Italy’s New Premier Wins Parliament OK

A week after his appointment, Prime Minister Giuliano Amato won a legislative mandate Friday night to head Italy’s 58th postwar government and try to keep the country’s bickering centrist and leftist forces in power until scheduled elections next spring.

But even as Amato was given a 319-298 vote of confidence in Parliament’s lower house, it was clear that the winner of Italy’s latest political turmoil was Silvio Berlusconi, the flamboyant media tycoon and former prime minister who is leading a conservative comeback.

Friday’s vote averted the collapse of what has been one of Italy’s most discordant but successful ruling coalitions in the past half a century--one that led the country into Europe’s currency union and played a key role in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization’s air war against Yugoslavia.

Berlusconi vowed, however, to keep agitating for early elections that he is confident of winning.

“The day isn’t far away when the citizens, with the vote you fear so much, will take back the power to decide, which you have held hostage for so long,” he declared in the Chamber of Deputies.

Amato’s eight-party coalition--former Communists, Socialists, Greens, Christian Democrats and other centrists--is expected to gain its full mandate next week with a confidence vote in the Senate.

Whether the 61-year-old Socialist-turned-independent can stem Italy’s rising conservative tide is another question--and not only for his 57 million compatriots. All but three of the European Union’s 15 member states are run by coalitions that include Socialists and former Communists, and many are watching Italy as a testing ground for issues that matter across the Continent.

Italy’s center-left coalition came to power with the 1996 election of Prime Minister Romano Prodi. In October 1998, after Communists withdrew their support, he was ousted by a coalition partner, Massimo D’Alema, who became the first former Communist to lead a Western European government.

While voters applauded Italy’s qualification for Europe’s common currency, the euro, they still chafe under the cost--high taxes and spending cuts that drain funds from public schools and hospitals. And by European standards, Italy’s recent growth has been low, its unemployment high.

Although they failed to cut the high costs of pensions and welfare payments, Prodi and D’Alema alienated powerful unions for trying. Many Italians believe that the government is too lax in handling Balkan and North African immigrants, and many link rising immigration with rising crime.

Berlusconi, a slick, jovial 63-year-old billionaire whose Forza Italia party is named for a soccer cheer, tapped this discontent in 10 days of campaigning up and down the coast on a freshly painted luxury liner before the April 16 regional elections. Promising less-intrusive government, he turned the elections into a referendum on his supply-side philosophy that lower taxes equal faster growth.

The results humiliated D’Alema, who had predicted gains for the center-left, and prompted him to resign. Berlusconi and his Freedom Alliance coalition won in eight of the 15 contested regions, including four previously controlled by the center-left.

“The vote shows that Italians now take the euro for granted and are much more focused on ensuring the competitiveness of the country,” said Franco Pavoncello, a political scientist at John Cabot University in Rome. “They feel that a left tied to the unions is less appealing than a right that’s in favor of the free market.”

Such a formula helped center-right Prime Minister Jose Maria Aznar win big in Spain’s elections last month. But Berlusconi’s coalition partners--the right-wing Gianfranco Fini and the erstwhile separatist Umberto Bossi--have much in common with Joerg Haider’s xenophobic party that rose to power this year as part of Austria’s ruling coalition. Fini and Bossi back tough curbs on immigration.

Berlusconi’s appeal may have less to do with issues than with his knack for turning campaigns into entertainment. But his foes acknowledge that Forza Italia is a far stronger party today than the one that propelled him to the prime minister’s job for less than a year in 1994.

“In 1994, we thought it was a plastic party, a marketing concept, nothing more than a commercial enterprise,” commentator Ezio Mauro wrote in the left-leaning newspaper La Repubblica. “Today it is a party of iron, with roots in the cities and the coasts, united in the cult of the leader and the ideology of television.”

The politician’s ownership of Italy’s three largest private television stations--along with the AC Milan soccer team--does not seem to trouble most Italian voters; nor does the fact that he has been convicted of taking illegal campaign contributions and bribing tax inspectors. Many Italians, not just his supporters, believe that he is the victim of politically motivated left-wing magistrates.