Italians are getting fed up of Silvio Berlusconi's alleged playboy anticts

12 April 2012

Italian premier Silvio Berlusconi may have been handed a brief reprieve when his trial was adjourned today - but there is a feeling that the alleged antics of the playboy prime minster might be about to catch up with him.

Increasingly the joke of their leader and his so-called 'Bunga Bunga' parties is wearing thin with a majority of Italians.

Of all the 130 charges brought against Berlusconi during his various terms as prime minister, these are the most lurid. The premier is accused of paying for sex with a minor, Karima El Mahroug, aka Ruby 'the heart stealer'.

Allegedly the 17-year-old Moroccan was hired for one of the Berlusconi parties - which supposedly involved various showgirls and ladies in different degrees of undress cavorting in a less than spontaneous orgy.

A second charge relates to the prime minister abusing his office in trying to obtain Ms El Mahroug's release from arrest for theft in Milan. He contacted the police to say that she was related to the now deposed Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak.

Before Mr Berlusconi actually gets his day in court there are lengthy legal arguments and procedural debates to be held - including sifting through 200,000 pages of trial documents and whittling a list of 140 potential witnesses including some 35 showgirls, the actor George Clooney, and football ace Cristiano Ronaldo.

His appearance in the box may come later but the impact is already unnerving Italians from all walks of life. He has defended himself by claiming to be the most persecuted man in Italian history, and that he is faced by a conspiracy of corrupt and subversive lefty lawyers and judges.

Interestingly he has refrained from criticising the tribunal of three women judges hearing the Milan case, who are respected right across the judiciary.

But the crude vulgarity of his personal habits, repeat partying with teenagers, and raucous verbal assaults on his enemies as left wing scum, is having an effect. His lack of manners seem to have reached parliament, where last week a member of his government yelled at a member of his own party to go and play with himself -- though in much cruder terms. This made Italy's President Giorgio Napolitano come to parliament to tell members to behave themselves or go.

Equally the Berlusconi broadsides against lawyers and judges have been taken by leading newspapers as an invitation for Italians to break the law, or ignore it altogether.

Approval ratings for the prime minister are plummeting, 33 per cent and going down. This is because Italy is now facing its most dire national and international crisis since 1945. Of all the EU and Nato countries Italy is already facing the heaviest impact of the Libyan crisis. Already tens of thousands of refugees from Libya and Tunisia have come to Italy these past few weeks - and the flow could be in the hundreds of thousands and possibly the million by the end of the summer.

It is a time when Italy needs statesman not a playboy at the helm.

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