Updates
Updates are in order for developments in Italy, and in Northern Africa, particularly Tunisia and Mali.
The worst-case election scenario occurred, in Italy, with a vote that produced no clear winner for a new government in Rome, and not even the emergence of one political party with support sufficient to permit the formation of a coalition government. With its huge public indebtedness, and years of virtually no economic growth, Italy's need is an effective central government that can continue former Prime Minister Monti's policies of structural reform and restoration of fiscal sanity. The Italian electorate, however, thought otherwise, voting against austerity (Mr. Monti garnered a mere 9-10% of the seats in each of the Chamber and Senate) and against politics as usual (Beppe Grillo's 5-Star Movement received sufficient support to hold a balance of power in the Senate between the right and the left). The country is now politically deadlocked; the cost of financing public sector debt has risen (10-year bond yields jumped in today's auction, from 4.1% to 4.83%); even another election may be required. Watch for Mr. Bersani (leader of the centre-left Democratic Party, which won the most seats in the Chamber of Deputies) to attempt an alignment over the next two weeks with Mr. Monti's centrist supporters. All of Europe, especially the Germans (who end up funding Europe's bail-outs), have a vested interest in at least some semblance of political stability in Italy. But the improbable ease by which so many earlier coalition Italian governments were pasted together, appears unlikely this time.
Across the Mediterranean, in Tunisia, where the Arab Spring movement began over two years ago, there's an extraordinarily positive development: the Islamist-led government in Tunis has just agreed to a re-do of its cabinet, admitting non-Islamist figures as replacements in certain key Ministry positions. Prime Minister Hamadi Jebali resigned last week after his own, Islamist Ennahda party rejected his plan for exactly this kind of technocratic cabinet - to calm unrest, fueled by the murder of secular politician Chokri Belaid on February 6. Moderate, secular, middle-class Tunisians are no doubt encouraged. Moreover, Mr. Morsi's government in Cairo, and others in Middle East capitals, should take heed. This "Tunis tune-up", broadening the government's representation - and hence its legitimacy - may be early evidence of a spreading "Turkish" model of governance for 21st-century, Middle East, post-autocratic, societies.
And moving south and west from Tunisia, French and supporting pan-African forces have had success in routing Islamic-Jihadists, not only from Malian cities, but even from their desert hide-outs in the northern fringes of Mali's border with Algeria. French President Hollande must be elated by his African success (especially since, at home, the French economy is faltering). His prediction at the beginning of this month that French forces could be withdrawn from Mali "within a few weeks", and replaced by perhaps a UN peace-keeping contingent, is, however, yet to be born out. Indeed, President Obama announced late last week that America would add a few hundred troops in neighboring Chad, as a means of supporting drone surveillance over Mali, Niger and Algeria. Expansion, then, rather than withdrawal, of French and other Western involvement in northern Africa seems at least as likely.