“It’s a great sacrifice to do what I’m doing,” said Italy’s Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, Italy’s richest man, “I’m not having fun at all… I have a sailboat, but in two years, I’ve only been on it one day… and I haven’t been to my house in Bermuda for two of three years. And the same goes for my house in Portofino… Do you understand? My life has changed? The quality has become terrible. What a brutal job… How much longer do I have to live this life of sacrifices?”
Mr. Berlusconi said he was confident that his government would last a full-five year term. “It’s never happened before,” he said, referring to postwar Italy, “but it will happen to me.”