Berlusconi Says Basta! to Violence

Last month, Italy's biggest, strongest unions brought the country to a standstill for a day, staging a general strike in protest at the centre-right government's plans to reform the crippled pension system.

A few weeks earlier the billionaire prime minister, Silvio Berlusconi, had announced he would sue a political opponent, Piero Fassino, leader of the Democrats of the Left, for suggesting the prime minister was choreographing a corruption smear campaign against the left.

This was all par for the course in Italy's fiery political scene, where political enemies still spit the words communism and fascism at each other on an almost daily basis.

But this week Mr Berlusconi for the first time called on everyone - the left, the right, the unions and the average Italian - to take to the squares and protest together.

And most of his arch-enemies seem to think it is one of the media mogul prime minister's better ideas.

Why? Because in the last month Italy has been jolted by a series of "micro attacks" on police and government buildings that have sent shudders through the country's ruling classes.

Since October 2, parcel bombs - usually basic devices involving a VHS box or a hollowed out book packed with explosives and sent through the post - have turned up at offices around the country. No one has been killed and many of the devices have not even detonated. But the most recent, a letter bomb delivered to a Carabinieri office in Rome, blew up in the hands of the man who opened it, severing two of his fingers. Another letter bomb, sent on the same day to police headquarters in nearby Viterbo, was defused.

"In the face of repeated acts of terrorist violence it is necessary and urgent for the country to repudiate, without divisions, these acts and violent ideas," Mr Berlusconi said in a statement.

It is time, he said, for a "great sign of the collective maturity of Italian democracy," to make a stand against all forms of political terrorism.

So on November 19, a month after the general strike, the traditional left-wing heartland of Florence could witness all the country's political colours marching together. As the pro-Berlusconi daily Il Foglio insisted, the cry of Basta! (Enough!) will be significant only if it comes from across the democratic spectrum.

No group has claimed responsibility for the latest parcel bombs but investigators believe they are the work of "anarchist-insurrectionist-explosives experts". They allegedly swap online bomb-making recipes in the name of groups thought to be an offspring of the Molotov cocktail-hurling Black Bloc, who triggered riots at the G8 summit in Genoa in 2001.

These anarchists are not thought to be related to the new Red Brigades, descendents of the extreme left-wing group responsible for bombings and the murder of a prime minister in the 1970s, the so-called Years of Lead.

But their low-level aggression comes as Italy struggles to stamp out a new generation of the violent Marxist group, suspected of carrying out two political assassinations in the last four years. In recent weeks, nine suspected leaders of the reborn guerrilla group have been arrested in spectacular raids.

While their statements may help solve the murders of two labour ministry advisors, the identification of an organised armed group, some of whose members are still at large, has caused many to question whether Italy will ever be able to rid itself of domestic terrorism.

Interior Minister Giuseppe Pisanu warned that the threat of political violence was not eliminated by cutting off the serpent's head.

"The main root has been cut, but this organisation has other roots nearby and still alive," he said, warning that those stragglers could "grow until they become the main root again."