Ask yourself why Italy’s prime minister, despite the mess his own country is in, refuses to resign from office, and all sorts of possible answers crop up. Pathological megalomania is one: with resignation, he won’t be any kind of leader, ever again, won’t command any kind of loyalty, won’t be able to stomach his own reflection in the mirror. Pride is another: Silvio Berlusconi isn’t used to losing anything, except occasionally his mind.

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For the rest: Money, power, women, business empires, they have always been integral parts of his life, as important as breathing or a beating heart. He simply cannot undergo any kind of operation that would remove these vital organs. And yet, these aren’t the most important reasons for the man with the face lifts and the orange skin to cling to what he has.

Italy, just to define the mess, is Greece with money. It has the third largest economy in the eurozone, and also, by the by, a debt of 1.9 trillion euros. This happens to be an amount so large that it could trigger a default which could, in turn, sink the eurozone (and perhaps a lot of other economies). Its bond yield just jumped another 0.33 percentage points, to 6.58, a number almost reminiscent of the 7 percent bond yields held by Ireland and Portugal at the time that those nations finally had to accept bailouts. Small wonder Berlusconi may soon face a no-confidence vote, and even smaller wonder, as Berlusconi ally and Interior Minister Roberto Maroni said on Sunday, his coalition just might lose that vote.

But the real reason, I suspect, for Berlusconi’s reluctance to step down is much simpler: He’s afraid of being packed off to prison.

Italy’s courts are beholden to power (even more so, say, than US courts—in fact, far more so) and money, and thus far the premier has a lot of both. So much so that last month a court in Milan refused to indict Berlusconi on charges of tax fraud and embezzlement, which arose from TV rights acquired by the Berlusconi company Mediaset.

Now here’s the interesting part: Berlusconi’s son and the company’s deputy chairman, Piersilvio Berlusconi, was indicted by the same Milanese court on both charges. Berlusconi’s closest friend, Fedele Confalonieri, who happens to be chairman of the media company, was also indicted. But Silvio—who founded the company and grows ever richer from it, who pointedly refused, even when pressured, to sell the company 18 years ago upon attaining his nation’s highest office, and who, as everyone in Italy knows, closely watches every move the company makes—he is innocent in the eyes of the judiciary.

Let’s see what would happen if for some reason Berlusconi had to leave office. There are still three other big pending trials in which he is expected to play a large role. Berlusconi is accused of yet another case of tax fraud. He is also accused of bribing David Mills, a British attorney, to commit perjury. And finally, as almost everyone knows, the Berlusconi penchant for women has resulted in yet another case: Silvio paid for sex with an underage hooker. There are lots of tapes suggesting this was no prosecutorial fantasy.

I realize that Nicholas Spiro, a London-based sovereign debt consultant, told the Wall Street Journal, “Mr. Berlusconi may still be in office, but he has not been in power for some time.”

But that depends on your definition of power. In Italy, power is office. Office is power. What you do with the office or the power is your business—and maybe a hooker’s or an attorney’s. But it has nothing to do with rescue efforts or keeping a nation on the straight and narrow.

No one in Italy expects that.