14, June 2023
Italy bids farewell to former PM and billionaire tycoon Silvio Berlusconi 0
Silvio Berlusconi was honored Wednesday with a state funeral in Milan’s Duomo cathedral and a day of national mourning, as his legacy — positive or negative — was being hotly debated among Italians.
Tens of thousands of people outside the Duomo and within erupted in applause as a sign of respect as Berlusconi’s flower-draped casket was hoisted out of the hearse and into the cathedral. His children and companion teared up as the casket was placed in front of the altar.
Most Italians identify Berlusconi, a media mogul, soccer entrepreneur and three-time former premier, as the most influential figure in Italy over recent decades. But they remain sharply divided on whether his influence was for the better or worse, extending to whether the three-time former premier merits all the fuss and ceremony.
Berlusconi died at the age of 86 on Monday in a Milan hospital where he was being treated for chronic leukemia. His family held a private wake Tuesday at one of Berlusconi’s villas near Milan, the city where he made his billions as the head of a media empire before entering politics in 1994.
Political opponents are questioning not only the decisions of Premier Giorgia Meloni’s government to hold a state funeral — an honor that can be afforded all former premiers — but to also declare a national day of mourning, which is more rarely invoked. In the case of the latter, flags are flown at half-staff and all political events not involving charity are put on hold, but it is otherwise business as usual.
“Berlusconi split Italy, he insulted adversaries for 30 years, he criminalized the magistrates and he didn’t recognize laws. What are we talking about?” journalist Marco Travaglio, a long-time Berlusconi critic and co-founder of the il Fatto Quotidiano daily, told private La7 TV on Tuesday.
Nevertheless, thousands of Italians filled the piazza outside Milan’s Duomo to follow the funeral on two giant video screens while carabinieri in full ceremonial regalia awaited the arrival of the hearse bearing Berlusconi’s casket outside. Family members, political allies and opponents meanwhile were gathering inside.
Hungarian President Viktor Orban and Qatar’s ruling emir, Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani, were among the highest-ranking foreign dignitaries attending.
Meloni, who got her first government experience as a minister in a Berlusconi coalition, also will attend, along with League leader Matteo Salvini, whose party has long been allied with Berlusconi’s Forza Italia. Opposition politicians also are expected in a show of respect for a political figure with whom many had sparred.
Barbara Cacellari, a Forza Italia councilwoman and one-time candidate for the European Parliament, said protests over how to officially mark Berlusconi’s death showed a lack of respect.
“The person must be respected per se. He is a person who represents the history of this country,” she said outside the cathedral, adding: “No one is without stains, I think.”
Berlusconi is widely recognized as a precursor to the type of populist politics that later would bring Donald Trump to power in the United States, both using their high profile as businessmen to springboard into the political arena, upending politics as usual along the way.
Supporters of Berlusconi’s legacy cite his success in unifying the Italian center-right after the collapse of the post-war political landscape with the 1990s “Clean Hands” corruption scandal. They also see his years as leader as periods of stabilization, after years of quickly rotating governments, while admiring his bold rule-breaking and irreverence, perhaps especially in the face of other global leaders.
“He did many big and small things, while suffering a mediatic and judicial aggression that only Craxi before him had endured,’’ Stefania Craxi, a senator in Berlusconi’s party and the daughter of late Italian leader Bettino Craxi told private TV La7 on Tuesday. Her father died in exile in Tunisia in 2000 after being convicted in absentia for involvement in illegal party financing.
Berlusconi’s detractors’ list of political damage is long, including conflicts of interest relating to his media empire, dozens of trials mostly for business dealings, revelations of sex-fueled bunga-bunga parties at his villa near Milan and questionable associations, including his enduring friendship with Russian leader Vladimir Putin.
“He is not a leader who helped us grow,’’ said Beppe Severgnini, a long-time foreign correspondent and writer for Corriere della Sera. “He tapped all of our weaknesses: moral, fiscal, sexual, everything.”
Source: AP
19, June 2023
World leaders headed to Paris summit in push for global debt, climate reform 0
World leaders will gather in Paris this week with ambitions to reimagine global financing for a new era shaped by climate change, as a cascade of crises swamps debt-burdened countries.
French President Emmanuel Macron has said the Summit for a New Global Financial Pact is aimed at building a “new consensus” to meet the interlinked global targets of tackling poverty, curbing planet-heating emissions and protecting nature.
Ideas on the table range from taxation on shipping, fossil fuels or financial transactions, to innovations in lending and a structural rethink of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank.
France says the two-day summit, which begins on Thursday and will bring together some 50 heads of state and government, was more of a platform for ideas sharing ahead of a cluster of major economic and climate meetings in the coming months.
In particular, the French Presidency said on Friday it wanted to give “political impetus” to the idea of an international tax on carbon emissions from shipping, with hopes of a breakthrough at a meeting of the International Maritime Organization later in June.
With trust in short supply over broken climate financing promises from richer countries, developing nations are looking for tangible progress.
The V20 group of countries on the climate frontlines, which now includes 58 member nations, has said restructuring the global financial system to align with climate targets must be completed by 2030.
“It’s great we are talking about the international financial architecture, but we have to see timelines and we have not seen those timelines,” Sarah Jane Ahmed, V20 global lead and finance adviser, told AFP.
“If we’re starting to do this stuff in the 2030s, it’s going to be so much more expensive and the trade-offs are going to be far steeper.”
Leaders arriving in Paris to champion that message include Kenyan President William Ruto and Ghana’s President Nana Akufo-Addo, as well as Barbados Prime Minister Mia Mottley, who has become a powerful advocate for reform and will speak at the summit opening on Thursday.
Other attendees include Chinese Premier Li Qiang, US Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen and European Commission head Ursula von der Leyen.
Ajay Banga is also expected in Paris, in his first international meeting since taking the helm of the World Bank, promising to embrace change.
With fewer leaders from wealthier countries attending, Friederike Roder of Global Citizen said the conference could fall short of hopes for a show of unity.
“We need everyone coming together,” she told AFP, stressing that major economies are needed to agree reforms.
‘Failed’
Economies have been battered by successive shocks in recent years, including Covid-19, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, spiking inflation and the increasingly expensive impacts of weather disasters intensified by global warming.
United Nations chief Antonio Guterres has said the pandemic and its aftermath amounted to a “stress test” for a financial system that was set up nearly eight decades ago.
“It largely failed,” he said earlier this month, adding that 52 developing countries are in, or near, debt distress.
The World Bank plans to increase its lending capacity by $50 billion over 10 years.
Last week it also called for drastic reform to rechannel trillions of dollars in harmful and unnecessary subsidies for fossil fuels, agriculture and fishing into action on climate and nature.
Currently the world is far off track in its aims to limit warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial temperatures, risking enormous costs for nature, human societies and the global economy.
Last year, a UN experts committee said developing countries other than China will need to spend more than $2 trillion a year by 2030 on development and to respond to the climate and biodiversity crises.
Ambition ‘gap’
Roder said one key signal from the Paris summit would be for richer nations to show they can fulfil existing promises, like the still-unmet pledge of $100 billion annually by 2020 to help developing nations cut emissions and boost climate resilience.
Increasing the money available — potentially using hundreds of billions of the IMF’s liquidity-boosting “special drawing rights” — is among the calls from emerging economies, as well as a new lending strategy.
One idea championed by Barbados is a disaster clause so loan repayments can be paused for two years in the wake of a climate disaster or pandemic.
Another key point of debate is the scale of existing debts.
That will also focus attention on China, which has become a significant lender to African countries, but has been reluctant to participate in the common framework for debt restructuring.
The Paris summit can bring a lot of issues “out of their niche”, said Louis-Nicolas Jandeaux of Oxfam, noting, however, “a gap between the initial stated ambition of the summit and the reality”.
Source: AFP