Italians appear sanguine about accusations against their prime minister, writes PADDY AGNEWin Rome
“LET’S ADMIT it, Berlusconi has won, he has utterly won his battle for hegemony in Italian society. He has had the power and the means to change, to turn traditional Italian values upside down, values like solidarity and dynamism, entrepreneurial skills, a will to work and a fundamental honesty. In all these years he has created a system of non-values that we simply must fight.”
The speaker is Italian centre-left leader Walter Veltroni who last Tuesday, after his fifth consecutive electoral defeat by the prime minister Silvio Berlusconi, this time in a local election in Sardinia, resigned as leader of the largest opposition party, the 16-month-old Democratic Party.
In theory, this might have been a difficult week for the prime minister. After all, on Tuesday a Milan court handed out a 4½-year jail sentence to David Mills, estranged husband of British “Olympics” minister Teresa Jowell and one-time London-based lawyer for Berlusconi’s holding company, Fininvest.
Those grizzly judicial problems had come back to haunt the prime minister, or had they? For more than a decade now, Berlusconi has fought a series of dogged legal battles that certainly cast a less than flattering light on Italy. In more than a dozen major trials, he and/or senior company aides have been accused (but not convicted) of corruption, bribery of judges and tax inspectors, perjury, false accounting, tax evasion, money laundering and other crimes.
In this latest case, Berlusconi was originally accused of having paid a $600,000 bribe to Mills in exchange for favourable testimony during the former’s corruption trials in Milan in the late 1990s.
As one of the architects of Berlusconi’s complex network of offshore companies, Mills was of great interest to the Milan investigators. In a 2004 letter to his accountant, Bob Drennan, Mills appears to admit that his evidence in those trials was, at best, less than complete: “They [Berlusconi’s aides] also knew quite how much the way in which I had been able to give my evidence (I told no lies but I turned some very tricky corners to put it mildly) had kept Mr B out of a great deal of trouble that I would have landed him in if I had said all I knew.”
Tuesday’s ruling, which will be appealed by Mills, finds him guilty of having accepted a bribe in return for favourable evidence.
Missing, though, was any mention of the man accused of paying the bribe, namely Berlusconi. That is because last July Berlusconi’s government passed legislation (the so-called Lodo Alfano) granting legal immunity to the five highest office-holders in the land, including the prime minister.
That immunity, similar to one introduced by Berlusconi during his last spell in office, may be contested and rejected by Italy’s constitutional court over the next six months. However, if the law is thrown out and the Mills trial restarted with Berlusconi as a defendant, enough time may have passed for the statute of limitations ruling to apply, resulting in the entire case being dropped.
In other developed democracies such a scenario would prompt outrage and consternation. Spanish daily, El Pais, said this week that the Lodo Alfano “throws a disturbing shadow over Mr Berlusconi’s use of justice”, while French daily Le Figaro argued that Berlusconi had introduced the measure “to escape trial”.
In Italy, however, as Walter Veltroni pointed out, Berlusconi has so comprehensively won (in political and media terms) that it seems a majority of Italians either do not believe the accusations against him, or do not care.
Two days after the Mills verdict, the prime minister met Vatican secretary of state Cardinal Bertone and president of the Italian Bishops’ Conference Cardinal Bagnasco in a formal audience marking the 80th anniversary of the signing of the Lateran treaties between Italy and the Holy See.
Rather than explaining another potentially embarrassing court verdict, a beaming Berlusconi emphasised the good relations between his government and the Holy See: “We have completely identical viewpoints, the Holy See authorities have enthusiastically acknowledged that relations have never been so good,” he said.
It would be tempting to inquire just how the divorced, media mogul manages to have an “identical viewpoint” with the Vatican. However, on issues such as the “right to die” of the seriously ill, the financing of private Catholic schools, family subsidies and immigration, the government and the church may well find common ground.
In the week that Berlusconi saw off his seventh opposition leader and dodged another potential legal problem, it is hard not to agree with Antonio Polito, editor of Rome daily Il Riformista, when he says: “As far as public opinion goes, the message this [election result] gives is that Berlusconi is almost invincible and that the opposition is unelectable”.