For Italy’s Silvio Berlusconi, events on Tuesday this week must have had a grim air of déjà vu. After months of standing by him, his key ally, Umberto Bossi, leader of the Northern League, doomed their right-wing coalition with a single, characteristically blunt sentence.
Asked by reporters outside Parliament in Rome about the long-awaited vote on the public accounts expected in the afternoon, the 70-year-old Bossi appeared at first to have nothing new to say.
Knowing the opposition had decided in the national interest not to vote against the government, Bossi replied: “Today, nothing will happen.” But then he immediately contradicted himself. “We asked the prime minister to step aside,” he said, before naming as his choice of successor the secretary of Berlusconi’s party, Angelino Alfano.
It was the same 17 years ago, when the league leader pulled the rug from under the TV magnate’s first, tumultuous and short-lived government. But, whereas in 1994 Bossi was the billionaire politician’s executioner, switching his votes against the government in Parliament, this time he and his followers stood by the coalition to the end and let others plunge in the knife.
Members of Berlusconi’s Freedom People Party have been slipping away from him for weeks. The exact number became clear when the vote on public finances was held. On October 14, when Italy’s resilient prime minister survived the latest in a string of confidence votes, he mustered 316 of the 630 votes in the lower house, the chamber of deputies — a bare, one-seat outright majority. In Tuesday’s vote on the 2010 accounts he obtained only 308.
A photographer from the Ansa news agency managed to get a shot of the sheet of paper Berlusconi was writing on as the result became known. He had noted his tally of votes and next to it, in brackets, “eight traitors”. Underneath were his options, one saying: “I take note [offer my resignation].”
Berlusconi had declared on Monday: “I want to look those who want to betray me in the face.” That was possible in a confidence vote of the sort he planned to call. But the vote on last year’s government balance was registered electronically and flashed up on a big display behind the speaker. Soon afterwards, Berlusconi left the floor of the house looking grim-faced.
For weeks he had remained defiant, brushing aside successive desertions of deputies and senators and turning a deaf ear to the rumblings of discontent among those who remained loyal.
As recently as Monday he had quashed reports of his imminent resignation, describing them on Facebook as without foundation.
But overnight things changed significantly. Shortly after 1.30am, a meeting between Berlusconi and leading figures in his party ended, and sources close to the prime minister admitted for the first time that he would assess his future on the basis of Tuesday’s ballot.
During the morning five more of his party’s lawmakers announced that they would not take part in the vote on public financing, lining up with the boycott called by the prime minister’s adversaries.
Berlusconi also faced growing pressure from the markets as the yield on Italy’s 10-year benchmark bonds rose to 6.74% before dropping back again.
That took the interest rate on the country’s debt close to the 7% mark, considered the point of no return in the debt crisis. Portugal, Greece and Ireland were all forced to seek a bail-out after the yield on their sovereign bonds reached that level.
But although Italy may not be too big to fail, it is probably too big to bail. As Finnish Prime Minister Jyrki Katainen told Parliament in Helsinki: “It is difficult to see that we in Europe would have resources to take a country of the size of Italy into the bailout programme.”
Italy’s debts now amount to €1.9-trillion. Next year alone it will need to ask the markets to lend it almost €300-billion. —