Silvio Berlusconi and the commemorative stamp: here's the reason why it should be blocked

“THEThe stamp dedicated to President Silvio Berlusconi, which will be issued one year after his death (12 June 2023), is the right recognition for a great Italian who served and honored the Republic in all the roles he held: entrepreneur, sportsman, political leader and statesman.” . With these words, the vice president of the Senate and senator of Forza Italia, Licia Ronzulli, and the deputy of Forza Italia, Paolo Emilio Russo, thanked President Meloni and the entire Council of Ministers who had accepted the proposal of the “commemorative stamp” which they brought forward by Adolfo Urso, Minister of Business and Made in Italy, Adolfo Urso, and the delegated undersecretary Fausta Bergamotto.

And so far, nothing new: the narrative on the former prime minister since June 12, 2023 has been split in two between the right who reads him as a failed President of the Republic and the left who considers him divisive, recalling the political and judicial scandals that they had looked at him. However, when Ronzulli goes further and states: «We have responded to the request of many Italians», things start to get complicated.

First of all, the idea of ​​the stamp has outraged the young people of Wikimafia – Libera enciclopedia Da on the mafias, who are collecting signatures for a petition and last February 22nd they turned to the President of the Republic Sergio Mattarella not to authorize its issuance. «From young students and scholars who work daily to spread knowledge and awareness of the mafia phenomenon and who fight to free our country from mafias and corruption», they wrote to the Quirinale, «we find it inconsistent and highly uneducational to issue a commemorative stamp for Silvio Berlusconilike who instead, how Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellinopaid with their lives for their opposition to Cosa Nostra.”

What are Wikimafia's motivations? «That Silvio Berlusconi achieved important successes in his first entrepreneurial and then political career is not in question, nor that he was one of the most famous people of the last 40 years, thanks also to his television empire», writes the collective. «We believe, however there is a fundamental ethical prejudice which cannot be ignored, linked not only to his legal affairs, in which he received a final conviction for tax fraud, but also to his “not criminally relevant” conduct”.

Wikimafia then begins to explain why the stamp would be a symbolic gesture that the state cannot afford. «Among the many events that we could remember, like his affiliation with P2we consider the one that emerged from the judicial proceedings against the former senator and co-founder of Forza Italia to be particularly serious Marcello Dell'Utridefinitively convicted of external competition in mafia association”. The Appeal Sentence is then cited, later confirmed in 2014 by the Supreme Court, according to which «Dell'Utri obstinately decided to act in active synergy with the association and to address those who embodied the anti-state, in order to mediate between the needs of the Milanese entrepreneur and the interests of the mafia association, thereby consciously strengthening the criminal power of the association”. And they cite another point of the sentence: «The Milanese entrepreneur, abandoning any intention (which he never seemed to touch on) of being protected by institutional remedies, has returned under the umbrella of mafia protection hiring Vittorio Mangano in Arcore and never shirking the obligation to pay large sums of money to the mafia, as compensation for protection.”