Four-time former Italian prime minister Silvio Berlusconi extended his surge in Italy’s opinion polls on Friday, increasing prospects that the center-left Democratic Party now leading the race will have to seek a pact with outgoing Italian Prime Minister Mario Monti’s centrist bloc.
With a little over a month to go before the vote, Berlusconi narrowed the gap with Pier Luigi Bersani’s center-left coalition by 4 percentage points in just a week, but still trails by 6 percentage points, a poll published on Friday showed.
His gains follow a blitz on almost every TV talk show in Italy, where the 76-year-old billionaire has mixed blistering attacks on Monti’s technocrat government, Germany and the left with promises to restore growth and scrap a hated property tax.
Photo: Reuters
Berlusconi sought to maintain the momentum on Friday by announcing he would sign a new “contract with the Italians,” reproducing a famous stunt from a triumphant campaign in 2001, when he set out five election promises and signed them on prime time TV.
“I’ve heard Monti will do the same, but in his case it will be a contract with the Germans,” Berlusconi told his own Canale 5 TV channel, reiterating a frequent line that Monti’s austerity policies have been more in the interests of Germany than Italy.
The surge has been reminiscent of 2006, when the flamboyant showman clawed back 10 percentage points and nearly robbed Romano Prodi of what looked like certain victory just a month before the election.
However, so far, despite similar results in several recent polls, there seemed to be little chance of an election shock giving Berlusconi a fifth term after the stew of scandals and the financial crisis forced him to step down in 2011.
“This time around, Berlusconi’s ability to stage a comeback is limited,” said Maurizio Pessato, vice chairman of SWG polling institute, which conducted Friday’s poll.
“Berlusconi has lost a lot of credibility, more than he had before the 2006 vote, because of the failure of his government in 2011, and his personal scandals.”
The poll showed the center-left alliance of the Democratic Party and the leftist Left, Ecology, Freedom party at 33 percent, down from 34.9 percent a week ago, with Berlusconi’s alliance on 27.2 percent and Monti’s bloc at 13.7 percent.
If the result is confirmed, the center-left would have a solid lower-house majority.
However, due to electoral law peculiarities, Berlusconi could lose to the center-left in the national vote tally yet still win enough seats in the Senate, where voting is calculated region by region, to stop Bersani gaining an upper house majority.
That is important because legislation in Italy must be passed by both houses.
The center-right has traditionally controlled Italy’s most populous regions, like Lombardy, Veneto and Sicily, which are awarded more Senate seats.
This means the center-left, even if it garners a small Senate majority on its own, might seek Monti’s support in the upper house to avoid a replay of Prodi’s doomed second term, which ended after his wafer-thin majority collapsed.
“Under the rather perverse logic of this race, Monti has to hope Berlusconi does well to ensure that Bersani has to include him in a center-left government,” said Roberto D’Alimonte, Italy’s top election expert.
A former European commissioner, Monti is credited by investors and foreign leaders with having restored Italy’s credibility, and any role he has in a future government is likely to be welcomed by markets.
‘GREAT OPPRTUNITY’: The Paraguayan president made the remarks following Donald Trump’s tapping of several figures with deep Latin America expertise for his Cabinet Paraguay President Santiago Pena called US president-elect Donald Trump’s incoming foreign policy team a “dream come true” as his nation stands to become more relevant in the next US administration. “It’s a great opportunity for us to advance very, very fast in the bilateral agenda on trade, security, rule of law and make Paraguay a much closer ally” to the US, Pena said in an interview in Washington ahead of Trump’s inauguration today. “One of the biggest challenges for Paraguay was that image of an island surrounded by land, a country that was isolated and not many people know about it,”
‘DISCRIMINATION’: The US Office of Personnel Management ordered that public DEI-focused Web pages be taken down, while training and contracts were canceled US President Donald Trump’s administration on Tuesday moved to end affirmative action in federal contracting and directed that all federal diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) staff be put on paid leave and eventually be laid off. The moves follow an executive order Trump signed on his first day ordering a sweeping dismantling of the federal government’s diversity and inclusion programs. Trump has called the programs “discrimination” and called to restore “merit-based” hiring. The executive order on affirmative action revokes an order issued by former US president Lyndon Johnson, and curtails DEI programs by federal contractors and grant recipients. It is using one of the
‘FIGHT TO THE END’: Attacking a court is ‘unprecedented’ in South Korea and those involved would likely face jail time, a South Korean political pundit said Supporters of impeached South Korean President Yoon Suk-yeol yesterday stormed a Seoul court after a judge extended the impeached leader’s detention over his ill-fated attempt to impose martial law. Tens of thousands of people had gathered outside the Seoul Western District Court on Saturday in a show of support for Yoon, who became South Korea’s first sitting head of state to be arrested in a dawn raid last week. After the court extended his detention on Saturday, the president’s supporters smashed windows and doors as they rushed inside the building. Hundreds of police officers charged into the court, arresting dozens and denouncing an
One of Japan’s biggest pop stars and best-known TV hosts, Masahiro Nakai, yesterday announced his retirement over sexual misconduct allegations, reports said, in the latest scandal to rock Japan’s entertainment industry. Nakai’s announcement came after now-defunct boy band empire Johnny & Associates admitted in 2023 that its late founder, Johnny Kitagawa, for decades sexually assaulted teenage boys and young men. Nakai was a member of the now-disbanded SMAP — part of Johnny & Associates’s lucrative stable — that swept the charts in Japan and across Asia during the band’s nearly 30 years of fame. Reports emerged last month that Nakai, 52, who since
RSS