Rachel Donadio: Audience booing begins as Berlusconi's grip weakens

Over the years, Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi has marvelled Italians with his Houdini-like powers to escape the trickiest political traps and bounce back when all odds were against him.

But this time around, as a political crisis looks poised to bring down the government within weeks, something is notably different in Italy.

How can one tell? Because his former loyalists, who did not abandon him when he lost power in 2006 but who sense political weakness the way a dog smells fear, have visibly begun repositioning themselves for the next chapter - when Berlusconi is unlikely to be the leading man.

"It's an old Italian tradition that the tenor is idolised until people start booing him," said Beppe Severgnini, a Berlusconi critic whose latest book tries to explain the Italian leader to foreigners.

This month, the booing has begun. It started at the top, with Gianfranco Fini, the co-founder with Berlusconi of the centre-right People of Liberty party (PDL), who withdrew four Cabinet members on Monday. That move formalised a crisis that began when Berlusconi kicked him out of the coalition in July, costing him his parliamentary majority.

But every day, the defections - or perceived defections - multiply. Last week, Vittorio Feltri, a Berlusconi loyalist and editor of Il Giornale, a paper owned by Berlusconi's brother, gave an interview to a rival in which he criticised Berlusconi. "He's tired and confused," Mr. Feltri said to Il Fatto Quotidiano, a left-wing daily.

For years, critics of Berlusconi stayed off the record, worried about jeopardising their futures in a patronage society in which the billionaire Berlusconi has been the leading patron.

But now, politicians and other public figures who until this month were puzzlingly silent about Italy's lack of competitiveness, low productivity, high debt, brain drain and tax evasion, among many other issues, have begun to speak openly.

Pier Ferdinando Casini is the head of the Union of Christian Democrats, a Catholic party that was allied with Berlusconi in past governments but not the current one.

He said: "Inside the PDL there's a widespread sense that Berlusconi has reached the end of the line."

Making a wry reference to Berlusconi's involvement in several sex scandals he added: "An empire's an empire, but Julius Caesar is different from Caligula."

He also said that Berlusconi had not come through on a range of reforms, including to Italy's justice system, infrastructure and health care.

Casini is being courted furiously both by Fini and by the centre-left Democratic Party. Each wants his votes - estimated at 5.8 per cent in a recent poll in the newspaper Corriere della Sera - to help form a majority.Indeed, while there is a growing sense that Berlusconi is on the way out, no-one, including veteran political analysts, has any clear sense of who is on the way in, making this the most dynamic and uncertain moment in Italian politics in 20 years.