国际英语新闻:News Analysis: Berlusconi loses political sway as Renzi gains strength in Italy

ROME, Feb. 6 (Xinhua) -- It has dominated the center-right of Italian politics for 20 years, but now the wheels appear to be falling off the Forza Italia party, in line with the declining fortunes of its founder, the billionaire media mogul and three-time premier Silvio Berlusconi.

Membership of the party, which Berlusconi created in 1993, and that allowed him to sweep to power just months later, has collapsed from a high of 400,000 to just 60,000. Accounts are in the red, and at the end of 2014 it sacked 50 workers.

Meanwhile, Forza Italia poll ratings are sinking, falling as low as 15 percent and in danger of being overtaken by the populist, right-wing Northern League, which has surged on an immigrant-bating, anti-Euro ticket.

Marcello Veneziani, a political pundit at Berlusconi's own conservative newspaper Il Giornale, said that Forza Italia was in crisis and that a fight for the succession was to blame. "The real problem is that the Berlusconi era is ending and that's why the party is exploding," he said.

"It's to be expected. But the slightly strange thing is even the real Berlusconi loyalists such as Verdini are leaving," he added.

But if Forza Italia's problems are in part financial and internecine, the other menace is purely political, and its name is Matteo Renzi.

By last week succeeding in electing Sergio Mattarella, a known enemy of Berlusconi, as head of state, Renzi has managed to assuage left-wing rebels in his own party.

Renzi made this sly maneuver after Berlusconi's support enabled him to pass important electoral reforms through the Senate. The Italian prime minister received another boost Friday with news that six centrist senators from the small Civic Choice appeared poised to defect to his Democratic Party.

Political scientist Lorenzo De Sio of Rome's LUISS University said Renzi had played Berlusconi at his own game. "Renzi is an extremely able political operator," he said.

Berlusconi felt obliged to deal with Renzi in the first place in the hope of legislative guarantees that would protect his business empire, which has been badly wounded by a vicious recession. "Everything has been about saving his businesses," said De Sio.

But even that backroom guarantee appears to have been ripped up by Renzi following Friday's news that new media legislation regarding broadcast frequencies will, according to La Repubblica, add 50 million euros (56.58 million U.S. dollars) to the costs of Berlusconi's cash-strapped Mediaset TV empire.

Berlusconi formed Forza Italia and entered politics 21 years ago to avoid prison and save his business from left-wing opponents.

But now, pundits say, there's a sense that things are coming full circle. Among the deluge of self-serving legislation that Berlusconi introduced in the 1990s to protect himself and his companies, the bill that removed the crime of false accounting from the penal code was among the most notorious.

Renzi is now re-introducing this crime. "It will be good for legality, good for encouraging foreign investment. And given who got rid of it, its reintroduction will be very symbolic," said De Sio.

Veneziani said the end of the Berlusconi era would have far-reaching implications for Italian politics. "He's run the party so autocratically that there can't be a Forza Italia without Berlusconi," he noted.

"A modern democracy will need an effective, new center-right party. But at the moment it's hard to say who will be able to step up and do this." he said.