Author Topic: Berlusconi resigns: a change of season for Italy?  (Read 816 times)

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Offline wasteland

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Berlusconi resigns: a change of season for Italy?
« on: November 13, 2011, 11:57:20 AM »
Berlusconi, the self-appointed greatest Italian PM in the last 150 years (words that actually came from his own mouth a year or two ago), finally stepped down yesterday after a 17 year long political career, of which 11 spent leading the government. A highly controversial politician and man, he has become known outside Italy for his many gaffes and sexual as well as political and criminal scandals. It has to be said that none of his 26 trials ended with a sentence of condemn, for either absolution from the charges (only three times), expiration of the time limits of the trial (despite being found guilty), lack of proof, depenalization of the charge decreted by bills he himself had the italian parliament pass. Most of his trials have been greatly slowed by a number of "ad personam" laws, created ad hoc to strenghten his own defense strategies. The most famous of these laws, the "Lodo Alfano" (named after Berlusconi's Minister of Justice, Angelino Alfano), was decreted unconstitutional and as such abolished by Italy's Supreme Court  in 2010.

Always an extremely controversial politician, he became increasingly unpopoular over the last three years, recently sinking to a mere 20% of the popoular consensus. A crowd of about a thousand spontaneously gathered yesterday night in front of the residence of Giorgio Napolitano, the Italian President Of The Republic, to cheer the long awaited moment. A small orchestra even performed Hendel's "Halleluyah" to celebrate. Today, however, a few hundreds of his supporters bid him farewell outside of his workplace and house in Rome.

Berlusconi leaves a country plagued by social unrest and jeopardized by the severe "debt storm" that has been sweeping Europe since last summer. As a consequence of the failure of his government and his majority alliance, now unable to stand a confidence vote in the lowest chamber, Napolitano will appoint in a few hours the economist Mario Monti as next PM. He will then proceed to form a new gabinet that will most likely be composed only by scholars, with no direct political partecipation.

You probably don't care about an old pervert falling out of the spotlight after his overly long hour on the stage, but to us Italians this means a lot. I've started getting interested in politics when I was 10, and I've never read a newspaper or watched a TV news not mentioning Berlusconi or quoting one of his dirty jokes about vaginas or wannabe-Mussolini political statement.

The future of Italy is extremely far from being clear of black clouds, but at last today we can finally see a faint silver lining flickering through the dark sky. Whether it is the first harbinger of a brighter future of the mocking smirk of ill fate (read Grece, Argentina), only time will tell. We stay here and watch, ready and willing to step up and play our part in the game.

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Offline Rathma

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Re: Berlusconi resigns: a change of season for Italy?
« Reply #1 on: November 13, 2011, 04:20:12 PM »
Whoops, I guess we're fucked now, arrivederci!

Offline Riceball

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Re: Berlusconi resigns: a change of season for Italy?
« Reply #2 on: November 13, 2011, 06:39:22 PM »
My brethren are taking over the world, piece by piece hehe.

Seriously though, from what I can tell the President has been told by the IMF/EU to get a technocratic government in place to work through the current problems they have - probably a good move considering the risks that a Greek-style saga would pose to both the euro and the world economy.

From there, IDK, hasn't Italy always had quite a fracticious system of politics? I don't mean that in a negative sense. As far as I know the Italian parliament has a huge number of political parties represented with quite different ideologies?
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