy's problems are structural rather than cyclical, and they
urgently require the kind of root-and-branch reforms that Mr
Berlusconi's government signally failed to push through during its five
years in office. Unfortunately, after such a tight election, there is
little chance of the centre- left delivering them either. For one thing,
a new Prodi government will live in constant fear of a new election.
Will it want to put any votes at risk by taking on powerful vested
interests? Will it have the stomach for a fight with, say, the
professional bodies that everybody in Italy - except for the
professional bodies - agrees should have their privileges trimmed? Will
it be ready to challenge the public-sector unions' jobs-for-life
culture, let alone the wage negotiators in the private sector, where pay
rises are outstripping Italy's sagging productivity? The answers to all
such questions might well have been negative no matter how Italians
voted. But in the centre-left government that now looks probable, Mr
Prodi is likely to find himself a prisoner of the radical left. Among
the main winners of the election were the Communists of Italy, whose
share of the vote in the lower house rose to 2.3%; and the Refounded
(but unreconstructed) Communists, who took 5.8%. The leader of this last
party, Fausto Bertinotti, wants to scrap one of the few liberalising
measures of the Berlusconi government, the "Biagi" law that introduced
short-term contracts.
Moreover, neither of the two Communist parties likes privatisation,
which could make it far harder for the new government to sort out the
public finances. One of Mr Berlusconi's legacies is a growing budget
deficit, which is leading to a rising public debt. Even before the polls
had closed, Standard & Poor's, a credit-rating agency, had issued a
warning that Italy's AA-rating would be at risk if there were no sign of
a sustainable and coherent debt- reduction strategy after the election.
Ahead lurk minefields galore, any of which the centre-left could rapidly
blunder into. No fewer than three important votes are due before the
summer, which offer infinite scope for the trading of political favours,
hostage-taking and extortion. First comes the ballot in parliament in
May to choose a new president to replace Carlo Azeglio Ciampi, who is
coming to the end of his seven-year term. Only then can a new prime
minister be chosen. Given the narrowness of the result, an increasingly
likely option may be to persuade the 85-year-old president to stay in
office, at least for a while. Later in May, there will be elections for
mayor in some of Italy's biggest cities, including Rome and Milan, as
well as for a new regional government in Sicily. In the second half of
June, voters throughout Italy will be called back to the polls to
approve or reject one of the more controversial measures passed by Mr
Berlusconi's government: a reform of the constitution to turn Italy into
a federal state. The best hope for the survival of Mr Prodi's coalition
through all this may lie in its very fragility and vulnerability. Any
centre-left leader tempted to break ranks, on a point of principle or
for the sake of personal ambition, will do so in the daunting knowledge
that, by bringing down the government, he could give Mr Berlusconi the
opportunity for which he is waiting. Few will be ready to take that
risk. Aware of the dangers facing the centre-left, Mr Berlusconi has now
offered them a seductive alternative. Why, he asked, didn't Italians
take a look at what happened elsewhere in Europe? In Germany, the narrow
result last September led the two main political parties to form a
"grand coalition" of left and right. Italy too was split down the
middle. Mr Prodi had made a point of stressing national unity. So why
should he not agree to work with the centre-right on the nation's
problems? Yet any such notion seems highly implausible after such a
bitter campaign, in which Mr Prodi branded his opponents "criminals" and
Mr Berlusconi called opposition voters "dickheads". The two men, who
first faced each other in the 1996 election (when Mr Prodi also won),
roundly despise each other. They could never sit round the same cabinet
table. Moreover, a "grand coalition" alla Italiana would mean trying to
get agreement between former neo-fascists at one extreme and people such
as Fausto Bertinotti at the other. Even a more restricted coalition,
spanning the centre alone, would be hard to assemble - and it would
still be unlikely to pass the radical reforms that Italy needs. One of
Mr Berlusconi's allies, Roberto Maroni of the Northern League, got it
just right. If the results were upheld, he declared, the centre-left had
"not just the right, but a duty to govern".


After Italy's election and France's cave-in  
 
Another great week for Europe 
Apr 12th 2006  
From The Economist print edition 
 
Things must get more hellish in Italy and France before they stand any
chance of getting better 
THEY are two seemingly unconnected events, but they yield a common,
depressing conclusion. The events were the decision by France's
government to tear up its controversial law creating a more flexible job
contract for the young, and the razor-edge outcome of Italy's rancorous
election. The conclusion: the core countries of Europe are not ready to
make the economic reforms they so desperately need - and that change,
alas, will come only after a diabolic economic crisis. Italy's dramatic
election has grabbed the headlines, after the centre-left opposition
under Romano Prodi was deemed the winner by the narrowest conceivable
margin. Mr Prodi has declared bravely that he will form a
government, but it seems sure to be a hobbled creature dependent on the
support of a rabble of far-left parties. His discomfort owes much to a
final poisoned gift from the outgoing centre-right government under
Silvio Berlusconi: an electoral system that restored proportional
representation, imposed with the aim of recreating Italy's unstable
politics of the past. But it must also be conceded that Mr Berlusconi
did better than expected. For all his faults, he remains popular with
many voters. That he lost, just, to the uncharismatic Mr Prodi must
largely reflect growing dissatisfaction with the sluggish Italian
economy. Many voters backed Mr Berlusconi in 2001 because they believed
his promises to reform Italy and get its economy moving again. They
deserted him this time because he so abjectly failed to deliver on those
promises. Yet enthusiasm for the alternative was deafening by its
absence. Mr Prodi understands the need for change in Italy. But he is no
free-market liberal, and his 13-strong coalition includes two unreformed
Communist parties that are viscerally opposed to economic reforms. Under
their influence, an early pledge by the centre-left is to overturn parts
of the centre-right's "Biagi" law, which has permitted a boom in
temporary and part-time jobs. It was an attempt to create a similarly
flexible contract for the young that has just failed in France (see
article). Dominique de Villepin, the prime minister, had come to accept
that a main cause of France's high unemployment, especially among the
young, is an overly regulated labour market, with a high minimum wage
and fierce restrictions on firing people. But he also knew that a vocal
opposition would hold up his attempts to change any of these rules.
Hence his decision to push through the new contract not after full
consultation but by decree, in the hope of facing down subsequent
resistance. In hindsight, Mr de Villepin made two big mistakes. The
first was to reckon without the power of the street. Recent history is
littered with examples of French governments that have backed off
reforms in the face of large-scale protests. Mr de Villepin's surrender
can now be added to the list. His second mistake was to count on the
full support of his president, Jacques Chirac. Yet after 11 years in
office Mr Chirac has shown beyond a doubt that he is a weak president
who has no grasp of the urgency of reform. There is now no chance of
change in France before next spring's presidential election. At first
glance, the prospects for reform seem brighter in the third big member
of the euro zone, Germany. Growth has resumed, business has recovered
its zip, unemployment is falling and Angela Merkel has made a good start
as the Christian Democratic chancellor of a "grand coalition" with the
Social Democrats. Yet, as in Italy and France, the split result of
Germany's election last September revealed that there was only a limited
constituency for reform. Ms Merkel's government may be able to put right
the public finances - but it shows little sign of readiness to embark on
deeper liberalising measures.
 
In search of a crisis The sad truth in all three countries is that their
voters are not yet ready to swallow the nasty medicine of change. Reform
is always painful. And all three have too many cosseted insiders - those
with secure jobs, those in the public sector - who see little to gain
and much to lose. They are ready to fight against change even though it
would help outsiders - the young, the unemployed - and, ultimately,
their economies. Does that mean that Europe, especially the euro area,
is unreformable? It is fashionable to answer yes, and to conclude that
the continent's destiny is one of gradual decline into a genteel
poverty, as populations age and economies lose their last remaining
vestiges of dynamism. Yet that is surely too gloomy. In the right
circumstances, and with a braver political leadership, even the three
core members of the euro should be able to change their ways. One reason
for believing that reform can happen, even in Italy and France, is that
so many other European countries have shown the way. Britain faced
economic and social meltdown in 1979; there followed a decade of
Thatcherite reform. Admittedly, Britain is not in the euro, but the
Netherlands is. That country had an acute case of what became known as
the "Dutch disease" in 1982; a string of reforms were then made that
led, a decade later, to talk of a Dutch miracle. Another small country
now in the euro, Ireland, almost fell off the cliff into poverty and
bankruptcy in 1987; yet, after some years of painful change, it had
transformed itself into the "Celtic Tiger". Similarly, Finland became an
economic basket-case in 1990; it then implemented reforms that have
today helped to make it on some assessments the world's most competitive
economy, ahead even of the (far bigger) United States. Two things came
together to make radical reform possible in these countries. The first
was wide agreement, among voters, businessmen, trade unions and others
that there was a grave economic crisis. The second were determined
political leaders prepared to risk unpopularity. The real problem, not
just for Italy and France but also for Germany, is that, so far, life
has continued to be too good for too many people: there is not yet a
general consensus that their economies are in serious trouble. All three
have also lacked brave political leaders ready to leap in and explain
the case for reform. There is one depressingly certain way to remedy the
failings in the core European countries: to bring on a more serious
economic crisis. This week will surely have brought that a lot closer.


 From The Economist print edition
sai l'economist come lo chiamano in europa?
L'ecomunist....
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in Polonia. La tua comincia a Cassano Magnago e finisce a Macherio?
THE ECONOMIST č la BIBBIA dei grandi investitori mondiali, il giornale
dei conservatori liberali che ovviamnente sono furibondi con il
piduista che usurpa il loro nome e infanga la destra. Tutto qui.
e.
VIVA CIAMPI! Per ora ci ha evitato il golpe mediatico. Ciampi, occhio al caffč!