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Mr. Berlusconi's clear defeat

The majority secured by Italy's centre-left coalition, headed by Romano Prodi, former Prime Minister and President of the European Commission, in both houses of Parliament mirrors strong popular disapproval of the ruling centre-right alliance's abysmal performance in the past five years. Current Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi's reported demand for a repoll, alleging that the roughly 25,000 vote margin in the lower house (Chamber of Deputies) was too narrow, falls into a familiar pattern of the billionaire business tycoon hoodwinking Parliament and the judiciary right through his flamboyant political career. In this latest instance, he is merely attempting to make use of the inherent possibility of fractured verdicts under the system of Proportional Representation (PR) by exploiting the margin of votes, even though it translates into a clear lead of over 50 seats for the rival camp. The return to full PR — replacing a system that combined the first-past-the-post with PR — was itself surrounded by controversy as the move was widely perceived as an attempt by the centre-right coalition to minimise the losses in the general election after its rout in the regional elections last year. For the average Italian, Mr. Berlusconi's invocation of the old-fashioned mantra of low taxes and the malicious propaganda against communists in his poll campaign offered little hope of the kind of urgent measures needed to rescue the country from economic deceleration. Mr. Berlusconi's frequent references to Mr. Prodi as a "frontman for ultra-communists" and his arguably racist reference to the Chinese leadership of the 1960s were only matched by the intent of one of his ministers to provoke hate by wearing T-shirts bearing the cartoons of Prophet Muhammed. Mr. Berlusconi's rather sudden promise, towards the end of his electioneering, to abolish property tax on owners for their first house, a key source of revenue for local government, showed him up as a man who is out of touch with the issues of the day.

In contrast, Mr. Prodi's proposal to reduce employers' social security contribution as a means to cut the unit cost of labour, despite the potential for controversy within his left alliance, is a more honest attempt to come to grips with real issues. In his forthcoming second term as Prime Minister — after a short-lived tenure between 1996 and 1998 — Mr. Prodi can be expected to combine political acumen with leadership to hold together a disparate coalition. Given the slender majority that his alliance enjoys in the upper house, the test of his commitment to the announced reform programme will be his ability to balance the economic liberalism of former Christian Democrats with the antipathy of the Communists in the alliance to free-market policies. This balancing act will be rendered all the more difficult by the fact that Signor Prodi, though the consensual leader of a grouping of parties, does not himself seem to enjoy a mass base.

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