So Italians have voted primarily for the socialist, the corrupt philanderer and the comedian (whose main joke is that he isn't even standing because he has a conviction for manslaughter). The socialist opposes austerity, the philanderer opposes it too, promising to reverse tax increases and give everyone their money back (nice try) and the comedian wants to halve the working week and give everyone free internet access. For Italians to have bothered supporting any of these buffoons is comedy extraordinaire.
Italians don't trust politicians or bankers much, but also are averse to change. It's why on the one hand public debt in Italy is over 120% of GDP its private debt is very low. Around 30% of Italians don't have bank accounts, because of a history with a Lira that past government simply inflated away, so they don't trust their savings with banks. Italians don't take our credit to pay for a holiday or a car, they save, they have tightly integrated families. There is a lot to be said for not borrowing to consume, and the tradeoff of the intact families is a female employment rate 12% lower than the EU average. Whether the stability of families offsets the loss of economic and human potential from low employment of women is a moot point.
However, on the government side Italy is a disaster. It has had fiscal incontinence for many years, so needs to get spending under control. Mario Monti was the man appointed by the European Commission to sort the country out - and he was punished for that by his party coming a distant fourth. Not, because he is not respected, but because he was a tool of Brussels. The European Union, the great arrogant entity that proclaims whenever it can that it kept the peace in Europe, now has on its record the imposition of rule from Brussels upon a Member State. That wasn't going to last.
Yet Italy's problems are deep and cancerous, with endemic corruption, of which Silvio Berlusconi is only the leading figurehead for. Of a labour market that would make unions in the UK, US, Australia and NZ groan with envy, but which effectively makes it nearly impossibly expensive to make people redundant, and so keeps so many Italian businesses just below the threshold for such a law to come into place.
