Two entries in three weeks? It’s surprising we’ve even managed that much. Come on. It’s August. We’re in Europe. We’re all away from the computer and you should be too, enjoying the final hot, sweaty gasps of summer.
But if you just can’t tear yourself away, here are a few tid-bits from my corner of things.
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They had Parliamentary elections last week. Nobody much noticed, but,
1) The voting was conducted in good order and — according to international observers — was, for the most part, fair and without irregularities;
2) The opposition won a fairly clear victory; and,
3) The government promptly acknowledged the opposition victory, and is handing over power forthwith.
This is no small thing in Macedonia, an ethnically divided country with a long and miserable history of political violence. A bit more below the fold.
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Well here in sunny Catalonia we don’t have a fooball team of our own right now, so maybe that’s why we chose this precise moment to hold a referendum about our future.
Now the first thing to get straight is that despite all the direst predictions, Spain is still here the morning after the big vote, and in one piece, I just touched the floor to prove it. Indeed 11 footballers (some of them Catalan) will also come to earth on German turf tonight just to graphically illustrate the point. So it does seem that some of the concerns raised in the coments to this post were well wide of the mark.
Some issues do, however, remain.
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Prodi’s majorities in Parliament are still slim, and factional infighting is likely to remain Florentine, but Berlusconi’s political fortunes continued to float away in municipal elections just passed.
The municipal elections held in Italy from May 28 to 29 did not offer Berlusconi the revenge he was seeking. Massimo Giannini, the daily’s deputy editor, looks at the results and at a missed opportunity for the former prime minister. “The revenge, the dirty trick, the stiff uppercut, whatever the precise lexical nuance, Berlusconi’s political sally has failed. The municipal elections as an instrument of grass-roots ‘Jacquerie’ that was supposed to definitively deprive the centre-left government of its legitimacy – this strategy did not work. … And the 15 million Italians who went to the polls did not change the result of April 9 to 10 [legislative elections]. Much to the contrary. … The centre-left no longer has an alibi; it now has no choice but to govern. It can count on a new base: the roughly three million young people who massively voted for it.”
From La Repubblica via Eurotopics
The prospect of Sarkozy replacing Villepin as French Prime Minister has apparently been given a significant boost today, with a close aide of Sarkozy saying his boss could accept such an offer, provided he is allowed to carry out his (and not Chirac’s) political agenda.
Now, maybe this won’t come to pass (and I’ll argue below that it probably won’t). But it is worth recalling some recent history to show how extraordinary such a move would be.
It is not just that Chirac had considered Sarkozy a traitor since he chose to support the presidential bid of (then Prime minister) Edouard Balladur in the presidential elections of 1995. It is also that Chirac has done everything in his power to impede Sarkozy’s rise to power since 2002. In 2004, Chirac battled behind the scenes to try to foil the takeover of his own UMP party by Sarkozy, then the popular Minister of the Interior. When that didn’t work, he ordered him to leave the government, on the theory that having the head of the main party of the parliamentary majority in the cabinet would sap the authority of the Prime Minister (conveniently forgetting that Alain Juppé, a long-time Chirac protégé, was at the same time president of the RPR and Foreign Minister from November 1994 to May 1995).
That theory did last less than a year, since Sarko was back in the government after the failed referendum on the EU constitution in late May 2005. But Chirac ignored the calls of his parliamentary majority to name Sarko Prime Minister and went for Villepin instead, with the hope of making the latter a rival to the former for the next presidential elections. Asking now Sarko to replace Villepin would then be tantamount to a declaration of surrender on Chirac’s part.
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At the time of writing Berlusconi is still filibustering, but it seems to be simply that, rather than any serious attempt to derail the outcome of the electoral process. Meantime the financial markets are adapting themselves to the new reality.
I too am gearing myself up for what looks like being a very bumpy ride ahead. I have dusted off some of the rust from an old weblog I used to maintain – Italian Economy Watch. Many of the posts I have been putting up are simply recycled versions of material which has appeared here at Afoe, but it does at least serve the useful purpose of keeping all the posts tidily in one place. Recent posts include The Future Of Italy’s Young, Addio, Dolce Vita, Or Twilight of the Idols?, Italy Had Zero GDP Growth In 2005, Les Jeux Sont Faits, and The Italian Government Has A New Crisis.
But talking of new crisises, I fear Italy has a pretty old one (puns intended), and the ratings agencies are only just starting to get their minds round the problem.
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With respect to the Italian elections, there’s still only one thing certain – it’s going to be a long night, and, possibly, not the last one. There have apparently been, if my rudimentary understanding of Italian news broadcaster Rai News 24 is correct, unjustified delays in data processing. Thus, given the closeness of the race between the center-left and center-right coalitions, Italian expatriats may be the ones who cast the decisive votes for both lower and upper chambers of the Italian Parliament, since a law, introduced in 2001 formed four “overseas constituencies.” They will, accordingly, choose 12 of the 630 MPS in the lower, and six of the the 315 senators in the upper house.
So, instead of news, just some more context. At wwitv.com you can find a whole page full of web streams provided by Italian tv stations. Electionresources.com features a long explanation of the Italian electoral systems, both old and new. As the author, Manuel Ãlvarez-Rivera explains, the system has been altered in numerous ways for this election –
It is widely anticipated that in the event of an Unione victory under the new PR systems, the resulting center-left majorities in both houses of Parliament would be considerably smaller than under the previous systems, and the leader of the Unione, former Prime Minister (and former President of the European Commission) Romano Prodi has promised to undo the changes if the center-left returns to power in this year’s elections.
Finally, here’s the google-translated election website provided by Italy’s interior ministery, which, hopefully, is, where you can find the eventual election results as soon as they are released officially.
UPDATE below the fold.
With respect to the Italian elections, there’s still only one thing certain – it’s going to be a long night, and, possibly, not the last one. There have apparently been, if my rudimentary understanding of Italian news broadcaster Rai News 24 is correct, unjustified delays in data processing. Thus, given the closeness of the race between the center-left and center-right coalitions, Italian expatriats may be the ones who cast the decisive votes for both lower and upper chambers of the Italian Parliament, since a law, introduced in 2001 formed four “overseas constituencies.” They will, accordingly, choose 12 of the 630 MPS in the lower, and six of the the 315 senators in the upper house.
So, instead of news, just some more context. At wwitv.com you can find a whole page full of web streams provided by Italian tv stations. Electionresources.com features a long explanation of the Italian electoral systems, both old and new. As the author, Manuel Ãlvarez-Rivera explains, the system has been altered in numerous ways for this election –
It is widely anticipated that in the event of an Unione victory under the new PR systems, the resulting center-left majorities in both houses of Parliament would be considerably smaller than under the previous systems, and the leader of the Unione, former Prime Minister (and former President of the European Commission) Romano Prodi has promised to undo the changes if the center-left returns to power in this year’s elections.
Finally, here’s the google-translated election website provided by Italy’s interior ministery, which, hopefully, is, where you can find the eventual election results as soon as they are released officially.
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On Sunday, the people of Belarus will vote to elect their new president, who will be the same as their old president, Alexander Lukashenko. The incumbent will win about three-quarters of the vote because, I’ve been reading, that is the share that he wants to receive. Which only shows that he is a slightly more sophisticated autocrat than his many late and unlamented predecessors in Eastern and Central Europe. (Or Western, for that matter.)
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Ok, the Italian elections are now just about one month away, although you wouldn’t guess this from reading the British press where the David Mills/Silvio Berlusconi case is what seems to be making all the running. Now as I indicated in this post, I will try and give some systematic coverage to the election issues as they evolve during the campaign. In that post I outlined 7 issues which I thought would be worth looking at in an election which I think is going to be very important not just for the Italian people themselves but for all citizens of the EU. I had a first pass at one of the topics here (and here).
Maybe the best starting point is number 7 on the list: the sense of denial.
Looking at the fact that Berlusconi himself seems to have started his campaign in Washington, while former Commission president Romano Prodi now seems to have become an early convert to neo-protectionism (and this piece), I would definitely say that this is really the number one issue. In order to help me on my course through these troubled waters Roberto of Wind Rose Hotel has kindly offered to send me some on the spot material. Here is his first missive. It confirms my worst fears.
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