John Lloyd

Western youth are not what they used to be. Richer, better educated, more independent-minded than their forebears –they were once equipped for all conceivable futures.

But now, what future can they conceive?

These are the young men and women for whom the forward march of the generations has halted. Social normalcy was once defined as things only getting better. But now, not. What mixture of circumstances, what global alchemy, can put them back on that track once more?

For us in the older generations (40 years old and up), it is heartbreaking, even guilt-making, to hear of friends’ sons and daughters failing to find or to keep work. We see some of this firsthand, as increasing numbers of young people rely on or move in with their families, sometimes by preference and often out of necessity. Richard Settersten, a professor of human development at Oregon State University, says his research shows the young are:

“not hooked into jobs that provide decent wages, that provide insurance, that are stable and secure … the need to provide for growing adults is placing new and significant strains on a lot of American families, even middle-class families.”

One couple I know, medical researchers in London, have their early- and mid-twenties son and daughter at home. Two of their kids’ friends have also joined them, caught homeless when they could no longer afford an apartment and could not live with distant parents if they were to keep up the unpaid internships they hope will be transmuted into paying jobs.

Some working-class kids got an education their fathers and mothers did not have – and are now finding it doesn’t guarantee a job. For others, even the service and clerical jobs that have largely replaced manual and skilled work are shrinking relentlessly.

Ben Bernanke, head of the Federal Reserve, devoted part of his somewhat opaque speech in Jackson’s Hole at the end of last month to the need for the Fed to do more to tackle U.S. unemployment: It’s at 8.1 percent, and for youth (16-24) at 17.1 percent.

The rain in Spain is much harder on the young. More than half of Spanish young people – over 53 percent – have no job and little prospect of getting one in an economy in negative growth. The U.N.’s International Labor Organization’s figures, out this past week, showed a youth jobless rate of 17.5 percent this year in developed economies: That figure is due to fall a little, the ILO forecasts, but largely because “discouraged” kids give up on jobs altogether. The ILO had earlier called these people, worldwide, a “scarred” generation for whom jobs were no longer thought even an option – or if they were, they were precarious and low paid.

The West has been, and in some places still is, a great new jobs machine, and remains inventive, entrepreneurial and driven. Yet Indian and Chinese companies are poking into the old Western heartlands: Land Rover and Jaguar, British brands for decades, are now owned by the Indian company Tata; and Volvo, which defined itself as Swedish in its solidity and security, belongs to the Chinese company Zhejiang Geely, which plans to put future factories in China and to headquarter the company in Shanghai. Huawei is now the largest telecom equipment supplier, having overtaken Sweden’s Ericsson; Haier is among the world’s largest electrical appliance makers; and Lenovo is now pressing Hewlett-Packard for first place in PC production. These moves can bring jobs as well as destroy them, but the creation is less than the destruction. We are reduced to hoping that the large contradictions that run through Chinese society – a slowing economy, a vast gulf in wealth, a restive working class, an empowered middle class and a monopolistic Communist Party – will cause a period of turmoil, which will give us some respite from their relentless economic success.

Yet to see only the fundamental and possible fatal flaws in Chinese politics is to ignore the gathering crisis in our own. Western democratic practice presupposed an active electorate – one generally satisfied with the political arrangements as they are, content to leave most details, even strategies, to a political class without interfering too much. It was willing and able to rationally choose between competing political offers according to government performance.

That isn’t what we have now. The distrust and dislike expressed by Western electorates for their governing and most opposition parties is now intense. Everywhere, if in different degrees of intensity, the crisis is being addressed by cuts to what had been social entitlements. Even where one concedes their necessity, the obvious result is that those with not much get less.

And there seems nothing those who are getting less can do as the rich remain rich and usually take care to get richer.

We are at a critical stage. What to do?

First, start at the other end from the young – at the older middle-aged, who are stepping into pension and other entitlements that will load burdens on to their kids. In a much-discussed column, New York Times writer and former Executive Editor Bill Keller argued that “we should make a sensible reform of entitlements our generation’s cause.” Stanford University founded a Longevity Center six years ago with the explicit mission “to redesign long life,” so that men and women can contribute to (rather than take from) the economy deep into their eighties. Laura Carstensen, the director, says that “to the degree that people reach old age mentally sharp, physically fit, and financially secure, the problems of individual and societal aging fall away” – a statement redolent of American optimism, and a great goal.

Second, we should try to get at the rich. (Some have been got at already, most successfully by themselves.) They should be asked to give large portions of their wealth to help solve national and global problems. But many haven’t. We should make sure they know that their vast wealth will, increasingly, put society – and them – at danger: that increased impoverishment will inflame anger and that the social base for their enjoyment of great wealth will erode. Wealth is often the result of hard work and risk-taking, but coal miners, fishermen and nurses know about that too, and usually die in modest circumstances. Guilt and fear are not to be scorned as engines of change.

And for the youth generations themselves: You have more to fear from despair than from life itself. It’s you who need to generate the energy that turns your collective plight into a space for creativity and innovation. Blaming “them” – the politicians, the elders, the teachers, “society” – is deadly. Deadliest is a turn into crime and violence that sets group against group, the scared majority against the angry minority. The memory of London’s riots a year back should teach you that. Above all, your discouraged generation needs courage.

PHOTO: Job seekers wait in front of the training offices of Local Union 46, the union representing metallic lathers and reinforcing ironworkers, in the Queens borough of New York, April 29, 2012. REUTERS/Keith Bedford 

The European crisis isn’t over until the First Lady pays, and the First Lady of Europe, Angela Merkel, cannot pay enough. She needs to erect a large enough firewall to ensure that the European Union’s weaker members do not, again, face financial disaster. That will not happen – which means the euro faces at least defections, and perhaps destruction.

The crisis had seemed to recede somewhat in early 2012, and the headline writers moved on. But it had only seemed to recede, and relaxation was premature. As Hugo Dixon of Reuters’ Breaking Views put it on Monday, “the risk is that, as the short-term funding pressure comes off, governments’ determination to push through unpopular reforms will flag. If that happens, the time that has been bought will be wasted – and, when crisis rears its ugly head again, the authorities won’t have the tools to fight it.”

But the underlying tension remains between high indebtedness in nearly all the EU countries and the need to pare back public spending without suffocating the economies. The flat, or negative, growth lines in the same countries that are indebted are likely to be made worse as demand falls and a malign cycle threatens.

Merkel commands the stage, but she is a constrained commander. She has an electorate and a parliament that has been reluctant to agree to more assistance to those whom many Germans see as architects of their own misfortune, not to be trusted to do anything other than load the burden on to the backs of hard-working Northerners.

In other parts of the Union, signs of strain now manifest themselves daily. In France, the leading candidates – President Nicolas Sarkozy and Socialist contender François Hollande – have turned inward and, in the words of a sharply worded Economist editorial, while “it is not unusual for politicians to ignore some ugly truths during elections … it is unusual, in recent times in Europe, to ignore them as completely as French politicians are doing.”

Sarkozy has transformed himself from responsible European statesman into an anti-immigrant, anti-free-trade superpatriot (and his ratings improved). Hollande, from the Socialist Party’s moderate wing, has likewise transformed, but into a “hater” of the rich. Both see strong contenders to their right and left: Marine Le Pen of the far-right Front National has faltered recently – perhaps because Sarkozy has stolen some of her clothes – but she still polls at around 14 percent. And on the left, former Socialist minister Jean-Luc Mélenchon has swung hard-left, put together a group that includes the Communist Party, and seen his support rising in the latest poll, for LH2/Yahoo, up to 15 percent so far.

Britain is not in the euro but is deeply dependent on European resurgence. Its Conservative-Liberal coalition government finds itself faced with strikes by tanker drivers – men with a capacity for squeezing a nation’s windpipe – and plunging polls. Nor is anyone else enjoying support. All the main party leaders see their ratings deep into negative territory; and in a by-election last week, the renegade Labour MP George Galloway played for and won a heavily Muslim vote in the city of Bradford, destroying a long-held Labour majority.

Italy’s governing technocrats, led by Mario Monti, enjoyed a honeymoon even as they sketched out a program of cuts, but now enter a tougher time. The government wants to remove or at least dilute Article 18 of the labor code, which makes it hard for employers to fire workers. The unions have threatened strike action, and Monti, earlier this week, agreed to a compromise with political leaders – but no one knows if the unions will accept it. The Italian press agrees: The hard pounding on his government has begun.

Spain’s center-right government passed a budget last week that was described as “the most austere in democratic history,” with £27 billion worth of cuts. The day before it was passed, a general strike flared across the country, with 1 million protesters on the streets. The government itself fears that the depths of the cuts will stall any growth and that the huge unemployment, especially among the young, will become uncontrollable.

And now little Ireland, which had been the good girl of the euro class, taking its medicine without complaint, has turned. A group of parliamentarians called on their fellow citizens not to pay a recently levied flat-rate property tax – and were (presumably) gratified to see that, by the weekend deadline to register for the tax, half of the eligible population had not done so, signaling a taxpayers’ revolt. Thomas Pringle, one of the MPs, was quoted as saying that “if a law is unfair and unjust you have a right to oppose it.” Ireland, which had begun to recover early last year, has seen two quarters of negative growth, slipping the country into recession.

All of this is bad, but worse is the straining away from conventional politics. It takes different forms. The victorious George Galloway, the Bradford victor and a man of apparently indefatigable ability who can muster a ruthless populism, is less important (though not in his own eyes) than the contempt that seems to attend the harassed leaders of the British parties. Parties of the far right and left are significant in France and Greece. In the Netherlands, Geert Wilders’ far-right Party for Freedom has, by contrast suffered a drop in popularity – but that seems to be because he has supported the center-right government, and thus tarnished himself in the eyes of voters impatient for radical action on immigration and crime. Italy’s main parties have been given a holiday from government and even from opposition; but they do not seem to be putting it to use to prepare themselves for hard choices when, as he has promised, Mr. Monti bows out early next year.

Yet only the mainstream parties can command and defuse this crisis. That is not because they have an automatic right to fill the political stage, but because no alternative that can plausibly present itself as better has emerged. The far left and right recycle their nostrums: the end of capitalism or the end of immigration. The Green Party, once a real force in some states, is back to minor status everywhere.

No force, conventional or novel, has yet been able to articulate and win assent for a manifest truth: that Europe’s centrality to world events, wealth and cultural dominance over long centuries are now much reduced, and the decades of growth that brought relative wealth and ease are over. We need not sink, but we have to paddle harder if we wish not to. This crisis is not gone if and when the continent’s finances are made less perilous. If and when that happens, the next mountain to climb is to discover a political and economic structure that can ensure renewed growth, if possible without further gross inequity and without further pollution (some trick!). The challenge of the emerging countries is not just to the cost of labor and the survival of industries: It is to the very understanding we in the West have of our world and our place in it.

The U.S. has sheltered Europe since the war. Europe outsourced most of its defense, and enjoyed – as did the rest of the world – trade, air, shipping and Internet pathways kept open by, in the end, U.S. power. Now, a raft of jeremiads, by Zbigniew Brzezinski, Robert Kagan and Ian Bremmer, all out this year, point to a dangerous, much more anarchic world that would emerge if the global sheriff lacked the strength to take his boots off the desk and ride out. All of these see Europe as of little help, either unable or unwilling – or both – to shoulder a burden that now urgently needs sharing. The salvation of the euro, and of the Union, is of global import. It has yet to be ensured.

Speak now to an intelligent European politician (having assured him or her that the conversation is off the record) and you will discover a deeply worried representative — and one who leaves you in a similar state. Whether they are in the European parliament or a national legislature, European politicians are now constrained to contemplate their powerlessness. And ours.

Ordinary members of parliaments often feel like that. But ministers, even of small states, who have been elected to represent, propose, plan and legislate, now feel it too, and more acutely. Especially in the countries that remain devoted to the idea that the state should protect its people from the hardships and, in some cases, the vicissitudes of life, people have been accustomed to expect much more in the way of protection. But politicians must now offer less. For many citizens, that provision, coupled with security, was the point of government. But now, as each week brings little respite, ministers, prime ministers and presidents feel powerless.

In part this is because one state, Germany, emasculates all others. It acts — nominally — with France, but the latter’s weakened economy and politically weaker president, Nicolas Sarkozy, makes the duopoly at the apex of the European Union one of the weak providing political cover for the strong more than a true meeting of equals. On Angela Merkel’s decisions, and those of the German parliament, hangs the fate of nations. She has not wished it so: Those who make the parallel between the Nazi savagery of 70 years ago and Germany’s present power indulge in a facile radicalism that owes nothing to observable reality. Yet however reluctantly, she disposes for a continent.

This reduces politicians in other states to colonial administrators, constrained to follow the policies determined by Berlin, endorsed by France, and proclaimed as inevitable by prevailing economic opinion. It means that when their unions demonstrate, their small businesses cry for help, their students grow hopeless about jobs and careers, and their vulnerable and aging citizens grow fearful for their supports and pensions, they can only say: It will pass, we will return to growth and the good times will roll once more. And yet they don’t know if it’s true.

They are paralyzed, caught between two sets of headlights bearing down upon them. Germany has decreed that all members of the euro zone sign on to a pact that will make  the economic and financial levers of national governance dependent on a central EU power — a move on which the European citizens are not to be consulted and that comes at a time when there is a gathering revulsion against the Union.

To say it is undemocratic is to say the obvious. In the member states, parties of the far right and left, long hostile to the EU, denounce it at meetings and in statements. The strongest of the extremists of the right, Marie Le Pen’s Front National party, which poses a real threat to Sarkozy’s ability to remain on the ballot through to the second round of France’s presidential election in April, has soft-pedaled its racism but accelerated its anti-Europeanism. One of its militants, a translator named Guy Rondel, was quoted in the Financial Times this week as saying that “I think we should leave Europe. They decide everything and we have no say.” How much that remains a minority view depends on the success of the French president’s Merkel maneuver. Failure would play well for Ms. Le Pen.

If countries took Mr. Rondel’s advice, and left “Europe,” or at least the euro, then, indeed, democracy could be restored. Control of the currency would allow a devaluation, making domestically produced goods cheaper both at home and abroad. Fiscal decisions could again be taken by ministers. Industries could be protected.

But the relief would be temporary. Indeed, it might be illusory. The restoration of the drachma, the peseta or the lire would be followed by a ferocious attack on the new/old currency, driving it down — and leaving the government and the banks with debts even more vast because they are still denominated in euros. Unemployment, already high, would leap. Faith in conventional politics, already faltering, would collapse. Democracy would tremble, extremism gain.

The promise of the EU was to provide both protection and dynamism; the former from a welfare state, the latter from the removing of barriers to the international market. Protection, in many states, cannot be sustained at past levels. Dynamism, meanwhile, happened largely in Germany and the Scandinavian countries, while the southern states borrowed heavily over the past decade to finance their welfare states and disguise their decreasing competitiveness.

Governments, banks and corporations were all complicit in this. But so were citizens, forgetting all the tedious old warnings, dating back as far as Polonius in Hamlet: “Neither a borrower nor a lender be.” (And wasn’t Polonius king of the bores?) They racked up easily extended debt, careless of a reckoning. Now the reckoning is here, and its stakes are higher than even the Poloniuses thought.

Faced with a rapidly devaluing mandate, the intelligent European politician can do little but hope that Germany, the great European phoenix of our time, knows what it’s doing and will do it with care, returning us to growth. But it will do so without our assent. Because we have taken ourselves into a cul de sac from which there is no democratic exit.

PHOTO: A combination of three pictures shows German Chancellor Angela Merkel as she reacts during a discussion of the BELA (Broader European Leadership Agenda) foundation at the Neues Museum art gallery in Berlin, February 7, 2012.    REUTERS/Fabrizio Bensch

We Europeans are in the mud of agony, but our hearts are among the stars of bliss. Our anthem is Beethoven’s setting – in the last movement of his 9^th Symphony – of Schiller’s Ode to Joy, a work of transcendent romantic idealism, above all in its central claim – “All men will be brothers!” (“Alle menschen werden bruder”: in the fashion of the time, Schiller meant all humanity).

Adopted as Europe’s official anthem 40 years ago, it is supposed to be played rather than sung – one wouldn’t want to give the impression that Germans dominated the continent!  But it is sometimes voiced, as in 2004, when an orchestra was playing it on the German-Polish border on the occasion of Poland’s accession to the European Union, and the crowd sang Schiller’s words. Given Polish-German history, to sing that humanity will be united in love was a moving event.

The union of Europe was conceived and furthered in much that same vaulting romantic spirit. To be sure, it had its feet on the ground: a coal and steel community was the foundation of the Union. Among its most solid – and perhaps most lasting – achievements are in furthering common rules for trade, for investment and for services: the common market.

But the ideal behind it, the moving spirit of its founders, was to create structures which would make war impossible – to so bind the economies and the societies of the continent together that attempts at conquest of one over the other would be unthinkable. Thus it would work to bring Europeans together in amity, and have them explore their common European, rather than national, identity.

Later, from the seventies on, it became a democratic home for countries coming out of dictatorship – Greece, Portugal and Spain first, then the former Communist states of Central and Eastern Europe. The explicit promise was that a European framework would be a protection against domestic dictators and foreign tyrants – the shades of the Soviet Union/Russia lay darkly across the invocation of the latter.

For the more ardent spirits among the pro-Europeanists – and a few of these remain, though their voice is muted – Europe’s destiny was the achievement of statehood. It would of course have a federal structure to give substantial autonomy to the nations, but it would also have a centralized power which could and would express a unified political will, one capable of standing beside the current global hegemon, the USA and any future great power, like China.

But in these grand constructions and visions, two elements were forgotten – or at least ignored. One was the people of Europe; and the second was that the people of Europe thought of themselves as Europeans only sometimes: they otherwise stubbornly cleaved to their national identities.

The people of Europe had approved of much that was done. Especially in the years after the war, when Europe was reconstructing itself from ruins (leaning heavily on Marshall Plan aid from the U.S.), and the horror of war was fresh in the minds of all, the prospect of No More War was both a hope and an inspiration. For the political classes of the vanquished, in Germany and in Italy, the new Union was a means of national civic renewal: an implicit pledge to their neighbours that they were no longer militaristic in outlook, nor did they seek national glory through conquest.

National pride was taken, instead, in the renunciation of conquest. For Germany in particular, where war-guilt was by far the heaviest, a European destiny was a means of purging that guilt. And there was a largely uncontroversial acceptance on the part of the Germans, which lasted for decades, that they would show their pacific, good-European, side by paying the largest share of the bills.

For the nations on the winning side, Europe was both an insurance policy against war and a means of increasing national wealth through supranational agreement. France, the mostly undisputed political leader of Europe (the UK stayed on the sidelines, a late joiner, semi-detached after joining), saw the Union as a means of extending its power and its culture.

But in its growth, the Union became increasingly complex. Its centers of power proliferated, and these were led and administered by people of whom most Europeans knew little or nothing. Though most of the media (British newspapers were the major exception) were friendly to – indeed, dangerously uncritical of – the project, it became common journalistic parlance that stories with “Europe” in the headline were seen by readers or viewers as boring. Journalism, however large its democratic claims, is largely a for-profit business. It does not stick with boring for long.

Distance bred resentment; ignorance bred suspicion. As “Europe” dealt with issues that became increasingly arcane or high-flown or both, the concerns of the Europeans who thought of themselves as French, Dutch, Italian, or German took precedence. When, in 2005, the first two of these voted in separate referenda on the ratification of the treaty establishing a European Constitution, the proposal to ratify was defeated – decisively in France, resoundingly in the Netherlands.

Not all politics are local, but few are more than national. The ideals of Europe were and are fine: but the purchase its institutions have on the hearts and minds of Europeans was and is too slight. Beneath the current financial and banking crises, there lies a longer-lasting democratic one: a failure of identification with the human side of what seems an impersonal engine, created by elites and largely confined to them.

The Europeans see, in the governments, parties and  parliaments  of their countries, figures they know. They may dislike them for their beliefs and their actions; hold their politics in contempt; vote against them when they can. But popular movements have, through the centuries, fought to establish these institutions to express common wills – to both conduct national business and to confine the antagonisms of class and ethnicity to arenas in which compromises can be made. “Europe” was not built like that. It did not come through struggle, through agitation for reform, through popular campaigns. It was conceived for the best of reasons – for peace and unity; yet it has been built and administered in the worst of ways – from the top.

All men have not become brothers, and are unlikely to be so soon. Men and women require a politics which resonates with their collective history and contains figures who are in some measures like them. “Europe” has not supplied these. If and when the immediate crisis is surmounted, the fundamental limits of democratic and civic engagement must be explicitly recognized. If a new house of Europe is to be attempted, its foundations must be laid, as is customary, from the bottom up.

A woman looks at a billboard showing a photo montage with France’s President Nicolas Sarkozy kissing German Chancellor Angela Merkel displayed on a Benetton store in Paris November 17, 2011. REUTERS/Charles Platiau (FRANCE – Tags: POLITICS MEDIA BUSINESS)

He called himself the best leader in Europe, even in the world: but he was, by quite a way, the worst (in Europe at least: the rest of the world offers more competition). In part, this was due to the sheer force of his personality: if, to adapt his favored slogan, he gave little Forza to Italia, there was much Forza in Silvio.

Prime Minister (still) Berlusconi was the Boss, in every sense. He commanded his party, his coalition of the right and his governments through the power of his money and his media – but also because he had the strength of will to project himself, unceasingly, on his country and the theatrical chutzpah to make of his private life a fascinating public spectacle. He refused to bow to the customary rules of protocol, decorum or correctness of any kind. He was a man in full in the sense the novelist Tom Wolfe used it in his novel of that name: having achieved great success, he gloried in it, and wished others to see his glory.

Let us not say that the woes of Italy are due only to him, for that would be to believe that his promised resignation would end the crisis – in Italy, in Europe and the world. The productive base of the country had been, unusually for a West European economy, too long bound up in textiles, furniture, footwear and other medium technology goods which the Eastern powerhouses often do as well and more cheaply.

Its northern engineering companies often remain world class, but with increasing difficulty. Even Fiat, greatly re-energized by the forza of Sergio Marchionne, the Canadian-Italian chief executive, has a huge challenge to turn its Chrysler subsidiary around in the U.S., and to raise efficiency in its remaining plants in Italy – where its large market share depends heavily on the brilliantly-designed, but low profit, Pandas and Cinquecentos.

Its wealth has always lain very much with its creative and lively people; but their numbers are declining fast, and immigration, about which many Italians are at best ambiguous, hasn’t made up for the loss. Organized crime hasn’t been substantially reduced; on the contrary, according to its bold chronicler, Roberto Saviano, author of Gomorrah now living under constant police guard, it is spreading from south to north.

Berlusconi offered, after all, to lead, and brought together the disorganized and demoralized right wing forces after the party which had ruled Italy since the war until the late eighties, the Christian Democrats, collapsed. Together with the quite separate collapse of the Communist Party at around the same time, the political tectonic shifts of that period had political leaderships floundering, unsure of their base and their beliefs. And if the left remains splintered and at times unconvincing in what it offers the country in the way of an alternative, that may have benefitted him – yet he is not its cause.

But if the woes are not due only to him, he has deepened them, made the bad chronic, the disturbing threatening. The conflict of interests are vast – with the control of three commercial TV channels, the largest publishing house, national and regional papers, the largest advertising agency and the largest insurance company all retained in his family. More than any other figure in the 20^th/21^st century, he is a capitalist in power. In the course of governing, he has brought the state broadcaster, RAI, more closely under his command than before – with the result that RAI 1, the most popular channel, now broadcasts news which is at times near to propaganda.

He has sought to weaken or suborn every other center of power but his own – especially the judiciary, which he charges with being communist, and the parliament, which at one time he proposed should cease to vote. At the same time, he has so cowed and /or flattered his party’s deputies and his allies that they have, until recently, acted as echo chambers – or, in the case of Umberto Bossi, leader of the Northern League, his major ally, make wild charges and level gross insults at his enemies.

He has had some twenty serious charges against him, usually for one form or another of corruption. Four cases are presently pending, one for bribing the British lawyer David Mills. He has beaten the previous charges by technical means – usually by dragging them out so long that they breach the statute of limitations. He retains a team of some fifty lawyers, many of whom he has made MPs by placing them high on the party lists. Corruption in government – which he pledged himself to end when first elected – has probably worsened.

That which he seemed most fit to effect has been all but wholly ignored or botched. His claim was that his success as an entrepreneur made him the fittest among all contenders to turn round Italy’s sluggish economy, and that he would govern in the spirit and with the conviction of Margaret Thatcher in the eighties. Nothing of the sort. Italy’s bloated state sector has been a little – but only a little – cut; the state pensions have been a little – but only a little – reformed; the labor laws remain discouraging to employers and the unemployed alike. Above all, his governments have allowed the government debt to rise to close to 2 trillion euros.

He has been less a man for all seasons as a man for the holiday season. His constant, implicit pitch to the Italian people was – “don’t worry: be happy – see, I am.” A little too old to be a sixties man, he nevertheless embodies some of the elements of that era – sexual license, a determination to have a good time, a vague benevolence to all. Many thought of him as a nice guy: he was, to be sure, always smiling, often witty, sometimes impulsively generous. As Tony Blair, one of the few European leaders who would confess to an affection for him, said: it’s never boring when Silvio is around. And since boredom is one of the modern world’s great antipathies, his dramatic, sometimes farcical, always intriguing passage through life made for a stimulating reality show.

But reality is now a two-trillion euro debt burden. It is the consistently lowest growth in Europe. It is a near seven per cent yield on government bonds – a sign that there is great skepticism in the market over Italy’s ability to service its debt. It is the fact that Italy’s fate is the largest single threat facing the Eurozone. And it is the even more alarming fact that there is no guarantee that the absence of Berlusconi guarantees the coming of a solution.

Italy remains a vibrant and creative country still. Silvio Berlusconi, among his other sins, has played into the stereotype common of Italians – fun-loving, sex-mad, irresponsible – a kind of aging Latin lover on steroids and under a transplant. There are many other Italys: one is a group of men and women, of left and right, concerned for their country’s future. It is that group which must now step forward, willing to make sacrifices – including of their own popularity – to put the truth before a people starved of it, and harsh solutions to an electorate used to honeyed falsehoods. Italy surely needs them now.

PHOTO: Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi (L) holds League North Party leader Umberto Bossi’s hand during a finance vote at the parliament in Rome November 8, 2011. REUTERS/Tony Gentile