ROME | Italian women and their supporters turned out Sunday across the country to protest against Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, saying his dalliances with young women humiliate the sex as a whole and degrade female dignity.
In Rome, women shouted for him to resign, as Aretha Franklin’s song, “Respect,” blared from speakers in the Piazza del Popolo, a central square that can hold about 100,000 people. It was packed with mothers, daughters, grandmothers and many husbands and boyfriends.
Backers of the 74-year-old prime minister, who is suspected of illegally paying for sex with a 17-year-old girl, dismissed the protests as strictly political.
The teenager, a Moroccan nightclub dancer, has said Mr. Berlusconi lavished cash and jewelry on her. Both deny having had sex with each other.
Prostitution isn’t a crime in Italy, but paying a minor for sex is. Prosecutors are pressing for a quick trial in the most sensational probe against Mr. Berlusconi in more than a decade of criminal cases against him, mainly for dealings in his billion-dollar empire of TV, film, advertising and other business interests.
The prime minister claims he is being victimized by left-wing prosecutors who want to topple him from power. He willingly acknowledges his fondness for pretty young women, and his wife is divorcing him for his purported dalliances.
On Sunday, women pressed for Mr. Berlusconi to resign in demonstrations from the tiny island of La Maddalena in Sardinia to larger cities like Naples, Venice and even foreign venues like Paris, where around 400 people gathered outside Sacred Heart church to bang pots and pans.
In L’Aquila, the mountain town where Mr. Berlusconi has boasted about his reconstruction efforts after the 2009 quake damage, women complained they were still waiting for government-promised funds for a center for abused women.
Caricatures of some of the women promoted by Mr. Berlusconi, including former showgirls who are now ministers in his government or other officials from his conservative People of Freedom Party, decorated the walls surrounding the square. His penchant for choosing starlets for political posts has even been denounced by his estranged wife, Veronica Lario, a former actress herself.
“It’s the fault of TV if women are seen if this way,” said one of the Rome protesters, Eleonora Ermini, a woman in her 60s. “The majority of the people see things [on TV] that the powers want them to see.”
The main jewel in Mr. Berlusconi’s Fininvest businesses are Italy’s three largest private TV networks.
Many of the programs on his Mediaset networks are variety shows built around skits featuring scantily clad young women gyrating in sexy moves, showing off plunging necklines, bouncing barely covered behinds and beaming smiles with fleshy lips.
However, Mr. Berlusconi seems to have cannily built his success model on an accepted concept of decorative women as standard Italian TV fare.
When Italian newspapers published transcripts of intercepted phone conversations in the “Ruby-gate” scandal, using the nickname of the 17-year-old girl, the nation read about parents egging their daughters, who were invited to frequent evening parties at the prime minister’s private residences, to try to get more money or gifts out of Mr. Berlusconi.
Mr. Berlusconi issued no public comment on Sunday’s protests.
His education minister, Mariastella Gelmini, wrote off the protesters as “the usual snob heroines of the left who stepped out of their drawing rooms to exploit feminine issues and attack a government that continues to have the backing of the majority of Italians.”
Opinion polls have showed that the largely rudderless center-left opposition has failed to make a significant dent in Mr. Berlusconi’s popularity.
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