Berlusconi vows to remain in politics

ROME. September 21. KAZINFORM Former Italian prime minister Silvio Berlusconi's defiant pledge to stay in power received a muted response in Italy, but the 76-year-old billionaire still holds firepower not to be neglected.
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Earlier this week, Berlusconi released a video message vowing to stay in politics even if his fellow lawmakers in parliament vote to strip him of his Senate seat. But not many eyebrows were raised.

"I will always be with you, at your side, expelled from parliament or not," he said.

The muted response in Italy was seen as testament to Berlusconi's diminishing influence. But there are still key cards he holds.

The Italian Parliament announced it would hold a debate on Berlusconi's Senate seat after the Italian Supreme Court upheld a lower court's guilty verdict charging Berlusconi with false accounting and tax evasion. His sentence was a year of house arrest, while the court of origin reconsidered the length of the ban on politics it originally ordered, Kazinform cites Xinhua.

In Wednesday's video address, Berlusconi stayed away from issuing any threats to make Enrico Letta's government collapse, but said it did not matter what the Senate decided: he was not going anywhere.

"You can be a politician outside parliament," Berlusconi said. "The seat does not make the leader; it comes from popular consensus."

In his remarks, Berlusconi claimed most Italians still supported him, even though opinion polls generally show his support levels hovering between 25 percent and 35 percent of Italian adults.

"If Silvio Berlusconi says his political role is defined by a consensus, he doesn't have one," said Maria Rossi, co-director of the polling firm Opinioni. "His support levels are steady and predictable, but they fall far short of a consensus."

Ever since the August 1 Supreme Court ruling, pundits have been writing Berlusconi off, saying his 20-year tenure as the main protagonist in Italian politics was drawing to a close.

But while he may lack the political muscle he had in the past, he is not without weapons.

"The worst-case scenario is that Berlusconi does not keep his seat and does not go away, that he remains involved in a kind of limbo status," said Antonio Basso, a political analyst, editor, and author. "And that seems to be the path Italy is on."

It is a worry investors in Mediaset felt this week: the shares, which had nearly tripled since the start of the year, fell 2.5 percent in heavy trading the next day. Financial analysts said the shares slipped on fears that a drawn out battle between pro- and anti-Berlusconi in parliament would be bad for the company.

It is that threat of a protracted crisis that is one of Berlusconi's strongest cards, Basso said.

"The government will have every motive to avoid a situation where Berlusconi is on the outside looking in and criticizing every move," he said. "The problem is, it's not clear how to prevent that from happening. That is where the work needs to be done," Basso said.

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