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Berlusconi's parting gaffe a sexist gibe

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  • Berlusconi's parting gaffe a sexist gibe

    Berlusconi's parting gaffe a sexist gibe



    Natasha Bita
    Florence
    May 01, 2006
    ITALY's richest man, Silvio Berlusconi, will step down as Prime Minister tomorrow after weeks of disputing his razor-edge election loss -- but not before dropping a couple of his characteristic clangers.

    He delivered one ribald wisecrack while welcoming a newly elected MP from his Forza Italia party -- the photogenic Mara Carfagna, a 30-year-old showgirl from his Mediaset TV empire.

    "I can assure you all that Mara is very clever as well as beautiful," he told a group of new MPs, the Corriere della Sera newspaper reported yesterday.

    "I've known her father for 30 years and I am sure she will do very well.

    "However, dear Mara, I am obliged to remind you of a rule in the Forza Italia group, the jus primae noctis."

    Embarrassed laughter greeted the caretaker Prime Minister's Latin reference to a medieval "law of the first night", giving the lord of an estate the legal right to deflower its virgins on their wedding night. The paper did not report Ms Carfagna's reaction.

    Mr Berlusconi went on to say that Forza Italia liked women "of easy virtue".

    "Obviously I'm joking," he said. "I know you are all Marie Gorettis". The 12-year-old Marie was made a saint after a rapist stabbed her to death when she resisted his advances in 1902. Mr Berlusconi's tasteless gaffes often put him in the international spotlight during his five years as Italy's longest-serving postwar prime minister.

    In a speech to the New York Stock Exchange, he cited Italy's "beautiful secretaries ... superb girls" as a reason to invest in his country.

    Finland formally protested after the 69-year-old billionaire declared last year he had "brushed up on my playboy skills" to lobby Finland's female Prime Minister.

    After clinging to power ever since his narrow defeat to centre-left leader Romano Prodi three weeks ago, Mr Berlusconi announced yesterday he would hand in his resignation tomorrow. "I remain Silvio Berlusconi," he said. "I have had all the satisfactions possible and imaginable. For someone like me, it would be splendid to take a few years' sabbatical (from politics). However, I think that having had such high public approval, that would be like betraying Italians.

    "I will be a strong opposition in and out of parliament."

    Mr Berlusconi agreed to leave only after Mr Prodi's Union coalition elected its speakers to both houses of parliament, in a marathon voting session that verged on the farcical.

    "It was a bit of a circus," Melbourne-based senator Nino Randazzo, one of six senators elected from Italy's expatriate community, told The Australian yesterday.

    "There was close to a scuffle at about two o'clock in the morning. Nothing like this could ever happen in the Australian parliament; it's much more sedate."

    Voting in the hung Senate, where seven unelected senators-for-life and an independent senator for Argentina hold the balance of power, had seemed a simple task. All that the 322 senators had to do was write the full name of their preferred candidate for speaker on a slip of paper.

    But the election dragged on for two days because Union senators kept botching their ballot papers.

    Three left-wing senators did not appear to know the name of their candidate, Franco Marini. They wrote "Francesco Marini" instead, forcing a new vote.

    The second vote was declared invalid, too, because one senator insisted on writing "Francesco", while another wrote only "Marini" -- triggering a near punch-up when some Union senators accused their own colleagues of deliberately sabotaging the vote in an act of treachery.

    In the third round, Mr Marini secured the speaker's post with 165 votes, narrowly beating Mr Berlusconi's candidate, 87-year-old Giulio Andreotti, a seven-time prime minister who was cleared on appeal in 2003 of having ordered a mafia hit on a journalist murdered in 1979.

    Senators catnapped, read newspapers and exchanged abuse as they waited for the result.

    http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au...2-2703,00.html
    Berlossloony is quite a character!


    "Some have learnt many Tricks of sly Evasion, Instead of Truth they use Equivocation, And eke it out with mental Reservation, Which is to good Men an Abomination."

    I don't have to attend every argument I'm invited to.

    HAKUNA MATATA
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