ITALY:Controversial comedian and political activist Beppe Grillo rode up to the Italian Senate in a rickshaw yesterday to present a petition, signed by 350,000 people, calling for a "clean parliament".
Grillo's initiative comes at the end of another troubled week in Italian politics, marked yet again by tensions between magistrates and politicians. Not for the first time, media tycoon and centre-right opposition leader Silvio Berlusconi has featured at the centre of the debate, following a newspaper report earlier this week that he is under investigation by the public prosecutor's office in Naples for corruption.
For more than 20 years, Grillo has been a fringe figure on the Italian political scene. Yet he took parties of both the right and left by surprise last September when he organised a hugely successful "V Day", in which the "V" stands not for victory but rather for the extremely rude expression "vaffanculo" (f**k off).
More than 350,000 people attending 250 simultaneous "V" rallies up and down Italy signed a petition, calling for new legislation that would prohibit convicted criminals from standing for parliament, limit a parliamentarian to two terms of office and create an electoral system whereby the electorate votes only for named, individual candidates, rather those imposed after the election by the party hierarchies.
Two years ago, Grillo caused a major rumpus in Italy when he took out a full-page advertisement in the International Herald Tribune, highlighting the fact that the Italian parliament's lower house contained no fewer than 23 deputies convicted for a wide variety of crimes including bribery, perjury, income-tax evasion, the receipt of kick-backs and other forms of corruption.
Mr Berlusconi is alleged to have offered jobs and cash to a centre-left senator in an attempt to bring down the government of Romano Prodi, while he is also accused of abusing his position by soliciting work for four actresses with the soap department of state broadcaster RAI.
In an angry response to the allegations, Mr Berlusconi argued that the "red army" of magistrates had moved into action again, adding that "someone" wants to "exploit the situation in order to sabotage the ongoing dialogue on [constitutional and electoral] reforms".
That "dialogue" features Mr Berlusconi and the Mayor of Rome, Walter Veltroni, leader of the newly formed Democratic Party (PD). In what is yet another moment of fundamental soul-searching in Italian politics, both the centre left with the PD party and Mr Berlusconi's centre right, with the Party of the People of Freedom, also newly formed, are regrouping.
In this context, many believe that in the interests of ensuring stable government a radical reform of the electoral law and the Senate's role is necessary, given that centre-left and centre-right coalition governments of the last decade have been plagued by internal divisions.
Further problems for that dialogue emerged yesterday when President Giorgio Napolitano, in the US on a state visit, appeared to criticise Mr Berlusconi when calling on politicians to "avoid making judgements that delegitimise the judiciary".