ITALY: Buttiglione’s Alliance with Berlusconi Sparks Crisis in PPI

By IPS Correspondents Reprint | | Print |

Jorge Pina

ROME, Feb 21 1995 (IPS) - The left-wing of the Italian Popular Party (PPI) was up in arms on Tuesday over party leader Rocco Buttiglione’s decision to join television magnate Silvio Berlusconi, should early parliamentary elections be called some time this year.

Buttiglione, backed by the moderate sector of the PPI’s former Christian Democrats, announced the results of a Monday night meeting with former prime minister Berlusconi.

The party’s leftist sector has protested because an alliance with Forza Italia – Berlusconi’s party – would also mean entering into a coalition with the right-wing National Alliance that has remained loyal both to the former prime minister and its own neofascist past.

Buttiglione and Berlusconi also agreed that early parliamentary elections should be held in mid-June before potential voter support for their coalition begins to shrink.

Afraid of losing popular support, Forza Italia and the National Alliance decided to join with the PPI and present a broad centre- right coalition which they hope would win early parliamentary elections.

However, President Oscar Luigi Scalfaro has refused to dissolve the legislature and call elections, naming instead a new prime minister, Lamberto Dini, to form a new cabinet.

Meanwhile, Buttiglione has decided to call the leaders of the left-wing sector of his party up on disciplinary charges because they have come out in support of Romano Prodi as the head of a centre-left coalition opposed to Berlusconi.

But Rosy Bindi, one of the most combative members of the party’s leftist faction, has claimed it is Buttiglione who should be called up on disciplinary charges for the “clear violation of the accords adopted in the PPI’s last National Council.”

By this, Bindi was referring to Buttiglione’s willingness to reach an agreement with the National Alliance, which she said would violate a declaration approved by the PPI National Council on Feb. 10 which states that the party is centrist, detached from both left- and right-wing forces, including the National Alliance.

In the 45 post-war years during which 52 Christian Democratic governments have risen and fallen, the neofascists had remained on the fringe of power until for the first time in history they formed part of the cabinet in the seven short months that Berlusconi’s government lasted.

Berlusconi fell from power in December after his ruling coalition lost its absolute majority when the federalist Northern League abandoned the ‘Polo de la Libertad’, also made up of Forza Italia and the National Alliance.

Northern League leader Umberto Bossi accused Berlusconi – owner of the country’s three largest private television channels – of using the office of prime minister to favour his own private interests.

Berlusconi’s opponents, such as the Leftist Democratic Party (PDS), are opposed to early elections being held in June, insisting that Dini’s government must first pull the country out of its current economic crisis.

According to PDS leader Massimo D’Alema, if Dini’s programme is successful, the failure of Berlusconi’s government in economic terms will stand out even more clearly, causing a further shrinkage of his popular support.

Meanwhile, analysts point out that the media mogul’s political future has been jeopardised by the investigation of his economic empire, Fininvest – second only to Fiat in Italy – on corruption charges by Milan-based ‘Clean Hands’ judges.