Another Italian government bites the dust…

A few of my Italian readers chastised me last October for writing that, with three governments in three years, the Ukrainians were:

…on track to make the Italians’ promiscuous penchant for changing governments seem positively chaste.

However, given that yet another Italian government fell yesterday, they may want to eat their words. Never mind the damning fact that Italians have run through 61 governments over the past 60 years….

Therefore, this latest political crisis should have come as a surprise to no one – especially readers of this weblog. After all, here’s what I wrote almost two years ago when Romano Prodi replaced Silvio Berlusconi as prime minister:

Unfortunately, [the election results], which left him only 2 seats short of Prodi’s majority in the Senate, have stoked Berlusconi’s vain ambition to make Prodi’s term as prime minister even shorter and more beleaguered than his first 9-month term was in 1994. So congratulations Signore Prodi! And good luck. You’re going to need it….

Of course, Prodi can derive some consolation from the fact that his government lasted 20 months. But it was always only a matter of time before his brittle center-left coalition fell apart. And it finally happened in dramatic fashion yesterday – after a fractious no-confidence Senate debate, during which one senator was spat upon, fainted, and had to be carried out on a stretcher.

Alas, it hardly seems to matter why Italians lost confidence in Prodi’s leadership. Because, with the 60-year record cited above, not even the Pope could withstand their fickle scrutiny.

Meanwhile, Berlusconi made it clear yesterday that he is eager for yet another episode as prime minister. Because he responded to the fall of Prodi’s government by declaring that “we need to go to the polls in the shortest time possible without delay”.

And it would not surprise me if Italians re-elect him…again. This, notwithstanding that Berlusconi seemed to spend almost as much time during his beleaguered premierships (April 1994 – January 1995 and June 2001- May 2006) defending himself in court (against a battery of corruption charges) as he did representing them.

After all, there’s no denying that Berlusconi has been the most influential, dynamic and stabilizing figure in Italian politics since World War II.

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Italian politics