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
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