LAST MONTH he faced a mauling at the hands of voters in key local polls, most painfully in his power base of Milan, and last weekend Italy’s electorate has again rubbed salt in the wound with overwhelming snubs to Silvio Berlusconi in four referendum questions.
Against the background of charges against him of paying for sex with an underage prostitute, three fraud trials and plummeting poll ratings, political authority is seeping away from the 74-year-old premier, his country’s great political survivor. Pierluigi Bersani, leader of the centre-left Democratic Party, insists he should go now, and there are real questions about whether he can last until the end of his term in 2013.
Ostensibly the poll questions were about blocking both a return to nuclear power and the privatisation of water, and repealing a law, “legitimate impediment”, which allows ministers to dodge court hearings against them on the grounds they are tied up with government business. The latter provision has considerably facilitated the prime minister in his decade-long successful dance to evade the long arm of the law, and Berlusconi, also a strong supporter of nuclear power, resolutely opposed all the measures. In doing so, in effect, he turned the referendums into a poll on himself.
Convinced he would lose, the prime minister gambled unsuccessfully on promoting a poll boycott that would bring turnout below the 50 per cent threshold required to approve measures. A very robust turnout of 57 per cent – the first time since 1995 that a referendum has achieved a quorum – and a 95 per cent Yes on each question gave him his answer. The majorities included at least 10 million centre-right voters who would normally back him. A “clear” result, he acknowledged with some understatement, promising to accept the decision.
Berlusconi retains a shaky parliamentary majority that will again be tested in a confidence vote on June 22nd. But his increasingly strained relationship with coalition partners the Northern League has been exacerbated by the electoral setbacks and there is speculation it is about to pull out. The league’s price is tax cuts that fiscally conservative economy minister Giulio Tremonti, widely credited with shielding Italy from the financial crisis, is strenuously resisting. Yesterday he reiterated his position: “I do not see any alternative to reducing the deficit. Tax reform cannot be made in deficit”.
In the words of our Rome correspondent Paddy Agnew: “This may not yet be the end . . . but it certainly looks like the beginning of the end”.