Mogul's daughter-in-law stands in Italian election

ROME - Two of the world's wealthiest media moguls will find themselves in a de facto political alliance if Angela della Costanza Turner wins a seat in the upcoming Italian general election.

Ms Turner is the daughter-in-law of the Atlanta billionaire Ted Turner, founder of CNN.

In Italy's first ever experiment in giving seats in Parliament to Italian expatriates, she is fighting to represent the 350,000 Italian nationals in the United States on behalf of Mr Berlusconi's Forza Italia party.

The American and Italian paperoni (Italian for "super-rich") have plenty in common, including vast media empires, an inordinate number of properties and an addiction to the limelight.

They also appear to share the same speech writer.

"I didn't get here for my acting," Turner once remarked, "but I love show business." On another occasion he wisecracked, "If I only had a little humility, I'd be perfect." "You can never quit," he said.

"Winners never quit, and quitters never win."

Nobody would be surprised to hear Mr Berlusconi saying the same things.

Ms Costanza Turner is a 37-year-old architect who grew up in the north Italian port city of Genoa and moved to Atlanta 15 years ago.

She is running for the North and Central America district in the Italian general election, in which 18 places, six in the Senate and 12 in the Chamber of Deputies, will be reserved for Italians abroad.

She is the most celebrated of at least 38 candidates fighting to represent Italians living in the US.

If she wins she has no intention of becoming mere lobby-fodder for the party boss.

"If I manage to set foot in Rome, it's with the intention of making all those Italians who talk and talk and talk understand the importance of Italians living abroad," she told AP.

"My objective is to try and open the mentality of Italians.

The experience of living abroad is a strong school."Nor does she balk at the prospect of crossing the Atlantic to make her case.

"My husband didn't bat an eyelash," she insisted, at the prospect of the long (8,000-kilometre) commute to work.

"I'm like a tank," she added.

The opening up of the Italian elections to expatriates was the crusade of Mirko Tremaglia, 79, the oldest and most controversial member of Berlusconi's government, who fought alongside Benito Mussolini in the Republic of Salo, the Nazi puppet statelet to which Il Duce retreated after the fall of Rome.

He was last in the headlines for making a vulgar crack about gays at the time when fellow minister Rocco Buttiglione was rejected as European commissioner for his view of homosexuality as a sin.

- INDEPENDENT