Berlusconi is the only person who could have sorted out Italy’s problems
Where the monstrous regiment of judges, journalists and the other toxic derivatives of Italian communism failed, the Germans and the French, armed this time only with the euro, have triumphed.
Silvio Berlusconi, or ‘Silvio il Magnifico’ as I am still not ashamed to call him, the 75-year-old media tycoon who has dominated politics in Italy since 1994, has lost his majority and has promised to resign as Prime Minister, and not to stand again.
First the Germans and their French ‘caniche toy’ did for the Greek Prime Minister, George Papandreou, riding roughshod over the Greek people. Now it is the turn of ‘il Cavaliere’ (the Knight) and the Italians who elected him in 2008 for the third time with the largest ever majority of votes of any postwar Italian Prime Minister.
Neither Angela Merkel nor Nicolas Sarkozy nor anyone else in ‘Europe’ seems to know or care that Berlusconi, (whose idol is Margaret Thatcher) represents Italy’s best hope of cutting its astronomical sovereign debt — €1.9 trillion, the third highest in the world, and five times larger than the Greek debt. And they do not seem to know or care that Berlusconi, a self-made billionaire, represents Italy’s best hope of hacking back the jungle of laws that paralyse Italy’s labour market.
Neither the debt nor the bureaucracy is Berlusconi’s fault because — heh — they have been part of the scenery in Italy since at least 1968. Indeed, the reason that the majority of Italians have voted for him so often is precisely because of his election campaign pledges to sort them out.
The truth (though Carla Powell says otherwise in this issue) is that there is no valid alternative to Berlusconi.
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