martedì 14 maggio 2013
Prosecution Rests in Sex Case Against Berlusconi
By ELISABETTA POVOLEDO
Published: May 13, 2013
Giuseppe Cacace/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
Karima El-Mahroug
MILAN — The prosecution of former Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi on charges of paying for sex with an under-age prostitute and then abusing his powers to cover it up concluded on Monday with a call for a six-year jail sentence and a lifetime ban from public office.
In detailed closing arguments that lasted nearly all day, Ilda Boccassini, a prosecutor in the case, said that Mr. Berlusconi was aware that the woman, Karima el-Mahroug, was a minor when he met and subsequently had sex with her.
Ms. Boccassini said Ms. Mahroug, known as Ruby Heart-Stealer, was “part of a system of prostitution organized to satisfy the pleasure of Silvio Berlusconi” at parties held at his villa outside of Milan while he was in office. Documents presented to the court showed that in the three years since the alleged sexual encounter took place, Mr. Berlusconi, 76, a billionaire media executive, gave Ms. Mahroug more than $5.8 million.
Both Mr. Berlusconi and Ms. Mahroug deny that they had sex. He has insisted that nothing untoward ever happened at the parties at his residences.
The court is expected to announce a verdict on June 24. The outcome could affect Italy’s fragile three-week-old government, an uneasy alliance of Italy’s largest center-left party and Mr. Berlusconi’s right-leaning People of Liberty party.
“There will be an impact on the government” in the case of a conviction, “so once again Italy’s future hangs in the balance of Silvio Berlusconi’s judicial matters,” said Marco Damilano, a political commentator for the newspaper L’Espresso.
Another court upheld a tax-fraud conviction against Mr. Berlusconi last week. A decision by government ministers from Mr. Berlusconi’s party to attend a demonstration in Brescia on Saturday protesting the rulings against him severely strained the nascent coalition.
After the demonstration, Prime Minister Gianni Letta warned his center-right allies that he was not prepared to keep the government alive at any cost. Italy’s highest court is expected to rule on the tax case this year.
Defense lawyers in the Mahroug case will deliver their closing arguments on June 3. On Sunday night, Mr. Berlusconi offered his side of the story to the public in a prime-time special broadcast on his flagship television station, Canale 5, that lasted nearly two hours.
In the program, “20 Years of War: Ruby, the Final Act,” Mr. Berlusconi claimed that left-wing magistrates had conspired for nearly two decades to destroy him, subjecting him to 33 separate trials that cost him more than half a billion dollars in legal fees, because they could not defeat him at the polls.
In the program, Ms. Mahroug denied that she had ever been a prostitute. She said that she initially lied about the facts in the case — including pretending to be a niece of former President Hosni Mubarak of Egypt — to make herself seem more important. Mr. Berlusconi said that when he tried to get Ms. Mahroug released from prison after she was stopped on accusations of theft, it was because he believed she was related to the Egyptian leader.
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/14/world/europe/prosecution-rests-in-sex-case-against-berlusconi.html
domenica 21 aprile 2013
The old guard is back in charge
Apr 21st 2013
WHAT we are witnessing in Italy is remarkable, and at times scarcely believable. On April 20th, after five failed attempts to elect a new president, an electoral college that includes the members of both chambers of parliament, plumped for the incumbent, Giorgio Napolitano, who is 87 years old. Nicholas Spiro, a sovereign risk analyst, called it “the clearest indication yet of the utter dysfunctionality of Italian politics”.
Desperate to retire Mr Napolitano had ruled himself out as a candidate. But the leaders of the two biggest mainstream parties, Pier Luigi Bersani, the secretary general of the centre-left Democratic Party (PD), and Silvio Berlusconi, the de facto leader of the conservative People of Freedom (PdL), had earlier gone to the Quirinal palace to beg him to stay on. Poor Mr Napolitano wearily agreed.
In the ballot that followed he received 738 votes out of a possible 1,007. It is the first time in the 65-year history of the Italian republic that a president has been voted in for a second term.
The insistence on Mr Napolitano’s return was both an extraordinary admission of defeat, and an equally striking act of defiance. It came against a background of almost deafening calls from the younger generation of Italians for new faces, new policies and a form of politics less oppressively dominated by the country's almighty parties.
The most obvious and radical expression of their demands is in the Five Star Movement (M5S), co-founded by a former comedian, Beppe Grillo. But it is also clearly discernible in the radical Left, Ecology and Freedom (SEL) party and in parts of the traditional parties, notably the moderate faction within the PD that looks to Matteo Renzi, the young mayor of Florence. The mainstream party leaderships ignored them all.
Mr Bersani and Mr Berlusconi had originally tried to stitch-up the presidency by agreeing on Franco Marini, a former Christian Democrat trade unionist. When that failed, and with the moment approaching at which a candidate needed only to get more than 50% of the votes, Mr Bersani changed tack. He opted instead for a clearly partisan choice, the former centre-left prime minister and European Commission president, Romano Prodi. But the luckless Mr Prodi’s candidacy was torpedoed by rebels from within the PD. It remains unclear whether they were members of Mr Renzi's admirers or followers of another ex-prime minister, Massimo D'Alema, who helped bring down Mr Prodi back in the 1990s.
At all events, factional interests took precedence over those of the party in a way that its members, and the voters, will not easily forget. Mr Bersani, doubly humiliated, announced that he would resign as soon as the presidential contest was settled.
When the deciding vote was cast in favour of Mr Napolitano, Mr Bersani wept. Mr Berlusconi smiled broadly. And with good reason. The re-election of Mr Napolitano leaves the PD (never a very convincing fusion of ex-communists and former Christian Democrats) in outright disarray. It also revives the prospects of a left-right coalition of the sort that Mr Berlusconi has been calling for ever since the general election two months ago gave Italy a hung parliament. That would not perhaps hand the widely discredited former prime minister a seat in cabinet, but it would most certainly hand him renewed influence over the affairs of the nation at a time when he is a defendant in four trials.
That is one possible outcome. The name most widely touted as the next head of government was that of the 74 year-old Giuliano Amato who first held the job more than 20 years ago. The other possibility is that Mr Napolitano could form another non-party, technocratic government like the one headed by Mario Monti, the outgoing prime minister.
Mr Grillo called for a demonstration in Rome on April 21st, describing the re-election of the president a "coup d'etat" by the old guard. It was not that. The parties who elected Mr Napolitano took roughly two-thirds of the votes in the general election. And, in any case, Mr Grillo, who has never been elected by anyone, is not in a position to give lessons on democracy.
There is a strong case for arguing that this lacerating presidential ballot has re-drawn more starkly than ever before the battle lines in Italian politics. Once they ran between right and left. Now they separate the old and tired from the new and young. For the foreseeable future, the old and tired are firmly back in control.
Italy’s Napolitano re-elected as head of state
By Guy Dinmore in Rome April 20, 2013
Reuters
Reuters
Giorgio Napolitano, Italy’s 87-year-old head of state, was elected by parliament for a second term on Saturday as the country’s deadlocked parties begged him to remain in office to break the impasse resulting from inconclusive general elections held two months ago.
Mr Napolitano had previously rejected requests to stand for an unprecedented second term, with his seven-year mandate due to end in mid-May. But Italy’s most respected statesman caved in on Saturday after it became obvious that a deeply divided parliament was incapable of reaching an agreement on his successor after five rounds of voting.
Italian commentators on all sides saw the election of Mr Napolitano as the clearest indictment of the political system, with the centre-left Democratic party in particular a victim of bitter infighting leaving it on the brink of demise. Party leader Pierluigi Bersani handed in his resignation on Friday night after a party revolt led to the defeat of his candidate, former prime minister Romano Prodi, as head of state.
The deal to re-elect Mr Napolitano was struck by the Democrats along with caretaker prime minister Mario Monti, who leads a small centrist party, and Silvio Berlusconi, head of the centre-right People of Liberty.
But Beppe Grillo, the comic activist leading the anti-establishment Five Star Movement, denounced the agreement as a “coup d’état” and set out to drive to Rome from northern Italy to join his supporters already venting their anger outside parliament.
“There are decisive moments in the history of a nation,” he blogged. “Tonight I will be in front of parliament. I will stay there as long as is necessary. There have to be millions of us.”
Riot police sealed off the area around parliament as hundreds of protesters from the Five Star Movement and far-left and extreme right groups started to converge. Leftwing groups were waving red banners and chanting “What’s the solution? Revolution.”
Inside parliament deputies of his movement, the third largest force after winning a quarter of the vote in February’s general elections, voted for Stefano Rodota, a leftwing academic and jurist, as their candidate. The final count at parliament’s sixth attempt to elect a head of state saw Mr Napolitano take 738 votes and Mr Rodota 217.
Renato Brunetta, parliamentary leader of the centre-right, denounced Mr Grillo’s protest as “comic Fascism”, with other politicians making comparisons with the 1922 March on Rome of former dictator Benito Mussolini. Speakers of parliament’s two chambers described Mr Grillo’s “coup” remark as slanderous.
Despite the respect held for Mr Napolitano among many Italians, the manner of his election by the mainstream parties after a closed doors deal is likely to fuel support for the Five Star Movement after riding a wave of popular anger with the political elite and Mr Monti’s austerity policies in the February elections.
Nicholas Spiro, a sovereign risk analyst, said Mr Napolitano’s election was “the clearest indication yet of the utter dysfunctionality of Italian politics . . . the eurozone’s third-largest economy is, to all intents and purposes, ungovernable.”
Mr Napolitano, said by those close to him to be furious with the inability of the country’s politicians to bury their differences and reach agreement on a new government, is expected to relaunch efforts to form a new administration with a limited mandate to reform the electoral law and initiate measures to drag Italy out of its longest postwar recession.
Mr Berlusconi’s People of Liberty party reiterated its willingness to join a “grand coalition”, a solution that Mr Bersani had repeatedly rejected but one the Democrats might now be forced to consider.
Once elections are held, possibly by October, and a new government is formed then Mr Napolitano would be likely to step down, commentators said.
The Democrats now face the task of finding a new leader, with the leftwing reeling from its gravest crisis since the dissolution of the Communist party in 1991. Matteo Renzi, the young reformist mayor of Florence who in recent weeks had been increasingly vocal in his attacks on Mr Bersani, is seen as the leading contender. But his candidacy could also split the party should its more leftist factions decide to break away.
For the moment opinion polls give a lead to Mr Berlusconi’s centre-right. The former three-time prime minister is clearly relishing the prospect of campaigning against his disintegrating rivals, though wary of the momentum behind Mr Grillo who can take the most credit for exacerbating the faultlines within the Democrats.
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2013.
martedì 5 marzo 2013
Italy's election - Send in the clowns
How Beppe Grillo and Silvio Berlusconi threaten the future of Italy and the euro
A SENSE of humour in adversity can be attractive, but it is not always useful. Confronted by the worst recession in their country since the 1930s and the possible implosion of Europe’s single currency, the people of Italy have decided to avoid reality. In this week’s election a quarter of the electorate—a post-war record—did not even bother to show up. Of those who did, almost 30% endorsed Silvio Berlusconi, whose ruinous policies as a clownish prime minister are a main cause of Italy’s economic woes. And a further 25% voted for the Five Star Movement, which is led by a genuine comedian, Beppe Grillo. By contrast, Mario Monti, the reform-minded technocrat who has led Italy for the past 15 months and restored much of its battered credibility, got a measly 10%.
This result is a disaster for Italy and for Europe. In Rome the centre-left coalition headed by Pier Luigi Bersani, the pre-election favourite who ended up getting only a whisker more of the vote than Mr Berlusconi, is now struggling to form a government: it is unlikely to be stable or durable (see article). Meanwhile, financial markets across Europe swooned on the news. Share prices fell sharply almost everywhere. Sovereign-bond yields jumped across the Mediterranean countries, to levels touched three months ago, even as they fell in Germany, bringing the euro crisis back to centre-stage.
In fact the danger is less of break-up than of stagnation. This was the week, history may conclude, when Europeans made clear that they were not interested in reform. Nine months after the French ran away from change, the Italians sprinted past them. As many as two-thirds of Italians rejected not only German-imposed austerity but the entire reform agenda that was designed to improve their economy’s dismal record of near-zero growth. Follow that path, and it leads to the economic paralysis and political decline that Japan has endured for the past 20 years.
Change course or be like Japan
The election result is scarily reminiscent of the most recent occasion when the centre-left governed Italy, in 2006. Then a ramshackle coalition under Romano Prodi stuttered on, only to expire after less than two years. Mr Bersani could try to form a “grand coalition” bringing together elements from the centre-left and the centre-right, though that means dealing with Mr Berlusconi. Mr Bersani might do better to form a minority government with Mr Monti, sustained from outside by Mr Grillo’s Five Star Movement, a formula that has more or less worked in Sicily. The “grillini”, as Mr Grillo’s new deputies and senators are known, need to decide whether to be purely negative in seeking to overturn the entire political order, or whether to be responsible and support sensible reforms.
To complicate things, the new parliament also has to elect a replacement for the president, Giorgio Napolitano. The best candidate is a former centre-left prime minister, Giuliano Amato. But whoever is chosen, and whatever government is cobbled together, Italy will struggle to avoid a fresh election later this year. It would be better if that election were fought with new political leaders and under a new electoral system that makes a repeat of today’s gridlock less likely.
In the meantime, the worry is of no progress with the reforms that are desperately needed to restore vitality to an asphyxiated economy. To do nothing, as Italy’s voters seem to wish, is not the answer to the country’s problems. Italian GDP per head has actually shrunk during the euro’s first 13 years of existence. This performance has little to do with a lack of demand caused by excessive fiscal austerity, as some euro critics loudly claim. It has everything to do with year after year of steadily rising labour costs and falling productivity, which have undermined Italian competitiveness and exports. If Italy’s government cannot regain lost competitiveness and reignite growth through greater liberalisation of its labour and product markets and reforms to the country’s legal and welfare systems, the economy will suffer, and youth unemployment will climb even higher than today’s 36%.
Too big to fail or to bail
This is dangerous. It is hard to see Italy remaining in the single currency in such dire straits—and equally hard to imagine the euro surviving if it falls out. Italy is the euro zone’s third-biggest economy and, although its budget deficit is quite small, it has the biggest stock of public debt (at almost 130% of GDP). This makes it too big to bail out.
But without growth, Italy will not be able to service its debts. The possible pattern is clear: a series of crisis meetings, a few half-hearted efforts at reform to buy off Germany’s Angela Merkel, not enough growth, too much austerity, and then another crisis. The euro survives, but at immense economic cost. The euro zone becomes Japan.
It does not have to be that way. Italy’s political convulsions underline the need for Mrs Merkel to adapt her prescription. So far it has been a lot of austerity and some reform; it should be the other way round.
Deep recession and rising unemployment across the Mediterranean countries are triggering a popular backlash. Structural reforms continue to be essential if southern countries in the euro are to win back competitiveness and rekindle growth. But, given the voters’ response and the scale of recession, the pressure for continued fiscal austerity should now ease. Several countries—France is the most recent example (see article)—are expected to miss their budget-deficit targets this year. The European Commission should accept this if governments implement reforms. And northern members of the euro zone, especially Germany, should be readier to stimulate demand through tax cuts and spending increases.
The irony is that both of Italy’s clowns have got one thing right. Mr Grillo was right about Italy’s overpaid and corrupt politicians. Mr Berlusconi was right that austerity alone will not solve Europe’s crisis. Yet that does not mean Italians can run away from their predicament. If they continue to reject reforms, reality will catch up with them. Whatever the clowns may tell you, that is not funny.
It does not have to be that way. Italy’s political convulsions underline the need for Mrs Merkel to adapt her prescription. So far it has been a lot of austerity and some reform; it should be the other way round.
Deep recession and rising unemployment across the Mediterranean countries are triggering a popular backlash. Structural reforms continue to be essential if southern countries in the euro are to win back competitiveness and rekindle growth. But, given the voters’ response and the scale of recession, the pressure for continued fiscal austerity should now ease. Several countries—France is the most recent example (see article)—are expected to miss their budget-deficit targets this year. The European Commission should accept this if governments implement reforms. And northern members of the euro zone, especially Germany, should be readier to stimulate demand through tax cuts and spending increases.
The irony is that both of Italy’s clowns have got one thing right. Mr Grillo was right about Italy’s overpaid and corrupt politicians. Mr Berlusconi was right that austerity alone will not solve Europe’s crisis. Yet that does not mean Italians can run away from their predicament. If they continue to reject reforms, reality will catch up with them. Whatever the clowns may tell you, that is not funny.
giovedì 21 febbraio 2013
Berlusconi has tainted Italian politics for years to come Silvio Berlusconi faces Beppe Grillo in Sunday's election: two sides of the same Italian populist coin
Beppe Grillo on the campaign trail. The diseases Berlusconi helped create in the 80s have continued to dominate the political scene. Photograph: Tony Gentile/Reuters
In 1994 Silvio Berlusconi was standing in his first election. Nobody gave him a hope in hell of winning. He was a laughing stock, promising to create a million jobs and defeat the communists and sweep away the old politics. Italy had just gone through a traumatic and to some extent cathartic corruption crisis that had ended up with hundreds of politicians behind bars. I was living in Milan at the time, and my son had just been born. It felt like a revolution. It even looked a little like a revolution. A new Italy was emerging, at last.
But then Berlusconi won. It was one of the most extraordinary political events of the 20th century. Even the workers of Turin voted for him. It turned into a nightmare. It won't last, everyone said. Italians will see through this plastic billionaire. The scandals will bring him down. The magistrates will sort him out. Berlusconi in government, it was said, would "vaccinate" Italians against him. Numerous other scandals, arrests, investigations and trials followed.
At first the prophets and pundits were proved right. Berlusconi was brought down by scandals and by the trade unions. But he did not go away. Italians were not vaccinated against him. The diseases he had helped to create in the 1980s – populism, individualism, short-termism – continued to dominate the political scene. More elections followed: 1996, 2001, 2006, 2008. In every single campaign, Berlusconi made himself the centre of attention. He was the issue. He was the reason for voting for or against something. He was the election. Even when he lost (only in 1996 and 2006) it was not by much, and his opponents were paralysed by their own lack of unity and principles. Meanwhile, Berlusconi allied himself with a series of regionalists, racists and fascists, many of whom were elected to important positions of power. Women in Italian politics were reduced to the whims of a patriarch who saw them as sex objects or playthings. It was horrific, and the damage it has done is immense. Berlusconi was no longer a laughing stock: it was the whole of Italy that appeared to be a sick joke. The Italian language itself took a horrible beating, as political debate turned into something akin to two drunks shouting at each other in a bar. Oratory became a thing of the distant past. Footballing terms became endemic.
Now we are in 2013. It has been 19 years since that first, hideous, hands-over-the-eyes election campaign. We have had more trials, more scandals, more endemic corruption: bunga bunga, accounting fraud, tax evasion. Yet Berlusconi is still there, and he has done it again. The campaign has been all about him: his gaffes (carefully calculated to capture media attention) and his promises (which have become more and more absurd – we are now up to 4m jobs, and taxation will be handed back to those who paid it out). Other populists took the stage in Berlusconi's shadow, hoping to emulate his successful campaigning tactics: Umberto Bossi from the Northern League, and even one of the magistrates behind the tangentopoli corruption investigations, Antonio Di Pietro. All fell by the wayside. Silvio, in the end, could out-populist everyone. In the meantime, in power, he managed only to look after his own private interests. Not one structural reform of note was passed by any Berlusconi government, although they did make savage cuts to public spending.
This time, however, Berlusconi has a true rival in the populist stakes.Beppe Grillo, comedian turned messianic political activist, has been filling piazzas all over Italy with his tirades against the political class, which he promises to sweep away and out of power. Grillo is a little like a mirror image of Berlusconi: a populist demagogue who, nonetheless, refuses to appear on TV and exalts the democratic power of the internet. His followers indulge in violent language and criticise all newspapers as "publicly funded" and part of the system.
Grillo's "programme" is almost entirely negative: he promises simply to remove all laws that have created a costly and corrupt political caste with vast privileges entrenched in an absurdly undemocratic electoral law. This is not a programme for government, it is a programme for anti-government. Grillo and Berlusconi are sworn enemies, in theory, but in practice they are two sides of the same coin: Grillosconi. This election could well be Berlusconi's last as a potential leader. But his influence will live on, and on, and on. The Berlusconi era will not end with the departure of Silvio himself.
This year my son will be voting in a national election for the first time. The "choice" on the left is a depressing one: a mish-mash of a coalition led by a functionary who could well end up simply supporting a "new" Monti government to satisfy the austerity demands from Berlin and Brussels. Twenty years of nihilistic and narcissistic populism have produced a self-obsessed system incapable of action. One day, perhaps, this nightmare will end. For the moment, I am still stuck in a silent scream.
John Foot
John Foot is a professor of modern Italian history at UCL. His books include Calcio. A History of Italian Football
(Harper, 2007)
Italian elections: right, left or back to square one Don't understand the Italian elections? Here are five scenarios – and what they mean for Italy, the euro and bunga bunga parties
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