A demonstrator holds up a poster mocking the embattled Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi today in Rome (AP)
Italy's Prime Minister, Silvio "The Knight" Berlusconi has resigned shortly following the passage of a budget designed to pull the country from the brink of financial disaster. According to Reuters, demonstrators have gathered at President Giorgio Napolitano's residence in Rome and are loudly heckling him with shouts of "resign" and "clowns"—one reporter on the scene notes that she has "never seen anything like this."
Berlusconi, the 75 year-old billionaire media mogul who is the longest-serving postwar PM of Italy, essentially lost a vote of confidence on Tuesday as the world watched Italy's economy teeter dangerously on the precipice of total collapse. Yields on Italy's 10-year bonds reached levels similar to those of Ireland, Portugal, and Greece before they sought bailouts.
He's presided over many scandals but is probably most famous for brazenly throwing hedonistic benders with barely-legal women and prostitutes. Sometimes Berlusconi engaged in an "erotic ritual" called "bunga-bunga," which has been called a "sort of underwater orgy where nude young women allegedly encircled the nude prime minister and/or his friends in his swimming pool." Berlusconi reportedly got the idea from Muammer Gadhafi, as it was "a rite of his African harem."
Speaking of his resignation, the embattled leader told his aides, "This is something that deeply saddens me." For a full portrait of Berlusconi's madness and the entrancing, celebrity-obsessed grip with which he held his countrymen, check out the essential documentary Videocracy. And now, one last bunga-bunga, for old time's sake.
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Original Page: http://gothamist.com/2011/11/12/italian_prime_minister_silvio_berlu.php