The End of the Berlusconi Era. Maybe

LONDON - “Berlusconi, Game Over,” was the possibly premature headline on the Website of Christian Family, an Italian Catholic weekly, as it recorded the entire nation's shame at the fraud sentence handed down on Friday to its most notorious politician and media mogul.

It was a disastrous day for the mass of honest Italians, the Catholic newspaper opined, as the world's media wallowed in another affair that focused attention on the country's corruption. But at least the conviction of Silvio Berlusconi meant he would now carry no real political weight.

Mr. Berlusconi, who dominated the Italian scene for two decades, is down. But is he out?

Some of the Italian press appeared to take a sneaky pride in the fact that the latest scandal involving the 76-year-old billionaire was dominating front pages around the world, with most reaction concluding it marked the end of the Berlusconi era.

Amid a consensus that he would probably never serve a day of the four-year jail sentence imposed on him for tax fraud - it has already been cut to one year - some commentators suggested Italian politics had not seen the last of him.

Nick Squires, Rome correspondent for Britain's Daily Telegraph, said Italy's Teflon politician had “every intention of remaining at the forefront of politics.”

Mr. Berlusconi announced on Wednesday he would not lead his People of Liberty party in Italy's national elections next spring. But, according to Mr. Squires, he was intent on “stewarding the party he founded towards the vote and exerting as much influence as possible on its next leader.”

France's L'Humanité, which said the conviction put Mr. Berlusconi definitively out of the political race, conceded that his shadow would continue to hover over his center-right party.

My colleague Rachel Donadio writes that the ruling comes at a time when Mr. Berlusconi's party is unraveling and Italy is in the throes of the most dramati c political transition since the early 1990s.

The technocratic government of Prime Minister Mario Monti relies on the parliamentary support of Mr. Berlusconi's party. The man known in Italy as il Cavaliere, the Knight, announced his decision not to run in next year's election after dining with Mr. Monti on Tuesday night.

For some, that already marked the beginning of the end of the Berlusconi empire.

Even if he escapes a jail term for his tax fraud conviction, the former prime minister still faces the so-called Rubygate trial in Milan in which he denies charges that he paid for sex with an underage Moroccan-born belly dancer.

So, is yet another comeback really possible?

The Daily Telegraph's Mr. Squires acknowledged that the billionaire mogul was of an age “when most men content themselves with pottering around the garden and playing with their grandchildren.”

However, he was fighting fit and would be home and dry if the cases against him timed out under Italy's notoriously slow legal system.

“He doesn't smoke and he drinks only moderately,” Mr. Squires wrote. “Thanks to surgery he has more hair now than when he entered politics in the early 1990s.”