Word: berlusconi
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...Insiders for Berlusconi?s opposition acknowledge that they had the down-to-the-wire 2000 race for the White House top of mind as the final votes around Italy were being tallied past midnight on Tuesday. For Prodi?s side, Bush?s victory in 2000 was partly a product of the first impression voters had when a Fox News began reporting that he had taken Florida in a race that was by all accounts too close to call...
Italy?s flamboyant Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi boasts of remaking his country?s perennially gray politics into a U.S.-style, image-driven affair. Some in fact say that the media mogul has taken it all too far since first running for office in 1994, staging annual cult-of-personality party conventions and making controversial use of his private television stations to beam a Reaganesque message of smiling conservatism into the living rooms of Italian voters. Still, it has been a recipe for success for Berlusconi, 69, who has been Italy?s longest serving post-War Prime Minister since his election...
...Italian politics is built upon a never-ending supply of ironies. And so it was in the wee hours of Tuesday morning, with Berlusconi in a razor-tight battle for reelection against Romano Prodi, that his center-left opponents used their own familiarity with recent American political history-along with help from Berlusconi?s own TV network-to try to seal their victory, and send the billionaire packing...
...Silvio Berlusconi has never been one to act his age. Since being elected Italy's Prime Minister in 2001, he has called a German critic "perfect for the part" of a Nazi prison guard, reminisced after a speech to the U.S. Congress about seeing a Playboy calendar in high school and even held up two fingers behind the head of the Spanish Foreign Minister during a photo op. There's also the plastic surgery and hair replacement the 69-year-old billionaire has undergone to help mask the physical toll of his job--which he may well lose when Italians...
...longest-serving Prime Minister in postwar Italy, Berlusconi might be tempted to try to score points off his opponent's youth and inexperience--except that his rival, former Prime Minister Romano Prodi, is 66. Whoever wins, Italy will remain the only West European country with a sexagenarian Prime Minister. For Italians the face-off between two candidates born in the 1930s is a discomfiting reminder of the country's geriatric tilt. "It's the same faces saying the same things," says Mariangela Potenza, 24, a university student from Basilicata. "There's nothing that transmits innovation or novelty to the voters...