Word: forza
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...again spotlit RAI 's troubled board, whose seats are traditionally divvied up among majority and opposition Members of Parliament. Only board president Antonio Baldassarre and another center-right loyalist remain. Three others quit in November to protest Baldassarre's leadership and alleged partisanship. Sandro Bondi, spokesman for Berlusconi's Forza Italia party, said RAI's leadership is more independent than ever, though he conceded that "politics continues to influence the world of television." Those influences, says one veteran RAI reporter, include all the old tricks of warping coverage to favor the incumbents - only jacked up exponentially under Berlusconi. The subterfuge...
...courts to attack democratically elected leaders. Giuffrè's testimony was blunt. He said that after the decline in the early 1990s of the ruling Christian Democrats - who had leaders in Sicily who looked out for the Mafia's interests in Rome - top bosses turned to Berlusconi's Forza Italia party to do the Mafia's bidding. The Sicilian-born Dell'Utri, the witness said, was the go-to man on a range of legislative efforts to ease pressure on mobsters in exchange for electoral support. Giuffrè said that current top Mob boss Bernardo Provenzano told him that they...
...local elections, the poll-happy Prime Minister has suddenly got shy about releasing his own popularity numbers. Berlusconi began picking up the pieces by naming Giuseppe Pisanu, 65, as the new Interior Minister. More seasoned than his predecessor, Pisanu is a former Christian Democrat who helped build Berlusconi's Forza Italia into the country's largest party after the billionaire media mogul entered politics in 1994. But Scajola's departure comes just six months after Foreign Minister Renato Ruggiero stepped down in a dispute over what he called the government's weak commitment to Europe. In addition to the turnover...
...What's more, they made Berlusconi's Forza Italia the nation's most powerful political party, with nearly 30% of the vote, and gave so-called Il Cavaliere a big enough majority to have a shot at staying in power for a full five-year term - something no Italian prime minister has accomplished since Mussolini. Turning out in large numbers, the voters themselves did what years of bickering about the election law had failed to do: weed out the small parties that have traditionally wielded undue power and concentrate support on the two main blocs...
...scale of Berlusconi's victory may be a product of the fact that his center-right Forza Italia grew at the expense of far-right parties such as the Northern Leagues and the National Alliance. Last time he was in power, his majority depended on the support of the Northern Leagues, and that proved to be his downfall. This time, Forza Italia appears to have emerged as the largest party in Italy, having replaced the traditional Christian Democratic Party as the bulwark of the right. Although he still has the Northern Leagues in his coalition, their share of the vote...