Press Interpreter

02/13/06 -- Berlusconi's bizarre show at the start of the election campaign in Rome. -- Only God the Father is still missing. Otherwise the Italian Prime Minister has compared himself with all those who are of rank or fame. Silvio Berlusconi started with an emperor: "Only Napoleon has done more than me. But I am much bigger." He followed up with a war hero: "I will fight against communism like Churchill fought the Nazis." And he referred to the crucified: "I am the Jesus Christ of politics, suffering, I take everything on me, I sacrifice myself for everyone." Is the Prime Minister, after having been in power for five years, ripe for the loony bin? Nothing of the kind. It's just election campaign time in Italy.

Last weekend President Carlo Azeglio Ciampi disbanded Parliament and admonished the politicians to concentrate on the problems in the country in their campaigns for the elections of 9 and 10 April. A pious wish. Because such a businesslike debate can not hold any interest for Berlusconi. Too meagre is his balance as government chief of one of the countries with the weakest economic growth in Europe. So if he can not offer the people bread, at least he will offer them games. Therefore he's been treating the Italians to his antics for weeks now, in countless media appearances.

The always sunbronzed radiant man might promise chastity until the parliamentary elections, only to revoke the promise the next day. Or he warbles a song on the radio that he wrote himself. Another time he'll remark on the looks of his opponent. Just the other day he mocked the leader of the oppositional Democrats of the Left, a man as tall as he is thin, that it might perhaps be better to go into an ossuary than to be in closer contact with this Piero Fassino. The opposition and its top candidate Romano Prodi are having a hard time dealing with the Berlusconi show, because his madness has a method. Like a vampire he sucks up the public attention of the country. Both friend and foe continually talk about the 1 meter 71 tall man who'd like to be great, and who has made his narcissism the obsession of an entire people.

Whether that will pay out in the end, when the votes are counted? The Left, under Prodi, is still ahead in the polls by four to five percent. But the Prime Minister will have long given up on winning over its supporters anyway. What he aims for is to mobilise his own electorate, which is disappointed in his government record but which he hopes to tempt into the voting booth one more time. The more shrill the election campaign gets, the more worked up the opponents become, the better his chances are of succeeding in that. And so Berlusconi goes on with his "Operation Truth" without recitence, with litanies about the supposedly deep-red judges, left-wing journalists and crypto-communist opposition politicians.

This everpresent and hyper-charming salesman of himself is opposed by the Left with, of all people, Romano Prodi - a man of lecturing didactic earnestness and grumpy deliberation. The effect he has on the Italy of the Berlusconi years must be that of the hangover breakfast after a champagne orgy. Indeed, the economist from Bologna has made it his goal to sobre up Italy. He has just presented his programme to the voters - just 300 pages long! It is bursting with recipes to cure the country. "Small corrections will not suffice," Prodi says. "We need radical reforms."

The Professor has admittedly trouble spreading his message. His speech often lacks urgency. When he was the President of the European Commission in Brussels, his opponents mocked that they could barely understand his English. Today even his supporters joke: "We don't understand his Italian either." Moreover, there is scepsis in the country about whether Prodi would be able, as Prime Minister, to keep his coalition of about a dozen parties together. After all, he would have to take on all the social, labour market and public finance reforms that Berlusconi's right-wing government shied away from even in spite of its ample majority - with a coalition ranging from Christian-Democrats to communists.

Prodi argues that he has had the coalition partners sign for their committment to his program. Apart from that, he is hoping that the Italians are too tired to wait another five years for the miracles of Messiah Berlusconi. The Catholic Church has already reacted to his Jesus comparison. Cardinal Ersilio Tonini asked the Prime Minister to "please leave our Father in peace."

[Full article]

By Stefan Ulrich

--Translated By no-itsme

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