Like an enraged, wounded animal, Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi struck out indiscriminately at his perceived tormentors on Thursday, after Italy’s constitutional court stripped him of immunity from prosecution.
On Friday night the head of state, Italian President Giorgio Napolitano, summoned the speakers of both houses of parliament to an emergency meeting, apparently to discuss Berlusconi’s behavior and the risk that he was tipping Italy into constitutional crisis.
Within less than 24 hours of Wednesday’s judgment, the prime minister had insulted the constitutional court, questioned the impartiality of the president and his predecessors, and held a female member of parliament up to ridicule on live television.
Gianfranco Fini, the rightwing speaker of the chamber of deputies, who has stood at the TV magnate’s side since the start of his turbulent political career, openly deplored his reaction.
“Silvio Berlusconi’s indisputable political right, conferred on him by the voters, to govern and reform the country does not relieve him of his precise constitutional duty to respect the constitutional court and the head of state,” Fini said.
The bizarre sequence that prompted Fini’s intervention began the previous evening when, after issuing a restrained statement in reaction to the court’s decision, the prime minister launched into a rant outside his Rome residence. Among his targets was the court which, he said, was a “political body” whose members had been “chosen by three leftwing heads of state.”
The president, who has limited powers but exerts immense moral influence, is the guarantor of the Constitution and meant to be above party interests. Napolitano was a communist until the party dissolved itself and went on to become part of the center-left opposition Democratic party. His two predecessors, a former governor of the Bank of Italy and a Christian Democrat, have both joined the Democratic party since leaving office.
On a late-night TV show that Berlusconi joined by phone, he told the watching millions that Napolitano should have used “his influence” to get a different ruling from the court.
When a studio guest, Rosy Bindi, a former center-left minister, expressed outrage at his suggestion, Berlusconi replied: “I recognize you are increasingly more beautiful than intelligent.”
A shocked Bindi hit back with an allusion to the sex scandals surrounding the prime minister, saying she was “a woman who is not at your disposal.”
Among many who weighed in to support Bindi was a party colleague, Giovanna Melandri, who said the remark had summed up “the Berlusconi philosophy toward women”; the diminutive prime minister had shown himself to be “taller than he is well-mannered.”
Unabashed, an irate Berlusconi renewed his attack on the president yesterday. Napolitano, he told a radio interviewer, “was elected by a leftwing majority. His roots are entirely in his leftwing history and his most recent appointment, of the one of the judges to the constitutional court, showed which side he is on.”
The senate’s opposition deputy speaker, Vannino Chiti, said: “The prime minister’s attack on the president of the republic is very serious. Berlusconi is a man of division. To safeguard his interests he would be prepared to destroy the country.”
The Catholic bishops’ newspaper, Avvenire, also sounded an apocalyptic note. An editorial said Italy was “on the edge of a precipice.”
RSS