Italy: One sex scandal too many for Berlusconi?

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.”

So says the press in other European capitals, said Francesco Bei in Italy’s La Repubblica. In Italy, Berlusconi’s personal life is old news, but foreigners are following this story “with increasing interest.” British, French, and Spanish newspapers are publishing every detail they can find about who slept where and what they were wearing. They’re even running their own interviews with Berlusconi’s party girls. And those papers aren’t content to portray the affair as a passing sex scandal. To hear them tell it, the prime minister is about to be forced from office. Funny, you don’t get that impression here at home.

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Still, it’s tough to be Berlusconi right now, said Luigi La Spina in Italy’s La Stampa. “Accusations and criticism have been raining down on him in an impressive crescendo over the past few weeks.” Predictably, he has responded with his usual histrionics, railing that a “conspiracy” of leftists and rival business owners is trying to destroy him. You can forgive Berlusconi for wondering why the behavior he has indulged in all along—with “not only the complicity but even the envious admiration of most Italians”—is now suddenly a scandal. But the answer to that is easy: Italy is in an economic crisis. The playboy excesses of the ’90s are in bad taste. Even the billionaire prime minister may have to change his ways.