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Berlusconi Loses His Shield
Tony Gentile / Reuters
An Italian court finally says basta! to the prime minister’s antics and voids his immunity. Barbie Latza Nadeau sifts through the coming wave of charges that could swamp him.
For months now, Italy’s prime minister, Silvio Berlusconi, has faced a barrage of questions about his sex life and his moral fiber. Did he condone the orgies at his Sardinian villa? Is he a sex addict, as his wife says? What was his relationship with an 18-year-old Neapolitan underwear model? Did he know a business associate was paying prostitutes in advance to have sex with the prime minister? Did he really tell an escort to masturbate to boost her libido?
Berlusconi has so far been able to laugh off each question with the nonchalance Italians have grown to admire in their 73-year-old leader. “Italians love me the way I am,” he said recently. “They know I’m no saint.”
In all, the criminal cases pending against Berlusconi could land the billionaire head of state in prison for 21 years and cost him millions in restitution.
But now Berlusconi will have to face accusations that do count. Italy’s constitutional court ruled today that the so-called Lodo Alfano Law he instituted shortly after his election in 2008 violates the Italian constitution. The law, named for the young loyalist in Berlusconi’s party who sponsored it, shielded from prosecution Italy’s top four officials: the president, the prime minister, and the speakers of both houses of parliament. Only Berlusconi ever utilized the protection. But now, 15 judges have agreed that all Italians, Berlusconi included, are effectively equal before the law.
Now, without this judicial immunity, it is unclear whether Berlusconi will be able to complete his electoral mandate, which ends with the next scheduled elections in 2013. His approval rating is still relatively strong, although it has fallen from 64 percent to 47 percent since the latest sex scandals broke six months ago. Il Giornale (owned by his brother) headlined today’s paper with the hopeful assertion that seven out of 10 Italians support him.
Berlusconi also has a strong majority in both houses of parliament, which gives him the option of passing a new immunity law, at least to buy time. It is almost assured that his opponents will continue to kick him while he’s down, keeping the sex scandals alive as Berlusconi’s core team turns its focus to the pending criminal trials from which the prime minister is no longer protected.
Under the Alfano Law, Berlusconi ducked charges in several criminal cases that could resume immediately. David Mills, Berlusconi’s British lawyer, was convicted in a Milanese court last year and sentenced to four-and-a-half years in prison for accepting a bribe of more than half a million euros from Berlusconi in 1997 in exchange for false testimony regarding foreign assets in a corruption case. Other cases pending against the prime minister involve tax evasion, bribery, corruption, and false accounting from investigations stemming back to the late 1990s.
The most potentially dangerous legal issues for Berlusconi are charges of false accounting and tax fraud when his Mediaset company won television rights in the 1990s. Another case accuses Berlusconi of offering opposition senators cash for votes. In all, the criminal cases pending against him could land the billionaire head of state in prison for 21 years and cost him millions in restitution. Berlusconi denies any wrongdoing and calls the charges “science fiction.”
Today’s court ruling comes on the heels of another serious blow to the prime minister. Over the weekend, a civil court in Milan ruled that Berlusconi was “co-responsible” for corruption and bribery in a hostile takeover of the Mondadori publishing house in the late 1990s. While that case does not involve criminal charges at this juncture, Berlusconi’s Fininvest company was ordered to pay €750 million in damages.
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Lloyd Grove is editor at large for The Daily Beast. He is also a frequent contributor to New York magazine and was a contributing editor for Condé Nast Portfolio. He wrote a gossip column for the New York Daily News from 2003 to 2006. Prior to that, he wrote the Reliable Source column for the Washington Post, where he spent 23 years covering politics, the media, and other subjects.
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Jacob Bernstein is a senior reporter at The Daily Beast. Previously, he was a features writer at WWD and W Magazine. He has also written for New York magazine, Paper, and The Huffington Post.
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Barbie Latza Nadeau has reported from Italy for Newsweek Magazine since 1997. She also writes for CNN Traveller, Budget Travel Magazine and Frommer's.
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15 Italian judges ruled that all Italians are equal before the law. I wish that could happen here.
In 2000, some were made "more equal;-)"
Didn't the gDOp realize that the Shrub administration was really ANIMAL FARM!
Here she goes again...saying that 15 judges agreed is misleading. The court decided on majority: 9 against 6! This clearly shows that the matter is not so clear at all. e.g. see at:
http://tiny.cc/nBUF0
where it says "La decisione presa a maggioranza: 9 a 6"
although, based on the past coverage from Italy by Mrs. Nadeau I really wonder if she understands well Italian ;-)p
The situation in Italy is much more complex than most foreign journalists say (BTW, I'm not a Berlusconi supporter) or even appear to be able to comprehend (e.g. not few judges in Italy are highly politicized and use their power accordingly and it has been this way since well before Berlusconi even started in politics). I still have to find a journalist able to report properly (and without a hidden agenda - e.g. have a look at what the journalists payed by Rupert Murdoch write...) since I started reading/listening to non-Italian news more than 20 years ago. This is a pitty - as Umberto Eco noted in an interview in the NYTimes last year (or so) often interesting trends&developments in society or politics are anticipated and exagerated in Italy. Thus, if I were a scholar of sociology or political science I would closely monitor Italy as a great study system. Hopefully someone will do this sometimes!
Sorry to wander a bit off-topic, but I really start to get frustrated : Tina Brown, is this really the best coverage you can provide us for Italy???
If Italian politics anticipate developments elsewhere, then we're screwed.
Barbie Nadeau may have dropped the ball on the number of judges voting against the Lodo Alfano, but her understanding of the situation is correct. Furthermore, while the details of the case are complex (try reading "L'Odore dei Soldi" by Marco Travaglio and see if you can process the enormity of it all), the main point is understandable even to those who don't speak a word of Italian: Berlusconi committed crimes and manipulated the system to get off the hook by passing an immunity law. Whether the judges are politicized or not, they then proved that Italy thankfully still has some remnants of an independent judiciary that cannot be cowed by a corrupt billionaire media baron.
I understand that it's embarassing to have this happen in your country- we can only say the same about the 2000 election. But I find that even Italians in the opposition find themselves slaves to their knee-jerk "difendere l'onore della patria" reflex when foreigners analyze what's happening there now.
If, however, by "complex" your intend that evicting Berlusconi from the Quirinale won't solve Italy's problems, well then you're absolutely correct: The left does not offer answers to the problems Berlusconi creates, and any successor government would continue to be center-right. If you also are trying to chide the silly foreigners for not knowing that Italy had a corrupt political system before the "discesa in campo," then you're just being silly yourself- that has always been one of the unfortunate images associated with Italy. Whereas before certain members of government colluded with the Mafia, Berlusconi IS the Mafia- when will Italians stop pretending that the co-founder of Berlusconi's party was convicted for complicity in conspiracy with the Sicilian Mafia??
But political orientation should take a backseat to the threat of the dismantlement of what is otherwise a fine democracy supported by checks and balances between branches of government. Such an important founding member of the European Community, and the birthplace of the rule of law, cannot be allowed to fall prey to one scoundrel's selfish greed.
Thank you Barbie Nadeau for this article.
Thank you.
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