2023-06-13 14:00:50
The death of Silvio Berlusconi, this Mondayhas again evoked the endless scandals that involved him. Chronologically, however, there is one that stands out above the rest: the one that links him to Liccio Gelli, chief mason of the lodge P2. An unsettling figure in contemporary Italian history, Gelli fought with the fascists of Benito Mussolini and before, during Spanish Civil Warwith the troops of Francisco Franco.
Los Italian judges found out in 1981, before Berlusconi entered politics. That year, while investigating the bankruptcy of an Italian financial institution (the Ambrosian Bank) linked to a Vatican scandal, found some lists with names of almost 1,000 members of P2, a clandestine network of powerful people later accused of all kinds of manipulation of Italian institutions, including a Coup attempt. On those lists too Berlusconi’s name appeared. Masonic card: number 1816, he came to write the Roman newspaper ‘La Repubblica’.
The P2 lodge was not just any Masonic lodge in the transalpine country. Nor was that Gelli’s only contact with Spain. In 1983, when gelli ran away mysteriously from the Swiss prison of Champ Dollon, the Italian police alerted the Spanish authorities of his supposed presence in Catalonia. The search was unsuccessful and Gelli, previously linked to Juan Domingo Perontook refuge in Latin America and, after various vicissitudes, died in Italy in 2015.
Mondadori
Splashed by this dark plot, Berlusconi was never able to get rid of the shadow of his Connection with Gelli. The Mason himself, somehow, did not allow it. He publicly praised and defended him. In an interview with ‘Panorama’ magazine in 1990, he even ruled in his favor for him to stay with control of the powerful Mondadori group. Finally Berlusconi achieved his goal.
On another occasion, in an interview with the journalist Concita De Gregorio, Gelli explained in detail his opinion about the now-deceased magnate. “Berlusconi is a man out of the ordinary. I remember well that even then, at the time of our first meetings, he stood out for one characteristic: he knew how to carry out his projects. A man of action. That is what we need in Italy: not words, but actions,” he told her.
The plan
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It was not the only point of communion between the two. Gelli had enlisted in the 1930s (at just 17 years old) to fight alongside Franco and his brother had lost his life in Spain, something that according to some was the reason for his anti-communism. For his part, in the tormented 1990s, Berlusconi managed to enter politics precisely by presenting himself as a brake on communist ideas, at that time already in decline in Italy (the Italian Communist Party, the PCI, dissolved in 1991). And for years, the tycoon continued to accuse his rivals of being “communists” and “reds”, also those who were not.
The matter did not surprise everyone. already in that 1981 operationa revealing document had been found and titled Democratic renaissance plan. He considered the unions and the PCI, then still the second strongest party in Italy, as formations that had to be eliminated to create an authoritarian system within a legality. Gelli came to believe that his plans had been achieved. he affirmed it in an interview in 2003during the second Berlusconi government: “I look at the country, I read the newspapers and I think that everything is coming trueLittle by little, piece by piece. Maybe I should claim copyright,” he said.
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