EU PROFILE: ITALY:FOR 15 years now, when Italy goes to the polls (any polls), one figure dominates all calculations – current prime minister Silvio Berlusconi.
As Italy prepares to elect its 72 MEPs from five different constituencies, government and opposition alike have tended to see these European elections more as a plebiscite about Mr Berlusconi than as an opportunity to reflect on the challenges facing the EU, its parliament and its other institutions.
Typical was this reaction from senior Democratic Party (PD) figure Anna Finnocchiaro, someone who may well be a candidate for party leadership next autumn.
Asked the other day to predict how the European elections would turn out, she declined to answer.
“The real question is what will happen at the local elections. If the centre-right were to win control of local government as well [as control of national government], then we would be facing something very new, full of uncertainties,” said Ms Finnocchiaro.
The point about these European elections is that, as so often in the past, they coincide with a vast gamut of local elections, involving 62 provinces and more than 4,000 town councils and mayoral contests. In the age of this third Berlusconi government, centre-left exponents like to remind commentators that, despite everything, they control the majority of Italy’s local government. If the centre-left were to do badly at local as well as national level, then clearly the country would be ever more in the hands of Mr Berlusconi. The prime minister has made no secret of his ambitions. He heads the Freedom Party (PDL) list in all five constituencies, even though the obvious incompatibility between the office of prime minister and a MEP means that he will be forced to resign his MEP post in favour of others on the PDL list.
In so doing, Mr Berlusconi hopes his huge electoral “pull” will push the PDL all the way to a highly symbolic 51 per cent of the national vote. Mr Berlusconi believes that not even the recent polemics prompted by the much-publicised decision of his wife, Veronica Lario, to ask him for a divorce will do him any harm.
In a statement to the media, Ms Lario had criticised her husband’s PDL party for having threatened to field a whole series of young, glamorous “starlet” candidates at these European elections. Following the criticisms, a number of potential “starlet” candidates were removed from the PDL list.
Mr Berlusconi still claimed last weekend that his party had a 45 per cent approval rating, while he himself had touched 75 per cent.
Such figures may be happily exaggerated but there is no denying Mr Berlusconi risks running out an emphatic winner of Italy’s European elections.