Baloney Beats a Meatball

...The assumption (wild, in retrospect) was that most Italians overseas were still churchgoing cobblers in Queens and bus drivers in Buenos Aires...

...Bertinotti's followers say no, Diliberto's say yes...

...In a group photo from a summit in 2002, he can be seen making the two-finger cuckold sign over the head of Spanish foreign minister Josep Pique...

...Polls before the election consistently found him far behind, sometimes in double digits, but never closer than 5 points...

...second, a loving catalogue of favorite Islamic punishments...

...There is a mob on "the right" and a mob on "the left," and, as the political scientist Luca Ricolfi has shown, only about 3 percent of them ever switch camps...

...The Italian political system (much like the American one since Watergate) had grown dangerously complacent about using judicial proceedings to overturn democratic verdicts...

...The absence of immigration from the campaign may be a tribute to the way the last two governments—Berlusconi's and that of the post-Communist Massimo D'Alema —have handled the issue, through a rising but relatively orderly set of laws imposing quotas...

...This would indicate that the climate of public opinion, far from turning support for Berlusconi into a civic duty, had turned it into an embarrassment...

...It is true that Berlusconi squandered much of his political capital on keeping himself out of prison, and warped the legislative system to do so, stacking the Chamber of Deputies and the Senate with his personal lawyers...

...In certain ways, Italy is going through the same immigration pains that its neighbors have experienced...

...His heart was set on tax cuts—he notoriously claimed to "understand" those who evaded taxation, and he passed amnesties to permit tax-sheltered money back into the country—but these cuts were minimal, due to pressure from his coalition partners...

...Berlusconi explained that the Italian people would never be so stupid (he used an Italian obscenity for the word "stupid") as to vote against their own interests...

...Many others didn't like it, since, as Lord Acton might say, a judiciary that is fully "indepen-dent"—subject to no political control—can be as absolutely corrupt as any other possessor of absolute power...

...The DS leader Massimo D'Alema mentioned him, and admiring books on the Spanish leader filled the bookstores...

...One local expressed his approval to the Corriere della Sera, saying, "I'm not against all of them, but maybe it's about time to start organizing some roundups...

...His unprecedented choice of a political opponent, the leftist journalist Lucia Annunziata, to head public broadcasting won him little credit...

...In March, a 19-year-old Tunisian immigrant from the town of Serramaz-zoni (22 percent immigrant) was arrested for a knife murder in Pavullo nel Frignano, near Modena, generally a left-wing part of the country...

...Most come from North Africa, the Muslim Balkans, and Romania...

...He is a defender of the old-fashioned welfare state at a time when most European parties of the left are abandoning it...

...Prodi is anti-American and anti-British...

...But Berlusconi, the "showman," was actually running on an economic program that, although thwarted, did not differ in kind from those of other statesmen of the European center...

...The Margherita party, Prodi's center of power, is one half of Italy's old Christian Democrats...

...countries for 13 of the last 15 years...

...He is probably the most brilliant businessman Italy produced in the second half of the 20th century...

...Even more interesting are the intellectuals who are beginning to discuss whether Catholics and non-religious people can unite to defend Western identity (or maybe just to figure out what it is...

...This abolition certainly sheltered him from the judges, but the right to reopen an acquittal (what we call double jeopardy) would be considered an outrage in most free countries...

...Prodi announced that Italy needed a return to serietà, or seriousness, while painting Berlusconi as a simple mind, out of his depth...

...Berlusconi's interior minister tried to set up a Muslim council that could advise and negotiate with the government on behalf of the religious community...

...Rather, he lost on one stupid mistake...

...He promised five reforms in his Contract with the Italians: cut crime, lower taxes, increase pensions, embark on a huge program of public works, create jobs...

...And you could see his point...

...He is necessary because he is willing to play the role of fig leaf for leftists...

...To ask an impertinent question, is zero percent growth in Italy all that bad...

...The rate of conversion to Islam is extremely high in Italy, and includes a number of former ambassadors to Arab countries and radical political figures...

...One Christian Democrat in the Berlusconi government provoked a European diplomatic incident when he opined that "Nazi laws and Hitler's ideas are being reborn in the Netherlands with [the Dutch policy of] euthanasia...

...Maybe Berlusconi had climbed too far in his personal life to take Italy's problems terribly seriously...

...He had done most of these, had even given Italy a more flexible labor market, and had raised the retirement age...

...Right now, the leaders of the group are mostly secular, although Pope Benedict XVI converges with their thinking more than did John Paul II, who was more focused on interreligious dialogue...

...It is not easy to see, though, what Berlusconi could have done to arrest this economic decline...

...More likely, they are sociology professors in Berkeley or sous-chefs in Greenwich Village...

...Italians find themselves with a government far, far to the left of the one even its supporters voted for...

...Italy's public broadcasting (RAI) does not work like the BBC, with a journalistic culture that seeks reflexively to prove its "objectivity" by rallying viewers against the state...

...With help from political allies, he parlayed a real estate-development firm into a media, advertising, and investment empire...

...The narrative that emerged in Italy's major daily newspapers was that, while the left sought to govern responsibly, Berlusconi sought only to bamboozle viewers with the television-age equivalent of bread and circuses...

...The European Union, whose constitutional and regulatory agenda Prodi hopes to make his own, may be vivid in Prodi's mind...

...Yet Prodi is desperately necessary to his coalition...

...He is, without question, a greater embarrassment to his country's social and intellectual elites than any present-day national leader—including George W. Bush...

...The only alternative model that presents itself is that of Spanish leader José Luis Rodriguez Zapatero, who was, for the Italian left, the patron saint of the election...

...Flyers calling for mass deportations were distributed almost immediately...

...I thought you said Iraq...

...But once Berlusconi got to pick the staff of the three RAI channels on top of his three private ones, things looked different...

...What is interesting about the coming Prodi administration is that there is nothing in its election manifesto that can serve as a basis for government...

...If Zapa-tero proves the model, the likely result will be a combination of "neutralism" (meaning abandonment of the war on terror and, most certainly, of the war in Iraq) and a series of rushed-through rights-oriented changes in domestic policy...

...Berlusconi, though, was not without evidence that he was the target of undemocratic "red magistrates...

...Although directly descended from the former Italian Communist party (PCI), the DS is always described as part of the center-left...

...But Benedict XVI had termed this "the legislation of evil...

...Draghi, a former vice chairman of Goldman Sachs, is one of the best free market economists in Italy, and the picture he painted was one of disaster...

...Correntone followers will happily work with the two unrepentant, hard-line Communist parties in the Prodi coalition...

...To the government's consternation, though, the body has come to be dominated by a Muslim Brotherhood-linked group called Ucoii, short for the Union of Italian Islamic Communities and Organizations...

...The problem for Prodi was that much of his coalition was agitating strongly for gay marriage, and Refoundation was even running a drag queen named Vladimir Luxuria on its list...

...Italy wound up in a situation similar to that of America late in the Clinton years...

...His most recent judicial-reform project, for instance, was to abolish prosecutors' right to appeal acquittals...

...Another carries on a running debate in the eight-page daily broadsheet Il Foglio, owned by Berlusconi's wife, edited by a Russo-phone ex-Communist intellectual, and probably the most sophisticated (certainly the drollest) newspaper in Europe...

...He had come to power in the first place because he was not mixed up in the old system of kick-backs—at least not as a politician...

...They gave Prodi four of the five senate seats they were allowed to vote on and account for all of his two-seat margin...

...The election was a virtual tie...

...The network of small businesses that thrived in the 1990s is finding it hard to compete in the global economy...

...Five years in office made him Italy's longest-serving prime minister since the aftermath of World War II...

...The misnamed theocons are where most of the action is in Italian intellectual life, but they have been roundly calumniated in much of the press, and even by members of the Berlusconi government, including the interior minister Giuseppe Pisanu...

...After going on for half a minute he caught himself and asked: "What country did you say...

...In the end, Berlusconi was almost right...

...The electoral system (again, like America's) became polarized around judicial battles...

...The argument that Berlusconi was running a kind of personal propaganda machine was quite plausible...

...At the same time, he promised to cut the cost of Italian labor...

...Baloney Beats a Meatball It took an unsavory coalition for Romano Prodi to squeeze past Silvio Berlusconi BY CHRISTOPHER CALDWELL Rome Shortly before their elections, Italians discovered that three-quarters of the women who perform on phone-sex lines were planning to vote for the incumbent prime minister, Silvio Berlusconi...

...It has underperformed other E.U...

...Meanwhile, the left-leaning cognoscenti who were so keen to unload Berlusconi have a new problem...

...They are Communist Refoundation, led by the eloquent and gentlemanly Fausto Bertinotti...

...A party called Rosa nel Pugno ("Rose in the Fist"), led by a charismatic free market politician named Emma Bonino, has always been pro-American and pro-free market...

...This is understandable, given his need to reconcile Communists and free-marketers, but it reduced the left's platform to incoherence...

...On Saturday, March 11, thousands of antiglobalists poured into the streets of Milan to block a scheduled march by a tiny fascist group...

...Towards the end of the election, a Turkish group pamphleted every household in one part of Emilia with a bizarre document called "An Exhortation to the Right Way and True Salvation," which was broken into three parts—first, ridicule of the Christian trinity...

...Half the public laments that Berlusconi spent most of his five-year term getting himself out of trouble—but the fact is, he is in trouble, and it is his political opponents who have put him there...

...Berlusconi, unlike Perot, got elected...

...Berlusconi proved a steady ally to the United States (sending a large contingent to Iraq) and an equally steady disappointment when it came to reforming the system...

...Under this pretext, they smashed shops and burned cars up and down the city's main avenue...

...You can see this in the popularity of Ori-ana Fallaci's books, but also in the way, when a crime occurs, Italians will say things like, "Sarà stato un maro-quino" ("It was probably a Moroccan...

...It was more chic, it was more cool, to support the left...

...It was Bertinotti's defection from an earlier left-wing coalition that led to the collapse of Prodi's premiership a decade ago...

...Both are chic and growing...

...Debt is higher than GDP...

...It was noted that three-quarters of those who watched more than four hours of TV a day voted for Berlusconi in 2001...

...And that was perhaps the strangest aspect of the elections...

...He could rule according to the wishes of his leftmost coalition partners—already the powerful CGIL union is clamoring for a scrapping of virtually all recent economic reforms— but it is unlikely the centrist parties in his coalition will consent to that...

...For Berlusconi, this was a double-edged sword...

...This means that roughly a third of Prodi's ruling coalition will consist of hard-line smash-it-with-a-lead-pipe-and-light-it-on-fire Communists and antiglobalists...

...Ucoii calls for an Islamic bank with special lending practices, Islamic schools, religious hour, halal food in public institutions, and Muslim holy days off, and it denies Israel's right to exist...

...But Prodi promised to undo them...

...The second pillar of the case against Berlusconi was that he was subverting the independence of the judiciary...

...Berlusconi lost to Prodi by a few thousand votes...

...and the Italian Communists, led by Oliviero Diliberto...

...To take one example, the devout Catholic Prodi lost no opportunity to declare his common values with the Catholic middle class...

...The source of this information was Berlusconi himself—who admitted to making frequent use of such lines in the campaign's closing days...

...The parties are distinguished primarily by their willingness to burn American flags at rallies for Hezbollah and Hamas...

...Berlusconi in the end was rejected by a far narrower percentage than any pundit had predicted, and not for any of the reasons pundits had said he ought to be...

...But Rosa and the Margherita cannot compete with the left of the coalition in any way—in votes, passion, or intellectual energy...

...Prodi had tried to pacify everyone with a promise of civil unions...

...Immigration and Islam made little impact on the campaign, except in one spectacular incident...

...For one thing, the public discourse is very politically incorrect and hostile to immigration by European standards...

...Consider that Italy today is in the most desperate position of natural demographic decline of any country in history...

...In the early 1990s, amid corruption scandals that sent many of Italy's most powerful politicians to prison, exile, and suicide, Berlusconi stepped into politics much as Ross Perot did at the same time, and appealed to voters in the same way—as a plain-spoken outsider who understood well enough how large organizations worked that he could strike government corruption at its roots...

...This is not to say none of Prodi's followers are centrists—only that they are swamped by tendencies with which they have nothing in common...

...If anything, the latter was closer to the mark...

...Those who thought Berlusconi was a responsible leader thought he was acting like a responsible leader...

...It wanted to punish the entire old ruling elite to which Berlusconi belonged— the business johns as well as the political prostitutes...

...Italy has only seven television stations...

...His House of Liberties coalition (CDL) had been pummeled in regional elections a year before, and his Forza Italia party was way below its old scores...

...This is a stretch...

...At times he has been its most popular...

...Under such circumstances, a new kind of left-right polarization is emerging, although not yet with such clarity as to replace the obsolescent 20th-century one over which the recent elections were fought...

...The 69-year-old Berlusconi started his career as a door-to-door vacuum-cleaner salesman and lounge singer in his native Milan, and wound up the richest man in Italy, with a fortune estimated at $12 billion...

...One group of theocons surrounds the president of the Italian senate, Marcello Pera, and finds its most sophisticated exponent in the philosopher Gaetano Quagliarello...

...Some of Italy's population loss will be made up by English doctors and lawyers buying second homes in the countryside...

...Some voters liked Clean Hands, since it punished old-style political graft...

...Until five years ago, the left was as happy with this system as the right...

...Berlusconi and Pisanu quickly noted that Francesco Caruso, longtime leader of a violent branch of antiglobalization protesters called the Disobbedienti, was running in Calabria on Bertinotti's Refoundation ticket and would thus serve in any Prodi majority...

...returned to power in 2001 on a raft of reformist promises resembling Newt Gingrich's Contract With America...

...Despite their secularism, a name given them by the Riformista newspaper—i teocon, "the theocons"—has stuck, perhaps because it combines theology with neoconservatism, both less than popular in Italian intellectual circles...

...What kind of long-term investments, aside from nursing homes, would any businessman want to make there...

...The difference is that Italian voters are notoriously unbudgeable by arguments...

...Those who admitted to backing Berlusconi lagged far, far behind those who actually backed him...

...He has even appeared in public in a bandana after a hair-transplant operation...

...Berlusconi commissioned Bill Clinton's old poll-sters—Penn, Schoen and Berland—to do an independent survey...

...On one hand, Italian cultural conservatism is becoming more vocal...

...They have fallen into polarization and anger, which can last long after such a contested election, as Americans have discovered over the past six years...

...And there was more...

...It may be possible to reconcile civil unions and Catholic devotion if you're a Jesuit, but not if you're a politician...

...It is that they hold their leader, the old-fashioned Catholic industrial-policy expert Prodi, in extremely low esteem...

...Towards the end of his first debate with Prodi, he gave an answer to a question about Iran that was clearly baffling the moderators...

...Italian justices' Clean Hands investigation, starting in the early 1990s, sent so many top leaders in all parties to jail for bribes that it wound up dismantling the country's party system...

...So what will Prodi do...

...But Italy's immigration politics is sui generis in a number of ways...

...He described his victory as "a profoundly European result," whatever that means...

...In the end, he was only a brilliant entrepreneur with a strong interest in politics whose ideas—many of them quite good—proved less workable than he had thought, and whose personality proved less refreshing on the hustings than it did in the boardroom...

...RAI journalists have political affiliations and political agendas, and the appointment of a new RAI team, from top to bottom, is often the top priority of a new government...

...He once commented during a meeting with Danish premier Anders Fogh Rasmussen that the handsome Rasmussen would make a more suitable lover for his (Berlusconi's) wife than the mayor of Venice, with whom she was rumored to be having an affair...

...This being the case, Berlusconi's founding of nongovernment television made him, objectively speaking, a hero of free speech and open debate...

...And he is a believer that the solution to all economic and social problems is "more Europe" at a time when voters have rejected the European Union so decisively that that body hardly exists anymore in the sense Prodi means it...

...This was not always true...

...It is doubtful the result will be net growth...

...The center of gravity in the Prodi government is the Democrats of the Left (DS...

...But it is surprising nonetheless...

...The first was that he was using his virtual monopoly on the country's airwaves to subvert public discussion...

...Although his coalition did not last a year, he Christopher Caldwell is a senior editor at THE WEEKLY STANDARD...

...Prodi finds himself abjectly dependent on the hard-line Communists in his coalition (as distinct from the post-Communists who are his coalition's mainstream...

...Their position is considerably strengthened by their proven willingness to undermine Prodi...

...In an American campaign, no opponent Prodi faced would have let go of this issue until he had sawed the Prodi branch off the Vatican tree, but Berlusconi let it pass...

...Prodi, the "economist," was running on public relations and sloganeering...

...Roberto Calderoli, a jowly minister from the right-wing regional party the Northern League, who had once addressed a Palestinian-Italian journalist as "that suntanned lady over there," unbuttoned his shirt during a television interview to reveal a T-shirt featuring those Muhammad cartoons published in Denmark that famously led to riots throughout the Muslim world...

...As long as it remains in the Prodi coalition, it merely provides ballast for those who wish no such thing...

...But there has always been another superlative attached to Berlusconi...

...There were rancorous allegations of fraud, the worst of which were rejected by the Italian Supreme Court last week...

...But it won't do to exaggerate: Somewhere between a fifth and a quarter of the DS's elected representatives—a group called the correntone, or big current—think the whole move towards social democracy was a big mistake...

...Almost any economist would say that Berlusconi's pension reforms—notably, raising the retirement age from 57 to 60—were baby steps in the right direction...

...His statements since the election show him to be committedly pro-Hamas...

...The country's native population is projected to fall by almost 30 per-cent—from 58 to 40 million—before the year 2050...

...Italy's growth is at zero...

...Its birth rate is already below its death rate, and the difference will widen as the baby boom generation ages...

...Another Italian anomaly is the unusually large amount of active proselytizing on the part of Muslims...

...Italy is a latecomer to mass immigration, but today it gets more immigrants than any European country except Spain...

...What is more, Berlusconi's private control of Publitalia, Italy's largest advertising company, gave him even more press leverage than governments ordinarily had...

...The best proof that Berlusconi's control of the media neither threatened debate nor subverted Italian democracy is in the exit polls...

...Prodi aimed to undo most of Berlusconi's job market reforms...

...Another three are government channels...

...The case against him has always had two main pillars...

...The Catholic pacifist group Pax Christi even sent notes to Berlusconi's Forza supporters implying that it was unchristian to vote for the right...

...In retrospect, the turning point of the campaign probably came in March, when the new governor of the Bank of Italy, Mario Draghi, released his first economic bulletins...

...When he was told Iran, he said, "Oh...

...In these circles, the recent election campaign was seen as a referendum on Berlusconi, and it was impossible to imagine the Italian public would do anything but reject him...

...But it turned out to be untrue...

...Now that Berlusconi has (apparently) been ousted, it is worth asking: Was his reign a national emergency for Italy, or a partisan emergency for the left...

...Further reforms were made politically impossible when Italy's largest union federation put 3 million people into the streets to protest the Berlusconi agenda early in 2002...

...Rosa, with its 2.5 percent of the vote, can call all it wants for a "community of democracies" and the financial isolation of tyrants...

...Berlusconi's opponents were never able to decide whether to paint him as a threatening tyrant or an embarrassing buffoon...

...About the only safe bet is that Italians will have less to laugh about in the next government than they did in the last one...

...True, the PCI did reinvent themselves as social democrats in 1991, and were also the most moderate of the Western Communist parties during the Cold War...

...Berlusconi was opposed by a collection of soft and hard leftists fronted by the business professor and former premier Romano Prodi, who had spent the last half-decade in Brussels as president of the European Commission...

...Most will be made up by the immigration of unskilled labor from the Arab world...

...Prodi argued throughout the campaign for selling off frequencies to new channels and making appointments apolitically, but his own government in the late 1990s had done a particularly egregious job of stacking the RAI with political loyalists...

...RAI is a political football, an organ of soft propaganda...

...The European Commission and the IMF have both downgraded Italy's bonds...

...and third, a defense of Cat Stevens...

...But for most Europeans it is a mirage, a failed experiment...

...Bertinotti said that he himself was an antiglobalist, but stressed that he was dedicated to peace, and offered to organize a march to prove it...

...Italy has a strong movement against teaching of evolution in schools and an organized campaign last year blocked a referendum that would have liberalized Italian law on various kinds of test-tube conception...

...In Libya, where Italian television is widely picked up, there were riots (perhaps orchestrated by the Qaddafi regime), which left 14 people dead...

...Those who did not, did not...

...In a country known for rough-and-tumble campaigns, Berlusconi's was pussyfooting and hyper-scrupulous...

...But he had made his business fortune under that system, and the judiciary was showing itself insatiable...

...Calderoli resigned his post and may yet be prosecuted...

...Prodi had two obsessions on the stump: The capital gains tax (which he promised to hike dramatically) and lavore precario (jobs from which you can be fired, which Prodi opposed as unbendingly as the marchers in Paris...

...In this election, the government decided to give the vote to the 2.6 million Italians living abroad...

...Several of his judicial tormentors wound up running for election as part of Prodi's coalition...

...There, his political opinions, which date from sometime in the mid-1970s, hardened...

...Nothing in his 281-page election manifesto made the slightest sense...

...There are several ways to look at such an Italo-Spanish axis: as a "Latin" belt with affinities to the Latin America of Hugo Chavez, as the part of Europe that has been Finlandized by sudden heavy immigration and the close presence of North Africa, or as a "post-Catholic" belt that is taking a different road out of the industrial age than Europe's northern Protestant societies...

...When the State Department issued a travel warning after the Milan rampage, Prodi accused the Bush administration of trying to intervene in the campaign to help Berlusconi...

...So out went the small businessmen who had been (along with the above-mentioned TV addicts) the backbone of Berlusconi's 2001 victory...

...There are four private ones, three of which Berlusconi started from scratch in the 1980s...

...Berlusconi recently chatted on TV about his facelift...

...In Italy's salons, Berlusconi is seen as a shyster, a goombah, and even a moron...

...This is very much like France's experience with a similar mediating body...

...For one thing, the problem was not Berlusconi as a person but an antitrust system (or lack thereof) that made it hard to found new TV stations...

...But Berlusconi has not, as of this writing, conceded...

...They found the race too close to call, tighter than one percentage point...

...Most were in the post-Communist Democrats of the Left party (DS), but one, Antonio Di Pietro, headed a party called the Italy of Values, dedicated to the destruction of Berlusconi and asking Italians the question: Where is the Outrage...

...Berlusconi's opponents argued that he was wasting his unprecedented legislative majorities only to pass laws protecting him from prosecution...