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Silvio Berlusconi mocks female politician’s looks
Italian PM rattled as far-right Northern League raises stakes in regional elections
Silvio Berlusconi is never at his best when the sometimes adoring Italian public turn against him. With opinion polls showing his party faces a whitewash in this weekend's regional elections, and his approval ratings at an all-time low of 44 per cent, he lashed out this week at Mercedes Bresso, who is standing as regional president for Piedmont.
"You know why Bresso is always in a bad mood?" the 73-year-old prime minister told a rally in Turin on Tuesday night. "Because in the morning when she gets up, she looks at herself in the mirror to put her make-up on and sees herself. And so her day is already ruined."
Quite why the bizarrely perma-tanned PM, who everyone knows has undergone plastic surgery and at least one hair transplant in the past, thinks he can get away with this sort of personal attack remains a mystery. Earlier this month, he tried the same thing on a partially bald Italian journalist, saying: "Your day is already ruined when you look in the mirror to comb your hair."
Bresso, who is standing as regional president for Piedmont in northern Italy, answered Berlusconi's jibe by saying it was in poor taste for two reasons. "One, I am always happy and you will find it hard to see a picture of me not smiling.
"Secondly, when it comes to make-up all I can say is that I use a lot less than Berlusconi. I am younger and much better preserved and I haven't had a facelift."
Piemonte is just one of the regions expected to be lost this weekend by Berlusconi's People of Freedom party - and it could go, not to the centre-left represented by Bresso, but to the far-right anti-immigration Northern League party.
The Northern League, which is so xenophobic that its policies include the right of coastguards to shoot human traffickers, is currently a minority member of Berlusconi's coalition government.
"The Northern League will be the beneficiaries of the cabinet reshuffle that will follow the election," James Walston, a political analyst at the American University of Rome, told the Independent. "And this is seriously rattling Berlusconi." ·
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'Xenophobic' is one of the standardised insults that left wing journalists now routinely hurl as a hate weapon against anyone who disagrees with their destructive pseudo-submissive belief that peoples, white peoples only though, should not be permitted to protect their borders from unwanted and uncalled for foreign colonisers. The media is almost completely controlled now and if it weren't for the internet we would already be entrenched in a new dark period of Stalinist USSR style oppression. European peoples have barely any rights left at all as it is. How bizarre that so many journalists seem so hellbent on destroying their own and everyone else's country for no apparent reason.