Ciao Time
by Joshua Adams

Before losing last week's parliamentary election, Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi predicted on television that he would win. Why? Because there were simply not enough coglioni, or "assholes," living in his country to vote for his opposition.

In a way, he was right. Romano Prodi's center-left coalition won a tiny majority in both houses of the Italian Parliament, thanks to new seats representing Italians living abroad. Created by Berlusconi's own government, these new representatives were supposed to be grateful to the Prime Minister and his Forza Italia party for giving them a political voice. But, unimpressed by Berlusconi's sclerotic economic record, embarrassed by his frequent and ridiculous gaffes, and unswayed by his family-friendly promise to give up sex during the campaign, expatriate Italians made the right choice: they gave him his walking papers.

Unfortunately, Berlusconi has yet to walk. Despite his own Interior Ministry certifying a Prodi victory, the Prime Minister refuses to concede the election. Bravura like this is common enough for him, but, as of late, it comes tinged with a new and foreboding ingredient: paranoia.

Berlusconi has claimed, in descending order of plausibility, that the entire political process was rigged against him — even though his parliamentary majority pushed through major changes before the election — that 1,000,000 ballots should to be recounted and examined for fraud — even though only a few thousand contested ballots actually exist — and finally that he and his allies "will resist" the outcome — even though it would be against the law to do so. This last challenge carries ominous overtones in a country where democracy is barely sixty years old, and substantial nostalgia for fascismo still exists. You don't need to look far to find it, either: the National Alliance, one of Berlusconi's main coalition partners, traces its roots to Mussolini's last-ditch stand at Salò.

Seen from a distance, the stand-off seems a little too loud, a little too hysterical, and a little too funny — in other words, typically Italian. But don't let cheap stereotypes fool you: Berlusconi's demise has real consequences for his own country, and perhaps elsewhere.

Domestically, the election is a watershed. For the past five years, Italians have been living in an alternative political universe. When he was elected in 2001, Berlusconi faced four different criminal trials. Three went away when his government redefined some of the Prime Minister's adventures in false accounting as civil sins, rather than criminal ones. He managed to survive the fourth in 2004, when he was acquitted on one corruption charge, and saw the other thrown out because the statue of limitations had expired. It's remarkable that the prosecution went forward at all, since Berlusconi had passed a law granting immunity to himself and his associate, only to see it struck down by Italy's highest court. His cronies did not fare as well: two received lengthy prison sentences.

Internationally, Italy's is the latest foreign electorate to voice its displeasure with the Bush administration. The trend has been growing in Latin America for a number of years: Hugo Chávez in Venezuela, Lula da Silva in Brazil and Evo Morales in Bolivia have all ridden to power on waves of popular support abetted by anger at Washington. Across the Atlantic, Spain elected its Socialist opposition in 2004, not because of the brutal terrorist attacks in Madrid, but because an astonishing 90 percent of Spaniards opposed their country's participation in the War in Iraq. We already knew that Italians hated the war because millions of them turned out to protest it in 2003. Berlusconi joined the Coalition of the Willing anyway, and now he has finally paid the price. It's no accident that Prodi's first announcement as PM — after, of course, telling Berlusconi to "go home" — was that Italian troops would withdraw from Iraq post-haste.

A center-left Italian government also means that the EU won't be friendlier to the charms of unfettered free-marketeering anytime soon. Commentators typically cast this choice as a colossal mistake, a step backward on the evolutionary chain of economic life forms, a futile standing athwart history. But this is an oversimplification, borne of a combination of jealousy and myopia.

Europeans in general, and Italians in particular, cling to the last vestiges of social democracy because its institutions are as valuable as they are rare. If abolished, they will not spontaneously reappear, and a distinct vision of culture will have vanished, one in which society is not handmaiden to the market but its master. And, while it's true that some European economies are struggling to create new jobs, that doesn't mean it's impossible for them to do so. In fact, Italy — unlike, say, France — has a unique tradition of marrying leftist politics with economic innovation. Consider Emilia-Romagna: run mostly by Communists or ex-Communists since 1945, the region around Bologna is one of Italy's most dynamic. Social democracy isn't just for Swedes.

Would Euro-style social democracy work for us? Probably not. But there's a more basic lesson we can glean from the Italian election, even though it's been a long time since peninsular politics has told us anything about our own future.

The similarities between Berlusconi and Bush are abundant. Both made money in competitive sports. Both rose to office by running faux-populist campaigns, in which they garnered the support of the middle class while pursuing economic policies that rewarded the rich — not to mention themselves. Both pride themselves on being anti-intellectual, cultural triumphalists. Both led their countries into a vexed and still-difficult war. Both promised tax cuts that their countries could not afford. Both have uncomfortably positive things to say about Russian President Vladimir Putin. Both have notorious difficulty distinguishing their beliefs from reality.

One is gone, or at least, going. The other, sadly, is still with us. Italians chose a boring, substantive, technocratic candidate to fix the mess made by his ambitious, flimsy, ideological predecessor. It didn't work for us in 2004. Perhaps, with our own election in the distance, we should give it another shot.

Anyone seen Al Gore?

E-mail Joshua Adams at joshua at uchicago dot edu.

— graphic by Harsho Mohan Chattoraj (harshomohan at yahoo dot com)