OUR correspondents discuss the impact of Silvio Berlusconi’s conviction and whether Italy's leaders will be able to move the country forward
venerdì 30 agosto 2013
domenica 25 agosto 2013
ITALY love it or leave it
Italy Love it or Leave it
http://vimeo.com/ondemand/3712Tuscan fields, bel canto arias, slow food and movie stars are some of the images synonymous with one of the world’s most adored cultures. Yet many of filmmakers Luca Regazzi and Gustav Hofer’s disenchanted friends have recently emigrated from Italy. Before following suit, the Italian couple decides to take a six-month road trip across the country to investigate the extent to which current realities outweigh the icons of la dolce vita. Throughout their exploration they witness multiple examples of staggering corruption, an increasingly lower standard of living, environmental hazards and intransigent fanaticism. Simultaneously, however, they encounter loyal crusaders who feel unequivocally compelled to make their homeland a better place. In an astute manner and with quirky Felliniesque animation, the film further tantalizes us with Italy’s glorious past and future potential. Will the pair decide to leave or stay? Their journey tells it all.
Gangsterland
Organised crime in Italy
Brave mayors lose heart in the battle against the mob
Elisabetta Tripodi: last woman standing
ASK Elisabetta Tripodi if she is starting to feel lonely, and she replies, “A little.” Ms Tripodi is mayor of Rosarno, one of Italy’s most mafia-ridden towns. She was one of three female local-authority chiefs in the southern region of Calabria who won nationwide attention for their courage in defying the ’Ndrangheta, an organised-crime group that began locally and spread internationally. (It controls much of the transatlantic cocaine trade.)
The most serious threat to Ms Tripodi was subtler. Six months after taking office, she received a letter from a jailed ’Ndrangheta “godfather” complaining she had evicted his mother from an illegally built house. Chillingly, it was written on council stationery. She has lived ever since under police guard. At a meeting with the three women last month, Laura Boldrini, speaker of the Chamber of Deputies in Rome, said: “You wanted and want to do normal things. But in certain areas what is normal is considered extraordinary—so extraordinary as to be perceived as unacceptable.” Ms Tripodi, who is halfway through her mandate, says: “I consider it an achievement to have got this far. Everyone was ready to bet I’d give up after six months.”
The experience of these mayors has been typical of individuals and groups who take a stand against organised crime in Italy: three steps forward, followed by two back. But it shows that popular resistance to organised crime is growing. Until recently, this resistance was largely confined to Sicily. One of the first initiatives there was Addio Pizzo, an association founded in Palermo by four young people who wanted to run a bar without funding Cosa Nostra (the movement takes its name from pizzo, the slang word for an extorted payment). Its website has a searchable directory of its member organisations: shops, bars and restaurants whose owners refuse to pay up and shut up. That is easier said than done on an island where an estimated 70% of commercial establishments hand over a proportion of their earnings to the Mafia.
One that does not is the Antica Focacceria di San Francesco, which sells traditional Sicilian street food in eight Italian cities and at Fiumicino airport, near Rome. It began its expansion to offset losses it suffered in Palermo after its owners, the Conticello brothers, fingered the mobsters who had tried to extort them. They allied with Feltrinelli, a publishing house with left-wing roots which hosts the bakery’s outlets in many of its bookshops. Feltrinelli now owns 95% of the company and in January took a majority holding in the original Focacceria in Palermo. “We tried to hold out, for sentimental as well as economic reasons,” said Vincenzo Conticello. “But the recession forced our hand, along with the threats from the Mafia.”
venerdì 9 agosto 2013
L’Italia giusta v political expediency
Silvio Berlusconi’s criminal conviction could yet bring down the government
Aug 10th 2013
“IS THIS the Italy we love? Is this the Italy we want? Absolutely not,” exclaimed Silvio Berlusconi in an angry nine-minute video message on August 2nd. A day earlier Italy’s supreme court had sentenced the former prime minister to four years in jail, of which three will be lopped off thanks to an amnesty introduced in 2006. Pleading his innocence, Mr Berlusconi implored his followers “to continue to fight for freedom”.
Mr Berlusconi showed not the slightest contrition, only fury towards the judges who had, in his view, repaid his hard work for Italy over the past 20 years with a prison sentence. In fact, Mr Berlusconi is unlikely to spend a single day in prison, as Italian courts rarely jail first offenders with a year or less to serve. They also hardly ever impose community service on those over the age of 70, and Mr Berlusconi has already announced that he would rather go to jail than do any. He will most probably be put under house arrest, which in his case could mean being cloistered in a luxurious villa in Sardinia or a palatial home in Arcore, near Milan.
However light his sentence, the media-mogul-turned-politician has been humiliated. He did not expect this: although he has been tried more than a dozen times, and found guilty in lower courts, he was always acquitted on appeal or saved when the time to prosecute him ran out. Now he is a convicted criminal. His passport has been taken. He will be subject to police checks. And he will be supervised by a magistrate, who will decide when and how often he can leave his residences. Under an anti-corruption law passed by the government of Mario Monti in 2012, he will be banned from running for elected office for at least six years. “Berlusconi does not have any future in Italian politics,” says Gianni Riotta, a journalist.
The immediate future of the Cavaliere, as he is universally known, in active politics has not been decided yet. The judges of the supreme court upheld an instantaneous ban on Mr Berlusconi holding public office, but asked an appeals court in Milan to examine again how long it should last. The decision will then need to be ratified by the upper house of parliament, the Senate, of which Mr Berlusconi is a member. The vote will probably take place in mid-September, after the sacrosanct summer holidays.
As a blocking power, Mr Berlusconi will continue to play a pivotal role in politics. The left-right coalition government led by Enrico Letta depends on the votes of Mr Berlusconi’s party, the People of Freedom (PdL) movement. The former prime minister is still surprisingly popular. According to a survey after the supreme court’s verdict by IPR Marketing, 30% of those polled still trust Mr Berlusconi compared with 47% for Mr Letta and 55% for Matteo Renzi, the mayor of Florence, a rising political star. And 27.5% would vote for the PdL compared with 26% for Mr Letta’s Democratic Party (PD) and 19% for the Five Star movement led by Beppe Grillo, a comedian who has taken to politics.
The vote in the Senate on whether to kick out Mr Berlusconi represents an unenviable dilemma for the PD. “What keeps the PD together is the opposition to Berlusconi, the fight for l’Italia giusta [a just Italy]”, says Duncan McDonnell at the European University Institute in Florence. Voting with the PdL senators, who are likely to remain loyal to their leader, against the ratification of the ban so as to save Mr Letta’s government would mean voting against their conscience for nearly all PD senators.
Mr Berlusconi’s legal troubles will thus divide an already fractious political party. The PD needs a new leader, a new slogan (l’Italia giusta will not work any more), a new programme and a new coalition, says Mr Riotta. The party has a temporary leader, Guglielmo Epifani, because its previous boss resigned after bungling the presidential election this year. The popular Mr Renzi is the most likely winner of the leadership elections that will take place in the autumn.
With its boss likely soon to be under house arrest, the PdL needs a new leader, too. Perhaps to mark a new chapter, Mr Berlusconi announced that his party would revert to calling itself Forza Italia, its original name. Who will be his successor? Mr Berlusconi has omitted to groom anyone. The fortunes of Mr Berlusconi’s erstwhile crown prince, Angelino Alfano, seem to have faded. Attention is now increasingly turning to a crown princess, Mr Berlusconi’s daughter, Marina, who chairs Fininvest, the family’s holding company, as well as Mondadori, its publishing arm. Ms Berlusconi has repeatedly denied any ambition in politics and has no political experience, but she was the only one of Mr Berlusconi’s five children who went to Rome to wait with him for the supreme court’s verdict. She also attended a meeting of party leaders.
With the governing coalition divided and fragile, Italy is likely to return to the polls again at some point in the next eight months. Mr Letta has made a promising start, but his reforms proceed at a snail’s pace mainly because he has so little room for manoeuvre. He needs to use Mr Renzi’s popularity to his advantage and make him his ally in the next electoral battle.
Meanwhile the future of the PdL is up in the air. It is a personal party without grass-roots support. A few thousand supporters of Mr Berlusconi at a rally in front of his palazzo in Rome on August 4th were allegedly bused in from southern towns, lured with the promise of a free trip to Rome. Ms Berlusconi offers perhaps its only chance of survival, even though some PdL grandees dislike any talk of a dynastic succession.
Giorgio Napolitano, the president, who handpicked Mr Letta as prime minister, is unhappy with the status quo. He is being lobbied hard to pardon Mr Berlusconi. Yet Mr Napolitano has already said that the judges’ verdict must stand. If PD senators are as principled as the president, the autumn will be even hotter than the scorching summer.
Addio, Silvio
Having at last been convicted of a crime, Silvio Berlusconi should leave the national stage
Aug 10th 2013
ALTHOUGH Silvio Berlusconi has been convicted by Italy’s highest court, he is still trying to escape justice. His People of Freedom (PdL) movement is part of a rickety coalition government. Though Mr Berlusconi publicly backs the coalition, his people are putting it about that if he gets special treatment, it will survive, and that if he goes down, it will fall.
The tactic is typical of someone whom this newspaper has argued is unfit to be in politics—let alone run Italy. But that is not the only reason why we think Mr Berlusconi should now feel the full weight of the law, including an immediate ban from holding office. Italians have lost faith in politics. The first step in restoring it is to put justice before expediency for once.
The conviction was for tax evasion. Mr Berlusconi’s company, Mediaset, escaped taxes by falsely reporting how much it had paid for film rights. An amnesty from 2006 cut his sentence of four years in prison to one which, because of his age (he is 76), he can serve under house arrest or doing work in the community. He is automatically banned from running for office for six years, but the Senate must determine whether he should be kicked out of office immediately (see article).
The president, Giorgio Napolitano, has wisely beaten back talk of a pardon. But Mr Berlusconi’s supporters, who believe that his conviction is the result of persecution by a left-leaning judiciary, want him to keep his Senate seat. So do some Italians who have lost respect for him, but nevertheless fear the consequences of further political instability.
Things are at last looking up for Italy. Its moribund economy is showing signs of improvement. In its first 100 days the coalition government, with Enrico Letta of the Democratic Party as prime minister, has made a decent start. Mr Letta still has plenty to do. Without its founder, the PdL would probably collapse and, long before that, the government would fall. Even if Mr Berlusconi is guilty, the argument goes, his conviction and the years he has spent being dragged through the courts are humiliation enough. For the sake of Italians and the entire euro zone, now is not the moment to sacrifice Mr Letta’s government.
But the reason why Mr Berlusconi has spent years in the courts is that he has faced a pan-load of charges and strung each one out like a piece of vermicelli. He has been tried more than a dozen times. Six cases dragged on so long that they exceeded the statute of limitations. Two lapsed because he himself changed the law so to legalise his alleged offences. His latest conviction is for paying for sex with a 17-year-old. For this he was sentenced to seven years in jail and a lifelong ban from office. He is appealing.
It is also true that both the government and the economy are fragile (see article). Given time, Mr Letta could doubtless get more done. But Italy’s problems are deep-seated. Its economy is sclerotic, its electoral law is rotten and, yes, its courts are inefficient (had they worked faster, Mr Berlusconi might have been convicted years ago). A coalition with a gun to its head cannot hope to fix all that.
The limitations of statute
Reform can come about only under a sustained and resolute government that commands a popular mandate. Yet revulsion at politics led a quarter of the electorate to vote in February for the Five Star Movement, led by a comedian. Mr Berlusconi can play no part in rehabilitating politics. As prime minister, he repeatedly put his own interests before the country’s. He exacerbated popular cynicism about public life. If Italian politics is to earn the legitimacy it needs, Mr Berlusconi’s departure is as necessary as it is overdue.
lunedì 5 agosto 2013
'Teflon Don' Silvio Berlusconi finally comes unstuck after guilty ruling
Tax fraudster may use community service as publicity stunt
The bigger they come, the harder they fall. Silvio Berlusconi, Italy’s richest man, three-time premier and pre-eminent libertine, is now a tax fraud. By autumn he will be under house arrest or even sweeping the streets for his community service.
To ensure he does not flee the country like his mentor and former premier Bettino Craxi, who was convicted of receiving bribes, Berlusconi will now have to hand over his passport to the Interior ministry.
Even more humiliating for the would-be elder statesman is the requirement that he surrender his diplomatic passport to the foreign secretary Emma Bonino, one of his leading feminist critics who once described Berlusconi as “an international embarrassment”.
He has until 16 October to choose between a year of house arrest or community service. That might sound like a no-brainer. And some of his supporters have already mocked the notion that the billionaire playboy would choose to donate his time to help other septuagenarians when he could simply spend a sybaritic year in one of his many villas or palaces.
But Berlusconi has indicated he would prefer community service. With his political genius, it’s likely he would make the most of the publicity.
Public appearances would certainly allow him to vent his spleen. The long, seething video message he put out on Thursday night dispelled any doubt that he was furious and aghast that the judges of the Supreme Court, Italy’s highest court, had definitively convicted the billionaire of hiding millions of euros from his media empire in overseas slush funds.
The alternative opinion, shared by the majority of Italians, came from anti-establishment politician Beppe Grillo. “His sentence is like the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989,” the former comic declared yesterday. “The wall divided Germany for 28 years. This tax evader, friend of mafiosi, card-carrying mason, has polluted, corrupted, and paralysed Italian politics for 21 years since he came onto the scene in order to avoid bankruptcy and prison.”
The fact that the law has finally caught up with Berlusconi probably hasn’t mitigated overseas observers’ bafflement as to how he got away with it for so long.
For many Italians Berlusconi has for two decades been the incarnation of everything wrong with their country: its moral shabbiness, its superficiality, the elevation of the family above the state, the readiness to indulge special interests if it advanced one’s own career.
Berlusconi made a huge fortune out of property and became a billionaire media mogul, celebrated for his glamorous lifestyle long before he dreamed of going into politics. He probably made the momentous decision to enter the political fray fearing the knives would be out for his media empire if a radical left-wing government came to power following the collapse of the established political parties in the wake of the Tangentopoli corruption scandal in 1992.
At the start, few beyond his devoted fans took him seriously: how could an ingénue like him survive in that snake pit? He soon showed, however, he was leagues ahead of conventional politicians, creating in Forza Italia a party focused on himself, which was run like a business by his own employees.
As an addict of American television and the man who brought commercial TV to Italy, he was from the outset a genius at marketing himself and his shiny but vacuous political product. He forged alliances with neo-Fascists and northern secessionists and barged into government at the first attempt.
But the public prosecutors were not far behind. There were huge questions hanging over Berlusconi’s rapid rise to become the nation’s richest man: was he really in cahoots with the Sicilian Mafia? If not, why had he taken a senior Mafioso on as the “stable manager” at his mansion, despite having no horses? Had he got the better of the tax police by the simple dodge of putting their inspector on his payroll? Why, as prime minister, had he de-criminalised accounting fraud? The suspicions were numerous and weighty, and prosecutors were determined to get to the bottom of them. The criminal trials haven’t finished yet. And they probably never will while Berlusconi is alive. But in the shorter term, his legal travails may have very serious repercussions for Italian politics.
Under legislation introduced in 2012 by the Monti government, Berlusconi will not now be able to stand as a candidate at the next election. But worse than that, there’s a good chance he will be kicked out of the Senate in the coming months.
If enough members of the centre-left Democratic Party vote with the populist Five Star Movement on the Senate disciplinary committee they could bar him from parliament on the grounds that he now has a definitive conviction.
But whether the members of the Democratic Party will do that, and risk the collapse of the left-right coalition, which relies on Berlusconi’s support, remains to be seen.
But after 20 years of watching helplessly as Berlusconi ducked and dived, the law finally appears to be getting the upper hand.
The Guilty Men? Berlusconi's friends
Bettino Craxi
The ex-premier and Socialist Party leader fled to Tunisia in 1994 to escape a 25-year jail sentence for bribery. A close friend of Berlusconi, Craxi was accused of taking bribes worth millions of pounds. He died in exile in 2000.
Cesare Previti
Berlusconi’s lawyer, and sometime Minister of Defence, was found guilty of bribing a Rome judge in order to help Berlusconi win a takeover battle with another tycoon.
Marcello Dell’Utri
The former senator, a close friend and political associate of Berlusconi, was sentenced to seven years in prison for Mafia collusion this year by a Palermo appeal court. He denies the charges.
domenica 4 agosto 2013
Like Al Capone, tax proves the downfall for Silvio Berlusconi, the 'man who never dies'
His vanity and his delusions of being an international statesman have taken a knock from which they’ll never recover
The curtain falls on Rome’s buffoon
After the verdict, Italy’s Senate should boot Berlusconi out
August 2, 2013 7:06 pm
The decision by the supreme court in Rome to uphold a four-year prison sentence for tax fraud against Silvio Berlusconi marks a watershed in Italy’s recent history.
It is not the first time judges have ruled against the man who has dominated Italian politics for the past two decades. But never before had Berlusconi been convicted. Many of the cases brought against him had elapsed, thanks to the snail-paced nature of Italy’s judicial system and the tycoon’s shameless tendency to change the law to slow down his trials.
Berlusconi swiftly used his TV channels to protest his innocence. He accused the magistrates of political bias. But he failed to produce any evidence to support his claims. Italians have heard this litany many times before.
Some argue that the crime for which Berlusconi has been convicted is minor when set against his enormous tax bills. But it is never right to dodge taxes. Lawmakers have a special responsibility to set the example, particularly in Italy, where widespread tax evasion is one of the main reasons for the dire state of the public finances.
The judges in Rome should be commended for their independence. It was not easy to rule against the leader of one of Italy’s largest parties, who commands considerable power and wealth. Some Rome-watchers had even thought that Berlusconi would be offered a silent amnesty in return for his choice to join a grand coalition after last February’s messy elections. The verdict shows no one is above the law.
At 76, Berlusconi is too old to be jailed. He can opt for house arrest or community service. But an anti-corruption law passed by the Monti government and supported by Berlusconi’s party means he will not be able to stand for election for at least six years. The Senate, where he holds a seat, will need to decide whether to expel him.
If Berlusconi had any shred of honour he should now resign. That would spare his fellow senators the embarrassment of ejecting a former prime minister. But if he does not take that course – something which his record suggests is likely – they should boot him out. Any other decision would be impossible to justify and would open a dangerous rift between the lawmakers and the judiciary.
It would be naive to expect the parliamentarians of the People of Liberty to turn their back on the party’s founder, leader and main financial supporter. Berlusconi has vowed to fight on and many of them will no doubt follow him. But the time is ripe for the emergence of a rightwing party that is ready to ditch Berlusconi’s brand of frenzied populism and embrace economic liberalism.
After years of ineffective showmanship, Italy would greatly benefit from it.
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2013
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