[A-List] Italy: Berlusconi's inadequate face-lift

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

(DIS)UNITED EUROPE
Part 1 - My friend Silvio
By Pepe Escobar
Asia Times, February 6 2004

MILAN - Silvio Berlusconi is back. And at 67 he's got a brand-new look.
Talking about body politics: the Italian prime minister's blond trophy wife
pushed "Il Cavaliere", as he is widely known, to go for a face lift and to
keep extreme distance from meat, pasta and wine. He has lost 11 kilograms.
He's very pleased with his new look - and expects the same reaction from the
Italian nation. After all, the supreme credo of the egomaniac former
cruise-ship crooner, ad salesman, real-estate developer, media magnate and
politician is that whatever is good for Silvio is good for Italy.

Silvio is a great personal friend of US President George W Bush. In the
second half of 2003, largely because of this friendship, Italy should have
profited from simultaneously exercising the presidency of the European
Commission - with Romano Prodi - and the European Union - with Silvio
Berlusconi - to rebuild bridges between the two estranged Europes, and
between Europe and the United States. Instead, the double assignment turned
into a major disaster. In Brussels, the Italian presidency is still being
derided as the worst in the history of the EU. Silvio chose to play
proconsul to Bush: it was much easier to invest in a personal partnership
than to try to forge again a common identity for Europe and for the West.

Silvio may not be compromising his new svelte package by losing sleep over
the fact that Italy behaved as a dilettante on the world stage, and is now
little more than a pariah in EU decision-making. But the situation inside
Italy is another matter entirely. Silvio's two key allies in his coalition
government - the populist, racist reforms minister Umberto Bossi, leader of
the xenophobic Northern League, and Deputy Prime Minister Gianfranco Fini, a
reconstructed neo-fascist and leader of the Alleanza Nationale - are at each
other's throats.

Vast swaths of Italians are fuming because since the introduction of the
euro, prices have shot up by as much as 50 percent. Silvio's pension reform
is extremely unpopular and has led to incessant strikes all over northern
Italy. According to a recent poll, two in three Italians consider Silvio's
economic policy a total failure. And to top it all, there is the Parmalat
affair - the biggest financial scandal in Europe since 1945. Just like the
Enron, Tyco and Worldcom scandals in the US, this was a systemic mess -
fueled by creative accounting, piles of fake documents, false profits and a
mind-boggling pyramid of offshore companies. Scores of Italian bankers and
politicians - friends of Silvio - may have been involved.

None of this has been enough to prevent Don Gianni Bozzo - a Catholic priest
and star editorial writer for Il Giornale, a daily owned by Paolo
Berlusconi, Silvio's brother - from assuring everyone at the 10th
anniversary of Forza Italia, the prime minister's political party, that the
arrival of Silvio in the political arena was "an inspiration from the Holy
Ghost". The face-lifted premier beamed his approval. The Vatican was less
than amused. Silviophiles in Milan remember that when their master decided
to create a political party 10 years ago, they were on the brink of being
sent to jail as mafiosi by the Socialist Party and by "the communists". The
genius of Silvio was to create a political party as one would assemble a
business (or a soccer club, such as giant Milan AC, the European soccer
champion, owned by - who else - Silvio). When money is king, politics merges
with economics. Publitalia - his business network, merging advertising
consensus with infotainment - was Silvio's platform to take Italian politics
by storm.

"Mio amico George" (Bush) may have loads of motives to love the
chameleon-like Silvio - who built his last election campaign on the need to
fight the specter of communism just to subsequently submerge former KGB
colonel and now Russian President Vladimir Putin under hugs and kisses
(Putin is another privileged "amico di Silvio"). Silvio favors relentless,
preventive and endless war for the imposition of democracy - his own
version. Like Bush, he conveniently forgets that democracy cannot be imposed
by war. But his motivation is purely personal: he wants by all means to be
positioned as Bush's most faithful ally, any time, anywhere. The choice may
be contrary to the interests of most Italians, and to most of the EU. So
what? For Silvio, personal marketing is what marketing is all about.

Italian analyst Giorgio Bocca, who calls the prime minister "Little Caesar",
maintains that Silvio is a man of fortune, called to manipulate conflicting
ideas in times where ideas mean little and money means everything. Silvio is
Italy's wealthiest man and one of the wealthiest in the world. He is the
glue that keeps together Forza Italia's savage neo-liberalism, the Northern
League's xenophobic populism and Alleanza Nationale's neo-fascism. But he
may be no more than a successful salesman. And that's the danger for Italy.
Economist Oscar Marchisio says the Berlusconi business model applied to
Italy means the country turning into a giant salesman, just selling and
distributing - and leaving to the US and Germany the management of research
and production. The result, says Marchisio, will be to position Italy in the
lower echelons of world production and to ally it with such countries as
"mio amico Vladimir" Putin's Russia - underdeveloped but with strong, shady
networks and efficient mafias.

It's no wonder that Silvio, whose scores of super-managers, bankers,
senators and ministers are routinely denounced for theft, collusion or both,
is so close to the so-called Kremlin mafia. But his eyes only get misty when
he thinks about Washington - or Silvio as proconsul for Emperor Bush. They
think the same way, their project is the same - Bush on the world stage (now
also including the moon and Mars), Silvio is the microcosm of this dream: an
Italian presidential, and not parliamentary, republic. For Silvio as well as
for Bush, the key problem is to blur the distinction between executive and
judicial power. In the United States this is serious business: after all,
the US was born out of a revolt against authoritarian monarchism and in
favor of the autonomy of civil rights. The Bush administration has tried to
bend the rules anyway - rewriting the constitution with edicts and decrees.

Silvio is not so bold: fate has not given him terrorism to legitimize any
abuse against civil rights, but he manages anyway to pass a few "reforms" to
secure increasing impunity to the rich and powerful - starting with himself.
That's the point of Silvio's war against the Italian judiciary: more
immunity for Silvio and his cronies. In essence, Silvio's court in Rome and
Milan behaves just like the emperor's court in Washington. All's well.
Business is good. The poor and wretched in the world will make it, somehow.
The terrorists will be decimated in droves. And if you don't believe in
preventive war, you're a communist.

Is Berlusconism the future of politics - and is it exportable? Progressive
Europe fears Berlusconism as the plague. Valter Veltroni, Rome's mayor,
speaks for millions of Italians - and Europeans - who identify a government
that only cares about the business of its premier and its cronies, while in
the midst of a very serious social crisis: "This government presented itself
with a smile; it got an economic crisis, social conflict, impoverishment of
the middle class and an unbearable level of tension. It has not kept a
single promise." Veltroni points to the solution: more spending on
infrastructure and research and technological innovation: "We need this if
we don't want to be reduced to a manufacture war against India and China."

San Gimigniano, in the heart of Tuscany, is the Manhattan of the 14th
century, with its cluster of stone twin towers. It lives off agriculture and
tourism. Local businessmen - getting rich quick by selling Tuscany's marvels
to foreigners - have no reason not to be pro-Silvio. Florence is only one
hour away - the capital of the Renaissance and of Lorenzo de Medici, the
founder of the modern state. Florence is a hotbed of pacifism and
intellectual dissent: these descendants of Dante and the Medicis seem to
understand that Silvio may be a "little Machiavelli", but definitely not a
humanist. Silvio hates culture: for him the Divine Comedy doesn't work as
literature, but certainly as a TV series with pasta commercials filled with
bikini-clad women.

Silvio got what he wanted by trial and error - by testing little by little
the Italian degree of democratic resistance. He found out that the Italian
social body as a whole is extremely pliable, taking his freedoms for
granted, enslaved by the hedonistic wheel of consumerism and by a
pre-packaged sub-erotic universe available non-stop on Silvio's TV networks
(he controls more than 90 percent of Italy's media). So inevitably the
conditions had to be set for Silvio to (dis)unite modern Italy. Be like me -
and you'll be like Caesar. Don't be like me - and you're a communist loser.