Former French President Nicolas Sarkozy will face a trial in 2025 on charges of corruption and receiving illegal funding from former Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi for his successful 2007 presidential campaign, according to France’s financial prosecutors.

An initial hearing is set for March 7, 2024, the prosecutor’s office said, with the trial itself scheduled to take place between Jan.6, 2025 and April 10, 2025.

The 68-year-old is also fighting various other charges, including “concealment of embezzlement of public funds, passive corruption, and illegal campaign financing, the prosecutor’s office said.

The investigation was sparked by revelations from the investigative website Mediapart which published a document purporting to show that Gaddafi agreed to give Sarkozy up to 50 million euros ($54 million at current rates).

Sarkozy could face up to 10 years in prison if convicted in the case, while he has repeatedly denied the accusations. “There’s not even the smallest inkling of proof,” he said in an interview in 2018.

In addition to Sarkozy, there are 12 others facing the trial among them heavyweights such as Sarkozy’s former right-hand man Claude Gueant, his then head of campaign financing Eric Woerth and former interior minister Brice Hortefeux.

Sarkozy has already been convicted twice for corruption and influence-peddling in separate cases involving attempts to influence a judge and campaign financing.

He lost an appeal in May against a 2021 conviction for corruption and influence peddling. His legal team promised to challenge that at France’s highest court.

Sarkozy championed a NATO-led military intervention in Libya, taking advantage of an uprising against Gaddafi in 2011, which plunged the African country into chaos and infighting continuing to this day.

Before Sarkozy, the only former French leader to be sentenced at trial was his predecessor Jacques Chirac, who received a two-year suspended sentence in 2011 for corruption over a fake jobs scandal relating to his time as Paris mayor.

Source: Presstv

France’s former president Nicolas Sarkozy has stirred outrage in Kyiv and Paris by suggesting Russia’s invasion of Ukraine could be ended with new referendums in occupied territories.

“The Ukrainians… will want to reconquer what has been unjustly taken from them. But if they can’t manage it completely, the choice will be between a frozen conflict… or taking the high road out with referendums strictly overseen by the international community,” Sarkozy told conservative newspaper Le Figaro on Wednesday.

Speaking particularly about the Crimean peninsula, which Russia claimed to have annexed in 2014, the former French leader said that “any return to the way things were before is an illusion”.

“An incontestable referendum… will be needed to solidify the current state of affairs,” he added.

The ex-president insisted that Russian leader Vladimir Putin was “not irrational” and could be reached with the right kind of diplomacy from Europe, harking back to Moscow’s 2008 invasion of Georgia when Sarkozy said he “convinced (Putin) to withdraw his tanks”.

“Russia is Europe’s neighbour and will remain so,” he said. “Diplomacy, discussion and talks remain the only way to find an acceptable solution. Nothing is possible without compromise.”

Sarkozy added that Ukraine should remain “neutral” and had no place in the EU or NATO.

The remarks drew an immediate response from Kyiv, with Mykhailo Podolyak — a senior aide to President Volodymyr Zelensky — saying they were based on “criminal logic”.

“You cannot trade other people’s territories because you are afraid of someone or because you are friends with criminals,” Podolyak added.

While in office, Sarkozy had “deliberately participated in a criminal conspiracy for Russia’s seizure of Ukrainian territories,” he charged.

The ex-president — who has spent much of his time since leaving office battling a slew of legal cases — was also attacked at home in France.

Sarkozy “should be considered a Russian influencer,” said Julien Bayou, a senior Green Party MP, telling broadcaster LCI the interview was “lunatic” and “shocking”.

Bayou recalled an ongoing investigation into Sarkozy’s lucrative ties to a Russian insurance company on suspicion of influence peddling and concealing crimes.

Sarkozy’s former intelligence advisor Jerome Poirot told LCI that the ex-president’s words were “shameful”.

“He has no perspective on what’s happened or on what he did” during his 2007-2012 term, Poirot said, recalling that Sarkozy was one of the key voices against Georgia and Ukraine joining NATO in 2008 — which did not prevent Russia’s later invasions of both countries.

“What were President Sarkozy’s red lines? What was his vision for France’s security? Just giving in to whatever Vladimir Putin wanted?” he asked.

Source: AFP

Congo Republic President Denis Sassou Nguesso called on Friday for an end to the war between Russia and Ukraine, saying a peace plan put forward by African leaders deserved attention.

Nguesso spoke at a Russia-Africa summit in St Petersburg hosted by Russian President Vladimir Putin, who said the peace proposal would be discussed later in the day.

Source: France 24

Pope Francis said on Friday there was no apparent end in sight to the war in Ukraine as his peace envoy wrapped up three days of talks in Moscow.

“The tragic reality of this war that seems to have no end demands of everyone a common creative effort to imagine and forge paths of peace,” the pope told a religious delegation from the Patriarch of Constantinople.

The Vatican said in a subsequent statement that the pope’s envoy, Italian Cardinal Matteo Zuppi, had finished his consultations in Moscow, where he had met one of President Vladimir Putin’s advisers, Yuri Ushakov, and the head of the Russian Orthodox Church, Patriarch Kirill.

“(The visit was) aimed at identifying humanitarian initiatives, which could open roads to peace,” the statement said. It added that further steps would be taken, but gave no details.

Source: France 24

France braced for more angry protests Wednesday after the killing of a teenager by police during a traffic stop that President Emmanuel Macron called “unforgivable”.

The government said it would deploy 2,000 riot police to deal with any unrest, a day after a 17-year-old was shot in the chest by a police officer who then appeared to lie about the circumstances of the killing.

The shooting had already sparked unrest in several Paris suburbs overnight.

Celebrities and politicians expressed outrage and grief at the death of the teenager, with Macron calling it “inexplicable” and “unforgivable”.

The teenager, named only as Nael M., was pulled over by two policemen on Tuesday for breaking traffic rules, prosecutors said.

Police initially reported that one officer shot at the teenager because he was driving his car at him, but this version of events was contradicted by a video circulating on social media and authenticated by AFP.

The footage shows the two policemen actually standing by the side of the stationary car, with one pointing a weapon at the driver. A voice is heard saying “You are going to get a bullet in the head.”

The police officer then appears to fire point blank as the car abruptly drives off.

The car moved a few dozen metres before crashing. The driver died shortly after.

His death sparked immediate protests in Nanterre, a western Paris suburb.

Bins were set alight and a fire broke out at a music school, while police tried to disperse the protesters with tear gas.

Protests then broke out in some neighbouring suburbs.

Interior Minister Gerald Darmanin said Wednesday that 31 people had been arrested overnight, 24 police slightly injured and around 40 cars torched.

Darmanin added that 2,000 police would be deployed to deal with any further violence later Wednesday.

‘Revolt for my son’

Government spokesman Olivier Veran told reporters that Macron had expressed “emotion” at the shooting during Wednesday’s weekly cabinet meeting, and called for “calm” on behalf of the government.

Source: AFP

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

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

At least 59 migrants drowned early on Wednesday and more were feared missing when their boat capsized and sank off Greece, the country’s coast guard said.

By midday, 104 were rescued, but it remained unclear how many were on board when the vessel went under, authorities said.

The shipwreck was the deadliest off Greece this year.

The coast guard said the boat, which was en route to Italy, was spotted in international waters late on Tuesday by an aircraft belonging to EU border agency Frontex and two nearby vessels, around 50 miles (80 km) southwest of the town of Pylos in southern Greece.

Death tolls has now raised to 59, and is expected to continue to increase throughout the day.

The survivors of the shipwreck, around 100 people, have arrived in Kalamata, they had been picked up by a Cayman Islands registered yacht named Mayan Queen IV.

It said those on board had refused assistance offered by Greek authorities late on Tuesday. A few hours later the boat capsized and sank, triggering a search and rescue operation.

State broadcaster ERT said it had sailed from the Libyan town of Tobruk, which lies south of the Greek island of Crete, with most on board being young men in their 20s. Their nationalities, as well as where the boat had sailed from, were not immediately confirmed by Greek authorities.

Survivors were taken to the town of Kalamata, the authorities said.

Greece is one of the main routes into the European Union for refugees and migrants from the Middle East, Asia and Africa.

Most cross to Greek islands from nearby Turkey, but a growing number of boats also undertake a longer, and more dangerous journey from Turkey to Italy via Greece.

About 72,000 refugees and migrants have arrived so far this years in Europe’s frontline countries Italy, Spain, Greece, Malta and Cyprus, according to United Nations data, with the majority landing in Italy.

Source: Reuters

Russian strikes early Tuesday on the hometown of Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky killed ten people, as Moscow said it had captured Western armoured vehicles from Kyiv’s forces.

The strikes overnight hit multiple sites and smashed into a five-storey apartment building in the central city of Kryvyi Rig, leaving smoke billowing from the housing block strewn with debris.

“Ten people have died. One is under rubble. Twenty-eight are injured and 12 of them are in the city’s hospitals in medium, serious and very serious condition,” said Oleksandr Vilkul, the head of the city’s military administration.

“Rescue operations are ongoing,” he added.

Source: France 24

Silvio Berlusconi, the billionaire media tycoon and four-time prime minister who brushed off a litany of legal battles and sex scandals to dominate Italian public life for more than two decades, has died in Milan aged 86.

Italy’s longest-serving prime minister since World War II, Berlusconi had been admitted to Milan’s San Raffaele hospital on Friday for what aides said were pre-planned tests related to leukemia. His admission came just three weeks after he was discharged following a six-week stay at San Raffaele hospital, during which time doctors revealed he had a rare type of blood cancer.

His death was announced on June 12 by Italian media.

Long the country’s richest man, Berlusconi made his fortune in real estate before going on to build Italy’s biggest media empire, Mediaset, which he later enlisted to facilitate his swashbuckling entry into politics.

The scandal-plagued tycoon infamous for the debauchery of his “bunga bunga” parties transformed and monopolised Italian politics at the turn of the century, introducing a skewed left-right divide that pitted his conservative camp against the centre-left anti-Berlusconi front.

Known as “Il Cavaliere” (The Knight), among many other nicknames, he was admired and reviled in equal measure at home – but was mostly derided abroad. After a decade in power, The Economist magazine famously ran a cover story on his record in office with the headline, “The man who screwed an entire country”.

Despite the mockery, his unbounded bravado, unique brand of politics and tumultuous career became a playbook for ambitious politicians around the world, making him a precursor to contemporary populism.

Long before the likes of Donald Trump played the “anti-system” card, Berlusconi had successfully cast himself as the bête noire of a declining and discredited political class. Accused of being as narcissistic, sexist and self-serving as the billionaire former US president, Berlusconi also played an equally piteous victim, railing against the judiciary and once claiming he was “the most persecuted person in the history of the world and the history of man”.

He also played a more inveterate jester than Britain’s Boris Johnson, entertaining Italy as much as he ran it; a more polished macho than his friend Vladimir Putin, adding an affable, cultured touch to his personality cult; and a subtler strategist than Matteo Salvini, the loudmouthed nationalist who briefly supplanted him as leader of the country’s right-wing camp – only to be overtaken in turn by the far right’s Giorgia Meloni, Italy’s current prime minister and once a junior minister under Berlusconi.

The most talked-about Italian politician since Benito Mussolini, Berlusconi was once described as a “disease that can only be cured through vaccination” by the country’s most respected postwar journalist, the late Indro Montanelli. The vaccine, Montanelli argued on the eve of the 2001 general election, involved “a healthy injection of Berlusconi in the prime minister’s seat, Berlusconi in the president’s seat, Berlusconi in the pope’s seat or wherever else he may want. Only after that will we be immune.”

Montanelli was wrong about immunity, and so were the many other pundits who wrote off the Cavaliere, time and time again, even as his political career – and popularity – powered on.

The dream of America

Berlusconi was born on September 29, 1936, the first of three children raised in a middle-class family in Milan, Italy’s financial capital. Like many of his generation, he was evacuated during World War II and lived with his mother in a village some distance from the city.

The handsome and genial youth made his first money selling vacuum cleaners door-to-door, and occasionally singing in nightclubs and cruise ships with his friend Fedele Confalonieri, who would remain his loyal business partner to the very end.

After graduating in law in 1961, Berlusconi began a career in construction, establishing himself as a residential housing developer in the Milan area. He got his big break at the start of the 1970s with the construction of Milano 2, a self-contained town his Edilnord company built in the suburbs, soon to be followed by its twin, Milano 3.

With their artificial lakes, sports facilities, churches and shopping malls, Berlusconi’s model towns were designed as the Italian version of American suburbia – functional environments dedicated to work, leisure and watching television.

“I’m in favour of all things American before even knowing what they are,” Berlusconi once told Britain’s Times newspaper. His next challenge was to ensure his fellow Italians felt likewise, embracing American popular culture through soap operas, commercials and chat shows.

Milano 2 is where the Cavaliere built his media empire, Mediaset, launching Italy’s first private channels with the help of his politician friends, chief of whom was the powerful Socialist leader Bettino Craxi, a former prime minister whose name would later become synonymous with corruption.

The leafy suburb is also where Berlusconi’s own four-decade-long battle with the judiciary began in the late 1970s, with the first investigations into Edilnord’s shady funding. The cases were soon shelved, though it later emerged that the investigators had been given senior positions in Berlusconi’s Fininvest holding.

In the following years, several former mafia bosses were quoted as saying that Edilnord had received generous funding from criminal organisations based in Sicily, via Berlusconi’s close friend Marcello Dell’Utri, who was later convicted of collusion with the mafia in a separate case.

Berlusconi himself began feeling the heat in the early ’90s when a sweeping corruption investigation destroyed Italy’s Christian Democracy party, which had ruled the country since the war, along with his friend and protector Craxi. But instead of hiding in the shadows, the Cavaliere sensed an opportunity.

In 1992, at the height of the “Clean Hands” corruption inquiries, the media tycoon was asked whether he would consider running for mayor in his hometown of Milan, where a Berlusconi-owned football club won its 12th league title that year. His answer was an accurate forecast of the years to come.

“Do you know that every day I receive 400 letters from housewives thanking me for freeing them from their daily boredom with my television programmes?” Berlusconi replied. “If I entered politics with this electoral base, I wouldn’t go for mayor. I’d build a party like Reagan’s, win the elections and become prime minister.”

Go, Italy!

Two decades before France’s Emmanuel Macron seemingly pulled a political party out of his hat and conjured an Élysée Palace victory, Berlusconi, a media mogul with no political credentials, pulled the same trick in Italy – and in half the time. Staffed with marketing strategists in business suits, Forza Italia (Go, Italy) was just five months old when its founder swept to power in the spring of 1994 on promises of lower taxes, less encroachment from the state and restored pride in the Italian nation.

Hailed by his followers as “the Lord’s anointed”, the media mogul said he felt compelled to enter politics in order to bar the post-Communist left from power. Critics, however, claimed Berlusconi was primarily motivated by his desire to protect his own businesses – a critique borne out by the many bespoke laws his successive governments would force through parliament over the years.

While his first, grossly inexperienced government soon collapsed, the tycoon politician would go on to dominate Italian politics for the next two decades, bouncing back with further electoral triumphs in 2001 and 2008. Despite leading an unwieldy coalition with southern-based post-fascists and far-right Northern League separatists, he became the only prime minister to serve through a full five-year legislature, between 2001 and 2006 – no small achievement in a country that has known 67 different governments since 1945.

It would take a combination of the eurozone’s debt crisis, the loss of his parliamentary majority following a party split, and lurid accounts of “bunga bunga” orgies featuring showgirls and prostitutes at his private residence to finally push Berlusconi out of office – for the third and last time – in 2011, amid the jeers of protesters gathered in central Rome to celebrate his departure.

Earlier that year, Berlusconi suffered a major blow when Italy’s Constitutional Court struck down part of a law granting him temporary immunity. After years of being cleared of multiple charges – often because the statute of limitations had expired or because his government had changed the law, for instance decriminalising the practise of false accounting – his run of luck came to an end in 2012 when he was sentenced to four years in prison for tax fraud and barred from public office.

But because Berlusconi was over 75 at the time, he was instead handed community service, working four hours a week with elderly dementia patients at a Catholic care home near Milan.

The next year, he was also found guilty of paying for sex with underage prostitute Karima “Ruby” El Mahroug, 17, a guest at his “bunga bunga” parties, and then abusing his power to have her released from jail. The conviction was later overturned, though Berlusconi faced further charges for allegedly bribing a witness in the trial.

In the meantime, his second wife Veronica Lario, with whom he had three of his five children, decided to divorce him after he was photographed at the 18th birthday party of an aspiring model who referred to him as “Papi”.

Berlusconi’s enduring support

Despite his rapidly declining fortunes, Berlusconi made another comeback ahead of the 2013 general election, overturning a 15-point gap in the polls to come within a whisker of a stunning election win. Though he was barred from office, the result cemented his role as the central powerbroker in Italian

Reflecting on the tycoon’s enduring support, Maurizio Cotta, a professor of politics at the University of Siena, said Berlusconi understood certain aspects of the Italian psyche better than anyone else. Berlusconi spoke “alla pancia” (to the stomach) of Italians, Cotta said. “He knew their weak spots – their fear of discipline, of the state, of losing their homes, of being caught with their hands in the till.”

When the head of aerospace giant Finmeccanica was arrested ahead of the 2013 election for bribing Indian officials to secure a huge helicopter contract, Berlusconi alone of all politicians blamed the magistrates for hurting Italian jobs. “Sometimes you simply cannot sell anything without a bribe,” he remarked.

Never mind the repeated trials, the laws passed to protect himself and his businesses, the lurid campaign jokes about how often a girl would “come” or the fact that he personally intervened to have Mahroug released from custody – claiming he thought she was the niece of Egypt’s then-president Hosni Mubarak – almost a quarter of Italian voters still chose his party, and nearly a third backed his coalition.

“Berlusconi might cause every possible disaster, but he speaks the language and knows the interests of his ‘social bloc’,” wrote Perangelo Battista in the Corriere della Sera, Italy’s best-known daily, referring to the tax-averse small and medium-sized businesses that formed the backbone of his support.

At 81 and just 18 months after undergoing open-heart surgery, the Cavaliere was somehow back on his horse for the 2018 general election, still cobbling together unlikely coalitions and promising Italians a rosy future with unshakeable optimism. His party did reasonably well, though it was overtaken on the right by Salvini’s eurosceptic and anti-immigrant Lega party.

The next year, with his ban on public office lifted, Berlusconi won himself a seat in the European Parliament – 18 years after he delivered one of his most infamous lines there in a slur aimed at German MEP Martin Schulz.

“I know that in Italy there is a man producing a film on Nazi concentration camps,” Berlusconi said as he took over the EU’s rotating presidency in June 2003. “I shall put you forward for the role of a kapo (prison guard) – you would be perfect.”

Berlusconi went on to win yet another general election in September 2022 – this time as an unlikely junior partner in Italy’s most right-wing ruling coalition since Mussolini. From the get-go, he proved to be a troublesome ally for the far right’s Meloni, bragging about vodka gifts from Putin and blaming Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky for Russia’s unprovoked invasion of his country.

The man who claimed credit for “ending the Cold War” was in and out of hospital in his twilight years, battling a string of illnesses. His tenacity earned him another nickname – “the Immortal” – as well as the bipartisan respect that had eluded him throughout his career.

Three years before his final stay at Milan’s San Rafaele clinic, Berlusconi overcame a severe case of Covid-19 at the height of the pandemic. After testing positive for the deadly respiratory disease along with dozens of Sardinia jet-setters in August 2020, he responded with characteristic braggadocio.

“I’ve been diagnosed with one of the strongest viral loads in all of Italy,” he said in a phone call with supporters from his hospital bed in Milan. “It just goes to show I’m still the number one.”

Source: France 24