UK Edition
Silvio Berlusconi pledges to create jobs (again) and jokes about his hair transplants, in bid for election victory
Silvio Berlusconi used a glitzy television chat show as a platform to launch a “contract with the Italian people”, promising to create hundreds of thousands of jobs if his centre-Right coalition wins next month’s election.
He did the same thing 17 years ago, when he used the same programme, the same studio and even the same desk, to sign a contract with Italians in which he pledged to generate one million jobs – a promise that economists say he failed to deliver on.
“After the victory of the centre-Right in the election, my job will be to create jobs so that by the end of the five-year legislature we will have brought Italy’s rate of unemployment to below the European average, which is 8.7 per cent,” the 81-year-old billionaire said on Wednesday night, signing the accord with a flourish.
He decried Italy’s unemployment rate of 11 per cent, which rises to 32 per cent among young people.
“There are three million young people who don’t work. They get up at midday and go to the discotheque,” he said.
He even threw in some humour, joking that he has more hair now – thanks to transplants – than he did in 2001.
“Seventeen years ago I had less hair, and you had more. I’ll let you know the name of my doctor,” he told the presenter, Bruno Vespa, a close friend.
Mr Berlusconi insisted that the centre-Right was the party most likely to guarantee Italy “stability”.
Immigration has become a key issue in the election campaign, particularly after the murder and dismemberment of an 18-year-old Italian girl, allegedly by three Nigerians, and the revenge shooting of six African migrants by a 28-year-old Italian man with fascist allegiances in the town of Macerata in the Marche region.
Mr Berlusconi has co-opted the hardline language of the League, with whom he is allied, warning that there are half a million unauthorised migrants in Italy and that they represent “a social bomb” waiting to explode.
He cannot become prime minister again because of a conviction for tax fraud that bans him from holding public office, but he is determined to be the power behind the throne if, as seems likely, his alliance wins the most votes in the March 4 election.
The bloc, which consists of his Forza Italia party, the hard-Right, anti-immigrant League and a small far-Right party called Brothers of Italy, is expected to take 35 per cent of the vote, trumping its closest rival, the Five Star Movement.
Mr Berlusconi has not indicated who in his party would become prime minister in the event of an election victory, though there is speculation that his preferred candidate is Antonio Tajani, the president of the European Parliament.
He has repeatedly derided the members of Five Star as a bunch of novices with no political experience.
He upped the ante on Wednesday, calling Luigi di Maio, the movement’s youthful leader, “a boy”.
"To think that a 31-year-old boy who has never worked could take on the government of the country is a joke, and that is why I have joined the fray," he said.
Mr Di Maio worked as a website designer while studying for a law degree at Naples University.
He has previously worked as a waiter, a construction labourer and a steward at Napoli football club.
But he has enjoyed a meteoric rise within Five Star and became the youngest deputy leader of the lower house of parliament when he was appointed in 2013 at the age of 26.