Garbage row piles pressure on Silvio Berlusconi

Published on Friday 29 October 2010 17:37

SILVIO Berlusconi won the Italian national elections in 2008 largely by clearing up rubbish that had been piling up on the streets of Naples. With much fanfare he called in the army, opened new dumping sites, built a waste treatment plant and declared victory.

Now that victory is coming undone as waste again piles up in Naples. The treatment plant does not work at capacity and in Terzigno, in the shadow of Mount Vesuvius, residents downwind of a stinking dump are in revolt. Last week hundreds took to the streets, blocking bin lorries and clashing with police.

Once again Berlusconi has said he will solve the problem, but this time around something is different: few believe him. For years the prime minister has been able to survive with jokes and grandiose promises. But now, struggling to keep a grip on his unruly centre-right coalition, his popular consensus is plummeting as Italians grow weary of government infighting that seems at odds with their everyday concerns.

In Terzigno, a grim town of concrete houses just miles from Pompeii, are the stirrings of a local problem with national ramifications. Not only do residents not want rubbish in their backyard, but for the first time since they first helped elect him in 1994, they also do not appear to want Berlusconi there.

Lucia Fabozzo, a home help from Boscoreale, in the shadow of the dump, said: "Yes, of course I voted for him; I'm a southerner. But he won't have my vote again. He turned his back on us. He only brought trash here."

In recent days hundreds of residents such as Fabozzo have gathered by the road leading to the dump, airing their grievances and holding up protest signs. One said: "There are some things you can't buy, and for the rest, there's Berlusconi."

A radical handful of protesters recently threw Molotov cocktails, burning a row of bin lorries the wreckage from which were being cleared from the main road last week. But most of the protesters appeared to be peaceful, middle-class citizens fed up with the stench and significant health problems they believe come from living next to a dump.

The revolt began when the government started enlarging a dumping site near Terzigno. It has temporarily stopped trucking rubbish in, but once it starts again, residents threaten all-out war.

They claim Berlusconi's solution to the crisis in 2008 was largely to change Italian law to open a vast dumping ground in a Unesco-protected park on an active volcano. The park was created in 1995 to help prevent illegal waste dumping in the rocky volcanic terrain of Mount Vesuvius. Today, the dumping sites - the Terzigno site and another nearby - are guarded by soldiers who escort the garbage trucks inside."Now that the state does the same thing as the Camorra, what's the difference?" said Angelo Di Prisco, a schoolteacher in Terzigno whose house overlooks the dump, referring to the region's powerful organised crime syndicates.

The government last year opened a new waste treatment plant outside Naples, but it can process only rubbish that has been sorted first, a task that the region's broken waste-collection system has been largely incapable of doing.

A tired-looking Berlusconi last week insisted he would work with local authorities to fix the problem. He added testily that news media coverage of the trash crisis had damaged Italy's image.

Few are surprised Berlusconi has not resolved a chronic problem that predates him and will probably outlast him. The crisis is the fruit of decades of local government inaction and the activities of organised crime, which the government's point man for the rubbish crisis conceded had a "powerful role" in the region.

But because Berlusconi staked his image on solving the waste crisis his inability to do so has become a metaphor for his growing unpopularity, and the unseemly squalor that seems to lie just below the surface of his scandal-racked government.

Italian news outlets reported last week that prosecutors were looking into allegations by a 17-year-old girl who said she had taken part in wild parties hosted by Berlusconi, while the government has been preoccupied with passing a law that would limit the publication by journalists of wire taps, a measure widely seen as aimed at helping Berlusconi preserve his image.

Tensions have been boiling in the governing coalition since July, when Berlusconi split with a major ally, Gianfranco Fini, the co-founder of his centre-right party and the speaker of the lower house of Italy's parliament.

Although Berlusconi was once loved and then tolerated by many Italians, some are now beginning to lose patience.

Gianbattista De Angelis, an artist who was protesting in Terzigno, said: "He went into politics to solve his own problems. But he doesn't do anything."

For years, Terzigno residents have complained of allergies, asthma and a sharp burning in their throats. In the summer, the say they cannot even open their windows.

There are concerns about more serious health issues. Residents and environmental activists fear the rubbish being brought in could contain toxic substances, polluting the soil and groundwater of an agricultural area known for mozzarella, agricultural produce and a wine named Lacryma Christi, or tears of Christ.

Guido Bertolaso, the head of the government's Civil Protection Agency, said the state was carrying out the necessary safety tests. "We will inspire trust by maintaining all our commitments," he added.

But many have lost faith in Bertolaso, too. Once Italy's most respected technocrat, he has been tarnished by a series of bribery investigations. He has not been charged with any crimes.Berlusconi's mandate runs out in 2013, but with so much infighting in the governing coalition, the prospect of early elections is growing and abstentions could be high.

"I won't vote," said a woman in Terzigno who gave her name only as Anna, for fear of reprisals from local authorities. "This isn't a democracy. My political ideals went into that dump."