by John Hooper
The paper’s readers were told that Cameron chose inexpensive accessories “to seem chic, but not privileged,” and that although Brown had been criticized for her ill-matching clothes, “some people think she does it on purpose as a contrast to the too-perfect Samantha.”
It is inconceivable that any British paper would analyze in such intricate detail the dress sense of the contenders in an Italian election, let alone that of their wives. But then, in Italy, what can be seen on the surface is constantly being scrutinized for clues as to what might lie below. It goes some way toward explaining the paradox mentioned at the end of the last chapter: one reason Italians place such emphasis on what is visible is because they assume it is a representation of something that is not. And that is only to be expected in a society where so much is communicated by means of symbols and gestures.
No people on earth express themselves as visually as the Italians. Hand gestures—it is true—exist in every part of the world and some are international: we all know what someone means if he rubs together his thumb and index finger. But only the Italians can draw on such a vast range of hand signs, each linked to a precise meaning. Sometimes, if you cannot hear a conversation, you can get the overall gist just by watching.
There are gestures for hunger, agreement, dissent, wedlock, furbizia, insistence, negation, voluptuousness and complicity. There are different movements for communicating the drinking of water and the drinking of wine. Hand signs can be used in place of entire sentences like “See you later” or “Get to the point.” I once did an inventory of gestures and had no difficulty reaching a count of ninety-seven.
The “gesticulation quotient” varies considerably from person to person and situation to situation. By and large, the more intense the conversation, the more likely the participants are to use their hands. And, in general, the use of physical gestures diminishes as you go up the socioeconomic scale.
You are unlikely, for example, to see your lawyer raise his chin and jab his index finger at his open mouth rather than tell you he thinks someone is being greedy. But it is quite possible that, if a beautiful and elegantly dressed woman of his acquaintance walks into the room, he might well be tempted to open his arms with the palms of his hands facing upward in the movement that says: “You look fantastic.”
That is another reason for the importance of what is visible: the sheer enthusiasm for beauty that infuses life in Italy. Unless they go back to classical times, Italians cannot take pride in a glorious imperial past. Even the Venetian Empire was pretty small beer when compared with the empires of Spain and Portugal, or more recently those of Britain and France. There were moments when the states of central and northern Italy were richer than any in Europe. And from Galileo Galilei to Enrico Fermi, Italians have more than held their own in the area of scientific discovery. But their truly outstanding contributions to mankind have been in the arts, and particularly the visual arts. Historically, Italians have stood out in anything that has to do with what is visible, be it the art of the Renaissance or modern car design. The areas in which they have excelled include painting, architecture, sculpture, cinema and of course opera, which gives visual expression to music. As for fashion, they have been setting international trends since Shakespeare had York in Richard II cite
Report of fashions in proud Italy,
Whose manners still our tardy apish nation
Limps after in base imitation . . .
Frequently, appearance in Italy comes before more practical concerns. Elsewhere, for example, advertisements for computers and other technological gadgets concentrate mainly on specifications and performance: the gigabytes of RAM, the density of pixels on the display, the number of ports and so on. But advertisements intended to woo Italian consumers often have none of that. One, for laptops produced by the Taiwanese firm Asus in 2010, showed the company’s latest slimline notebook next to an array of filled champagne glasses. Alongside was the slogan “Tech in Style” with the word “Style” printed in a font so big it filled much of the page.
In many other countries, female police officers are made to cut their hair short because of the risk that long hair might be grabbed by an assailant. In Italy, that is thought unacceptable. It is quite normal to see lush tresses cascading out from beneath uniform caps. In the semi-militarized Carabinieri, there is a rule that the hair must be gathered, but it does not stop women members of the force from looking like a million dollars. There was one at a station near my office in Rome who had her jet-black locks in a ponytail that fell from under the back of her cap to between her shoulders.
Some years ago, in the middle of winter, one of the papers ran an article on how to cope with the fashion dilemmas posed by illness. The headline was: “Fever? I’m Dressing Sexily. From Lingerie to Scarves: How to Survive Influenza with Glamour.” It presented a range of suggestions on how to prevent “self-respect vanishing at the first sneeze.” Along with pretty pajamas and brightly colored thick socks (in place of “distinctly unseductive slippers”), a hot water bottle was “considered a ‘must.’” But—readers were earnestly advised—it would be “better to choose one with a designer label.” The article was illustrated by a photograph of a model with only slightly unkempt hair clutching a mug that presumably held something hot and comforting. But her pajamas, which were open right down to below her navel, were gossamer-thin. If she’d really had the “flu,” it would soon have turned into pneumonia.
The time and care expended by shop assistants in Italy on the wrapping of gifts can be astonishing. The cost of the purchase is irrelevant. The same care will be taken in wrapping a discounted paperback book or a pair of diamond earrings. Blithely indifferent to the queue building up behind you, the assistant will patiently fold over corners to form perfect isosceles triangles, use different-colored (but always exquisitely contrasting) wrapping paper to create diagonal stripes across the package, and then tie it with a length of ribbon that is made to end in delicate spirals. The finished package will then be handed to you with aplomb.
It is entirely consistent with the emphasis that Italians place on the visual that their longest-serving modern leader should have been a TV mogul. Silvio Berlusconi did not, in fact, start in the media business. He began his career as a property developer. While still in his early thirties, he embarked on the construction of a huge residential complex outside his home city known as Milano Due, or Milan Two. His first involvement with television came about as the result of his setting up a cable TV service for the residents. It was only later that he conceived the idea of breaking the state-owned Rai’s monopoly of national television by putting together networks of local stations that would each show the same programs at the same time. With the help of the Socialist leader and prime minister Bettino Craxi, Berlusconi became the owner of three of Italy’s seven channels—a position of media influence unparalleled in any other democracy.
He turned to politics after Craxi became mired in scandal and fled the country. In 1994, Berlusconi announced he would be running in that year’s general election. The way he did so was to set the tone for the rest of his career in public life. Another contender might have issued a press statement or announced his intentions at some high-profile gathering. Not Berlusconi. He sent a slickly produced video recording to all the main television channels to be broadcast on their news bulletins. He was filmed sitting behind his desk in the way that prime ministers and presidents do when they make televised addresses to the nation. The none-too-subliminal message was Berlusconi was already in charge. The impression of lofty condescension was reinforced by his choice of language: he had not decided to do anything so banal as enter politics, become a candidate or throw his hat into the ring; no, he had decided, he said, to “scendere in campo,” a sporting term that translates into English as “take to the field” but that in Italian uses the word for “descend.” In a nine-and-a-half-minute message, he went on to portray himself as a champion of personal freedom, economi
c liberalism and political innovation.
The last of those claims was unquestionably true. His party, Forza Italia, was unlike any political movement that had come before. It had been put together in less than a year, largely by Marcello Dell’Utri, the head of the advertising arm of Berlusconi’s media empire.* For the most part, Forza Italia’s earliest officials were Dell’Utri’s executives. Few people gave Berlusconi much of a chance when he launched his campaign, not least because his main allies were the maverick Northern League and a party of neo-Fascists, the ideological heirs of Mussolini. But when the vote was held just two months later, their ramshackle alliance won a decisive victory.
Berlusconi’s first government did not last long. The Northern League, which had yet to evolve into a party of the far right, was constantly at odds with the neo-Fascists (notwithstanding their claims to have become “post-Fascists”) and often with Berlusconi himself. After a mere eight months, the League’s leader, Umberto Bossi, ordered his followers in parliament to defect to the opposition, sealing the government’s fate. For Berlusconi, it was the beginning of a long spell in the political wilderness. But in 2001, after luring Bossi into a new alliance, he won a landslide victory and remained in power for the next five years.
Narrowly defeated in the 2006 general election, Berlusconi was back as prime minister two years later. His third government* made a promising start. But a year after his election victory, its leader became entangled in the first of a string of scandals over his private life. After Berlusconi was found to have attended the birthday party of an aspiring showgirl, his wife issued an extraordinary statement describing her husband as a “sick man” who “consorts with minors.” Over the next two years, Italy’s prime minister was claimed to have hosted parties in his Rome palazzo at which women outnumbered men by four to one; a recording that purported to capture his intimate pillow talk with a prostitute was posted to the Internet; and he was accused of having intervened with the police on behalf of a Moroccan runaway, Karima El Mahroug, who had attended so-called “Bunga Bunga” parties at his mansion near Milan while still only seventeen years old.*
But polls showed that what counted for more with the Italian electorate was Berlusconi’s response to the worldwide financial crisis that began in the United States in 2007 with the collapse in the market for subprime loans and led into the turmoil that engulfed the eurozone in 2009. One of Berlusconi’s guiding principles was always to remain unrelentingly optimistic. Long before he entered politics, he would tell his salespeople that he expected them to “carry the sun in their pockets.”2 Accordingly, his response to the gathering storm clouds was to deny that Italy would be affected. In one sense, he was right: Italian banks did not suffer the kind of disasters that befell financial institutions in the United States, United Kingdom and elsewhere. But the shock waves from the crisis shook the overall Italian economy more than that of almost any other country in Europe. In 2009, as Berlusconi continued to radiate good cheer, Italy’s GDP was falling by 5.5 percent. For a while, his tactics worked.* But as unemployment grew and bankruptcies soared, growing numbers of Italians realized that the situation was not as rosy as their prime minister was insisting.
Investors were meanwhile becoming progressively more concerned about the possibility of Italy’s defaulting on its vast public debts. The government’s borrowing costs started to climb, gradually at first but then with alarming speed. Yet Berlusconi seemed almost physically incapable of acknowledging the gravity of the situation and enacting the drastic but necessary measures needed to deal with it. Against a background of escalating panic on international markets, he stepped aside in late 2011 to make way for a nonparty government headed by an economist and former EU commissioner, Mario Monti.
The relief was almost palpable. After tendering his resignation to the president, Berlusconi slipped out of a side door of the Quirinale Palace to avoid a mob outside that had every so often been breaking into renditions of Handel’s “Hallelujah” chorus. Seldom has a prime minister stepped down in such humiliating circumstances.
But though his many detractors may be loath to admit it, Silvio Berlusconi can fairly claim to be among the modern world’s most successful politicians. Despite widespread predictions that his resignation signaled the end of his political career and notwithstanding a conviction for tax fraud two years later, the TV magnate was still a leading figure in the public life of his country twenty years after entering politics. No Italian since Mussolini had impressed his personality on his country as decisively, nor had any European politician outside the former Communist Bloc succeeded in generating a cult of personality such as that which enveloped the diminutive media tycoon in his heyday.
Not even Charles de Gaulle arrived at political rallies to be met by a song like the one sung by Berlusconi’s followers, “Meno Male Che Silvio C’è” (roughly, “Thank Goodness for Silvio”), which begins as follows: “C’è un grande sogno / Che vive in noi / Siamo la gente della libertà / Presidente siamo con te / Meno male che Silvio c’è” (“There is a great dream / Which lives in us / We are the people of freedom / Prime minister, we are with you / Thank goodness for Silvio!”).3
Nor did Margaret Thatcher have a fan club with a Web site offering devotees T-shirts, bags and aprons. Berlusconi’s Web site also sported a quotation that hinted at the view of democracy held by many of his followers.4 The quotation, attributed to Aristotle, reminded visitors to the site that “a state is better governed by a good man than by a good law.”*
So how did he do it? How did he persuade Italians in their tens of millions that he was the “good man” that they needed? Why did they elect him as their leader—not once, nor even twice, but three times?
There are several answers to that question. His opponents, whose political roots were either in the old Partito Comunista or on the left wing of the Christian Democrats, were ideologically heterogeneous and prone to squabbling. The same could be said of Forza Italia and its allies. But the parties of the left and center-left were representatives of two failed creeds. Christian Democracy may not have been discredited to the same extent as Communism after the fall of the Berlin Wall, but in its Italian form it was profoundly compromised by its leading role in the increasingly corrupt system that was used to run the country until the early 1990s.
A further important reason for Berlusconi’s success was his talent as a communicator. From the outset, he spoke to voters in a plain, unadorned Italian, drawing his metaphors from family life, eschewing the subjunctive and deploying a simple—and, on occasions, even crude—vocabulary that was instantly recognizable to the man or woman in the street. He also had the inestimable advantage for a politician of not seeming to be one. Right from the start, he portrayed himself to the electorate as an outsider, and in many respects he remained one; as his aides often remarked, Berlusconi was at his most successful when he was being spontaneous, incautious, irreverent and humorous. His frequent gaffes only served to convince potential supporters that ultimately he was “one of them.”
Berlusconi was born into a lower-middle-class family in Milan and for many Italians of a similar background, particularly those who were self-employed, one of Berlusconi’s greatest attractions was that he seemed to be tolerant of tax dodging. He described himself as a liberal. But the freedom he was taken to be offering was the one after which many an Italian hankers: to do “quello che gli pare”—whatever he or she likes. Nowhere is this truer than in the field of taxation.
A prime minister cannot, of course, openly tell people that he is happy to turn a blind eye to tax dodging. Nor did Berlusconi ever do so. But he set out his thinking on the subject in 2004 when, as prime minister, he attended a ceremony to mark the anniversary of the founding of the Guardia di Finanza whose officers carry out many of the functions of tax inspectors. “There is a rule of natural law that says that if the State asks you for a third of what you have earned with your hard work, it seems a fair request and you give it
over in exchange for services,” he told his audience. “If [the State] asks you for more, or a lot more, then you are being overwhelmed by the State and so you set about inventing systems of avoidance or even evasion that you feel are in accordance with your private sense of morality and which do not make you feel guilty.”5 Four years later, he declared that if “taxes are between 50% and 60% it is too much and it is thus justified to practice avoidance or evasion.”6 Ironically, though, his governments did not reduce taxes. In 2008, he fulfilled an election pledge to abolish a much disliked house tax. But the overall tax burden grew.
All that said, Berlusconi entered politics with two exceptional advantages. In the first place, he was among the richest men on earth, the head of a business empire stretching far beyond the media into retailing, insurance, asset management and, of course, sport in the form of AC Milan. According to Forbes, his wealth peaked at almost $13 billion in 2000.7
That sort of cash can come in handy in politics. It helped him to return to power in the general election in 2001, when, at a cost of 37 billion lire ($26.5 million), he distributed copies of a hagiography of himself to every household in the land. His political opponents have repeatedly claimed that his almost unlimited resources helped him to survive crucial no-confidence votes that risked toppling his governments. In the run-up to one such, no fewer than ten members of the Chamber of Deputies shifted their allegiances in Berlusconi’s favor. In 2013, a senator who had abandoned the center-left seven years earlier alleged that Berlusconi paid him €3 million to do so. Berlusconi, who denied the claim, was put on trial, charged with bribery the following year.