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The former French president Nicolas Sarkozy has published this Tuesday his autobiography entitled "Le temps des combats" (Time of battles), where among the most interesting episodes is one, where the protagonist is the late former Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi.
The events took place in Cannes, in November 2011, the day when the G20 summit was held.
Nicolas Sarkozy and Angela Merkel at this summit tried to convince Silvio Berlusconi to leave the leadership of the government, a decision that would be communicated by him only 12 days later.
Sarkozy had already confessed this decisive step, but not in the terms and with the details thrown into the lines in his book, "The Time of Battles".
The former president says he is "saddened by the death of Berlusconi", while further reconstructing the events, starting from April 26, 2011, when he arrived in Rome for a Franco-Italian bilateral meeting.
With that trip to the Italian capital, his thoughts on Berlusconi and Mario Draghi have been mixed.
"Our relations were beginning to deteriorate. Berlusconi was becoming a caricature of himself. The brilliant entrepreneur, the politician of indomitable energy, was but a distant memory. The sad episode of "Bunga-Bunga" had foretold an inglorious end. I took advantage of that trip to Rome to support Mario Draghi's candidacy for the presidency of the European Central Bank. Draghi was competent, open and likeable. His long collaboration with Goldman Sachs would have guaranteed us a more "American" than "German" approach. A decisive aspect in my eyes", writes Sarkozy.
Sarkozy also recalls the "deadly" financial crisis fueled by mistrust of stock exchanges. The alarm in Europe was general at the time and with this climate the leaders arrived in November at the G20 in Cannes.
Even US President Barack Obama and Chinese leader Hu Jintao were very concerned. "The summit dealt with the Greek collapse", but - notes Sarkozy - "at this point the primary issue was saving the third largest economy in the Eurozone: Italy".
Interest rates on public debt from the government in Rome had reached 6.4%, a level considered unsustainable and dangerous to financial stability.
"Angela Merkel and I decided to call Berlusconi to convince him to take further steps to try to calm the ongoing storm," Sarkozy recounts in his book.
"The Italian Prime Minister began to explain that we had not understood that there were no risks in the international markets, because the Italian public debt was in the hands of the Italians. He wanted to create more debts for his countrymen alone to shoulder. All this was quite delirious," adds the former French president.
The meeting then, according to the confession, became more and more bitter, despite the fact that Berlusconi tried to soften the atmosphere with some of his classic jokes, which Sarkozy judges as "completely out of place".
"There was a moment of great tension between us, when I had to explain to him that he was Italy's problem! Angela and I were convinced that it had become the risk premium that the country had to pay to holders of treasury bills. We honestly thought the situation would be less dramatic without him and his pathetic attitude. Hours were critical. We had to sacrifice Papandreou (the prime minister of Greece at the time) and Berlusconi to stem the tsunami. The markets understood that we wanted Berlusconi's resignation. It was cruel, but necessary."
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