Former Italian senator Sergio De Gregorio confirmed over the weekend that he’d been bribed by Silvio Berlusconi in 2006. “The Cavaliere paid me,” he told La Stampanonchalantly about the €3 million he’d received. “Of course I took the money, as I clarified to the prosecutors,” he said.
Utterly frustrated with this sort of daily display of corruption in their country, 8.7 million angry Italians from all walks of life voted for Beppe Grillo’s 5-Star movement. While 25.5% of the popular vote isn’t nearly enough to govern without being part of a coalition, which he has so far rejected, it’s enough to give the political establishment conniptions—and show that anger and frustration finally count.
“The existing political class must be expelled immediately,” he told the New York Times. Hence his refusal to form a coalition. He wants the political system to collapse. From it, he’d construct “something new,” something truly democratic. “We can change everything in the hands of respectable people,” he explained.
But wasn’t it reckless to try to destroy the system? “How can we be accused of destroying something that’s already destroyed?” he asked. “They’ve devoured the country, and now they can’t govern.” He called Berlusconi of the right-leaning PDL a “psycho dwarf” and Pier Luigi Bersani, the top honcho of the left-leaning Democratic Party, “a dead man walking.”
Italy’s political system would collapse, he told the German online magazine Focus. “I give the old parties six months, and then it’s over.” In the subsequent elections, the 5-Star movement could get enough votes to govern—and to clean house.The Testosterone Pit
The Fear of Nuremberg Trials For Corrupt Italian Politicians
Wolf Richter
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