Women MPs fight back as Berlusconi lashes out

Amid warnings that Italy is on the edge of a constitutional crisis after Silvio Berlusconi was stripped of his immunity from prosecution, the man himself has been flailing around like a bear with a thorn in its foot. Taking part by phone in a late-night television discussion, he struck out at President Giorgio Napolitano saying he should have used "his influence" to get a different ruling from the Constitutional Court.

When a studio guest, Rosy Bindi, a former family minister in Romano Prodi's centre-left government, expressed shock at this suggestion, Berlusconi replied: "I recognise you are increasingly more beautiful than intelligent".

Even coming from Berlusconi, this was over the top and Bindi answered that she was "not a woman at your disposal", alluding to the call-girls and television showgirls at the centre of the long-running Berlusconi sex scandal.

Among the first to leap to Bindi's defence was another former minister under Prodi, the American-born Italian MP Giovanna Melandri. She said the remark summed up "the Berlusconi philosophy towards women". The diminutive prime minister, she went on, had shown himself to be "taller than he is well-mannered".

None of this, however, dissuaded the furious PM from continuing his attack on Napolitano. He reminded a radio interviewer that the president, a former communist, had been elected by a left-wing majority and that his "roots are entirely in his left-wing history". Napolitano's recent appointment of a Constitutional Court judge "showed which side he is on", he said.

The court's ruling, handed down on Wednesday, was that the law giving the PM immunity from prosecution while in office, pushed through parliament by Berlusconi within weeks of his becoming prime minister last year, was unconstitutional. The law covers not only the PM but also the president and the two speakers in the Italian parliament - but of course it was designed solely for Berlusconi's purposes.

Because the court's decision is final - there is no right of appeal - several court cases in which Berlusconi would have faced charges of corruption, fraud and tax evasion over the past year can now be reopened. But Berlusconi continues to call Wednesday's judgement "laughable" and claims it nothing but a political gambit got up by his enemies on the left.

Opposition leader Dario Franceschini said yesterday that Berlusconi's public criticism of Napolitano - who, whatever his history, is the head of state - would be "unimaginable in any other country". He foresaw "difficult days ahead" if Berlusconi refused to accept the removal of his immunity.

An editorial in the Catholic bishops' newspaper, Avvenire, whose editor Dino Boffo quit after being attacked by allies of Berlusconi this summer, said the country was "on the edge of a precipice". ·