Bunga Bunga No More

"Controversial" former Italian PM Silvio "Bunga Bunga" Berlusconi is dead at age 86.

 

Silvio Berlusconi, the boastful billionaire media mogul who was Italy’s longest-serving premier despite scandals over his sex-fueled parties and allegations of corruption, died Monday. He was 86.

Supporters applauded as his body arrived at his villa outside Milan from the city’s San Raffaele Hospital, where he had been treated for chronic leukemia. A state funeral will be held Wednesday in the city’s Duomo cathedral, according to the Milan Archdiocese.

A onetime cruise ship crooner, Berlusconi used his television networks and immense wealth to launch his long political career, inspiring both loyalty and loathing.

To admirers, the three-time premier was a capable and charismatic statesman who sought to elevate Italy on the world stage. To critics, he was a populist who threatened to undermine democracy by wielding political power as a tool to enrich himself and his businesses.

His Forza Italia political party was a coalition partner with current Premier Giorgia Meloni, a far-right leader who came to power last year, although he held no position in the government.

His friendship with Russian President Vladimir Putin put him at odds with Meloni, a staunch supporter of Ukraine. On his 86th birthday, while the war raged, Putin sent Berlusconi best wishes and vodka, and the Italian boasted he returned the favor by sending back Italian wine.

When former U.S. President Donald Trump launched his political career, many drew comparisons to Berlusconi, noting they both had long business careers, sought to upend the existing political order, and grabbed attention for their over-the-top personalities and lavish lifestyles.

Meloni remembered Berlusconi as “above all as a fighter.”

“He was a man who had never been afraid to defend his beliefs. And it was exactly that courage and determination that made him one of the most influential men in the history of Italy,” Meloni said on Italian TV.

 

Screamingly corrupt, just like Trump.  And now he's gone.

The Nice Italian Fascist, Con't

With all the recent turmoil at 10 Downing Street in the UK, Lula's comeback win this weekend in Brazil, and US midterm elections in just a week (and early voting ongoing in multiple states), it's easy to overlook that Italy's new PM, Giorgia Meloni, is a fascist empowering other fascists in the home of Rome.

Galeazzo Bignami, a lawmaker of the rightist Brothers of Italy party who sparked outrage in 2016 after a newspaper published a picture of him wearing a Nazi swastika on his left arm, was named junior infrastructure minister on Monday.

Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, who personally announced Bignami's appointment at a news conference, is the leader of Brothers of Italy, a group which traces its roots to the post-fascist Italian Social Movement (MSI).

Bignami, 47, was elected last month to a second term in parliament. He has long been part of the Italian hard-right but has spent part of his political career in former prime minister Silvio Berlusconi's more moderate Forza Italia.

He said in a statement on Monday that he felt "profound shame" for the pictures and firmly condemned "any form of totalitarianism," calling Nazism and any movement connected to it "the absolute evil".

Meloni did not comment on the 2016 photo but repeatedly condemned the infamous racist, anti-Jewish laws enacted by dictator Benito Mussolini in 1938 and last week told parliament she "never felt any sympathy for fascism".

"I have always considered the (anti-Semitic) racial laws of 1938 the lowest point of Italian history, a shame that will taint our people forever," she said in parliament.

Bignami will serve under the right-wing League party leader Matteo Salvini, who is the infrastructure minister and deputy prime minister.

 

The "former" Nazi has literally been appointed to help make sure the trains run on time.

 

You can't make this up, folks.

 

Last Call For The Nice Italian Fascist, Con't

With a big win in Italian elections on Sunday, right-wing Italian nationalist Giorgia Meloni is expected to be named the country's next Prime Minister, and as I warned about last week, the first thing to go will be most of Italy's refugee and immigration policies.

For years, Giorgia Meloni has railed against Italy’s migration policies, calling them overly lenient and saying they risk turning the country into the “refugee camp of Europe.”

Now that she is Italy’s presumed next prime minister, migration is one of the areas where Meloni can most easily bring in sweeping change.

“The smart approach is: You come to my house according to my rules,” Meloni, of the far-right Fratelli d’Italia party, said earlier this month in an interview with The Washington Post.

Her ideas, taken together, figure to significantly tighten the doors to one of the European Union’s front-line destinations for undocumented immigrants.

While in other areas — like spending and foreign policy — Meloni would be more constrained by Europe, E.U. countries have plenty of leeway to handle their external borders, and she has long made it clear that halting flows of people across the Mediterranean is one of her priorities.

But that doesn’t mean it will be complication-free.

Efforts to block humanitarian rescue vessels from docking at Italian ports could prompt legal challenges. And if Meloni chokes off pathways to Italy, the volume of crossings would probably increase to other Mediterranean countries such as Spain — as happened three years ago when Italy was briefly led by an anti-immigration, populist government.

“You can do stuff relatively quickly [on migration] that is draconian, symbolic and sends a clear message: We’re here, we’re doing something. But there’s trouble in store,” said Andrew Geddes, director of the Migration Policy Center at the European University Institute in Florence.

“When you stop the crossings and divert them [elsewhere], that is where you get into conflict with the E.U.,” he said. “It will breathe life into an old conflict.”

 

The previous conservative government tried this, and got sued to kingdom come and back. We'll see if Meloni is this dumb.

The Nice Italian Fascist

Seeing the Washington Post treat far-right Italian fascist Giorgia Meloni's "meteoric rise" towards Prime Minister as a good thing is bad enough, but it's pretty obvious that like Virginia GOP Gov. Glenn Youngkin, Meloni is lying about being an authoritarian, and the Post is falling for the lie yet another time. 

 

The favorite to be Italy’s next prime minister has rocketed almost from out of nowhere.

Her party, until recently, was on the fringes. She was overlooked for years by Italy’s male-dominated political class. She is an unmarried mother with a heavy Roman accent, always casual and blunt, gesturing with hands to the sky, lambasting “woke ideology” and cancel culture.

By any account, Giorgia Meloni’s rise is astonishing. In a matter of weeks, if all goes as expected, she stands to become Italy’s first female leader. She’s also set a benchmark for a far-right politician in Western Europe, earning a level of power that’s been out of reach for her counterparts in Germany and France, and doing so even after the forces propelling nationalism on the continent — a migration backlash and Euroskepticism — have waned.

But Meloni’s profile is distinctive, as is the path she’s found for political success.

Amid war in Europe, she has notably avoided the pitfalls of nationalist figures elsewhere. She’s a strong NATO supporter and shows no affinity for Russian President Vladimir Putin. She has pledged not to disrupt Italy’s stability and Atlantic alliances. The country, she says, won’t take some authoritarian turn.

What will surely change, though, is Italy’s tone. Meloni takes shots at the “LGBT lobby” and the “globalist” left. She highlights anecdotes about immigrant crime. She has said that “everything we stand for is under attack” — Christian values, gender norms. Some of her stances — like opposition to gay adoptions, for instance — don’t get much traction among Italian voters, but she cites them as evidence that she cares more about principles than popularity.

“In a political world where everyone’s saying one thing and doing another, our [party’s] system of values is pretty clear,” Meloni said in an interview with The Washington Post. “You may like it or not, but we aren’t misleading.”

If Meloni, 45, prevails, she’ll wind up with a hard job: running a country in a generation-long economic decline that is somewhat wary of her powers.

Those on the left have sounded the alarm, saying that Meloni could push Italy into Europe’s illiberal bloc, alongside Hungary and Poland, fighting against diversity and agitating against Brussels. Her opponents argue that her views can veer into the extreme. They cite past remarks — such as a speech from 2017 — in which Meloni said mass-scale illegal immigration to Italy was “planned and deliberate,” carried out by unnamed powerful forces to import low-wage labor and drive out Italians. “It’s called ethnic substitution,” Meloni said at the time, echoing the far-right “great replacement” conspiracy theory.

Her allies, on the other hand, say Meloni has the kind of serious plans her predecessors have lacked, and that she chiefly wants to address Italy’s economic woes. Her stump speech is theatrical, but it deals mostly with ideas about boosting investment and curbing welfare. Her party’s recently released platform has 25 proposals — everything from extending high-speed rail lines to jump-starting university research. Voters inclined toward Meloni tended to cite, in interviews with The Post, her perceived honesty and coherence as the reasons for their support.

For now, Meloni’s Fratelli d’Italia party — the Brothers of Italy, a name that echoes lyrics in the national anthem — is the most popular in the country, favored by roughly one-quarter of voters. It has a coalition agreement with other parties on the right, giving it overwhelming odds to prevail against a fractured and reeling left. The right-wing bloc has said that the premier job should go to the leader of the party with the most votes. Still, following the Sept. 25 general election, the president, Sergio Mattarella, has final say on who gets the mandate. 

 

The bad news, Italy is about to get a hell of a lot more hostile toward immigrants, Muslims, and of course, Jewish Italians. Meloni cozying up to Viktor Orban is inevitable if she takes power, and she's already letting everyone know her government is going to target LGBTQ+ folks from day one.

Sounds like every GOP politician in America, and the Post is like "But she's different!"

No, she's not.

Berlusconi's Bunga-Bunga Becomes Bloody Brutal

Italian police are now treating the hospital death of one of the main witnesses against former Prime Minister Sylvio Berlusconi in his corruption and bribery trial as a deliberate radioactive material poisoning homicide investigation.

Italy prosecutors have opened an investigation into the possible poisoning death of a Moroccan model who was a key witness in the trial against ex-Premier Silvio Berlusconi over his infamous “bunga bunga” parties. 

Imane Fadil, 34, died March 1 at a Milan-area hospital, where she had been treated since Jan. 29 for exhibiting “symptoms of poisoning,” Milan prosecutor Francesco Greco said, according to the Italian news agency ANSA. 

In 2012, Fadil had told reporters that she feared for her safety after telling prosecutors investigating possible witness tampering in the case that she was offered money in exchange for her silence about what went on at Berlusconi’s parties. 

Berlusconi was initially convicted of charges that he paid for sex with an underage woman at the sex-fueled “bunga bunga” parties, and used his influence to cover it up. He was ultimately acquitted by Italy’s highest court in 2015. 

Asked Saturday to comment, Berlusconi said he was always sorry when a young person dies. 

But he added: “I’ve never known this person and never spoke to her. What I read were her declarations that made me always think these were always invented and absurd things.” 

Fadil had testified against Berlusconi during the initial trial, and then with two other women had sought civil damages in a spinoff investigation over allegations that Berlusconi paid witnesses for their silence. That trial is ongoing. 

Fadil, who had reportedly wanted to be a television sportscaster, argued that she had suffered from lost opportunities because of her involvement in the cases. 

Late last year, lawyers for one of Berlusconi’s co-defendants in the witness tampering trial began negotiations to settle the women’s claims, ANSA reported at the time. But by January, the Milan court had thrown out their claims altogether. Two weeks later, Fadil was hospitalized. 

News reports said before Fadil slipped out of consciousness she told her lawyer and family that she feared she had been poisoned. 

ANSA quoted Greco as lamenting that the Humanitas hospital in Rozzano didn’t report Fadil’s complaints or symptoms, which he said were consistent with poisoning while she was being treated. He said prosecutors were only informed of the death when Fadil’s lawyer reported it. 

In a statement reported by ANSA, Humanitas disputed that, saying that Fadil’s medical charts were seized by law enforcement as soon as she died. It said it provided the results of her toxicological exams to prosecutors when they were completed on March 6.

Regardless of the poisoning charge, a major witness against an extremely corrupt former PM is now dead, that's not in dispute.  If Italian prosecutors were supposed to protect her, they failed. In a kinder timeline, I'd think that US intelligence may have some clue as to what really happened, and a President Hillary Clinton would be making more than a few phone calls to make it clear what the international community expected here.

Sadly, in this timeline I believe our intelligence services might be the ones giving Bunga Bunga Berlusconi tips on how to get away with poisoning your foes, since our good friend Vladimir Putin runs them anyway.

Last Call For The Italian Job

Don't look now, but we could be six weeks away from yet another Brexit-level crisis in Europe, this time as Italy faces a referendum in early December that will make or break the government of Italian PM Matteo Renzi.

In the town of Pontida at the foot of the Italian Alps, Alberto Frassoni cheerfully admits he knows nothing about the country’s upcoming referendum, not even the date. 

What the unemployed 48-year-old does know is that the economy isn’t working for him. 

“The euro ruined us because prices doubled,” says Frassoni, who supports the anti-immigrant Northern League that wants Italy to abandon the single currency. “A few things have changed, there are better public services for young and old people, but my job opportunities haven’t changed.” Foreigners “have taken work away from me,” he says. 

It’s the sort of discontent that populists are thriving on, taking them from the vocal fringes of politics right into the mainstream. After Britain’s stunning decision to withdraw from the European Union, now comes another ballot that could topple a leader should Italy defy Prime Minister Matteo Renzi over what, on paper at least, is the constitutional issue of reducing the size and powers of the Senate.

Should the December 4th referendum fail, Renzi has promised to resign as PM, and a narrow loss is looking more and more possible as Italy turns to protectionism and populism (sound familiar?)

What is clear is that many voters don’t know what it’s really about. They fret over the economy, immigration and Italy’s future in or out of the euro. 

Renzi, 41, now has a little over a month to champion a reform that promises to end the political instability that has toppled dozens of governments since World War II. But polls show he could be narrowly defeated, an outcome that is likely to lead to elections and potentially a leader who wants to take Italy out of the euro. 

Pontida stands out neither for its beauty nor rough edges, riches nor poverty. Every year, though, it hosts the annual rally of the Northern League, making it a touchstone for its followers. A poster on the main street proclaims: “Renzi slave of Europe and banks.”

The good news for the prime minister is that Frassoni, a former delivery driver, is among a third of the electorate who polls show might not even vote. There’s also at least 20 percent of voters who haven’t made up their minds in surveys that put Renzi’s “Yes” campaign trailing by four percentage points.

It's a bold move by Renzi, but if it fails, Italy will almost certainly elect a PM who will want to make sure that Italy is the next country out of the euro currency or the EU entirely.

Keep an eye on this one.  So far the EU has dodged plebiscite bullets in Spain but Lithuania's new government is very nationalist and more such elections around Europe are certainly on the way, the big one being France next year where President Hollande is pretty much doomed and Marine Le Pen and her French Trumpites are waiting in the wings.

2017 is the year the EU could crack up completely, folks.  We may get out alive in November but the rest of the world won't be so lucky.