It's Such a Great Airline, Let's Keep It!
If the French can colonize Italy, why not the Belgians?
Silvio Berlusconi is one of those people who just doesn’t know when to stop. He has never learned how to pass or even call, he ups the ante, whatever it is, and keeps throwing chips on the table. The worse it gets, the more he shoves out there.
The former and possibly future Prime Minister has now managed single-handedly to blow the sale of a white elephant, State-controlled airline – Alitalia – that Italy thought it was finally going to be rid of. He did this for no profit either to the country, the company or to himself.
We at “Upper Italy” have never admired this deal, but it did at least have the merit of putting a belated stop to something embarrassing and extremely costly.
Mr. Berlusconi’s thoughtless intervention made it possible for Alitalia’s labor unions to overplay their hand – they are Italian and grandstanding comes naturally – and Air France/KLM picked up its fiches and went home. The Wall Street Journal Europe today, commenting on the mess Berlusconi has made of the sale, said editorially: “It’s rare for a politician to spark a serious crisis before he’s even won office.”
How did he reply to the wave of criticism? No doubt thinking to spread oil on troubled waters, the former President of the European Union and self-anointed statesman has now announced that if his opponents win the coming elections, “among the negative consequences there will also be the colonization of Italy by the French”.
This is not something most Italians have been worrying about very intensely. Still and all, somebody has to run the place and since even Italy thinks the French are wimps, it might as well be them.
We needed to illustrate this brief note and were of course looking for good snaps of French legionnaires preparing to assault an Italian border post and rampage along the Riviera. The photograph above is actually of members of the Belgian Foreign Legion (Ha!), but they pose so much better.
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5.04.08
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