Less than Dolce Vita.

• Author: Gilbert, Mark

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. Weil, 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.

How much such views will directly impact Italy's relations with the United States is unclear. U.S. bases are probably at no risk of closure. What is certain is that a Union government will be less supportive of U.S. policy in the Middle East than Berlusconi has been. Prodi himself has more than once described the war in Iraq as a historic error. Over Iraq, the only question now is whether Italy retires its contingent by the end of 2006, as Berlusconi's defense minister, Antonio Martino, promised in late January, or whether Rifondazione and the Far Left will constrain a Prodi government to pull out at once as a gesture of disrespect for the American empire. Over Palestine and Iran, there is little chance of a Union government siding with a hard U.S. line. Both the stability of the government and the personal convictions of the Center Left's leadership rule this out.

The EU should care about a future center-left government and political turmoil in Italy because the country's public finances are in disarray. Neither Prodi's coalition nor the outgoing government has convincing ideas about how to get them back into shape. The Italian state today is rather like the overindebted U.S. homeowner: It is somehow making ends meet but will suffer like sin if lenders start demanding a higher return for their money. An Italy that opts to escape from the rubbing harness of permanent fiscal rigor by inflating its obligations away is not an unimaginable proposition, and it is one that alarms the European Central Bank and other EU governments.

There are, therefore, plenty of good reasons for thinking that Italy's coming election matters. Although Italy lives in a permanent state of high political fever, its crises do sometimes cease to be amusing comic opera for the rest of the world and become authentic foreign policy dilemmas. This happened in the 1970s, when the Communist Party became a de facto member of the government (and arguably kept the political system from falling apart), and in the early 1990s, when the postwar political...