LONDON: If everyone in the world had bought a ticket for the pleasure and entertainment that Italy has given them over the past five years, the Italian economy would be booming. Unfortunately, they did not. And so Italy, like the La Scala opera house, is in crisis behind the stage. Under a party called Forza Italia, its name derived from the football chant “Go, Italy!”, the country has gone nowhere at all. Last year it had zero economic growth.

Its total growth over the five years that Berlusconi has been in power is 3.2 per cent, the worst of any EU member state.

This has been compounded by a new electoral system, introduced by the Berlusconi government last autumn. I talked earlier this week to Peter Eicher, the head of the OSCE mission that has been observing the Italian elections. He praised many aspects of Italy’s ‘healthy democratic environment’, and would not be tempted into a comparison of the Italian elections with those in Ukraine or Belarus, but he did name two areas of serious concern. One was bias in the news coverage on the commercial television channels owned by Berlusconi and the public channels strongly influenced by him, as the incumbent prime minister.

The other was the way the electoral law had been pushed through without consensus between the major parties. Electoral laws, argues Eicher, are not like other laws: since they are the ‘rules of the game’ between competing political parties, a higher measure of consensus is called for. As in football, the winning side should not simply change the rules for the return match.

Beyond the way that the rules were changed, there are the rules themselves. One conclusion drawn from the meltdown of Italian politics in the early 1990s was that the country needed a stronger majoritarian element in its electoral system, to produce more stable governments. Berlusconi himself benefited from the more majoritarian system in the 2001 election, and it helped him to stay the course for five years, becoming postwar Italy’s longest-serving prime minister. But at the end of last year, he introduced this new one, based on proportional representation, applied slightly differently in two houses of parliament, each of which has the capacity to block the other.

The Italian opera now moves into a curious interval. Once the Florida-style examination of spoiled ballots demanded by the reluctant loser Berlusconi has been completed, and assuming the results still give the narrowest of victories to the centre-left coalition led by Prodi, the combined houses of parliament then have, in mid-May, to elect a president to succeed the popular and widely respected Carlo Azeglio Ciampi. (I’m told that one possible successor is Ciampi himself.)

Only when that president is installed can he call on Prodi to form a government — and act three will begin. —Dawn/The Guardian News Service