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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

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.


http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/oct/31/silvio-berlusconi-profile