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Political 'earthquake' in Italy, but scepticism over Berlusconi
Conservative leader Silvio Berlusconi won Italy's general elections by an unexpectedly wide margin on Monday, securing a third term as prime minister but warning of tough times ahead for the country in the grip of an economic downturn.
ROME
Petroleumworld.com, April 15, 2008
Italy has shifted back to the right with the return of flamboyant media baron Silvio Berlusconi after a convincing election victory, but expectations for significant change were muted on Tuesday.
"This time the centre-right won't have an alibi ... and knows it," wrote analyst Massimo Franco in Corriere della Sera. "The problem is to legitimise the (new leadership) with serious and incisive measures."
While the return of the septuagenarian Berlusconi may be no watershed for Italy, the elections brought a tidal wave to a once kaleidoscopic parliament, leaving only five parties behind including the two big formations created last year by Berlusconi and his vanquished rival Walter Veltroni.
More than eight in 10 voters backed one or the other of the two biggest blocs, Berlusconi's People of Freedom (PDL) and Veltroni's Democratic Party (PD).
"These elections revolutionise the national political geography, marking a decisive step forward by Italy" towards political streamlining and institutional modernisation, said Massimo Giannini of Rome University.
With words like "earthquake" and "tsunami," commentators ticked off the list of familiar figures who will be absent from the incoming parliament, notably outgoing lower house speaker Fausto Bertinotti, the communist leader who resigned on Monday after a dismal showing by the far left.
"The guillotine operation ... made the heads roll" of far left leaders who formed a common front under the banner Rainbow Left, wrote the leading Corriere della Sera daily.
The PDL and DP each has an ally in the assembly -- the populist right-wing Northern League and the small centre-left Italy of Values respectively -- while the middle ground will be occupied by the centrist Union of Christian and Centre Democrats (UDC).
Flush with victory, the Berlusconi camp should be aware that "not only the electorate but the international community is watching the Italy that has returned to Berlusconi with a mixture of scepticism, alarm and expectation," Franco wrote in Corriere. "Up to now, the first two have prevailed."
Giannini lamented: "After four fraught parliaments we are back where we started" a decade and a half ago when Berlusconi burst onto the scene, leading Forza Italia to victory, aged 55, on promises of a business-like approach to the country's economic morass.
Now 71, Berlusconi "will be old. He'll be deflated. He'll be unfit," Giannini wrote in the daily La Repubblica, adding that a "sovereign people" elected him despite his "inadequacies, conflicts of interest and brushes with the law."
The "videocrat" who has managed to hog much of the limelight in Italian politics through his media empire that includes three national television channels "sees politics as an opportunity and not a responsibility," Giannini said.
Meanwhile La Stampa credited the new-look parliament "exclusively to Walter Veltroni and his decision to break up the centre-left coalition and run alone (or almost)."
Veltroni excluded the far left when he formed the American-style PD last year, leading Berlusconi to set up an opposing centre-right bloc by merging his Forza Italia and the conservative National Alliance.
Other casualties included Italian Communist Party leader Oliviero Diliberto and Green chief Alfonso Pecoraro Scanio, who was outgoing Prime Minister Romano Prodi's environment minister.
The far right lost the controversial self-described fascist Daniela Santanche -- the flagbearer of La Destra (The Right) who wanted to become Italy's first woman prime minister -- and the party secretary Francesco Storace.
And as expected, the tiny centrist UDEUR party of Clemente Mastella -- the outgoing justice minister whose defection brought down the Prodi government in January -- failed to win a seat.
Story by Gina Doggett from AFP
AFP 15 0950 GMT 04 08
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