US President Donald Trump risks
becoming the "demolisher" of the West and the European Union
should engage in "self-criticism" if Europe will be excluded
from a solution to the conflict in Ukraine, Fininvest and
Mondatori President Marina Berlusconi, the eldest daughter of
three-time ex-premier and media mogul Silvio Berlusconi, told
daily newspaper Il Foglio in an interview published on Monday.
In the interview, Marina Berlusconi spoke about the first
actions of the new US administration, from a phone call last
week between Russian President Vladimir Putin and his U.S.
counterpart Donald Trump to tariffs.
She said that, "for the moment, many of Trump's first
interventions certainly brought some immediate advantage to the
United States although, in the long term, his strategy of
constantly putting other countries under pressure will turn into
an increasingly violent centrifugal force, able to separate and
divide the western community".
"I really hope that the country which has always been the main
guarantor of the West will not have a president who now has the
ambition of becoming himself the 'demolisher' of the West,
tearing down everything America has been over the past 80
years", noted Berlusconi.
Speaking about the war in Ukraine, the 58-year-old Fininvest and
Mediaset chair told Il Foglio's editor-in-chief Claudio Cerasa
that, "in order to end this terrible conflict, a compromise will
be inevitable, but I am absolutely convinced that the
conclusion of the conflict must not coincide with Kyiv's
surrender and Moscow's victory".
"Ukraine needs the necessary guarantees for its security and
independence", said the daughter of the founder of the Forza
Italia (FI) party in the ruling coalition, according to whom, a
peace agreed at the expense of Kyiv and Europe "could not be
considered beneficial".
"If Europe will be cut out of the solution that appears to be
delineating, it will also need to engage in serious
self-criticism", she noted.
Berlusconi's interview was published on the day Italian Premier
Giorgia Meloni joined heads of government of Germany, UK,
Poland, Spain, the Netherlands and Denmark to take part in a
meeting on European security and Ukraine in Paris called by
French President Emmanuel Macron.
Macron has organized the meeting amid concerns that Trump could
make a deal with Putin to end the war in Ukraine that undermines
Kyiv and European security.
Marina Berlusconi also spoke about Big Tech companies, noting
there "is a problem of disloyal competition as big as a home"
and said they "have been able to impose the dictatorships of
algorithm in our everyday lives".
Speaking about Italy's political scenario and Europe, Marina
Berlusconi said there are "many Rights in Europe" and "Italy's
succeeds in maintaining a position of equilibrium and full
adhesion to democratic values".
She also said that "too often", belonging to the European Union
"has been experienced as handing over sovereignty, as if more
Europe meant less Italy, less Germany, less France….It's just
necessary to look at those movements which, on the one hand,
proclaim that they want to make Europe great and on the other
preach the motto of less Europe and more sovereignty.
"But the contrary is true, because true sovereignty is knowing
how to better respond to the needs of citizens and there can be
no sovereignty in solitude, today more than ever.
"I am thinking about a common defence, common foreign policy,
common debt, a common capital market - all cases in which unity
is strength", stated Marina Berlusconi.
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