European Politics

Here's a (faintly surprising) thing.

The Italians hate the French.

This puts them in that exclusive world club: "Everyone who isn't French".

Using World Wars as an example (and I'm British, so I enjoy doing that):

The Germans and the British fight on, pointlessly, until everyone is dead.

The French build big, futile walls to cower behind. Throw down their guns at the first sign of trouble, and spend the rest of the war sneering at the occupying force whilst plying them with Champagne and coffee.

The Italians, when outnumbered on one side, simply turn around and start firing the other way.

You have to admire their pragmatism.

I am, to all intents and purposes, employed by the EU. I enjoy this state of affairs; it appeals to my hand-wringing, limp-wristed, Guardian reading side (and lets face it, I'm fairly one dimensional).

However, the Italians also hate each other. There's a term for it, Campanilissimo, which means, vaguely literally, bell-tower lover. They're wedded to their region far more than they are to Rome or the other states of Italy. It's been less than 150 years since Garibaldi, Cavour and Vittorio Emmanuelle II (and trust me, in Piedmont you're never more than 5 inches from a street, piazza or monument dedicated to one or all of them) united Italy into a bunch of slightly resentful provinces hell bent on hating each other.

In recent years this has boiled down to a North v South thing. In the South the economy is built on tourism and crime; in the North it's built on proper things like the manufacture of coffee grinders and high fashion.

The North views the South as little more than idle scroungers too bone idle to do more than fleece the occasional tourist. The South see Northerners as little more than wannabe Germans.

The government takes a pragmatic (natch) line and deals with this by collapsing into anarchy every few months.

So we have an election coming!

This boils down to no more than 'which corrupt tycoon do you want to rule you for the next few months until their inevitable downfall'.

Sylvio Berlusconi, famed through-out Italy as a man able to hold on to power for more than 10 days, is hotly tipped by the media as the man most likely to win the next election. He's got a proven track record, they say, and he enjoys widespread support from almost every TV pundit and newspaper editor in the country.

Silvio Berlusconi happens to own almost every TV station and newspaper in the country.

Go figure, eh?