The fallout from Fukushima continues. Concerns about an effort by Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi to revive his country’s nuclear power program helped drive millions of Italians to the polls June 13, when they voted overwhelmingly to block any such revival amid safety concerns following the meltdown in March of the Japanese plant.
Berlusconi’s name didn’t appear on the ballots, which also offered voters the opportunity to overturn laws governing the privatization of water and a controversial measure protecting top government officials from prosecution. But it might as well have. Italy’s law on referendums requires more than a 50% turnout in order to overturn legislation. And while the opposition framed the vote as a referendum on the way the country is being governed, Berlusconi spent the days leading up to the polls challenging the nuclear power measure in court, declaring he wouldn’t vote and suggesting his fellow Italians stay at home too. “This vote was a mix of policies and politics,” says Roberto D’Alimonte, a professor of political science at Rome’s LUISS University. “It was about the issues, and it was about delivering another knockdown to Berlusconi.” The result was seen as an overwhelming rebuke to a man who has spent his career conflating the personal with the political. Some 57% of voters in Italy went to the polls, with roughly 95% voting to strike down the various laws. It was the first time the 50% threshold had been breached on a referendum since 1995.
The Prime Minister’s defeat is the latest in a yearlong series of setbacks and humiliations, in which he has seen his closest ally defect from his party, been brought to court on charges of juvenile prostitution and steadily seen his poll numbers slip. Two weeks ago, his ruling coalition suffered a resounding defeat in local elections, including in his political stronghold of Milan. While the most recent referendum is unlikely to have an immediate impact on the ability of Berlusconi to keep his ruling coalition together, the results are sure to reinforce his image as a politician clinging to the last months of his career.
Measures Berlusconi introduced when his consensus was strong are now weighing him down. In 2008, the Prime Minister overturned a 1987 decision during a similar referendum in which Italy’s voters ordered a halt to nuclear-energy production and the phasing out of the country’s existing power plants. In the wake of the meltdown in Fukushima, Berlusconi issued a one-year pause in Italy’s renascent atomic-energy program, but he also indicated he planned to reactivate it when passions cooled. The June 13 referendum results put the country’s nuclear power industry back in cold stasis.
