mercoledì 16 dicembre 2009
domenica 13 dicembre 2009
domenica 6 dicembre 2009
Il bello della decenza
| Scritto da Nando dalla Chiesa | |
| Sunday 06 December 2009 Ecco il testo del mio intervento alle manifestazioni di ieri a Milano e Genova "Volete voi che vi parli di Gaspare Spatuzza? Volete voi che vi parli dell’avvocato Mills? Non vi parlerò né dell’uno né dell’altro. Vi parlerò invece della decenza. Perché se oggi sono qui è per un bisogno di decenza. Non ho bisogno di rivelazioni. Mi basta, mi avanza, mi toglie quasi il respiro quel che ho visto e sentito in questi anni. Un paese decente non può. Non può avere per capo del governo un signore che disconosce l’autorità delle leggi e pretende di non sottomettersi loro per ciò che ha fatto ieri, che fa oggi e che farà domani. Un capo del governo che insulta senza coraggio (perché sempre pronto a smentirsi) tutte le istituzioni del suo paese, se solo lo ammoniscono che le leggi esistono e vanno rispettate. Un capo del governo che disfa i codici, scassa la giustizia, manda liberi i criminali per non rispondere dei reati che gli vengono contestati. Non è decente un paese in cui sono gli indagati, gli imputati e i pregiudicati a scrivere il codice penale e ad attaccare i loro giudici senza contraddittorio sulle televisioni di Stato. Non lo è nemmeno un paese in cui il capo del governo offre alle sue favorite non gioielli e profumi ma posti di governo, poltrone istituzionali e pubbliche responsabilità in nome del popolo. In cui il capo del governo impiega la metà del suo tempo -di questo sì abbiamo le prove- non a lavorare per il paese ma a corteggiare signorine e tramare contro la giustizia. In cui gli aerei di stato vengono usati per sbarcare menestrelli e ballerine nei luoghi di sollazzo del capo del governo e della sua corte variopinta, minorenni comprese. Nessuna civiltà, nessuna decenza possono riconoscersi a un paese in cui i luoghi sorvegliati e protetti dalle forze dell’ordine vengono violati da donne sconosciute e noleggiate da imputati di traffico di droga per divertire i potenti di Stato, anzi, il più potente tra loro. Non è decente il paese in cui il capo del governo dà pubblicamente e per strada della “stronza” a una cittadina che lo contesta con parole civili. In cui il capo del governo risponde alla giovane che lamenta l’assenza di lavoro invitandola a sposarsi con un ricco. Od offende il sedicenne che gli denuncia l’ indigenza di suo padre rispondendogli “si vede che non ha lavorato abbastanza”. C’è in tutto questo la perdita del decoro; del rispetto e della rispettabilità. Non c’è decoro quando dopo una calamità naturale il capo del governo annuncia pubblicamente ospitalità nelle proprie residenze per i disperati senza tetto e poi non ne dà ad alcuno. Quando le relazioni internazionali del paese si costruiscono su ospitalità libertine e su scherzi d’infanzia o ammiccamenti senza intelligenza. Quando appuntamenti diplomatici di prima importanza vengono disertati d’improvviso per attardarsi in convegni erotici da basso impero. Non c’è decenza se nel paese sfregiato e straziato dalla mafia il capo del governo grida che strozzerebbe con le sue mani chi ha fatto film e libri sulla mafia. Se egli ha tenuto per anni come suo ospite e commensale un capomafia sanguinario spacciandolo per stalliere. Se il suo socio di sempre e senatore definisce quel capomafia un eroe, in un evidente impeto di gratitudine per non avere egli raccontato nulla ai magistrati di quanto aveva visto e saputo. Io non ho bisogno di sapere da Spatuzza della trattativa. A me basta vedere. Vedere che è stato appena deciso che i beni sequestrati alla mafia possono essere rivenduti all’asta, dove la mafia li ricomprerà intimidendo la concorrenza. A me basta vedere la campagna condotta contro i collaboratori di giustizia, indeboliti per legge e bersagliati senza fine dai giornali posseduti o controllati dal capo del governo. A me basta vedere che il carcere duro viene ridotto progressivamente nelle sue applicazioni dai giudici di sorveglianza e dalle burocrazie. Che il concorso esterno in associazione mafiosa (pensato e voluto da Falcone e Borsellino) viene oggi attaccato per salvarsi dai processi. Non ho bisogno di Spatuzza. Io vedo che mentre le forze dell’ordine e i magistrati prendono i latitanti indipendentemente dai governi, le leggi (che sono l’espressione più chiara della volontà politica) rendono sempre più difficili o impossibili i processi e ostacolano le indagini, o rendono irriconoscibili le tracce e i movimenti dei capitali sporchi. E che il governo non scioglie per mafia i comuni che i prefetti e perfino il ministro dell’interno chiedono di sciogliere.Questa è la trattativa. Non è decente un paese in cui l’opposizione e chi non si fa servo nella maggioranza vengono ricattati con video, foto, notizie, minacce di notizie sulla vita privata, a opera dei giornali del capo del governo. In cui si colpiscono le intercettazioni telefoniche legali e si moltiplica il controllo illegaledelle persone a opera di gruppi privati, del sottobosco dei servizi o di faccendieri senza scrupoli. Dove i testimoni scomodi vengono ammazzati o intimiditi. Dove i giornalisti e gli opinionisti critici vengono ripetutamente portati in giudizio civile per rovinarli economicamente. Dove i giudici scomodi vengono pedinati e filmati e poi messi alla gogna in pubblico per il colore del calzino. Dove si assiste alla più ossessiva campagna ideologica della storia repubblicana contro i comunisti ma si adottano i metodi di controllo dei regimi comunisti e si innalzano ad amici privilegiati e a esempi di democrazia gli avanzi più ripugnanti di quei regimi. Non è decente un paese dove si continua a parlare di Dio, di patria e di famiglia da gente senza Dio, né patria né famiglia. Dove il potente può tutto, senza confini, e il più debole diventa il capro espiatorio indifeso di tutti i rancori e degli umori peggiori, dei coraggi repressi e delle quotidiane frustrazioni di persone che hanno messo in vendita la loro libertà e la loro pietas. Noi viviamo oggi in un’orgia di indecenza. Ma l’indecenza, cari amici, non sta tutta da una parte. Da quella parte è grande, sterminata. Ma proprio perché lo sapevamo, avremmo dovuto fare l’impossibile perché non tornasse al potere, dopo che per cinque anni di fila gli italiani avevano fatto vincere le elezioni al centrosinistra. L’indecenza sta anche nell’essersi infischiati del pericolo di quella indecenza più grande per inseguire le proprie personali o partitiche ambizioni. Nell’averle messe davanti all’ Italia e agli italiani. Nulla c’entra Berlusconi se un killer della camorra risulta iscritto al Pd, se amministratori del centrosinistra finiscono in scandali di ogni tipo e di ogni livello quasi in ogni regione, se un senatore dell’opposizione divide il suo braccio destro a mezzadria con un boss di Cosa Nostra. Non siamo tutti uguali. Ma a me piacerebbe che questo No B Day fosse l’inizio di una vera, grande, consapevole, partecipata rivolta morale contro tutto ciò che rende possibile il dominio di Berlusconi e ce ne fa assimilare i modelli di vita e di pensiero. Una rivolta morale in nome di un paese capace di riscoprire l’orgoglio di sé. Che scopra la bellezza senza fine, la rigorosa serenità, la grandezza civile della decenza." http://www.nandodallachiesa.it/public/index.php?option=content&task=view&id=1229 |
Berlusconi at bay
Editorial - Published: December 6 2009
Silvio Berlusconi, Italy’s flamboyant prime minister, has always seemed able to float above the controversies that episodically crowd in on him, like the impish hero of some picaresque novel. Italian voters continue to elect him and the wave of sex scandals that have kept his name in the news for much of this year has, if anything, added to his mystique.
But things could now – at last – be getting serious for Il Cavaliere.
On Friday, in Turin, he was named in court by a convicted killer as having links to Sicily’s Mafia in the midst of a bombing campaign carried out by the Cosa Nostra in the early 1990s. The allegations – denied by Mr Berlusconi – nevertheless highlight his links with Marcello Dell’Utri, a close associate appealing against a nine-year jail sentence for Mafia association. On the same day, in another court in Milan, Mr Berlusconi’s lawyers said that his official duties prevented him from appearing to defend himself against charges that he had bribed David Mills, his former UK lawyer, to give false testimony. He is also a defendant in a separate trial involving his Mediaset TV interests, while last week yet another court demanded that his Fininvest holding company provide a €750m bank guarantee against damages awarded against it in a takeover battle for the Mondadori publishing house.
Since the constitutional court in October struck down a law he pushed through to make sitting prime ministers immune from prosecution, Mr Berlusconi has been under siege. His wife’s claim for a punitive divorce settlement has added to his woes – and kept the headlines well stoked. Over the weekend, Italians mounted a big No to Berlusconi demonstration.
Even his ally, Gianfranco Fini, a possible successor who has hurtled from post-fascism towards the political centre, was recorded saying Mr Berlusconi confuses “leadership with absolute monarchy”. His foreign policy, based on personal ties to leaders such as Vladimir Putin and Muammer Gaddafi, sometimes appears to mix state and business affairs.
It is premature to count this wily survivor out – but he is skating on thin ice. His own complaint that he cannot govern and fight the barrage of court cases against him is surely right. He may dismiss it all as a witch-hunt by “red magistrates”. But his government is starting to spend more time dealing with Mr Berlusconi’s problems than the country’s. Tough decisions to reform Italy’s economy and institutions will not be taken while he remains prime minister.
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2009
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/230a7a4e-e29c-11de-b028-00144feab49a.html
Books by Economist writers in 2009
Dec 3rd 2009
From The Economist print edition
Into the Heart of the Mafia: A Journey Through the Italian South
By David Lane. Profile; 288 pages; £15
The Mafia is of service everywhere, it seems, even to Silvio Berlusconi. A lesson in how Italy really works, by a longstanding Rome-based contributor to The Economist.
http://www.economist.com/books/displaystory.cfm?story_id=15009707
From The Economist print edition
Into the Heart of the Mafia: A Journey Through the Italian South
By David Lane. Profile; 288 pages; £15
The Mafia is of service everywhere, it seems, even to Silvio Berlusconi. A lesson in how Italy really works, by a longstanding Rome-based contributor to The Economist.
http://www.economist.com/books/displaystory.cfm?story_id=15009707
Time to say addio
EPAOur favourite prime minister
Dec 3rd 2009 From The Economist print edition
Silvio Berlusconi’s political career is teetering on the brink. He should go
EVEN by his standards, it has been a bad week for Silvio Berlusconi, Italy’s prime minister. A court demanded surety for a huge fine on his Fininvest company, over its 2000 purchase of Mondadori, Italy’s biggest publisher. His wife, Veronica, is seeking a vast divorce settlement. His trial on charges of bribing a British lawyer, David Mills, is restarting after his immunity was quashed. New claims are being aired of one-time Mafia connections. A “No Berlusconi Day” protest is being staged in Rome this weekend. Mr Berlusconi has made political survival an art, but even he now looks to be in trouble (see article).
The Economist’s view of Mr Berlusconi has been consistent. We criticised his political debut in 1993-94. In 2001 we said he was unfit to rule Italy. In 2006 we advised Italian voters to say “Basta!” to his government. We urged them to back his centre-left opponent in March 2008. Yet we have been cautious over joining the extensive and prurient commentary on a lurid array of sex scandals that have engulfed the 73-year-old prime minister this year. We prefer to judge him on two more substantive matters: the conflicts of interest between his business and political jobs, and his government’s performance.
This week’s events have thrown a dark light on the first. The resumption of various court cases involving him or his associates, plus a series of other business and legal issues, are distracting him and his government from their other responsibilities. The damage is visible. With the financial crisis and the recession, attention has shifted from Italy’s economic difficulties to the plight of places like Greece. Yet although Italy’s admirable small businesses in the north are thriving, the country as a whole still lags behind badly. In the year to the third quarter its GDP shrank by more than the euro-area average, and it is expected to fall by almost 5% in 2009, as big a drop as in any other big west European country.
Mr Berlusconi’s government has been shockingly dilatory in its response. For a long time the prime minister denied that Italy would go into recession. He used the parlous public finances as a reason to justify why Italy’s fiscal stimulus should be much smaller than in other big countries. Unlike a few braver political leaders, he also failed to promote the sorts of economic reform needed to restore the country’s competitiveness, which has deteriorated sharply against Germany’s. Italy remains over-regulated and comes out distressingly badly in international league tables for such things as the ease of starting a business, the extent of corruption, the level of a country’s research spending and the quality of its education.
In his third government Mr Berlusconi has also pursued an eccentric foreign policy out of kilter with Italy’s Western allies. He has cosied up to Russia’s Vladimir Putin and Libya’s Muammar Qaddafi in pursuit of Italian energy interests (this week he was in Belarus, chatting up another dictator, Alyaksandr Lukashenka). Under Mr Berlusconi, Italy continues to punch below its weight in the European Union and the world.
Go, go, Silvio
Partly thanks to his own machinations, there is no obvious successor if Mr Berlusconi quits. Indeed, some supporters say it is better to stick with him because the alternative would be chaos. Yet Italy has other potential leaders: Gianfranco Fini in his own party, who is openly plotting to oust Mr Berlusconi; Pier Ferdinando Casini in the centre, who held aloof from his third government; even the new centre-left leader, Pierluigi Bersani, who pushed reforms in the government of Romano Prodi. One of these would surely come to the fore were Mr Berlusconi to go. Whoever does might even complete the country’s transformation, which Mr Berlusconi halted in its tracks when he entered the political stage in the 1990s. Italy would be better off if il cavaliere now rode out of the scene.
http://www.economist.com/opinion/displaystory.cfm?story_id=15017197
Dec 3rd 2009 From The Economist print edition
Silvio Berlusconi’s political career is teetering on the brink. He should go
EVEN by his standards, it has been a bad week for Silvio Berlusconi, Italy’s prime minister. A court demanded surety for a huge fine on his Fininvest company, over its 2000 purchase of Mondadori, Italy’s biggest publisher. His wife, Veronica, is seeking a vast divorce settlement. His trial on charges of bribing a British lawyer, David Mills, is restarting after his immunity was quashed. New claims are being aired of one-time Mafia connections. A “No Berlusconi Day” protest is being staged in Rome this weekend. Mr Berlusconi has made political survival an art, but even he now looks to be in trouble (see article).
The Economist’s view of Mr Berlusconi has been consistent. We criticised his political debut in 1993-94. In 2001 we said he was unfit to rule Italy. In 2006 we advised Italian voters to say “Basta!” to his government. We urged them to back his centre-left opponent in March 2008. Yet we have been cautious over joining the extensive and prurient commentary on a lurid array of sex scandals that have engulfed the 73-year-old prime minister this year. We prefer to judge him on two more substantive matters: the conflicts of interest between his business and political jobs, and his government’s performance.
This week’s events have thrown a dark light on the first. The resumption of various court cases involving him or his associates, plus a series of other business and legal issues, are distracting him and his government from their other responsibilities. The damage is visible. With the financial crisis and the recession, attention has shifted from Italy’s economic difficulties to the plight of places like Greece. Yet although Italy’s admirable small businesses in the north are thriving, the country as a whole still lags behind badly. In the year to the third quarter its GDP shrank by more than the euro-area average, and it is expected to fall by almost 5% in 2009, as big a drop as in any other big west European country.
Mr Berlusconi’s government has been shockingly dilatory in its response. For a long time the prime minister denied that Italy would go into recession. He used the parlous public finances as a reason to justify why Italy’s fiscal stimulus should be much smaller than in other big countries. Unlike a few braver political leaders, he also failed to promote the sorts of economic reform needed to restore the country’s competitiveness, which has deteriorated sharply against Germany’s. Italy remains over-regulated and comes out distressingly badly in international league tables for such things as the ease of starting a business, the extent of corruption, the level of a country’s research spending and the quality of its education.
In his third government Mr Berlusconi has also pursued an eccentric foreign policy out of kilter with Italy’s Western allies. He has cosied up to Russia’s Vladimir Putin and Libya’s Muammar Qaddafi in pursuit of Italian energy interests (this week he was in Belarus, chatting up another dictator, Alyaksandr Lukashenka). Under Mr Berlusconi, Italy continues to punch below its weight in the European Union and the world.
Go, go, Silvio
Partly thanks to his own machinations, there is no obvious successor if Mr Berlusconi quits. Indeed, some supporters say it is better to stick with him because the alternative would be chaos. Yet Italy has other potential leaders: Gianfranco Fini in his own party, who is openly plotting to oust Mr Berlusconi; Pier Ferdinando Casini in the centre, who held aloof from his third government; even the new centre-left leader, Pierluigi Bersani, who pushed reforms in the government of Romano Prodi. One of these would surely come to the fore were Mr Berlusconi to go. Whoever does might even complete the country’s transformation, which Mr Berlusconi halted in its tracks when he entered the political stage in the 1990s. Italy would be better off if il cavaliere now rode out of the scene.
http://www.economist.com/opinion/displaystory.cfm?story_id=15017197
giovedì 3 dicembre 2009
Under attack from all sides
Illustration by Peter Schrank
Italy's troubled prime ministerDec 3rd 2009 | ROME
From The Economist print edition
THOUSANDS of protesters will gather in Rome on December 5th, not against the government’s policies, but against its leader. “No Berlusconi Day”, the latest protest born spontaneously on the internet, underlines the degree to which Italian politics is now defined by attitudes to one man: Silvio Berlusconi. Yet not even Italy’s attention-grabbing prime minister can any longer relish this. For No Berlusconi Day comes after a week in which the billionaire politician has been under relentless attack. This could even prove a turning-point. Italy’s most popular blogger, the comedian Beppe Grillo, thought so. “The countdown has already begun for Berlusconi,” he wrote. “Prepare the bubbly.”
The first blows landed on December 1st when tensions within the ruling majority burst into the open. An opposition newspaper, La Repubblica, posted a recording, made without his knowledge, of remarks by Gianfranco Fini, whose former National Alliance party is now part of Mr Berlusconi’s People of Freedom (PdL). The man who is notionally Mr Berlusconi’s closest ally was caught saying that the prime minister confuses “leadership with absolute monarchy” and “popular consent…with a sort of immunity from any other authority”. As Mr Fini’s spokesman noted, this was merely a franker version of criticism he had already aired. But it raises more starkly than ever a question: can he and his colleagues stick with Mr Berlusconi?
Also on December 1st, a Milan court asked Fininvest, the company at the heart of Mr Berlusconi’s business empire, for a €750m ($1.1 billion) bank guarantee. This was to show it could pay damages awarded to CIR, the holding company of Mr Berlusconi’s arch-rival, Carlo De Benedetti, in a case after the battle in the 1990s over the Mondadori publishing house. Fininvest’s lawyer was found to have bribed a judge to favour its bid. Mr Berlusconi’s company is appealing against the award, but if it fails, it may have to sell assets.
That is not Mr Berlusconi’s only money worry. His wife, Veronica Lario, who wants a legal separation, reportedly seeks annual maintenance of €43m. She broke with her 73-year-old husband after he attended the birthday party of a pretty 18-year-old, Noemi Letizia, in Naples. Neither that scandal nor one involving women allegedly paid to spend the night with him has gone away. Ms Letizia is now a model and Naples is dotted with giant posters of her in skimpy lingerie. Bookshops across Italy are selling a new book written by a call-girl, Patrizia D’Addario, recounting in explicit detail her alleged sexual encounter with the prime minister.
The sex scandals have taken only a limited toll on Mr Berlusconi’s popularity. But he is also a figure in two court cases that could do him more damage. In Milan judges are due to begin hearing a case in which he is accused of bribing a British lawyer, David Mills. This trial was halted in 2008 by a law (of Mr Berlusconi’s design), which gave the prime minister immunity but was overturned by Italy’s constitutional court in October. The new trial and the two appeals allowed under Italian law are unlikely to be over before the case is timed out by a statute of limitations. But Mr Mills has already been convicted of taking the bribe, and has lost his first appeal. His final appeal will be heard next year, by when the court trying Mr Berlusconi should reach an initial verdict. In a shameless bid to slow it down, his lawyers insist that he must be present at every hearing, only to cite reasons why he cannot be because of government business.
In the second case a former mobster, Gaspare Spatuzza, will say in court what he has already reportedly told prosecutors: that Mr Berlusconi did a deal with the Mafia around the time that he entered politics in 1994. Mr Fini was overheard calling this an “atomic bomb”. But its true explosive potential is unclear. Mr Berlusconi’s relationship with Sicily’s Cosa Nostra has long been the subject of conjecture. He once employed a Mafia boss. Marcello Dell’Utri, who set up Mr Berlusconi’s first party, Forza Italia, is appealing against a nine-year jail sentence for Mafia ties.
Yet Mr Spatuzza’s account is hearsay, based on what he claims to have been told by a more senior mafioso. According to leaks, Mr Berlusconi, who furiously denies any link, is accused of promising to relax the tough prison regime that has become the state’s most effective weapon against organised crime. It is still in use. And the Mafia is weaker than ever thanks to some spectacular police operations, the most recent of which were carried out after Mr Berlusconi’s return to office last year.
Indeed, he might plausibly argue that Mr Spatuzza’s claims reflect a vendetta by Cosa Nostra, aimed at a politician it wrongly assumed would do its bidding. Nor is this the only card Mr Berlusconi has. Mr Fini has for months puzzled his followers by arguing for a conspicuously progressive form of conservatism. The disclosure of his true feelings about Mr Berlusconi may leave him isolated, even vulnerable.
Moreover, if pressure from outside becomes intolerable, the prime minister has a final option: to appeal over the heads of critics and enemies alike to voters, arguing that he is the victim of an unholy alliance of left-wing judges, right-wing mavericks and the Mafia. Mr Berlusconi may be looking at a dwindling stack of chips. But he has a joker up his sleeve.
http://www.economist.com/world/europe/displaystory.cfm?story_id=15014270
martedì 1 dicembre 2009
How Silvio Berlusconi Uses Women on TV
By CARLA POWER Monday, Nov. 30, 2009
Standing in their uniform miniskirts and stilettos, three young women bend over ironing boards, pressing men's shirts before a live studio audience. They're competing to be schedine, young women who dance a little, wear little and say little on Quelli Che ... Il Calcio (Football Fans), a popular Sunday afternoon show on Italian state TV. "Schedine have to be beautiful, but they've also got to be practical," grins the show's presenter. "Let's see how they do!" An ex-footballer descends to judge the ironing contest, awarding the prize to a lissom blonde.
There's nothing new about breasts, thighs and silliness on Italian TV. They have bedazzled viewers since the 1980s, when the television stations of Silvio Berlusconi, a mere media mogul before entering politics, revolutionized the airwaves by putting Italians on a diet of American soap operas, football and sex all over his Mediaset empire. But the formula was about more than TV ratings; it also boosted Berlusconi's political fortunes.
More than 20 years after he transformed Italian TV, Berlusconi is Prime Minister for the third time; he has already served longer in the office than anyone since 1946. Of late, to be sure, he's taken some lumps. Italy's Constitutional Court overturned a law granting Berlusconi immunity from prosecution while in office, clearing obstructions to trials in which he is accused of bribery and illicit accounting at Mediaset. But even were he to be turfed out tomorrow, Berlusconi would leave a lasting legacy. His TV shows have seen to that. "Berlusconi changed the culture of Italy before he changed the politics of it," says Alexander Stille, author of The Sack of Rome, a book on Berlusconi's power tactics. "He introduced a culture of luxury and sex, one entirely different from the traditions of austerity promoted by Catholicism and the communists. His control of commercial television meant that he is the only politician in the world who helped create and shape his own electorate before it elected him."
At the heart of Berlusconi's culture is the velina, or showgirl, who is served up to Italians every day, like pasta. Some veline merely stand mute while male presenters talk. Some give on-air lap dances to chat-show guests, as did one earlier this year to Inter Milan coach José Mourinho. Others play the funny little games producers devise, posing as table legs, or braving cold showers in tight dresses. Some simply strip: Mediaset's homepage recently featured a clip of a blonde clad in a black garbage bag, slowly lowering it to reveal her breasts. Degrading? Undoubtedly. But there's no denying the status of the showgirl in Berlusconi's Italy. "We used to get 10 or 15 applications a week," notes Gabriele Bertone, an agent at a Milan talent agency. "Now we get hundreds." A recent poll among young girls in Milan showed their top choice of profession was to be a velina. "Sure, everyone wants to be [one]," shrugs Anna Depoli, a Milanese secretary waiting to take her seat in Quelli Che ... Il Calcio's audience. "If you're a velina, then you have the chance to get to know football players, and if you marry them, you could end up with a lot of money."
The velina has become more than a mainstay of Italian television; she is the rock on which Berlusconi built his political career. In the 15 years since he began dominating Italian politics, Berlusconi has created a seamless weave of entertainment and power. The Taliban may use the virtue of their country's women as a rallying cry; Berlusconi has used Italian women's beauty. Americans should invest in Italy, he once told a Wall Street audience, because it had the comeliest secretaries.
Playing the Game
Increasingly, the velina is a political player as well as a sexual one. Though just 18, Noemi Letizia — whose relationship with Berlusconi spurred feverish speculation in the Italian press this summer — knows how the game works. "[I want to be] a showgirl," she told an Italian newspaper. "I am interested in politics, too ... I'd rather be a candidate for the Chamber of Parliament. Papi Silvio would take care of that." Last year, Berlusconi formalized the politics-showgirls link, appointing Mara Carfagna, 32, a former velina and topless model, as his Minister for Equal Opportunities. This summer his party nominated four young starlets as candidates for the European parliamentary elections. "The idea was to make the party younger," says Elisa Alloro, a 33-year-old television presenter who was initially proposed as a candidate, and is the author of We, Silvio's Girls. "It was the first time in Italy that people were interested in the European elections — just because we were veline! " Berlusconi's soon-to-be ex-wife, Veronica Lario, was less impressed, decrying the tactic as "entertainment for the emperor."
Entertainment is central to the political genius of a man who started off as a crooner on a cruise line, and who christened his party Forza Italia after a national football chant. He's anything but gray. "When [former Prime Minister Romano] Prodi was on TV, I had to turn the sound way up," snorts one middle-aged Berlusconi supporter. "Prodi speaks like a priest." Ask an Italian what they think of their current leader, and chances are they'll chuckle — but most go on to say they voted for him. For many of his countrymen, Berlusconi's appetites are central to his appeal: "He is a real Italian," shrugs Alessio de Mitri, a youth coordinator for Berlusconi's party, now called Il Popolo della Libertà (PDL). "He likes to eat. He likes parties. He's going through a divorce, like a lot of people. He's going through company problems. He's really normal."
Sort of a normal superman — at least as his story is told on his own stations. Mediaset shows will tell you Berlusconi has boosted the economy, brokered peace in Georgia and built new houses for the victims of the 2009 L'Aquila earthquake, whereas the opposition would, as one Milanese Mediaset viewer quipped, "still be arguing about the density of the cement." When the Prime Minister handed out the keys of new homes to quake victims in September, two popular shows were bumped from other channels to avoid a clash. Italy is now the only country in Europe whose leader owns the media: Berlusconi's Mediaset stations, and his government's control of the state-owned RAI, means he has cornered 90% of the television market, in a country where an estimated 80% of the population gets its news from television. Criticizing Berlusconi can be costly. Since the stories about Letizia and alleged dalliances with prostitutes broke this summer, the newspaper La Repubblica has been covering them aggressively. The paper faces a libel suit from Berlusconi, as have foreign magazines and journalists who have criticized him in the past. "There are newspapers which have gone past the limits, have been too invasive of the Prime Minister's private life," says Carfagna.
Berlusconi's media empire began with the local TV station for Milano 2, a subdivision Berlusconi built outside of Milan when he was a young construction entrepreneur in the 1960s. A pioneer of private commercial television in Europe, he then sidestepped Italy's antimonopoly laws banning national private television by buying up scores of local stations. With assets spanning Italy's largest publishing company, an ad agency and the AC Milan football team, Berlusconi built up his Fininvest empire to become Italy's richest man. In 1993 he entered politics, declaring his newly launched party to be a "pole of liberty" — though for many, his sudden political awakening was a transparent effort to protect his own business interests.
There's little doubt of Berlusconi's appeal. In a country weary of political wrangling — it's on its 62nd government since the war — Berlusconi has successfully "tapped into nonpolitical sentiments," says Fabrizio Tonello, a political scientist at the University of Padua. Against the backdrop of the aspirational consumption shown on his television stations, Berlusconi's blend of ordinary Italian guyhood with the image of fabulously wealthy Don Juan is a potent one: "It's an entertainment culture," says Tonello, "the direct opposite of a political culture, in which only politicians who are celebrities can compete in the political market."
New Faces! New Ideas!
After Berlusconi, Mara Carfagna is Italy's biggest politico-celebrity. At a September conference in Cortina of Berlusconi's party, fans thronged to pose with the Equal Opportunities Minister as their friends clicked away furiously on digital cameras. "There is only one person in Italy who has had the courage to put young people and women in politics," said Carfagna. "Thank you, Berlusconi!" Where his opponents sneer at Carfagna's appointment as a crude appeal to Italy's libido, Berlusconiani see it as a democratizing act in a country that's been run by old men. "Carfagna is a strong sign that the PDL wants to change something," says Franco Vendramin, a silver-haired ad executive at the conference. "New people means new brains, new faces, who'll bring new approaches and new ideas." Carfagna herself, he grins, "is very nice." "He's just like Berlusconi," sighs his wife Daniela fondly.
Carfagna is keen to emphasize her ministry's accomplishments: a law on stalking, for example, "has made Italian women feel more secure." The government is committed to tackling domestic violence, she says, and to helping women achieve equal opportunities in the workplace. She has her work cut out for her: Italy has the lowest percentage of working women in Europe. Only 2% of top management positions in Italy are held by women, less than in Kuwait. In last year's Global Gender Gap report from the World Economic Forum, Italy ranked 67th out of 130 countries. Such figures are particularly shocking for women like Elisa Manna, who is old enough to remember Italy's muscular feminist movement of the 1970s. "Back then, young women wanted to become doctors, lawyers — professional people," says Manna, director of the Department of Cultural Policies Centre for Social Studies and Policies (CENSIS) in Rome. "It was terrible to get ahead in your profession because you are beautiful. Now, it's absolutely the reverse: if you use your body, your beauty, you're clever. You're pragmatic."
Quite so. For Elisa Alloro, a former Mediaset presenter who was tapped for the E.U. election, "Silvio's" suggestion that she go into politics was a welcome attempt to close the age and gender gap in government. She'd met the Prime Minister back in 2005, when she was 28, and was interviewing him for a Mediaset program. Alloro missed her plane; he offered her a ride on his jet. As they flew, she recalls, he quizzed her on his policies, on that morning's newspapers. By the end of the afternoon — some of which was spent strolling in the natural museum section of his Sardinian villa, looking at olive trees that were a gift from the Israeli Prime Minister — he had asked her to join his new task force on Europe. "He chose people who already work in TV, because they are usually better than others at talking in public situations," Alloro says. "Because politics is a show."
Will the velinization of Italy continue? There are some signs of a backlash against it — and Berlusconi. Earlier this year, two women parliamentarians argued that he had breached the European Convention of Human Rights for his "repeated statements that offend female dignity." Lorella Zanardo, a management consultant and former Unilever executive, grew so disgusted with the scenes of degradation on Italian television that she made her own video to raise awareness of the problem, splicing together clips from shows. The closing shot, from a show called Joking Apart, shows a woman in a thong hung on a hook in a meat locker, next to the bloody carcasses. "Women come up to me and say, 'Listen, I've been watching television for a long time, but I didn't realize,'" she says, her eyes welling with tears. Zanardo says that some Italians have opted out of their society. "People like me are guilty," she says. "We're well educated, so we traveled, or worked abroad. Italy was left completely in the hands of [Berlusconi's] media." And after Berlusconi snapped on national television at Rosy Bindi, 58, a gray-haired, opposition politician, that she was "always more beautiful than intelligent," La Repubblica launched a petition declaring that his use of women's bodies undermines democracy. "This man offends us," it reads. "Stop him." More than 100,000 have signed.
But it will take more than that to challenge Berlusconi. Italy's center-left opposition is in disarray, as usual, having just elected its second new leader in six months. And for most Italians fed Mediaset fare for 30 years, Berlusconi's cultural outlook runs deep. Midway through the ironing contest on Quelli Che ... , the would-be schedine look up from their ironing boards to watch a comedy clip, in which three fat, old women compete in a beauty contest. The audience laughs, as do the presenters and the schedine.
Imagine: women who are not young and not beautiful, daring to show their faces on Italian TV. In Silvio Berlusconi's Italy, that really is a new idea.
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1940229-1,00.html
Standing in their uniform miniskirts and stilettos, three young women bend over ironing boards, pressing men's shirts before a live studio audience. They're competing to be schedine, young women who dance a little, wear little and say little on Quelli Che ... Il Calcio (Football Fans), a popular Sunday afternoon show on Italian state TV. "Schedine have to be beautiful, but they've also got to be practical," grins the show's presenter. "Let's see how they do!" An ex-footballer descends to judge the ironing contest, awarding the prize to a lissom blonde.
There's nothing new about breasts, thighs and silliness on Italian TV. They have bedazzled viewers since the 1980s, when the television stations of Silvio Berlusconi, a mere media mogul before entering politics, revolutionized the airwaves by putting Italians on a diet of American soap operas, football and sex all over his Mediaset empire. But the formula was about more than TV ratings; it also boosted Berlusconi's political fortunes.
More than 20 years after he transformed Italian TV, Berlusconi is Prime Minister for the third time; he has already served longer in the office than anyone since 1946. Of late, to be sure, he's taken some lumps. Italy's Constitutional Court overturned a law granting Berlusconi immunity from prosecution while in office, clearing obstructions to trials in which he is accused of bribery and illicit accounting at Mediaset. But even were he to be turfed out tomorrow, Berlusconi would leave a lasting legacy. His TV shows have seen to that. "Berlusconi changed the culture of Italy before he changed the politics of it," says Alexander Stille, author of The Sack of Rome, a book on Berlusconi's power tactics. "He introduced a culture of luxury and sex, one entirely different from the traditions of austerity promoted by Catholicism and the communists. His control of commercial television meant that he is the only politician in the world who helped create and shape his own electorate before it elected him."
At the heart of Berlusconi's culture is the velina, or showgirl, who is served up to Italians every day, like pasta. Some veline merely stand mute while male presenters talk. Some give on-air lap dances to chat-show guests, as did one earlier this year to Inter Milan coach José Mourinho. Others play the funny little games producers devise, posing as table legs, or braving cold showers in tight dresses. Some simply strip: Mediaset's homepage recently featured a clip of a blonde clad in a black garbage bag, slowly lowering it to reveal her breasts. Degrading? Undoubtedly. But there's no denying the status of the showgirl in Berlusconi's Italy. "We used to get 10 or 15 applications a week," notes Gabriele Bertone, an agent at a Milan talent agency. "Now we get hundreds." A recent poll among young girls in Milan showed their top choice of profession was to be a velina. "Sure, everyone wants to be [one]," shrugs Anna Depoli, a Milanese secretary waiting to take her seat in Quelli Che ... Il Calcio's audience. "If you're a velina, then you have the chance to get to know football players, and if you marry them, you could end up with a lot of money."
The velina has become more than a mainstay of Italian television; she is the rock on which Berlusconi built his political career. In the 15 years since he began dominating Italian politics, Berlusconi has created a seamless weave of entertainment and power. The Taliban may use the virtue of their country's women as a rallying cry; Berlusconi has used Italian women's beauty. Americans should invest in Italy, he once told a Wall Street audience, because it had the comeliest secretaries.
Playing the Game
Increasingly, the velina is a political player as well as a sexual one. Though just 18, Noemi Letizia — whose relationship with Berlusconi spurred feverish speculation in the Italian press this summer — knows how the game works. "[I want to be] a showgirl," she told an Italian newspaper. "I am interested in politics, too ... I'd rather be a candidate for the Chamber of Parliament. Papi Silvio would take care of that." Last year, Berlusconi formalized the politics-showgirls link, appointing Mara Carfagna, 32, a former velina and topless model, as his Minister for Equal Opportunities. This summer his party nominated four young starlets as candidates for the European parliamentary elections. "The idea was to make the party younger," says Elisa Alloro, a 33-year-old television presenter who was initially proposed as a candidate, and is the author of We, Silvio's Girls. "It was the first time in Italy that people were interested in the European elections — just because we were veline! " Berlusconi's soon-to-be ex-wife, Veronica Lario, was less impressed, decrying the tactic as "entertainment for the emperor."
Entertainment is central to the political genius of a man who started off as a crooner on a cruise line, and who christened his party Forza Italia after a national football chant. He's anything but gray. "When [former Prime Minister Romano] Prodi was on TV, I had to turn the sound way up," snorts one middle-aged Berlusconi supporter. "Prodi speaks like a priest." Ask an Italian what they think of their current leader, and chances are they'll chuckle — but most go on to say they voted for him. For many of his countrymen, Berlusconi's appetites are central to his appeal: "He is a real Italian," shrugs Alessio de Mitri, a youth coordinator for Berlusconi's party, now called Il Popolo della Libertà (PDL). "He likes to eat. He likes parties. He's going through a divorce, like a lot of people. He's going through company problems. He's really normal."
Sort of a normal superman — at least as his story is told on his own stations. Mediaset shows will tell you Berlusconi has boosted the economy, brokered peace in Georgia and built new houses for the victims of the 2009 L'Aquila earthquake, whereas the opposition would, as one Milanese Mediaset viewer quipped, "still be arguing about the density of the cement." When the Prime Minister handed out the keys of new homes to quake victims in September, two popular shows were bumped from other channels to avoid a clash. Italy is now the only country in Europe whose leader owns the media: Berlusconi's Mediaset stations, and his government's control of the state-owned RAI, means he has cornered 90% of the television market, in a country where an estimated 80% of the population gets its news from television. Criticizing Berlusconi can be costly. Since the stories about Letizia and alleged dalliances with prostitutes broke this summer, the newspaper La Repubblica has been covering them aggressively. The paper faces a libel suit from Berlusconi, as have foreign magazines and journalists who have criticized him in the past. "There are newspapers which have gone past the limits, have been too invasive of the Prime Minister's private life," says Carfagna.
Berlusconi's media empire began with the local TV station for Milano 2, a subdivision Berlusconi built outside of Milan when he was a young construction entrepreneur in the 1960s. A pioneer of private commercial television in Europe, he then sidestepped Italy's antimonopoly laws banning national private television by buying up scores of local stations. With assets spanning Italy's largest publishing company, an ad agency and the AC Milan football team, Berlusconi built up his Fininvest empire to become Italy's richest man. In 1993 he entered politics, declaring his newly launched party to be a "pole of liberty" — though for many, his sudden political awakening was a transparent effort to protect his own business interests.
There's little doubt of Berlusconi's appeal. In a country weary of political wrangling — it's on its 62nd government since the war — Berlusconi has successfully "tapped into nonpolitical sentiments," says Fabrizio Tonello, a political scientist at the University of Padua. Against the backdrop of the aspirational consumption shown on his television stations, Berlusconi's blend of ordinary Italian guyhood with the image of fabulously wealthy Don Juan is a potent one: "It's an entertainment culture," says Tonello, "the direct opposite of a political culture, in which only politicians who are celebrities can compete in the political market."
New Faces! New Ideas!
After Berlusconi, Mara Carfagna is Italy's biggest politico-celebrity. At a September conference in Cortina of Berlusconi's party, fans thronged to pose with the Equal Opportunities Minister as their friends clicked away furiously on digital cameras. "There is only one person in Italy who has had the courage to put young people and women in politics," said Carfagna. "Thank you, Berlusconi!" Where his opponents sneer at Carfagna's appointment as a crude appeal to Italy's libido, Berlusconiani see it as a democratizing act in a country that's been run by old men. "Carfagna is a strong sign that the PDL wants to change something," says Franco Vendramin, a silver-haired ad executive at the conference. "New people means new brains, new faces, who'll bring new approaches and new ideas." Carfagna herself, he grins, "is very nice." "He's just like Berlusconi," sighs his wife Daniela fondly.
Carfagna is keen to emphasize her ministry's accomplishments: a law on stalking, for example, "has made Italian women feel more secure." The government is committed to tackling domestic violence, she says, and to helping women achieve equal opportunities in the workplace. She has her work cut out for her: Italy has the lowest percentage of working women in Europe. Only 2% of top management positions in Italy are held by women, less than in Kuwait. In last year's Global Gender Gap report from the World Economic Forum, Italy ranked 67th out of 130 countries. Such figures are particularly shocking for women like Elisa Manna, who is old enough to remember Italy's muscular feminist movement of the 1970s. "Back then, young women wanted to become doctors, lawyers — professional people," says Manna, director of the Department of Cultural Policies Centre for Social Studies and Policies (CENSIS) in Rome. "It was terrible to get ahead in your profession because you are beautiful. Now, it's absolutely the reverse: if you use your body, your beauty, you're clever. You're pragmatic."
Quite so. For Elisa Alloro, a former Mediaset presenter who was tapped for the E.U. election, "Silvio's" suggestion that she go into politics was a welcome attempt to close the age and gender gap in government. She'd met the Prime Minister back in 2005, when she was 28, and was interviewing him for a Mediaset program. Alloro missed her plane; he offered her a ride on his jet. As they flew, she recalls, he quizzed her on his policies, on that morning's newspapers. By the end of the afternoon — some of which was spent strolling in the natural museum section of his Sardinian villa, looking at olive trees that were a gift from the Israeli Prime Minister — he had asked her to join his new task force on Europe. "He chose people who already work in TV, because they are usually better than others at talking in public situations," Alloro says. "Because politics is a show."
Will the velinization of Italy continue? There are some signs of a backlash against it — and Berlusconi. Earlier this year, two women parliamentarians argued that he had breached the European Convention of Human Rights for his "repeated statements that offend female dignity." Lorella Zanardo, a management consultant and former Unilever executive, grew so disgusted with the scenes of degradation on Italian television that she made her own video to raise awareness of the problem, splicing together clips from shows. The closing shot, from a show called Joking Apart, shows a woman in a thong hung on a hook in a meat locker, next to the bloody carcasses. "Women come up to me and say, 'Listen, I've been watching television for a long time, but I didn't realize,'" she says, her eyes welling with tears. Zanardo says that some Italians have opted out of their society. "People like me are guilty," she says. "We're well educated, so we traveled, or worked abroad. Italy was left completely in the hands of [Berlusconi's] media." And after Berlusconi snapped on national television at Rosy Bindi, 58, a gray-haired, opposition politician, that she was "always more beautiful than intelligent," La Repubblica launched a petition declaring that his use of women's bodies undermines democracy. "This man offends us," it reads. "Stop him." More than 100,000 have signed.
But it will take more than that to challenge Berlusconi. Italy's center-left opposition is in disarray, as usual, having just elected its second new leader in six months. And for most Italians fed Mediaset fare for 30 years, Berlusconi's cultural outlook runs deep. Midway through the ironing contest on Quelli Che ... , the would-be schedine look up from their ironing boards to watch a comedy clip, in which three fat, old women compete in a beauty contest. The audience laughs, as do the presenters and the schedine.
Imagine: women who are not young and not beautiful, daring to show their faces on Italian TV. In Silvio Berlusconi's Italy, that really is a new idea.
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1940229-1,00.html
sabato 21 novembre 2009
sabato 14 novembre 2009
mercoledì 11 novembre 2009
martedì 10 novembre 2009
Berlusconismo: the real reason why foreign media should pay attention
Bill Emmot - 04/11/2009
We foreign commentators often sit and wonder why it is that we are so fascinated by Silvio Berlusconi. Certainly, he is a rather livelier piece of show business than other political leaders (certainly livelier than Gordon Brown). Certainly too, his blend of sex, machismo, conspicuous wealth and direct and indirect links to criminality play into a traditional stereotype about Italy, one that has some truth to it yet is also misleading. But there is a lot more to it than that.
When the idea first came up at The Economist, of which I was Editor at the time, to make an investigation into Silvio Berlusconi, I of course approved. For a rich democracy like Italy, a founder member of the European Union, to have as a prime ministerial candidate (this was 2000/2001) a man over whom there were so many shadows, raised plenty of questions that were worth answering. Once the work had been done, and once I began to think about it more deeply, the questions became more profound in my mind and more widely relevant than just for Italy.
A fundamental issue for all capitalist democracies is the appropriate relationship between government and business. All elected governments want to encourage prosperity, job creation and rising living standards. Yet to achieve that, we now know, requires them to foster dynamic markets, to enable a wide variety of entrepreneurs to operate, to facilitate innovation and the use of new technologies, all in a framework set by a rule of law that permits individuals and companies to enforce contracts and to believe that all are equal in the face of the law. And for this system to maintain popular support over time, it is necessary that the citizenry believes that inequalities of income or power have not become excessive. It is not, in other words, a case of governments encouraging and helping businesses. It is a case of governments encouraging markets, and creating the environment in which many businesses can flourish.
Not all countries conform to that, essentially liberal, model in all its respects. The influence of big business varies greatly, and of course its financial power as well as its potency in creating jobs and exports give it great reach. But until Silvio Berlusconi came into politics in Italy in 1994, but then will full force and success after 2001, in no western democracy had a major businessman actually run the government—moreover while still owning and controlling his businesses.
It was this merger between business and government that made Berlusconi and Italy so important for me, and for The Economist. In the 1930s, and again with extensive nationalisation in the postwar period, we have become accustomed to corporatism, to a strong role for the state in guiding certain businesses or sometimes forming alliances with business. But to have the country’s most powerful businessman take over the government: this was entirely exceptional, and to us, a deeply disturbing trend.
Since his election in 2001, Silvio Berlusconi has given ample evidence of how a businessman in politics can turn legislation into a tool for his own business interests. The fact that he has a dominant position in two of the communications industries that play a huge part in modern life and in politics—advertising and television—makes the flow of influence a two-way affair. He uses his media control to enhance his political power, while using his political power to enhance his media control.
That is what makes Berlusconi a figure of global interest and importance, rather than just a political freak-show. In a way, the good thing about Silvio Berlusconi is that he appears to have no real personal ideological agenda beyond the preservation and enhancement of his own power. But he provides a dangerous example to other powerful businessmen in other democracies for what they could achieve by copying his techniques. And around his powerful presence are gathered many other individuals and organisations who do have their own agendas, both ideological and selfish, and can use Berlusconi’s power as a tool through which to achieve it.
The sex scandals, or scandals of the abuse of power, which is what they really are, might offer comfort in the sense that they give us a sense that Berlusconi is mortal and may bring about his own downfall eventually. Yet also they serve to distract from the real issue, which is the capture of democratic governmental institutions by a single, powerful business.
Bill Emmott is one of the most influential journalist of the world. He has been editor of The Economist.
http://www.visionblog.eu/blogdivision/blog/articolo.asp?articolo=43
Being Silvio Berlusconi
The parties, the women, the rumours - inside the world of Italy's billionaire prime minister
Saturday 31 October 2009 - John Hooper
Noemi Letizia, 18, poses with a portrait of Silvio Berlusconi in her home in Naples, Italy. She claimed she called Berlusconi "papi" or "Daddy" and was photographed sporting a gold and diamond necklace the premier reportedly gave her as a birthday gift. Photograph: Franco Castano/AP
"When I went with the girls to Palazzo Grazioli, I made them sit on the back seats since the windows at the rear of my vehicle were darkened," Giampaolo Tarantini told police in Rome. "I would alert someone taking care of security to my arrival and then, when we got to the main door, the first guard alerted the others to our arrival. Once inside the courtyard, we were accompanied to the upper floors…"
You can see at once that Palazzo Grazioli, which occupies an entire block near the Piazza Venezia, is no ordinary noble Roman residence. At any hour of the day or night, you will find a Carabinieri vehicle pulled up on the pavement outside with a couple of paramilitary policemen standing in the imposing gateway, one cradling a sub-machine gun. Nearby, there is often a clutch → of solidly built men in sharply cut, dark grey suits and vibrantly white shirts. They have earphones from which coiled flex stretches away into the folds of their jackets. Every so often, a dark blue, official limousine purrs up to the entrance. A window is briefly lowered and the car disappears into the first of the two courtyards around which Silvio Berlusconi's Roman home is built.
Italy's billionaire prime minister rents the second floor and part of the first from the family that gives the building its name. The Graziolis' home has seen its fair share of drama. In 1977, Duke Massimiliano Grazioli was kidnapped and murdered by a notorious gang of Rome criminals.
Now Palazzo Grazioli is at the centre of another drama as the setting for the latest sex scandal involving the television and property magnate who is Italy's leader. Giampaolo Tarantini, a businessman from the southern city of Bari, has admitted to investigators in a statement leaked to the press that over a four-month period last winter, he slipped around 30 women into parties hosted by Berlusconi and paid some to stay the night.
Speculation about the prime minister's involvement with young women is hardly new. As far back as 1986, police investigating an associate listened in as he telephoned Berlusconi on New Year's Eve to find him in an ill humour. Two girls from Drive In, a show on his fledgling Mediaset network, had failed to come to a party he was throwing.
"Why should you care about Drive In?" asked his associate.
"Why should I care?" echoed Berlusconi. "Next thing we'll never be fucking again."
The episode combines two of the main strands in the complex tapestry of Silvio Berlusconi's life. One is close attention from law enforcement agencies. The other is his media power.
Apart from a two-year interlude in which the country was governed by the centre-left, Berlusconi has been running Italy since 2001. In 2004, he became the leader of the Republic's longest-serving government and earlier this year its longest-serving prime minister. The tycoon-turned-politician can justifiably claim to have stamped his personality on Italy in a way that no other leader has done since the fascist dictatorship of Benito Mussolini.
The son of a suburban bank manager from Milan, Berlusconi started out, not in the media, but in property. By the age of 32 he had begun one of the biggest construction projects in postwar Italy, the creation of an entire residential suburb near Milan airport. (How a bank manager's son raised the money for this grandiose project is one of the great mysteries of his career.)
Setting up a television station for his new development was what lured Berlusconi into the media and, for a while, turned him into a free enterprise crusader – the man who smashed the national television monopoly of Italy's public broadcaster, RAI. He did this by spotting a loophole that excluded local television from RAI's monopoly and exploiting his friendship with the socialist leader, Bettino Craxi, who conveniently altered the law to meet Berlusconi's needs. Their relationship was characteristic of the cronyistic political order in Italy that appeared to fall apart in the early 1990s under pressure from the so-called Clean Hands investigation into graft. Berlusconi was among its main targets.
Yet when he himself entered politics, in 1994, he managed to bring off the remarkable trick of portraying himself to the electorate as the standard-bearer of a new Italy. In some ways, he was – and is – a mould-breaker: an "anti-politician", as his supporters claim. His political movement was conjured out of his business empire in just a few months. Its name, Forza Italia! ("Come on Italy!") cannily echoed the language of the football terraces. His first government, in 1994, was a disaster, though – wracked by fierce controversy over the conflicts of interest with his media ownership. As prime minister he had then, as he again has now, direct or indirect control of six of the seven main terrestrial TV channels.
Despite prophesies to the contrary, Berlusconi's removal from office at the start of 1995 did not signal his departure from politics. His admirers argue the six long years of opposition that followed bear witness to his perseverance and spirit of self-sacrifice. His critics see it as evidence simply of a determination not to go to jail, because throughout the 1990s and beyond, he has been pursued by the Clean Hands prosecutors and their successors for a range of alleged offences, including the bribing of judges. Under a legal system that allows for up to three trials, however, Berlusconi has never been definitively convicted.
When Berlusconi first came to the attention of the public, he seemed the typical successful businessman with a trophy wife. In 1990, he had married a voluptuously beautiful actress with the stage name of Veronica Lario. By then, however, she had already borne him three children, the first while he was still married to his first wife, Carla Dell'Oglio. After their divorce in 1986, Dell'Oglio disappeared from his life. Lario, on the other hand, has gradually changed from a model partner into an avenging fury who could yet prove to be Berlusconi's nemesis.
During the 1990s, their public appearances together became increasingly rare. But they seemed to have reached an accommodation. Lario, 20 years his junior, occupied herself with bringing up their children at a villa near Milan, occasionally giving interviews about her concern for the environment and support for other, mostly progressive causes. Berlusconi led the opposition in Rome. He paid fulsome tribute to the support he received from his wife during his successful battle with prostate cancer in the late 1990s.
Like many Italians of his generation, he had never acknowledged a contradiction between playing the roles of devout Catholic and Latin lover. He had a reputation as a sciupafemmine ("lady-killer"), but by 2001, when he returned to power, there seemed to be every likelihood he would settle into an increasingly respectable old age.
Things began to go askew in 2002 when, at a press conference with a visiting prime minister, Berlusconi astonished his audience by seeming to suggest that his wife was having an affair with a centre-left politician. At about that time, said a journalist who shadowed him for several years, his behaviour underwent an abrupt change.
"He suddenly began flirting with the women journalists in the pack that followed him round," she said. "He'd say things like, 'With legs like that, you can ask me whatever you like', or 'What a nice décolleté, signora.' " Sexually loaded comments became a hallmark of the Berlusconi persona. But it was not until February 2007 that one such quip set off a wince-makingly public crisis in his marriage.
At a TV awards ceremony, Berlusconi gestured towards one of his MPs, a former topless model, Mara Carfagna, and declared to the other guests: "Take a look at her! I'd marry her if I weren't married already." Lario has said that she failed to get her husband to apologise in private, and so she hit back with a letter to her husband's least favourite newspaper in which she said his remarks were "damaging to my dignity". She demanded – and received – a public apology.
Since then, there has barely been a gap between scandals. In April of the same year photographs were published showing Berlusconi in the grounds of his sumptuous Sardinian villa with a posse of young women. In one shot, he had a girl on each knee; in others, he was walking hand-in-hand with one or more of his young guests. Then there was a court case that revolved around his still-unexplained relationship with a television announcer. And an outcry over his appointment last year of Carfagna to be equal opportunities minister in his new government. At an opposition rally in Rome, a satirist, Sabina Guzzanti, suggested that Carfagna owed her job to a sexual involvement with Berlusconi. Carfagna responded with a writ.
In May of this year, Berlusconi's wife lifted the catch on a Pandora's box of allegation and speculation when she let it be known she was divorcing her then 72-year-old husband because she could no longer stay with a man who "frequented minors". Her announcement coincided with the discovery that Berlusconi had attended the 18th birthday party in Naples of an aspiring actress and model, Noemi Letizia. After providing an explanation for their friendship that did not hold water, the prime minister announced he would make a statement to parliament. He has never done so.
In June, a Spanish newspaper published paparazzi photographs showing naked and semi-naked guests at Villa Certosa, Berlusconi's retreat on Sardinia. And finally, later the same month, the latest scandal broke over his parties at Palazzo Grazioli. It has every conceivable ingredient for lurid controversy – sex, power, money and drugs, all set against a backdrop dotted with celebrities. (Among those who figure peripherally – and innocently – in the affair are the Queens Park Rangers chairman and formula one boss, Flavio Briatore; and the Chelsea chairman and oil and metals billionaire, Roman Abramovich).
It comes as a surprise to discover that it all began with artificial hip joints and cerebral ventricular catheters. Those are among the products offered by a small firm in Bari run by Claudio Tarantini and his younger brother, Giampaolo. The medical supplies business is rarely out of the newspapers in Italy – and more often than not it features on the pages devoted to crime and corruption. In Puglia, the region of which Bari is the capital, prosecutors have launched no less than four investigations in seven years into alleged corruption in the health sector. Giampaolo Tarantini is suspected – but not charged – of having bribed doctors to get their hospitals to buy his firm's products. Big money was involved. The Tarantinis' prosthetic devices cost up to €30,000. Investigators believe Giampaolo used as bait powerful cars, cash, drugs – and women. In his own words, he thought "girls and cocaine were a key to success in society". (He was arrested, briefly jailed, and then put under house arrest on 21 September on suspicion of drug trafficking.)
Bari has long been a pretty racy place. Its demi-monde is the setting for the much-translated crime novels of judge-turned-politician Gianrico Carofiglio. A port that looks across the Adriatic to the Balkans, it is the centre of operations of Italy's "fourth mafia", the Sacra Corona Unita (United Holy Crown). Lately, Puglia has been the region of southern Italy with the fastest-growing economy, partly because it is belatedly catching up with other parts of the country as a tourist destination.
Easy money feeds extravagant dreams – in Giampaolo Tarantini's case, of giving his company a national presence by winning the favour of no less a figure than the prime minister. In the summer of 2008, he and a friend sank €70,000 a month into renting a villa on the Sardinian Costa Smeralda, near Berlusconi's. In the safe, Tarantini said, he tucked away the lion's share of a consignment of 50-70 grammes of cocaine to give to friends.
The young entrepreneur made contact with the prime minister by getting himself invited to a dinner hosted by Berlusconi in honour of Roman Abramovich. According to Sabina Began, the actress who organised the dinner, it was held "to facilitate the passage of [Ukrainian striker] Andriy Shevchenko from Abramovich's Chelsea to [Berlusconi's AC] Milan". Tarantini evidently made a big impression on Berlusconi. Shortly afterwards, Began said, Tarantini "began to come along with other [female] friends instead of his wife, who moreover was pregnant". The following month, Tarantini later told police, he had the dark glass put in the rear windows of his car.
Between September 2008 and January 2009, Tarantini said he brought women in groups of up to four at a time to no less than 18 parties hosted by the prime minister. Most simply had dinner and left. But others remained, he said. One was Patrizia D'Addario, a high-class call girl who operated under the assumed name of Alessia. She claims to have made a series of recordings inside Palazzo Grazioli. D'Addario gave the recordings to the prosecutors investigating Tarantini and they were subsequently leaked to a magazine, which posted them to the internet. One purports to capture the conversation between D'Addario and a man accompanying her up the stairs of Palazzo Grazioli on her first visit.
"I know the prime minister is pretty jovial," the unidentified man can be heard saying. "He sings; he tells a few stories." "Can we sing, too?" asks D'Addario. "And a bit more," replies the man.
Another young woman from Bari, Maria Teresa ("Terry") De Nicolo, later told the newspaper La Repubblica that Tarantini had suggested she wear "a black dress with not much make-up". Another of the recordings appears to confirm there was a sort of uniform for these occasions.
Man: "Clarissa…"
Berlusconi: "Ciao. All well?"
Woman: "Absolutely."
Berlusconi: "Ciao."
D'Addario: "Alessia."
Berlusconi: "Ah! How attractive they are. Congratulations."
D'Addario: "Thank you."
Woman: "All in black."
Berlusconi: "Ahhhhh!"
Man: "All in black!"
Woman: "All in black!"
So what exactly went on once the champagne and canapés had been consumed? Few of the guests have agreed to answer the questions put by investigators and the media, and in some cases their recollections are markedly different. Take the dinner De Nicolo attended. Tarantini said → that, in addition, he invited an exhibition hostess and fashion model who brought along two friends: a well-known actress and a woman who oversaw the VVIPs-only area of Billionaire, Flavio Briatore's Costa Smeralda night club. Altogether, then, four women. But De Nicolo told La Repubblica, "There were 20 of us in, I would say, a ratio of one man to every four girls." Her version is endorsed by another guest, an executive of the state-owned television network, RAI, who said there were "about 15 girls" at the party.
One thing on which everyone agrees is that, once the plates were cleared away, there was singing and dancing. The host brought in his personal "minstrel", a Neapolitan singer-guitarist called Mariano Apicella, and sometimes other musicians. Berlusconi, who worked as a crooner on a cruise liner in his student days, would himself give voice.
De Nicolo said "the atmosphere is so informal that after a bit I began shyly to [use the familiar form of 'you' with Berlusconi]. Shortly afterwards, I started calling him Silvio." That was on 28 September last year when Berlusconi was scheduled to be addressing the UN general assembly. He cancelled, ostensibly because of the crisis then engulfing the airline that carries Italy's flag, Alitalia. De Nicolo said the partying went on until 4am. Asked what happened when the music stopped, she replied "No. Please. Don't ask me that kind of question."
One hint at an answer is contained in the transcript of a recording Patrizia D'Addario claims to have made of a telephone conversation with a friend who had been with her on her second visit, when she claims to have stayed the night in Palazzo Grazioli. D'Addario asks the friend if she remembers "how he fondled me while we were on the sofa, and how he fondled you and looked at me". According to the transcript, published byCorriere della Sera, the other woman replied: "It was disgusting there. He did it all in front of the guards."
Another recording appears to confirm something claimed by both Berlusconi and Tarantini – that the prime minister was unaware that any of the women were paid. Italy's billionaire leader must nevertheless have guessed that some of the women delivered to his long, oval dining table were hoping for benefits in kind. He could find them roles on TV. But even more importantly, perhaps, he could get them jobs in politics.
This is the unique aspect of this affair and the other recent scandals involving Berlusconi. There are innumerable examples from history of political leaders caught out with figures from a milieu that encompasses, at one extreme, straightforward prostitution, and at the other legitimate entertainment. But their worlds remained otherwise separate. Christine Keeler was paid by John Profumo for her services. But there was never any question of her getting a safe Tory seat. Marilyn Monroe may or may not have slept with John F Kennedy. But she remained an actress, just as he remained the president. In the Italy of Silvio Berlusconi, this invisible membrane between the two worlds has been breached, and figures in – or hoping to enter – fashion, films and TV have rushed through the opening, along with at least one self-admitted call girl.
Oddly, this has something to do with feminism. After the Spanish prime minister, José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, presented a cabinet in 2004 in which half the members were women, there was urgent discussion in Italy about how to increase the number of its female lawmakers and ministers. But in Berlusconi's party, the Freedom People (PdL), the process has been given a peculiar twist. Paolo Guzzanti, a deputy and the father of the satirist who so offended Berlusconi's equal opportunities minister, was a member of the PdL until February.
"Berlusconi is quite open about the fact that he wants all of his people to be good-looking," he says. "He applies the same criteria to politics as would be applied to a TV show."
Mara Carfagna led the way. Less than five years after appearing semi-nude in a men's magazine, she was a member of parliament and secretary of its constitutional affairs commission. A law graduate and former Miss Italy contestant, she spent the intervening years working for Mediaset.
In Italy, party leaders have total control over who stands for election, and with what→ likelihood of success. At the last European election, Berlusconi was intending to use that power to send what Libero, one of the papers closest to his party, termed "a troupe of showgirls" to Strasburg. A crash course in EU politics was arranged for about 20 young (all female) hopefuls. A few were genuine youth activists. The rest included a Big Brother contestant who had been photographed sitting on Berlusconi's knee in Sardinia, the "star" of a peek-a-boo webcam transmission and what Libero called "a mysterious young lady" from Lithuania.
After Berlusconi's wife, in a move that foreshadowed her break with her husband, denounced the operation as "shameless trash", the electoral lists were hastily revised and only three young women aspirants were put up, all of whom are now MEPs. Several of the disappointed contenders complained bitterly at being dropped after having been promised a place on the slate presented by Berlusconi's party. The father of one, Cesare Romano, a craftsman from Naples, went further. On the morning of 28 April, in an incident barely reported in the Italian or international media, he appeared outside Palazzo Grazioli, soaked his clothing with flammable liquid and tried to set fire to himself. He was stopped by the Carabinieri.
Patrizia D'Addario, who admits she is a prostitute, claims she, too, was heading for Strasburg until Veronica Lario stepped in. She says she was fobbed off with a candidacy in the Puglian regional elections, standing for a party allied to Berlusconi's. She ran alongside another Palazzo Grazioli dinner guest, Barbara Montereale. A bridal gowns model and former hostess at Billionaire, Montereale is an ex-girlfriend of the nephew of Bari's most feared crime lord.
Noemi Letizia, the 18-year-old who became famous for saying that she called Berlusconi "papi" ("daddy"), told Corriere del Mezzogiorno in April that she wanted to be a showgirl, but added: "Politics interests me, too." Was she perhaps after a seat in the regional assembly? "I prefer to stand for the Chamber," she replied blithely. "Papi Silvio will take care of it."
Berlusconi's plan to turn largely unqualified young women into lawmakers is just one of several issues of public interest in the affair. A husband and grandfather, he is the leader of a party that promotes family values. By letting dozens of previously unknown visitors into his private apartments he was courting the risk, not only of blackmail, but of a security breach. Then there is the fact that, just before Tarantini began his visits to Palazzo Grazioli, Mara Carfagna tabled a bill to punish both prostitutes and their clients and pimps. Even if, in the unfortunate words of his lawyer, the prime minister was merely an "end-user" of some of the women he entertained, he was allegedly happy to reward the man who brought them along. Tarantini was after an introduction to the head of Italy's civil protection service, a major spender of the taxpayers' money. And, he said, he got what he wanted.
"One evening", he told police, "prime minister Berlusconi introduced me to [the junior minister in charge of civil protection] whom I met subsequently." The minister cannily passed him on to someone else and the initiative got nowhere. But that does not detract from the fact that Berlusconi allegedly did an important favour for the young entrepreneur.
Nor, perhaps, was that the only favour he was ready to do. Patrizia D'Addario claims to have come away from her night in the prime minister's bedroom with a piece of costume jewellery – and a promise that Berlusconi would get her planning permission for a building scheme. It was his failure to deliver on her promise, she implies, that spurred her to take revenge by giving her recordings to the Bari prosecutors.
Yet another issue of public interest, and one that has grown in importance as the affair has unfolded, is what it reveals about Berlusconi's attitude to women. Guzzanti says he split with his former party leader mainly because of his support for Russia in the conflict last year with Georgia. But a contributory factor was Berlusconi's behaviour with female colleagues. "It was so tacky, touchy and sexually allusive – so old-fashioned."
He recalls a rally at which he and Berlusconi both remarked on an attractive woman among the party faithful. Guzzanti entered the hall in a scrum of people that included the woman.
"As I reached Berlusconi, he said excitedly: 'Did you touch her? Did you touch her? Did you get your hands on her bum?' What was I meant to say? 'Yes, prime minister?' "
In an earlier controversy, over his sponsorship of actresses seeking parts on television, Berlusconi was heard to refer to them in a bugged telephone conversation as "these little butterflies". Since then, a lot of evidence has come to light to suggest that he sees these pretty, insubstantial, giddy and transient creatures as representative of the women with whom he surrounds himself. Associates say he has a cage full of butterflies at Villa Certosa. Several of the women who visited Palazzo Grazioli said they came away with jewellery in the shape of a butterfly. And Sabina Began, the actress who organised the banquet on Sardinia at which Berlusconi met Tarantini, has a tattoo of a butterfly on her right foot – a symbol, she told the Italian edition of Vanity Fair, of her "absolutely platonic" friendship with the prime minister.
It is one thing that an ageing alpha male like Berlusconi might want to feed his self-esteem by encouraging the attentions of younger women. But parties of 15 women at a time? With only three other men? It is the sort of behaviour that is very difficult to explain.
One possible factor is Berlusconi's apparently compulsive need to be loved. His speeches often contain whingeing passages in which, taking it for granted that everything he does is for the good of the nation, he complains of the ingratitude of → journalists and prosecutors who try to hold him to account, and tells his audience they have no idea how hard he works on their behalf. He was at it again this month. Explaining his irritation with media criticism, he told reporters: "I do everything in my power to make myself loved."
Another possible factor is his complex relationship with his own mortality. He has created an underground mausoleum, using more than 100 tonnes of marble, in the grounds of his house outside Milan which even has niches for his key aides so they can continue to accompany him in the afterlife. Berlusconi himself is destined for a pink marble and granite sarcophagus in the centre of the main burial chamber. Yet he often gives an impression of intending never to occupy it. He has undergone a hair transplant and a facelift to make himself look younger. He is an enthusiastic supporter of research at a Milan hospital aimed at increasing longevity. And in 2004, his doctor, Umberto Scapagnini, said Berlusconi was taking an elixir he made especially for him containing ingredients from the diets of "centenarians I met on the Silk Road south of Urumqi and in the oases between the Taklamakhan and Gobi deserts". He claimed that, as a result, his patient was "technically almost immortal".
Politically, he certainly seems indestructible. Despite all that has come out, Berlusconi's personal approval rating, though eroded, is still nearly 50%. The conventional explanation is that Italians do not care about the private lives of their politicians in the way "puritanical Anglo-Saxons" do. Or that they are rather proud of a septuagenarian leader who remains apparently virile. Yet neither of those theories is fully borne out by poll evidence. A survey for Corriere della Sera in May found 54% of those interviewed agreed that government office-holders should exemplify "honesty, propriety and moral stature". The controversy over Berlusconi's relationship with Noemi Letizia had already erupted by then. Yet when the same interviewees were asked if it had influenced their opinion of the prime minister, 77% said "no".
One possible explanation for the discrepancy is that large numbers of those polled were unaware of the details of the scandal. About two-thirds of Italians say they form their voting intentions entirely on the basis of what they see on television, which reflects a distinctly muted version of these controversies. With Berlusconi in office, this is true not just of Mediaset, but of the state-controlled RAI.
Depending on Italian television for news must, indeed, be pretty disorienting. Bulletins often refer back to events that were not originally reported because of self-censorship. On 29 April, the evening news on RAI 1 opened with a report of Berlusconi's irate denial of the insinuations levelled at him in the Noemi Letizia affair. "A set-up. Rubbish. The prime minister does not mince his words in his comments on the controversy," RAI's reporter said. "There was nothing 'spicy' about the party in Casoria…" Casoria? Party? Spicy? Viewers must have wondered what on earth the reporter was on about, since the previous night's bulletin had made no mention of Berlusconi's presence at the girl's birthday celebration.
Ignorance of the facts, though, is only part of the story. Silvio Berlusconi has unquestionably established an almost symbiotic bond with part of the electorate. One attempt to get at the essence of this relationship was made by three academics who analysed some 350,000 words of his speeches. "Among the strongest elements to emerge was reassurance," said Nora Galli de' Paratesi, formerly professor of linguistics at the university of Calabria. "Berlusconi played two roles. One was to scare his audience by presenting them with a danger: that of communism, as if it still existed in Italy. The other was to reassure them, by saying, in effect, 'Leave it to me. I know how to deal with it.' "
Of late, the threat of communism has given way to the twin dangers of immigration and crime, which Berlusconi consistently presents as linked. But the principle is the same. Galli de' Paratesi believes it is a highly effective stratagem in a fundamentally insecure society with little historical experience of either political stability or economic prosperity. "One thing I found very worrying was the prevalence of certain responses from his audiences. One was 'Tu sei tutti noi!' ('You are all of us'). That was also something shouted to Mussolini."
For many Italians, Berlusconi is a symbol of upward mobility in a society which is statistically among the least egalitarian in Europe. And, to an almost caricatured extent, he embodies the vices and virtues of a stereotypical Italian male: charming, faithless, football-loving and furbo("wily"). Less abstractly, Berlusconi dominates politics and the media in a society fascinated by both and in which, largely because of his own efforts, the two overlap to a troubling extent.
In the latest edition of her biography, published after her split from the prime minister, Veronica Lario complains bitterly of the "videocracy" her husband has helped to create: "a country in which no one any longer wants to make sacrifices because money, fame and fortune arrive by way of the television, with Big Brother."
Silvio Berlusconi's power has, of course, arrived in the same way. And there is no sign he intends to relinquish it. His image and political standing have unquestionably been damaged by the scandals. But the opposition in Italy is weak and there is no one in a position to replace him on the right. Silvio Berlusconi may be on his way down. But he is not necessarily on his way out.
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