Silvio Berlusconi is not a man who gives in easily. He has yet to concede that he lost the last Italian general election — and that was 10 months ago. So his wife, Veronica Lario, knew it was going to take an extraordinary manoeuvre to drag words of contrition out of him after he was overheard propositioning a couple of showgirls at a gala dinner.
Following a TV award ceremony hosted by his Mediaset group on Friday, Berlusconi was chatting to the Venezuelan-born dancer Aida Yespica, a former Miss Amazonia. ”I’d go with you anywhere,” he was reported to have told her.
The former prime minister’s roving eye then settled on Mara Carfagna, a one-time winner of the Miss Smiles and Songs title, who has since appeared in numerous variety shows on Berlusconi’s TV channels and entered Parliament at the last election as an MP for his Forza Italia! party. She is now a member of the Italian Parliament’s constitutional affairs committee.
Standing beside her, the billionaire politician declared to guests: ”Take a look at her! I’d marry her if I weren’t married already.” Unfortunately for Berlusconi, his declarations made their way on to the front page of a national newspaper.
Pain and indignation
But even then, Lario was unable to coax an apology out of her husband of 17 years. So she took the nuclear option: she went public with her pain and indignation in a letter of her own, again splashed across the front of a newspaper. In a tone of acid restraint that suggested she had learned a thing or two from her husband on how to handle the media, the former actress and mother of three of Berlusconi’s five children said his remarks were ”unacceptable” and ”damaging to my dignity”.
She explained that she had failed to convince her husband in private to recognise that his behaviour had been beyond the pale. ”I am therefore asking for a public apology,” she added.
Her extraordinary initiative prompted speculation that Berlusconi’s marriage was doomed. It also shone a painfully bright spotlight on the 70-year-old opposition leader’s attempts to convince Italy’s voters that he is still young enough to be prime minister again. Having had a face lift and a hair transplant, Berlusconi has increasingly tried to give the impression of a man in his prime.
Lario said her husband’s comments could not be dismissed as jokey remarks. Hinting at how deeply they had hurt her, she said she felt like a woman in one of the novels of the Irish writer, Catherine Dunne. ”I ask if, like the Catherine Dunne character, I have to regard myself as ‘half of nothing’,” she wrote.
Piling insult on injury, the vehicle she chose to deliver her public admonishment was a centre-left newspaper that had long been fiercely critical of her husband.
Thoughtless quip
On Wednesday night, her tactics produced the desired response. Berlusconi proffered his wife an excruciatingly public act of contrition. ”Excuse me, I beg you”, he wrote in a letter to her, again released to the media. He lauded his partner as ”the splendid person you are and have always been for me since the day we met and fell in love”. He entreated her to overlook the odd ”thoughtless quip” — the result of a life of ”constant pressure”.
Rumours that Berlusconi’s marriage is in trouble have been circulating for years. In 2002, he appeared to suggest his wife was having an affair with the philosopher and mayor of Venice, Massimo Cacciari. At a joint press conference, he flabbergasted the visiting Danish Prime Minister, Anders Fogh Rasmussen, by saying: ”I think I’ll introduce him to my wife, he’s much better looking than Cacciari.”
Cacciari was among the first to comment on Lario’s letter. He said: ”When you get to talking to one another through the press and public letters, it’s clear that a relationship is finished.”
A minister in Italy’s centre-left government, Giovanna Melandri, said the episode had exposed the ”total inconsistency” between Berlusconi’s personal behaviour and his frequent exaltation of family values.
Lario had never before showed exasperation with her husband’s macho swaggering. But it has long been characteristic of his personality. A book published by three Italian journalists in 1994, when he first entered politics, described an incident following a dinner hosted by Berlusconi to celebrate a famous victory by his football team, AC Milan. Bidding farewell to his guests at his villa, he was heard to slap his wife on the bottom, telling her: ”Now you’ll see how the champion of the world fucks.”
Berlusconi on women
At a congress of an allied party: ”I notice some extraordinarily pretty legs around here.”
Addressing Germany’s then chancellor, Gerhard Schröder: ”Let’s talk about women and football. You, for example, Gerhard. You’ve had four wives. What can you tell us about women?”
On France: ”I love France and continue to love it. You only need to count up the girlfriends I’ve had there.”
At a business conference: ”Competitiveness is what you need to have with the girls.”
Commenting on his government’s opposition to moves to earmark a fixed proportion of seats in parliament for women: ”We very much like [having] women in parliament – especially beautiful ones.” – Guardian Unlimited Â