Italian Elections 2006

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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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Ilan Halimi: clichés turning lethal

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There was a big uproar in France during the past few weeks caused by the horrifying murder of Ilan Halimi, a 23 year old Jewish shop clerk, by a gang of hoodlums who called themselves, very aptly, “The Barbarians”.

Halimi was abducted by the gang on January 21st. On Monday 13th he was found naked, gagged and handcuffed, his body bearing burn marks and showing signs of torture, near the railway station of Sainte-Geneviève-des-Bois. Soon after he died.
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Le Soir on Islam’s Laicism

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An interesting point of view.

“Islam is in fact a laicity-based faith [one
rooted in the separation of religion and government affairs],”
the Franco-Tunisian writer and essayist Abdelwahab Meddeb
explains in an interview. “It has no Church, nor a supreme
moral authority. During his final crusade, the Emperor
Frederick II, had observed that Muslims made a distinction
between the temporal and the spiritual. … We can trace the
origins of the reflection on laicity to Averroès [1126-1198].
He was the first to plant the seeds of the idea that there
existed two truths, one philosophic, the other theologic. He
saw them as twin sisters. But it is his philosophical
successors who end up forging the theory of a dual truth and
bringing about the split between philosophy and theology. …
Let us not forget that the non-separation of religion and
politics is part of the phantasmagoria surrounding the origins
of Islam that is all the rage among fundamentalists.”

By way of Germany’s Federal Agency for Civic Education (Bundeszentrale für politische Bildung/bpb, Germany) and its estimable newsletter on European topics. I imagine the article is from Le Soir‘s issue of today, but the link does not specify, and my French is not up to searching it out. Any pointers to and/or translations of the full article gratefully accepted.

Damage at heart of Europe’s single market?

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Following up on the points made in this post and this one, former EU competition commissioner Mario Monti has a comment article in today’s FT (behind the firewall unfortunately, but his point is clear from the extract):

The single market, a key pillar of the European Union since its foundation, is in danger. Several member states are reluctant to proceed further in building it; they oppose, for example, the services directive. They even try to undermine the working of those components of the single market that are already in place – and oppose foreign takeovers.

Worryingly, the epicentre of this revolt against the single market lies in countries that are at the core of the single currency. The eurozone, in order to deliver the benefits expected from the euro, needs to have more of a single market than the rest of the EU, but already it is getting less. The euro, meant to be the crowning achievement of the single market, looks increasingly like a currency in search of its market.

More Troubling News

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Just off the wires from Iraq:

The sectarian cleansing that drove 68-year-old Abbas al-Saiedi from his home may be as alarming a sign of a country on the brink of civil war as the killings that have swept Iraq in the past week…….

Al-Saiedi’s story, a tale of fear and desperation told to The Associated Press on Wednesday, represents a growing phenomenon of religious cleansing in which members of each Muslim sect are driving the others from neighborhoods where they have long lived side by side.

The practice, which has been going on for some time in neighborhoods south of Baghdad, is a barometer of the degree to which the Shiites and Sunnis have moved on the path to civil war. The number of incidents cannot be fully gauged, but is not yet at the level of mass expulsions of the kind that took place in the Balkans during the civil war there in the 1990s.

For their part, Sunnis have long-standing claims of attacks by Shiite-dominated and, some say, government-linked death squads and eviction from homes in the very neighborhoods now being occupied by Shiites displaced from Sunni areas.

A Coalition Of The Willing?

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Thursday’s edition of the International Herald Tribune features an interesting article concerning the recent European rows about state interference in favour of so-called national champions.

Quoting Elie Cohen, the Tribune’s authors – Katrin Bennhold and Graham Bowley – suggest that both the French government’s allegedly new/refound role as M&A consultant in the Suez and Gaz de France deal (to avoid a bid from Italy’s ENEL) as well as the Spanish government’s attempt to thwart a takeover of Endesa, a Spanish utilty by E.ON, the German power corporation, are indicative of a resurgence “nation state” as a political concept in the Europe of the 21st century.
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Italy Had Zero GDP Growth In 2005

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I am sure some people must sometimes feel I am exaggerating when I try to explain the rather dire straits which I feel the Italian economy has fallen into. If you are one of those people I would ask you to take a good look at the latest data release:

Official statistics published on Wednesday showed Italy experienced zero growth in 2005 underlining the dire state of the country’s economy and dealing a blow to Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi’s election campaign…..Istat, the official statistics institute, said that the weak data contrasted with the US’s 3.5 per cent, the UK’s 1.8 per cent, the 0.9 per cent of Germany and Spain’s 3.4 per cent.

And it’s not as if 2005 was a bad year for the global economy generally, the world economy steamed ahead at a rate of around 4.25% last year, driven by systematic development in India and China and strong growth in the US. Italy has now had an annual growth rate of around 1% per annum over the last decade, and I see no good reason to justify the expectation that this is going to perk upwards sharply anytime soon.