political landscape

Monti Resigns in Italy, but May Seek to Regain Office

At a news conference scheduled for Sunday, Mr. Monti is expected to present a political agenda — pro-Europe and pro-fiscal rigor — and call on all parties to endorse it, aides said Friday. Mr. Monti, an economist who has helped restore Italy’s international credibility but has suffered politically for championing a series of tax increases and budget cuts, has steadfastly refused to say whether he will run for prime minister or present an agenda that he hopes parties will endorse. Whether he does run or not, however, he has already radically shifted Italy’s political landscape.

With Italy facing economic uncertainty and sluggish growth, Mr. Monti has emerged as a centrist force in a field previously divided between the center-left Democratic Party of Pier Luigi Bersani, which opinion polls place first, and former Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, who has risen in polls since taking to the airwaves with a populist message critical of Mr. Monti’s tax increases.

“He’s de facto a candidate. He is the head politician of this coalition,” said Stefano Folli, a columnist for the business daily Il Sole 24 Ore, referring to a centrist grouping that has been courting Mr. Monti.

On Friday evening, Mr. Monti handed in his resignation to President Giorgio Napolitano, who in a tough speech to lawmakers last week lamented the “brusque” end of the government and Parliament’s failure to carry out significant structural changes in Italy’s encrusted economy.

Mr. Napolitano is soon expected to dissolve Parliament, opening a hard-fought campaign amid rising unemployment, taxes and populism. Mr. Monti will stay on as caretaker prime minister until a new government is formed. In that time, he is expected to retain the power to pass emergency legislation.

“He’s already a senator for life, so he doesn’t have to become a candidate in the technical way,” Mr. Folli added.

After losing the support of Mr. Berlusconi’s People of Liberty party this month, Mr. Monti said that he would step down after the budget was passed. On Friday, lawmakers voted 373 in favor and 67 against with 15 abstentions in a confidence vote over the budget, which stipulates spending cuts of $4.8 billion through 2015.

Mr. Monti could run as a candidate or endorse a centrist alliance that includes a veteran political party, the Union of Christian Democrats, and Toward the Third Republic, a fledgling civic movement led by the chairman of Ferrari, Luca Cordero di Montezemolo. If Mr. Monti lends his name to the centrists, he is expected to draw moderates from Mr. Berlusconi’s party. Mr. Monti also has the implicit support of the Catholic Church, which is crucial to the survival of any Italian government.

After weeks of wavering, Mr. Monti seems to have decided to stay involved in Italian politics after other European leaders, concerned about the prospect of an increasingly populist Mr. Berlusconi, urged him to stay in the picture.

Last week, members of the European People’s Party, a group of center-right parties across Europe, asked the unelected Mr. Monti to attend a summit in Brussels, which Mr. Berlusconi attended as the head of Italy’s largest center-right party. “I can say that there was massive support from E.P.P. members that Monti should remain at the helm of Italy,” said Kostas Sasmatzoglou, the group’s spokesman.

“It was Europe pushing him to continue,” Mr. Folli, the columnist, said. “Germany already has Hollande,” he said, referring to France’s Socialist prime minister, François Hollande. “It doesn’t want another country to go to the left, to go back on fiscal rigor.”

He added: “It can have Bersani, but Bersani ‘corrected’ and supported by Monti.”

Indeed, if he lends them his support, Mr. Monti and the centrist groupings are not expected to get more than 15 percent of the vote. Mr. Bersani’s Democratic Party is expected to place first, but without enough votes to govern in both houses even if it allies with the smaller Left Ecology and Freedom party. It remains to be seen if the center will take votes away from Mr. Berlusconi or Mr. Bersani.

On Thursday, Mr. Monti was widely perceived to have begun his campaign with a politically calculated speech at a Fiat automotive plant in southern Italy. With Fiat chairman Sergio Marchionne by his side, he said that Italy needed to stay the course on structural changes. The speech effectively challenged Mr. Bersani, a moderate who will most likely have to tack further left.

Mr. Monti came to power in November 2011, replacing Mr. Berlusconi amid global financial panic. He helped burnish Italy’s image abroad, but effectively raised taxes, worsening Italy’s recession. Although populists have depicted Mr. Monti and his government as a puppet of Europe and the banks, many Italians support him as a needed change from politics as usual.

“I prefer Monti to Berlusconi or any other politician, even if he left us in our underwear,” said Annalisa di Piero, 50, a costume designer and stylist, referring to the tax increases that have left Italians with less in their pockets in the holiday shopping season. “I just paid my property tax, but I still prefer him to these other clowns.”

Gaia Pianigiani contributed reporting.

Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/22/world/europe/monti-resigns-in-italy-but-may-run-again.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

In Texas, Perry Has Ridden an Energy Boom

Is Texas just lucky, or has the state benefited from exceptional leadership? As Gov. Rick Perry campaigned Monday in Iowa for the Republican presidential nomination — with the economy dominating the national political landscape — the answer to that question is central to his candidacy.

Even before he formally entered the race over the weekend, Mr. Perry and his allies set out to dictate an economic narrative on his terms. A radio spot last week in Iowa told voters that the governor “has a proven record of controlling spending and creating jobs” and suggested that he could replicate the success of Texas on a national scale. In a budget speech a few months ago, Mr. Perry boasted that Texas stood “in stark contrast to states that choose to burden their residents with higher taxes and onerous regulatory mandates.”

But some economists as well as Perry skeptics suggest that Mr. Perry stumbled into the Texas miracle. They say that the governor has essentially put Texas on autopilot for 11 years, and it was the state’s oil and gas boom — not his political leadership — that kept the state afloat. They also doubt that the Texas model, regardless of Mr. Perry’s role in shaping it, could be effectively applied to the nation’s far more complex economic problems.

“Because the Texas economy has been prosperous during his tenure as governor, he has not had to make the draconian choices that one would have to make in the White House,” said Bryan W. Brown, chairman of the Rice University economics department and a critic of Mr. Perry’s economic record. “We have no idea how he would perform when he has to make calls for the entire country.”

And if Mr. Perry were to win the Republican nomination, he would face critics, among them Democrats, who have long complained that the state’s economic health has come at a steep a price: a long-term hollowing out of the state’s prospects because of deep cuts to education spending, low rates of investment in research and development, and a disparity in the job market that confines many blacks and Hispanics to minimum-wage jobs without health insurance.

“The Texas model can’t be the blueprint for the United States to successfully compete in the 21st-century economy, where you need a well-educated work force,” said Dick Lavine, senior fiscal analyst at the Center for Public Policy Priorities, an Austin-based liberal research group.

On the campaign trail, Mr. Perry is hearing none of it. In announcing his candidacy in South Carolina on Saturday, he pointed to his policies of low taxes, reduced government spending and regulatory easing as “a recipe to produce the strongest economy in the nation” and one that Washington would do well to duplicate. The next day, he told Iowa Republicans that the party needs to nominate “somebody who understands, knows how and has had job-creation experience.”

Since Mr. Perry succeeded George W. Bush as governor in 2000, he has viewed his role as mostly staying out of the way of the private sector. When he has stepped in, he has tweaked the system, not remade it.

For example, he pushed through tort reform to limit lawsuits against doctors, which encouraged the continued expansion of major medical centers around the state. He also set up an enterprise fund that gave businesses nearly a half a billion dollars in grants and financial incentives over the last eight years to encourage their expansion.

For homeowners, he cut real estate taxes to make the state’s already cheap housing a bit more affordable. And a few months ago, with the state facing a $27 billion deficit in its two-year budget, Mr. Perry called state lawmakers into a special session and insisted lawmakers not raise taxes. The Republican-dominated Legislature complied, slashing billions of dollars in aid to public schools.

“He’s been a promoter of stability in regulatory policy and stability in spending,” said Talmadge Heflin, director of the Texas Public Policy Foundation’s Center for Fiscal Policy and a former Republican state representative. “That gives him something to show for whatever he runs for.”

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: August 15, 2011

An earlier version of this article rendered incorrectly part of the name of the Maguire Energy Institute at Southern Methodist University.

Article source: http://feeds.nytimes.com/click.phdo?i=0c9ac11b2149cd97656e1b83fb88642c

Monti Resigns in Italy, but May Seek to Regain Office

In Texas, Perry Has Ridden an Energy Boom

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