As the country’s leader, Silvio Berlusconi was regarded by many Italians as a national embarrassment. Now he has put his foot in his mouth again, saying that his country should leave the euro.
On Friday, on his Facebook page, the former Italian Prime Minister suggested in all apparent seriousness that Italy should leave the single currency unless the European Central Bank was prepared to inject more cash into the country’s tottering economy.
“We have to go to Europe and say forcefully that the ECB should start printing money. If it doesn’t, we should have the strength to say ‘ciao, ciao’ and leave the euro,” he wrote. It put him in direct opposition with Mario Monti, who succeeded him as Prime Minister and who repeated his assertion over the weekend that the euro would stay together and Greece would not leave.
Less than 24 hours later, he had reversed his position. “That a joke ... could be mistaken for a proposal is certainly a serious mistake for whoever claims to provide political news,” he wrote on his Facebook page. He said that the media had taken seriously what he had said “with a smile and irony”.
Mr Berlusconi’s People of Liberty party is one of the two main political supporters of Mr Monti’s government of technocrats, which came to power in November precisely to prevent Italy from defaulting on its debt and destroying the single currency. His previous comment, therefore, could have been seen as undermining the Government less than a year before the next election.
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The Italian media took it seriously. Commentators said that it would be impossible for the PDL to continue to support Mr Monti if the party openly campaigned against the euro.
Mr Berlusconi, 75, was forced to give up leadership of the party because he has been charged with paying for sex with an underage prostitute. It was the latest in a series of lurid revelations over his private life that introduced a hitherto ignorant Italian electorate to the notion of “bunga bunga”, the phrase given to the wild parties he is said to have thrown.
His party was blamed for failing to reform the economy and did badly in local elections last month.