Not to speak too soon, but this morning I heard about Chirac's squalid climbdown on NPR. EVEN NPR asked the union-types and deadbeat Sorbonners if winning this one might not be sealing their own doom. Nah, of course not. Same old nonsense about the patronat, no mention of the banlieues or retirements... Immediately afterward the horrific news struck that the polls in Italy had closed and the Communists had tripled (!) their vote according to exit polls. I thought about calling in sick.
I just got home and it seems that the Italian elections are extremely close, with the Senate tending to the right on pure votes. The representation rules are regional and so it might go quite decisively right in terms of its final makeup. The lower chamber looks like it is going left but within one half percentage point!
Any law has to be passed by both, so if it holds up, this is pretty good news, I'd say.
Berlusconi and his crooked ad personam dealings sickened everyone in the country but not enough for the left to win. That would be throwing the mutt out with the dogwater and letting a pig in.
It seems, anyhow. I am trying not to get my hopes up, but the prospect of another cretin like Zapatero again fills me with dread, for every time he opens his filthy yap, I miss Aznar's measure and poise. Prodi would never have been another Zapatero. He's LSE, after all. Still, many of his allies are even worse.
If for any reason, you ever feel the need to become violent, I suggest some readings from Bertinotti, Diliberto, or Pecoraro Scanio. I put a little Livingstone up to see how your digestion reacts.
Fingers crossed, friends.
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Red Ken is pretty sickening, all right, though lately he looks more like a clown more than anything else.
Who are Bertinotti, Diliberto, and Pecoraro Scanio. Never heard of these guys -- Gramsci/Togliatti types?
Going back to the Italian election -- yes, it looks like Berlu pulled off some kind of a draw. Let's wait for the fat lady to sing. As you say, the prospect of yet another Zapatero in Southern Europe would be quite demoralizing...
To answer the "who are" question is not such an easy task if it is to be done well. Back in Togliatti time (BTW you know how big a shot that bastard was with Stalin?) the PCI (Partito Communista Italiano) was snug with Stalin. Since then a lot has happened, particularly so that during the Prague Spring thing, the PCI actually condemned the Soviets. This was windowdressing as far as I can tell. The Italians never had much taste for the egg-breaking part of making an omelette and so were put off.
So the Communists are all in bed together pretty much until 1991 when the PCI repackaged itself under the name PDS (Partito Democratico di Sinistra). I believe it was at this point that a rump formed of guys not liking the "democratico" part... and they became Rifondazione. The chief there is named Fausto Bertinotti. He is a very bright guy, but of course for all his logic and argumentation, the continent would be overrun by immigrants and terrorists of all stripes and everyone not in a trade union or madrassah would be in a reeducation camp.
During Prodi I, Bertinotti's Rif. Comm. was part of the government. Prodi refused to hand about $10 billion in freebies to "employ" layabouts in the South and so he bolted the coalition, causing the govt to fall. A part of Rif Comm thought this made no sense politically (duh) and so they split off to form Communisti Italiani, now headed by Diliberto. This avoided elections that time. Prodi was out, d'Alema (PDS) was in.
In order not to look like a sellout, Diliberto talks and acts like a union thug sometimes and like a Paris philosophe the rest.
Pecoraro Scanio is a Green and his points of contact with logic are tenuous at best. A centrist party (Margherita) that had for a time co-opted the Greens used him as spokesman for a while.
What the hell were they thinking?
This is very erudite, and quite a complete answer to my question -- but hey, I'd rather go back to the discussion in a previous post, and talk about la Arcuri, than all these quasi-reformed commies.
But yes, Togliatti was a big poombah in the Comintern, and the Russians even named their Motown after him. Getting closer to present time, I still remember the close call from the late 70s, when the Italian commies nearly got elected. And this was serious business at the time, smack in the middle of the Cold War, could have been a real disaster for Western Europe if they'd gotten a few extra points in those elections. Now, I dunno, does it really make such a difference who gets to manage the Nanny State? OK, yes, there is some, let me not overstate the case, but I'm still a bit sympathetic to Fukuyama's old thesis ("End of History"), especially now that he's down and out for the count (KO in 1st, or TKO in 3rd, have we nailed that down?)
Yeh, it makes a difference. Though Berlusconi is by program a socialist and his allies are socialists in name, too, the centerleft coalition has to placate pieces from the extreme left. There are all kind of awful shit lurking around in there, but the worst is the antiliberal group. These guys will do all they can to wreck business and Italy is hard enough to do business in legally.
The Corriere now says the Senate has gone to the Right by ONE SEAT! Shit. The lower house is close enough so that absentee ballots from overseas can decide it.
This is a good sign for the right because most Italians emigrate to wher business works better and because business works better out of Italy.
Fingers crossed. This could be the upset of the decade.
Shades of Truman-Dewey, 1948?
Hanging chads? Black Italians kept from the voting machines?
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