Silvio Berlusconi Found Guilty. What's next?

Oggi abbiamo con piacere collaborato con il blog di economia americano worldandmarkettrends.com che ci ha chiesto un articolo sulle reazioni italiane alla condanna di Silvio Berlusconi. Lo riportiamo anche ai nostri lettori:

Silvio Berlusconi Found Guilty. What's next? 

Silvio Berlusconi’s conviction to seven years in jail and a life-time ban from holding a public office (that includes the loss of Right to vote, to be voted and to hold any public charge) sparks chaos within the Italian government, where Silvio’s political formation, PDL (Party of Freedoms), is an important member (due to a weird and non-functional law, the uncertain electoral victory did not grant a parliamentary majority to the most voted party). Prime Minister Letta’s Democratic Party (that supports the government together with the Party of Freedoms) issued a statement on Tuesday saying that it “takes note” of the sentence and expressing respect for the Court, words that the Italian press has considered as void and useless.
On the other side, though, the reaction of the Cavaliere’s friends are less diplomatic and many of his party’s women, like Daniela Santanché, have called the Court’s decision a “shame” and accused judges (as usual) of acting in a factious and criminal way against “poor Berlusconi”, a victim of a “communist system”. One of the few pondered political comments today was the one of Nichi Vendola, the President of Puglia Region and the leader of SEL (Ecology and Freedom Left Party), an historical target of Berlusconi due to his homosexuality. Vendola declared: “I am not jubilant for Berlusconi’s conviction. I really hoped I could beat him by political means and I think it is extremely negative for our country that a person who had such major roles as Berlusconi can be sentenced for those crimes”. The extreme wariness of Silvio Berlusconi’s opponents should be looked at with a view to the Italian legal system, very protective and oriented to safeguarding individual freedoms, that is spread over three different levels of courts. After the first court’s decision Berlusconi must be judged by an Appeal Court, and even if this last Court confirmed the previous Court’s ruling, the Cavaliere will still have to be proven guilty by a “Corte di Cassazione”. Only if both the Appeal Court and the Cassation Court will convict Berlusconi (and that will take years) the Italian legal system (and of course, the Italian people) will consider the man who ruled the country for 20 years as guilty.