James L. Newell
On 2 October, the
Letta government won a vote of confidence that seemed considerably to
strengthen it following months of uncertainty about its future and the sense
that it was highly fragile. The vote had been engineered by Silvio Berlusconi,
and the sense of drama associated with it was considerably heighted when,
during the preceding debate, the entrepreneur entered the Senate chamber
suddenly to announce a humiliating climbdown: he and his followers would oppose
the no-confidence motion. Just a few days previously the Government’s survival
had been put in doubt by the announcement that ministers belonging to
Berlusconi’s People of Freedom (Popolo della Libertà, Pdl) would resign. They
had apparently been instructed to withdraw from the Government by the
entrepreneur in protest at a 27 September Cabinet decision to postpone
discussion of a series of matters in the area of economic and fiscal policy
including Value Added Tax. Thereby it became clear that the Government would
almost certainly be unable to achieve a promised postponement of the VAT
increase decided by the previous Monti government due to come into effect on 1
October.
The VAT issue cited
as the reason for the ministers’ resignations was widely regarded as a pretext.
Berlusconi claimed that the Government’s decision violated the agreement on
which the coalition was based. Prime Minister Enrico Letta replied that the
postponement decision had been made necessary by the earlier announcement on
the part of Pdl parliamentarians that they would resign en masse out of
solidarity with Berlusconi whose future was to be the subject of a vote by the Senate
elections committee on 4 October. On that date the committee would decide on
whether to recommend to the Senate that it vote in favour of Berlusconi’s
expulsion following his 1 August conviction for tax fraud. Letta had argued
that the Pdl parliamentarians’ threatened resignation created such uncertainty
about the Government’s capacity to pursue its programme that there needed to be
clarification, in Parliament, about whether it could carry on. Then, when
announcement of the ministers’ resignation came, Letta echoed a view widely
shared among media commentators that the gesture had actually been motivated by
Berlusconi’s personal interests.
These personal
interests arose from the position Berlusconi found himself in following his
conviction. He had been caught up in numerous judicial investigations into his
business affairs over the years. What made this case different was that for the
first time, charges against him had been upheld by the Court of Cassation,
Italy’s highest court. In the past, he had always managed to take advantage of
the automatic right of appeal from courts of first instance to the Appeal Court
and from there to the Court of Cassation. This had enabled him in some cases to
avoid prosecution by exploiting his great wealth and the relative slowness of
the Italian judicial process to ensure that proceedings were ‘timed out’ thanks
to the statute of limitations. In other cases, he had used his position as
Prime Minister to secure the passage of legislation aimed at rendering the work
of the judiciary more difficult, or decriminalising the acts of which he was
accused. Now, however, he was out of office and faced with charges that he had
bought the rights to screen American films through a series of offshore
companies that had resold them to each other at inflated prices each time
allowing him to evade taxes and pocket the difference. On 26 October 2012 he
had been sentenced to four years in prison, a decision upheld by the Appeal
Court on 8 May 2013 and by the Court of Cassation on 1 August. In the meantime,
the Monti government, driven by deep popular dissatisfaction with standards of
probity in public life as well as awareness of the actual costs of office
holders’ abuses, had passed the so-called Severino Law. This bans those
convicted of crimes carrying a penalty of two years or more from being members
of Parliament or holding other offices and renders them ineligible to stand as
candidates for such offices for at least six years. In deference to the
separation-of-powers principle and in accordance with article 66 of the
Constitution which reserves to Parliament the power to determine the
eligibility of its members, the Senate itself would have to decide whether
Severino applied in Berlusconi’s case.
Berlusconi presumably
calculated that if he succeeded in bringing the Government down he could
provoke fresh elections, which might enable him to avoid the consequences of 1
August: though the outcome of a new poll could not be taken for granted, voting
intentions data were not discouraging either and his Democratic Party (Partito
Democratico, Pd) opponents on the centre left were in trouble. The party’s
decision to join Berlusconi in coalition following the inconclusive election
outcome in February was deeply unpopular among its supporters. On the other
hand, it might suffer most from any government collapse if Berlusconi could
frame the event as “a battle against moves by the centre-left to raise taxes as
part of [the following] year's budget discussions” (The Guardian, 2013). The risk was that
collapse might provoke turmoil in the financial markets, for which Berlusconi
himself might be blamed, and bring a decline in the share value of his
companies.
And it was presumably
the awareness of this risk that led each of the ministers “ordered” to resign,
one by one to line up to express their misgivings until it became apparent that
the threat to bring the Government down might provoke a major party split. From
this it became apparent that, notwithstanding Berlusconi’s stance, the
Government would survive the confidence vote anyway. Berlusconi’s dramatic
last-minute U-turn was therefore the consequence of an awareness that he no
longer had the power and authority to call the shots on the centre right –
presumably because his age (77) makes him a rapidly wasting asset. The widely
held assumption when the Government had taken office was that it would be weak
because it depended on the cooperation of Berlusconi who had the power to
withdraw the support of his followers any time he wished. Now that power had
been put to the test and found wanting – and this was a dramatic new
development in Italian politics: for the first time, Berlusconi, the leader of
a “personal party”, created by him and for him, had been forced to bow to the
will of his followers. Though his political demise had been predicted and
disconfirmed many times in the past, now more than ever before his career as a
political leader seemed to be drawing to a close.
For the past twenty
years Berlusconi himself – his role in politics, his legal difficulties, his
conflict of interests – has been the main cleavage structuring political
conflict in Italy. Therefore, Letta’s description of the events of 2 October as
“historic” could well turn out to be much more than a politician’s hyperbole: we
may indeed be witnessing the end of an era.
Reference
The Guardian (2013), “Silvio Berlusconi insists he will stay in
politics”, 18 September, The
Guardian, http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/sep/18/silvio-berlusconi-politics.
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