All Intensive Purposes

Alexander Stille points out that the Berlusconi government, anticipating that it would lose power in this election, pushed through a change designed to weaken its successors:

It seems sadly fitting that the legacy that Silvio Berlusconi’s government will leave Italy is a gigantic mess. It appears that his rival, Romano Prodi, has pulled out a narrow victory that will allow him to put together a shaky majority in parliament. A weak government, presiding over a sharply divided country, will allow Mr Berlusconi to continue to play an important role in blocking any measure that is of interest to him.

This was not only predictable but actually planned by the outgoing Berlusconi government and partially created by a new electoral law passed in the government’s twilight. A few months before the election, Mr Berlusconi – after studying polls that showed the centre-left winning a substantial parliamentary majority in the country’s first-past-the-post electoral system – decided to return to the proportional voting arrangement that the Italian electorate had roundly rejected in a popular referendum in 1993.

The old proportional system was thought to have encouraged a plethora of small parties, unstable government majorities, short-lived, revolving-door governments and endless horse-trading among coalition partners that fostered corruption and lack of programmatic clarity in the post-war period. Mr Berlusconi came to power for the first time in 1994 thanks to the new majority-rules system and once declared that the majoritarian system was his “religion”. But he lost his religion when studies showed his coalition doing better in 2006 under the proportional system. At the very minimum, the centre-right calculated that even if the centre-left won, the proportional system would fragment the vote and leave them with a fractious, unstable coalition that would need the centre-right’s help in order to govern.

In a moment of shocking candour, Roberto Calderoli, Mr Berlusconi’s minister for reform, admitted: “The ­election law? I wrote it, but it’s a porcata,” a vulgar term that roughly means “a piece of crap”. It was the move of a retreating army that has decided to blow up the bridges, poison the wells and sow the fields with salt to make life difficult for the conquering army.

This sounds like something Karl Rove, whom we have to thank for the innovation of off-year congressional redistricting, would dream up. By the fall, if it appears that the Democrats are poised to take control of the House or Senate, what will Rove have up his sleeve? (Or is that what the budget deficits are about?)