Politica all'Italiana

Bem haja a quem escreve melhor do que o meu génio intempestivo:

In the end, it worked.

It took nine months, which is a very long time in Italian politics, but finally the time bomb planted under Romano Prodi's government blew up and wrecked it yesterday as the prime minister offered his resignation. The explosives were packed by his arch-rival and predecessor, Silvio Berlusconi. It was little noticed outside Italy that, shortly before leaving office, he put together an electoral reform law that introduced an extreme (and idiosyncratic) form of proportional representation.

The centre-left said at the time it was a way of poisoning the wells, a way of rendering Italy even more ungovernable than it is at the best of times. The voting system made for a multiplicity of parties in the legislature and boosted the chances of the more radical ones.

For the lower house of parliament, the Chamber of Deputies, a device was inserted that ensured a clear majority to one of the two broad alliances, of right and left, that have come to dominate Italian politics. But for the Senate, the upper house, where the government came to grief this week, the terms of the law were framed in such a way as to make a working majority unattainable.

Thus, Prodi's government had been lurching from crisis to crisis since last May with a paper majority in the Senate that had been reduced to one by the time it fell. It was clear that, sooner or later, an issue of conscience would bring it down.

Most people's money was on a bill to be debated in the spring that would give legal rights to unmarried couples, including gays. It is anathema to some of the Catholics on the right of what was the governing coalition. In the event, the fatal issue proved to be a mix of Italy's ties to the US military and its presence in Afghanistan, as I discussed on Cif yesterday.

All this is what makes the latest Italian government crisis more serious than it might at first appear. A reshaped Prodi cabinet will have exactly the same problems unless it can open its ranks to the right. The obvious candidates are in the Union of Christian Democrats (UDC), the wobbliest element in Silvio Berlusconi's rightwing opposition.

But that, in turn, will exacerbate its other problem, which was its heterogeneity. If the former EU commission head was unable to get by with a coalition that took in communists at one end and moderate Christian Democrats at the other, how on earth is the poor man going to plough on with one that ranges from communists to reactionary Christian Democrats?

People outside Italy have been all too ready to accept Berlusconi's claim that he and his followers represent the "centre-right". They don't. By the standards of any other country in western Europe, they are the hard right.

Their most "centrist" element is the UDC, a party wedded to the ideas of the Wojtyla-Ratzinger Vatican. One of its leaders is Rocco Buttiglione, whose views on gays and single mothers so appalled EU parliamentarians that they blocked his appointed as a commissioner.

The other solution, already gaining currency, is a non-aligned government of some kind whose main - or perhaps sole - remit would be to change the electoral law. Whatever the outcome of Italy's latest political crisis, a change to that pernicious measure is urgently needed.