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.<\/p>\n
“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.<\/p>\n
Berlusconi himself reportedly said: “We have to ask for new elections as quickly as possible and win them.”<\/p>\n
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”.<\/p>\n
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.”<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
“The government is a dead man walking,” the Il Fatto Quotidiano daily said in an editorial.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
A key question will also be whether Letta will manage to contain growing discontent within the PD about governing together with a confirmed criminal.<\/p>\n
“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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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