In the Middle East, revolution; in Europe, bunga bunga

What triggers revolution? In the Middle East, popular uprisings that
swept the leaders of Tunisia and Egypt from power have spread to
challenge authoritarian rulers for crushing their freedom over decades.
In Britain, the steep rise in university tuition fees has mobilized
student demonstrators in numbers not seen in a generation. In Italy, the
last straw for the people is “bunga bunga.”

Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi has been chased through the
courts over his financial dealings for years. But the issue that brought
hundreds of thousands of women onto the streets was an allegation that
he paid an underage girl for sex in “bunga bunga” parties at his
Sardinian villa. Berlusconi, who denies the sex charge and says he was
unaware that she was 17, now faces trial in Italy before an all-woman
panel in April.

In Britain, where a former MP’s body was once found draped on his kitchen table, wearing stockings and with a tangerine in his mouth, sex scandals are usually pretty colorful. The Labour government of Tony Blair was distracted for months by an affair involving the blind Home Secretary, David Blunkett, with a married woman. Conservative governments in the 1990s were shaken to the core by a string of sex scandals that undermined the party’s trumpeted attachment to family values. Now Britain has adopted a different attitude to marital infidelity: Nobody batted an eyelid when a Lib Dem member of the ruling coalition — whose party had been buffeted by earlier gay sex scandals — left his wife for his bisexual mistress. And that’s not to mention the serial infidelities of the Tory mayor of London, Boris Johnson.

But Italy’s sex scandal takes the biscuit. It remains to be seen whether Berlusconi’s bunga bunga will bring him down. He says he is “not worried” about the impending trial. But he has said that he learned about the bunga bunga sex sessions from Libyan President Moammar Gadhafi. And guess where the latest protests have been held in the Middle East — in the Libyan city of Benghazi. So bunga bunga meets the revolution.