Guardian UK: Berlusconi's beauty pageant (Italy has fewer women in parliament than Afghanistan)

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Berlusconi's beauty pageant
Italy has fewer women in parliament than Afghanistan. But no wonder, when it seems that to get into government, only the gorgeous qualify
Giulia Lagana

April 17, 2008 12:30 PM | Printable version

Identifying the political winners of Italy's recent election may be relatively easy, but one particular category appears to have lost out once again - women, who make up over half the electorate, look set to scoop less than a quarter of the seats available in the new parliament. Female MPs in Italy, according to the Inter-Parliamentary Union, made up just over 15% of the total in 2006, against a European average of 21% and 36% in similarly devoutly Catholic Spain. Given current trends, Rwanda's 49% of female parliamentarians, or even Afghanistan's 28%, seem hard to attain.

A rather lacklustre election campaign was livened up by Silvio Berlusconi's jokes, many of which are about the beautiful women he seems to privilege as political partners. "Rightwing women are definitely more beautiful than leftwing ones", he told journalists a few days before the vote. During his previous stint as prime minister, the tycoon turned political leader told delegates from his coalition partners the National Alliance: "I notice some extraordinary pretty legs around here." Back in 2002, Berlusconi began a joint press conference with Danish prime minister Anders Fogh Rasmusson by remarking that "Rasmussen is the most attractive prime minister in Europe".

Berlusconi has promised that four of the 12 ministers in his government will be women, against Romano Prodi's six out of 25. Like Prodi, though, the new prime minister looks set to only allocate low-level ministries without a budget, like the ministry for the family, to women. Top candidates include Mara Carfagna, a former TV starlet and Miss Italy finalist whose recent two-year stint in parliament went virtually unnoticed and who will probably head the equal opportunities ministry, and Stefania Prestigiacomo, a striking former minister in Berlusconi's 2001-2006 government whose stance on gay rights and IVF treatment set her out from the yes-men (and women) Berlusconi usually favours.

Giulia Bongiorno, who is mooted as the next justice minister, first registered on the media radar when, as veteran prime minister Giulio Andreotti's lawyer, she screamed with joy as judges in Palermo assessing Andreotti's links with the mafia delivered a guilty verdict for her client which was tempered by the statute of limitations, making it void. Bongiorno has since gone on to forge a career as a top lawyer for the rich and famous. .......(more)

The complete piece is at: http://commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/giulia_lagana/2008/04/berlusconis_beauty_pageant.html