Giuseppe Conte lashes out at Berlusconi for his statements on Ukraine: «He has undermined Italy’s image».
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The former Prime Minister of Italy and president of the Five Star Movement party, Giuseppe Conte, on Wednesday described as “serious and unacceptable” the leaked statements of the leader of Forza Italia, Silvio Berlusconi, in which he assured that Vladimir Putin did not want to start the war against Ukraine and in which he blamed the Ukrainian president, Volodimir Zelenski, for the beginning of the Russian invasion of his country.
The leader of the third political force after the elections of last September 25 has accused the right wing of “undermining Italy’s image”, assuring that Berlusconi’s words on the Ukrainian war prevent his formation, Forza Italia, from obtaining the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in the next government.
“In light of Berlusconi’s latest and most comprehensive statements on the Russian-Ukrainian conflict, a problem for our country becomes apparent. I don’t think it can be acceptable for Force Italia to get the Foreign Ministry. It is a serious problem for Italy’s credibility abroad,” Conte said in statements reported by ‘Corriere della Sera’.
In this sense, Conte has announced that he will raise “clearly” this issue to the President of the Republic, Sergio Mattarella, who begins this Thursday consultations with political parties to propose the formation of a new Executive.
During the afternoon of Wednesday, the Italian agency La Presse made public a new audio in which the leader of Forza Italia states that the Ukrainian president would be responsible for the war in Ukraine since he would have “tripled” the attacks on the two self-proclaimed republics of Donbas: Donetsk and Lugansk.
“The two republics suffer casualties among the military that reach, I am told, 5,000, 6,000, 7,000 dead. Zelenski arrives: he triples the attacks on the two republics”, Berlusconi stressed, after which he described that, subsequently, a delegation was sent to Moscow to talk to the Russian president.
The former Italian Prime Minister stressed that, in the face of “strong pressure from all of Russia”, Putin decided to “invent a special operation” to enter Ukraine with his troops and depose the Ukrainian government and its president in less than a week.
REACTIONS AMONG FUTURE GOVERNMENT PARTNERS Following the audio leak, sources in the winning party of the September 25 elections, Brothers of Italy, have told the AndKronos news agency that these are “worrying words”. “It is a problem for Forza Italia. The more unreliable they are, the less space they will have,” the source has said.
In fact, the leader of Brothers of Italy, Giorgia Meloni, has defended Italy as a fundamental country of the Atlantic Alliance and of the European Union. “Whoever does not agree with this pillar will not be able to be part of the government,” she has sentenced.
“I intend to lead a government with a clear and unambiguous foreign policy line. Italy is fully, and with its head held high, part of Europe and of the Atlantic Alliance (…). Italy, with us in government, will never be the weak link of the West”, Meloni has expressed in declarations collected by ‘Il Post’.
In the other partner of the future government coalition, the League, however, the confessions of the former Prime Minister would have surprised. The leader of this formation, Matteo Salvini, has expressed his astonishment in a meeting with the executive of the League, according to the AdnKronos agency.
However, the party led by Salvini has assured that the leak of Berlusconi’s audio is due to a strategy of the left and the media that “fuel tensions”.
“The left and its media continue to fuel tensions, but the League is determined to give life to the government of the right to meet expectations. All the mud and falsehoods of these days are material for our lawyers,” the party has expressed in a missive.