Former Italian prime minister Silvio Berlusconi. Photo: ReutersFormer Italian prime minister Silvio Berlusconi finally got some good news from Italian judges yesterday when a court halved the amount of money he will have to pay his estranged wife Veronica Lario.
The media tycoon must pay €1.4 million per month, the court in the northern city of Monza ruled, slashing the €3 million previously stipulated, sources close to the matter told Reuters.
Earlier this year Berlusconi, 77, criticised the panel of what he called “feminist and communist” female judges responsible for the original settlement and launched an appeal.
The former prime minister has had little to celebrate since he was sentenced in August to four years in jail for tax fraud, commuted to a year under house arrest or in community service.
Last month he tried and failed to bring down Enrico Letta’s government and on Saturday a Milan court banned him from public office for two years.
However, Lario can appeal the divorce settlement decision again.
The former actress, who was married to Berlusconi for more than 22 years and had three children with him, asked for a divorce in 2009, accusing him of having an affair with a 17-year-old girl.
In June he was convicted of paying for sex with an underage prostitute during “bunga bunga” parties at his villa near Milan.
His new girlfriend, 28-year-old Francesca Pascale, said in September that she wanted to marry Berlusconi, who first caught her eye when she was a teenager.
Meanwhile, Italy’s divided centre-right is paying a heavy price for failing to arrange a smooth succession to Silvio Berlusconi, according to a minister in his last government who broke ranks with the former premier last year to set up a rival conservative party.
Giorgia Meloni, a 36-year-old former youth affairs minister, known for her rapid-fire debating and thick Roman accent, launched the Fratelli d’Italia (Brothers of Italy) party late last year and is one of several lawmakers trying to find space on the right of Italian politics after a revolt within Berlusconi’s People of Freedom (PDL) party in September.
“This is obviously a very fluid moment; the situation is being redefined, there’s a lot of confusion,” Meloni told Reuters. “But obviously the problem for the centre-right – and in a certain sense for the centre-left as well – is that for 20 years everything has revolved around Berlusconi.”
Now the billionaire Berlusconi’s total control of a party built largely around former executives of his Mediaset television empire and a loyal army of parliamentary foot soldiers, disparagingly dubbed “peones”, is under its greatest threat in two decades.
Berlusconi’s domination of Italian politics has not just shaped the right. The centre-left has also been drawn into his orbit, struggling to define itself as anything other than an anti-Berlusconi force, as one leader after another has failed to shift the focus away from “Il Cavaliere”.
But the revolt last month by PDL Senators was a humiliation for Berlusconi that has changed all that, forcing him to back the government of Prime Minister Enrico Letta in parliament only days after he pledged to bring it down. There had been PDL defections before, but none that challenged his authority so directly or revealed such a fragile grip on the party.
On Monday evening, the divisions within the PDL surfaced again when 24 party senators signed a statement defending Italy’s recently unveiled budget from attacks by other members of the conservative party.
“The level of degradation in the tone and language of political debate within the PDL is intolerable,” the senators wrote in the statement.