Silvio Berlusconi, scandal-ridden former Italian prime minister, dies aged 86
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
I mean it. There's no "respect for the dead" to be had, no "honour the man not his actions", no "he just died that's distasteful". The world is actively a better, less corrupt place with this man dead.
It's like the situation with Trump. So long as he as alive the Republican party is going to be out of its mind, sidelining conservatives with (at least some) honor like Mike Pence, Mitt Romney and such. So long as Trump is alive we're going to be afraid of a comeback but when it is over it is over.
I have never voted for Berlusconi, but he has been a minor figure in Italian politics since 2011, and in terms of actual policies implemented during his governments, he has done very little that I would call dangerous, crazy or ruinous.
Since the euro, there has been very little room for European countries to implement any kind of adventurous domestic and foreign policies, if you exclude France's shameful bombing of Libya.
Forza Italia (Berlusconi's party) was one of the main members of the European People's Party, certainly not a den of extremists.
Contrast that to the U.S. where a party has only held the presidency for at most three terms since 1948 and that just once and where there is usually divided government, as much as Democrats and Republicans can claim the other side wins all the time, no party is so perpetually out of power that it can evade all blame for the way things are. Looking at Europe and sideways at the U.S. it seems almost like center left parties are doomed to be in some quantum superposition of Tony Blair and Jeremy Corbin. By simply framing themselves as the surviving defenders of the welfare state, the far right wins.
Corbyn? Maybe. He was always too divisive to be PM. Then again, maybe Labour needed a bit of correction after "New Labour".
Comparisons with China are ridiculous in any case.
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I don't know the details of the situation in France exactly, but Macron is doing what he feels is needed. Maybe he's right, maybe not, but you can't forever hold of unpopular but needed reforms out of fear of populist parties that merely tell people what they want to hear.
For anyone thinking that "scandal-ridden" is "distasteful" you are just adding insult to injury to his victims.
Are Italian prime ministers more scandalous than French (take Sarkozy, to cite a recent example) or British (Boris Johnson anyone?) prime ministers? More recent Italian prime ministers include Mario Monti, Mario Draghi, Romano Prodi, Giuseppe Conte, all politicians and bureaucrats who may or may not be liked, but with a much higher personal and public profile than many of their counterparts in the Western world.
Please let's stop with silly, and frankly annoying, stereotypes.
In this case, the other person (me), wrote, with reference to the "scandalous profile" of many Italian PMs: "all politicians and bureaucrats who may or may not be liked, but with a much higher personal and public profile than many of their counterparts in the Western world."
I did not mention their political stature, but their personal and public profile. Giuseppe Conte, who was a nobody before he got the role of PM (which, for those unfamiliar with the Italian Constitution, must be elected by Parliament, it is not as if he was a self-candidate. In Italy, PMs are not elected by the people, but by the members of the Senate and Parliament, so there was nothing strange, the same was true for Monti and Draghi, while Prodi was the leader of a coalition that got the majority of votes/seats), he was a full professor of Private Law (not just a "lawyer") at the University of Florence and LUISS University in Rome (one of the very few private universities in Italy), and he had a number of quite relevant (for Italy) board positions. A profile fairly common among politicians. As far as I know, his private life was not scandalous at all.
He was far from having the international profile of Monti, Draghi or Prodi, but both his personal life and tenure as premier were not scandalous at all (and arguably better than the terrible tenure of Mario Monti).
PS, I did not vote for him or support him, and I consider him among the best and brightest.
You cannot not even compare him with someone that was president of BCE and with academic PhD at MIT like Mario Draghi or with someone that was Rector of Bocconi (probably the best university in Europe for economic studies) and European Commissioner.
Almost nobody knows him before being a puppet in the agreement between M5S and Lega. And his experience as PM was worst than terrible: the yellow-green government was the worst government in the history of Italy and with him as PM we had the higher number of deaths for COVID in Europe, the harder lockdown and the biggest impact in the econony.
Conte wrote in his CV that he had been a visiting professor/scholar at some foreign universities, while it appeared that he had only visited universities (a curious case was at the University of Vienna, where he said he had spent time as a visiting professor, instead he went there for English classes). In the online resume he made available when he was a professor and had just begun his political career, he also claimed to be a follower of Padre Pio of Petralcina (I am going from memory here). All rather ridiculous, but largely inoffensive.
I wrote that his profile was not even comparable to that of Monti and Draghi (despite my dislike of techno-euro-bureaucrats).
You wrote, "Almost nobody knows him before being a puppet in the agreement between M5S and Lega." Here you are wrong: not "almost no one" but "no one" knew him. But the fact that he was a puppet is contradicted by his quick takeover of the M5S reins.
His experience as premier has been average, which was partly surprising, since he is far from being a political talent (I don't know about his tenure), but it is hard to see today (after Monti, unfortunately, since he was a "big name" he was given leeway that turned out to be disastrous) catastrophic leadership: there is a very narrow corridor defined by the EU along which a European government can walk.
Your commentary seems to me to be overall infused with bitterness (Stamina and the NoVax movement have nothing in common, apart from some weirdos who manage to jump from one conspiracy to another) and broad strokes that are not conducive to reasoned conversation.
If Conte, whom I repeat I did not vote for, do not like, etc., is to be condemned, what to make of former German premiers Schroeder and Merkel, whose pro-Russian leadership and sentiment-based policy of open borders caused humanitarian and financial disasters? What about Sarkozy and his bombing of Libya? What about Boris Johnson and his dastardly decisions during the pandemic? What about Sanna Marin and his parties in the very first months of the Russian invasion of Ukraine?
The decisions made by his government may or may not be to your liking, but at the European level there have been, in the consequences of government actions, many worse leaderships.