Day Berlusconi could not 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-yearold 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 selfstyled 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.
Experts last night said a hung parliament was the most likely outcome, although both the former PM’s Right-wing coalition and the anti-establishment Five Star Movement claimed they were confident of victory.
Mr Berlusconi heads an alliance that he has stitched together between his own centre-Right party, Forza Italia, the anti-immigrant, anti-euro League and two smaller Right-wing parties.
He cannot 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 given his public backing to European Parliament president Antonio Tajani as his choice to lead the country.
Polling day has seen long queues at voting centres around the country caused by a new voting system and in-depth, anti-fraud checks. Pollsters have predicted that Mr Berlusconi’s alliance will emerge as the largest bloc in parliament but fall short of a majority.
The anti-establishment Five Star Movement looks set to be the biggest single party, feeding off discontent over entrenched corruption and growing poverty. The turnout by noon was a little more than 19 per cent.
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.
‘I didn’t get a chance to see her’