Berlusconi offers old message at an old desk
SILVIO BERLUSCONI used a glitzy television chat show as a platform to promise hundreds of thousands of jobs if his centre-right coalition wins next month’s election.
He did the same thing 17 years ago, when he used the same programme, the same studio and even the same desk to sign a “compact with Italians” in which he pledged to generate one million jobs – a promise that economists say he failed to deliver.
“After the victory of the centre-right in the election, my job will be to create jobs so that by the end of the fiveyear legislature we will have brought Italy’s rate of unemployment to below the European average, which is 8.7 per cent,” the 81-year-old billionaire said on Wednesday night, signing the accord with a flourish.
Italy’s jobless rate, 11 per cent, rises to 32 per cent among young people. “There are three million young people who don’t work. They get up at midday and go to the discotheque,” he said. Mr Berlusconi insisted that the centre-right was the party most likely to guarantee stability. Immigration has become a key issue in the election campaign, particularly after the murder and dismemberment of an 18-year-old Italian woman, allegedly by three Nigerians, and the revenge shooting of six African migrants by a 28-year-old Italian man with fascist allegiances in the town of Macerata in the Marche region.
Mr Berlusconi has co-opted the hardline language of the League, with whom he is allied in a centreright coalition, warning that half a million unauthorised migrants in Italy represent “a social bomb” waiting to explode. He cannot become prime minister again because of a conviction for tax fraud that bans him from holding public office, but he is determined to be the power behind the throne if, as seems likely, his alliance wins the most votes on March 4.