The Rise and Fall of Berlusconi
Is Italy's flamboyant leader going down in flames?
By Christopher Dickey
Newsweek International
April 3, 2006 issue - The lights were set up, the camera was ready. Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi stood in front of the Italian and European Union flags, ready for a portrait, but he stopped for a second to chat with an American reporter.
"You know," he said, practicing a line he would use before a joint session of the U.S. Congress a few days later. "When I see the American flag, I don't see just a symbol of a country, I see a symbol of freedom and democracy." He smiled, satisfied. "And that European flag?" the reporter asked.
Berlusconi seemed a little taken aback. He paused and thought. "Under construction," he said.
Listening to the 69-year-old billionaire turned politician's increasingly frenzied politicking against the euro and Brussels, one might think "under destruction" would be more accurate—especially if Berlusconi manages to win his uphill bid for re-election on April 9 against former European Commission president Romano Prodi.
Right now, however, that seems unlikely. Berlusconi's political machine is in meltdown. The candidate's first televised debate was a disaster. His coalition and his cabinet are out of control. Instead of tending to allies, he's battling the big business interests that ought to be his core support—all of them alarmed by Italy's seemingly unstoppable economic slide.
Along with much of the rest of Europe, they hope more and more for a Prodi victory. But while many of Italy's ills can justly be laid at the door of its flamboyant prime minister, those that matter most—and most threaten the rest of Europe—will persist no matter who wins this year's closest and most important election.
It wasn't supposed to be this way, at least in Berlusconi's eye. He imagined winning a second term by sheer force of personality, thrusting himself onto the public stage to showcase his natural advantages: ebullience, charm and take-charge personal confidence. But that strategy seems to have backfired. Tense and defensive, he looks these days like he probably feels—a man whose hopes for staying a step ahead of Italy's vindictive prosecutors (by running the country) are coming to a potentially ugly end.
The latest polls show him behind by 3.5 to 5 points, a gap that has lately widened rather than narrowed. The winning smile that has long been his emblem looks increasingly like a rictus.
Berlusconi's last best hope is that the Socialists' famously soporific Prodi will so thoroughly bore the electorate—or the extremist fringes of Prodi's cobbled-together leftist coalition so appall it—that at the last moment Italians will throw up their hands and return to the long-running political carnival that has been Silvio's Circus.
It would be premature to count him out, of course. As the longest-serving Italian prime minister since World War II, he has brought admirable political stability to a country notorious for its lack thereof. Yet Europe wants him gone, for good reason. Partly it's his government's uncanny knack for infuriating European leaders, which at times seems almost pathological. At the height of the controversy over Muhammad cartoons earlier this year, one Berlusconi minister donned a T shirt emblazoned with a particularly insulting caricature of the prophet. (The minister resigned, but not before 14 people were killed in anti-Italian riots in Libya.)
Harking back to 2003, when Berlusconi likened a German member of the European Parliament to a "kapo" in a concentration camp, a member of his cabinet just last week compared the Netherlands' legalization of euthanasia to Nazi eugenics. Even the government of Berlusconi's ally Tony Blair has been rattled by accusations that the Italian magnate involved the husband of a British cabinet member in money laundering and tax evasion, a charge both men deny.
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The Rise and Fall of Berlusconi
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) compare vogliate o meno ammetterlo è una ed una sola:
... ce ne fosse una, di pubblicazioni extra-bananaland che scriva MEN CHE MALE del Banana; manco UNA.
