Support for Berlusconi slides to 49%

THE approval rating of Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, who has been dogged by a messy divorce and accusations of cavorting with teenage girls and escorts, has fallen below 50% for the first time.

A poll yesterday had only 49% expressing confidence in him as prime minister, four points down from the last time the same group, IPR Marketing, took it in May. Fifty percent said they had “little or no” confidence in Berlusconi.

The government’s approval rating was unchanged: 44% said they had “a lot or sufficient” confidence and 52% said they had “little or none”.

The poll was taken for La Repubblica newspaper, Italy’s second-largest selling mainstream paper, which has been leading demands that Berlusconi clear up aspects of his personal life.

It was published a dayafter the websites of L’Espresso weekly and La Repubblica posted recordings of conversations purported to be between Berlusconi and Patrizia D’Addario, a high-end escort who says she and other women were paid to attend parties at Berlusconi’s residence in Rome.

Berlusconi, 72, has not denied that the 42-year-old woman went to his home but has said he did not know she was an escort.

D’Addario says she made the recordings on her mobile phone during the night she spent with the prime minister or while involved in telephone conversations, one with Berlusconi.

Mainstream newspapers republished the conversations yesterday, in full or in part, including one in which a man purported to be Berlusconi says they should take showers, and whoever finished first should wait in “the big bed”.

Another conversation is purported to be between D’Addario and Berlusconi the next day, where heexpresses surprise that D’Addario says she has lost her voice “because we didn’t scream”.

Berlusconi’s lawyer Niccolo Ghedini has dismissed the recordings as “totally unlikely and a product of the imagination”, saying it was illegal to post or publish them.

One conversation is purportedly between D’Addario and Giampaolo Tarantini, a businessman who is being investigated on suspicion of providing paid escorts to curry political favour for an enterprise in the southern city of Bari, from where D’Addario also hails. In one conversation, D’Addario tells Tarantini she had expected to receive money but did not, adding that Berlusconi promised to help her solve a problemrelated to a real estate deal in the south.

D’Addario has given the recordings to magistrates investigating Tarantini.

Ghedini said there should be an investigation into how the publications obtained them, and has threatenedlegal action against those who republish them.

But L’Espresso stood its ground and yesterday posted four more segments of conversations, three in which D’Addario and Berlusconi discuss their encounters, politics and art.