Silvio Berlusconi flees reality

[marmar]

from the Independent UK:




Milan is reclaiming its place as "the moral capital of Italy" and you can feel the pride of its people rise as the dark shadows of the past 15 years slowly recede. Silvio Berlusconi is a Milan boy born and bred, and his thrusting ambitions have defined the city for much of the past half century. But as his candidate faces a humiliating defeat in the run-off mayoral election today, for the first time in many years Il Cavaliere is no longer the centre of the story. Milan is.

That's not how this script was supposed to play. Borne aloft by his usual gaseous self-confidence, Berlusconi had no hesitation in shoving the incumbent Letizia Moratti, a former education minister in his government, to one side and declaring the mayoral election for his home town a plebiscite on himself. It's a gambit that has worked many times before, why not now?

Berlusconi's weekly appearances at the Tribunale di Milano, the city's Fascist-era court building, to contest charges of consorting with under-age prostitutes and financial crimes, became a political cabaret, a theatre of the absurd which saw Italy's lovable rogue of a Prime Minister declare that he was barred from doing his job by these unelected "communist" judges: a cancer on society, he called them, terrorists in lawyer's robes. Posters went up around town comparing the city's prosecutors to the Red Brigades, the ultra-left terrorists who cut a bloody swathe through Italy 30 years ago.

.....(snip).....

Now the man who turned the poll into a test of his personal popularity is running for cover. He disappeared from view for a full week after that defeat. He emerged to break the election rules by giving a party political broadcast on five television channels simultaneously – the networks were subsquently heavily fined – and then, pathetically, to tell every G8 leader who would listen, including Barack Obama, how Italy was really ruled by a cabal of communist judges, out to get him. Now he says the Milan result is unimportant – he will continue as Prime Minister no matter what. That's doubtless true. But Milan is slipping through his fingers. ................(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/peter-popham/peter-popham-berlusconi-runs-for-cover-at-last-2290737.html

[pnwmom]

1. I don't know what to think about Italy, lately.

I don't like Berlucsconi, but he's got a point about the Courts. For almost 4 years, we've watched the travesty of the Knox/Sollecito witch trial. Now another Judge has decided to try a half dozen seismologists for manslaughter because they failed the predict the 2009 earthquake!

[More_liberal_than_mo]

2. He would be wise to remember

28 April 1945, when the last fascist ruler of Italy met his fate in Milan.