Berlusconi Tightens Grip After Italy Left Implodes

In the Sardinia elections, Berlusconi hand picked someone out of virtual obscurity and helped him win as island governor.

The implosion of Italy's centre-left opposition after a key resignation and a humiliating regional election defeat has left Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi with even more power to run the country and the economy virtually uncontested, political analysts said.

"It's not so much a one-coalition country any more as a one-person country," said James Walston, professor of political science at the American University of Rome.

The opposition to Berlusconi was weak, rudderless and faced with the spectre of an uncertain future one day after Walter Veltroni resigned as head of its largest group, the Democratic Party (PD).

The academic, bookish Veltroni quit after the PD took a drubbing in a regional election in Sardinia to Berlusconi's party, capping a sequence of setbacks and internal bickering.

Even the PD's official organ, l'Unita, which usually tries to put a brave face on bad news, was politically apocalyptic with its headline: "Who will save the PD?"

While the PD licks its wounds, the result for now is clear: despite a deep recession that would normally send opposition parties soaring, Berlusconi is consolidating his strength.

"It means that he can do more or less what he wants," Walston said, noting that Berlusconi already has very comfortable majorities in both houses of parliament.

"Berlusconi has become the lord of Italian politics," commentator Augusto Minzolini wrote in La Stampa newspaper.

Commentators said a weakened opposition means Berlusconi will also consolidate power within his centre-right bloc and this will give him a stronger hand in his sometimes scratchy relations with Italian President Georgio Napolitano.

"EMPEROR BERLUSCONI"

"His only opposition is internal now," said Walston. "He was already the emperor but even emperors have internal problems."

One of the parties in Berlusconi's coalition, the Northern League, is pushing for so-called fiscal federalism, where tax revenues are spent locally, while the National Alliance wants spending spread to the backward south, one of its power bases.

In the Sardinia elections, Berlusconi hand picked someone out of virtual obscurity and helped him win as island governor.

"His party's victory in Sardinia will show his own allies that they really can't do anything without him, that he is the key ingredient for them to stay in power," said Sergio Romano, a former ambassador and leading political analyst.

Romano also speculated that some lawmakers from the right wing of the centre-left could "leave the shipwreck" and defect. Berlusconi wants to push through constitutional reforms despite centre-left resistance "and now he will feel even more convinced that he can do it all alone," Romano said.

As for the future of the centre-left, some have called for a Soviet-style purge of the PD leadership, with the newspaper La Repubblica citing blogs calling for a new party "nomenclature".

A snap poll taken by La Repubblica showed that 77 percent of PD supporters wanted a change of leadership and a national congress before the European elections in June.

Veltroni, 53, a former Rome mayor, led the PD since it was created in 2007 by merging the post-Communist Democrats of the Left and the more centrist Daisy Party to form a broad, single party that excluded the extreme left.

But after his crushing defeat to Berlusconi in the April 2008 national vote and the more recent rout in the Sardinian regional election, that strategy may be reversed and the small, ultra-left splinter parties may be vindicated.

"The PD will need a long time to heal this wound and the big uncertainty is whether the small, radical leftist parties will be allowed back into the fold to run together for the European elections," Walston said.