It's not often that one hears a Prime Minister claim his job is a part-time one, even less so because the activities that supposedly take precedence involve a large degree of whoremongering. Sadly though, what makes these allegations even more unpalatable is that they are attributed to the Prime Minister of a G7 country. Juicy though they may be, Berlusconi's sexual exploits are not Italy's main plague at the moment. The country has been garnering a lot of unfavourable press coverage this summer due to the festering euro crisis that seems on the verge of ballooning out of control. Last week Standard & Poor's chose Italy as its next victim for a debt downgrade because of the government's inability to respond decisively to the wildfire that is the euro zone. The grotesque spectacle that was the passing of a third emergency austerity budget in two months only serves to lend credibility to S&P's decision. The constant backtracking and watering down of the austerity measures by the government in a populist attempt to please voters and representatives of the special interests that hold Italy's economy hostage, are evidence that the political caste has lost touch with the electorate. Not suprisingly, Berlusconi's approval ratings have plummeted to below 25%.
Berlusconi has not only lost the confidence of the Italians however, but also of Confindustria, the employer's federation, whose boss Emma Marcegaglia has become a vocal critic of the government. She has doggedly attacked the latest austerity measures, pointing out that they patently fail to address Italy's long-term structural problems such as liberalising the job market, eliminating red tape for businesses and decreasing the state's monopolies. Il Sole 24 Ore, the business newspaper owned by Confindustria, urged Berlusconi to go and warned that Italy was well on its way to following Greece into bedlam, blaming “the fragility of its governing coalition, the embarrassing chain of scandals that directly affect the prime minister, his ministers and their immediate associates, [and a] persistent inability to take painful but necessary decisions.”
Furthermore the long chain of trials in which Berlusconi is a defendant on charges ranging from embezzlement to paying for an under-age prostitute make his position even more untenable. The opposition has long been calling for him to resign citing the ad personam laws his government has passed, which tend to reduce the statute of limitations, as evidence of his many conflicts of interest. On September 19th judges overseeing the case in which he is accused of bribing his former legal adviser David Mills, shortened the list of witnesses so as to increase the chances of evading the iniquitous statute of limitations that has always been Berlusconi's saving grace. Berlusconi's lawyers, however, are exceptionally adept at finding ways of eschewing a verdict or churning out another ad personam law aimed at reforming the judiciary (the only type of reform in which his government has been remarkably prolific).
Berlusconi's legal troubles are not limited to the trials in which he is a defendant. In the past weeks allegations have been emerging that he was blackmailed by Giampaolo Tarantini, a businessman-turned-pimp from Bari, who is said to have provided him with numerous young women, including prostitutes, for his parties. The list of accusations runs from providing Tarantini with an official plane, to including the girlfriend of a gangster amongst his guests and arranging for Tarantini to discuss lucrative contracts with the bosses of Finmeccanica, a defence company partially owned by the state. To top it all off the intercepts between Berlusconi and Tarantini appear to include a slew of denigrating remarks about Angela Merkel; it is hardly the time to belittle Europe's main saviour.
Any other prime minister in a democracy would have resigned way back when if faced with such serious accusations. But Italy has long been bucking the trend and Berlusconi insists he will serve out the rest of his term to 2013, frantically waving the "mandate of the people" in support of this. It is too bad that the people seem to have changed their minds.
However, as the Economist notes, removing Berlusconi would be no panacea. If he has been able to shy away from implementing the structural economic reforms that are indispensable for kick-starting Italy's competitiveness, it is largely because of the intransigence of the public sector, the trade unions and professional bodies as well as the tacit consent of the Italians. The harsh truth remains that Italy is a democracy (albeit a very dysfunctional one) and that he was voted into office by the people. The implicit contract between the Italians and Berlusconi, whereby the latter would never "put his hands into the pockets of the Italians" and conveniently never tackled tax evasion with the zeal it requires in return for the support of the electorate, has only recently been broken thanks to the austerity measures which Berlusconi has grudgingly had to pass to appease the markets.
But nothing has changed dramatically in Italy's economy to fully justify the market jitters; it is merely a case of the market losing confidence in Italy's debt, as opposed to a boom and bust in countries like Spain and Ireland. Italy's economy has been stagnating for almost 20 years and Berlusconi has been in power for the majority of the past decade. Italy's public debt which now stands at 120% of GDP has been steadily and very visibly growing for the past 20 years, but Berlusconi's inherent populism makes him loath to deliver bad news. This led to Berlusconi claiming back in 2008 that there was no crisis in Italy, and more recently his coalition partner Umberto Bossi advocating a fiscal reform (i.e. tax cuts) to re-kindle voter support.
18 years ago, on the 30th April 1993, angry Roman citizens threw coins at Bettino Craxi, the Socialist Prime Minister, to express disgust at his venality. A similar display of public contempt has not been seen since and is a clear sign that Italians have lapsed into a moral apathy of which Berlusconi is only a symptom; it is time for the young, who are not a party to the implicit contract, to shake off their malaise and quit saying "but if not Berlusconi, then who?"
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