A government held hostage

During the two months that have gone by since the Italian Supreme Court confirmed, without possibility of appeal, his conviction for tax fraud, Silvio Berlusconi has been exerting every kind of pressure on the Italian government in an endeavor to stave off his political ostracism, after 20 years of omnipresence. Il Cavaliere’s latest move has been to withdraw his five ministers from the Cabinet of the coalition with Enrico Letta’s center-left party, and to call for early elections, on the flimsy pretext of obtaining a popular mandate for a one-percentage-point hike in VAT.

President Giorgio Napolitano, who has the constitutional powers to do so, has said that he will dissolve parliament only if he cannot put together an alternative majority that might sustain a second government headed by Letta or some other political figure — an undertaking that is difficult but perhaps possible.

All this, rather than succumb to the permanent instability — and thus to avoid another round of early elections, regulated by the same outdated and dysfunctional electoral law — which, with three parties of similar strength, might well result in a repetition of February’s stalemate. Berlusconi, irrepressible at age 77, is already on the campaign trail, bringing back the former name of Forza Italia for his party, lately called People of Freedom.

The fact that Napolitano has been able, at the last moment, to prolong the life of this parliament, in no way ensures the efficacy of Italian political life. All it does is supply some artificial respiration for a system that is now incapable of coping with the various challenges that it faces.

No country in modern Europe — let alone the third-ranking economy of the euro zone, in grave difficulties and with the budget for 2014 still mired in indecision — can live under the blackmail of an unscrupulous leader, whose chief cause for concern is staying ahead of his personal problems with the law; and whose condition as political boss and media magnate enables him to keep the machinery of democratic government permanently seized up, with the inestimable help of a justice system as labyrinthine as it is sluggish.

Within the next few days, the Senate will decide on Berlusconi’s expulsion from his parliamentary seat, and a court in Milan, on the duration of his disqualification from political activity, in application of the anti-corruption laws and the Supreme Court's conviction.

The rules of the game must be scrupulously respected. Early elections or no early elections, Berlusconi cannot go on holding the government hostage in a founding member nation of the European Union. However desirable it may be to avoid the immediate impact of a new crisis in long-suffering Italy, such an event would, after all, be a lesser evil compared with the continued presence of Berlusconi as a decisive factor on its political scene.