And Santoro admits: “The sadness is not only of the Berlusconi people, I feel it too”
“After yesterday’s televised celebration, watch the front pages of today’s newspapers. And then, please, stop complaining about the cultural hegemony of the leftGad Lerner thus intervenes on Twitter showing the front pages of the newspapers all indiscriminately dedicated to the news – and it could not be otherwise – of the death of Silvio Berlusconi. A chorus of memoirs declined in different tones following what Marco Travaglio defined as “a embarrassing day of beatification“. A list of titles among which the anything but celebratory one chosen by the director of the Fatto Quotidiano for its opening stands out: ‘La Repubblica del banana’.
A necessary choice according to the journalist, one of Berlusconi’s most critical, because “we cannot say the opposite of what we thought of a person when he was alive….Let’s avoid this hypocrisy – is Travaglio’s call -: the worst service we can do to Berlusconi is to paint him as a holy card. If he’d been a holy card, he wouldn’t have gotten a grade. His voters voted for him-remember-because they knew that he was a nice rogue“. Then, without giving in to the celebratory, he traced his memory of Berlusconi by recalling some anecdotes. “When we wrote about his trials, he called Padellaro and said ‘you wrote that I have fake hair, come to Palazzo Chigi to check.. .’. He has cleared behaviors that were previously hidden: pork, in the sense of things that shouldn’t be done, has become beautiful. He exalted tax evasion at the Guardia di Finanza party, these are the damages that we will carry and that have been removed. I’m sorry to remember them now, we should at least wait for the funeral but it’s not possible – the journalist articulates – because the beatification has taken place, in spite of the deceased”.
Not beatific but claims “the sadness” for the death of Berlusconi, Michele Santoro, among the ‘enemies’ most recognized by the Knight. “Sadness does not only belong to the Berlusconi people, I feel it too, even though I have always opposed it”, admits the journalist who was the architect of the historic episode of ‘Servizio Pubblico’ in which Berlusconi dusted off his chair occupied by Travaglio before taking a seat. “That broadcast – he reminds ‘Otto e mezzo’ – was a bit like Italy-Germany… Berlusconi was very tense, very worried. I am a showman, like he was. I was worried about the progress of the evening, I made an appetizing and cheerful start to cheer him up. Then he came out as a protagonist, he took the stage” and, Santoro reveals, “in a break in the show, he took me by the arm: ‘Michele, how are we having fun?’ This says a lot about the character”, Santoro remarks, acknowledging that, however one thinks of it, “a very important personality who marked a piece of our country’s history is gone. A part of the country – adds the journalist – remembers it with a certain pain, me I would like to remember him more cheerfully, as he was“.
And the ‘two enemies’ spoke until a few days ago: “He called me before the last hospitalization, which was fatal. He started talking on the phone, I kept this 40-minute call to myself. He spoke mostly about the war, the horror of war and the damage the war was doing to Europe. He spoke – Santoro reveals – of the overall inadequacy of Italian politicians, of the right and of the left, to face this situation with absolute lucidity “.
Source-www.adnkronos.com