Berlusconi’s pro-Putin outbursts spark chaos in right-wing coalition

The feeling in the last few hours is that there is no one at the wheel of Forza Italia. Or, at least, that the person who insists on driving the vehicle at a crucial moment for Italy, an 86-year-old man more aware of his interests than those of the formation he founded 30 years ago, is about to crash it. Silvio Berlusconi has not been in the Senate for a week, the chamber that saw him say goodbye to active politics nine years ago after being disqualified for tax fraud. In this short period of time he has already been on the verge of blowing up the government formation led by the far-right Giorgia Meloni twice. On Tuesday night, after having to humiliate himself by going to the headquarters of the Brothers of Italy to seal peace with their leader, it transpired that he had screwed up again. He again praised Russian President Vladimir Putin, assured that he had relaunched relations with him and questioned the military and political strategy of the EU and NATO in Ukraine. “Italy is fully fledged and with its head held high, part of Europe and the Atlantic Alliance. Who does not agree with this premise, may not be part of the Executive. Even at the risk that it will not form,” Meloni warned on Wednesday night.

The bomb exploded in three stages. First the statements of The Cavaliere and Forza Italia denied them to various media, including EL PAÍS. “This is an anecdote from years ago that he told the deputies,” said the formation. Shortly after, La Presse, the agency that had published them, released the audio in which Berlusconi himself could be heard, very animated, talking about an unmistakably present situation. “After a long time, I have resumed relations with President Putin a little, a little much… that for my birthday [el 29 de septiembre] He has sent me 20 bottles of vodka and a very kind letter. I have responded with bottles of [vino] Lambrusco and an equally friendly menu”. Berlusconi also confesses that the Russian president considers him “the first of five true friends of his” and that he cannot express his opinion, because if he told it to the press it would be a disaster. “America and the West have no real leaders,” he noted.

On Wednesday, when the storm seemed to abate, new audios of the same conversation were leaked again. Even more serious. In one of them, Berlusconi dispatches the Ukrainian president with a derogatory remark: “Zelensky? Let’s leave it, I don’t want to say what I think.” And then they also begin to hear applause from the deputies of Forza Italia. He asks for “discretion” because he is going to tell them how the current situation has come about. “In 2014, in Minsk, Belarus, an agreement was signed between Ukraine and the two new republics of Donbas for a peace agreement without mutual attacks. Ukraine tossed that treaty to hell a year later and started attacking the borders. The two republics suffered victims, some 7,000 soldiers. Zelensky triples attacks. And desperate, the two republics manage to talk to Putin and tell him: ‘Vladimir, we don’t know what to do, you defend us.’ He was against any initiative and resists. But he is under very strong pressure from all over Russia. And then he invents a special operation, ”he tells his faithful.

Berlusconi, in the same intervention, explains the key, according to him, of the military issue. “The troops were supposed to enter Ukraine, in a week to arrive in kyiv, depose the Government in office and put in an Executive elected by the Ukrainian minority of people with common sense. And then another week to go back. But they have encountered an unforeseen situation because Ukraine has started receiving money from the West from the third day. And the war, instead of being a matter of weeks, became one of 200 years. This is the situation of the war in Ukraine.”

Meloni, furious at Berlusconi’s shrillness, was very harsh in her response. “Italy, with us in government, will never be the weak ring of the West, the nation that cannot be trusted, so dear to our detractors. I will ask all the ministers of a possible government for clarity. The first rule is to respect the program that the citizens have voted for”.

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Supposed guarantor of moderation

Berlusconi already defended Putin’s invasion in a prime-time show just a month ago. This recurrence clearly reveals his real thinking and that places his party in a position of weakness in the current negotiation to distribute the ministries among the three formations of the right-wing coalition that has won the elections (Brothers of Italy, Forza Italia and Liga). . Until now his right-hand man and coordinator of Forza Italia, Antonio Tajani, was destined to become foreign minister and guarantor of the possible excesses of the other parties in international affairs. The problem is that, until now, the only outbursts have been committed by the man who had to defend the moderation and Europeanism of the future Executive.

Berlusconi’s comments also reached the personal aspect. In the recording you can hear how he refers to Meloni’s partner, the journalist Andrea Giambruno, who hosts one of the Mediaset newscasts, owned by The Cavaliere. “There has never been a distance with her. But if her husband works in my company… ”. The leader of the Brothers of Italy, according to the Italian press, would have said: “She wants to complicate my life. Berlusconi is like the scorpion with the frog, it stings even though he knows that he is going to die”.

His first day back in the Senate was also chaotic. He ordered his people not to vote for Meloni’s candidate to preside over him because she refused to give Licia Ronzulli, one of his closest collaborators, a weighty ministry. Believing himself in a situation of power, he tried to pressure her with that threat, but Brothers of Italy obtained support from the opposition parties, evidencing the political decadence of that old gambler who won all the games. Later, the televisions recorded a paper that Berlusconi wrote in the Chamber where he insulted Meloni: “Stubborn, arrogant, arrogant and offensive. No willingness to change. You can’t agree with her.”

The situation worries those around you. His children intervened this week to curb his destructive impulses. A person who knows him describes the situation like this. “Some of the issues that have happened in recent days should not be addressed from a political perspective, but rather biographical. That of an older man whose time is long past. A giant of Italy whose faculties today are no longer the same”. Among his partners, on the other hand, opinions are harsher. Some members of the Brothers of Italy, according to the newspaper Il Fatto Quotidiano, referred to Berlusconi like this: “He is a knucklehead. In one day he has ruined everything” or “He is a poor old man”.

The problem is that a loot of at least four ministries and a vice-presidency of the Government is at stake. And Berlusconi, despite having signed peace with Meloni on Monday at the headquarters of the Brothers of Italy, continues to disagree on the distribution designed by the future prime minister and demands the Justice portfolio for his party: his great obsession. The Cavaliere I would like it to go to Elisabetta Casellati, former president of the Senate. But Meloni insists that he should go to Carlo Alberto Nordio.

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