Gallowglass

Forza Italia

I meant to link to this NYT interview with Berlusconi a couple of days ago, but never got around to it; it's interesting. Berlusconi's claim - he is the only man who can save Italy from Communism. As he describes it, he's living a "life of sacrifices;" the poor man has only been on his yacht once in the last two years.

The lines of battle are being drawn ever more clearly - and this really might threaten the medium-term stability of Italian politics. Left and right view each other as fundamentally illegitimate; the President of the Republic, who's a technocrat, has called for a cooling of rhetoric, but nobody seems to be paying much attention. Berlusconi is denouncing his opponents as Communists and fellow-travellers, and is claiming that the magistrates who are prosecuting him are fundamentally biased. The Left are calling Berlusconi a "desperate man" who doesn't deserve to be Prime Minister. Romano Prodi, the President of the European Commission, talks of his indignation that "the head of government has exploited television for all of his personal aims, in a manner that is unprecedented in our Republic." The point being that Berlusconi has a griplock on private television in Italy; since being elected Prime Minister, he's been diligently doing his best to bend public TV to his will too. It's as if George W. Bush owned ABC, NBC and CBS, and then started to stack PBS with his cronies after being elected. There's not much scope for compromise between Left and Right, and a real risk that it'll all spiral into a major political crisis. It's a mess, even by the freewheelong standards of Italian politics.