Word: prodis
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Entertainment is central to the political genius of a man who started off as a crooner on a cruise line, and who christened his party Forza Italia after a national football chant. He's anything but gray. "When [former Prime Minister Romano] Prodi was on TV, I had to turn the sound way up," snorts one middle-aged Berlusconi supporter. "Prodi speaks like a priest." Ask an Italian what they think of their current leader, and chances are they'll chuckle - but most go on to say they voted for him. For many of his countrymen, Berlusconi's appetites...
...Elkann, the grandson of the former head of the Fiat auto dynasty Gianni Agnelli, was rushed to the hospital when he overdosed on cocaine at the Turin apartment of a transsexual prostitute. (He survived.) Two years later, photographs surfaced of Silvio Sircana, chief spokesman for then-Prime Minister Romano Prodi, having a conversation with what appeared to be a transvestite prostitute on the outskirts of Rome. Sircana insisted he was not soliciting the prostitute...
...should the Americans worry about the verdict being executed by other European governments. "I doubt that any country would step on the U.S.'s toes," says DiBenedetto. Berlusconi was also Prime Minister in 2003; neither he nor Romano Prodi, who was Prime Minister from 2006 to 2008, sought to extradite the CIA defendants. Berlusconi is unlikely to press for them to be put in prison...
...This is a puzzle; after all, we are talking about a left that not so long ago produced Prime Ministers such as Romano Prodi in Italy, Tony Blair and Gordon Brown in Britain, Gerhard Schröder in Germany, and Presidents, like François Mitterrand, who ruled France for 14 years. The puzzle is sharpened by the current crop of center-right leaders, who are either not very exciting (Merkel) or much too exciting (Sarkozy and Berlusconi, with their flashy or buffo theatrics...
...from time to time, while many have breached the pact's other main criterion: that national debt stay below 60% of GDP. Germany, the pact's main proponent, has been one of the most consistent abusers of the budgetary rules. In 2002, then president of the European Commission Romano Prodi even described the rules as "stupid...