For days in Italy there was no talk of anything else. The rumored break-up between the Prime Minister, Giorgia Meloni, and her partner until recently, the journalist Andrea Giambruno, has occupied TV news and bar conversations. "I, as a woman, understand it", opined a Roman taxi driver a few days after the Prime Minister planted her boyfriend with a publication on her social networks, after a satirical program of Mediaset exposed the shameful sexual comments that Giambruno , a worker in the same house, was on top of his colleagues on the set.
Days later the Mediaset group announced that Giambruno would no longer present the program he had been leading since July, Diario del Giorno, a general news program from which the prime minister has been compromised more than once. From now on, instead, he had to deal with "editorial coordination" tasks. But beyond the rosy chronicle, the episode threatens to have important political consequences in this country. Because the Mediaset television group, which has recently been transformed into Media For Europe (MFE), is the flagship of the business conglomerate of the Berlusconi family, which since the death of former Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi in June at the age of 86 it is captained by his first-born, Marina Berlusconi, president of the Fininvest holding, which brings together all the family's businesses. Berlusconi was also the founder of Forza Italia, the right-wing party that he treated as if it were one of his companies, and which is now Meloni's partner in the coalition that governs the country.
So 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 about it. This is what Pier Silvio, the businessman's second son, told the Prime Minister personally.
But many people in Italy doubt this reading and wonder if Meloni has actually been the victim of a conspiracy by Berlusconi to weaken his Government. According to the Italian media, the Prime Minister does not hide her irritation. The protagonist of these conspiracy rumors is Marina Berlusconi, pointed out as the person who would have engineered the emotional crisis at the Prime Minister's house. Apparently, the relationship between the two is good, but no one escapes the fact that the family was not at all happy with Meloni's intention to apply a tax on the extraordinary profits of the banks, which would have affected Banca Mediolanum, also controlled in part by Finnivest. At the time, Marina Berlusconi described the proposal as "demagogic" and Forza Italia managed to downgrade it.
Naturally, the tycoon's eldest daughter has denied any role in Giambruno's affair. "In the last few days I have read and heard everything: stories made up behind the scenes, reconstructions totally lacking in logic and often even contradictory. The truth is only one, I have great respect for Giorgia Meloni", says one of the previews of his book. He also tried to reassure the Minister of Foreign Affairs, Antonio Tajani, leader of Forza Italia since the death of the founder, who assures that "the Government can sleep peacefully" because "Forza Italia is serious, there is no problem, if if there were, we would have said so openly, the Berlusconi family has nothing to do with the leaks transmitted by Mediaset". "The relations between the Mediaset Government are the normal ones between the Government and a large Italian company", agreed Meloni in statements in Brussels.
The only thing that is clear is that the issue, as much as it is linked to the private life of the prime minister, has acquired a political character. Italians well remember Meloni's warning to Berlusconi last year, when the tycoon defined her in a list as "arrogant, offensive and overbearing" for her differences in the names of Italian ministers. "That list was missing one point, that I can't be blackmailed", she replied then, very upset. The sentence is reminiscent enough of what he wrote publicly to announce his break with Giambruno: "All those who hoped to weaken me by attacking me at home should know that no matter how much the drop waits to pierce the stone, the stone remains a stone and the drop is only water”. Interpretations are open.
