Berlusconi rocks!
Posted on 06/30/2003 8:59:39 PM PDT by Pikamax
Italy sparks row on first day at EU helm
Ian Black in Brussels Tuesday July 1, 2003 The Guardian
Silvio Berlusconi, Italy's controversial prime minister, who takes over the European Union presidency for the next six months, turned his fire on France and Germany by warning that Europe must not try to compete as a power block with the United States . Amid unease across the continent about his presidency, which starts today, Mr Berlusconi made clear that he would have no truck with France's notion of a "bi-polar" world.
"Europe must be complementary to the United States," the multi-billionaire media magnate insisted on Europe 1 radio. "I think the West must be united. There can't be competition between us and America."
Rivalry was acceptable in business and economics, but not in politics, he added.
Mr Berlusconi was one of the staunchest supporters of the US-led war on Iraq, along with Tony Blair and the Spanish prime minister, Jose Maria Aznar.
Under the Greek presidency, which ended last night, efforts have been made to heal the scars of the conflict, especially to patch up EU relations with the US.
But there is mounting nervousness about what lies ahead, especially in Brussels, where Romano Prodi, the Italian president of the European commission, is an old and probably future rival of Mr Berlusconi.
Mr Prodi, a former centre-left prime minister who is likely to return to Italian politics next year, once compared Mr Berlusconi to the Nazi propaganda chief Josef Goebbels. Their mutual dislike is powerful.
The two meet in Rome on Friday to discuss Italy's priorities for its six months at the helm. "We welcome the Italian presidency as we welcome all presidencies - with hope," Mr Prodi's spokesman said yesterday. "We will work in a close, almost intimate fashion."
Early signs of rivalry between the two emerged over the weekend when the commission president phoned the Libyan leader, Colonel Gadafy, after Mr Berlusconi failed to persuade him to let Italy police Libyan ports to curb illegal immigration.
Immigration is likely to be a priority for the presidency. But Mr Berlusconi will also need all his diplomatic prowess to oversee highly sensitive negotiations between governments on the EU's new constitutional treaty, working with the draft drawn up by Valéry Giscard d'Estaing.
Even more ambitiously, his finance minister, Giulio Tremonti, is to launch a "new deal programme" aimed at boosting sluggish EU growth by investing billions of euros in infrastructure.
Protests are expected tomorrow when he formally sets out his plans in the European parliament in Strasbourg, where many MEPs are deeply concerned about the prime minister's concentration of media power.
"Mr Berlusconi has already committed a number of mortal sins towards the EU," said Helmut Weixler, a spokesman for the Greens. "We think it's a bit like letting the fox into the chicken coop."
The Italian leader signalled yesterday that European defence, a difficult and slow-moving area, would also be an important issue. "If we don't have a military force, we don't have diplomatic or political power," he said.
He has already drawn fire for displaying too pro-US a line by boycotting the Palestinian president, Yasser Arafat, against EU policy. With newspapers all over Europe questioning his ability to lead the union, Mr Berlusconi was defiant about his legal position at home, where he has won immunity for his term in office against charges of bribing judges.
"In Italy we have a cancer that must be treated, the politicisation of the judicial authorities," he said. "We need to reform the judiciary to assure the public that they have judges who are not judges of the left, [and] who are impartial judges."
Berlusconi rocks!
Silvio gives notice to the Eurosexuals that a real man is in town.
Berlusconi's "bribery" charges were fabricated against him by corrupt prosecutors and judges who despise Berlusconi's right wing political views. The "left" also assasinated Berlusconi's finance minister, and further such hits will be made by the Left against Right-wing figures (certainly that holds for what happened to Pim Fortuyn in Holland, as well as against center-left Schoeder's left-wing nemisis in Germany ??Moeller??) recently).
Berlusconi is not corrupt, but the judges and prosecutors who fabricated the bribery charges against him **are** corrupt.Moreover, those judges and prosecutors are aligned with the same people who are assasinating people such as Pim Fortuyn who cause problems for the Left.
Berlusconi's own finance minister has already been assasinated, for instance.
???
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