WHEN ITALIAN prime minister Silvio Berlusconi enlivened last Friday’s EU summit in Brussels with a statement strongly in favour of beleaguered Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak, his words prompted many to wonder if the Italian leader was again ploughing his own furrow, one hardly in agreement with either the United States or Italy’s EU partners.
Mr Berlusconi annoyed the US in 2008 by claiming it was Georgia not Russia who was the aggressor in the Georgia-Russia war. Diplomats tended to explain that position by underlining Mr Berlusconi’s close friendship with Russian prime minister Vladimir Putin.
Likewise, Mr Berlusconi has never hidden his appreciation, if for different reasons, of Mr Mubarak. When the two men met last summer in Rome for talks, Mr Berlusconi went out of his way to say how glad he was to see the Egyptian leader back on duty, “dynamic, active and always ironic” after having been sidelined by illness.
On other occasions, Mr Berlusconi has praised the stabilising impact of Mr Mubarak during his 30 years in power in Egypt, even once joking that he himself would like to learn the secret of Mubarak’s political longevity.
In more recent times, of course, the names Berlusconi and Mubarak have become entwined in the ongoing “Rubygate” sex scandal involving the Italian prime minister. When he phoned Milan police last May to pressurise them to release Moroccan escort Karima “Ruby” El Mahroug (17), he claimed she was a relative of Mr Mubarak and that to hold her would be to risk a diplomatic incident. Reports of that incident prompted the Egyptian embassy to release a note saying Ruby was in no way related to Mr Mubarak.
It is ronic, too, that the two men now both face a major domestic political crisis of a fin de régime nature, even if the violent Egyptian situation is infinitely more serious and not comparable to that in Italy.
It would be mistaken, however, to ascribe Mr Berlusconi’s comments last Friday just to his desire to stretch out a helping hand to an old colleague with whom he shares an affinity, at least in terms of political longevity. The reality is that Italian foreign policy has traditionally rotated around fairly obvious concepts: maintaining good and privileged relations with (1) EU partners, (2) the US and (3) the Arab world and in particular the Mediterranean Arab world.
In this last named context, the old colony Libya has clearly had a leading role. Yet that is not to deny Italy’s intense economic, cultural and scientific relationship with Egypt. Italy is Egypt’s second biggest trade partner, after the US, with more than 600 Italian businesses trading with Egypt.
Prof Azzurra Meringolo of Bologna university has estimated that Italian investments in petrol, gas, cement and textiles in Egypt were worth about $8 billion over the last three years.
Could it be that when Mr Berlusconi expressed the (increasingly forlorn) hope that “the wise” Mr Mubarak might be able to oversee a non-traumatic “transition . . . to democracy”, he was only following a traditional Italian line – defending Italian interests?