sdrummelo |
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| gradevole come sempre Travaglio  credo di aver ascoltato parte o tutto l'articolo ad Anno Zero... Comunque.... quanto siamo ciechi...
da The Economist, Apr 10th 2008 :
Return of the jester (jester = giullare)
Will the last joke be on Silvio Berlusconi?
THE biggest risks for Silvio Berlusconi as Italy votes in general elections on April 13th and 14th are of his own creation. For ten weeks after the fall of Romano Prodi's government on January 24th, Italy's tycoon-politician managed to keep his more outrageous quips to himself. With economic indicators rapidly worsening, and Italy this year forecast once more to under-perform the rest of the European Union, few Italians are cheery.
Mr Berlusconi has played it safe and seems likely to become prime minister for the third time in 14 years. His People of Freedom movement was ahead in the polls when the last opinion survey was released on March 28th (Italian law bans publication of polls in the campaign's last fortnight).
Most of Mr Berlusconi's jests have been either silly (the claim that he spoke Latin well enough to have lunch with Julius Caesar) or sexist in a way that did not seem to damage him (his view that right-wing women were better-looking than lefties). But on April 8th, a more sinister side re-emerged when Mr Berlusconi said that state prosecutors, like those who have been chasing him through the courts since the early 1990s, should undergo periodic mental-health checks. His main rival, Walter Veltroni of the centre-left Democratic Party, demanded an assurance of Mr Berlusconi's loyalty to state institutions.
One interpretation—hardly a reassuring one—was that Mr Berlusconi was trying to divert attention from an even more alarming outburst from his ally, Umberto Bossi, the leader of the Northern League. He said his followers might take up arms over what he claimed was an attempt by the centre-left to confuse voters with overly complicated ballot papers. Mr Bossi's rhetorical excesses are legend and are usually discounted, but like Mr Berlusconi's, they send a subliminal message of indifference to Italian laws.
The irony is that the voting slips are, in fact, a product of legislation drafted by one of Mr Bossi's own deputies and pushed through by Mr Berlusconi's last government in 2005. Its author, Roberto Calderoli, unabashedly called it a porcata, roughly a “load of rubbish”. It encouraged political fragmentation and, although it allowed a clear majority in the lower house, the Chamber of Deputies, it minimised the chances of a working coalition in the upper house, the Senate. Critics said Mr Berlusconi adopted the system because he knew he would lose the 2006 election, and wanted to undermine his successor.
If so, he succeeded. Mr Prodi's centre-left government struggled for two years with little or no majority. But having turned down an offer from Mr Veltroni to reform the electoral law, Mr Berlusconi, if he wins, could be hoist by his own porcata and preside over an equally unstable government. |
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