[A-List] Italy: Berlusconi profiled

["Michael Keaney" <michael.keaney@xxxxxx>]

The man who would be king
Silvio Berlusconi is a prime minister like no other. But the nightclub
crooner who became Italy's richest man has been trying hard, since he was
elected, to curb his flamboyant ways. So why, then, has he decided to
release an album of Christmas songs?
By Peter Popham
The Independent, 05 December 2002

Silvio Berlusconi has been prime minister of Italy for 18 months now. The
sky has not fallen. Visitors will find no startling changes. Fiat, Italy's
biggest employer, is in terrible trouble, it's true - but on Tuesday
Berlusconi proposed a simple solution: change the firm's name to Ferrari!
(Fiat's directors were not amused). And to prove how bright and breezy he
feels, he is putting out an album of his own songs for Christmas. Profits to
charity, naturally.

Mr Berlusconi's election campaign 18 months ago was obsessively focused on
the man himself. Candidates for his party, Forza Italia, were recommended to
put Berlusconi's picture, not their own, on campaign literature. Huge images
of the man were everywhere, not least on television, more than 40 per cent
of which was in his pocket. Forza Italia was Berlusconi: without him it was
nothing, and everybody knew that. With him at its head, the party needed
little else - had little need of policies, for example. The party's
manifesto was published one week before polling day.

A figure of Orwellian size, with a permanent, gleaming smile, bestriding an
odd sort of country - that's how it looked. But take another look today. The
Cheshire Cat has vanished, grin and all. No sign of a personality cult. No
sign of a dictatorship. The airwaves, more than 90 per cent of which
(including the national broadcaster, Rai) Berlusconi now directly or
indirectly controls, are as full of fluff as ever, but there are frequent
political debates, too, and they are raucously uninhibited. And Berlusconi
does not get it all his own way on the news: if government sympathies
dominate on Canale 5 and Rete 4, Berlusconi's enemies get a good suck of the
sauce bottle on Rai 3 and La 7. A Berlusconi friend and supporter Giuliano
Ferrara seems to host a political programme practically every night of the
week, but this bearded, Falstaffian ex-Communist has such a brilliant
television presence that he would be a natural for intelligent television
anywhere.

So where exactly is the problem? To be sure, Italy's economy is in trouble,
the national debt is swelling, none of the promises of 18 months ago -
massive infrastructure projects, a million new jobs, lower taxes - looks
remotely within reach. Mr Berlusconi is learning all over again, as he
learnt rudely and fast during his seven-month tenure in 1994, that steering
a country in the direction of growth and prosperity is far more complicated
than doing the same for a business enterprise.

But arguably Berlusconi is in it for the long term now: during more than six
years in opposition, this tireless, hard-driving, self-made man learnt many
of the skills required to govern one of the world's leading industrial
countries. Now he knows, for example, that he cannot fob off his
cantankerous but important ally Umberto Bossi, leader of the
quasi-secessionist Northern League, with promises: urgently now, with a
deadline of next Monday, he has been ramming through parliament the
legislation to devolve control of health, education and local policing to
the regions, the first step in the federalism long cherished by Bossi. Eight
years ago it was Bossi, dubbing the Prime Minister "Berluskaiser", who
brought his government down. This time the kaiser will be more careful.

Berlusconi has devoted most of his effort since winning the election to
getting the judges off his back. Fighting off frenzied attacks by the
opposition, he has finally got his "legitimate suspicion" bill signed into
law by President Ciampi, permitting the alleged bias of judges to be raised
before the Court of Cassation, Italy's highest court. If the court agrees
that the judges in question are indeed suspect, a case can now be
transferred to a more balanced (or sympathetic) bench somewhere else.
Berlusconi has maintained for years that Milan's "left-wing" judiciary was
out to get him; in parliament his opponents insisted that the over-riding
purpose of the bill was to rescue his loyal friend Cesare Previti from the
court in Milan where he is standing trial on charges of bribing judges. And
indeed, almost immediately the legitimate suspicion bill became law, the
Previti trial was suspended.

But now that those fireworks are behind him, there is a whiff of normality
in the air. The opposition senses it too, grudgingly. Following ex-prime
minister Giulio Andreotti's 24-year jail sentence for ordering the murder of
a journalist, politicians of all stripes made noises about there being an
urgent need to reform the judiciary. Through much of the first year, the
opposition responded to Berlusconi's government with barracking and
walkouts, fisticuffs and filibuster. Those tactics, they have learnt, are
not paying off. Piero Fassino, secretary of the Left Democrats, said on
Sunday, "The war of all against all benefits nobody, neither the government
nor the opposition."

Eighteen months ago, two weeks before the election, The Economist said
Berlusconi was "unfit to lead Italy". The article supporting that judgment
described in gruesome detail the panoply of criminal law suits in which the
aspirant to Italy's top job was embroiled.

It made gripping reading. But perhaps The Economist got it wrong. For a
country such as Italy, with its extraordinary legacy of economic achievement
shrugging off a deadweight of bureaucratic inertia, perhaps Mr Berlusconi is
the only strong leader available. A little like Mrs Thatcher in the UK 20
years ago: the nasty medicine for the appalling complaint.

There has long been a particular way of writing about, and writing off, the
man they call the Cavalier. "In an environment of luxury," wrote a
celebrated journalist, Camilla Cederna, after becoming the first person to
interview the coming millionaire in 1977, "one drawing room leading into ano
ther, meadows of carpet, kinetic sculptures, leather, mahogany and rosewood,
a not very tall man is talking away: the face of a baby, lacking even a
single wrinkle, but with a moustache, and a little nose like a doll." The
intellectual hauteur is unmistakable, her sly mockery of this bank clerk's
son's vaulting pretensions, his tireless boosterism, his grand, vulgar
ambitions.

All three men currently in charge of Italy's destiny are outsiders. Deputy
Prime Minister Gianfranco Fini brought the frankly fascist Movimento Sociale
Italiano in from the cold eight years ago, rebranding it Alleanza Nationale;
Umberto Bossi, who stormed into "Roma Ladrona", "Rome, the Big Thief" from
his northern stronghold like a modern-day Visigoth, was a guitarist, maths
tutor and labourer before turning to politics. Berlusconi was an outsider,
too: his origins obscure and provincial. But it is his ties to the powerful
and tainted insiders of Italian politics that explain his rise.

He was born into a middle-class Milanese family in 1936. Enterprise was
manifested early: he did other pupils' homework as well as his own - if they
paid. But although his father rose to the position of bank manager,
Berlusconi worked his way through law school: selling vacuum cleaners door
to door, working as a crooner at student parties and on cruise liners. After
getting top marks for his graduation thesis on advertising, he hurled
himself into business.

It was the beginning of the Sixties, and Italy's post-war boom was under
way. Berlusconi became a property developer, throwing up apartment blocks on
the outskirts of Milan for commuters. "His dream," reported Camilla Cederna
in 1977, "is to be in demand all over the world to build up cities. 'Let's
call Berlusconi,' will be the cry of places wanting to expand.'' But the
tycoon added a caveat: "If urbanism is what is cooked up between developers
and powerful politicians, then that's not me."

Yet that was exactly how he worked. To grow at the speed he grew - from
penniless student to wealthy property developer in a decade - would have
been impossible if he had not had cosy relations with the powerful. He was
close successively to senior leaders in the Christian Democrats and then in
the Socialists, the two parties whose shared hegemony gave Italy fragile,
short-lived governments for nearly 60 years.

Like all successful Italian businessmen, Berlusconi thrived on the
deep-rooted, indeed ancient, custom of clientelism, whereby a businessman
and a politician strike up a friendship to the benefit of both and the
detriment of the public purse. The politician provides his client with jobs,
licences, and official favours of one sort and another in return for the
client's loyal support. Such relationships, which were obviously in defiance
of the greater common good, and often in defiance of the law, too, were the
rocks on which Italy's industrial success was built. And they were not
restricted to the circles of the great and powerful: they were the way
anyone, at practically any level of society, exerted the necessary influence
to get things done.

As the scholar Paul Ginsborg writes in his recent book, Italy and Its
Discontents , "Patron-client relations, the exchange of favours, the use of
kin and friends, became an accepted way for families to negotiate and
traverse the bureaucracy. The state was not seen either as impartial or
benevolent, but rather as a container of resources which individuals and
families, if they found the right keys, could hope to unlock."

Berlusconi went for the biggest locks, and he needed the best and biggest
keys. Milan 2, for example, a huge development outside the city, was under
Linate airport's flight path when it was built. Four years later, the civil
aviation authority obligingly shifted the line of approach to another
residential area. Another case: Berlusconi bought a tract of land in the
city for 500 lire (15p) per square metre. Eight years later, the public
works department rescheduled the land as residential: Berlusconi sold it for
a profit of more than 800 per cent. Such crucial shifts in official policy
could not have been obtained without very special connections.

Milan 2 proved to be the launch pad from which Berlusconi transformed
himself from a local developer to a figure with a national profile. Among
its many facilities, the new suburb had cable television. This little local
station proved to be the first building block in his media empire. At the
time there was no nationwide commercial TV network because none was allowed,
only small local outfits like Milan 2's. With massive capital funding - the
origins of which have never been explained, and which are being mulled over
in the trial of another close Berlusconi colleague, Marcello Dell'Utri, in
Sicily, charged with aiding and abetting the Mafia - he simply ignored this
ban and established a nationwide commercial network. He flattened his rivals
by sheer impudence and determination, ignoring the legal restrictions.

In August 1984 he bought a channel called Rete 4, thereby establishing a
near-monopoly of commercial television. Two months later there was a
showdown: the courts ordered a partial blacking out of Berlusconi's network.
Berlusconi responded in outrage at this violation of the citizen's "libèrta
di telecommando", ("right to use the zapper"); within four days the
Socialist Prime Minister Bettino Craxi, his close friend, the godfather of
his child and best man at his marriage, issued a "decree law" overturning
the court's ruling. This was clientelism at the highest level, for the
highest stakes.

Craxi himself has long gone from the political stage, convicted in absentia
of corruption and dying in disgraced exile in Tunisia. Of all the shady and
compromised figures in recent Italian political history, he is perhaps the
darkest; his leadership, writes Ginsborg, "transformed the [Socialist] party
beyond recognition, sucking nearly all and sundry into a vortex of corrupt
and authoritarian relations".

Berlusconi's astonishing wealth appears to have been the product of close
vertical relationships with loyal retainers on the one hand, and reliable
patrons, notably Craxi, on the other.

How and why did Berlusconi turn to politics? "I chose to enter the field,"
he has written, "and occupy myself with public affairs because I didn't want
to live in an illiberal country, governed by immature forces and by men
committed to a failed political and economic past." Or, if you like: in the
maelstrom of 1992 to 1994, when Italy's ruling parties were swept away in
the backwash of Tangentopoli, the huge, Milan-based investigation into
corruption, Berlusconi lost the patrons who had long ensured his safety and
success. Now his empire was horribly at risk, and the legality of his
business dealings open to piercing scrutiny. So he did the one vastly
ambitious thing: transformed himself from client into super-patron.

It is hard to overstate the boldness of the Forza Italia undertaking: as if
Bill Gates were overnight to turn Microsoft into a political party, and
within a year snatch the American presidency. Only at a time when the
established political forces were in meltdown could it have worked.

That it did so, and worked again in April 2001, proves that Silvio
Berlusconi is more than a massively rich manipulator. As the booklet An
Italian Story , distributed in the millions before the last election,
underlined, his life is a modern Italian fable of difficulties overcome,
enemies confounded, vast success achieved. "Italy is the country I love," he
wrote, "where my roots are, my hopes and my horizons. Here I have learnt,
from my father and from life. Here I have gained my passion for liberty."

"Liberty" is the great Berlusconian buzzword; his coalition government is
called "the House of Liberties". But what is liberty to Berlusconi? The
liberty of citizens to become a little like the great man himself: full of
ambition for self and family, with the guts to hack through the petty
obstacles that "men committed to a failed political and economic past" throw
in their way. "He believes that what is good for him must also be good for
Italy," says a supporter. Berlusconi is a super-patron: every Forza Italia
voter, wishfully at least, a mini-client.

So what is at risk if the Cavalier succeeds, if he continues to dodge law
suits until they all die of old age, if he rules for a full term and then,
as has been hinted, goes on to become the first incumbent of a new, powerful
Italian presidency?

What Berlusconi, for all his grand scale, does not encompass - what, because
of the trajectory of his spectacular, tainted career, he specifically shuts
out - is the notion of citizenship as something broader and deeper than the
pursuit of individual and family happiness. Berlusconi is unlikely to be as
rash as to say, after Thatcher, "There is no such thing as society." But
that is the message, in the end. There are powerful individuals, there are
close families, there are loyal retainers and powerful patrons. The rest is
mere ideological flim-flam. At heart it is a deeply cynical, pessimistic
creed.

But unless an opponent steps up who can articulate the concepts of
citizenship and society with a great deal more vigour and conviction than
the present bunch, Berlusconi looks well set.