who installed a new board in the state-owned RAI after their electoral victory in the 2001 Italian general election. Sciuscià remained on the air until May 2002. Attacks from Berlusconi The new RAI board installed by the centre-right government decided not to renew Santoro's contract. This followed a declaration by Silvio Berlusconi, then prime minister, at a press conference in Sofia, Bulgaria, where he clearly stated: Santoro, Biagi and Luttazzi used the public TV, paid by all, in a manner which is criminal. I believe it to be a specific duty of the new RAI board not to allow this to happen again. Soon after, neither Santoro nor the two others obtained any more work for RAI, and working for Berlusconi's own TV networks (the other half of the TV system) was obviously unviable. A legal dispute has been ongoing, since Santoro contested a violation of his contract by RAI. He was supported by a court decision that should have forced RAI to give him the direction of a news magazine, but in the end Santoro was omitted. European Parliament candidate In the 2004 European elections, Santoro accepted the offer of candidacy proposed by the centre-left confederation called United in the Olive Tree. He was elected as MEP with a great poll success, obtaining a total of more 700,000 votes in Italy as a whole. In the southern-Italian mandate, Santoro defeated Silvio Berlusconi himself with 526,535 votes against 452,326. Michele Santoro resigned as an MEP on 19 October 2005, basing his decision on his desire to go back to his work on RAI, citing a judicial verdict which obliged the Italian national television to reinstate him. Contemporarily he announced his participation on RockPolitik, a controversial and long-awaited TV show on Rai Uno, hosted by singer Adriano Celentano, to talk about issues of media censorship, after Luttazzi and Biagi refused to be guests on the show. Return to RAI Following his resignation from the European Parliament, he started working on a new TV news magazine called AnnoZero (Year Zero) broadcast on Rai Due and Raisat Extra and initially scheduled to be aired first on 27 April 2006; its debut was however delayed and it started on 14 September. The show's regular commentators consist of the journalist Marco Travaglio and the cartoonist Vauro. The episode of the show aired on 8 March 2007, which featured Italian Minister of Justice Clemente Mastella as