SILVIO BERLUSCONI, Italy’s centre-right prime minister, is seeking a convincing endorsement of his two-year-old government in nationwide regional elections that conclude today.
Conditions are hardly fortuitous for the 73-year-old billionaire media mogul. The economy is only just limping out of recession, close aides are under investigation for corruption in assigning state construction contracts, and the prime minister is suspected of trying to censor state television amid a wider conflict with the judiciary.
And yet the centre-left opposition Democratic party, testing out its fourth leader in two years, will count itself fortunate if it does not lose more than two of the 11 regions it holds.
Mr Berlusconi’s People of Liberty party holds two of the 13 regions going to the polls, which are widely seen as a referendum on his government. Some 41 million Italians were eligible to vote in the poll, spread over yesterday and today.
The results could determine whether a government with solid popular support presses ahead with economic reforms, or a weakened Berlusconi spends his remaining three years in office fighting internal divisions and the inevitable succession battle.
The spotlight is focused on three large regions – Piemonte in the north, Lazio in the middle and Campania in the south. The Northern League, junior partner in the coalition government, demonstrated its growing weight in Mr Berlusconi’s constant juggling act by demanding that it field the coalition’s candidates for governor in two industrial powerhouses in the north.
Veneto, held by the People of Liberty, is seen as an easy win for the league, while the last polls two weeks ago indicated a close battle with Mercedes Bresso, centre-left governor in Piemonte. Lazio, the region around Rome, should have been an easy win for the centre-right after the previous centre-left governor quit in a sex scandal. But the People of Liberty bungled the registration of its full slate of candidates, and the government’s can- do reputation was undermined when courts rejected its attempts to reinstate the list.
But, the Catholic Church’s intervention against Emma Bonino, opposition candidate and ex-European commissioner, could nudge the vote in favour of the centre-right’s Renata Polverini.
Mr Berlusconi is widely expected to capture the southern region of Calabria from the centre-left, but a bigger prize would be Campania, where the centre-left government’s achievements in infrastructure were overshadowed by the 2008 refuse crisis in Naples. – (Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2010)