Why we are sending an open letter to the Italian prime minister
TO HIS many other talents, Silvio Berlusconi has recently added that of ironist. The Italian prime minister entered the role of president of the European Union's Council of Ministers with a bang, by likening a German member of the European Parliament to a Nazi-era concentration camp guard. Many failed to see the joke. And the resulting imbroglio with the German government had a paradoxical effect: it distracted attention from the very accusation that the German MEP had been noisily making, namely that Mr Berlusconi has exploited his parliamentary majority in Italy to put himself beyond the reach of the law.
SNIP
He cannot be immune from the public
A serving prime minister should be answerable, on this argument, to the court of public opinion, not to courts of law. So, in an effort to make Mr Berlusconi answerable to the public, The Economist is this week sending him a challenge. We have drawn up a substantial dossier concerning his alleged misdeeds, backed up by documentary evidence. Most notably, for the criminal case which prompted the passing of the immunity law, concerning the alleged bribery of judges as part of the blocking of the sale of a state-owned food company, SME, the evidence we have assembled stands in sharp contradiction to the supposedly factual claims Mr Berlusconi made in court on May 5th this year, proclaiming his innocence.
SNIP
This is not a matter of a rich businessman now applying his talents to reforming Italy and giving it a greater voice in the world, though no doubt Mr Berlusconi is sincere when he says he would like to do those things. It is a matter of a rich businessman using his political power to foster his businesses, both by defeating judicial investigations against him and by enacting new laws and regulations in his own interest. The Economist is thus concerned about Mr Berlusconi both as an outrage against the Italian people and their judicial system, and as Europe's most extreme case of the abuse by a capitalist of the democracy within which he lives and operates. Far from being, as he claims, the man who is creating a new Italy, he is a prime representative, and perpetuator, of the worst of old Italy. Ironic, really.
http://www.economist.co.uk/printedition/displaystory.cfm?Story_ID=1957150
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