Only Beppe Grillo knows

The Italian elections continue to provide amusement, albeit far from my usual obsession with war and peace.  At this writing, not too many hours after the polls closed, the votes are counted.  Surprised?  This is a bit like waiting for luggage at Fiumicino:  the electronic board predicts to the minute when your luggage will arrive, and it does!

It looks as if the leftist coalition of Pier Luigi Bersani has won in the lower house by a very slim margin of popular votes.  But the leading party there gets a “premium” of seats that will enable him to wield a comfortable majority.  In the Senate, Silvio Berlusconi’s rightist coalition is a couple of seats ahead, if I am to believe the algorithm nerds at La Repubblica.  Comedian Beppe Grillo will hold the votes needed to gain approval in the upper house.  He can’t make Berlusconi prime minister, but he could make it impossible to form a new government.  The far more serious and sober Mario Monti, who so ably steered Italy through the shoals of financial crisis for the past year, will not have enough seats to make the difference.  His big real estate tax increase weighed heavily against him.

This is Italy:  the leftist candidate is the more fiscally conservative one.  The right is much less likely to meet the needs of the financial markets, which is at least one reason American markets fell today on the news (though the impending sequester is likely another reason).  Of course this should really be comprehensible in Washington:  American deficits rose sharply under George W. Bush and in the first year of Barack Obama but have been declining for several years since.  Of course in Italy there is also pressure for government spending cuts.  Berlusconi never implemented any significant restructuring during three terms (10 years) as prime minister and isn’t likely to do any better the fourth time around.  He could of course overcome the current electoral impasse by offering to join Bersani in a national solidarity government, perhaps even one with Monti as prime minister again.

But he shows as little sign of willingness to do that as to rein in his foul behavior.  I’ll be in Rome next month:  I’ll be asking how any woman could vote for such a mascalzone.  The issue isn’t whether he paid for sex with underage girls.  The issue is how little respect he has for women in general.

The key question now is what Beppe Grillo will do.  That is the most unpredictable thing in Italian politics these days.  To call him an iconoclast would minimize his resistance to paying Italy’s debts and remaining in the Eurozone.  To call him a populist would minimize his promises to introduce a 20-hour work week and free internet and tablet computers for everyone.  To call him a comedian would minimize the seriousness of his attack on privilege and corruption.

Italy of course has big problems:  its mountain of public debt, its slow economic growth, its lagging exports, its aging population, its youth unemployment, its shaky banking system, its corruption, its organized crime and its scandal-ridden church, just to name a few.   All of this now falls in the lap of someone who is better known for attracting hordes to V(affanculo) demonstrations than for deliberating seriously on issues of state.  His choice is whether to back a former Communist who promises continuing austerity, which isn’t likely to be popular in piazza, or block government formation and push the country to a new election.

I have no doubt what I would choose.  The combination of Monti’s sobriety about the budget deficit with Grillo’s passion for rooting out corruption in the public sector could be healthy.  President Giorgio Napolitano, a former Communist himself, is likely to favor a left-supported government with Monti at the helm.  It is hard to see how Grillo and Berlusconi, who in any event will not have a majority in the lower house unless the cavaliere wins a new election, would do anything more than roil markets with pledges to cut taxes and failure to cut expenditures.

But if Italians agreed with me they wouldn’t have given Berlusconi 30% of the vote. Nor would any Italian who agreed with me have given Beppe Grillo the votes needed to block Monti from finishing the serious work he started.  Such are the glories of democracy.  The Italians are entitled to, and deserve, the government they have voted for.  But only Beppe Grillo knows what that is.