| Miguel Murado Miguel-Anxo Murado . |
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......................................................................................................................................... ......................................................................................................................................... Berlusconi as the Cheshire cat Miguel A. Murado The Cheshire cat, of Alice in Wonderland fame, was known for his mysterious smile; so mysterious that it remained there after the cat vanished. He wouldn’t be a rival for Silvio Berlusconi, though. His smile is, maybe, less mysterious but more omnipresent this days. In his case, it is there before he arrives rather than after. His reasons for smiling are apparent enough: Last week, Prodi’s centre-left cabinet suffered a self-inflicted defeat in the Senate and for a couple of days it looked as if Italy was heading toward early elections; but not yet. Suddenly scared by the prospect of its own political suicide (Berlusconi is ahead in the polls), the myriad of parties in the governmental coalition are treating their own behaviour as a fit of madness and, with the help of the President of the Republic they’re giving themselves a second chance. The Presidential palace is known in Italy as “Il colle” (The Hill), and Prodi, like a Moses descending from the Mount Sinai, has returned from that hill with a twelve point programme, a kind of “twelve commandments” that his heterogeneous coalition will have to respect from now own. Will this be enough to survive next week’s confidence vote? Yes, if he gets the support of Follini’s breakaway Catholics and the life Senators. Of course, this will come at a price; namely, the withdrawal of the law regulating the unmarried couples and, well, the law suppressing life Senators… It’s somewhat ironic, since the current Senate majority is some sort of an unmarried couple, unwilling either to part or to make a serious commitment. Meanwhile, Berlusconi keeps smiling. It was his own electoral law, tailored to deliver a solid majority in Parliament for himself, what, after a mistake made his spin-doctors, gave it to Prodi. It gave him an unworkable Senate too, though. The paradox is that if Prodi changes the electoral law for a better one, as he intends, he will be benefiting Berlusconi in his turn, in case of early elections. And there will be early elections, sooner of later. Italy, a country which has seen more than sixty governments since 1945, Machiavelli’s home country, is a country accustomed to political crises as a form of political stability in its own right.
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