Word: mastella
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Dates: during 2008-2008
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...stand or fall. It was the final evening act in a day's worth of high and low drama in the ornate chambers of the Italian Senate on Thursday. There were bombastic speeches by party members defying their leaders' orders on which way to vote. Former Justice Minister Clemente Mastella, who'd brought on the government crisis by yanking his support from Prodi, choked up as he recited a Pablo Neruda poem. One lawmaker was accused of spitting at another, as he screamed "traitor!", "piece of merda!" and made the gesture of firing a gun. The targeted Senator then duly...
...appeared evident to most that Prodi had lost his slim working majority in the Senate on Monday when Mastella announced that he was pulling out of the coalition following a magistrate's filing of influence-peddling charges against him and his local politician wife. Most expected Prodi to promptly submit his resignation, but the sometimes stubborn 68-year-old former European Union president challenged his fellow lawmakers to the individual oral vote on Thursday. After the vote, Prodi submitted his resignation to President of the Republic Giorgio Napolitano, who now has the task of either searching for Parliamentary support...
...fitting that the man who sparked the current predicament, Mastella, hails from the region of Campania, home to a wretched public-works emergency - trash has gone uncollected for weeks. And that is not the only reminder that distracted political leadership has direct consequences on people's lives. Another is the fate of a bill crafted by the Ministry of Social Affairs setting badly needed national standards for long-term elderly and disabled care. Raffaele Tangorra, a top technical official in the Ministry, would have expected no opposition to this nonpartisan proposal were it pushed through Parliament, as planned, this spring...
...these arguments may have their merits. But identifying the causes does little to remedy the problem. A better starting point might be to look for the rare attribute that Mastella claimed to possess: courage. There is a notable dearth of it among Italian politicians, and that is both cause and symptom of the malady afflicting public life. Political courage is, of course, something that can neither be spontaneously declared nor imposed by law. The most cynical Italians will say it is a concept that doesn't even exist. Still, there is no way out of the current gridlock without...
Prodi himself gave what might seem a bold speech to Parliament, seeking a vote of confidence after Mastella's exit. Chiding those fellow legislators who might have been planning an "opaque," backroom resolution to the crisis, he stated: "It is right that all comes to light in this place, in the halls of Parliament, the fundamental seat of democracy." But after his own closed-door coddling of allies in the government's 10-party coalition, he couldn't play even that card with much conviction. Twenty months of constant internal bickering, and a half-dozen near or real crises, have...