For days in Italy nothing else was talked about. The high-profile breakup between the Prime Minister, Giorgia Meloni, and her until recently partner, the journalist Andrea Giambruno, occupied television news and bar conversations. “I, as a woman, understand her,” said a Roman taxi driver a few days after the premier stood up to her boyfriend with a publication on her social networks, after a satirical Mediaset program exposed the embarrassing sexual comments that Giambruno, a worker from the same house, performed her colleagues on the set.
Days later, the Mediaset group announced that Giambruno would stop presenting the program he had led since July, Diario del Giorno, a general news program from which he put the prime minister in trouble on more than one occasion. From now on she was going to take care of “editorial coordination” tasks instead. But beyond the gossip, the episode threatens to have important political consequences in this country. Because the Mediaset television group, which recently became Media For Europe (MFE), is the flagship of the business conglomerate of the Berlusconi family, which since the death of former Prime Minister Silvio Berlsusconi in June at the age of 86 has been led by his first-born daughter. , Marina Berlusconi, president of the Fininvest holding company, which brings together all the family's businesses. Berlusconi was also the founder of Forza Italia, the right-wing party that he treated as one of his companies, and which is now Meloni's partner in the coalition that governs the country.
Therefore, the obvious question when Giambruno's vulgar comments came out was who had allowed this situation. The official version of MFE is that it was an autonomous decision of the satirical program, and that no Berlusconi knew anything. This was personally communicated to the premier by Pier Silvio, the businessman's second son.
But many in Italy doubt this reading and wonder if Meloni has actually been the victim of a Berlusconi conspiracy to weaken his government. According to the Italian media, the prime minister does not hide her irritation. The protagonist of these plot rumors is Marina Berlusconi, identified as the hand behind the sentimental crisis in the prime minister's home. Apparently, the relationship between the two is good, but no one is aware that the family was not at all happy with Meloni's intention to carry out a tax on the extraordinary profits of banks, which would have affected Banca Mediolanum, also controlled partly by Finnivest. At the time, Marina Berlusconi called the proposal “demagogic” and Forza Italia managed to lower it.
Naturally, the eldest of the magnate's children has denied any role in the Giambruno affair. “In recent days I have read and heard everything: stories invented behind the scenes, reconstructions totally lacking in logic and often even contradictory. The truth is only one, I have Giorgia Meloni in great esteem,” says one of the advances of her book. Foreign Minister Antonio Tajani, leader of Forza Italia since the death of the founder, also tried to reassure him that “the Government can sleep peacefully” because “Forza Italia is serious, there is no problem, if there was one, we would have said it openly.” , the Berlusconi family has nothing to do with the leaks transmitted by Mediaset.” “The relations between the Government and Mediaset are normal between the government and a large Italian company,” Meloni agreed in statements in Brussels.
The only thing that is clear is that the matter, as much as it is linked to the prime minister's private life, has reached political tones. Italians well remember Meloni's warning to Berlusconi last year, when the magnate defined her in a list as "arrogant, offensive and arrogant" due to her differences in the names of the Italian ministers. “That list was missing one point, that I cannot be blackmailed,” she then responded, very upset. The phrase is quite reminiscent of what she wrote publicly to announce her breakup with Giambruno: “All those who hoped to weaken me by hitting me at home should know that no matter how much the drop hopes to pierce the stone, the stone remains a stone and the drop only is water". Interpretations are left open.
