After an initial reaction based on reasonableness, Silvio Berlusconi's response to the sentence of the Court of Cassation which definitively condemned him for tax fraud, making him uncandidable and creating the conditions for his forfeiture as senator, is angry and threatens to quickly overwhelm the government Read.
Parliamentarians and ministers of the PDL are ready to resign to put both the Chambers and the Executive in formal notice. Berlusconi is pressing Napolitano asking for pardon, despite the persistent judicial pending against him. And both the PDL and its leader have thrown down the gauntlet to the Letta government: either immediate justice reform or early elections.
Both the request for a pardon and the immediate justice reform, which needs months and which certainly won't repeat the demands of the PDL which would like to checkmate the judiciary, do not have much chance of being accepted. But for this very reason - unless more meditated political reflections are intervened in the centre-right - the political temperature rises and makes the government wobble.
Both the premier and the head of state immediately intervened to try to put out the fire, but the horizon is extremely uncertain. Even former premier Mario Monti has clearly censured the hypothesis of a government crisis.
What is certain is that, until the Porcellum is reformed or archived, it will not be possible to return to the vote, even if Berlusconi would like it and even if temptations to do so are also growing in the Pd house and above all in his left wing and in the anti - Renziana, played by Bersani, who thus hopes to block the way to Renzi's leadership.
But, without the electoral reform, it would be a real joke for the citizens to go back to the polls and nothing would guarantee that the result would ensure governance. Without reform, Napolitano would never dissolve the chambers elected just a few months ago.
In the next few hours we will see the developments of an unprecedented political situation but what is certain is that the emergency has already started and that the summer will be at very high voltage.
