Italian Election

This week, I was following the italian election with keen interest. I have visited and lived Italy different times. Even though, I like watching Italian football and love the fine Italian cuisine, I have never understood the Italian political system and how unpredictable it is. My familiarity with Italy has to do with colonial legacy. Somalia was an Italian colony.
Italy had short and unstable coalitions to form governments for about four decades. Its Prime Ministers such Bettino Craxi and Giulio Andreotti were known to be somewhat corrupt. Then came the rich cavalier Berlusconi who was the longest serving PM for 5 years.
Back to the election results. Romano Prodi, a former Italian prime minister and former president of the European Commission and his centre-left party had a narrow margin to win the elections. However, this victory is being challenged vigorously by Berlusconi.
According to the latestst news from BBC “Italy’s centre-left opposition leader Romano Prodi has been declared official winner of the parliamentary election after an extremely close race. But his rival, centre-right PM Silvio Berlusconi, refused to admit defeat, saying there had been irregularities.”
This challenge from Berlusconi shows how Italy is headed to uncertain times and how it will be difficult find a way out of this mess. What is even worse is the Italian electoral system is more complicated. I tried to understand how it works but to no avail. Here is what I got from extensive reading on newspapers in both Italian and English.
The Italain electoral system is based on a proportional representation. They have two houses like the Congress and the Senate here in United States of America:
Chamber of the Deputies or as it is known the “Lower House” has 630 seats and 617 of these seats are elected according to the “popular Vote” 12 seats are elected by Italian citizens abroad and the reamining seat is for the semi-autonomous region of Valle D’Aosta in the North. The “Upper House” or the Senate has also a similar system.
The margin of victory of Mr. Prodi is so small. According to The New York Times: “The final results, released late Tuesday, showed Mr. Prodi winning the lower house with 49.8 percent of the votes, compared to Mr. Berlusconi’s 49.7.”
Prodi will form a government with a sizeable majority even though he only beat Berlusconi by 0.1 percent of the popular vote of 38 million. That amounts to a difference of just 25,000 votes.
The American Florida election blunder in 2000 that bidded Al Gore against Bush would look like nothing compared to the looming Italian vote contest. This contest is much bigger. Berlusconi will not concede that easily. He has several TV stations and newspapers and a lot of money at his disposal to keep on contesting. It may continue for weeks until they count all the ballots. Maybe the Italian Supreme Court just like its American counterpart will have the final say of who is the victor here and what ballots to count or not.
Italy’s problems is not only about this political nightmare and uncertainity. The Italian economy is in shambles. Italy’s economy was declining for the past decade especially the years Berlusconi was in power. Some economists blame Berlusconi for this economic stagnation.
According to the Economist: “Italy is caught in a long, slow decline. Reversing it will take more courage than its present political leaders seem able to muster”

French Riots

Reflections on The French Riots

I am little bit hesitant to at least make sense on the continuing French riots over new employment laws.

There have been large demonstrations in which millions of people took to the streets to voice their opposition of the new job regulations. The new law dubbed the First Job Contract (CPE) gives firms the right to lay off those under 26 any time during a two-year period. This new law was initially promoted as a means to improve the youth unemployment.

The government thought that the new laws would encourage companies to hire young. The French youth unemployment is estimated to be at 22 percent. The number of the unemployed youth is even higher when you consider the unemployment rate among the children of North African immigrants. The unemployment rating for this group is 40 percent according to many sources and a big part of this is because companies are reluctant to hire younger workers.
There were more violent riots last year from this underprivileged youth group about the death of two young French-African teenagers. However, the riots were also a symptom of the dissatisfaction of these jobless alienated youth had with the France’s employment system. At the time of these riots, I was very sympathetic to the cause of these young people. There is a prevalent racism in French society against African Muslim immigrants.

But I am not sure how I could give support to a protest that seems so unreasonable.

I am little bit confused about the French government or system but from what I read of the riots, the French government is supposed to act both as welfare socialist state and capitalist one. The government employs a large number of these rioting kids parents. The kids know their parents had guaranteed life employment with the state and perhaps that is what they want and used to. Things have changed and now the government cannot continue being a welfare state and is no longer going to guarantee jobs.

The government seems run out of money and that is why they reforming the system and letting companies fire any employee as they see it fit. The government is possibly wanted to follow suit and reduce their large public employees. There is little public government-run enterprise. However, the government wants the private sector to follow suit and at the same time they don’t want to restrict these companies and thus they want to implement these laws so as not to cancel the competitive advantage of the market-based economy.

The unemployment problem in France is nothing. France had high unemployment rates since the eighties. France has to put into practice some employment and economic reform that truly reflects the free market economy.