ROME, 29 December 2003 — Silvio Berlusconi’s presidency of the EU began with a bang and went out with a whimper, but the Italian prime minister brushed aside criticism and pointed instead to what he considered to be a resounding success.

“Never has a presidency received so many plaudits, even if the result was not a total success,” he said after the collapse of the Brussels summit in December which was to have sealed the EU’s first constitution.

In fact, Berlusconi never believed he could emerge with a deal. “We knew from the beginning that we could not reach a solution in the time allowed to us,” he told journalists in an end of year press conference last week.

The Italian prime minister was criticized by his EU counterparts for demonstrating little enthusiasm for brokering a deal over the course of his presidency.

“The negotiations didn’t even begin, Mr. Berlusconi,” Dutch Prime Minister Jan Peter Balkenende said, according to diplomats.

Even worse from Brussels’ perspective, the media magnate and billionaire businessman still thinks in Italy’s old currency, the lira, and has given the euro a decidedly lukewarm reception. He blamed the single currency for a hike in Italian consumer prices and complained that its strength against the dollar was hampering the economy. He indicated that if it was up to him, Italy would have opted to stay out of the 12-nation eurozone, as Britain had done “with very favorable results”.

“The single currency produced some positive effects, but today, there are more negative effects,” said Berlusconi.

Such an attack on the euro by the leader of one of the six founding members of the European Community and the world’s sixth strongest economy may come as a surprise, but it reflects Italians’ loss of confidence in Europe as revealed in two recent opinion polls.

Less than half of respondents in one survey — 47 percent as against 58 percent in June 1999 — believe that Italy’s participation in the EU is a good thing. And only 44 percent — 54 percent in 1999 — back the euro.

Italians’ confidence in the EU has fallen from 71 percent in June 1999 to 54 percent in November 2003, when 1,500 people were polled about relations between citizens and EU institutions. Berlusconi can therefore take some comfort at home, after showing his main interest lies in a broad free-market union which is closely allied to the United States.

Berlusconi’s economy-oriented perspective is one of two deeply held views of Europe in Italy, the other being the political entity supported by state President Carlo Azeglio Ciampi and European Commission President Romano Prodi, the former left-wing prime minister who is set to return to Italian politics when he steps down next year.

For Berlusconi, the results of the Rome presidency which ends Wednesday are to be viewed with “great satisfaction”, particularly given what he called its two concrete successes: an agreement on the EU infrastructural program for major projects, and the decision to name Parma as the host of a prestigious new European food safety organization.

But these silver linings have been clouded by a loss of credibility vis-a-vis his European partners stemming from his well-documented blunders.

Berlusconi began his presidency with a diplomatic gaffe of monumental proportions, when he likened a German politician who was heckling him to a Nazi camp guard during a speech to the European Parliament in July.

He followed that up in November with a staunch defense of President Vladimir Putin’s dubious human rights record in war-torn Chechnya, outraging the European Commission which has strongly disapproved of Moscow’s Chechen policy.

It is those blunders, the result of the prime minister’s joshing, ebullient style, which will tend to dominate the memory of the Italian presidency for the center-left opposition at home and his critics in Europe.