The day Silvio couldn’t face the bare facts
A BARE- breasted protester confronted Silvio Berlusconi yesterday as the scandal-hit tycoon staged a return to front-line politics.
Leaping on to a table, the demonstrator shouted ‘time’s up’ as the flamboyant 81-year-old prepared to vote in the Italian elections.
The three-times former PM, famed for his louche ‘bunga-bunga’ parties, averted his eyes and was bundled out of the room by security guards. The woman was taken down from the table and ushered out.
Scrawled across her chest was the phrase ‘Berlusconi, your time has run out’. On her back was the word Femen, the name of a radical Ukrainian feminist group.
The incident took place as the self-styled godfather of Italian politics posed for photographers at a voting station in Milan.
The media mogul, whose fiancee Francesca Pascale is 32, joked: ‘She passed so quickly I didn’t get a chance to see her.’
It came as Italians went to the polls after a divisive election campaign dominated by concerns over immigration.
An initial exit poll last night suggested Italy had lurched to the populist right.
The poll for TV channel RAI predicted the anti- establishment Five Star Movement, founded by controversial comedian Beppe Grillo, was in first place with up to 32.5 per cent of the vote.
However experts said a hung parliament was the most likely outcome after Mr Berlusconi agreed a coalition deal between his own centre-Right party, Forza Italia, the anti-immigrant, anti-euro League and two smaller Right-wing parties.
Their combined vote in the initial exit poll was estimated to be around 36 per cent. A centre-left alliance dominated by former prime minister Matteo Renzi’s ruling Democratic Party was projected to win around 28 per cent.
Mr Berlusconi can’t hold public office until next year due to a tax fraud conviction. But he has managed to manoeuvre himself into the position of power broker and has backed European Parliament president Antonio Tajani as his choice to lead the country. Polling day saw long queues at voting centres around the country caused by a new voting system and indepth, anti-fraud checks.
Mr Berlusconi has refashioned himself as a moderate, elder statesman, as well as an animal rights activist.
His four-party group is bolstered by two resurgent far-Right forces – the League and Brothers of Italy – which have capitalised on fears over the hundreds of thousands of migrants who have arrived by boat from Libya since 2013.
Immigration was thrust into the heart of the election campaign by the brutal killing of an 18-year-old woman in Macerata which was blamed on Nigerian migrants. It prompted a racist ‘revenge’ gun rampage by a committed fascist.
Parties of the Right have promised to expel ‘600,000 illegals’.
League leader Matteo Salvini’s campaign slogans include ‘Italians first’, and he repeatedly referred to ‘out of control immigration’.
Five Star and the League had promised to hold a referendum to leave the euro but later dropped the idea.