And they're back

Collapsing Italian government are back. Reuters reports that

Italian Prime Minister Enrico Letta will call a confidence vote in parliament after a showdown with center-right partners in his fragile coalition scuppered a vital package of budget measures on Friday and took his government to the brink of collapse.

Letta flew back from a visit to New York with coalition unity already in tatters after a threat by center-right lawmakers to walk out over former premier Silvio Berlusconi's battle against a conviction for tax fraud.

"Efficient government action is obviously incompatible with the mass resignation of a parliamentary group which should support the government," Letta said in a statement after a cabinet meeting on Friday.

"Either there is a new start and the interests of the country and its citizens are put first or this experience is at an end," he said.

Regional Affairs Minister Graziano Delrio said Letta, who met President Giorgio Napolitano on Friday, would go before parliament in the next few days to seek backing to continue.

Let's face it, collapsing Italian governments and brinkmanship in politics are all part of those European values we keep hearing about.

The daughter also rises

It is possible that Silvio Berlusconi's political career is actually finished though I would not put any money on that. However, there is speculation that his daughter

Marina Berlusconi will be her father’s heir to the throne of the People of Freedom (PDL) and will re-launch the party under its original name, the Forza Italia (Go Italy). PDL is affiliated with the centre-right European People’s Party in the European Parliament.

Well, at least, there will be no question of teenage prostitutes. We hope.

We have a new Italian Prime Minister

Some readers of this blog may have missed the earth-shakingly important news from Italy: President Giorgio Napolitano has asked Enrico Letta to form a new government that would be a broad coalition (as opposed to a narrow one, I suppose).

Mr Letta is forty-six, which makes him rather young by Italian political standards and he is currently the Deputy-Leader of the centre-Left Democratic Party; his aim is to change the course in Europe on austerity though it is unclear to what. Economic growth, perchance? Just kidding.

Mr Letta must now form a cabinet that can win cross-party support and a vote of confidence in parliament, possibly this weekend.

Factions from across the political spectrum, including former Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi's right-wing People of Freedom Party, have indicated that they are now ready to form a coalition under a figure like Mr Letta.

However, Mr Berlusconi's party and the Democratic Party differ on a number of issues.

Party National Secretary Angelino Alfano warned that his group would not take part in a government unconditionally.

Mr Letta's uncle has been Mr Berlusconi's chief-of-staff for 10 years. A broad political alliance would again make Mr Berlusconi a major influence.

The Wall Street Journal says:

Mr. Letta—who at 46 would be one of Europe's youngest leaders—stressed that Italy's new government needed to focus on the country's economic woes. The country has been enduring its most prolonged recession since World War II, and the unemployment rate hit an all-time high of 11.7% in January of this year.

He also said that Italy quickly needed a new electoral law that would avoid a repeat of the political stalemate that has left the country without a government since elections on Feb. 24 and 25.

"I feel a huge sense of responsibility upon me," Mr. Letta said. "The situation is very difficult."

If the new government is voted in, as expected, it is nonetheless unclear how long it can last. Italy's political scene is as fractured as ever, and the country isn't used to grand right-left coalition governments like elsewhere in Europe.

One can but wish him luck and point out yet again that none of this would be more than of passing interest if it were not true that whoever heads the Italian government is also a member of our own real government.

Comedian does well in Italy

No, not Berlusconi, whose party did not do as well as they had expected, but the real comedian, Beppo Grillo, whose party, " the Five-Star Movement emerged as the largest single party in the lower house, with over 25% of support, and the second-largest party in the Senate, where he won 23.8% of votes". This comes from the analysis by Open Europe, who lament the fact that the results of the election are likely to cause yet more turmoil in the eurozone. They also suggest various scenarios as to where Italian politics and politicians might go next but, I think, we can assume that they will find yet another way forward or sideways.

Most Italians, according to all analysts, remain pro-EU and even those who voted for the Five-Star Movement are unlikely to want to exit even from the euro. At the same time 57 per cent voted against austerity measures, which they perceived as German-inspired and orchestrated. No doubt, there were references to the evil war criminals just as there always are in Greece.

So, an election once there is a new President, whose term is to expire in May and who, therefore, cannot dissolve parliament in the forthcoming months or, perhaps, a coalition between two or more comedians?

Italian election

1.30 am According to the Financial Times, Italy is in for a troubled period and probably a second election very soon.

Italy was on Monday night staring at a period of prolonged political instability following a general election in which voters delivered a resounding rebuff to austerity policies with little hope of any party mustering a governing majority.

The upstart anti-establishment Five Star Movement, founded only three years ago by the comedian-blogger Beppe Grillo, was on course to stage the biggest shock by garnering the largest number of votes of any single party. With all but 2 per cent of polling stations reporting, the grassroots movement was leading on 25.5 per cent, a few thousand votes ahead of the centre-left Democrat party.

But the nation was torn three ways between Mr Grillo and his band of political novices, Pier Luigi Bersani’s centre-left coalition and Silvio Berlusconi’s centre-right alliance, raising the prospect of a second election within months.

None of this would matter if whoever gets elected would not be part of our real government as well.

Going on as we speak or as I write this. The Grauniad is updating, should anyone be interested enough to care. Looks like Berlusconi might be back. Personally, I would prefer a real comedian like Grillo.

UPDATE: Der Spiegel thinks that the Centre Left under Pier Luigi Bersani may have won a majority in the Lower House but not in the Senate. A gridlock, in other words, like most streets in Rome.

What has been happening?

One or two things seem to have happened while I was off-line. Firstly, of course, there is the story of the appointed Prime Minister of Italy, Mario Monti, deciding to go earlier and pave the way to Italian politics as usual. It would appear that Silvio Berlusconi, whose understanding of economics does not extend beyond the lining of his own pockets, has already started ranting about the "Germano-centric" Monti and his austerity measures. Having been found guilty of various malfeasance, obviously, does not prevent a man from standing in elections or, possibly, even winning and becoming Prime Minister again, though I do rather like the idea of Berlusconi losing votes to the professional comedian Beppe Grillo. Let us not forget that whoever wins this election becomes a member of the UK's real government.

Moving on to the UN, the fount of all tranzi thinking and organization we find a press release from UN Watch, an admirable organization that persists in the righteous fight. Yesterday, let me remind people, was International Human Rights Day as it was the anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (stop laughing at the back), adopted on December 10, 1948.

The UN has its own way of celebrating such matters. This year they did so by electing Mauritania, "a country that allows 800,000 of its citizens to live as slaves", to be Vice-President of the Human Rights Council. Poland was elected as President with Maldives, Switzerland and Ecuador (a country of shabby human rights record) also becoming Vice Presidents. It could have been worse, I suppose. They could have elected Syria to be President. As it was pointed out to me just a few hours ago, you cannot spell unethical without UN.

To end this rambling posting, I can report another argument I had with a well-meaning journalist who cannot quite get his head round the idea that some people do really think that the world would be a better place without the EU. When he reported that in Slovakia "extremists", undoubtedly rather a nasty bunch, are getting more sophisticated, I made a sarcastic comment about EU membership working so well. Was this not the main argument used against those of us who said it would not be a good idea for the East Europeans to join the EU and we should stop pressurizing them but sign free trade agreements, that within the EU their nasty old habits would die? It would seem that the extremists are utilizing people's frustration with the system and political activities. A success, undoubtedly. My journalist friend professed  himself to be baffled. Did I mean that I did not think that the 10 East European countries should have joined?

Slovakia is not alone to prove those predictions wrong. Right wing extremism (yes, I know that Nazism was not right-wing but that is how Der Spiegel, inevitably, refers to it and its successor ideologies) is becoming more widespread in Germany, especially and unsurprisingly, in the East, where they had not had years of denazification.

All a huge success.

Not sure this is going to help anyone

On the one hand, the news of two days ago (yes, yes, sorry but life keep interfering with my blogging) of "six scientists and a government official [being]sentenced to six years in prison for manslaughter by an Italian court on Monday for failing to give adequate warning of an earthquake that killed more than 300 people in L'Aquila in 2009" sounds like an excellent precedent for many other events.

Can we gaol the people who get the various financial predictions wrong? Of course, the hacks in the media would be the first to go in that case.

Or the people who predict wrongly the outcome of various EU negotiations? Can we gaol them?

Naturally, all those scientists who have been threatening us with huge destructive heat waves if we did not stop all our activity at once and crawl back into caves should get hefty sentences. After all, did they actually predict the recent fairly harsh winters? Did those who went on and on about the British drought predict the floods we have actually been experiencing? I think not.

Unfortunately, a little bit of thinking makes one realize that this is not such a good idea after all. Undoubtedly, the immediate result will be scientists not giving any opinions or advice at all, in case they get it wrong and end up in gaol. As for the long-term problem: I note that there is only one official in the group and six scientists. To what extent was the problem caused by officials not doing their job and how is not prosecuting them going to prevent future tragedies of this kind?

News from Italy

Not only is 2012 a year of important elections (with some results, like the Russian presidential one, entirely predictable) but May will see a number of them. May 6 will be the date of the Greek election, which is likely to result, I am told by one friend and blog reader, in the old coalition cobbling together another government of not dissimilar kind; it will also be the day on which the French President will be chosen; and in Italy there will be local elections, also on May 6 and 7, in which around 11 million voters, or a quarter of the whole, will be expressing their opinions on what has been going on.

The Centre for Policy Studies has an interesting blog post up on the subject, the first of quarterly updates on Italian poliitics by the Centro Einaudi. Little of it is unexpected even to those who have followed events from a distance but it is always good to read analyses from insiders. Here is a brief account of Mario Monti's government, its initial popularity, which might come as a surprise to some rather hysterical eurosceptics, and the gradual loss of that popularity as some very necessary reforms were enacted.

The new government’s first decision was to enact a bill on pension reform, which was immediately passed by the Chambers. As a result, the Italian pension system, one of the biggest drains on public finance, was put under control, providing automatic adjustment not only to economic growth (and, by the same token, to fiscal revenues) but also to population ageing. However, with the pension reform came a swathe of new taxes on property and income, and a VAT rise.

In the weeks that followed, the tensions on the financial markets eased, while the opinion polls suggested that Mr. Monti enjoyed wide support. Buoyed by this, the Cabinet then started to implement the recommendations to the Italian government specified by the ECB in August 2011 and reinforced by the EU Commission President, Olli Rehn, in November 2011: these required not only the reform of the pension system but also a number of measures of privatisation and liberalisation, particularly of the labour market.

It was then that the honeymoon between the government and its multi-coloured majority ended: while the centre-right objected to measures directed at liberalizing professions (such as notaries, lawyers, chemists, taxi-drivers, etc.), the centre-left found it almost impossible to accept an easing of the hire-and-fire rules on the labour market, strongly opposed by the leftist CGIL union. The result was a much watered-down ‘liberalisation’ law and an impasse on the labour-reform bill.

In the meantime, Mr. Monti tried to soften the German stance on fiscal rigour and the introduction of Eurobonds: but these attempts, which for a few weeks at the turn of the year had looked almost successful, appeared at last to have failed. The tensions on the financial markets rose again, with the spread on the Italian public debt climbing up and the Italian stock exchange losing all the gains it had accumulated in the first weeks of the year.

It is particularly interesting to note that the centre-right objected to the liberalization of professions and the centre-left to the liberalization of the labour market - a neat summary of the difference between the two in Italy (and a number of other Continental countries) or, in other words, no difference at all.

Only Theresa May remains

Even Berlusconi has finally departed. Mind you, I don't think this is for good. I simply cannot believe that someone like that can be kept down for very long. And on the other side of the Pond we have the comeback kid, Newt Gingrich, once again being talked of seriously as a contender. Undoubtedly, the Obama machine will go into overdrive on Gingrich's private life, telling lies if necessary, but when it comes to real debates, there is no beating Newt. Suddenly the presidential election is beginning to look even more interesting.

So where are we on those resignations?

Talks to form a unity government in Greece have collapsed and there ain't no Sanity Clause either.

In a day that was bizarre and chaotic even by Greek political standards, Papandreou wished his successor well and headed off to meet the president -- only for it to emerge that there was no successor due to feuding in the political parties.

Earlier, party sources said senior members of the socialist and conservative camps had settled on the speaker of parliament, veteran socialist Filippos Petsalnikos, barring last-minute snags.

But snags did indeed emerge, with large sections of Papandreou's PASOK party and the conservative New Democracy refusing to back Petsalnikos after a three-day hunt for someone to lead the coalition until early elections in February.

So who is the Greek Prime Minister? Do we even care? It appears that talks will start again tomorrow.

Meanwhile, we are assured that the eurozone has not plans to rescue Italy, which was never on the cards anyway. Whether Italy is too big to fail or not is a moot point but it is certainly too big to rescue.

French and German officials are discussing a smaller eurozone. It is not immediately clear whom they will shed but they might start with France. Of course, a smaller eurozone is as good as no eurozone, given that this was a political project from the very beginning, aimed at a fiscal and economic unification of however many countries there might be in the EU at any given time. That project has, to all intents and purposes, been abandoned.

The Italians hope to avoid the Greek political mess and a possible successor to Silvio Berlusconi when he finally goes has been mooted. Then again, it looked like the Papandreou succession was all stitched up as well, yet here we are.

Theresa May is definitely not resigning. Not today, anyway.

Just checking

Berlusconi is still promising to step down but that, apparently, is not going to save Italy and her economy.

Italy's borrowing cost has soared to a record high, despite Silvio Berlusconi's promise to step down as prime minister.

Mr Berlusconi had said he wanted to show global markets that the country was "serious" about sorting out its finances.

But on Wednesday morning, Italy's 10-year government bond yield - the rate the country pays in interest to borrow money - rose above 7% for the first time since entering the euro.

Italian President Giorgio Napolitano called for an immediate commitment to economic reforms to restore confidence in panicked financial markets.

Bond yields of more than 5% are considered unsustainable in the long term as governments cannot afford to pay that much over a long period.

Would it have been different if the man had paid any attention to his job and/or stepped down earlier? Quite possibly.

The Boy-King has come out fighting (well, sort of) for the beleaguered (I believe that is the correct expression) Theresa May. Her position thus becomes unassailable. Let me say that again, unassailable.

Hereditary Prime Minister Papandreou is all set to resign and this time he will really, really, do it. Well, he has to; after all, he told Sarko. In the fullness of time he will tell the people of Greece as well.

What with all this going on plus the IAEA officially announcing that Iran is becoming something of a problem, it is not surprising that the students' march for more money to be handed out against those terrible cuts in education has somehow disappeared from people's consciousness. Bad luck chaps and chapesses. And just a hint: try not to display Socialist Worker placards quite so prominently.

Are they going? Not on your life

Berlusconi "vows to resign". What on earth does that mean? The man has lost the vote, has lost his majority. Just go already. Nope, the BBC doesn't say he has resigned either just that " has confirmed he intends to resign after key economic reforms have been approved". Goodness me, I remember a time when Italian prime ministers went down like ninepins and there was none of this vowing around the place.

According to Reuters, he will resign after a new budget law is approved in parliament.

No, Papandreou hasn't gone either.

Greek political leaders failed to wrap up coalition talks as planned on Tuesday night, raising fears the deal could start to unravel after two missed deadlines.
The country’s president had been set to appoint a new cross-party government headed by Lucas Papademos, a former vice-president of the European Central Bank who previously served as Greece’s own central bank governor.

George Papandreou, the outgoing prime minister, was supposed to announce his resignation at the same time, according to an official from his PanHellenic Socialist Movement.

“There’s radio silence from our side, let’s see what happens in the morning,” said a senior socialist. The government spokesman could not be reached for comment.

An official from the conservative New Democracy party said:”Contacts seem to be over for today.” He added that there were “no indications” that Mr Papademos had pulled out of the discussions.

OK, I'll say it again: just go already.

That leaves Theresa May who has managed to pass the blame for her incompetence on to the head of the UK border force. He has resigned but in a Parthian shot has accused Ms May of misleading Parliament. As if she would. So the heat is on. Theresa May has already announced that she will not resign but we have not had a public pronouncement of support from the Boy-King. When that happens we shall know that her days are numbered.

Not nobody is going to resign

Theresa May is not resigning. Berlusconi is being urged by his "key ally", Umberto Bossi of the Northern League, to resign but is singing the Italian equivalent of "la-la-la-la, can't hear you". Greece is still "inching towards a deal" while

an emergency cabinet meeting -- the last likely to be held by the present government -- was postponed owing to a meeting between outgoing Prime Minister George Papandreou and Finance Minister Evangelos Venizelos, state television channel NET said.

That means that Papandreou has not resigned either.

As you were.

Karlo rather than Groucho Marx for once

Of course, many of us recall what Karl Marx said at the beginning of The Eighteenth of Brumaire of Louis Napoleon (I must admit to finding it quite useful when I was doing history O level): History repeats itself, first as tragedy, then as farce.

Actually, that is a meaningless statement for if the first event, the tragedy, is history repeating itself, then there must have been an even earlier one. In his view Napoleon I was the tragedy and Napoleon III, the farce. But what came before that?

However, there is no getting away from the fact that all historical parallels one can draw for present events in Greece and Italy show the situation up as farce. For the time being, anyway.

Berlusconi, too, is hanging on

As Al-Jazeera says,

Silvio Berlusconi, Italy's prime minister, has rejected reports that he is on the brink of resigning from office on the eve of a crucial vote that could anyway bring down his government and effectively end the media tycoon's turbulent political career.

In a comment posted on his Facebook page on Monday, Berlusconi said rumours reported in the Italian media that he was close to quitting were "baseless".

Two journalists close to Berlusconi earlier said they believed he would resign within hours, with his centre-right coalition on the brink of collapse ahead of a crucial public finance vote on Tuesday.

Hah! Much those journalists knew. I reckon we can say a domani. In the meantime (I keep saying that, but the whole crisis has been a long sequence of "in the meantimes") here is a reasonably good analysis of the Italian situation in the Economist.

Meanwhile, in another Mediterranean country ...

... a crunch vote on public finance is awaited in Italy.

The euro fell on Monday as markets eyed a crunch vote on Italy's public finances amid concerns the euro zone debt crisis could engulf the country, while the Swiss
franc was pressured by speculation of further policy action to curb its strength.

The Swiss franc tumbled against the euro and the dollar after Swiss National Bank chairman Phillip Hildebrand suggested the franc was still overvalued against the
single currency.

The Swiss ought to be pleased.

Reuters reports rumours of a forthcoming Berlusconi resignation. Hmm. Maybe.

Sure enough, Berlusconi has denied rumours. Such matters as "the main Italian index, the FTSE MIB, recover[ing]earlier losses after reports emerged that Mr Berlusconi may resign" are of little interest to dear old Silvio.

One more day of Greece

There are other things to write about and I shall do so very very soon but there is one more day of the Greek farce to get through before life returns to normal.

14.45 Result of confidence vote expected late this evening, possibly around 10 pm our time. It is timed to avoid any reaction in the markets though I don't think the US ones will be closed yet. Certainly the European ones will be for the week-end. The vote looks like being close though it appears that a number of PASOK MPs may go back to supporting Papandreou now that the notion of the referendum has been abandoned.

Reuters adds that

But the future of the 130 billion euro deal remained hostage to wrangling among Greek politicians, much to the disgust of voters living through dire economic times.

One thing we can say for certain: whichever way the vote goes, the problems will not be solved and the crisis will be postponed rather than averted.

12. 20 Prime Minister George Papandreou (a hereditary prime minister) is facing that long-heralded vote of confidence and, according to Sky, is ready to resign if MPs back him tonight. Now there's an offer of a bribe that is hard to resist. If they vote against him, on the other hand,

Greece could be plunged into further uncertainty and a snap election.

That may mean it would not be in a position to receive the next slice of bailout funds it desperately needs to avoid defaulting on its loans.

He is clearly using the carrot and stick approach.

>Meanwhile, as it has been pointed out, Finance Minister Evangelos Venizelos is becoming a serious contender.

EUObserver reports that the austerity measures are beginning to have a very harmful effect on the most vulnerable in Greece.

It is unheard of for aid groups such as Medecins Sans Frontieres or Medicins du Monde to have to take over the role of providing basic medical services from normal state or private providers in a Western country.

But in the era of ever-tightening EU-IMF austerity, that is what is happening in Greece now, as the unemployed and HIV patients begin to turn up at temporary clinics that had been intended to come to the aid of migrants and refugees.

According to Apostolos Veizis, the head of programmes for MSF Greece, this is the new reality that the country is waking up to.

The trouble with the story is that it seems to be based on an interview or discussion with Apostolos Veizis, the head of programmes for MSF Greece, who is an interested party in this. I should like to see some accounts of what is happening from people who are not in the business of raising money for their own organizations or providing support for the view that Greece should not be asked to introduce any austerity measures or even reforms.

In the meantime, let us not forget Italy, probable scene of the next crisis that is likely to be big enough to engulf the whole of the eurozone and, probably, the EU. According to Reuters, whose coverage yesterday was the most reliable, as it turned out

Italy, under fierce pressure from financial markets and European peers, agreed to have the IMF monitor its progress with long delayed reforms of pensions, labor markets and privatization, senior EU sources said on Friday.

Riots in Italy? Berlusconi talks of a referendum then decides not to go ahead? Election in Italy? More riots? Just speculating.

Sauve qui peut

The Centre for European Reform, which used to be a perestroika europhiliac think-tank but has dropped the perestroika bit or passed it on to Open Europe has published a short paper about the forthcoming European Council in June.

Time was there were only two European Councils a year, one at the end of each six-monthly presidency. Then, in the late nineties, they started having the odd emergency Council half-way between the regular ones. It did not take a genius to work out that those emergency Councils would become regular ones and we shall end up with four jollies a year instead of two. It's not their money, after all.

According to Hugo Brady author of the paper that predicts what will happen in June, the biggest, most overwhelming problem will be immigration, with thousands, though not that many thousands apparently pouring into Italy from Tunisia and Libya (and who knows from where else by then.

This could easily become a bad tempered, inconclusive affair. First, the summit is supposed to take a broad strategic view of EU immigration and asylum policies. But instability in North Africa will inevitably skew discussion towards the present. Italy is adamant that it needs help to manage what it calls a "human tsunami" from Tunisia and Libya. Demands for greater "solidarity" from fellow EU countries essentially mean their agreement to take in some of the 20,000 or so migrants currently housed in tent camps on the islands of Lampedusa and Sicily and in the mainland region of Puglia. The EU has committed money, a humanitarian mission and border guards from Frontex, its border agency. Nonetheless, the Italians feel entitled to more. The EU-supported rebellion against Muammar Gaddafi's regime and the Tunisian uprising against President Ben Ali have left its realist immigration policy, heavily reliant on the two dictators, in tatters.

More in tatters than Mr Brody appears to realize. In response to the crisis shaping up around refugees in Italy, France has abandoned Schengen and resurrected its border with that country.

The crackdown is sowing tensions between the two neighboring countries. "There's a hostile attitude coming from Paris," Italian Interior Minister Roberto Maroni told the Italian Senate on Thursday.

French Interior Minister Claude Guéant lashed back, saying France "is completely within its rights to send these people back to Italy."

The dispute ultimately stems from the European Union's failure to forge a common policy for dealing with migrants, ranging from political refugees to undocumented job seekers who enter the EU from countries along its periphery but are determined to settle in richer economies to the north.

Another day, another crisis and another crack in that famous European solidarity.