Italians voted Saturday in European Parliament elections that have become a virtual barometer of Premier Silvio Berlusconi's ability to weather a scandal over his attention to young women, according to AP. The three-time conservative premier has bounced back in the past from corruption probes or international gaffes. Now Italians can weigh in on whether he has finally gone too far. Despite a deep recession and unemployment aggravated by the global economic crisis, the scandal has become the focus of Saturday's and Sunday's balloting for 72 deputies from Italy for the European Union's legislature. Italians were also voting for local governments in dozens of town and provinces. «It's a referendum on Berlusconi,» was Turin daily La Stampa's headline on the voting. Other nations voting in European elections on Saturday were Cyprus, Malta, Slovakia and Latvia. The Italian scandal revolves around whether the 72-year-old Berlusconi had an inappropriate relationship with an 18-year-old model and used a government plane to ferry friends to his vacation villa. Last month, his wife, Veronica Lario, lamented what she called her husband's «infatuation» with young women and when she announced her intention to divorce, cited his attendance at the woman's 18th birthday party in Naples. The premier denied having a sexual relationship with the woman, saying she is a daughter of an old friend. «I would have liked it if the politicians spoke more about politics and not gossip,» Salvatore Pieropan, a 62-year-old sculptor, said a few hours before polls opened at 3 p.m. (1300 GMT). At that hour, many Italians were at beaches, trying to beat muggy temperatures with a dip in the sea, especially in Sicily and other southern regions. Worried that voters were turned off by the campaign, La Stampa predicted the «real victor» when the tally starts coming in Sunday night from Italy's weekend vote would be «the party of abstention.» «Berlusconi has succeeded in making the European election a plebiscite on him,» said James Walston, a political science professor at the American University of Rome. «Most Italians are voting on whether or not they like the government, there is very little that is a European issue.» In mid-May, with the scandal already raging, polls gave Berlusconi's Freedom People Party a two-digit lead over the Democratic Party, its main center-left rival, which has struggling since it lost to Berlusconi in Italian parliamentary elections a year ago. «I think everything will go forward for Berlusconi, because the left doesn't have anybody» to really challenge him, said Dario Passalacqua, a middle-aged man in Rome. «There's no alternative. I don't think the scandal will have an impact.» Recently, Berlusconi was placed under investigation after photos surfaced showing friends flown on a government plane for parties at his seaside villa in Sardinia. Berlusconi maintains the guests traveled with him at no extra cost to taxpayers and provided entertainment during a state visit by a foreign leader. On Friday, Spanish newspaper El Pais published photographs of topless women and a naked man lounging at the villa. Berlusconi called the photos an invasion of privacy and moved to sue the paper. Approval ratings remained high despite a number of unguarded comments, including his description of President Barack Obama as «tanned.» After the April earthquake in central Italy he also made a dubious attempt at humor about the homeless having a beach vacation at the state's expense. Tents doubling as voting booths were set up in the camps where thousands of refugees from the quake have been living for weeks. Those who had found temporary shelter in Adriatic seaside hotels, with the government picking up the tab, were taking chartered buses to their hometowns so they could vote. About 375 million voters across the 27-nation European Union are voting Thursday through Sunday, selecting candidates to 736 seats on the assembly in the second-largest election in the world after India's. Cypriot President Dimitris Christofias appealed to voters on the divided island to «express their will» through their ballots. Andros Kyprianou, leader of island's largest party, communist-rooted Akel, urged citizens to rally around their president to strengthen his hand in talks with breakaway Turkish Cypriots to reunify the Mediterranean nation. Malta's governing Nationalist Party was facing a challenge from the opposition Labor Party over the handling of illegal immigrants who arrive by sea and the rising cost of living on the tiny island. Slovakia's Prime Minister Robert Fico's social democrats were expected to win, although a good showing was also predicted for the ultra nationalist Slovak National Party following tensions over the country's ethnic Hungarian minority. In Latvia, the Harmony Center, a left-wing force that represents the country's large ethnic Russian minority, was doing well in the polls.
