by Tim Parks
The sad comedy of a book like L’odore dei soldi, typical of much investigative journalism in Italy, is that the extravagance and sheer abundance of the claims made creates such bewilderment in the reader that any truly damaging content is lost and ignored. That Berlusconi’s companies will have come into contact with the mafia when extending his TV stations to Sicily would hardly be surprising. That he was involved in the murder of Borsellino, as Travaglio vaguely hints, is about as believable as that the queen ordered the death of Princess Diana. Here is a typical paragraph: Travaglio has just quoted Berlusconi’s assistant Marcello Dell’Utri as saying that he wasn’t aware that a certain Gaetano Cinà was a mafioso:
Strange. Because Tanino Cinà, born in Palermo in 1930, owner of a laundry and a sports shop in Palermo, together with an elementary school certificate, is reported by all the main pentiti to have been the man who … at least from 1980 onward and doubtless up until the murders of Falcone and Borsellino (1992), was supposed to have made substantial payments to the mafia on behalf of the Berlusconi group. Cinà obviously denies this. But arrested and questioned in 1996, he would be forced at least to admit having relatives and friends among some of the finest names of the honourable society, names including Mimmo Teresi, cousin and right-hand man to Stefano Bontate.11
If the desperately dry Social Identities and Political Cultures in Italy was eager to document the persisting importance of the family and local community in the dynamics of Italian public life, it could usefully have quoted this account of Travaglio’s where to be related to someone, or to have been part of a community, is to be presumed guilty and where the syntax deployed seems itself to embrace the complications of the extended family. Typical of this kind of journalism is the way an account of the facts gets mixed up with a complacent declaration of cultural superiority (the comment on Cinà’s level of education) which nevertheless doesn’t exclude a certain residual populist romanticism about the very phenomenon condemned (‘some of the finest names of the honourable society’). Clarity, whether intellectual or emotional, is not at a premium.
But Berlusconi himself is no stranger to the art of generating confusion. The most amusing part of Travaglio’s book is the section where he describes the dizzying series of Chinese boxes which was Berlusconi’s financial empire throughout the 1970s and 1980s. Aside from the umbrella finance company, Fininvest, and a variety of real estate and later TV companies, twenty-three holding companies were formed, officially owned by old and innocuous friends and relatives, and monotonously named Holding Italiana 1st, 2nd, 3rd, 4th, etc., as if in an attempt to defy distinction. Quoting the reports of various tax inspections, all launched, it has to be said, soon after Berlusconi’s entry into politics in 1993, Travaglio describes how large sums of money of unknown origin were shunted back and forth between, for example, holdings 9, 10 and 11, or 2, 17 and 6, or 3, 18 and 22, to no apparent end.
Travaglio suggests that the company is laundering dirty money. Clearly something suspicious is going on. What he never mentions is that whenever a piece of real estate changes hands in Italy at least a third of the total value is paid under the table, usually in cash. I know of very few exceptions to this habit, at once illegal and tolerated, to the extent that when assessing a client for a mortgage the bank will politely enquire what price he is actually paying as opposed to the price he is declaring for tax purposes. Hence a company dealing in property on the vast scale that Berlusconi did would have needed all kinds of ways of bringing cash amounting to a third of its income into useful circulation. Travaglio, whose book is mainly an uncomfortable and inadequately explained weave of extended quotations from judicial sources, doesn’t do the work that would be required to establish the relationship between these mysterious sums of money and the size of Berlusconi’s operations overall. It thus becomes hard to understand what kind or degree of illegality we are talking about. While for the puritan this may hardly seem relevant, for the Italian voter it is crucial.
The same sort of ambiguity undermines the last and interminably long section of the book which offers, with no analysis, 170 pages of extracts from the trial, one of the various trials, of Marcello Dell’Utri, to which Berlusconi was called as prosecution witness. Questioned about a number of potentially illegal movements of huge sums of cash, Berlusconi again and again makes the same fascinating double gesture: on the one hand he assures the judges that backhanders and sweeteners are endemic in the world he moves in, but then insists that his companies are quite unique in never having been involved in such practices. He is clean. On the subject of tax evasion he gives the judges a little lecture straight from the campaign trail:
You know well enough how our tax system works, you know that the present system of high tax rates, the highest in Europe, is such that there is a presumption of systematic elusion and possible evasion. Hence the citizen responds with a certain attitude, on a moral level too that, well … look, a state that doesn’t give back in services what it takes in taxes and that has rates way above the general norm, above the level that our natural sense of justice tells us is right … When the state asks of a citizen and of the fruit of his toil more than a third of that fruit, then the citizen feels, well … morally at loggerheads with the state.12
Having made these appeals, which curiously use exactly the rhetoric of norms and innate morality deployed by those who consider him a scandalous anomaly, Berlusconi then goes on to deny that he or his company have been involved in any wrongdoing. The magistrates could legitimately have picked on anyone but him. I’m reminded of a conversation I recently had with Giambattista Pastorello, the owner of Hellas Verona, a football club in Italy’s Serie A. I asked him whether there wasn’t a conflict of interests in his sons being the agents for some of the players he had bought. ‘People are just jealous,’ he remarked. ‘The fact is that when an agent is your son he doesn’t ask for $20,000 under the table when you buy a player.’ ‘Are you saying’, I enquired, ‘that other player transactions you have made involved illegal payments?’ Pastorello smiled: ‘Of course not.’ One of the many trials Berlusconi is involved in has to do with his football team’s purchase of the player Gianluigi Lentini. He is accused of false accounting. The general public is not interested.
The comedy of these exchanges between Berlusconi and his judges brings us close to what is not so much the anomaly – for there is no universal norm for public behaviour – as one of the main distinguishing features of Italian public life. That there be a gap between what is legal and what is common practice is not unusual anywhere. But a special psychology seems to govern people’s handling of that gap in Italy, with the result that however constantly exposed and alluded to it never seems to be diminished. The irony of Travaglio’s book is that many of its readers, while suspecting that Berlusconi is guilty as charged, will nevertheless feel a certain sympathy with the man. It is not, they sense, or not only, because he has broken the law that he is being put on trial. Behind this intuition lies all the Italian vocation for factionalism. However much one may appeal to national unity and the authority of the state, no institution, least of all the judiciary, is ultimately perceived as anything other than one more warring group in competition with one’s own.
Social Identities and Political Cultures in Italy poses a dull and naive premise: in a ‘traditional’ society people vote (‘passively’) according to family and community allegiances; in a modern society the individual emerges from family and community and votes (‘actively’) according to ‘rational choice’. The author Anna Cento Bull, who works at the University of Bath, sets out to analyse Italy’s position in this presumed evolutionary process by conducting detailed surveys of voting habits in Sesto San Giovanni, an area of declining heavy industry in the suburbs of Milan that traditionally voted communist; and in Erba, a small town near Como that traditionally voted Christian Democrat. Both communities, like so many in Italy, have recently changed their voting patterns, with DS (the erstwhile Communist Party) losing their majority in Sesto a
nd the Christian Democrats all but disappearing in Erba. Nevertheless, the author’s findings, diligently collected and reviewed with an admirably open mind, do not indicate a move to the vision of the sovereign individual deciding how to vote on the basis of rational self-interest mediated by conscience. In particular, the huge vote for the Northern League in Erba in 1996 suggests a renewal of localism with people consistently voting in line with community and family. The phenomenon obliges the author to allow that the future of a sense of identity may not after all reside entirely with the freewheeling individual. On the contrary, where such an individual exists, he or she may actually choose to join the fold of a collective identity, which, far from being trapped in the past, can be dynamic and forward-looking. But such qualities do not necessarily mean that all is sweetness and light. Bull concludes with a consideration that gets closer than anything else I have read to what one senses is happening in Italian society:
whereas traditionally the Catholic and communist subcultures exercised a pervasive influence upon and successfully appeared to encompass the entire territorial community, nowadays a political subculture … seems to represent the interests and needs of specific groups within a territory. The exclusionary aspect of a political subculture (‘Us’ versus the ‘Others’) has become more in evidence than its inclusionary one.13
In the light, then, of what seems to be an exacerbation of factionalism, rather than the reverse, let us try understand the story of Berlusconi’s party, Forza Italia, which is still, even after his government’s defeat at the 2006 elections, the largest political party nationwide in Italy.
Born in 1936, son of a bank employee, the exemplary young Silvio pays for his university education by singing to tourists on summer cruise ships. In his early twenties he invests his father’s retirement fund in a property development. In very short order he wins the right to develop Milano 2, a complex of 4,000 homes in an eastern suburb of Milan. Generous with space and greenery and including all possible services, the project is recognised as a model development. By the early 1970s Berlusconi’s is the largest construction company in Italy. Father Luigi and brother Paolo are ever beside him. This is a clan in the making.
With the removal of the state monopoly on TV broadcasting in 1976, Berlusconi starts a cable TV channel for Milano 2 which is rapidly transformed into a local channel for the whole of Lombardy. Hindered by a state monopoly on national broadcasts, he purchases local channels across the country and has them broadcast prerecorded programmes simultaneously. Taken to court for breaking the law on national broadcasting, he claims he is fighting a battle for liberty: the image of the modern entrepreneur embattled against the forces of an obtuse and entrenched status quo is born. Certainly the general public is on Berlusconi’s side. Large contributions to the Socialist Party of Bettino Craxi, a key player in the coalition government of the time, guarantee Berlusconi protection and eventually lead to a made-to-measure law that legalises his position.
Exploiting a consumer-boom thirst for advertising space, Berlusconi’s TV rapidly produces huge incomes. He establishes two more national channels and thus commands more than forty per cent of viewing time, with a near monopoly in the private sector. In 1991 he is able to offer the first national news programme that can compete with the public television channels, which are still largely following the dictates of the old political parties. Italy does not have a strong tradition of independent TV journalism.
Married with two children, Berlusconi falls in love with a young actress, divorces and remarries. This does not prevent him from presenting himself, ad nauseam, as a family man. Three more children, all of them enviably handsome, will follow. The older children take their places in the business. The younger attend a Steiner school which forbids them from watching TV. Meantime, Berlusconi purchases one of Italy’s major book and magazine publishers, Mondadori, and one of the big five football teams, AC Milan. His commercial successes are endless, his largesse mythical. With 30,000 employees, he is now the second largest employer in Italy.
In 1992, the ‘Clean Hands’ investigation into Tangentopoli takes a heavy toll of Berlusconi’s political connections, leaving him without protection. In particular, Craxi flees the country to avoid prison. When elections are announced for the spring of 1994, it seems inevitable that the left will at last take power. Berlusconi joins those who speak of the ‘Clean Hands’ operation as an example of one faction’s use of the judicial process to destroy another, not an impartial application of the law. Apparently terrified by the prospect of a left-wing government, he does everything to persuade what players remain in the centre and right of Italian politics to form a coalition capable of winning with the country’s new majority voting system. The various fragments will not agree. Advised to the contrary by his closest associates and family, Berlusconi nevertheless forms his own movement, Forza Italia, in February 1993. His instinct is to make it a centre party but his market research tells him to stay to the right: a liberal ticket of fewer taxes and radical deregulation is the thing. Bringing together an improbable coalition of the country’s two political pariahs, the Northern League and National Alliance, he, amazingly, wins the elections of 28 March.
It is now that Berlusconi experiences his first spectacular failure. Ninety per cent of his party’s deputies are new to parliament. They are inexperienced. The Northern League and the National Alliance are at loggerheads. Under fire for the obvious conflict of interests, Berlusconi is reluctant to let go of his TV channels. He is an empire builder, not a constitutionalist. A first package of laws to deregulate business practice is successful, but then the government turns to the problem of pensions. It is universally recognised that Italian pensions are ruinously generous. Berlusconi proposes a drastic reform that would bring the country in line with others and make Italy ‘normal’. As a result, the hitherto divided left is at last given an issue to unite around. Nobody wants to surrender acquired pension rights, however abnormal they may be. There are huge demonstrations, larger than any in the history of the country. A man who loves to be seen as a benefactor, not a pruner, Berlusconi loses his nerve. His businesses are now under constant assault from the tax police. While presiding, in Palermo, over a United Nations conference on international crime, he is given formal notice that he himself is under investigation for corruption. The magistrates involved claim that this timing was not deliberate. They are not under oath. When the Northern League desert the coalition, Berlusconi resigns, imagining that new elections will be called. Instead, President Scalfaro gives a mandate to a government of ‘technicians’ supported by the fragments of the centre, the left and the League. At this low point many imagined that Berlusconi’s love affair with politics was over, his virtual, TV-driven party would surely wilt as rapidly as it had blossomed.
More than seven years later, Gianfranco Pasquino, professor of political science at the University of Bologna and one of Italy’s most respected political commentators, finds himself reviewing Berlusconi’s pre-election manifesto book, L’Italia che ho in mente (The Italy I have in Mind).14 It is well known that Pasquino’s sympathies are with the left. Nevertheless, he does not, like so many, write Berlusconi off as merely a corrupt tycoon and vulgar showman. On the contrary, the man has stayed the political course:
For those like D’Alema [then secretary of DS] who think that these days it’s enough to have ‘TV and cash’ to make it in politics, Berlusconi’s books will hold many surprises: a speech to the first National Assembly of Forza Italia’s Women Members … a speech to the first National Assembly of Senior Members, a speech to the National Congress of Young Members, a speech to the Councillors of Lombardy … It would be interesting to know how many of the secretaries of traditional parties have worked the circuit so hard … The truth is, that if Forza Italia is no longer nor in any sense a tinsel party, it owes its transformation to the unflagging efforts of its founder and president. In short, the party’s successful organisation is the result of much hard work and is well deserved.15
These remarks echo Anna Bull’s findings in Social Identities, which recognises the importance of traditional methods of creating a sense of community and drumming up support. How Berlusconi would gloat! For what emerges from the 300 and more pages of his book is not so much an acute political analysis, nor a coherent programme of reform, as the man’s growing excitement with his own image, his chosen role as visionary political leader. Not for nothing does the volume come in the form of transcripts of speeches complete with italicised parentheses (applausi) (applausi prolungati). The man’s unerring instinct, as when he sang on those cruise ships in his youth, is to play the seducer. He is determined to draw you into his clan. He actually needs you to succumb to him. He is charming. He will work night and day to have you believe in him. If you join him, he will sweat blood not to disappoint you. As he repeats over and over his sensible, laissez-faire policies for getting Italy’s over-regulated economy moving again, it is hard to keep your attention on such dull issues. Rather one is fascinated, appalled, by the demon that condemns this talented tycoon to go on and on overachieving, swallowing up the whole world in his empire. Frequently he refers to Forza Italia as a large happy family with himself at the head.
But perhaps Berlusconi’s obsession is not an unnatural reaction to endemic factionalism. The Istituto Cattaneo’s annual reviews include at the outset a list of ‘the main party acronyms used in this text’. There are thirty-one in the account of the events of 1997. Despite the introduction of a majority voting system, all kinds of laws encourage the existence of small parties. Any party with over one per cent of the vote receives a1.70 for every vote polled, this despite a referendum in which Italians clearly indicated that they did not want political parties to receive public funds. Even parties with minimal representation in parliament are granted equal time for party political broadcasts. Thus a fragmented coalition gets more free time than one of two or three larger parties. But that does not mean it will be more successful. Unlike the lobby, the small party is interested not in the achievement of any particular policy, but in the perpetuation of itself, the affirmation of its own group. As a result postures are frequently struck in perverse defiance of coalition partners in order to gain the limelight.