The saga of Silvio Berlusconi’s divorce has the Italian media in such a frenzy that the press review simply cannot resist offering you daily coverage.


Il Giornale (Italy)
Berlusconi : « Da sinistra solo calunnie. A Veronica voglio bene, ora le scuse »
Berlusconi: “Nothing but slander from the left. I love Veronica, now she must apologise”

Yesterday the prime minister went on prime time TV – not one of his private channels but the public broadaster, RAI – to give his side of the story, making headline news for all the country’s dailies.

Berlusconi is demanding an apology from his wife, Veronica Lario, who he says has been conned by the left.

Corriere della Sera (Italy)
Il Cavaliere: mia moglie? Le voglio bene ma si scusi
The Cavalier: my wife ? I love her but she must apologise

Corriere della Sera has a picture of the prime minister with his wife on big screen behind him, the screen emblazoned with the words “my turn to talk”. Berlusconi now says that all the things his wife Veronica accuses him of are lies – he never intended to present pretty young women as candidates in the European elections, he is not friends with the young girl whose 18th birthday party he went to but simply had political business to attend to with her father – and amazingly, in the course of this special TV interview, he implored the media to leave his private life alone.

The director of Corriere della Sera, Ferruccio De Bortoli, was on the program, too, and took the opportunity to express a degree of sympathy with the prime minister, though he did rather timidly suggest that it might be more becoming of a prime minister to avoid 18th-birthday parties of any kind.

The episode illustrates just how much power Silvio Berlusconi has over the media. Perhaps some of his massive counter-attack will stick. But still, even Corriere devotes a full five pages to the divorce and reports that the Catholic Church in Italy has expressed a degree of indignation about the prime minister’s behaviour.

L’Unità (Italy)
Quelle foto tra stranezze e sospetti
Those odd and suspicious photos

There are little left-wing papers like L’Unità which are very much against Berlusconi. L’Unità covers a debate going on in Italy about whether the pictures of Berlusconi at the 18th birthday party are real. There are various pieces of evidence suggesting he was added in – he appears much taller than he really is, for example. So there’s a conspiracy theory emerging there – perhaps a little far-fetched, though!


Le Figaro (France)
Sarkozy en appelle à un volontarisme européen
Sarkozy calls for European voluntarism

Perhaps Silvio Berlusconi would rather have been giving interviews about the first year of his third stint as Italian prime minister rather than about his divorce. France’s President Nicolas Sarkozy is celebrating his first two years in office. But does he really have much to celebrate? A recent poll shows that 63% of the French are not satisfied with their president. The anniversary did not make the front page of the pro-government paper Le Figaro, which prefered to look forward, at the president’s European policy.

L’Humanité (France)
L’homme qui ne donne qu’aux riches
The man who only gives to the rich

Sarkozy's anniversary does, however, occupy the front page of the Communist newspaper L’Humanité, a staunch opponent of Sarkozy. The paper laments the president’s tax cuts for the rich and his failure to reduce the cost of living. Frédéric Durand’s assessment, however, seems a little directionless. The problem is that L’Humanité is fundamentally opposed to the liberal reforms that Sarkozy proposes, yet the article still attacks his failure to implement those sweeping reforms as quickly as he promised. It’s a bit like the old Woody Allen joke: “The food here is terrible – and such small portions!”

Libération (France)

A more mainstream left paper, Libération, only covers the anniversary on its inside pages, with an article detailing his achievements (the slant is predictably negative) and a sort of “best of” of cartoons about Sarkozy from around the world from the last two years. One from the Luxembourgian paper Tageblatt accuses him of selling out to Libya’s Muammar Gaddafi with the words “liberté, égalité, achetez” – “liberty, equality, buy". And there’s rather a sweet one mocking the president’s inability to stand still – even for an official portrait, according to a cartoon from the Burkina Faso newspaper Journal du Jeudi.


To finish up: another cartoon?

Jerusalem Post (Israel)
The new theme of anti-Israel cartoons

On a more serious note, the Jerusalem Post reports that Arab cartoonists have been using swine flu to make blatantly anti-Semitic attacks. It prints a picture from the Qatari paper Al Watan, showing Israel’s prime minister, Benyamin Netanyahu, with a pig nose and the caption “World Health Organisation is warning about an epidemic of swine flu.” Pretty low stuff.