ALL THE signs are that Italian prime minister Silvio Berlusconi will survive yet another severe parliamentary test when he faces confidence votes in both houses of parliament today.
Even if the prime minister pulls through both votes, the end result though could well be his resignation, especially if his winning margin is wafer thin. In that case, Mr Berlusconi would hope to persuade President Giorgio Napolitano to call an early general election, probably for next spring.
For weeks now, today’s vote has been billed as an OK Corral confrontation in which Mr Berlusconi and his once close centre-right ally, speaker of the lower house Gianfranco Fini, who has called for his resignation, finally settle all their outstanding accounts.
During much of the build-up to the vote, Mr Fini and the centre-left opposition regularly expressed their belief that Mr Berlusconi would be defeated today. As the vote draws closer, however, that confidence seems to have evaporated.
Mr Fini’s new Future and Liberty party last night appeared to extend an olive branch to Mr Berlusconi, offering to abstain on this morning’s senate confidence vote if he would agree to resign before the subsequent lower house vote.
Mr Berlusconi’s rejection of the offer is a sign of his growing confidence.
Earlier, addressing the senate, Mr Berlusconi defended his government’s record. In particular, he chose to highlight precisely those issues – the L’Aquila earthquake, the Naples rubbish crisis and his relations with Vladimir Putin – which he saw as proof of his ability to govern.
The post-earthquake reconstruction had been handled in a “superlative way”, the recurring rubbish crisis in Naples had come about because Naples Town Council had “done nothing about the rubbish”, while he swore on the heads of his children and grandchildren that he personally had not taken a penny from lucrative energy contracts between Italy and Russian energy giant Gazprom.
The prime minister said it would be an act of total irresponsibility to prompt an early general election in the current climate of economic global uncertainty. Under his leadership, Italy’s public accounts had been stabilised and the country no longer formed part of the Pigs (Portugal, Ireland, Greece and Spain) group of potentially unstable national economies.
Needless to say, opposition figures were unimpressed. Pierluigi Bersani, leader of the largest opposition party, the Democratic Party (PD), accused the prime minister of failing to recognise the “real problems of the country”.
Former investigative magistrate Antonio di Pietro, leader of the Italy of Values (IDV) party, lodged a complaint with a public prosecutor, alleging that Mr Berlusconi’s People of Freedom party had become involved in a “football transfer market” as it attempted to buy votes for today.
Mr Di Pietro also repeated his belief that Mr Berlusconi’s overriding concern was a fear of prosecution: “The premier is terrified because if he is no longer prime minister, then he will be heading to the court house in Milan rather than to parliament in Rome.”