Word: berlusconi
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Italy's relentless investigations into corruption are now focusing on Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, himself elected in reaction to the shadiness of his predecessors. If scandal brings down his government any time soon, Berlusconi's will take its place among a long series of famously short-lived postwar governments in Italy, where the citizenry certainly take to heart Thomas Jefferson's dictum "that government governs best which governs least...
...ingredients of a full-blown political crisis were gathering last week over Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi's fragile coalition government. But none was more threatening than the challenge directed at Berlusconi personally, the tycoon who had been swept into power earlier this year on a tide of anticorruption sentiment. Even as he was host to a U.N. conference in Naples on combatting organized crime, the Prime Minister, once dubbed Il Cavaliere, or the knight, found himself among the knaves as he was formally placed under investigation by magistrates engaged in a bribery probe of Fininvest, his business empire...
...have never corrupted anyone," was Berlusconi's indignant response to the accusations, which he claimed were part of a campaign aimed at his conservative government by leftist magistrates. The Prime Minister contended that his companies never attempted bribery but were victims of corrupt tax inspectors who had extorted money in exchange for favorable tax audits. Although the judicial notification implied no guilt, Berlusconi found himself directly caught up in the debate over the apparent conflict of interest between being Prime Minister and holding onto control of Fininvest, a $7 billion-a-year conglomerate that dominates the Italian media. Belatedly...
...political players weighed the risks of a Berlusconi fall eight months after national elections had decimated Italy's traditional political parties. If new elections were held, no one could be sure how voters would react. In first-round municipal balloting two weeks ago, Berlusconi's party, Forza Italia, dropped from its 30% share last June to only 12%, largely because of public resentment against his drive to shrink the bloated welfare state by reforming government pensions. During his run for the Prime Minister's job, Berlusconi had promised a new economic miracle in which a million new jobs would...
...Berlusconi was not ready to concede. If any of the five parties in his government switched allegiance, he said, it would be "a Judas," and he would ask for new elections; he would make no deals "over the heads of the electorate." He had the agreement of President Oscar Luigi Scalfaro, who warned party leaders against forging the kind of Byzantine deals that produced paralytic governments in the past and distorted the voters' expressed will...