Berlusconi sez: "Invest! No commies, cute secretaries!"

Mr Berlusconi's gaffe followed Italy's success in hosting the European Food Safety Authority, which opened in Parma on Tuesday, instead of Finland.

Adding fuel to the flames, Mr Berlusconi poured scorn on Finnish food, saying he had had to "endure" it.

"There is absolutely no comparison between culatello (speciality ham) from Parma and smoked reindeer," Mr Berlusconi was quoted as saying.

His comments drew criticism from Italian opposition MPs, who called on him to apologise.

But Mr Berlusconi's spokesman said there was no diplomatic crisis and it was simply "a nice thing to say; a way of showing friendliness at a festive occasion".

In Helsinki, Finnish Prime Minister Matthi Vanhanen said: "The matter is closed; I have nothing against Italian food; I love spaghetti, as long as it's not too spicy."

'Nazi' gaffe

It is not the first time Mr Berlusconi's comments have ruffled diplomatic feathers - nor is it the first time Finland has been on the receiving end.

In 2001, he told the European Union that Finland did not deserve the food safety agency as "Finns don't even know what prosciutto is".

Regarding his tactics in persuading Mrs Halonen, Mr Berlusconi reportedly said: "When you seek a result, it's necessary to use all available weapons and therefore I brushed up all my playboy skills, now from the distant past, and I used a series of tender pleas to the president."

Mr Berlusconi has become notorious for making comments that others regard as tasteless.

He famously told German MEP Martin Schulz that he would be dream casting for a Nazi concentration camp guard in a forthcoming Italian film.

The remark, made at the launch of Italy's presidency of the European Union in 2003, caused huge offence in Germany and - after Mr Berlusconi refused to apologise - a diplomatic rift between the two nations.

http://thecurrent.theatlantic.com/archives/2008/07/italian-prime-minister-silvio-1.php

The Italian Prime Minister could hardly contain himself after a string of electoral victories this spring. "We are the new Falange," he crowed - a reference to the fascist party that helped General Franco seize power in 1930s Spain. Supporters of Gianni Alemanno, a former youth leader of the neo-fascist Italian Social Movement, celebrated his election to Rome's mayoralty later in April by chanting "Duce! Duce!" - Benito Mussolini's nickname - and raising their arms in the fascist salute. Arriving for a parliamentary session that same month, Umberto Bossi, a minister in Berlusconi's government and the head of the anti-immigrant Northern League party, all but threatened the Italian opposition with violence: "I don't know what the Left wants but we are ready," he warned. "If they want conflicts, I have 300,000 men always on hand."

Since Berlusconi's victory, these echoes of the 1930s have been backed by a series of chauvinistic and discriminatory measures. Claiming to address crime by clamping down on immigration, the Berlusconi government has conflated these two phenomena, scapegoating the country's Roma, or Gypsy, population as a major cause of its social problems. An impoverished and marginalized ethnic group, the Roma are particularly vulnerable to resentment by the rest of the population. Despite a presence on the Italian peninsula since the Middle Ages, Gypsies are poorly integrated and many live in rundown encampments on the outskirts of urban centers. Recent increases in immigration patterns - and public outrage over a series of violent crimes - have hardened the Italians' hostility and transformed Gypsies into the far right's ideal targets.

In the run-up to the April elections, Berlusconi pledged to act against "Roma, clandestine immigrants and criminals." Influenced by the vitriol of the Northern League and fearful that they could be labeled soft on crime, politicians from all parties (including leaders of the center-left) joined the Roma-bashing.

Inevitably, actions have followed words. In May, news spread that a teenaged Gypsy had tried to abduct a baby; a mob spontaneously assembled in Naples and proceeded to attack and burn down the city's Gypsy camps. Bossi's reaction encapsulated the government's attitude. "The people do what the political class isn't able to do," he said.

Soon after, in a move that carried overtones of the registration drives that eventually allowed for the persecution of Jews and Gypsies in the 1930s, Interior Minister Roberto Maroni announced a plan to create a national registry of the country's Roma population. This census was launched earlier this month. In Berlusconi's Italy, all Gypsies are now being recorded as members of their ethnic group, regardless of whether they are immigrants or Italian nationals - and fingerprinted as well.

The European Parliament almost immediately passed a resolution condemning Maroni's plan, though members of the body's center-right parliamentary group voted against the resolution. Sadly, this purely symbolic vote has been Europe's main political protest against Italy's authoritarian drift.

In 1999, when Austria's center-right formed a governmental coalition with the country's far-right party, widespread outcry led to Austria's being temporarily ostracized from the European Union. Since then, however, a number of countries - including Berlusconi's Italy - have followed in Austria's path without any reaction at the continental level. In other countries, the center-right has resisted an open alliance but has co-opted many of the far right's themes.

That is the case in France, for instance, where Nicolas Sarkozy rose through the political ranks by stigmatizing the Arab community and the inhabitants of the lower-class banlieues. After his victory in the 2007 presidential election, Sarkozy created an ominous-sounding "Ministry of Immigration and National Identity" and sponsored a proposal that would require immigrants already in France who are seeking to be reunited with their families to use DNA testing to prove their blood ties - a humiliating policy that tosses the concept of legal guardianship, reduces family ties to biological parenthood and moves back towards a model of citizenship based on blood.

In October, The New York Times blasted Sarkozy's "pseudoscientific bigotry" and likened the DNA testing bill to the Vichy collaborationist government during the Nazi occupation. Now Silvio Berlusconi is upping the ante, though, and even the Times hasn't bothered to protest. Europe's xenophobic drift has become dangerously routine.

I voted against the cunt, if it helps.

how?

MUMPLACATION ISA YEARNING BY WHICH I MENS PERRYPOPS IS THE NEW CHILD SCARRING TEATS THAT MAY CONTAIN BACONATED DIGESTIVE AIDS BROADCASTING LIVE FROM THE VATERLAND WHJH

well i'll be

Same here, although tbh I think that Veltroni would be doing the exact same shit now had he gotten in, only with a less obvious plastic surgery.