Last weekend's referendum defeat comes after a winter of discontent, writes PADDY AGNEWin Rome
FOR YEARS the most regular question visitors to Italy would ask Rome-based foreign correspondents concerned prime minister Silvio Berlusconi.
How could a majority of Italians continue to vote for a man who, in any other developed democracy, would have been chased out of public life long ago?
Perhaps the question need no longer be asked. If three successive electoral defeats in the last month are anything to go by, it would seem the Great Communicator has lost his touch.
The emphatic nature of his defeat in last weekend’s referendum beggars belief.
Despite his best efforts at discouraging the vote, 26.85 million Italians or 57 per cent of the electorate turned out to vote, ensuring that for the first time in 16 years, a referendum made the legal quorum.
What is more, 95.5 per cent of voters rejected three crucial pieces of Berlusconi government legislation.
The prime minister’s supporters argue this referendum cannot be interpreted in purely party political terms. Correctly enough, they point out that two of the issues on the ballot sheet – nuclear energy and water resources – are obviously such important and indeed emotive issues that they transcend petty partly politics.
This is undoubtedly the case. The fact that perhaps as many as 10 million of Mr Berlusconi’s centre-right voters turned out to express their opposition to both privatised water and a future nuclear energy programme proves the point. A nuclear-free future is a legitimate aspiration, be you a centre-right or a centre-left voter. Yet this vote also carries a clear anti-Berlusconi message.
If nuclear energy and water resources can be seen as cross-party issues of national interest, what about the third question on this weekend’s ballot paper, the abrogation of Mr Berlusconi’s self-conceded immunity legislation, otherwise known as the Legitimate Impediment? There is only one person to whom that law applies, only one person for whom that (unconstitutional) law was introduced: the prime minister himself. Some 95.15 per cent of voters opted to abrogate that law, effectively telling Mr Berlusconi that he was not above the law but should abide by it, like any other citizen.
All the signs suggest that, for the time being at least, he has lost touch with the electoral pulse.
His anti-magistrate campaign, vividly highlighted by his embarrassing little tete-a-tete with President Barack Obama at last month’s Deauville G8, has clearly backfired. As did his decision to make the Milan mayoral contest a “pro-Berlusconi” or “pro-judiciary” vote. Not to mention his announcement that he would not be voting in last weekend’s referendum.
In an Italy where 30 per cent of the under-35 age group are unemployed, the worldwide economic crisis has contributed to Mr Berlusconi’s electoral problems. Yet, the electorate has also clearly punished his government for its relative inaction on chronic infrastructural problems, at a time when it has wasted much time and energy on (judicial) issues of concern only to himself.
Last weekend's defeat comes after a winter of discontent marked by nationwide anti-Berlusconi protests, whether its women expressing their disgust at the Rubygate sex scandal revelations or opposition to the proposed "Gag Law" (an attempt to limit the investigative judiciary's use of wiretaps). Not for nothing was the Vieni Via Con Meseries in which anti-Mafia writer Roberto Saviano attempted to outline a different (Berlusconi-free) Italy one of the most successful television programmes of the last year.
Arguably, too, the most significant data to emerge from Mr Berlusconi’s defeats concerns television. For the last 18 years, he has skilfully used his de facto control of 80 per cent of the terrestrial TV audience to influence and win over voters.
In the age of the Indignados, of the Arab Spring, however, there is a whole different, younger Italian electorate out there who have escaped his televisual stranglehold, thanks to the web and its social networks. This may not yet be the end of 74-year-old Mr Berlusconi but it looks like the beginning of the end.