Republican Italy
Italy after the fall of Mussolini, until the present day. The King was removed via a referendum (a controversial referendum it should be noted, with widespread accusations that the anti-monarchists rigged the result) and Italy became a Republic.
The following 50 years, known as the First Republic or Christian Democratic Italy, led to the country initially being dominated by the centre-right but later confronted by the rise of the Socialist Party, had the premiership change hands 40 times in 50 years and endured short-lived governments (average shelf life: around 11 months; shortest: 21 days[1]). The main reason for this was that the important parties ended up playing a game of dividing important posts in government between themselves on purely strategic considerations as opposed to, say, competence (The Other Wiki's list of PMs illustrates this game of musical chairs rather well), and generally engaging in Banana Republic-level corruption - the constant reshuffles were meant to preserve the Balance of Power and accomodate their "clients". Add to that a long period of tension and terrorism dubbed "The Years of Lead", the Cold War-era strategy of tension with its assorted intrigues, and the Mafia's power in Southern Italy (just for starters), and the First Republic starts to look like a very resilient Crap Saccharine World.
After the Cold War ended (and thus the USA's interest in keeping left-wingers out of power vanished), the corruption-laden political system, dubbed "Tangentopoli" (Italian for "bribeville") was exposed by the "clean hands" investigations of 1992-1994. These involved a big part of the Senate and House and caused the collapse of the Christian Democratic and Socialist parties, the emergence of new parties in their stead, the adoption of a mixed member proportional representation electoral system, and generally had such a large impact that the period afterwards is called "The Second Republic".
In 1994, the TV magnate Silvio Berlusconi, richest man in Italy, became PM for the first time. He still owns three national TV channels, as well as the AC Milan football club. He was defeated, fairly narrowly, in the 2006 elections and replaced by Romano Prodi, who had been PM before. In 2008, Berlusconi became Prime Minister again. In 2011 he refered to Italy as "this shitty country" and people were not happy. He has recently resigned in favour of independent Mario Monti, who is chairing a transitional government tasked with implementing urgently-needed reforms to stave off a debt crisis.
Modern Italy in fiction
- The Italian Job (original version)
- Gunslinger Girl
- Zen
- Axis Powers Hetalia (The modern-day strips)
- ↑ That'd be Amintore Fanfani's first government, between 18 January and 10 February 1954 - it lost a vote of confidence