There were ugly scenes in Turin yesterday as supporters of actor Beppe Grillo contested the President of the Italian Senate Renato Schifani, the third highest person in the country’s hierarchy.

This is only one symptom of a situation that may well explode in the coming days, beginning with this evening itself.

For all our closeness to the Italian scene, especially where football or Grande Fratello are concerned, we as a nation are completely unaware of what is really happening in our neighbour’s country.

To summarise a complicated situation: Italy’s government is made up of an alliance, more of a coalition between Silvio Berlusoni’s Popolo della Liberta and Umberto Bossi’s xenophobic Lega Nord.

The fly in the ointment is the President of the Italian House of Representatives, Gianfranco Fini, who some years ago merged his Alleanza Nazionale, formerly Movimento Sociale and before that the remnant of the Fascist party, with Berlusoni’s Forza Italia and who seems to be regretting it ever since.

A little over a month ago, Fini announced that he and the group around him were distancing themselves from the governing alliance although they were still supporting it. When the chips were down, Berlusconi found himself without a working majority in the House.

Both Berlusconi and Bossi threatened an early election, with Bossi all for a November election and Berlusconi for a March one. The pro-Berlusconi media have all been saying that Fini’s group will be clobbered at the election and that polls give him just two per cent.

Yet Fini’s group is stronger than that. Not only was he not cowed when he dared attack Berlusconi to his face at the last general conference of the alliance, he also knows he has the numbers to bring him down.

Hence the mediatory attempts of the past days to placate him. From the person most demonised by the Berlusconi media as ‘traitor’ and worse, various signals have been sent to him by the leaders of the governing alliance to open up a possible mediation between the two erstwhile allies.

All now seems to hinge on what Fini will say tonight at the conclusion of the conference of his new group. He may either pull the plug on Berlusconi, in which case elections will be held, or he may hold out so that his group may in the meantime get stronger in the polls.

Meanwhile, there are other forces at play. Even if Berlusconi is brought down in the House, it is by no means certain that President Napolitano, who was elected by the votes of the Left, will immediately and automatically go for an election.

It may well be that Napolitano tries to see if there is any other politician in the ranks of the governing alliance who may command a majority in the House. This would assume that somebody can still get the support of the Berlusconi and Bossi MPs as well as those of Fini and possibly also of the centrist Pier Ferdinando Casini.

We are now well in the realm of political speculation. Among the people who have been mentioned as possible leaders of such a coalition one name keeps recurring – Giulio Tremonti, the Minister of Finance, well-respected both in Italy and abroad.

A rather more remote possibility is a government of technocrats which tries to introduce the reforms the country so sorely needs if it is to return to a growth path.

At the other end of the political spectrum, the Left is still at odds, as witnessed in yesterday’s crude scenes in Turin when leftist extremists wrought havoc on a political meeting organised by the official Left.

There seem to be two contradictory movements at ground level in Italian politics. On the one hand, there seems to be a groundswell of those who want to see an end to the Berlusconi days and all the carnival associated with him. He has become a figure that makes most Italians cringe, due to the recent episodes of parties involving call-girls, the recent corruption scandals involving people around him and the way he and Libyan President Muammar Gaddafi outdid each other in bizarre statements and gestures at last week’s meeting.

On the other hand, it would seem that the only way for Berlusconi and Bossi to remain in power is to ratchet up a mother of confrontations with a fractious Left to earn an unmerited further term.

Note:

I have been corrected on my hazy recollection of a quote from Iris Murdoch last week. The proper quotation, thanks to a reader, is: “This is sacrilege, my Jessica. A very important human activity...” and it is taken from the book The Nice and The Good.