Is Italy’s Opposition out of Options?

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from Dissent magazine:



Is Italy’s Opposition out of Options?
Alexander Lee - November 9, 2011





Late on Tuesday night, Silvio Berlusconi announced his intention to resign as prime minister of Italy. After losing his majority in parliament in a key vote on economic policy, even the normally bullish and intransigent Berlusconi realized that his departure was inevitable. Despite weathering a storm of scandals over the past two years—including the notorious “Rubygate” affair—and surviving a dizzying number of confidence motions, his number was finally up.

Berlusconi’s Achilles’ heel was his economic policy. In the face of the European debt crisis, his government came apart at the seams. Although the 2010 budget report required for the implementation of austerity measures was finally passed on Tuesday afternoon, his strategy for dealing with Italy’s mounting economic woes—spending cuts, job cuts, and tax increases—has come under attack from all sides in recent weeks. Confindustria (an Italian business group), the European Central Bank, and CGIL and CSIL (Italy’s major labor unions) have all criticized Berlusconi’s proposals as a recipe for higher unemployment, limiting economic growth, and punishing the lower-middle class. Then, on October 3, Moody’s downgraded Italy’s debt rating, and a week later a first draft of the budget report was rejected by parliamentarians. On Tuesday morning traders began demanding record yields for Italian bonds in a clear indication of falling market confidence in his leadership.

Already weakened by incessant scandals, the economic downturn pushed the prime minister’s popularity to a low of 24 percent. According to some polls published in the week before his resignation announcement, some 62 percent of Italians wanted the prime minister to step down. On October 15, 150,000 demonstrators furious at worsening conditions and Berlusconi’s proposed austerity measures took to the streets, with some hundreds attacking shops, government buildings, and riot police seemingly indiscriminately.

But Berlusconi’s fall was precipitated not by Italy’s center-left opposition, but by rebels within his own coalition desperate for a change of leadership. Only members of Berlusconi’s governing coalition participated in Tuesday’s vote, and only 308 of them supported the motion, far short of the 316 votes needed to guarantee a working majority in the future. Several members of Berlusconi’s Popolo della Libertà (PdL), including a number of former cabinet members, declined to support the government. His major coalition partner, the right-wing Lega Nord, broke over the vote, and its leader, Umberto Bossi, called on Berlusconi to step aside. .............(more)

The complete piece is at: http://dissentmagazine.org/online.php?id=559

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