Berlusconi meets the judges again ITALY can be an oddity in Europe. It is the centre-left Democratic Party (PD) that is most anxious to apply the fiscal austerity enjoined by the European Commission and the Germans, whereas the right-wing People of Freedom (PdL) movement under Silvio Berlusconi is keen to ignore deficit ceilings in an effort to revive Italy’s stagnant economy—and, conveniently, to fulfill Mr Berlusconi’s campaign promise of lower taxes. The trouble is that left and right are yoked together in the government led by the PD’s Enrico Letta.The two parties’ clashes are increasingly denting the government’s credibility. In May Mr Letta’s cabinet suspended, but did not scrap, a property tax that the PdL wants to abolish. On June 26th it put off, though only for three months, a 1% rise in value-added tax that the PdL wants to avoid.The policy emerging from this is fiscal relaxation by deferral. Two developments raise questions about how long this can be pursued before alarm bells sound in Brussels and Berlin. One was a rise in bond yields prompted by the Federal Reserve’s announcement that it would at some point be reducing…
