The government of Silvio Berlusconi is an affront to the democratic values which the nations of the European Union affirm as their most precious heritage. It ruthlessly manipulates the large majority it gained in both houses of parliament in the election of spring 2001 to pass legislation tailored for the prime minister's commercial benefit. It controls almost all of the nation's television channels. It is, in many respects, comparable with governments of post-Soviet states-governments of backward economies which struggle with a much more recent experience of authoritarian rule than Italy.
The Casa delle Libert? (House of Liberties) coalition of the right, led by Berlusconi's Forza Italia party, has not, of course, expunged democracy. Italy's civil society remains lively. The presidency, the opposition parties, the judiciary, the trade unions, intellectual, scholarly and creative life and (latterly) the business community are wholly or partly opposed to the juggernaut which is the Italian government. And Berlusconi is provoking crises within the judicial system, the state broadcaster RAI, the ranks of the main business organisation Confindustria, with the organised workers, in the diplomatic corps and in the world of education-all of which are becoming more serious.
Nevertheless, he faces a weak formal opposition. The left is divided into several parties which conduct a ceaseless war of position, and which are often divided within themselves. There is no widely accepted leader of the left and none seems likely to emerge. The mass movements of citizens, organised by figures within the creative and intellectual worlds, are often scornful of the parties but cannot replace them. Italy is not alone in having a weak opposition-indeed, it is presently something of a feature in western Europe, evident in countries as diverse as France, Spain, the Netherlands, Norway and Denmark, which have weak left oppositions, and in Sweden and Britain, which have weak right oppositions. But in none of these is the government destroying the principles of a liberal state. In Italy, it is.
Most worrying, Berlusconi's form of politics may be showing us our own future. Italy has often been in the vanguard of history. Capitalism began on the peninsula, in the medieval city-states. Some of these states showed another novelty for the medieval period: elective governments. In the 20th century, fascism was pioneered; as, after the war, was Euro-communism. Berlusconi has brought to democratic government another novelty-a populist videocracy.
Berlusconi's first and major target has been the Italian judiciary-whose problems did not, to be sure, begin with him. Parts of it have for decades been compromised by association with, or inaction in the face of, the mafia and other organised crime networks. Only in the early 1980s was the presence of the mafia officially admitted, and action taken against it as an organisation. Corruption, too, was tackled from the 1980s through the "Clean Hands" movement, which was responsible for the Tangentopoli (Bribesville) trials, leading to the implosion of the political system and the end of the long Christian Democratic hegemony. But the movement is now much weaker. It had only lukewarm support from the centre-left Ulivo (Olive Tree) government, which seemed to feel that the crusading zeal of magistrates like Antonio di Pietro and Gherardo Colombo was becoming excessive. Their work is now being undone by Berlusconi.
Berlusconi was close to the late and disgraced Socialist premier Betinno Craxi, and both the construction projects on which his first fortune was built, and the creation of his Mediaset television, advertising and publishing business owed much to Craxi's government. Berlusconi was, none the less, a supporter of the crusading magistrates when they seemed to be riding a wave of the future; he subsequently turned against them before his first government came to power in 1994. That administration approved a decree effectively ending the Tangentopoli investigations: the outcry caused the Northern League, an indispensable coalition partner, to threaten resignation and Berlusconi climbed down. The first Berlusconi administration also turned away from an active prosecution of mafia cases. Indeed, in a currently ongoing trial in Palermo of Berlusconi's close associate Marcello dell'Utri, evidence was given in December by one of the pentiti, or supergrasses, that the prime minister had been in personal touch with mafia bosses. The mafia subsequently decided to back Forza Italia from its foundation in 1993, in return for help with judicial problems. (Forza Italia presently holds every single one of Sicily's 61 constituencies.) It was, however, the magistrates who had the last laugh on that government. In November 1994, while presiding over a UN meeting in Naples on international crime, Berlusconi was handed a decree informing him that he would be arraigned on charges of corrupting the finance police. The government fell soon after.
The dish of revenge is now being eaten cold by Berlusconi's second government. He came back to government in 2001, encumbered with lawsuits and allegations of criminal wrongdoing that he was determined to face down. In its famous "Why Silvio Berlusconi is unfit to lead Italy" issue of April 2001, published just before the last general election, The Economist listed eight cases in which Berlusconi was under investigation, and others in which he had been found guilty but in which the statute of limitations had extinguished the trial while it was on appeal. One of these cases was the charge of bribing judges; it is still going on.
That case has become the focus of an extraordinary attempt on the part of a government to pervert the course of justice. Throughout this summer, the Case delle Libert? majority rammed through a law-known as the Cirami Law, after its proposer-which would allow a challenge by an accused to the examining magistrate on the grounds that the latter was politically biased against him or her. The government went to great lengths to get the law through quickly-even trying to have the parliament sit in August, a month sacred to the beach. The law was widely seen as aimed at the corruption case in Milan, which seemed to be heading towards a conviction. If Berlusconi's lawyers could plausibly claim that the Milanese magistracy was-as Berlusconi and his allies have been saying for the past eight years-a "red terror," then the case would have to be moved: the resulting delay would make it likely that it, too, would join the list of those cases dropped because they had run out of time. The Cirami Law was finally passed and Berlusconi's lawyers duly claimed bias: however, the magistracy has not-at the time of writing-allowed the plea, and the case goes on, if jerkily.
This is only the latest of other, successful efforts to use legislation to protect Berlusconi and his companies from judicial challenge. A law now on the statute book all but decriminalises the crime of false accounting. Another makes it virtually impossible to admit, in an Italian court, evidence which is gathered abroad.Yet another gives an amnesty on offshore tax evasion. These laws not only provide protection for Berlusconi's companies they all run counter to the general trend in other states, especially the US, where company crime is being viewed more seriously because of the rise in corporate malfeasance.
Berlusconi's control of the media is the second long agony which he is visiting on Italian democracy. He controls almost all of the television channels watched by Italians: the three channels operated by Mediaset, which he owns (there is one other private television channel) and the three channels of Radio Televisione Italiana (RAI), which he controls by virtue of holding the majority in the country. This involves him in two enormous conflicts of interest: first, that his political power can, as in his manipulations of the judicial system, directly benefit his commercial interests; second, and more seriously, his near monopoly of the most powerful communication medium in the state directly contradicts liberal assumptions about power and the role of the media in a democracy.
Berlusconi built up Mediaset through the acquisition of hundreds of local television stations, which he strung together into a national network to get around the legislation protecting the RAI national monopoly. By the early 1990s, Berlusconi had control of three channels of national television. They gave him huge revenues and far more influence than any other media mogul in the world had or has within his own state.
In his The Dark Heart of Italy (Faber, January), Tobias Jones writes that, "having a politician who owns three television channels turns any election into the equivalent of a football match in which one team starts with a three-goal advantage. Victory for the other side, even a draw, is extremely unlikely... Thus Berlusconi has been compared, not unfairly, to Mussolini: both had a balcony from which they could harangue, cajole and persuade adoring viewers."
Many Italians of the left do compare Berlusconi to Mussolini, but it misstates his importance. He is not a haranguer but-as Jones himself writes-a seducer, and one of the means of his seduction is to pose as the underdog, and the champion of underdogs. Thus he and his associates constantly point to the domination of RAI, especially its news and cultural programmes, by leftists: a charge in which there is some truth. This is because, as in most states, current affairs journalists tend to be liberal-left in inclination and, in Italy, that often meant being a member or a supporter of the Communist party. It is also because RAI is as politicised as any other major institution of the Italian state, which carves up the channels and managerial jobs according to political interests. Under the long Christian Democratic hegemony, for example, RAI 3 was, in effect, the "communist channel." Figures like Enzo Biagi and Michele Santoro, both of whom were high-profile broadcasters, were proudly and openly on the left. On a Biagi programme just before the election, the film director Roberto Benigni (best known for La Vita ? Bella) unleashed a diatribe against Berlusconi. Such incidents made it easier for Berlusconi to represent himself as a victim, wishing only to even the score.
The common trope of opposition protest against Berlusconi is that he is a monopolist of both the public and the private spaces. Living in a state commanded by Berlusconi, for the most part living in regions governed by administrations of the right, citizens also watch state and independent Berlusconi television, buy commodities prompted by Berlusconi advertising and seek justice in courts which Berlusconi is seeking to restructure. This omnipresence gives meaning to a banner seen at the mass rally of the anti-Berlusconi forces held in Rome on 14th September-"Berlusconi is a fairy tale."
In the Berlusconi world, the prime minister plays the part of the endlessly smiling and jovial master of ceremonies. He treats government in his many off-the-cuff interviews as a brisk business, like decisions made by a bunch of jolly friends. At times, Berlusconi is, for those used to Anglo-Saxon political culture, astonishingly comic. At a press conference early in October with Anders Fogh Rasmussen, the Danish prime minister, then president of the EU, Berlusconi brought into the public arena press gossip that his wife, Veronica Lario, was having an affair with Massimo Cacciari, the philosopher and former (leftist) Mayor of Venice. "Rasmussen is the best-looking prime minister in Europe," said Berlusconi, gesturing at his guest. "I'm thinking of introducing him to my wife, because he's much better looking than Cacciari... poor woman." For many Italians, not all pro-Berlusconi, this was endearing, indeed a welcome change after so many decades in which persistently grey figures have dominated the national politics of this least grey of European states. It also shows, however, a concern to blur the boundaries between private and public life-also witnessed in Berlusconi's preference for his own luxurious homes as sites for meetings with ministerial colleagues and foreign and domestic dignitaries.
In a book about Berlusconi's language-called Mi Consenta ("allow me," a constant Berlusconi phrase)-the psychologist Alessandro Amadori discusses the Berlusconi booklet, "An Italian story," lavishly illustrated and sent to every Italian home in advance of the 2001 general election. It painted the portrait of one who could have simply enjoyed his great wealth, but who could not stand aside while his nation was ruined. Berlusconi tells the reader: "I thought I had finished with goals and objectives, I thought my life's course had been run, that I could be a grandfather, that I could read the books I hadn't read, watch the films I hadn't seen, listen to the music I like. But then a great danger loomed up over our country, something which could change our life and above all the lives of those we love: a future uncertain, suffocating and illiberal. And so there has appeared, unsuspected, a new and unavoidable goal: to guarantee to the country a permanent place in the west, in liberty, in democracy."
But it is broadcasting, his ace in the hole, which may prove to be his Achilles heel. For a man who likes to appear as an ordinary bloke, he has become arrogant with power. During a press conference in Bulgaria in April, he launched an attack on Biagi and Santoro and called for them to be fired (their contracts have not been renewed). Even Giuliano Ferrara, the acerbically anti-leftist editor of the daily Il Foglio (co-owned by Berlusconi's wife) and Berlusconi's spokesman during his first government, thought this went too far, and wrote, "he who has a potential influence on a good six television channels and a great deal of financial and political power concentrated in his hands has to know how to control himself." The silencing of Biagi and Santoro has made them possible rallying centres for a future anti-Berlusconi tide.
The two centre-left representatives on the five-strong RAI board resigned in November in protest, they said, against the increasingly blatant manipulation of the news and current affairs on RAI and the fact that RAI was being run down in order to favour Mediaset. After a few days' hesitation, the centrist on the board also resigned, leaving the two right wingers deprived of a quorum, and the government with a headache on what to do. The leaders of the two houses of parliament, by law the electoral college for the new board, have not yet agreed on whether to appoint new members, or reconstitute the board entirely.
The matter is important in itself, but also points to a growing problem for Berlusconi. Marco Staderini, the hesitating centrist, was a former Christian Democrat and close to Pier Ferdinando Casini. Casini is president of the lower house and leader of the Unione Democratica Christiana, a small Christian Democratic party and a member of Berlusconi's coalition of the right. Casini favours a total reconstitution of the RAI board: Marcello Pera, the president of the senate and a Forza Italia man, wants the rightists to stay on. It is more than a technical difference: it is a growing divergence of governing philosophy between right and centre-right.
Most of the Christian-inclined parliamentarians have until now sided with Berlusconi. Now, they are feeling queasy. Although the government's conservatism fits well, in some respects, with the conservatism of Pope John Paul II, in other respects, active Catholics are finding the government repellent. Its measures against immigrants, and the anti-immigrant pronouncements of some regional and city leaders of the right, have provoked strong criticism from priests and bishops-who are often in the forefront of offering aid and shelter to immigrants.
The Christian politicians also feel as though their time may come again. This, at any rate, is the view of one of the grand seigneurs of Italian politics-cum-business, Carlo de Benedetti, former head of Olivetti, whose interests are now largely confined to publishing (one of his interests is la Repubblica, the main daily of the left). In an interview at his Milan headquarters, he said that Berlusconi had been amongst the first to see that the collapse of the Christian Democrats and of the Socialist party had left an empty space, and that he had the money to fill it. But, he says, "the ideological space he occupies is itself empty. His party will not survive him. There will be a new grouping of the centre-right. The Catholics are still very powerful. They are presently an 'underground' party, but they will re-emerge. We will be governed, again, after Berlusconi, by the centre and the centre-left."
It is one of the best hopes for the salvation of the Italian state that the centrists will swing left once more, unable to stomach the increasingly overt imposition of Berlusconian power. International pressure would help: but there is no likelihood of a repeat of the EU imposing sanctions on a member government, as it did on Austria after J?rg Haider's Freedom party entered the coalition of the right in 2000. Yet in some respects, Berlusconi is a greater threat to Italian democracy than Haider has been to Austrian.
The economy, however, is the greatest source of worry for the right-for it was Berlusconi's claim that he was the man for a new era of growth. The Milanese business consultant and writer Marco Vitale, himself a prominent Catholic who has worked all of his life among the financial and industrial elites of Italy's wealthy north, told me that, "the business people in the north don't care much about conflicts of interest. They assume that Berlusconi will take care of his own interests first: that's normal. But he received strong support from the business world because he promised a policy based on deregulation, privatisation, freedom for business from the bureaucracy. And, of course, tax cuts."
Vitale explained that much of the 1990s-when Italy had mainly "technocratic" cabinets or, from 1996-2001, the Ulivo administrations-were a hard financial grind. "The policy was to get into the euro: it was the policy of the leading figures, like Ciampi and Prodi. And they succeeded, against the expectation of the whole world." It was a remarkable period of success for Italian political and economic management: a period in which, focused on the overriding objective of remaining in the core group of European states, successive governments got unwilling assent to tax increases and spending freezes. In a lecture he gave earlier this year, Vincenzo Visco, who was finance minister in the Prodi government, said that when Italian politics imploded at the start of the 1990s the country was seen as economically, as well as politically, lost. Yet the governments in that decade managed the budget and got into the euro in the first wave. "But the price was high," says Vitale. "Taxes were raised, and there were practically no public works in the country."
Berlusconi's pitch, which was that he would run Italy as successfully as one of his businesses (and, subliminally, that he was so rich that he had no need to steal, like other politicians), was tailored for a country in which impatience with economic sacrifice temporarily united the classes. The Ulivo government achieved a lot, but much was also left undone: the bureaucracy was still nightmarish, large parts of the south still in the grip of organised crime and underdeveloped, growth lagging behind the European average. Berlusconi's programme was a "don't worry, be happy" one: tax cuts could co-exist with public works; more privatisation would make the state more efficient; the bureaucracy would be cut. "All this meant that Berlusconi got support from a wide range," says Vitale. "It wasn't just business and the uneducated. It was educated people as well, who thought-he can do what needs to be done."
Berlusconi proclaimed that he entered politics to get rid of statism, excess union power and a judicial system abused by judges biased against individual freedoms. His coalition promoted, both in opposition and in the first months of government, a freewheeling economic agenda composed of labour flexibility, liberalisation, privatisation and overall tax reductions. But 19 months later, very little has been achieved. All major reforms directed to freeing market forces are static, if not going backwards.
An interview in November with Economics Minister Giuliano Tremonti, in La Stampa, seems to mark a turning point. "I am not afraid," said Tremonti, "to talk about a European neo-protectionism, whose aim is not to threaten world trade but to correct its asymmetries." He added that "the market isn't an idol," criticised "the privatisation utopia" and said that "those who think that the right rejects state intervention understand neither the right nor the state." This took many liberal and free-marketeers by surprise: Angelo Panebianco, a political scientist and columnist for the Corriere della Sera, until then moderately supportive of the government, wrote that "even those who never had much faith in the pro-market nature of Berlusconi's government are now flabbergasted by the ease of the turnaround." For the first time, those close to what they had thought was Berlusconi's free-market agenda criticise him openly-including the Confindustria (Confederation of Italian Industry).
Privatisation has been the first victim of this process. In the period 1992-2000, when centre-left governments were in power-except for the Berlusconi interregnum-Italy had been the leader of the European privatisation movement, with proceeds of around 113 billion euros for the Treasury. Since Berlusconi has been in power, the proceeds have been around 0.25 billion.
Marco Vitale, who dealt with the parties of the right during a period as budget controller for Milan, says "none of the coalition partners are really interested in liberal economics. The Alleanza Nazionale (the former neo-fascist Movimento Sociale Italiano) thinks of the state as above the citizen; the Northern League is supported by small business people who just want the state to protect them from big business and from imports; and the Forza Italia people are populists and opportunists who simply react to the public likes and dislikes."
Other liberalisation is also stalled. At different times, government ministers have made clear that the current administration doesn't like too much power in the hands of the regulatory bodies set up by the previous centre-left government. One could argue that market reforms are too ambitious a task at this juncture for Italy, and that the emphasis has to be given to the basics of macroeconomic stability and labour market flexibility. But even here the record is meagre. The last budget is full of one-off measures and it makes no pretence of tackling the pensions problem. There has been a tax reduction for the poor but the huge tax reductions promised during the electoral campaign are nowhere to be seen.
Having projected himself as a Thatcher-like figure, committed to reform even if painful, Berlusconi is emerging as a corporatist-inclined populist, with no discernible policy except a continuation of his own power. And his own power is likely to continue-most of all because of the weakness of the left.
The left was shattered by the defeat of 2001, even though it saw it coming. The centrist, centre-left and far-leftist groups which had collaborated until the far left broke away are now mutually distrustful. The three main parties are (in descending order of size) the Democratici di Sinistra (former communists), led by Piero Fassino; the Margherita, led by Francesco Rutelli; and the Rifondazione Communista (still communists) led by Fausto Bertinotti. Rutelli, an articulate and attractive figure, also led the Ulivo coalition in the 2001 election and did better than expected.
Bertinotti has led his Rifondazione into ever-closer alliance with Italy's powerful "no-global" movement. Rutelli, whose Margherita is composed of liberals, former Christian Democrats and environmentalists, is not given overall authority over left tactics and strategy. Fassino is seen as a weak leader.
The failure of the left parties has led to much criticism, especially from the left-inclined intelligentsia. Both the trade unions and civil society groups have put on vast demonstrations in Rome, Milan and other cities, in which the leaders of the main parties of the left have not been invited to speak. The prospect of an electable centre-left continues to be undercut by the prime minister's media monopoly, its own divisions and the anti-party militancy of the intelligentsia and the young.
The final disturbing question is-how far is this a wave of the future for Europe? I think it might be, in a number of ways. First, Italy has gone further than any other major state in destroying parties. The implosion of the late 1980s and early 1990s left a vacuum. The beneficiary was the wealthiest man in Italy, who filled it with his money, his media, and an instantly-created populist party which took a football terrace chant for its name and brought into coalition a group of former fascists and an authoritarian-populist, regional autonomy party. The left has two large fragments of the Communist party still forced to fight old feuds and a new centrist party which still lacks a firm base and ideology. It may be, as de Benedetti says, that the old pattern of Christian Democracy on the centre-right and mild socialism on the centre-left will restabilise Italian politics: at the moment, a majority-and a stable majority-has been assembled by money and media and is kept there by money and media. There are enough parallels with political life in North America, Europe, the former communist states and the developing world to point to this mix being more than a temporary transition. Italy is a vision of what happens when parties lose authority. Political parties are losing members, cohesion and credibility everywhere-yet there is no sign that any other system can govern complex modern democracies.
Second, Italy-hitherto the most loyal adherent to the European ideal and the Atlantic Alliance since Alcide de Gasperi's postwar Christian Democrats pledged fidelity to both as a foundation for a centrist political order-is now reaching for a more nationalist political expression. The anti-European rhetoric of its ministers is now a constant feature, as is its aggressive hostility to immigration: the "Bossi-Fini" law, called so after the two party chiefs who framed it, is designed to stop all immigration except where the immigrant has the offer of a job. Italy has one of the lowest proportions of immigrants of any of the EU states: it has been used to seeing itself as a country of emigration. Now, with Africa and the Balkans nearby, it is amongst the most hostile to immigration, in both government policy and popular feeling.
Nationalism is not confined to Italy: it is evident throughout Europe, where parties of the populist right have surged in the last two years. And narrow nationalism can come in both state-level and European-level forms: Tremonti's remarks, calling for a European protectionism, may be a prelude to further calls for a Europe which pulls up at least some of the drawbridges it had lowered to the rest of the world.
Third, Berlusconi incarnates the logic of modern media politics. He focuses on the present, and on presentation. He is famous for saying contradictory things within hours. In a public speech in Germany soon after 11th September, he said that the west had a superior civilisation, then denied he said it. To journalists in Moscow, during a meeting with Vladimir Putin, he said that he did not believe that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction, then reversed this view a day later when back in Italy. These contradictions disappear down a memory hole. It is a kind of soft version of 1984, where everything that is asserted now is true and is capable at any time in the future of being declared false-or just forgotten.
"We will be," says the newscaster Howard Beale in the 1974 film Network, "whatever you want us to be. We will tell you whatever you want us to." The vast and delusive power of television is now linked to a politician who has shown that he has few scruples in its use. The lack of any sustained protests by Europe's other politicians, especially from the centre-right European People's Party of which Forza Italia is a major member, has given the signal to the Italian right that it is fine to act in this way. It may also be prompting other would-be tribunes of the people to think they too can, with impunity, unite media and political power in one party, or one person. Berlusconi in power is a danger to a great country, a danger to Europe's proclaimed ideas and a danger to a world in which media have wrapped themselves around public life, and may strangle it.
