Italy awaits new Berlusconi, bids communism goodbye

Apr 15, 2008, 12:37 GMT

Rome - Italy's commentators Tuesday volunteered a number of lessons to be learned from Italy's general election, which was comfortably won by Silvio Berlusconi.

The first is that the 71-year-old media tycoon, in spite of his controversial personal background and populist politics, is no longer an 'anomaly,' as some claim, but a fully legitimized force that needs to be reckoned with.

The second is that his centre-left rival, Walter Veltroni, failed to gain the support of Italy's moderates, as he had intended, and instead captured many of the votes traditionally destined to the far left, which now has no elected representatives for the first time in modern Italian history.

The third is that Italy is beginning to resemble other European democracies, with only four or five parties in parliament, rather than the more than 20 that existed before Sunday and Monday's vote.

According to Massimo Franco of the non-aligned Corriere della Sera, one of the most striking aspects of Berlusconi's triumph is that it was achieved without resorting to easy promises, as he had done during his previous four election campaigns.

'This is a double victory for Berlusconi. Not only are we witnessing his predictable return to government, the novelty is that the new appointment (as prime minister) takes place after an election campaign in which he did not promise any miracles,' Franco wrote in a front-page editorial.

While Berlusconi did vow to cut taxes and raise pensions, he also acknowledged that Italy is facing economic hardship and that his voters face 'difficult times ahead.'

'His miracle has been to make himself acceptable without producing a magic wand,' Franco wrote.

Moreover, Berlusconi has moved to reassure Brussels about his pro-European credentials by touting Franco Frattini, the European Union's top justice official, as his next foreign minister.

For Veltroni, a former editor-in-chief of what was once the mouthpiece of the Italian Communist Party, L'Unita, the main lesson to be drawn from the election is that in Italy, moderate voters still do not trust him.

His Democratic Party, borne from the merger of the former communist Democratic Left and the liberal Daisy Party, received one-third of all votes cast. But it was not enough to achieve victory in what is ultimately a conservative, overwhelmingly Catholic country.

Inspired by its American namesake, Italy's Democratic Party moved to the centre in a bid to intercept the votes of people who had grown tired of Berlusconi and his post-fascist and anti-immigration allies.

He even flaunted his patriotic credentials on the campaign trail by defending the national flag and the constitution.

But most of his supporters turned out to be from the left rather than from the centre.

'(Veltroni) did not drain consensus from the centre and ended up cannibalizing the consensus of the left,' wrote Massimo Giannini in La Repubblica, a daily that had backed the Democratic Party during the campaign.

In fact, perhaps the biggest surprise coming out of the election is the disappearance of the far-left.

The country that once had the biggest communist party in Western Europe no longer has a single Marxist in parliament. Nor any Greens.

In the 2006 election, Romano Prodi's far-left allies conquered a combined total of 10 per cent of all votes cast and proved instrumental in defeating Berlusconi.

This time round, running on their own under the umbrella group Left Rainbow, Italy's far-left parties received a measly 3 per cent, insufficient to overcome the 4 per cent threshold needed to enter parliament.

Its leader, Fausto Bertinotti of what was once the Refounded Communist Party, promptly resigned. And so did Enrico Boselli, whose Socialist Party stopped at just 1 per cent.

Apart from their media-savvy abilities and common love for football, there is one other thing that unites Berlusconi and Veltroni.

By urging Italians not to vote for the country's smaller parties, they succeeded in greatly simplifying its political landscape.

Often ridiculed for its plethora of parties, some of which were one-man shows, Italy's parliament will now have only four or five groups.

'This is a simplification that brings us closer to the often envied systems in other European countries and which could produce greater speed in decision making,' wrote Federico Geremicca in an editorial published by La Stampa, a Turin-based daily.