Italy’s regional elections: Twinges of foreboding

The right is walloped, tax cuts notwithstanding

HE SEIZED back the initiative in typically media-savvy fashion. For almost 24 hours after the first official predictions that the right had suffered a crushing defeat in the regional elections held on April 3rd and 4th, Silvio Berlusconi said nothing. Then, unexpectedly, he turned up on a television chat show, gleefully pugnacious, to confront the victors.

Yet no amount of inspired bravado could disguise the fact that the prime minister and his allies had suffered what one of them called a “massacre” in the last big test of public opinion before Italy's general election due in a year's time. One ballot was postponed, so elections were held in 13 of Italy's 20 regions. Eight of these regions had been held by the right, which has now lost six of them.

The centre-left opposition led by Romano Prodi, now called the Union, gouged deep into the heartlands of Mr Berlusconi's coalition. It took Piedmont and Liguria, regions that make up the western end of the prosperous, industrialised corridor that stretches across northern Italy. In the centre, the Union seized Lazio, the region around Rome, and a stronghold of the former neo-fascists who are Mr Berlusconi's main allies. Unexpectedly, the opposition challenger there won with no help from the rebel rightist, Alessandra Mussolini, who took a mere 2% of the vote from the incumbent governor. In the south, Puglia, another hard-right bastion, produced an even greater shock. The governorship passed to a gay Communist.

Anyone who has not been listening to the news from Italy over the past ten months might find all this unsurprising. The right took two stunning blows at the European and provincial elections in June 2004. But what makes the latest results so devastating for Mr Berlusconi is that, in the meantime, two rounds of tax cuts were introduced at his behest. He sees these cuts as the key to victory next year. The strategy is not yielding the results he expected.

Perhaps that, in its turn, is not so surprising. For the government, while cutting direct taxes, has slyly raised indirect ones, so voters do not feel any richer. Moreover, the tax cuts have been implemented in isolation, rather than as part of a comprehensive programme of liberalisation that would have enabled them to kick-start the economy. Mr Berlusconi and his allies have shied away from the confrontations that such boldness would provoke.