Scandals fail to affect Berlusconi popularity

Berlusconi: his family controls Italy’s biggest private TV network, as well as two newspapers, the AC Milan football club and the Mondadori publishing house.By Alvise Armellini/RomeBack in October, the man who had dominated Italian politics for the previous 20 years appeared to be on his way out. Eight months on, Silvio Berlusconi remains firmly at the centre of the country’s political stage, notwithstanding the scandals. On Monday, the media-mogul-turned-politician once again made the international headlines, as a court in Milan sentenced him to seven years and banned him for life from public office for paying for sex with a minor and of abusing his power as prime minister to cover up the affair. The verdict came on top of another conviction in March, this time for leaking information to smear a political rival, and an appeal verdict in May, which upheld a guilty verdict for tax fraud. A judge in Naples is this week due to decide whether he should face a new trial for bribing an opposition lawmaker with 3mn euros ($3.9mn) in order to provoke the collapse of Romano Prodi’s leftist government, in 2008. And yet, despite the embarrassing allegations that have continued to swirl around him, Berlusconi remains a force to be reckoned with. After announcing he would not be running again for high office, the 76-year-old retook control of his conservative People of Freedom (PDL) party and fought an energetic campaign that brought him within a whisker of election victory in February. The unexpected result baffled political analysts and observers, and allowed him to force his centre-left rivals - which in December still had a 20-point lead over the PDL - into a grand coalition government. Support for one of Europe’s most controversial politicians has continued to be high. A recent SWG poll had his coalition on 35%, against 30% for the centre-left, whereas in February the two sides were neck-and-neck with around 29%. Berlusconi has benefited from populist campaign pledges to slash taxes and reject strict budgetary policies enforced by the European Union and inspired by Germany. The PDL is now pressuring Prime Minister Enrico Letta into scrapping an unpopular property tax on primary residences and halting a July 1 increase in value added tax, with Berlusconi saying the government should be prepared to flout EU deficit rules if needed. His message chimes with many austerity-weary Italians, who seem prepared to forgive Berlusconi’s sexual and financial woes. One explanation for such tolerance is that the country’s magistrates, unlike elsewhere in Europe, are not universally held in high esteem by ordinary citizens. Italy’s legal system that is notoriously slow, inefficient and unpredictable. Furthermore, political activism by some magistrates - such as former hard-left prime ministerial candidate Antonio Ingroia - has helped Berlusconi portray the courts as biased against him. A recent Demopolis poll found that only 48% of Italians trust the courts, with the percentage dropping to 24% among conservative voters. Another explanation is Berlusconi’s enormous influence on Italian society. His family controls Italy’s biggest private TV network, as well as two newspapers, the AC Milan football club and the Mondadori publishing house. But he has also been appreciated as a strong leader, in contrast to a succession of centre-left rivals who have failed to contain internal factionalism and rivalries that have weakened their effectiveness in office. In 2006, at the end of a five-year stint in government, centre-left academic Luca Ricolfi calculated that Berlusconi had complied with “61.1%” of his 2001 campaign pledges, including creating more jobs and raising pensions.  He failed to cut crime and reduce taxes, but at least he did not raise them, Ricolfi noted. Despite his resilience, Berlusconi may eventually be forced out from public life if Italy’s top appeals court upholds later this year a tax fraud conviction that also carries a ban on holding public office. But Matteo Renzi - the youthful mayor of Florence who is tipped as Italy’s next centre-left leader - has already said that he would rather beat Berlusconi at the polls than rely on judges to do the work for him. - DPA