Within 48 hours of learning that his wife intends to sue for divorce, Silvio Berlusconi had invited himself on to a popular TV talk show to give his version of what looked like a very seedy story indeed. “It is quite untrue that I go out with underage girls,” he announced. Here was the Italian prime minister, 72 years old, twice married, five children, waving the crumpled newspapers in his hands at the huge, silent photograph of his wife on the studio wall and proclaiming that she had been hopelessly misled by “left-wing broadsheets”. We watched and we cringed.
Some of us did, at least. Incredibly, Berlusconi’s popularity has not been seriously dented by his latest spat with his long-suffering wife, Veronica Lario. Not even the appearance of a hitherto unknown 18-year-old who claims to call the prime minister “Daddy” managed to make his resilient supporters waver. According to a survey published by Ipsos Italia last week, 69 percent of Italians take the view that “politicians should be judged for their actions and not their private lives”. In her heartfelt protest, Lario had touched a sensitive spot in the Italian psyche: Children. It should have hurt and it was intended to. Not only was Berlusconi treating the parliamentary selection process, and democracy itself, like a circus, but he had also forgotten his children’s birthdays.
Lario said she was “surprised” to learn that her husband had secretly attended the birthday party of 18-year-old Noemi Letizia in the suburbs of Naples. She added he had never been to his own children’s 18th birthdays, “though invited”.
It didn’t look good. The party near Naples was an extraordinary affair, even by Berlusconi’s standards of self-gratification. The birthday girl announced that she and her mother, a beautician, were close friends of the prime minister and that he had given her a gold necklace with a pendant for her birthday. She later told a local journalist that she and the prime minister were so close she often traveled up to Rome or Milan to keep him company and help him unwind, sometimes with duets on a karaoke machine. Many Italians, myself included, began to wonder if we had woken up in the court of the Sun King. Berlusconi, initially dismissive, soon hardened his tone. “The lady”, he said refering to his wife, was obviously suffering from nerves, “as happens to women”.
The next day, Lario gave her second interview to announce her intention to divorce. “I cannot stay with a man who goes out with minors,” she is quoted as saying. After Lario’s first outburst, most of the young women who had been selected to attend a three-day course on Europe and its institutions were quietly dropped from the lists. Giovanni Sartori, a columnist and retired professor of constitutional law, has just published a book on Italian politics. The book offers a dispassionate chronicle of Italy’s growing democratic travails, its ever-more docile media, feeble political opposition.
Lario’s lawyer has said she will give no more interviews. Pity, because she has mounted one of the few effective challenges to Berlusconi’s mystique. “I have come to wonder,” she is quoted as saying, “what kind of country we live in.”
Many of us wonder. And we are as dismayed as she is by the fact a political climate which includes promoting showgirls to Parliament no longer seems to shock or surprise most Italians. “Through some strange alchemy, this country appears to forgive all and justify all for its new emperor.” Well summed up, Veronica.
— Tana de Zulueta is a former Italian Green MP.
