Quote:Silvio Berlusconi's allies turn on him to keep Italy's grand coalition aliveKey figure says more than 40 MPs from billionaire's Freedom People party ready to back PM Enrico Letta in confidence vote
Lizzy Davies in Rome
theguardian.com, Tuesday 1 October 2013 20.48 BST

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Members of Silvio Berlusconi's party appear to be ready to defy him in backing the coalition. Photograph: Andreas Solaro/AFP/Getty Images
Silvio Berlusconi, Italy's longest-serving postwar prime minister, who has dominated the country's politics for two decades, appeared to be facing an unprecedented rebellion in his own party that raised hopes of the eurozone's third-largest economy avoiding a government collapse.
On the eve of a make-or-break day in parliament when the prime minister, Enrico Letta, is likely to call for a confidence vote in the grand coalition he has headed since April, Berlusconi appeared on Tuesday night to be on a collision course with a breakaway faction of his People of Freedom (PdL) party.
If the vote is called and fails, Letta will have to resign and the government will fall, a situation likely to spread shockwaves through the European markets. It would presage a fresh period of uncertainty for a recession-mired country that has already spent two months in political limbo this year, and could eventually prompt a new election.
However, as outrage about Berlusconi's decision to withdraw his ministers from the coalition built not only among his opponents but also within his own party, hopes grew last night that the Letta government could be saved by a faction of disgruntled PdL "doves".
To win the confidence vote in the senate, Letta needs to attract extra votes from either the centre-right PdL or the anti-establishment Five Star Movement (M5S) to reach the magic number of 161. He has said, however, that he has no interest in continuing at the head of a government that only sneaks in by a handful of votes.
His chances appeared to have been significantly boosted on Tuesday, when Carlo Giovanardi, a long-time ally of Berlusconi, struck the first major blow when he announced that "more than 40" PdL MPs were prepared to vote to keep the government afloat.
Then, in a stunning move likened by one observer to an "Et tu, Brute?" moment, Angelino Alfano, the deputy prime minister long seen as Berlusconi's political heir, appeared to solidify the mutiny. "I remain firmly convinced that all our party should tomorrow back the confidence vote in Letta," he said, according to Ansa.
His words defied the 77-year-old billionaire party chief, who on Friday faces a senate committee vote which is almost certain to go against him on whether he should be stripped of his seat because of his conviction for tax fraud.
Berlusconi has made a series of contradictory statements in recent days, appearing at times to be prepared to offer external support for the government after first calling for Italy to return to the polls "as soon as possible".
But after a late-night summit with party "hawks" at his Rome residence, he gave no doubt as to his intentions, reportedly calling on his MPs to vote against a confidence vote. The decision, which came soon after Letta said he had refused the resignations of Berlusconi's five ministers, including Alfano, set the stage for a dramatic parliamentary showdown.
For Letta, Tuesday's session in the upper house of parliament will be by far the biggest test of his career. The mild-mannered 47-year-old has attempted to reconcile the centre-left and centre-right for five months, a task which became dramatically more difficult after Berlusconi's conviction on 1 August.
If the numbers claimed by Giovanardi are borne out and analysts warned against assuming anything Letta would have a majority which would afford him room for manoeuvre.
If, during the debates on Tuesday, he senses that he does not have the support needed, he could choose not to call a vote and go instead to the Quirinale to have a crisis meeting with the president, Giorgio Napolitano.
The 88-year-old head of state, forced to serve an unprecedented second term in the aftermath of February's inconclusive election, is desperate to avoid a crunch vote that would see the government fall.
He does not want Italians to return to the polls any time soon, especially before a new electoral law is passed that could avoid returning a deadlocked parliament as in February.
In recent days, critics of Berlusconi's strategy, from the Vatican to Italy's leading employers' association, have lined up to condemn him for risking a new period of turmoil in a country struggling to exit its longest recession in decades.
Italy's statistics agency, Istat, announced on Tuesday that, for the first time since records began, youth unemployment rose above 40% in August. Overall joblessness stands at 12.2%.
For the Democratic party and other supporters of the Letta government, this is reason enough for the government not to be made to fall.
"This country needs anything but more electoral and political limbo," said Sandro Gozi, a PD MP. He said that to go to new elections without first redrawing the electoral law that led to a deadlocked senate would be "masochistic". "We would risk finding ourselves in exactly the same situation as today," he said.
But, over in the M5S, the view is different. Its MPs are expected to vote en masse against the confidence vote. "The situation is extremely serious. There is a government crisis with a totally fractured majority," said Paola Carinelli, who represents the M5S in the chamber. "But precisely because of this, what sense is there in keeping it alive? Rather let's have new elections."
She said the government had failed to deliver. "What a government should be doing in a situation of this gravity is respond to the problems of the country. Instead, in recent weeks, they have just been arguing with each other and not prioritising the interests of the country," she said.

Peter Lemkin Wrote:He has enough money for lots of Bunga-Bunga parties with underage girls, not to mention being able to keep affording face lifts, hair transplants, viagra, fancy life-style until he dies...but, no, he wants political power too......and very corrupt power, to go with his totally corrupt media power.

I'm sure he regrets he was too young to have served with Mussolini. They'd have gotten along very well.

Quote:Silvio Berlusconi makes humiliating climbdown in Italian parliamentPrime minister Enrico Letta wins confidence vote after retreat by Il Cavaliere in face of MPs' rebellion

Lizzy Davies in Rome
The Guardian, Wednesday 2 October 2013 20.16 BST
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Silvio Berlusconi attends the confidence vote for Enrico Letta's Italian government in Rome. Photograph: Franco Origlia/Getty Images
Even before he'd started to speak, the signs were of a performance that lacked his usual panache. To begin with, the microphone that Silvio Berlusconi picked up to address the senate didn't work properly. Once it did, his speech was uncharacteristically flat. There were no histrionics or garrulous jokes just a final sentence which, in a few rather sheepish words, spoke volumes.
The man who had dominated Italian politics for two decades had been forced into a humiliating climbdown by a rebel faction of his own MPs. Outfoxed, out of luck and abandoned as never before, he looked tired and downcast. But he brought a smile and incredulous chuckle to the face of Enrico Letta, the prime minister.
"Italy needs a government that can carry out structural and institutional reforms which the country needs to modernise," said Berlusconi, his hands clasped in front of him, an Italian flag pin on his lapel. "We have decided, not without internal strife, to vote in confidence."
There was a burst of applause. But Il Cavaliere, as the Italian media like to call the billionaire former prime minister and convicted tax fraudster, had nothing to cheer about.
In a fittingly dramatic denouement to a political saga that a former minister likened to a tragicomedy and an MP said was more like a farce, Italy's government crisis a week of mounting dread and trembling markets that had risked scuppering the grand coalition and plunging the eurozone heavyweight into turmoil was over, just like that.
Letta, the centre-left leader of a government which since its inception has been plagued with tensions and ideological splits, went on to win the senate confidence vote with a sweeping majority. Only 70 of 305 MPs voted against; 235 MPs voted for. Berlusconi the man who triggered the crisis and spent days clamouring for the government's downfall was one of them.
Later, in the lower house of parliament, a vindicated Letta said it was time to call a halt to the threats and ultimatums which had dominated the coalition since Berlusconi's first definitive criminal conviction on 1 August.
"Italy needs there to be no more blackmail of the 'do this or the government falls' sort," he said. "Italy doesn't need any old government, but a government at the height of its abilities with a clear majority supporting it."
The prospect of more stability was music to the markets' ears. The FTSE MIB was the best-performing stock market index in Europe, up 0.7%, while Italian debt strengthened in value, pushing down borrowing costs and sending the yield on Italy's 10-year bonds to 4.37% from as high as 4.74% on Monday morning. They were not the only ones to be relieved. Ever since ominous drumbeats started sounding last week, concern had grown not only among Berlusconi's opponents but large parts of Italian society about what lengths he was prepared to go to in order to in Letta's words "protect his personal interests".
Facing imminent expulsion from the senate and the enforcement of his commuted one-year sentence, the recently convicted People of Freedom (PdL) party chief had insisted that his motive for suddenly withdrawing his ministers from the government was a sales tax hike imposed by the coalition that he had vehemently opposed.
Even by Berlusconi's standards, however, this was hard for Italians to swallow even, it transpired, for most of the very ministers he had ordered to resign. One by one, four of them lined up to voice their misgivings. Their exact status was unclear; La Repubblica, translating the uncertainty into punctuation, referred to one of them as an "ex(?) minister". By Tuesday night, however, in the latest step in an increasingly bizarre political dance, Letta made an announcement to the effect that the five could resign all they liked; he was not accepting their resignations.
In the senate on Wednesday, the stage was set not only for a showdown between Berlusconi and - as Il Sole 24 Ore wrote "the whole world Europe, the United States, the markets, the [semi-official Vatican newspaper] Osservatore Romano". It would also be a vital test of whether the leader of what has always been a personal party built around Berlusconi the man - his success, his power and his bravado - still called the shots.
As it turned out, he did not not, at least, in the way he once would have done. With his family newspaper condemning the flabbergasting "patricide" of Angelino Alfano, the PdL secretary widely seen as Berlusconi's heir who emerged as leader of the rebels, the 77-year-old arrived at the senate around 25 minutes into Letta's make-or-break speech
"Italy is running a risk that is potentially fatal, without remedy," the prime minister told MPs, warning them of the damage to the country's economy and image that a government collapse and eventual fresh elections would inflict. "Thwarting this risk, to seize or not seize the moment, depends on the choices we will make in this chamber. It depends on a 'yes' or 'no'."As he sat in Palazzo Madama, his expression grim, Berlusconi, the longest-ruling prime minister Italy has known since the second world war, was greeted by a succession of supporters, many of them among the so-called PdL "hawks". One of them, a former MP named Daniela Santanchè, a loyalist so fierce she is known as "the pythoness", was reported to have offered on Sunday to give Alfano her "head on a platter" if it helped her boss.
But as the day wore on it became clear that a significant portion of Berlusconi's party was going to defy his wishes and vote for the government to continue. Arithmetic on a scribbled piece of paper that Alfano displayed had 32 senators voting with their leader, 24 absenting themselves, and 25 against him. With such numbers, Letta was home and dry. And Berlusconi, not long after the party line was voted and confirmed to be for the "sfudicia", then got up in parliament and performed a screeching U-turn.
The prime minister, perhaps, could be forgiven a small smile. Later, the editor of La Stampa, tweeted him reminding him that, on Sunday, Letta had likened Italian politics to Groundhog Day, the film in which every day turns out the same. After all that, Mario Calabresi seemed to suggest, Italy had ended up with exactly the same government, with the same problems, as before.
But, said Vincenzo Scarpetta, an analyst at Open Europe, it would be a mistake to think that Wednesday's vote changed nothing. On the one hand, the set-up that Letta has been left with is still far from ideal and "there are still doubts about this government's ability to push forward with painful, unpopular measures," he said. Many suggested Letta would have preferred to have kept Berlusconi out of the majority altogether, thus giving himself a more unified government.
On the other, Scarpetta said, Berlusconi's ability to pull strings and dictate events had definitely been compromised. "He clearly comes out weaker from this. The initial situation when they formed the government was that he would be able to pull the plug on it whenever he wanted, because the government depended on his support. But now, that's exactly what he tried to do … and it didn't work," he said. Analysts said that what happens to the centre-right now will be key in determining whether this is the beginning of the end for Berlusconi, or just a major setback. On Wednesday night, in the lower house, a group of 26 PdL deputies had reportedly signed up to a new centre-right group led by Alfano. Berlusconi loyalists were expected to stay with him under the relaunched Forza Italia party name. "Of course, he remains the leader of the party," said Scarpetta. "We will just have to see what happens to the party."

Quote:Silvio Berlusconi faces trial for allegedly bribing senator

Former PM accused of bribing Sergio De Gregorio as part of attempt to bring down Romano Prodi's government in 2006

• Reuters in Naples
  
• theguardian.com, Wednesday 23 October 2013 18.33 BST
  

Silvio Berlusconi, the former prime minister of Italy. Photograph: Giorgio Cosulich/Getty Images

Silvio Berlusconi has been ordered to stand trial for corruption, in a fresh legal blow following his conviction for tax fraud in August and a string of other cases.
Prosecutors in Naples accuse the former prime minister of bribing Sergio De Gregorio, a former senator in the small Italy of Values party, to switch allegiance as part of an attempt to bring down the centre-left government of Romano Prodi in 2006.
De Gregorio, who has admitted receiving €3m from Berlusconi and attempting to persuade other senators to change sides, was sentenced to 20 months in jail after plea bargaining. His change of sides destabilised Prodi's government and contributed to its eventual collapse, but he has since turned against Berlusconi.
"This is a decision which substantially confirms what I told the Naples magistrates," De Gregorio told SkyTG24 television. "I have cleared my conscience as far as possible and apologised for what I did."
Berlusconi has denied any wrongdoing, and his lawyer Michele Cerabona said he was confident of the outcome of a preliminary hearing expected on 11 February.
However, the case adds to a long list of legal headaches facing the billionaire media tycoon, who faces expulsion from parliament and a year of community service or house arrest after he was convicted of being at the centre of a vast tax fraud system at his Mediaset television empire.
His legal battles have caused serious tension in Enrico Letta's coalition government, an unwieldy alliance between the centre-left Democratic party and Berlusconi's People of Freedom (PDL).
Berlusconi and his supporters have consistently argued that politically biased magistrates have tried to destroy him, and there was a chorus of support from PDL MPs following news of the trial.
"The strategy of a certain section of the magistracy is clear as is its objective. Reform of the justice system is unavoidable," said Mara Carfagna, spokeswoman of the PDL group in the lower house of parliament.