Anti-Govt General strike paralyses life in Italy
Pakistan Times Monitoring Desk

ROME (Italy): Italy faced a standstill as millions of workers took part in a general strike against the economic policies of Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi.

Travellers face chaos and hospitals are only providing emergency services. Trade union leaders are furious with $8bn in public sector spending cuts in next year's budget, pushed through last week by Berlusconi.

The European Commission had warned Italy to reduce its public debt, which is the third largest in the world.

In-depth

Italy ground to a halt as millions of workers observed a general strike in a show of force against the economic policies of Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi's centre-right coalition government.

Shops and business-owners pulled down the shutters and factories across the country came to a standstill as noisy and colourful columns of demonstrators filed through the centres of Rome, Milan, Turin and around 70 other cities.

"Millions of workers are on the streets" around the country, claimed a triumphant Savino Pezzotta, leader of the Catholic CISL union.

He addressed a rally in Venice's St Mark's Square, where around 35,000 demonstrators braved heavy rain and seasonal floodwaters.

The unions said 100,000 workers had marched in Milan, 60,000 in Turin and 50,000 in Rome.

Berlusconi is struggling to reconcile Italy's European Union obligations with his campaign pledge to cut taxes, and has seen his popularity plummet.

Perspective

Italy is one of several eurozone states at risk of breaching the stability pact's public deficit limit of three percent of gross domestic product (GDP) next year. And with debt around 106 percent of GDP over the past four years, it has sharply exceeded the pact limit of 60 percent.

Opposition leaders were in the vanguard of the marches Tuesday in a show of left-wing muscle with a general election looming in early 2006.

"We are not just protesting against a policy, but beginning the work to revive the country," key opposition leader Romano Prodi told a rally in Rome as the 65-year-old former European Commission president made his return to Italian politics.

Berlusconi himself was in Spain for a summit with Spanish Prime Minister Jose Luis Zapatero, but coalition leaders slammed the strike as political.

Travellers once again bore the brunt of the strike, hammered by phased stoppages in the transport sector which caused severe delays.

First, railworkers walked out for four hours from 0900 GMT before airport staff held their four-hour strike from midday, prolonging the agony for those queueing for flights.

136 flights Cancelled

National airline Alitalia said it had cancelled 136 flights, including 70 international routes, and British Airways, Air France, Iberia and Lufthansa were also forced into frantic rescheduling and cancellations

Officials at Rome's Fiumicino airport said a total of 54 international flights had been cancelled.

Leaders of Italy's three most powerful unions claimed 80 percent of workers in industries across the board observed an eight-hour public service strike. Some sectors, like transport, opted for four-hour stoppages.

CGIL leader Guglielmo Epifani told a rally in Milan that the mixture of tax cuts and a spending squeeze in the 2005 budget will do little to boost a sluggish economy.

"For the past four years we've had growth of about one percent a year, we're a country which is effectively at a standstill, while others around us are progressing," he said.

Art-loving tourists found themselves locked out of Florence's Uffizi Museum as staff as one of Italy's most visited art galleries observed the stoppage.

Public health services shut down for eight hours, halting non-emergency surgery, laboratory analysis and x-rays, and private clinics shut for four hours.

Newspapers not Appear

The country's biggest selling newspapers did not appear on newsstands, due to a related printworkers' strike the day before, and only a few newspapers close to the government appeared.

The strike had been called by the left-wing CGIL, Catholic CISL, and centrist UIL unions, which between them boast some 12 million members.

In Naples, demonstrators combined the anti-government protest with an angry protest against the local mafia, known as the Camorra, over a turf war in the southern port city which claimed its 119th victim overnight.

"We are demonstrating against the budget, but seeing the difficulties the city is facing at the moment, our protest is also against the Camorra -- because the Camorra's workforce is joblessness," a 34-year-old unemployed labourer Vicenzo said.

Tuesday's was the fifth general strike, affecting the vast majority of Italy's 23 million-strong workforce, in the past two and a half years.●