Italy: Berlusconi’s follies are dead serious

Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi is now “fighting for his political life,” said Stefano Folli in Il Sole 24 Ore. After the constitutional court last month overturned a law that gave him legal immunity, prosecutors swamped the billionaire media tycoon with charges of tax fraud, corruption, and abuse of power. The most serious case, of course, is the charge that the 74-year-old Berlusconi paid Moroccan pole-dancer Karima el Mahroug—aka Ruby the Heartstealer—for sex while she was still a minor and then used his influence to free her from police custody when she was arrested for shoplifting. This week, the prime minister’s strategy to stay out of jail became clear: “Resist. Resist as long as possible, relying on a parliamentary majority that has no desire to be challenged with an early election.” He has already launched an effort to restore his immunity. He also wants to restrict the courtroom use of telephone wiretaps, which would eliminate most of the evidence against him in the corruption cases.

Berlusconi is simply obsessed with girls, said Juan Manuel de Prada in Spain’s ABC. He must have watched too many of those Italian sex comedies “that were all the rage in the 1970s, full of schoolgirls in miniskirts and short, balding men spying on them through keyholes.” Only the “rashness of someone who is thinking with his nether regions” can explain his idiotic decision to pressure police to release an immigrant caught shoplifting. And the story he concocted to do so! He told them that Ruby was the granddaughter of Egypt’s then President Hosni Mubarak, and that her arrest would cause a diplomatic incident.

It’s not funny, said Marcello Sorgi in La Stampa. All this “focus on his personal troubles” means that Berlusconi is neglecting the business of government. Italy is closer to Libya than any other European nation: The two countries do billions of dollars in business together, and Berlusconi counts Muammar al-Qaddafi as a personal friend. But the prime minister has refused to use his influence on the dictator, saying he did not want “to disturb him.” Apparently Berlusconi just couldn’t be bothered to react to a massive upheaval in a neighboring country. Last weekend, as Libya was going up in “the flames of revolt,” the prime minister should have been condemning the repression there and planning for “a new mass arrival of refugees” fleeing the fighting. Instead, he was “holed up with his lawyers,” trying to devise a strategy to escape the myriad charges against him.

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Escape he must not, said Massimo Giannini in La Repubblica. In his desperate attempt to avoid a conviction, Berlusconi is trying to “subordinate the judiciary to politics.” He is fighting for a privilege that only despots enjoy, the freedom to flout the country’s laws with impunity. Italy’s status as a state that respects the rule of law “depends on the outcome of this contest.”