Italy: Berlusconi is not going quietly

“Like an enraged, wounded animal,” Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi snarled at the world last week, after Italy’s top court stripped him of his immunity from prosecution, said John Hooper in the London Guardian. That ruling cleared the way for several corruption cases against him to go forward. To say that Berlusconi overreacted would be putting it mildly. In a blitz of media appearances, Berlusconi let loose on the court as well as on the Italian president, Giorgio Napolitano, whom he accused of packing the court with “leftist judges.” On live television, Berlusconi told a female member of parliament who dared to criticize him that she “had more beauty than brains,” prompting denunciations from female politicians of all political stripes. Berlusconi later lamented, “I am the most legally persecuted man of all times, in the whole history of mankind.”

Spare us the histrionics, said Ezio Mauro in Rome’s La Repubblica. Berlusconi’s ridiculous outbursts are “yet more evidence of his instability.” There is no leftist conspiracy here, and certainly no witch hunt. Contrary to what the television news programs—most of which are controlled directly or indirectly by Berlusconi’s personal media empire—are telling us, lifting the prime minister’s immunity does not open the floodgates to frivolous lawsuits motivated by politics. Let’s not forget that the law struck down last week was written by Berlusconi himself “for the express purpose of evading prosecution for alleged crimes committed while he was still a businessman, before he ever took political office.”

Yet you can hardly blame the man for feeling nervous, said Stefano Folli in Milan’s Il Sole 24 Ore. Berlusconi, 73, has weathered numerous sex scandals, including, most recently, revelations about trysts with teenage girls. But never before has his political standing been so imperiled. “The specter of the prime minister being forced to stand before judges and answer questions” while the threat of a prison sentence hangs over him “is devastating to his domestic and international reputation.” The cases that can now go forward involve possibly criminal shenanigans in business dealings by Berlusconi’s Mediaset company. The highest-profile case concerns charges that Berlusconi bribed British lawyer David Mills in 1997 to lie in court about some of Mediaset’s deals. Mills has already been convicted of receiving the bribes. “Is it credible that Berlusconi will be able to lead the coalition in this state of increasing weakness?”

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Actually, as long as he doesn’t have a public breakdown, the wily Berlusconi can probably survive this new challenge, said Luigi Ferrarella in Milan’s Corriere della Sera. In the Mills-Berlusconi case, the trial has to start over with new judges, because the judges who found Mills guilty of accepting bribes from Berlusconi can be presumed to “have already expressed a belief” in Berlusconi’s guilt. Before the case works its way through the process a second time, the statute of limitations may well expire—and the matter will have to be dropped. Berlusconi is nothing if not a fighter; don’t count him out yet.