Tag Archives: Political issues

Italian Elections, Now The Serious Part Starts

Posted on by

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.
Continue reading →

Senate: 158-156 Prodi

Posted on by

Corriere della Sera is now reporting that the Italian Senate is breaking 158-156 to the Left, with the lower house going 340-277. The controversial six seats for Italians abroad, introduced by neo-well actually quite-fascist minister (a former member of the Salo Republic’s army) Mirko Tremaglia, seem to have backfired badly on their inventor, with 4 out of 6 going to the Left (German link) and pushing them over the hump.

The Italian right was so keen on those seats that Forza Italia appeared on the overseas ballot as “Italians Abroad with Tremaglia”, which sounds to me at least worryingly like a support group for sufferers of some sort of embarrassing disease. Still, all’s well that ends well, which is probably not what the mafia boss of bosses Bernardo Provenzano is saying right now, having been busted after 40 years on the run. Not that I’m saying there was any connection..

It still might not end well, though, as Berlusconi is babbling about a government of technocrats (German), presumably as a way to stay in office and out of jail a while longer. That could happen either on the basis of a grand coalition (which the Communists are pledged to reject) or alternatively, by somehow dodging the election results.

Market Watch: The MIBTEL has given up some of yesterday’s gains, down 0.67% at 1430 local time..

The Market Speaks…and Jörg Packs

Posted on by

Well, by 1630 CET today, the Milan stock market had made a very clear judgment on the outcome of the Italian elections – the MIBTEL index being up just under 1 per cent intraday, despite a pasting for Berlusconi’s own Mediaset..down 1.98 per cent at €9.68 a share. Berlusconi’s departure seems welcome indeed.

More exit poll results are spilling out all the time, showing the Left with a working majority in both houses. So far, the only weirdness has been the rather idiosyncratic kerfuffle in the town of Amelia (German link), where a protest led to the removal of crosses from all polling stations on the grounds of constitutionally guaranteed secularism, and predictable moaning from the ex/post/neo/whatever-fascists. A small outbreak of laicisme.

Oh yes, and this…sorry, more German linkage. Seems Jörg Haider, fun-lovin’ pseudofascist scandal monkey and governor of the Austrian province of Kärnten, is going to stand for election in 2009…in Italy, as a candidate for a party advocating Venetian independence. Not just Northern independence as per routine Liga Nord stupidity, but independence for the Most Serene Republic herself.

Strange really. I’ve always thought of Haider as a man out of place, a Mediterranean politician stuck on the wrong side of the Alps with the Germans. His demagoguery, rocambolesque coalition whoring and-to be brutally frank-corruption and barely concealed racism would have fitted beautifully into Silvio Berlusconi’s recent campaign, the municipal authorities of Marbella, or perhaps the intrigues of southern French Gaullism. Carinthia produced far more than its fair share of Nazis, as did many similarly debatable provinces on the edges of the German linguistic sphere, and in a sense his pumped-up nationalism fits the pattern.

Until you remember that he’s not actually from there at all (not far from Linz, actually), and in fact is putting on the overcompensated border nationalism to ingratiate himself with the overcompensated border nationalists. Which fits, too.

But it’s going to be fun to watch.

Italian Elections

Posted on by

Well it’s not official yet, but the first exit poll has Berlusconi trailing:

An exit poll Monday showed conservative Italian Premier Silvio Berlusconi trailing center-left challenger Romano Prodi in parliamentary elections. The Nexus poll indicated that Prodi’s coalition received between 50 and 54 percent of the vote in both the upper and lower chambers of parliament, while Berlusconi’s coalition received 45-49 percent.

Obviously this is the ‘early days’ stage, and we shouldn’t jump to conclusions. I will be updating as the day (or night) wears on.

Update I: It’s looking firmer for Prodi. More exit polls are coming up with similar results. For example the Piepoli Institute’s exit polls for Sky TG24 have given the Prodi coalition 52 percent to 47 percent for Berlusconi’s centre-right and for both houses.

Update II. Tobias has now posted more extensively. First thing Tuesday morning the outcome is still in doubt, and those who were sceptical about the early exit polls were right to be so. Prodi is now claiming victory, but this is being challenged vigorously by the Berlusconi camp. The margin is wafer thin for the lower house (the Chamber of Deputies, or ‘Camera’), with Prodi’s having 49.80 per cent of the vote as compared to 49.73 per cent for Berlusconi’s House of Freedoms (a difference of a mere 25,000 votes). Naturally calls for a recount abound. The position of the Senate is still in doubt. There is currently a one seat difference between the camps (in favour of Berlusconi) but six more seats based on overseas votes are still to be allocated.

Wikipedia have a substantial entry on the elections themselves, and another on the Italian parliament, which may prove useful in understanding things if the final out come is ultimately a ‘hung’ parliament.

One-liner of the week

Posted on by

The Mirror, on the latest bizarre twist of the Italian election campaign :

Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi yesterday confessed to calling sex chat lines – to ask women what they thought of his policies. (…)

He called the girls to ask what they thought of him and Mr Prodi.

He told party workers at a briefing: “Seven out of the nine young ladies I called said they preferred me, which is very good news indeed.”

One aide said: “He was delighted that the women were in favour of him. It certainly perked him up.”

But a member of Mr Prodi’s camp said: “These women say anything to please the desperate men who call them.”

(via Yglesias)

Flexicurity – a working model for Europe?

Posted on by

Before moving in to the nitty-gritty of flexicurity; what it is and whether it can work as a universal European labour market model I should take the time to thank the AFOE team for allowing me a spell as a guest-writer here at the blog in the coming two weeks. In terms of presentation my name is Claus Vistesen and I am a Danish student at the BLC program at Copenhagen Business School. For further info I invite you to visit my personal blog Alpha.Sources, which deals with a wide range of topics of my interest.

There is a lot of talk and flurry at the moment about labour market reforms in Europe, notably in France, but also Germany has been struggling with how to reform the labour market and here as well as here.

Looking to the north we find the Nordic countries who seemingly have the best of two worlds; low uemployment coupled with a high degree of security but what is it exactly that the Nordic countries are doing, and could others potentially follow their example?
Continue reading →

Changing Colors

Posted on by

The CDU in Baden-Wuerttemberg is conducting negotiations with the Greens in that state to decide if the two parties should form a coalition government. If they do, it will be the first “black-green” coalition at the state level, and another sign of fluidity in Germany’s post-reunification party politics.

Update: Maybe next time. The CDU and FDP will, according to reports today, continue the coalition that has run the southwest for the last 10 years. Germany changes slowly.
Continue reading →

Dutch (in)tolerance

Posted on by

Dutch shocklog Retecool has posted an entry containing a link to an episode of the BBC’s Hard Talk in which Stephen Sackur is grilling Dutch right-wing MP Geert Wilders, founder of Group Wilders and the new Party of Freedom.

You can watch the episode by clicking here (RealPlayer, 23 minutes). Before you click, please read what’s below the fold first.
Continue reading →

State of Democratic Emergency!

Posted on by

Or should that be a undemocratic state of emergency?

In past AFOE threads, we’ve been discussing the Italian elections, as you no doubt saw. One thing that came up is the possibility that Silvio Berlusconi might not behave himself in the event that he looks like losing. This is after all a man who has no compunction about changing the law to avoid being prosecuted, associating with barely concealed mafiosi, and generally flouting the principles of the Italian constitution. It’s by no means impossible that, losing power and immunity, he might end up in jail. Can he really be trusted, then, not to try to rig the ballot and to go away if he loses?

This week’s events have lent much point to this discussion. Berlusconi’s behaviour has become a little odd, to say the least. After walking out of a TV discussion, he proceeded to harangue the members of Confindustria for making up all Italy’s economic problems as part of (you guessed it) a communist plot, and finished up by announcing that a “state of democratic emergency” existed after a minor fracas broke out near one of his speeches.

Worryingly, he seems to be assembling the ideological foundations of anti-democracy; he argues that there is a plot by secret communists who incorporate the judiciary, the procuracy, the media and even the top executives of Italian industry, and that the state is in danger from a violent opposition movement aligned with them. They are also part of the communist conspiracy. Perhaps he will soon discover that they are also terrorists.

Is this not something like the arguments of Carl Schmitt’s Ausnahmezustand? To deal with these violent communists who are endangering democracy and the rule of law, presumably, democracy and law must be suspended. If the election is close, I think there is a small but non-trivial chance that he will try to announce that, “to restore order”, the elections will be “suspended” or some such. Fortunately, any such action would have seismic economic and political consequences, national bankruptcy being the most immediate, which ought to deter the people he would need to carry with him from supporting such a move.

Yes, there is a “state of democratic emergency” in Italy. I don’t think it’s too wild to say that Silvio Berlusconi is it.

French protests : it’s the politics, stupid!

Posted on by

There are some offers you can’t refuse. An invitation to join the permanent roster of Afoe is one of them. Let me first say, then, that I was initially happy and thrilled and grateful to be part of this wonderful blog. All the more so since it means that I’ll be ineligible for the Afoe Awards next year, and thus spared the humiliation of a third crushing defeat in a row. (For those of you who are scratching their head and wondering “who the hell is this guy?”, check this post)

If is say “initially”, it’s because, as the French guy of the team, I now have the daunting task of trying to explain clearly our current social row over the Contrat première embauche (First job contract) to a mainly non-native readership. As it happens, the BBC has already done a quite decent Q&A on the topic. So go read it to get the basics. And then come back here if you want my long and -I hope- not too muddled thoughts on what it all means.
Continue reading →