A STAND-UP comedian who jokes that Italy’s politicians are among the most corrupt in the world has won some serious backing for a campaign to get MPs with criminal convictions thrown out of parliament.

Beppe Grillo, long regarded as a scourge of the political classes, has compiled a list of 23 MPs who have been found guilty of offences ranging from corruption to fraud and posted it on a website. He claims the site is attracting 130,000 visitors a day, making it the third most popular in Italy.

Grillo’s growing band of supporters paid for a full-page advertisement last week in the International Herald Tribune. “Is (there) another state in the world in which 23 members of parliament have been convicted of a variety of crimes and yet are allowed to sit in parliament and represent their citizens?” Grillo asked.

“If a country like this exists, we Italians would like to propose a ‘twinning’.”

The answer came from readers in Uzbekistan, a notoriously corrupt central Asian state where 18 MPs have been convicted in the past.

No country in Europe comes close, although a number of MPs in Portugal, Spain and France have had brushes with the law.

Grillo, 57, had his first run-in with the Italian authorities in 1987. During an appearance on Rai, the state television network, he referred to rumours of corruption swirling around Bettino Craxi, the then prime minister. Although Craxi’s career ended in disgrace six years later, Grillo was effectively banished from state TV.

He has kept up the momentum in a series of popular stage shows. He famously hinted at dubious accounting practices at Parmalat, the dairy food conglomerate, in 2001, more than two years before the company plunged into the biggest bankruptcy in European history.

Several Italian politicians named on his list have dismissed it as a stunt. “The court decided not to ban me from public functions, so I have the same rights as other citizens,” said Enzo Carra, a member of the centre-left Margherita party, who was convicted of perjury during a corruption trial in the 1990s.

Grillo’s campaign has been applauded by Antonio Di Pietro, a former proscutor who now heads the Italy of Values party and campaigns for the removal of MPs who have been convicted of corruption.

“My party has been asking for this incomprehensible and unjustifiable anomaly to be addressed for a long time,” he said.

Grillo suggests that the crimes of election candidates should be listed on ballot papers alongside their names. “Perhaps we ought to stop giving them the title of ‘honourable’,” he said in an interview last week.

Entering Italy’s lower house of parliament was like walking into “a centre for the rehabilitation” of offenders, he added.

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