Silvio Berlusconi can boast that he is the last Italian prime minister to be directly elected by the ballot box. Since his resignation in 2011 suffocated by the financial crisis, the six heads of government who have emerged, the last of them the outgoing Mario Draghi, have come to power thanks to various agreements between the parties in parliament. Though he is on the brink of turning 86 in the next election, Berlusconi is reluctant to retire and relinquish the leadership of his political force, Forza Italia (FI).
In a move that betrays his usual aspiration to become a moderate center-right party, the tycoon’s electoral creature abstained on Wednesday in the confidence vote in the Draghi government along with the League and the Five Star Movement, leading to the fall of the executive and the expected end of the legislature. This decision has caused an internal earthquake within FI, whose ranks have already left two members of Draghi’s cabinet: Mariastella Gelmini, Minister of the Regional and Autonomous Affairs portfolio, and Renato Brunetta, Minister of Public Administration. “It is not I who is leaving him, but Forza Italia who is abandoning itself and denying its history,” said Brunetta, who did not accept her party’s withdrawal of support for the former president of the European Central Bank.
Gelmini also thought it was a mistake that the political force of which he has been a member for twenty-five years follows in the footsteps of the sovereignist right wing of the League. The minister eventually got into a public argument with one of her classmates, Licia Ronzulli, who challenged her, “Go cry somewhere else and take a Xanax (tranquilizer)”. Another FI senator announced that he would also be leaving the party, while he is expected to take the same step and bid farewell to Southern and Territorial Cohesion Minister Berlusconi Mara Carfagna.
Source: La Verdad
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