Newsgroup: it.politica
Titolo: Newsweek: Silvio, it's Time to Go

Silvio, it's Time to Go
Italy can no longer afford the antics of its playboy in chief.
Italian prime minister Silvio Berlusconi's record of intimidating and 
outfoxing his enemies, rewriting laws to suit himself, and generally leading 
his public as well as private life in flagrante delicto puts him in a 
particularly Italian pantheon. One thinks of Nero, or the Borgias, of bread 
and circuses, debauchery and corruption. Never mind that this is 2009; 
consider just a few of the scandals that have rocked Berlusconi's throne in 
the past few months. There was the allegation by his estranged wife that he 
was flirting with underage girls; the sleazy sex tapes made by a call girl 
who said she serviced Il Cavaliere, as he's called, and that he offered her 
a seat in the European Parliament; and the allegations of an influence 
peddler and cocaine dealer that he'd furnished hookers for Berlusconi's 
parties in Rome. All that on top of paparazzi photos taken at the prime 
minister's villa in Sardinia that showed at least one distinguished guest 
cavorting like a priapic satyr.
Then, last week, the besieged media mogul turned politician got hit with a 
pair of devastating court rulings. One declared him partially responsible 
for a corruption case in which a judge was bribed in a corporate battle 
during the early 1990s, and ordered Berlusconi's holding company to pay ?750 
million ($1.1 billion) in damages. The other ruling, by the Constitutional 
Court, threw out a law that gave the prime minister immunity from criminal 
prosecution, thus potentially exposing him to further trials for bribe 
paying and investigations of ties to organized crime.
The prime minister maintains his innocence about all the allegations, sleazy 
or otherwise. He is appealing the damage judgment and has criticized the 
Constitutional Court. He claims to be a victim of a witch hunt led by 
left-wingers, communists, and foreign business interests. You might think 
all the trouble would be enough to make this 73-year-old former cruise-ship 
crooner and self-made billionaire decide to start winding up his political 
career. But you'd be wrong. Berlusconi plans to hold on-and he just might 
succeed. His approval rating is 63 percent in recent polls, his left-wing 
opponents are in complete disarray, and his would-be successors on the right 
are still jockeying for position. If Berlusconi uses the court's new ruling 
to force elections, he may even manage to strengthen his parliamentary 
majority.
Just because he can stay in power doesn't mean he should, however. It's high 
time for Italy to draw the line. It's neither conspiratorial nor 
condescending to say, Silvio, it's time to go. It's just common sense.
In the United States there's a saying: "Friends don't let friends drive 
drunk." Berlusconi has never been a tippler, but it's obvious with every 
passing day that he's drunk on power and drunk on himself-and that if he 
stays at Italy's wheel, he's likely not only to wreck the country but also 
to damage Europe and possibly even the North Atlantic alliance. These are 
perilous times for Rome, with dangerous roads to navigate from Wall Street 
to Afghanistan. Italy faces pressing problems. Yet instead of focusing on 
what's in front of him, the scandal-racked Berlusconi now has his eyes 
firmly fixed on the rearview mirror, looking for the prosecutors, press, 
communist conspirators, and scheming competitors-not to mention angry 
women-out to get him.
There was a time when Berlusconi saw himself as the savior of his country, 
and could actually make a plausible case. In the early 1990s, his choice to 
enter politics may have been selfish in part. It's often alleged he worried 
that his vast media empire would fall prey to corruption inquiries if he did 
not find a way to put himself or someone very close to him in power. Many of 
his business moves had been facilitated by politicians who were under 
indictment. But Berlusconi also played a valuable role at that moment in 
Italian politics. The country's political class had been decimated by the 
"clean hands" corruption investigations, leaving a void at the center-right 
that Berlusconi managed neatly to step into and fill. "Moderate voters no 
longer had anyone to vote for," he told NEWSWEEK in 2006. "I know that 
cemeteries are filled with 'indispensable' people. But at that time I think 
there was no other possibility for my country" to emerge from the political 
crisis. He wanted, he said, to give centrist voters "dignity in terms of 
their past, and hope for their future."
Berlusconi the businessman became the quintessential antipolitician. His 
mistrust of government and dislike of taxes played well among small-business 
owners, who are the driving force of the Italian economy. He also spoke for 
many in the working class who felt threatened by immigrants moving into 
their neighborhoods and competing for their jobs. The Italian left, 
meanwhile, had grown ossified, vilifying authority and clinging to 
idealistic notions of social justice that the rest of Italian society had 
left behind. If anyone could move Italy into the 21st century, Il Cavaliere 
seemed to be the one.
In this sense, Berlusconi's greatest crime is not legally actionable. It's 
that he never delivered on this early promise. Instead, like a late Roman 
emperor, he has pandered to society's weaknesses, indulged extravagance, and 
encouraged irresponsibility at almost all levels. If he were the father of 
his country, he'd be feeding his children pure sugar. Nobody likes to pay 
taxes. But rare is the politician who would actually say, "We must fight 
against tax evasion but also defend the rights of tax evaders, or companies 
that make mistakes," as he did in 2006. Even though Berlusconi claims that 
his popularity stems from the way he reflects what Italians want, he has 
done everything he can to make Italians a reflection of himself.
The prime minister's demeaning attitude toward women, for example, is for 
him as much a political device as a personal vice. "I think Italians 
recognize themselves in me," he recently told a youth rally. "I am one of 
them. I was poor. I am interested in the things that interest them. I love 
football. I smile. I love others and, above all else, beautiful women." A 
documentary shown at the Venice Film Festival last month, Videocracy, 
records in painfully funny-and then just painful-detail the way Berlusconi 
played on prurience to build his private TV empire in the 1980s. A symbol of 
those years was a game show where sexy housewives stripped off a piece of 
clothing every time a contestant gave the right answer to a question. With 
each apron, rubber glove, or hair scarf that fell to the floor, Berlusconi 
reinforced an image that would help marginalize Italian women for decades to 
come. Today on his networks-and, to some extent, even on the 
state-controlled channels he dominates-the housewives have been replaced by 
ever-younger women wearing sequined pasties, garter belts, and rubber 
thongs, who writhe around older men in tableaux reminiscent of King Neptune 
surrounded by mermaids-or, indeed, of Prime Minister Berlusconi at one of 
his parties.
Il Cavaliere's faithful supporters buy into that image to such an extent 
that at a recent convention of his Popolo della Libert� party in Milan, even 
women delegates rushed to his defense, claiming the stories about his 
philandering were either idle gossip, fabrications by his enemies, or 
validations of his masculinity. "If he has so many women," said housewife 
Carmela Mamone, "this means he's a real man."
What's missing amid this spectacle is the political will to do anything but 
survive. And Italy simply can't afford such narrow egocentricity. It now has 
the oldest population in Europe and the second oldest in the world, after 
Japan. Immigrants who replenish the labor force are exploited and reviled. 
The cost of pensions is eating up the national budget. The country's 
commercial infrastructure is doddering along as well, crippling chances for 
economic growth. Until the start of the 1990s, Italy was one of Europe's 
best-performing countries; ever since, it's been one of the worst, and the 
IMF now expects Italy's GDP to drop by 5.1 percent this year, far more than 
the euro zone as a whole. Public education is an embarrassment. (As a recent 
report from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development 
pointed out, the only OECD countries where children get worse schooling are 
Mexico and Turkey.) Development depends on the rule of law, but Italy's 
mafias still rank among its biggest businesses, raking in an estimated ?130 
billion a year.
Berlusconi's policy failures are everywhere. His attempts to improve 
education have amounted to little more than cost cutting. He's done almost 
nothing to tackle welfare reform. And despite his rhetoric on taxes-during 
the last general campaign he promised to lower rates-the government now 
predicts they will rise this year. During an earlier stint of his as prime 
minister, Berlusconi's police did help bring down one of Sicily's last 
powerful godfathers, Bernardo Pro-ven-za-no. But prosecutors in Sicily have 
so often tried to tie Berlusconi himself to the mob, although they've never 
made the charges stick, that this undermines his accomplishments.
Internationally, Berlusconi's personal demeanor and scandalous reputation 
are not just cringe-inducing-they are directly harming Italy's interests. 
Having caused an uproar soon after President Barack Obama's election by 
remarking on the first African-American president's "suntan," Berlusconi 
thought he'd try out the joke again after coming back from the G20 meeting 
in Pittsburgh last month. He brought greetings from the U.S.A., he told 
conservative supporters. "What's his name? Some tanned guy. Ah, Barack 
Obama," the prime minister quipped to uncomfortable laughter. "You won't 
be-lieve it, but the two of them went to the beach-the wife is also tanned," 
he added.
Italian Foreign Minister Franco Frattini, a longtime Berlusconi ally, is 
quick to defend his boss. "Italy should be judged by our merits and 
accomplishments, not our scandals," he says. But they don't make his job any 
easier. "I have to spend time explaining the real story," he says. "If you 
look at the front pages of the press you see the scandal in the headlines, 
but if you look at page four or five, you see how the world asks Italy's 
help in Lebanon, how America appreciates Italy's work in Afghanistan . But 
you know that good news is no news."
 If only it were that simple. Italy still has the world's seventh-largest 
economy, and is a member of NATO, the G20, the euro zone, and just about 
every other club of powerful nations. But it punches well below its weight. 
Berlusconi's off-color jokes and reputation make other leaders 
uncomfortable. No surprise, then, that Italy is often left on the sidelines; 
to cite one important recent example, Rome has been excluded from the core 
contact group dealing with Iran over its nuclear weapons. Berlusconi doesn't 
help matters by claiming credit for initiatives where his role is 
marginal-for example, in the summer of 2008 he claimed it was he who sent 
French President Nicolas Sarkozy to Georgia to fend off the Russian 
invasion. Italy's military has served in Iraq and Afghanistan and suffered 
tragic losses. But it -left Iraq long ago and wants out of Afghanistan 
sooner rather than later.
Always inclined to put show over substance, Berlusconi works hard to make 
sure-through lawsuits, investigations, and political pressure-that good news 
is about the only news Italians ever see. When an estimated 100,000 
protesters turned out on the streets of Rome recently to support press 
freedom, the event got little or no coverage on the TV shows most Italians 
rely on for news. And no wonder: Berlusconi controls all three state TV 
networks, the three largest private channels, the country's largest 
publisher, a weekly newsmagazine, and a newspaper owned by his brother. 
Whenever a state network airs a critical segment, he declares that state 
media should support the government, and he has fired journalists who 
crossed him. Those outlets he doesn't control are frequent targets of legal 
action.
The tragedy is that Italy-a nation of brilliant intellectuals and artists, 
talented public servants, and creative business leaders-could do so much 
better. A few names are now being touted as possible successors to 
Berlusconi: Fiat chairman Luca Cordero di Montezemolo; Gianfranco Fini, the 
progressive heir to the former Fascist mantle; the economics minister, 
Giulio Tremonti; Foreign Minister Frattini; and Mario Draghi, governor of 
the Bank of Italy. But after years of indictments, investigations, leftist 
infighting, right-wing race baiting, and Berlusconi's habit of sucking up 
all the air in the center, true saviors for Italy are in very short supply.
The ultimate blame may lie with ordinary Italians. Author Umberto Eco wrote 
last month that the Italian public has accepted Berlusconi, and will accept 
the gagging of the press. "So why write about this when most Italians know 
very little-because the media, so tightly controlled by Berlusconi, tell 
them very little?" Eco asked. "The answer is simple. In 1931, Mussolini's 
Fascist regime made all 1,200 university professors swear fidelity. Only 12 
refused, and lost their jobs . Those 12 saved the honor of our 
universities-and of our country. That's why you have to say no, even when it 
may do no good."
And that's why Italy must say no once more. And tell Silvio it's time to go.
With Jacopo Barigazzi in Milan and Barbie Nadeau in Rome
http://www.newsweek.com/id/217155
-- 
"Contro la stupidit�, neanche gli dei possono lottare."
[Friedrich von Schiller - "Giovanna d'Arco", Atto III, Scena 6]

 to Afghanistan.
Beh ... Insomma ... Non sono considerazioni basse come quelle espresse
su Prodi e la sua battuta sulle guardie svizzere, però è un giudizio
leggermente severo.
Certo se Repubblica non gli passasse le battute non esisterebbero
nemmeno più 'sti nipotini di Stalin ...