The prospect should be unthinkable, but polls suggest that Italians may pick Silvio Berlusconi for a third stint as prime minister in their quest for a government.
Leave aside the conflict of interest with his media and business empire, and his amendment, while in office, of laws on penal justice that helped him to sidestep charges of false accounting. Leave aside, too, for a moment, his reform of the electoral laws that has returned Italy to the days of splintering governments that cannot withstand the strain of difficult decisions for much more than a year.
But even considering his record in office, there is not enough to warrant a return. If people want to attempt a justification, they point to two slivers of reform on pensions and employment. That is all they can do, because there are no other cases where Berlusconi clearly acted for Italy's benefit rather than his own. It is true that he managed to push through a reform of Italy's costly pensions, raising the retirement age from 57 to 60, to come into action this year. The reform, known as the Maroni law, aimed to curb costs that eat up more than 15 per cent of gross domestic product.
It is also true that Romano Prodi, who has just resigned after losing a confidence vote, watered this down, delaying its effect for three years. This appears to be a backwards step - except that the Berlusconi “reform” was never solid. In drawing up the law he kicked its start into the next term, knowing that a new government would have to reaffirm its support and would almost certainly fail. Prodi's “delay” is the same tactic that Berlusconi used: postponing a measure for which any appearance of consensus was an illusion.
Berlusconi's second reform, the “Biagi law”, allowed employers to offer more flexible contracts. It was named after Professor Marco Biagi, killed in 2002 by the Red Brigades for proposing such reforms, a reminder that opposing Italy's entrenched interests can be lethal. It did begin to boost employment, studies found, although under Prodi's coalition unions had clawed back some changes.
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Berlusconi also trimmed some taxes, but that worsened public finances: Italy broke the European Union rule that debt should not exceed 3 per cent of gross domestic product in every year from 2002 to 2006. The growth that Berlusconi claimed would follow did not. In December the OECD economic forecast revised down Italy's growth to 1.3 per cent, underperforming the eurozone, as it had for a decade.
Berlusconi's most damaging legacy was his 2005 reform of the 1993 electoral law. He replaced the strong first-past-the-post element, which produced workable parliaments, releasing Italy from decades of toppling governments, with proportional representation and very low thresholds for competing, which was bound to inflate the power of tiny parties. His Forza Italia party hoped to minimise its losses in 2006 (although, as it turned out, it may have done better under the old system), and to worsen the problems for any new government. In that, it succeeded. Prodi's nine-party coalition, which crumbled once over troops in Afghanistan, never had a chance of pushing through reforms. Nor, given the rift between Left and Right that bedevils Italian politics, will any precarious coalition. Italy needs many things, but first it needs a government strong enough to repeal the law that has cursed it, once again, with weak coalitions.
It is preposterous for Berlusconi to claim that only he can release Italy from a serious problem that was his own creation.