Italy: One sex scandal too many for Berlusconi?

Italians are becoming fed up with Silvio Berlusconi's sexual antics.

The sex scandals are finally taking a toll on Silvio Berlusconi, said Nick Squires in Britain’s Daily Telegraph. The Italian prime minister has long been known for throwing parties “featuring scantily clad starlets and models,” and that reputation never hurt him in “hot-blooded” Italy. But the latest scandal has him “tired, flustered, and worried—because it is threatening to overshadow his hosting of the G-8 summit” next month. The newest revelations come from a young woman who attended a Berlusconi bash last November. She says the place looked like “a harem,” and that the prime minister slept with one of the women there, a professional escort who was promised money for her services. A businessman friend of Berlusconi’s is alleged to have paid for women to come to the parties. Italians, though accustomed to their leader’s arrogance and boorish antics, are fed up. There is a “growing clamor of criticism against him,” not only from his political opponents but also from the Catholic Church.

The outcry “is threatening to topple” the government, said Spain’s El Mundo. For the past 15 years, Berlusconi has “seemed politically immortal.” Dogged by countless corruption allegations, including that he bribed judges and colluded with the Mafia, he has never been convicted and his political popularity has never been in jeopardy. But this time it’s different. “Scarcely a day goes by” without a damning new revelation that “threatens the reputation and power of Il Cavaliere.”

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