Il Guardian incorona la Brambilla!

[King Z.]

Intervista della leader dei Circoli della Libertà La Brambilla conquista l'Inghilterra Il Guardian la «incorona»:

«Volto nuovo del centrodestra. Sembra uscita da una pubblicità»

Michela Vittoria Brambilla (Ap)
LONDRA - Prima regina di bellezza, poi giornalista televisiva, quindi una magnate dell'acciaio, fino a diventare l'ultimo alleato di Silvio Berlusconi e il volto nuovo del centrodestra in Italia. Così il quotidiano britannico Guardianpresenta Michela Vittoria Brambilla, intervistata sui Circoli della Libertà, riferendo fin da subito i vezzi della «Rossa» con la stampa: niente fotografie se non dopo un adeguato trattamento dal parrucchiere e da un truccatore professionista.

INTERVISTA - «Quando compare su una terrazza di albergo che guarda il Mediterraneo, con mezz’ora di ritardo e i suoi inconfondibili lunghi capelli rossi, dà l’impressione di essere appena uscita dalla pubblicità di una delle macchine italiane che si acquistano con un mutuo di media entità - scrive il corrispondente John Hooper - indossa un completo e un paio di scarpe argentate con tacchi a spillo che si intonano perfettamente con la sua borsa. Come tutte le ricche dame in vacanza in Costa Azzurra, ha un piccolo cane legato a un collare abbinato alla sua imbracatura. Ma non si tratta di un barboncino o un pechinese, quanto piuttosto di un bastardino trovato per strada». Il quotidiano ripercorre quindi la storia biografica di Brambilla prima di passare all'intervista sull'attuale situazione politica in Italia e sui Circoli della libertà da lei presieduti.
01 settembre 2007


http://www.corriere.it/Primo_Piano/P...tervista.shtml

[Dantès]

Intervista della leader dei Circoli della Libertà La Brambilla conquista l'Inghilterra Il Guardian la «incorona»:

«Volto nuovo del centrodestra. Sembra uscita da una pubblicità»

Michela Vittoria Brambilla (Ap)
LONDRA - Prima regina di bellezza, poi giornalista televisiva, quindi una magnate dell'acciaio, fino a diventare l'ultimo alleato di Silvio Berlusconi e il volto nuovo del centrodestra in Italia. Così il quotidiano britannico Guardianpresenta Michela Vittoria Brambilla, intervistata sui Circoli della Libertà, riferendo fin da subito i vezzi della «Rossa» con la stampa: niente fotografie se non dopo un adeguato trattamento dal parrucchiere e da un truccatore professionista.

INTERVISTA - «Quando compare su una terrazza di albergo che guarda il Mediterraneo, con mezz’ora di ritardo e i suoi inconfondibili lunghi capelli rossi, dà l’impressione di essere appena uscita dalla pubblicità di una delle macchine italiane che si acquistano con un mutuo di media entità - scrive il corrispondente John Hooper - indossa un completo e un paio di scarpe argentate con tacchi a spillo che si intonano perfettamente con la sua borsa. Come tutte le ricche dame in vacanza in Costa Azzurra, ha un piccolo cane legato a un collare abbinato alla sua imbracatura. Ma non si tratta di un barboncino o un pechinese, quanto piuttosto di un bastardino trovato per strada». Il quotidiano ripercorre quindi la storia biografica di Brambilla prima di passare all'intervista sull'attuale situazione politica in Italia e sui Circoli della libertà da lei presieduti.
01 settembre 2007


http://www.corriere.it/Primo_Piano/P...tervista.shtml

oltre al volto cosa c'è?

[Kronos]

The Forza be with you



A beauty queen, then a TV reporter and steel magnate, now Michela Brambilla is Silvio Berlusconi's latest ally and the new face of rightwing Italy. John Hooper meets 'la Rossa'

Saturday September 1, 2007
The Guardian

'No," says Michela Vittoria Brambilla's press woman, firmly. The Guardian wants to send its own photographer. But, she explains, Brambilla - Silvio Berlusconi's latest protege and founder of his new party - is never photographed without first submitting herself to the attentions of a hairdresser and a professional makeup artist.Lord knows why not. When she appears on the hotel terrace overlooking the Meditteranean - half an hour late and unmistakeable with her flame-coloured, shoulder-length hair - she looks as if she has stepped out of an ad for the sort of Italian car that costs a medium-sized mortgage. She has on a suit and a pair of silver, high-heeled, sparkly shoes that exactly match her bag. Like all rich ladies holidaying on the Côte d'Azur, she has a little dog on the end of an expensive-looking lead that precisely matches its harness.


Yet it is not a poodle or a Pekinese, but a mongrel Brambilla rescued from the streets. This ex-beauty queen (and philosophy graduate) is inescapably a woman of contradictions. There are few businesswomen who find the time - or space - in their lives for 25 cats, 14 dogs, seven goats, four horses and two donkeys (even if there may be some who, like Brambilla as a girl, own a lion cub).The Italian media have built her up as the "steel lady" (her family's wealth is built on making strips of metal that go to manufacture springs), with much emphasis laid on the fact that she sleeps only a few hours a night. "I usually turn off the computer at about three and then I get up at 7.30," she confirms.
But anyone expecting Michela Vittoria Brambilla to be an ice queen, perhaps with a line in disarming flirtaciousness, is in for a surprise. What you get is a chain-smoking, plain-speaking, gravelly voiced former journalist who seems disconcerted by her new status of national, and now international, celebrity.
Ambitious? Unquestionably. Ruthless? Maybe. But, for the moment, refreshingly natural.
Naturalness seems to be what Berlusconi saw in her when last November he put her up to the idea of creating a national network of so-called "Freedom Circles". Romano Prodi's centre-left government, with its byzantine internal wrangles, has given Italians a longing for what they term anti-politica. Brambilla plays to this desire.
"Today, we have politicians in government who only know how to speak in the jargon of politics - men and women who have not established any sort of professsional reputation outside politics, but who have spent their entire life just doing that," she says. Berlusconi, on the other hand, "realised himself, both in his calling and his life, before going into politics". Italians are mistrustful of established politicians, and Brambilla "unlike the politicians" is "in the midst of the people". She has her finger "on the pulse of the situation".
Before politics, Brambilla had two other careers. After reaching the 1986 Miss Italy final, she struck out into journalism and became a reporter with one of Berlusconi's TV channels, though she says she didn't meet him until much later. After Iraq invaded Kuwait in 1991, she covered the military build-up from an Italian military vessel in the Gulf.
Three years later, her father called her into the family business to take over a luxury food import firm he bought in an attempt to diversify. She made it a success, and founded other small concerns. Although now managing director of the family steel company, doubt has been cast on whether she runs it. The specialist publication Milano Finanza reports that her responsibilities, set out in the firm's registered documents, are "to organise fairs and events, develop operational and strategic marketing policies and select personnel, specifically in the area of public relations".
There are no doubts about her role as head of the Italian young retailers' association or president of the Italian animal defence league. But question marks float teasingly around her political clubs. Italian journalists find difficulty running to ground Brambilla's circles, their premises and officials.
How many members do they have? "Look," she says, "today [the number of] circles is well over 5,000 and we expect by the end of the year to be present in all 9,000 boroughs in the country. Some of the circles are small, say, 30-40. But there are others of perhaps a thousand. It depends. But right now to make an estimate of the number of members would be a bit difficult."
Does she mean they don't have an exact number? "Of course. We're very well organised. I have my entrepreneurial experience and the circles have been organised in an almost entrepreneurial fashion."
So how many members are there? "I don't know right now because I've been away for a month. I'm here on holiday."
One thing is certain. Brambilla's Freedom Circles cannot be less substantial than was Berlusconi's own party, Forza Italia, when he summoned it into existence and made his advertising executives its first officials 13 years ago. All of which raises the question - why, if Berlusconi, whom Brambilla refers to invariably as Presidente ("chairman") Berlusconi, has a party, did he need her to register a new one, the Freedom party, that she then put at his disposal?
There is speculation that Italy's opposition leader is seeking either a movement to replace Forza Italia or a satellite party to pick up votes beyond the reach of Forza Italia's increasingly conventional leadership.
"The Freedom party was born of an idea of President Berlusconi who all of three years ago wrote a book, Towards the Freedom Party. He wants it to be the great party, the great movement, of the centre-right that brings together under the one symbol all the liberal parties in the country," says Brambilla.
If he can bring that off, then the woman he says will be the party's general secretary could wield vast influence. Few women have ever enjoyed such a high profile in Italian public life.
Less than nine months after launching her Freedom Circles, she is well enough known for most Italians to recognize her by her nickname of "La Rossa" (the redhead) or as just MVB. Yet she remains strikingly unprepared for the duties that may be thrust upon her.
As a businesswoman, she has no difficulty lashing into the tax-and-spend economic policies of Romano Prodi's government. "I'd like to see the whole tax system reassessed."
The centre-left government's liberalisation programme? A farce. "They are reforms that don't touch the really important points of the economy, like energy and public services," she says.
Toss her a question about Iraq and she draws breath. "Well, certainly I can tell you on this front ... certainly ... er ... I don't approve ... I think the west should be, in any case, speaking in general, the west should be absolutely united insofar as strategy in the war on terrorism is concerned. Rather than ... instead of which [the fact that] our foreign policy has not taken a well-defined position alongside our allies I think is a serious problem all in all," she says.
Nor, it seems, has anyone primed her on how to deal with really tricky questions. I quote to her something she said, that she made a success of her company with an "honest commercial policy". Will she be just as honest in politics?
"Honesty in politics is not just about not stealing," she says. "You take that for granted. It's about fulfilling your promises."
That leads her into a quick rundown of the election promises on which, she claims, Prodi has reneged.
Returning to the theme of honesty, I mention the newspaper of her Freedom Circles, which is inserted in Il Giornale, the Berlusconi family's daily, and whose insertion cost the paper a one-day strike by journalists protesting at rubbing newsprint with "the acknowledged organ of a political movement".
I remind her that her partner, with 30% of the company that publishes her Freedom Journal, is a man who, in the 1990s, admitted paying bribes to revenue guards to give favourable treatment to the accounts of firms in Berlusconi's empire. He was convicted but, after being elected as an MP for Forza Italia, acquired parliamentary immunity. What does she make of that? "For me, people's pasts are an affair for them," she replies. "So I don't set about investigating, looking into, inquiring into the past, the choices, the actions of anyone."

[Malgascio]

«Volto nuovo del centrodestra. Sembra uscita da una pubblicità»

Più che un'incoronazione mi sembra un articolo velato da un leggero disgusto.

[King Z.]

Più che un'incoronazione mi sembra un articolo velato da un leggero disgusto.

Forse volevano dire "Il Guardian inCorona".

[furbo]

la mammà col papà / la nanà col gagà / sulla vecchia Balilla s’avanza / la famiglia Brambilla in vacanza.

[Boogeyman]

Che cosa potrà mai rappresentare la Brambilla, ormai si è capita l'antifona del sistema berlusconiano che non ha portato alcuna significativa riforma e novità rispetto al passato, anzi per sopravvivere ha dato spago al cattolicesimo più integralista con le sue probizioni e divieti di diritti civili acquisiti, non c'è nulla della parola libertà in questi movimenti politici