One year after his resignation, former premier Silvio Berlusconi is not missed by the average Italians, but they are growing increasingly weary of the bitter austerity medicine that his successor, Mario Monti, has forced upon them. "Monti has restored our dignity ... people have understood this and are in some way grateful to him. The kind of personal stature Monti has allows them not to be ashamed," Giuseppe De Rita, president of Censis, Italy's top social research institute, told dpa.
Berlusconi left on November 12, 2011, in the midst of a financial crisis and a string of corruption and sex scandals. He was sentenced last month to four years' imprisonment for tax fraud and is still facing trial for his infamous "bunga bunga" night parties. "What really brought Berlusconi down is this feeling that he was sick, that he could not control himself, that all he had in mind were women. When the problem was his conflict of interests (...) people were happy to look the other way," De Rita said.
Upon taking office, Monti's technocratic administration passed an emergency austerity bill, including a hefty property tax, and raised the minimum retirement age. It later liberalised the labour market, notably by making job dismissals easier. Such tough measures "have allowed Italy to avoid a collapse that perhaps would have been drawn out and irreversible and could have also taken down Europe," Monti claimed in September.
Since last November, risk differentials between Italian and German 10-year public debt have fallen and the public deficit has almost been erased, even if overall debt remains high. This was achieved without the strikes and street violence seen in Greece and Spain.
But under Monti's watch, the economy has sunk further into a recession and unemployment is spiking. His reforms also caught out tens of thousands of older workers who accepted voluntary redundancy thinking they could retire, but now find themselves too young to draw a pension.
In September, jobless numbers swelled by 25 percent on an annual basis. Youth unemployment, up to 35.1 percent, is the highest in 24 years. Gross domestic product is expected to shrink by 2.3 percent this year. Critics from both the left and the right are up in arms. Renato Brunetta, an economic spokesman from Berlusconi's centre-right party, the People of Freedom, says the government went too far with austerity.
He calculates that Monti's budget-trimming measures amount to 63 billion euros (80 billion dollars) over three years. Brunetta claims that less than 50 billion euros would have been enough to balance the books. "The results are before everybody's eyes: recession, recession, recession. Or rather: depression, unemployment, collapse of investments, collapse of consumption, shops closing, firms laying off people," he wrote Monday in Il Giornale, a Berlusconi-owned paper.
Susanna Camusso, leader of the left-wing CGIL, Italy's biggest trade union, complained to RAI state broadcaster on Sunday that austerity had been "one sided," hitting workers and pensioners disproportionately. "This government, in the end, took an easy way out, taking money only from the usual suspects," she said. "We pay for this in terms of a fall in consumption, which means a fall in output and more unemployment."
Even peers of Monti, an economics professor, are unhappy. Francesco Giavazzi and Alberto Alesina wrote last month in Corriere della Sera, Italy's most respected daily, that the premier should have focused more on spending cuts and less on hiking taxes. Nearly 65 percent of Italians disapprove of Monti, according to a poll published Wednesday by the SpinCon institute.
But, despite his unpopularity, the non-partisan technocrat is still seen as a better option than Berlusconi and the other professional politicians vying to take power after next year's elections. Another poll this week, commissioned by the LA7 broadcaster, showed that Monti was the top choice when people were asked who they would elect as head of government - albeit with a low score of 15 percent.
Pietro Ichino, a senator for the centre-left Democratic Party, told dpa that "a large majority of Italians is determined to make even more sacrifices to allow Italy to play a leading role in the building of a new Europe." Ichino, a university professor and expert on labour issues, said it was "impossible even just to suggest" that Monti's reforms are to blame for rising unemployment, and indicated that they had already produced one benefit: "a marked fall" in litigations over job dismissals. He accepted that austerity measures had made the recession worse, but argued they were necessary after 30 years of debt-fuelled growth. "Already next year, I think, the facts will show that we made the right choice (with Monti)."
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