On April 9, 2006, Italians will vote on Silvio Berlusconi's record as premier of Italy--and are expected to give a negative verdict. The likelihood is that a coalition of center-left and left-wing parties led by a former president of the European Commission, Romano Prodi, will take office, albeit with a slim majority. Whether Prodi will be able to govern effectively is another matter. The Union, as Prodi's coalition is named, consists of a dozen parties and includes former and actual communists along with socialists, liberals and Christian Democrats.
Who cares? "Political turmoil likely in Italy" is hardly a headline to set the pulse racing. Well, both the EU and the United States should care.
The United States should care because Italy, while scarcely an indispensable ally, has nevertheless been a steadfast friend of the United States in the past, most recently in Iraq and the War on Terror. A center-left government, despite the presence of Prodi himself and a number of other senior figures who are not anti-American, would probably be required for domestic political reasons to flirt with a Zapaterist line in foreign policy. This is because Prodi's majority will almost certainly depend for its survival on Rifondazione Comunista. Rifondazione's longtime leader, Fausto Bertinotti, proposes that Italy's broad foreign policy strategy should be an "activist" one that encourages "Europe" to scale down or even abandon military spending, "supersede" NATO and end the "military servitude" that "condemns free countries to be occupied by the military bases of other countries." Instead, Italy should redirect its energies towards aiding the Third World.
