Italian Sausage

is the author of The Dark Heart of Italy. His next book, Utopian Dreams, will be published in the United Kingdom in January 2007. For the last five years, we lucky Italian correspondents have had it easy. We have trailed a prime minister so flamboyant, charismatic, and tactless that he guaranteed press conferences would become international news. You needed only to get your dictaphone close to Silvio Berlusconi's chin to be ensured a stream of insults, obscenities, philosophies, and fun. He told so many jokes and made so many gaffes that they have been collected in a book called Berlusconate ("Berlusconi-isms"). Rarely has covering politics been so amusing: Listen to bar banter in Italy, and there was always a story by or about the man they call il Cavaliere, "the Knight."This month, he fought a general election against Romano Prodi. Prodi, a former economist, is a man nicknamed either "the Professor" or "Mortadella" (a rotund, processed ham). With his large glasses and lipless grin, Prodi looks like a kindly but dull parish priest. His uninspiring election posters promised- -in deliberate contrast to Berlusconi--"seriousness in government." This, no doubt, was a clash of styles, and, in Italy, style is everything. An election is less about politics than pageantry. Debate is often conducted through gesture and pose. During the last few days of campaigning, I was walking through a piazza in Rome and saw hundreds of people wearing t-shirts with the same message: sono un coglione, they said, i'm a dumbass. Attractive girls kept offering me balloons or billboards so that I, too, could declare myself a coglione. I switched on the news that night and discovered that this was the day's top political story: Up and down the country, hundreds of thousands of people were cheerfully insulting themselves and insisting on being called dumbasses. Even by the bizarre standards of Italian politics, this was weird. It all came about because Berlusconi had, the day before, explained why he thought he could still win: He didn't think, he said, there were that many "dumbasses around who could vote against their own interests." It was vintage Berlusconi--the swear-word showed he was still a man of the people, able to shoot from the hip. The mention of "interests" raised the specter of Prodi's tax increases and reminded voters of the key difference between the challenger and the incumbent: One was soberly talking about what was best for the country; the other was brazenly urging voters to do what Berlusconi does best--look after number one and no one else. Berlusconi is often credited with bringing a consultant-driven, poll-tested American style of political campaigning to Europe. And now he can take credit for importing some other facets of modern American politics to Italy as well: a polarized electorate that bears an uncanny resemblance to America's intractable red state-blue state divide and bitterly contested vote tallies a la Florida in 2000. So the country enters a kind of political purgatory as Prodi takes his razor-thin electoral victory and attempts to assemble a coalition government. And, given the notorious instability of Italy's ruling coalitions, perhaps Prodi ought to savor the moment. If history is any guide, this interregnum may last longer than his reign. Italian politics has little to do with politica and almost everything to do with partitica: It's not about policies as such but old-fashioned party politicking. In the election, there were a jaw-dropping 174 parties competing, each with their own circular symbol officially registered for the pageant. Almost all debate prior to an election is about which party will affiliate with another; page upon page of newspaper commentary is dedicated to which parties will split or join together or disappear. The ballot is normally called a scheda lenzuolo, a "bedsheet ballot," because it's so large. Actually, this year it was a modest 25 inches long. Characteristically, Berlusconi rewrote the electoral law months before the April poll and thus turned the result into a knife-edge. Prodi won the lower house election by less than one-tenth of 1 percent, and, in the upper house, the Senate, Prodi actually received 428,179 fewer votes than Berlusconi, not including overseas ballots (but, because of the constituency system, he has 158 seats against Berlusconi's 156). Berlusconi contested the result, ultimately appealing to the supreme court, which confirmed Prodi's victory. Now there is considerable doubt that Prodi will actually be able to govern. Fluidity, rather than loyalty, is the enduring characteristic of Italian politics. Prodi won another election against Berlusconi back in 1996 and was subsequently ousted by defections in his own ranks. During that parliament (1996-2001), a staggering 158 politicians changed political party or moved with their party into a different coalition. To cling to power this time, Prodi will have to do the political equivalent of walking on water. But he's not even in power yet. Prodi has to negotiate with all his allies and work out which "armchair" to give to whom. Then he has to present his government to the ceremonial head of state, the president of the Republic. The trouble is that the current president, Carlo Azeglio Ciampi, is reluctant to swear in the new government, since his mandate ends on May 18. That means that the warring factions of the parliament's lower house (and 58 representatives of the regions) will have to decide on a new president before Prodi can begin to govern. It will take weeks, and Italy could find itself without a government until late May or even June. All of which is further complicated by the fact that Italy is in the throes of a peaceful civil war. The country is split almost exactly down the middle (the results for the lower house were 49.8 percent against 49.7 percent). Those two halves are more than just political opposites: They are separated by history and culture and fashion. For the left, April 25 is the founding day of Italian democracy. It's a national holiday marking the anniversary of the 1945 liberation from fascism. But, as prime minister, Berlusconi pointedly refused to attend the celebrations. For him, the date is a dark reminder of the left- wing partisans who betrayed their own country. One of his political allies is, after all, Alessandra Mussolini. During Berlusconi's government, the judiciary was seen by the left as a last bulwark against illegality and corruption; for the right, the courts were merely theaters for communist-inspired witch hunts. Wearing Tod's shoes (made by Diego Della Valle, a fierce critic of Berlusconi) suggests you lean left; so does facial hair (Berlusconi famously demanded that his parliamentarians shave off beards) and drinking Illy coffee (coffee magnate Riccardo Illy is the left-wing president of the Friuli-Venezia Giulia region). Tuscany and Emilia-Romagna are known as the red belt (red here meaning left, not right as in the United States); Veneto, Lombardy, and Sicily are more right- wing (in 2001, Berlusconi won 100 percent of the parliamentary seats in Sicily). This tribalism is partly why the turnout at Italian elections is so admirably high (83.6 percent at this election). As one editorial said in Il Messaggero the day after the supreme court upheld the official result, "Italy has shown it has one great enemy: itself." When Berlusconi came to power for the second time, in May 2001, he was characterized by the left as a post- democratic dictator, a cross between Citizen Kane and Benito Mussolini. Now that the left is in power, Berlusconi has steadfastly refused to acknowledge defeat, thereby delegitimizing Prodi in the eyes of one half of the country. That Berlusconi came within a whisker of winning tells you everything you need to know about Prodi. It's true, of course, that the new electoral law was a shamelessly bespoke piece of legislation; and it's true that Berlusconi has at his disposal a media empire that penalizes and discredits all opposition. But, given the circumstances, Prodi should have enjoyed a landslide. Economic growth in the last five years has been a slovenly 0.64 percent. The International Monetary Fund predicts a deficit of 4.3 percent of GDP in 2007, way above the 3 percent ceiling set by the European Union's Stability and Growth Pact. Berlusconi came to power riding on his reputation as a businessman with the Midas touch. He promised to make Italians rich. But, not only did he oversee an economic meltdown, he also--to the chagrin of the vast majority of Italians--pledged Italian support for Bush's Iraq fiasco. But Berlusconi was running against a man who seemed to lack the killer instinct. The most common adjective used to describe Prodi is pacione, a pejorative way to say he's placid. He retains that air of a bumbling academic, a benevolent bore. His greatest strength--it's a strange kind of strength--is that people underestimate him. Like former British Prime Minister John Major (another man chosen as an antidote to a charismatic predecessor), Prodi has raced through the ranks almost because he goes unnoticed. Having been a professor at Bologna University, he became head of the Institute for Industrial Reconstruction (IRI), the enormous para-statal institute that was parceled off and privatized under Prodi's leadership. He became Italian prime minister for the first time in 1996, then president of the European Commission, and is now Italian prime minister once more. The CV suggests there must be some steel ... somewhere. The less flattering analysis of Prodi's ascent--the one repeatedly alleged by Berlusconi--is that he is merely the weak front man for darker forces. During his watch, the privatization of the IRI was dogged by allegations of profiteering, as state assets were mysteriously undersold. At the European Commission, corruption continued unchecked throughout Prodi's presidential tenure, even though he had come to power on the promise to root it out. Prodi's great asset is that, almost uniquely for an Italian politician, he is perceived as honest. Known for his Catholic faith, he's called a bonaccione, a goody- goody. The problem is that no one is quite sure at what point his perceived goodness becomes naivete. But the most intriguing moment of Prodi's career actually came when he tried to be a seer. In 1978, when former Prime Minister Aldo Moro was kidnapped by the Red Brigades, Prodi and other university colleagues held a seance to try to discover where he was being held--or where to find his corpse. Many felt that the seance was merely a charade by which university professors could tip off police without incriminating the far-left students or academics who may have given them the information. The spiritualist sitting came up with the name Gradoli, a medieval village near Viterbo. Police raided the place and found nothing. Only later was it realized that there was a Via Gradoli in Rome; and it was there, two weeks after the seance, that a recently abandoned hideout of the Red Brigades was actually discovered. Prodi has never given a satisfactory account, beyond the supernatural, of how he came by the information. If Prodi actually has any superpowers, now would be the time to use them. The problems facing Italy are immense: Many of its traditional industries-- particularly fashion and furniture--are those most vulnerable to cheaper Asian alternatives. The aging population exacerbates an already acute pension problem: The retirement age is 60, and Prodi will be under pressure from his allies to return it to 57. That in itself wouldn't be such a problem if the adult population were all fiscal contributors, but only 58 percent of those in the 15-64 age range are employed, the smallest percentage in Western Europe. To balance budgets, Prodi will almost certainly have to reintroduce the inheritance tax abolished by Berlusconi. As for foreign policy, many in Prodi's left-wing alliance are knee-jerk anti- Americans. His coalition partners have frequently spoken of the desire to pull Italian troops out of Nasiriyah, in Iraq. Prodi himself knows the United States well. He has been a visiting professor at Harvard University and a scholar at the Stanford Research Institute; unlike Berlusconi, he speaks good English. The suspicion remains, however, that, as an ally, he'll be more like Spain's Jose Luis Rodreguez Zapatero than Great Britain's Tony Blair. All of which might, however, prove to be academic. Berlusconi was the longest-serving postwar Italian prime minister--the first to serve his full mandate. Many suspect that, having returned to proportional representation, Italy will once again witness revolving-door governments in which prime ministers breeze in and out of power like guests in a hotel lobby. Prodi, they say, will be gone before the year is out. But the deep divisions in the Italian electorate and the massive structural problems facing its economy--those are likely to prove more enduring fixtures of Italian life.

By tobias jones