Vatican’s Sticky Fingers All Over Italian Election Campaign

16.12.2008 In an appeal to Catholic voters taking part in Italy’s general election in April, Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi says he will restrict imports of the controversial “abortion pill” RU486. The move will make abortion an election issue in Italy for the first time in 25 years.

Francesco Storace, the Health Minister, said that: “From now on, doctors will have to justify every individual request on precise clinical and epidemiological grounds. All we want is to safeguard women’s health. There are people out there trying to exploit them.”

Signor Berlusconi is trying to attract traditionalists with his emphasis on “family values”. He has vowed never to sanction “civil unions” between homosexuals, restricting the availability of abortion and the so-called ‘abortion pill’ – all policies dictated from the Vatican. Last weekend he told a TV preacher that he would abstain from sex until after the election to honour “the Catholic ideal of chastity”. Corriere della Sera said that at 69 the twice-married Signor Berlusconi “has apparently become a Christian traditionalist overnight”.

In opposition, Romano Prodi, the leader of the Centre Left, which is ahead in the opinion polls, has said that he would consider legal recognition for gay unions and unmarried heterosexual partners without allowing gay marriage. The Right said that if Signor Prodi returned to power “there will be a slide towards Zapatero-style politics”, referring to the leftwing José Luis Rodriguez Zapatero, the Spanish Prime Minister.

Last week, in a blatant attempt to dictate the direction of the election, Cardinal Camillo Ruini, the head of the Italian Bishops Conference and a close aide to pope Ratzinger, said that voters should “take into account” issues such as abortion and gay unions.

Abortion was legalised in Italy in 1978. The abortion pill RU486 became available recently in some parts of Italy on an experimental basis. Last month, 50,000 women marched in Milan vowing to keep Italy’s abortion law. The Berlusconi Government has promised, if re-elected, to place “pro-life activists” in state-funded abortion advice centres. But Berlusconi’s alliance with the Vatican could backfire. An opinion poll of self-professed Italian Catholics by the Eurispes polling organisation suggested that 70 per cent favoured “civil unions” and 65 per cent favoured retaining liberal laws on abortion.