An Italian Senate committee on Friday approved a motion for former Italian prime minister Silvio Berlusconi to be expelled from parliament following his criminal conviction, dealing a further humiliating blow to the embattled billionaire tycoon.
The senators, most of them leftist opponents of Berlusconi, voted 15 for and eight against and the motion now goes to the full Senate for final approval expected later this month.
After hours of talks, the head of the committee, Senator Dario Stefano, said it had “decided by a majority to propose that the Senate assembly debate invalidating the election of Senator Berlusconi.”
Photo: AFP
The procedure could add to the political tensions in Italy that threatened to topple the uneasy coalition government earlier in the week and sent shock waves through the financial markets.
Ejection from the Senate would mean Berlusconi being out of parliament for the first time since 1994, when the media and construction magnate first burst onto Italy’s political scene.
Berlusconi said the decision showed “a specific desire to eliminate through judicial means a political adversary who has not been eliminated at the ballot box through democratic means.”
“When you violate a state of laws, you hit the heart of democracy,” he said in a Facebook post.
Senator Daniele Capezzone, another pro-Berlusconi lawmaker, said: “The Senate committee has written a very black page for Italian democracy.”
However, Senator Isabella De Monte from the center-left Democratic Party, one of those who voted to eject Berlusconi, said: “Whoever talks about a political verdict does not know the law.”
Berlusconi supporters in the committee had tried to stall the proceedings, which began last month.
Berlusconi allies have said he could continue to lead his party even out of parliament, but analysts say his failed challenge to Italian Prime Minister Enrico Letta shows he has lost control of the party.
Berlusconi said on Saturday last week that he was pulling his ministers out of the government and pushing for early elections but the ministers themselves and other once loyal allies balked and he was forced into a U-turn in parliament on Wednesday.
Some People of Freedom lawmakers have said they could break off and set up their own grouping in parliament, although the 77-year-old Berlusconi has played down divisions, saying: “I see an absolutely united party with some internal differences.”
Italy’s Supreme Court on Aug. 1 turned down Berlusconi’s second and final appeal against a tax fraud ruling, handing him his first definitive conviction in many years of legal woes.
A judge in Milan is due to decide this month whether Berlusconi should serve the one-year prison sentence he received as part of the conviction as house arrest or community service.
The pitch is a classic: A young celebrity with no climbing experience spends a year in hard training and scales Mount Everest, succeeding against some — if not all — odds. French YouTuber Ines Benazzouz, known as Inoxtag, brought the story to life with a two-hour-plus documentary about his year preparing for the ultimate challenge. The film, titled Kaizen, proved a smash hit on its release last weekend. Young fans queued around the block to get into a preview screening in Paris, with Inoxtag’s management on Monday saying the film had smashed the box office record for a special cinema
CRITICISM: ‘One has to choose the lesser of two evils,’ Pope Francis said, as he criticized Trump’s anti-immigrant policies and Harris’ pro-choice position Pope Francis on Friday accused both former US president Donald Trump and US Vice President Kamala Harris of being “against life” as he returned to Rome from a 12-day tour of the Asia-Pacific region. The 87-year-old pontiff’s comments on the US presidential hopefuls came as he defied health concerns to connect with believers from the jungle of Papua New Guinea to the skyscrapers of Singapore. It was Francis’ longest trip in duration and distance since becoming head of the world’s nearly 1.4 billion Roman Catholics more than 11 years ago. Despite the marathon visit, he held a long and spirited
‘DISAPPEARED COMPLETELY’: The melting of thousands of glaciers is a major threat to people in the landlocked region that already suffers from a water shortage Near a wooden hut high up in the Kyrgyz mountains, scientist Gulbara Omorova walked to a pile of gray rocks, reminiscing how the same spot was a glacier just a few years ago. At an altitude of 4,000m, the 35-year-old researcher is surrounded by the giant peaks of the towering Tian Shan range that also stretches into China, Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan. The area is home to thousands of glaciers that are melting at an alarming rate in Central Asia, already hard-hit by climate change. A glaciologist, Omarova is recording that process — worried about the future. She hiked six hours to get to
The number of people in Japan aged 100 or older has hit a record high of more than 95,000, almost 90 percent of whom are women, government data showed yesterday. The figures further highlight the slow-burning demographic crisis gripping the world’s fourth-biggest economy as its population ages and shrinks. As of Sept. 1, Japan had 95,119 centenarians, up 2,980 year-on-year, with 83,958 of them women and 11,161 men, the Japanese Ministry of Health said in a statement. On Sunday, separate government data showed that the number of over-65s has hit a record high of 36.25 million, accounting for 29.3 percent of