Tuesday,
March 06, 2007
Italians ask: "What's Wrong with
The
ANNOTICO Report
With
Most Italians there is an underlying sense of frustration that permeates their
life. It comes from conditions created by (1)
The Church (2) The stagnant economy, which for almost 40 years
after 1945, politics and all of society were frozen in a deeply conservative
and profoundly corrupt pattern (3) the decision to swap the lira for the euro was a disaster for Italy (4) Italian politics
are still poisonous,(5) the justice system is a joke, (5) and the efforts
at reform are endlessly sabotaged by the beneficiaries of the current state of
affairs.
One
must never forget however that after WWII, the
It
can make one angry that while the
How
much worse (or possibly better) could it have been had the Communists come to
power in a closely divided government, and avoided the decades of Rampant
Corruption and Insidious Influence of the Mafia??
This
author unravels the mystery why Andreotti used his
one vote to bring his ally down, and to resurrect him.
Most
Italians Agree, There's Something Wrong with
Gwynne Dyer
London-based independent
journalist.
Tuesday, March 6, 2007
The trigger for this extraordinary outburst was the
week-long political crisis that nearly brought down Prime Minister Romano Prodi's center-left government,
It's
an affliction he shares with a great many Italians: No country except
The
vote that Mr. Prodi's government lost was actually on
a proposal to leave 1,900 Italian troops in
The
government would still have won the vote if senator-for-life Giulio Andreotti had not unexpectedly voted against it. But the
87-year-old Andreotti, seven times prime minister and
often known as the "Prince of Darkness," is a strong supporter of
NATO and the American alliance, so why would he vote against that bill? Because
it was going to be so close that his surprise "no" vote could bring
Mr. Prodi's government down.
Why
would he want to do that? Mr. Andreotti has always
been very close to both the Catholic Church and the Mafia, but on this occasion
it was the former tie that mattered. The
Most
Italians would agree that there is something wrong with their country, but it's
not the Church that bothers them. The stagnant economy makes matters worse -
even
For
almost 40 years after 1945, while the rest of Europe was growing and changing
very fast,
That
system ended 15 years ago when the Christian Democrats imploded in a blizzard
of corruption scandals and Communism simultaneously went out of fashion, but
Italians have a lot of lost time to make up.
Moreover,
the decision to swap the lira for the euro was a
disaster for
But
that is about what you'd expect at this stage of the process of modernization,
because it is a process, and it takes time.
Gwynne
Dyer is a London-based independent journalist.
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