A Tale of Two Countries II

I love Italy and I love Spain. I would gladly live in Spain and here's one reason why:

Spain's first woman defense minister was among 17 members of the Cabinet sworn into office Monday.

Carme Chacon, 37 — who is seven months pregnant — is one of nine women in Prime Minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero's new government.

Chacon, from the Catalan town of Esplugues de Llobregat, served as a city councilor in 1999 and as deputy parliamentary speaker in 2004. She was promoted to housing minister in Zapatero's first government and was accredited with the Socialist party's success in the powerful northeastern region of Catalonia in the March 9 elections.

No tokenism here: a majority of the cabinet positions are now held by women. It seems hard to believe that just thirty-two years ago Spain unshackled itself from twenty-seven years of a brutal, repressive dictatorship determined to keep the nation backwards. All credit to Prime Minister Zapatero for putting the progress into progressive.

As for Italy, as much as I love the food, the countryside, the history, the literature, the music, the films, the warmth of its citizens (traits which I also love about Spain), it is so hard to feel optimistic about its future. Here's why:

Silvio Berlusconi, the idiosyncratic billionaire who already dominates much of Italy’s public life, snatched back political power in elections that ended Monday, heading a center-right coalition certain to make him prime minister for a third term.

But with a weak economy and frustration high that Italy has lost ground to the rest of Europe, it was unclear whether Italians voted for Mr. Berlusconi out of affection or, as many experts said, as the least bad choice after the nation weathered two years of inaction from the fractured center-left.

Still, Italy now returns to a singular sort of personal politics with Mr. Berlusconi as the unquestioned protagonist.

Rejecting the sober responsibility of the departing prime minister, Romano Prodi, Italians chose in a moment of national self-doubt a man whose dramas — the clowning and corruption scandals, his rocky relations with his wife and political partners, his growing hairline and ever browner hair — play out very much in public.

This is a man about whom The Economist stated that he was unfit to lead Italy, whose political career is a shameless attempt to hold power to feed his corrupt soul. The Italian people have elected him for a third time. It's utterly incomprehensible to me that such a manifestly corrupt, self-serving charlatan could be elected three times. If nothing else, it demonstrates the impact control of the media can have - and Berlusconi controls some 70% of the media in Italy.