Supporters of Silvio Berlusconi threatened to resign from Italy’s government on Friday after a verdict against the billionaire tycoon that could place him under house arrest and eject him from parliament.
“We are ready to resign to defend our ideal,” Interior Minister Angelino Alfano, Berlusconi’s closest ally from the People of Freedom party, was quoted by Italian media as saying at a meeting with the mogul.
Berlusconi himself reportedly said: “We have to ask for new elections as quickly as possible and win them.”
Prime Minister Enrico Letta, who presides over the uneasy alliance between his centre-left Democratic Party (PD) and Berlusconi’s centre-right coalition, earlier pleaded for calm “for the good of Italy”.
But he added: “I do not think a deterioration is advantageous and I do not believe that continuing at any cost is in the interests of the country.”
Italy’s current government was installed following a two-month deadlock between Berlusconi and their eternal rivals, the PD, after close-run February elections in which both won around a third of the vote.
“The government is a dead man walking,” the Il Fatto Quotidiano daily said in an editorial.
Opinion polls based on surveys carried out in the run-up to Thursday’s verdict indicated that Berlusconi’s coalition would win new elections by a large margin.
A key question will also be whether Letta will manage to contain growing discontent within the PD about governing together with a confirmed criminal.
“It is impossible to imagine that the PD can remain allied to the party of Silvio Berlusconi,” said Nichi Vendola, leader of the small leftist opposition party Left, Ecology and Liberty.
Some leftists have called for the 76-year-old Berlusconi to be expelled from the Senate as soon as possible, with the Five Star protest movement calling for an immediate vote on his ousting.
But Alfonso Stile, a law professor at Rome’s Sapienza university, said the procedure to exclude him from parliament would be “long and tortuous” and would be a similar to a re-run of the tax fraud trial.
Italy’s top court on Thursday handed Berlusconi his first definitive conviction in a 20-year political career dogged by legal woes and sex scandals.
The court ordered the three-time premier to do a year of community service or be placed under house arrest — a sentence due to be enacted in October.
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