Italian politics set for new look, change of style
By Stephen Addison
ROME (Reuter): Romano Prodi's win in this week's general election will bring a new look and a change of style to Italian politics, commentators believe.
For a start, there are bound to be more men with beards.
Both in approach and political culture, the members of Prodi's center-left Olive Tree coalition are worlds apart from media tycoon Silvio Berlusconi and his right-leaning Freedom Alliance. Not for them the slick televisual approach or the perceived pursuit of personal objectives, which many political analysts believe helped doom Berlusconi.
Instead, the Olive Tree presents a more intellectual, serious face and marks a probable return to Italy's traditional consensus style of politics.
"They're a more serious group and they'll probably take a more serious approach to subjects like, for example, justice," said Patrick McCarthy, Professor of European Studies at Johns Hopkins University in Bologna.
Berlusconi's sustained attack on the judiciary was one aspect of his brief 1994 premiership which many Italians felt smacked of self-interest.
Seeing a man on trial for alleged bribery campaigning to limit magistrates' powers during this year's election worried a significant section of the electorate, several analysts believe.
It combined with an unease in political circles about Berlusconi's cavalier attitude and constitutional preference for making the office of president much stronger.
"He imported something new and destabilizing into Italian politics that united the center-left," said Gino Bedani, Professor of Italian at Swansea University in Wales.
"He broke the consensual mold and went against the deep-rooted culture of collaboration that marked both the Catholic and communist parties for decades."
That culture is likely to return under an Olive Tree government, many analysts believe, although not in the tarnished old image of smoke-filled rooms and revolving-door governments.
"This lot represent currents that go back a long way," said Johns Hopkins' McCarthy. "But they embody the modernization of Italy with a new, more pragmatic approach -- they're the Catholics and communists again but both renewed."
They are also far less telegenic.
Berlusconi, the beaming billionaire with the permanent sun tan, had carefully schooled members of his Forza Italia party in looking good on television.
They were encouraged to smile, to wear suits -- and not to sport beards. They were at ease in front of the cameras and came across well in televised debates.
By contrast the mild-mannered Prodi and his dour ally Massimo D'Alema, leader of the ex-communist Democratic Party of the Left, often appear uncomfortable under arc lights or in the frenzied scrum of Italian news conferences.
Not for them the high life or the links with the glamorous world of soccer which Berlusconi, owner of Italian champions AC Milan, used so assiduously to court popularity.
Prodi, for example is a bicycle-loving academic who has said he hopes to cycle to the prime minister's office. He is religious, academic and -- say his detractors -- far too colorless to lead a hot-blooded nation like Italy.
D'Alema is a lifelong leftist, a stern-looking, mustachioed intellectual who does not suffer fools gladly.
Together they hope to bring another radical change to Italy by staying in office for a full five-year term instead of the post- War average of ten months.
Their chances of doing that, many analysts believe, depend on reducing links with the hardline communists with whom they control the Chamber of Deputies and attracting the support of other centrist and federalist groups with a program of real constitutional reform aimed at ensuring stable government.