This might be seen as a defining moment for Silvio Berlusconi. He has, since the banking crisis, affected to regard Italy as sailing above the wreckage (to the extent it has it was because the Italian banks were too old fashioned to buy any of the new fangled financial instruments) and Silvio has not been slow to take some credit for the fact that everything seemed OK.
But with a budget deficit and ballooning debt it wasn’t OK. Now the crisis, a sovereign debt one rather than a bank liquidity one, is in his front garden and knocking on his door. When talking of excessive sovereign debt, the markets never really thought ‘Greece’; they might have thought a little bit ‘Spain’ (which has been downgraded recently) but what they really think is ‘Italy’. And Silvio obliged by posting even worse debt figures than had been expected.
What sort of opportunity is it for Silvio? Perhaps this most Italian of politicians, who uses charm and style to circumvent even the most dangerous moments can reinvent himself as the man who made austerity work, the man who saved Italy, even (and he has already mooted this) the man who saved the euro.
But to what end? He has three years left of his mandate. At the end of it he will be 76. True, that won’t make him the oldest ever (that was Fanfani, who held on until he was nearly 80) but times are changing, and the corrupt, immovable system which kept Fanfani, Andreotti and the rest in power is no more.
Really for Silvio it is too late. He should, as advised by this blog, have done this a lot earlier. His only hope is that he wants to be President, a post elected by MPs, and that he can threaten to carry on after 2013 unless they vote him in.
It is a tragedy of lost opportunity. A man with the country at his feet who did nothing until the markets forced him to.
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