Veltroni of weer Berlusconi ?

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Op zaterdag 12 april 2008 20:55 schreef Monidique het volgende:
Het is natuurlijk absurd dat zo'n clown nog zoveel stemmen krijgt.

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Op zaterdag 12 april 2008 22:35 schreef HPoi het volgende:
Zal wel weer Berlusconi Macronie worden...................

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Op zondag 13 april 2008 02:11 schreef JohnDope het volgende:
Tong jonge blijf nou lekker bij het Gouden Kooi forum, want daar heb je tenminste wel verstand van.

Verder hoop ik natuurlijk dat Berlusconi gaat winnen.

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Op zaterdag 12 april 2008 20:34 schreef Morendo het volgende:
Ik heb altijd wel een zwak gehad voor Berlusconi.

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Niets veranderd in al die tijd

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Op zondag 13 april 2008 11:05 schreef tong80 het volgende:

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Over tien jaar lezen we dat ie de godfather van de maffia was.

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Op zondag 13 april 2008 10:23 schreef Klopkoek het volgende:
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Alle charlatans naast elkaar.

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Op zondag 13 april 2008 12:08 schreef waht het volgende:

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Bush is het breedst

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Berlusconi vents wrath on ECB policy
By Guy Dinmore in Rome

Published: April 11 2008 18:56 | Last updated: April 11 2008 18:56

Silvio Berlusconi, bidding to become Italy’s prime minister for the third time in elections this weekend, on Friday lashed out at Europe’s central bankers, promised to make Israel his first overseas visit and predicted he would blitz his rivals if fraud did not stop him.

The billionaire opposition leader’s comments – made on the last day of campaigning before voting Sunday and Monday – followed a final rally in Rome where post-fascist allies pleased an enthusiastic but relatively small crowd by promising to rid the city of 20,000 immigrants as soon as they returned to power.

Organisers claimed more than 30,000 people attended the rally next to the Colosseum, but the number was closer to 5,000. Repeating his usual stump speech, Mr Berlusconi painted his rivals in the centre-left Democratic party as being communists and liars.

No matter that he is fighting his fifth campaign since 1994, Mr Berlusconi’s closest supporters still see him primarily as an outsider, the successful entrepreneur who has challenged the system to help the Everyman.

“All those court cases against him just make him the persecuted martyr,” said Paola, a rightwing voter.

While the committed few turned out to listen, some were drifting away before he had finished, and many on Italy’s right admit they only back him because they see no alternative to the left they hate and fear and see as responsible for their low wages and high taxes.

Although he promises cuts in taxes and spending as he has before, Mr Berlusconi’s statements on the economy, notably his opposition to a foreign takeover of the loss-making Alitalia airline, indicate that his centre-right alliance would take a more statist direction in government.

“It is clear that something is not right in the interest rate policy of the European Central Bank,” he said, complaining about the rise of the euro in an interview with Panorama, a magazine owned by his Fininvest company.

“We should return to the primacy of politicians. It is not thinkable that it is the bankers who decide the destiny of 400m Europeans.”

Giulio Tremonti, finance minister in the last Berlusconi government, rejected accusations of statism and protectionism levelled in response to his recent book, Hope and Fear.

“To put it in a nutshell, my view can be summarised in two points: ‘Market if possible, state if necessary’ and ‘rule-based trade versus unregulated free-trade’,” he told the Financial Times.

Two weeks ago the last opinion polls allowed before voting gave Mr Berlusconi’s People of Freedom coalition a comfortable lead of some seven points.

Walter Veltroni, reformist leader of the centre-left Democratic party, has narrowed that lead slightly according to pollsters and betting markets.

Mr Veltroni, Rome’s former two-term mayor, held his final rally in the capital last night. Earlier he said Mr Berlusconi was “not a statesman” and pointed out that Italy’s economy barely grew during his government.

Due to the different voting systems for the two chambers of parliament, some analysts predict a clear win for Mr Berlusconi in the lower house but a close race for the Senate.

Such an outcome could lead to the same kind of instability experienced by Romano Prodi’s centre-left coalition government until it collapsed in January after just 21 months.

Comparing the elections to a game of tennis, Mr Berlusconi said he would win 6-0 in both houses in the absence of fraud. By repeatedly suggesting his rivals plan to cheat, Mr Berlusconi is galvanising his own supporters, but also raising fears of contested results.

Giuliano Amato, the interior minister in charge of the elections, confirmed on Friday that the authorities had prevented an attempt by the Ndrangheta Mafia of Calabria to rig overseas voting among Italians resident in South America. Officials did not say which party the Ndrangheta was favouring.

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Silvio Berlusconi

The billionaire entrepreneur, media tycoon and centre-right opposition leader is fighting his fifth election campaign at the age of 71 in a bid for a final, third term as prime minister.

In the last elections, in 2006, his coalition lost by the narrowest of margins, just 24,000 votes. This time around he has started his campaign with a comfortable lead in opinion polls.

Little seems to change him. He is enduringly popular among his

supporters despite a lack of major accomplishments in his last term in office (2001 to 2006). His irreverent and sometimes sexist jokes – he most recently suggested to a young woman with job problems to marry someone wealthy like his son – charm and infuriate Italy’s long polarised electorate.

In politics as in business, Berlusconi is a risk-taker, using the power of his personality and his wealth to keep motivating devoted fans and maintain the loyalty of sometimes reluctant allies.

For several decades he has kept a tight circle of most trusted associates whose role includes distancing Berlusconi from trouble. Marcello Dell’Utri, a Sicilian-born senator and long-term business partner, is appealing in the courts against a conviction for collusion with the Mafia.

On the international scene Berlusconi courted friendship with George W. Bush, the US president, and Tony Blair, then UK prime minister, committing Italian troops to a deeply unpopular war in Iraq. His closest relationship, however, is probably with Russia’s Vladimir Putin.

Berlusconi’s most audacious move late last year, when he looked in political trouble and unable to keep his promises to bring down the centre-left coalition government, was to suddenly announce he was dissolving his Forza Italia party and creating the People of Freedom.

Public arguments erupted with his long-term allies. Berlusconi pushed ahead, calling them “ectoplasm” and eventually lost just Pier Ferdinando Casini whose centrist Catholic bloc could emerge as king-maker if the elections are close.

Berlusconi burst onto the political stage in late 1993 by forming Forza Italia (Go Italy) and declaring, with his love of sporting metaphors, that he was “entering the field” to keep Italy free.

In the Italian lexicon, this means free of state “interference”, hence less government spending, lower taxes and market liberalisation. Even his supporters concede that his 2001-2006 government had a mixed record on this score, blaming difficult coalition partners.

In 1993 Italy’s established parties, the Christian Democrats, Socialists and Communists, were collapsing amid what became known as the “tangentopoli” corruption scandals. Berlusconi saw the opening for a new brand, a new style of maverick politician marketing himself as traditional in values but anti-establishment, liberal and fiercely anti-communist.

The Catholic family man image remains, despite a divorce and having three children out of wedlock before marrying again. His flirtations led to a memorable letter of rebuke from his current wife, a former actress, published in the left-wing Repubblica daily. He made a public apology and appears to have suffered no damage at all.

Critics say Berlusconi had no choice but to enter politics as his construction and media empire was in deep financial trouble, and the courts were hounding him to discover the true source of his complex financing.

Within months he had won the 1994 elections. His first government lasted only seven months, however, brought down by one of his allies, Umberto Bossi, leader of the separatist and racist Northern League.

One of the earliest court cases against Berlusconi related to his membership in the secret, anti-communist Masonic lodge known as P2 or Propaganda Due. A membership list of 962 of the nation’s elite had been discovered. Berlusconi was was on it.

In 1990 the Venetian court of appeal condemned him for false testimony he gave about P2. Historian Paul Ginsborg writes that the case has been the only definitive sentence of guilt passed against Berlusconi. But in the meantime there had been an amnesty.

Although Berlusconi’s problems with the courts have not ended, he has not served any prison sentence. Cases against him have been dismissed, or lapsed through the statute of limitations, overturned on appeal or made void by amnesty. In his last government he was accused by the opposition of passing “ad personam”, for example by exempting high officers of state from trial, a law that was later declared un-constitutional.

At least two cases still hang over him, postponed because of the election campaign. The first, in his hometown of Milan, involves charges of tax fraud related to his Mediaset’s purchase of television rights for US movies. Mediaset runs three national television stations. Berlusconi’s Fininvest business empire also includes advertising, publishing and insurance.

The second trial involves charges of corruption in the alleged payment of a$600,000 kickback in 1997 to lawyer David Mills, the estranged husband of Tessa Jowell, a UK government minister.

Berlusconi denies any wrongdoing in both cases. He says he has faced 96 different court cases since entering politics and accuses leftist judges of persecuting him for political reasons.

Berlusconi has slid down the ranks of the world’s wealthiest, according to Forbes, falling in 2007 from 51st to 90th with $9.4bn.

He is no longer Italy’s richest, ranking third behind chocolate king Michele Ferrero and Leonardo Del Vecchio, who made his fortune in spectacles.

Tax returns released in March, 2008, showed that Berlusconi had declared an income of 139.2m euros for 2006.

Berlusconi has fought cancer, had a pace-maker installed and in 2006 fainted while on stage. Still, at his rallies he looks energetic and relatively youthful, partly thanks to hair implants and facelifts he is proud to talk about. “I feel 35,” he says.

His magnetism remains, although this campaign appears – at least until mid-March -- more low-key and restrained than before.

Given his age, aides and friends suggest he would not serve a full five-year term if elected in April. They say his ultimate goal is to become head of state, a ceremonial and still influential position held in high regard by most Italians.

Who would succeed him as prime minister is unclear. Gianfranco Fini, former foreign minister and leader of the post-fascist National Alliance, is the leading contender. Given Berlusconi’s capacity to surprise, however, the field could be open.

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Walter Veltroni

Walter Veltroni, the new Democratic party’s candidate for prime minister, has evolved from a young communist activist in the 1970s into a leading centre-left reformist.

As a prolific author and strong patron of the arts while mayor of Rome, Mr Veltroni combines the brand of being an intellectual of the left with the drive of a pragmatist who wants to capture the growing, non-ideological centre ground of Italian politics.

To do this Mr Veltroni broke the electoral alliance with his former allies among the Communists, Greens and Socialists, telling voters that the Democratic party would represent stable government and not suffer the fate of the fractured outgoing centre-left coalition led by Romano Prodi.

A tough campaigner who speaks directly and is able to connect well with diverse audiences as both earnest and friendly, Mr Veltroni is carrying his message of change up and down Italy in a big green bus. After several weeks of a relentless schedule he is starting to look very tired.

He is his own campaign manager and speaks freely with the press -- “I don’t believe in spin doctors.”

His election team is small and fairly young. Although his critics say he makes nice with everyone and does not have the guts to make tough decisions, Mr Veltroni and his faction within the Democratic party appear to have established control.

He wrote a book on Robert Kennedy and the preface to the Italian edition of Barack Obama’s The Audacity of Hope. He is a huge admirer of the US presidential hopeful and identifies with his politics.

“Obama is innovative, unifying and post-ideological,” Mr Veltroni, 52, told the FT on his bus in Tuscany.

Being nearly 20 years younger than his centre-right rival, Silvio Berlusconi, who is fighting his fifth election campaign, Mr Veltroni is able to portray himself as the new man. In reality he has been in politics twice as long, and in his suit and round glasses he even looks more old fashioned.

At 21 he was a Rome city councilor for the Italian Communist Party, and became a member of its national secretariat in 1988.

With the end of the Cold War and the collapse of the party in the early 1990s, Mr Veltroni played a prominent role in its transformation through various guises. From 1992 to 1996 he was editor of L’Unita, the former Communist party organ whose evolution has followed Mr Veltroni’s.

From 1996 to 1998 he served as deputy prime minister and minister of culture in the first Prodi government, and was elected mayor of Rome in 2001. Many residents grumble that he spent too much time on culture and not enough in fixing the streets and rubbish, but he was still re-elected by a record margin in 2006.

In October 2007 he and other reformers of the Democrats of the Left merged with progressive Catholics of the centrist Margherita party to form the Democratic party. He was overwhelmingly elected party leader in national “primaries”, helped by other potentially strong candidates stepping aside.

On the basics he is clear – lower taxes, more help for families, smaller government, less public spending, a minimum wage for workers on short-term contracts. When a woman in Rome was killed last year by a Romanian immigrant gypsy, he also showed he could act tough on immigration by clearing out unauthorized settlements.

But in his post-ideological pragmatism and emphasis on non-confrontational politics, some voters wonder what he really stands for, especially when it comes to dealing with an increasingly intrusive Catholic Church.

For a lot of young people on the radical left, Mr Veltroni has sold out. Among the many undecided in the middle, he is starting to be taken seriously.

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Outbursts turn up heat in Italy campaign
By Guy Dinmore in Rome

Published: April 10 2008 03:48 | Last updated: April 10 2008 03:48

Italy’s election campaign began to heat up on Wednesday – only days before polling – with Silvio Berlusconi, the billionaire opposition leader, relaunching attacks on the judiciary and suggesting that his rival was planning to win through fraud.

Allegations of political ties to organised crime also resurfaced, with the disclosure that a senator seeking re-election in Mr Berlusconi’s People of Freedom alliance was under investigation for suspected association with the Mafia.

Weeks of low-key campaigning by both sides – conspicuous by the absence of personal vitriol – led many Italians to suspect that Mr Berlusconi, the media tycoon and former prime minister, and Walter Veltroni, the centre-left ex-mayor of Rome, were interested in a post-election power-sharing deal.

But increasingly shrill accusations by Mr Berlusconi are galvanising his supporters into believing that voting on Sunday and Monday will be a real contest after all. The ruling centre-left Democratic party says Mr Berlusconi’s headline-grabbing outbursts are driven by fear that his lead has slipped since the last opinion polls were published nearly two weeks ago.

Confirmation for Italians of a return to form came on Wednesday when the opposition leader called on Mr Veltroni, the Democratic party leader, to commit himself “not to use blank ballot papers and not to perpetrate the fraud that has been an ancient profession of the left”.

For several days, Mr Berlusconi and his rightwing allies have demanded the reprinting of millions of ballot papers whose layout they say is confusing.

His media outlets have also alleged that overseas voting could be rigged, while Umberto Bossi, leader of the rightwing Northern League, has spoken of possibly “taking up arms” to stop Rome from making an electoral mess.

Mr Veltroni, who has tried to maintain an image of staid respectability, called on Mr Berlusconi to commit himself to uphold national unity, refrain from violence and respect the constitution.

On Wednesday Mr Veltroni said Mr Berlusconi was proving himself unfit to govern by making unfounded accusations.

Mr Berlusconi, who has survived numerous court cases and investigations alleging criminal ties and financial wrongdoing, declared on Wednesday that he would require public prosecutors to “undergo regular mental health checks”.

Judicial sources confirmed to the Financial Times, meanwhile, that Sergio De Gregorio, head of the defence committee and an ally of Mr Berlusconi, was under investigation on suspicion of arranging the sale of a military barracks to the Mafia during a dinner last year in Reggio Calabria. The senator denies any wrongdoing and says the alleged conversation never took place.

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Op zondag 13 april 2008 11:59 schreef Jurgen21 het volgende:
Simpele keuze: Berlusconi

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Op zondag 13 april 2008 21:15 schreef PJORourke het volgende:
Waarschijnlijk omdat die andere hansworst nou niet bepaald beter is...

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Op zondag 13 april 2008 21:23 schreef Floripas het volgende:
Ik weet niet gek veel van Veltroni. Wat doet-ie verkeerd?

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Op zondag 13 april 2008 22:47 schreef henkway het volgende:
Het grootste probleem is de maffia die steeds zand in de motor van Italië gooit

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Op zondag 13 april 2008 23:11 schreef du_ke het volgende:

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Waarom zou hij dit keer wel slagen in het aanpakken van de Maffia ?

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Op maandag 14 april 2008 07:01 schreef WammesWaggel het volgende:
Wat is het beleid van Berlusconi wbt het graf van onze Drs Fortuyn?
De grootste Nederlander ligt immers in Noord-Italie.

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Op maandag 14 april 2008 06:51 schreef henkway het volgende:

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Omdat de maffia zijn werk wil blokkeren, zijn werk is baas van Italie zijn, hij heeft ook eergevoel, daarnaast heeft hij zijn sporen verdiend in keihard leiding geven

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Op maandag 14 april 2008 13:27 schreef tong80 het volgende:
Waarom werd de communist Verloni dan burgemeester van Rome

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Op maandag 14 april 2008 13:37 schreef Scaurus het volgende:


De beste man was doctor. Dr. Fortuyn dus.

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Op maandag 14 april 2008 19:51 schreef tong80 het volgende:
Hoeveel presidenten hebben ze nu gehad na WO-2 ? Stuk of 40 ?

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Op maandag 14 april 2008 06:51 schreef henkway het volgende:

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Omdat de maffia zijn werk wil blokkeren, zijn werk is baas van Italie zijn, hij heeft ook eergevoel, daarnaast heeft hij zijn sporen verdiend in keihard leiding geven