The Right lost heavily in the regional elections of 2005, and opinion polls suggested it would suffer a similar defeat in the national elections a year later. Yet as the contest approached, Berlusconi’s alliance began creeping up in the polls, and in the end the result was surprisingly close, Romano Prodi’s Union coalition, successor to the Olive Tree, gaining power with only 24,000 more votes than its opponents. Berlusconi came so near partly because of his command of television, partly because he changed the voting rules – reviving proportional representation which the electorate had rejected in 1993 – but mainly because the Left fought an incredibly inept campaign. Leaders of the Union behaved as if victory was inevitable because the electorate had seen through Berlusconi and identified him as a charlatan; they assumed voters would recognize that Prodi was the better man but were unable to see that, serious and intelligent though he was, he came across on television as a boring professor of industrial policy (which he also was). Yet the Left had been equally feeble and passive during its years in opposition. In exasperation the novelist Umberto Eco asked how a country could be healthy if ‘comedians and artists [were] the only people to inspire argument and debate, obviously without being able to suggest solutions?’ One of the comedians was Roberto Benigni, who at the San Remo Festival in 2002 both shocked and delighted Italians with his plea, ‘Please Berlusconi, please do something that, when we go to bed at night, will make us proud to be Italians.’ One of the artists was Nanni Moretti, the left-wing film director, who turned his anger on his own side, mocking its failure as an opposition and predicting that, with leaders like the current bunch, it would not win again for another three generations.10
Prodi’s second spell as prime minister ended in the same manner as his first – by a rebellion within his coalition. Fresh elections were held in the spring of 2008 at which the Left’s leader was another mayor of Rome, Walter Veltroni, a decent candidate but one who, like Prodi, lacked charisma and who, unlike Berlusconi, made the mistake of lecturing the electorate. The outcome was a third emphatic victory for Berlusconi, a result which showed, as the elections in 1948 had first done, that Italy has a natural conservative majority encompassing some 55 to 60 per cent of the electorate. As Beppe Severgnini, an Italian journalist once based in London, said to me at the time, ‘Italians are conservatives pretending to be progressives, whereas you British pretend you are traditionalists though in fact you are quite radical.’ The Left could draw an election, as it did in 2006, if the Right had been governing very badly, but it was unable to win one without a charismatic leader. Unfortunately for its supporters, the only charismatic leaders in recent Italian history have been the right-wing populists, Umberto Bossi and Silvio Berlusconi.
Berlusconi’s talents and personality went on display at an early age. The child of a modest, middle-class family in Milan, he earned money as a boy by helping schoolfellows with their homework, and as a student by singing and playing the guitar on cruise ships. Ever after, he retained the manners of a crooner: sleek and smarmy, smiley and jokey, a self-assured entertainer who wanted everyone to love him as much as he loved himself. In his early thirties Berlusconi became a property tycoon, constructing a huge suburb near Milan that, according to mafiosi allegations over the years, was funded by the Mafia, which later used these dealings to blackmail him. Yet his natural habitat was the media rather than real estate, and he made the bulk of his fortune in television.
Berlusconi had a hold over the Italian people as no other politician had had since Mussolini. Of course the allure of the fascist leader had been very different, for women as well as for men. He had not been one for serenades and lingering siestas: he liked to take women roughly and briskly, on the floor or up against a wall. Berlusconi by contrast was a seducer and a caresser, an archetypal giver of chocolates and pearl necklaces. A smiler rather than a scowler, he appeased his narcissism with a face-lift and a hair transplant and by surrounding himself with gaggles of young women, to some of whom he gave political careers and occasionally a post in his government. He liked making remarks that were crass, sexist and insensitive, as they were when he advised an unemployed woman to marry someone like himself, but most women forgave him. He was an Italian male.
Berlusconi’s message to men was equally simple: I am like you, and you can be like me if you try; you too can be famous, rich and seductive even if (like me) you are small and not very handsome. With all his vulgarity, Berlusconi was able to talk to voters in a way that nobody on the Left could begin to emulate. Instead of telling them what they should think or do, he would wink and grin at them: we are all sinners, he was saying, but life is good, and we should do our best to make it better. He appealed to many men because they thought that, unlike intellectuals such as Prodi or Veltroni, all his pleasures were their pleasures, especially those connected with football, sex and making money. And they voted for him, not only because they recognized that he was clever and furbo (a greatly respected quality meaning ‘cunning’) but also because he was the archetype of many. They did not seem to mind if he made gaffes, told lies, betrayed his wife or faced criminal charges. They even seemed to enjoy his tactic of deflecting criticism by labelling it communist: it was quite a clever joke to call the Economist the ‘Ecommunist’. When he was rebuked for something he had said, he sometimes denied he had said it and then, when proof was given, would laugh it off, claim it had been a joke and remark that the ‘communists’ had no sense of humour. Other responses to criticism were to state that the ‘communists’ were jealous of his wealth and that they had no taste in women: right-wing ladies, he declared, were much more attractive than left-wing ones.
Berlusconi had little interest in philosophy or ideas. He was the supreme master of l’arte di arrangiarsi, of getting by, of making deals, of governing by intuition and opportunism. He did not pretend to be chaste, devout or obedient, but he genuflected to the Church and won its support with expedient and well-timed stances on bioethics and other moral issues. Few prime ministers of any epoch have been so ignorant of – and indeed uninterested in – the history of their country. In an interview in 2003 with the British weekly the Spectator, he made the astonishing claims that Mussolini had not ‘murdered anyone’, that his dictatorship had been ‘benign’ and that he had punished his opponents not by jailing them but by sending them ‘on holiday’ to islands in the Mediterranean.11 Later he became a little more cautious or perhaps just rather bored with the subject of Mussolini. When members of his coalition were rancorously arguing in 2008 whether fascism was sometimes excusable or always deplorable, Berlusconi declared that the matter was simply irrelevant. He was a busy man with a lot of projects to attend to, and his duty was not to worry about the past but to concentrate on the future.12
Berlusconi had never thought of politics as his vocation and, when in his late fifties he went ‘on to the pitch’ of the political stadium, he had no statesmanly vision of the Italy he wanted to fashion. As his friends admitted, he became a politician by accident and calculation, choosing the profession in 1994 as a means of protecting his business empire and of evading charges of corruption. A few years later, one of his closest associates even confessed that, had Berlusconi not gone into politics and formed Forza Italia, they would by then be in prison or hanging under a bridge – a reference to the corpse of the corrupt banker Roberto Calvi, which had been found under London’s Blackfriars Bridge in July 1982.13
Radiotelevisione Italiana (RAI), the public service broadcaster, used to have a monopoly of national transmissions, which meant that Berlusconi’s company Mediaset, the owner of the three main commercial channels, was restricted to local broadcasting. When in 1984 magistrates discovered that Mediaset was breaking the rules and broadcasting nationally, they ordered that its channels be partially suppressed. An indignant Berlusconi reacted by appealing to his friend Bettino Craxi, who was prime minister at the time, and succeeded in having the rules changed. Subsequent legislation allowed Mediaset to broadcast nationally and gave him a virtual mon
opoly of commercial TV. This in turn gave him the chance to create another monopoly for one of his companies, the advertising agency Publitalia, which came to handle and control the hundreds of daily advertisements on his television channels. Berlusconi was thus in the happy position of being able to pay himself to advertise his own products on his own TV stations. Later, as a politician, he hatched another wheeze, making the news himself and getting his employees to report it as prominently and favourably as possible.† In 1993, however, Mediaset’s profits were threatened by the stance of the PDS which, if it formed part of the next government, was expected to push for limits to the control of the media by individuals and companies. This perceived danger was one of the factors that impelled the magnate into politics.
As prime minister Berlusconi had ultimate control of his own channels plus the three state ones which, in order to compete with Mediaset, lowered their standards to such an extent that for a generation Italian television has been regarded as the most inane in Europe – an endless succession of game-shows, talk-shows, phone-ins, advertisements and news bulletins aimed at audiences with an attention span of about seven seconds. Yet more invidious than the abysmal quality has been the fact that a single individual, a politician in a democracy, could have the power to command almost the entire output of the most important sector of his nation’s media. Berlusconi regarded the notion of an independent broadcasting corporation as simply ludicrous. After becoming prime minister in 1994, he declared it would be ‘anomalous’ for a country to have a state television that did not support the government elected by the people;15 a month later, he removed the RAI’s directors and replaced them with nominees of his own. On a visit to Bulgaria in 2002 he even went so far as to denounce three journalists who had either mocked him or allowed someone else to mock him on TV: the trio were duly sacked and effectively banned from working in television. Berlusconi’s threatening behaviour towards journalists, and the curbs placed by his governments, persuaded an American Freedom of the Press report in 2009 to downgrade its rating of Italy’s press from ‘free’ to ‘partly free’ and to list the country seventy-third in the world’s press freedom rankings, below Ghana, Chile, Mali and Namibia.16 The Sienese writer Antonio Tabucchi was so appalled by the situation that he chose to live in Portugal, where he found life was now more agreeable and civilized than in Italy.17
There can be little doubt that Berlusconi’s control of television perverted the electoral process in Italy. The country’s many serious and responsible newspapers refuse to make concessions to popular taste and as a result have small circulations and little influence on public opinion. Television is the real opinion-former, and two-thirds of Italians admit that they make up their minds whom to vote for entirely from what they see on TV.18 This might not matter if the broadcasting companies were neutral in their views and balanced in their coverage; when, however, they are controlled by one of the two prime ministerial candidates, balance and neutrality are obviously impossible. In the month before the election campaign started in 2006, television viewers saw sixteen times as much of Berlusconi as they did of his rival, Romano Prodi. Even during the campaign itself, when the competitors were supposed to receive equal time on the screen, the right-wing coalition obtained 60 per cent of the coverage on RAI and a great deal more than that on Berlusconi’s own channels.19 Perhaps the Right’s chief advantage was the sycophantic treatment its leader secured from interviewers, who were often his own employees and had been told what to ask him beforehand. This allowed Berlusconi to spend hours in front of the camera, chatting and joking in a relaxed mood in the knowledge that he would be untroubled by probing questions.
In 1990 the Court of Appeal in Venice had convicted Berlusconi of the charge of giving false testimony in a libel case two years before. In the subsequent decade he was charged with numerous other crimes, including embezzlement, tax evasion, false accounting, illegal funding and the bribing both of judges and of tax inspectors of the Guardia Finanza, who consequently ‘forgot’ to check the accounts of some of his companies. Two incidents in 1994, the year he went into politics, illuminate the nature of Berlusconi’s regard for the law. As his first minister of justice he chose a close associate, Cesare Previti, a lawyer of such dubious repute that President Scalfaro refused to accept him. While Previti was allowed to become minister of defence instead, Scalfaro’s judgement was later vindicated when this shady character was found guilty of corruption and, after a lengthy appeal, sentenced by the Supreme Court to six years in jail. Berlusconi seemed to have suffered another embarrassment when his brother Paolo admitted he had indeed bribed the tax police to overlook the accounts of his sibling’s companies. Yet the prime minister was unabashed by the confession. Although he did not deny that the wrongdoing had taken place, he claimed that the bribe was as insignificant as a litre of water in the Mediterranean.
Berlusconi employed a dual strategy in his counter-attack on the law, attempting to circumvent it and to discredit its representatives. Circumvention was a complicated business requiring a subtle use of delaying tactics and a clever changing of the rules. One court in Milan had to acquit the prime minister of false accounting after his government had decriminalized the offence. Several cases against him were protracted for so long that, in accordance with the Statute of Limitations, they had to be closed. But the most effective ploy of all was a law of 2003 that gave the prime minister and other holders of the highest offices legal immunity for the duration of their tenure. It has been estimated that by 2010 Berlusconi had passed as many as eighteen laws ‘to meet his own personal needs’.20
Denigration of judges and prosecutors was a more straightforward business. Berlusconi simply ordered his political supporters and his employees in the media to wage a vicious and often hysterical campaign against Di Pietro and his colleagues, denouncing and accusing them of corruption and abuse of power. The accusations were so insistent that investigations had to be set up, which wasted a lot of the magistrates’ time and which regularly found the charges to be unfounded. Berlusconi’s contribution to this campaign was entirely typical, starting with the incredible assertion that, as he had been elected by the people, he could not be judged by individuals who had merely been appointed to their positions. More predictably he claimed that the prosecuting magistrates were politically motivated and accused them of using the ‘old communist practice’ of putting their opponents in jail. He also became vituperative, declaring that the magistrates were insane, mad politically and ‘mad anyway. To do that job you need to be mentally disturbed, you need psychic disturbances’.21 The prime minister was speaking of people who did more than anyone else to keep Italy a civilized place in the 1990s, men who had exposed political corruption and had struggled – sometimes at the cost of their lives – to defeat the Mafia.
When Berlusconi first came to power, the mafiosi were in a cowed and dejected state. Hundreds of them were in jail, put there by a combination of evidence from pentiti, a courageous Piedmontese prosecutor in Palermo and the public outrage at the murders of Falcone and Borsellino in 1992, which had impelled the government to take action. Under new leadership the Mafia ended its suicidal policy of assassinating senior officials and politicians of the state. Yet it was no less criminal in its business activities and it even managed to increase its economic control of Sicily through extortion and protection rackets. As it became more invisible, it also became more invasive. According to a report by the Censis research institute in 2009, it received protection money from 80 per cent of the shops in Catania and Palermo and, together with its counterparts in the Mezzogiorno, enjoyed an annual turnover of 130 billion euros and adversely affected the lives of 13 million Italians.22
It is no coincidence that the Mafia’s resurgence coincided with the political ascendancy of Silvio Berlusconi. Even in 1994 Sicilians who had traditionally voted christian democrat had few doubts about transferring their allegiance to the new leader of the Right, who by 2001 had acquired even greater support on the island than Andr
eotti had enjoyed: his coalition captured all sixty-one of the directly elected seats in the Chamber and the Senate. Evidence about Berlusconi’s links to the Mafia, which allegedly went back to the 1970s, was often given but never proved in a court of law. He himself was clever enough neither to criticize the Mafia nor to suggest he was indifferent to it, though one of his ministers reflected his government’s relaxed attitude to the matter when he observed that, as the Mafia had always existed and always would exist, Italy would have to ‘learn to live’ with it.23 Like Andreotti, Berlusconi himself learned to live with it by employing Sicilian lieutenants as ‘go-betweens’. His equivalent of Salvo Lima was Marcello Dell’Utri, widely credited as the man who had persuaded him to save his neck by going into politics. This devious and unsavoury person, who had been head of Berlusconi’s advertising company Publitalia, was convicted and sentenced for tax fraud and false accounting in 1999, was found guilty of association with the Mafia and sentenced to nine years’ imprisonment in 2004 and was given a third prison sentence for attempted extortion in 2007. These setbacks did not, however, dissuade Berlusconi from nurturing Dell’Utri’s parallel career as a politician, giving his friend’s followers seats in parliament and enabling their leader to go from deputy in 1996, to member of the European parliament in 1999, to senator in 2001 and to be re-elected to the latter post in 2006 and 2008. The appeal system in Italy goes on for such a long time that by 2010 Dell’Utri had still not served any of his sentences.
RESILIENT ITALY
Italy entered the third millennium in a mood of some despondency. The euphoria of a few years before, when the economy was flying and politics were being cleansed, had evaporated as a cascade of statistics suggested that the nation was in incurable decline. Especially worrying was the decrease in the birth rate which, despite the Vatican’s stance on birth control, had fallen to 1.18 children per woman (or 118 children for every 200 adults), the lowest in the world, perhaps the lowest in all history, one that suggested the Italian people would die out within four or five generations; in the month of January 2005 Italians seemed to give an indication of their priorities when they produced fewer than 46,000 babies and bought more than 212,000 new cars.24 The accumulation of gloomy data led to a decline in self-esteem and to a widespread crisis of identity. Why, people asked, did Italy not function? Why was it apparently ungovernable? Was it in fact a real nation or was it just a nineteenth-century invention? Except in a purely formal sense, could it really be said to exist?
The Pursuit of Italy Page 47