Berlusconi suffers local election wipeout

Silvio Berlusconi has suffered the gravest electoral rout of his political life this week, with his centre-right coalition losing power in 11 regions from the far north of the peninsula to the heel of the boot.

Silvio Berlusconi has suffered the gravest electoral rout of his political life this week, with his centre-right coalition losing power in 11 regions from the far north of the peninsula to the heel of the boot.

The regional elections appeared to have been blotted out of the nation's consciousness by the death of the Pope, but in the event turnout was high at 71 per cent. And the result was freely admitted to have been a disaster by commentators on the right as well as the left.

Mr Berlusconi, closeted in Villa Arcore, his palatial home outside Milan, blamed everyone but himself.

"Now I really want to see," he was quoted as growling down the phone to a close ally, "how my two deputy premiers are going to explain themselves! It was their fault that we didn't play as a team. Self-criticism? It's the others who have to explain why they behaved in this fashion!"

It was a remarkable upset for the media billionaire who transformed Italian politics by launching his Forza Italia party 12 years ago, and whose government has ruled for longer than any other Italian government since the war. Mr Berlusconi has discovered that domination of 95 per cent of the nation's television output - enabling him to appear on talk shows that are in effect three-hour political broadcasts for himself - was not enough to quench growing dissatisfaction with his government's performance.

The "House of Liberties" coalition has now lost three regional and European elections in a row, each more decisively than the one before. The next general election is scheduled for the spring of 2006. Tony Blair's strongest European ally will need to move heaven and earth if he is to avoid a wipe-out.

The only consolation for the centre-right was that the candidate of the secessionist Northern League, a partner in the coalition, managed to hang on to Lombardy by a slender margin. Elsewhere the pattern was uniformly bleak.

Massimo Giannini of La Repubblica newspaper saw the loss of the other prosperous region, Piemonte, as bad news for Mr Berlusconi. The professionals and factory owners of the region, he said, "had entrusted Italy's keys to 'the Entrepreneur' [Berlusconi], convinced he would open the gates to an economic Eldorado". The loss of the region, he said spelt "the end of the dream".

Italy's economy has been stagnant for months; the only firms to have benefited from four years of Berlusconism are those controlled by his family.

But the news from the far south, traditional heartland of the post-Fascist Alleanza Nazionale, was no more cheering. In Puglia the winner was Niki Vendola, a Catholic gay communist and member of the Rifondazione Comunista, one of Italy's two communist parties.

The fact that Mr Vendola's triumph is also a potential long-term problem for the centre-left - crucially ditched by the Rifondazione the last time they were in government - does not detract from the embarrassment of his triumph. Mr Berlusconi is a visceral enemy of communists, attacking them at every opportunity. After the Puglia result came in, Gianfranco Fini, leader of Alleanza Nazionale and the second most important man in the government, said: "If we want to return to win, we must give up this crusade against communism."

The rest of Europe may have left communism behind years ago, but Mr Vendola proved it is still a force to reckon with in Italy.

Mr Berlusconi's leaked comments make it clear that he hopes to use the defeat to read the riot act to his coalition allies. The problem with this strategy is that his own party, Forza Italia, has fared far worse than the others in the coalition. As James Walston, professor of politics at the American University in Rome, put it: "It's more likely that they will read the riot act to him."

The result was "an earthquake, it's extraordinary. It's a serious wake-up call to Berlusconi and his people", Professor Walston said.

"It shows the depth of dissatisfaction, which until now no one had understood. It's not the style of Berlusconi's government that is the problem but the substance: the fact that it hasn't delivered. My suspicion is that he's close to his sell-by date."