MILAN: Silvio Berlusconi has prepared a video message that could announce a decision to bring down Italian Prime Minister Enrico Letta’s coalition government, one of his staunchest supporters said yesterday.
The comment came ahead of a meeting on Monday of a special Senate committee that will vote on whether to strip centre-right leader and former premier Berlusconi of his seat in parliament after he received a four-year jail sentence for tax fraud.
“It’s ready, Berlusconi will decide when to broadcast it and I think it is absolutely imminent,” Daniela Santanche, a deputy nicknamed “the pythoness” for her fierce devotion to the media billionaire, told a news conference.
She said the 76-year-old Berlusconi alone would decide whether to quit the government but that statements from his centre-left coalition partners in support of expelling him from the Senate were unacceptable.
Speculation over a crisis that could topple Letta’s fragile coalition of the centre-left Democratic Party (PD) and the centre-right People of Freedom (PDL) party has been swirling ever since Berlusconi lost his final appeal against the conviction last month.
The trigger for a crisis could be a Senate committee on parliamentary eligibility which meets on Monday to begin discussions that could end with the formal opening of procedures to expel Berlusconi from the Senate.
However, the PDL itself appears divided and has switched between pledges of support for Letta and repeated threats over the last few weeks to bring down the government, adding to the sense of confusion hanging over the political world in Rome. Italy can ill-afford disarray: the euro zone’s third largest economy is struggling to emerge from its longest post-war recession and cut its massive public debt, but reform efforts have been hampered by constant infighting within the government.
“There is something irrational in the behaviour of Silvio Berlusconi at the moment, which can only be explained by a state of great personal torment,” the Corriere della Sera, Italy’s biggest daily, said in a front-page editorial. Reuters
