Newsgroup: it.politica.pds
Titolo: The Guardian su Papi

All hail Berlusconi
He's the gaffe-plagued populist who thrives on controversy. A self-made 
plutocrat with a taste for La Dolce Vita, pancake make-up and the grandest 
of gestures. He's been called a clown and a buffoon; but he's Italy's 
richest and most influential public figure and is well on his way to 
becoming the country's longest-serving head of state since Mussolini. John 
Carlin profiles Silvio Berlusconi, a Roman emperor for the 21st century
There's always a tingle of anticipation when Silvio Berlusconi enters the 
stage, a sense that something shockingly out of the ordinary will happen. 
Italy's accidental prime minister - the fabulously rich businessman turned 
astonishingly successful politician - has a knack for disrupting the earnest 
protocols of office. Kissing the bride at an Islamic wedding in Turkey; 
insinuating to the prime minister of Denmark that he should have sex with 
his (Berlusconi's) wife; calling a German parliamentarian a Nazi: it has all 
been part of the burlesque repertoire of the man that Italians have come to 
know - some in jest, some with admiration - as il Cavaliere, the knight.
A press conference in Rome last month with Russian president Vladimir Putin 
presented a further opportunity for outrage or - depending on your point of 
view - delight. The surprise was that for the first few minutes of the 
ceremony it seemed as if this was an opportunity he had resolved to pass up. 
Possibly out of respect for the man he likes to call his 'caro amico 
Vladimiro', he was on his best behaviour, nodding ponderously, lips pursed 
with almost comical solemnity, as Putin trotted out the pieties habitual on 
these occasions.
When the mood changed, when the dour Russian ventured a dull pleasantry, 
Berlusconi released a sunny smile - then held the smile on his 
copper-coloured face, dense with make-up, for a good half minute, before 
allowing it gently, sagely to recede. To the relief of Berlusconi's anxious 
aides, and to the disappointment of the large journalistic contingent, it 
was all going very smoothly indeed. Until a reporter from Le Monde thought 
to ask Putin a double-barrelled beast of a question about human rights in 
Chechnya and the political motivations behind a decision by the Russian 
judiciary to jail the country's richest tycoon. The former KGB man, 
unaccustomed to this sort of bolshiness from reporters, stiffened. 
Berlusconi adopted the guise of a man who had suffered a dreadful personal 
affront. 'What! Insult a guest in my house? How dare you?' his face seemed 
to say.
So he did what any good cavaliere would do in the circumstances. He leapt to 
Putin's defence, interposing himself between the Russian and his French 
assailant. Reaching out a hand and grabbing Putin by the arm, as if to say, 
'Leave this to me, Vladimiro', he fixed his eyes defiantly on the rude 
interrogator and declared, 'I would like to say something first, if I may.' 
Introducing himself to the assembled company as Putin's 'defence lawyer, 
'even if he has not asked me', Berlusconi proceeded to clear his bemused 
client on all counts. First, all these stories of Russian human rights 
abuses in Chechnya were 'legends' fabricated by the press. He knew all about 
this, he said, forced to endure, as he had been, the hostility of 85 per 
cent of the Italian press. As for the notion, similarly disseminated by the 
'false' press, that Putin had anything at all to do with the decision to 
jail the oil billionaire, Mikhail Khodorkovsky, Berlusconi knew the Russian 
president well enough to offer 'a guarantee' that he respected the division 
between the executive power and the judiciary.
The gaffe was not Berlusconi's most ludicrous, but it was one of the most 
serious - because he was speaking in his capacity as president of the 
European Union's Council of Ministers and it is a well-known fact that the 
EU disapproves of what it considers to be brutal human rights abuses in 
Chechnya by the Russians, and that it has grave reservations about what many 
Kremlin observers have taken to be a Putin-inspired decision to go after 
Russia's richest man.
Foreign ministries up and down Europe immediately disowned Berlusconi's 
remarks, making it plain he was not speaking on their behalf. Such, indeed, 
was the outrage Berlusconi generated that his remarks have been taken by 
foreign ministries across the continent as a reason seriously to re-examine 
the validity of the principle of a rotating EU presidency. Berlusconi's 
six-month incumbency, which ended last month, failed in its central task of 
drawing up a new European constitution and has been roundly condemned as a 
fiasco in the European parliament. Graham Watson, leader of Britain's 
Liberal Democrat contingent in the parliament, told Berlusconi his 
presidency had been 'a personal failure'. 'In six short months the 
presidency... has shown contempt for the European Union's policy toward 
Russia and has offended Canada,' said Watson, referring to Berlusconi's 
unilateral decision to cancel an annual Canada-EU summit. 'You set your 
presidency a target of a constitution by Christmas and by your own standards 
you failed.'
Maybe. But in the Berlusconi universe interests - concrete things that you 
can see and hold - count for a lot more than vague notions of 'standards'. 
Il Cavaliere's perception of what lies in his, and maybe even Italy's, 
self-interest includes forging closer ties with Russia, which means - to 
hell with what the Liberal Democrats or the Canadians might think - being 
good friends with Putin. As one of his economic advisers admiringly 
explained, Berlusconi has had 'the vision' to see that a close strategic 
alliance with Russia is good for Italian business. And he has accordingly 
invested a good deal of time in cementing that alliance. He has met with 
Putin four times in the past year; once, in the summer, at his holiday 
residence in Sardinia, where he invited the Russian leader's wife and two 
daughters and filled nine of his own villas with the impressive Russian 
retinue. (He had to buy two new ones at the last minute in order to 
accommodate a larger than expected bodyguard contingent.)
Putin is a cold fish, but Berlusconi's opulence and personal warmth have 
charmed him. A KGB apparatchik most of his adult life, who would have 
sampled little in the way of la dolce vita during his years as a spy in East 
Germany, Putin is a sucker for Berlusconi's Mediterranean largesse. The 
Italian's gallant intervention on his behalf in the face of French 
journalistic perfidy was the consummation of a most unlikely marriage. As 
Berlusconi raved, Putin glowed. Why unlikely? Because Berlusconi is the very 
incarnation of the thing that, in his own country, Putin most detests. The 
view of most independent analysts of the Russian political scene is that the 
reason Khodorkovsky was jailed is because he and other Russian tycoons had 
made an unspoken deal with the Kremlin, whereby they would be allowed to set 
about their tax-dodging, filthy rich ways so long as they never, ever 
crossed the line into politics. Khodorkovsky did, funding political parties 
opposed to Putin, and that was the end of him.
To say that Berlusconi, who is the richest man in Italy (far richer than 
Khodorkovsky), has crossed the line between big business and politics would 
be a ludicrous understatement. Never in history - at least not in the 
history of western democracy - has anything like it ever been seen. It's as 
if Rupert Murdoch were president of the US, but in addition to owning Fox he 
also owned CBS and NBC. But Berlusconi, in the Italian context, is actually 
more than that. He is a mix of Murdoch and Bill Gates, laced with a generous 
measure of Mohamed Al Fayed. Berlusconi - or, in some cases, his wife and 
children - owns virtually all of Italy's commercial TV networks, the 
country's biggest advertising company, the biggest publishing house, the 
biggest film distribution business, two national newspapers, 50 magazines 
and internet service providers. He is a big player in the construction 
business and insurance, and he is president of Italy's most glamorous 
football club, current European champions AC Milan. On top of all that, as 
head of a political party that he - or rather his advertising company, 
Publitalia - created in two months in 1994, he has been elected prime 
minister of Italy twice. His current tenure has stretched to two and a half 
years, the second-longest run of a head of government since Mussolini. If he 
makes it through to Christmas 2004, and the betting is that he will, the 
record will be all his own.
There are two ways to respond to these breathtaking facts. The first, and 
most habitual in the Protestant cultures of the north, is moral outrage. 
Scandinavian - not to mention German - politicians are always getting 
terribly exercised over what quite obviously are his stupefying conflicts of 
interest. The Economist, joined with sporadic vehemence by the big American 
newspapers, has led the charge in the English-speaking media against what 
many unsurprisingly perceive to be the rampant manner in which he has 
traduced the tenets of capitalist democracy.
The second way to respond to Berlusconi (and it does not necessarily have to 
be at odds with the first - one may bury and praise him at the same time) is 
with plain admiration. 'L'tat c'est moi,' declared Louis XIV, and no doubt 
he was pretty pleased with himself when he said it. But it's one thing to be 
a hereditary Sun King 100 years before the French revolution; quite another 
to be Sun King (Berlusconi does, incidentally, describe himself as 'the 
anointed one' from time to time) at the beginning of the 21st century. And 
not, with respect, in Equatorial Guinea, but in Italy, the world's sixth 
largest economy. Though that's the least of it. We are talking about a quite 
magnificent country here, whose contribution to humanity, whose history, is 
awe-inspiring. The list of great Italians is, simply, unbeatable. Leonardo 
da Vinci, Galileo, Christopher Columbus, Dante, Puccini, Michelangelo, 
Vivaldi, Thomas Aquinas, Marconi, Virgil, Cicero, Julius Caesar. And now, 
following in the great tradition, Silvio Berlusconi. A buffoon, maybe, who 
is on record as describing himself as the greatest Italian of the 20th 
century; corrupt, quite possibly, as he has spent much of his life fending 
off sundry charges of bribery and illegal enrichment - charges which he says 
are politically motivated. But, say what you like about him, the one thing 
you cannot deny is that he is also a genius. He has to be, otherwise how 
could he have amassed and retained such an extraordinary concentration of 
wealth and power? Everything he touches turns to gold, even if, as one 
Italian journalist suggested, he then takes it.
The Roman emperors knew that the secret to exercising peaceful rule over the 
people was to provide them with bread and circus. Well, Berlusconi owns the 
circus, pretty much all of it - the TV, the football, the magazines, the 
books. And as a head of government, who also happens to own Italy's biggest 
supermarket chain, he also controls, in the widest sense of the word, the 
bread.
Just in case anyone entertained any doubts as to his all-pervasive ubiquity, 
he posted his personal biography, the magnificently bound An Italian Story, 
to every single family in Italy during the 2001 election campaign. Replete 
with glossy colour photographs of a relentlessly grinning Silvio, the 
128-page book (12m copies were made) describes Berlusconi as 'the perfect 
personification of the Italian dream'. Rather more accurately, Italy being a 
country where people rarely imagine they will ever rise out of the social 
stratum into which they were born, he might be described as a perfect 
Italian imitation of the American Dream.
He was born in 1936 in Milan, to ordinary middle-class parents: his father, 
Luigi, was a bank employee; his mother, Rosella, was a secretary at a 
Pirelli factory. A bright lad at school, he displayed his entrepreneurial 
bent early on by charging his schoolmates for help with their Latin and 
Greek. He then paid his way through university working as a piano-playing 
crooner on cruise ships. Singing remains a passion to this day. Further 
evidence, if evidence were needed, of the man's genius is that - in between 
running his business empire, Italy and the European Union - he has found 
time to compose the lyrics for an album of love songs sung by a 
guitar-playing balladeer called Mariano Apicella. The album, released on CD 
the week before Putin's visit to Rome, is called Better a Song. Among the 
immortal lyrics the album contains, composed perhaps with the Russian 
president in mind, are these: 'With my heart in my mouth/ Because your love 
is everything to me/I know you may make me suffer/But I'll never let you 
go/Even if I have to fight/I will love you until the end'.
Italy's 21st-century Renaissance Man made his first serious bundle, and 
acquired his first private jet, in his mid-thirties, following the 
completion of his first construction project. A short man who thinks big, 
Berlusconi did not limit himself to your regular residential complex, or 
run-of-the-mill skyscraper. He built a town of 4,000 units on a swamp 
outside Milan, which, with characteristically brash immodesty, he christened 
Milano Due - Milan Two. He conceived the plan at the tender age of 27. He 
raised the money, well, no one quite seems to know where he raised the 
money, although inevitably in Italy there are unproved suspicions that the 
Mafia played an important part in kick-starting the Berlusconi business 
empire.
The profits from Milano Due went into starting his advertising agency, 
Publitalia, an entirely natural move for a man whose quintessential 
attribute, all observers agree, is that he is a brilliant salesman. 
Publitalia, the most successful selling machine in Italy, has remained from 
the beginning the beating heart of his sensationally successful commercial 
and political operations. Starting with television, and his company 
Mediaset, which today owns three of Italy's four terrestrial private TV 
channels; and ending with his political party, Forza Italia, whose image and 
message were created by Publitalia and subtly tailored to the requirements 
of each part of the country by the company's network of regional offices, 
located in every significantly sized town in Italy. Thanks to the miracle of 
advertising, Forza Italia was founded in January 1994 and by March the party 
was in power, with Berlusconi as prime minister - 50 of the Forza Italia 
deputies elected to parliament in that election were employees of 
Publitalia.
Renato Brunetta, one of Berlusconi's chief political strategists and 
economic advisers at Forza Italia, says that the way Berlusconi built his TV 
empire offers a large clue to the secret of his success. 'Berlusconi arrived 
in private TV after all the historically big entrepreneurs of Italy had 
tried to make a go of it and failed,' says Brunetta, speaking in his office 
at Forza Italia headquarters on Humility Street (Via dell'Umilta') in 
central Rome. Among the companies that had failed to cut it in the TV world 
were Fiat, whose late chairman Gianni Agnelli used to describe Berlusconi as 
'the man with the pancake make-up'. Pancake or not, Brunetta continues, 
'what Berlusconi did was what he always does. He cut to the core. He is not 
a "refinatto" analyser, not a man who turns things over in his head round 
and round. He goes straight to basic principles. So he asked himself the 
question, "What is the point of the TV business?" The point is, he said, to 
sell advertising at a national level.'
Berlusconi's problem was that at that time, in the Seventies, private TV was 
only allowed to operate in Italy at local level. 'So what he did next, 
having identified the core objective,' Brunetta says, 'was to invest all his 
energy and imagination in achieving it. His solution was to create a virtual 
national TV station.' What he did was broadcast the same programmes on local 
TV stations he owned all over the country at exactly the same times. 'The 
idea was pure genius. Through synchronising countless local stations 
nationwide he was able to compete in advertising revenue with the state 
broadcaster, RAI.'
In the Eighties, Berlusconi expanded into publishing. Again, he arrived 
late; again, his company, Mondadori, swiftly became the country's biggest 
publisher. So promiscuously extensive is the business that Mondadori 
actually publishes the majority of books critical of Berlusconi himself.
'It's not masochism, it's the market!' enthuses Brunetta, an economics 
academic whom Berlusconi defers to as 'professore' in their weekly meetings. 
'Berlusconi is a pure businessman. For him, the free market is king.'
Just how pure is, of course, a moot point. Too pure, at one level, in the 
eyes of his most savage Italian critic, the magnificently named editor of 
the left-wing newspaper l'Unit, Furio Colombo. 'A normal person who goes 
into the television business does so with the dream of improving the content 
of the programming, but this was the very last thing in Berlusconi's mind,' 
says Colombo. 'For him, TV is exclusively a medium to make money, a large 
advertising mine to be tapped. Programmes are space to fill in between ads. 
We have maybe the worst TV in Europe. It is utterly vulgar. But no problem, 
because for Berlusconi it is a money-making formula.'
Berlusconi's TV channels very possibly are the worst in Europe, especially 
for a man of taste such as Colombo, a silver-haired sophisticate who spent a 
good part of his life as Gianni Agnelli's New York-based chief 
representative in the United States. Indeed, if diligently researched news 
documentaries or well-scripted costume dramas are what you are after, then 
don't waste your time channel-surfing Mediaset. What Mediaset did provide 
from the start were popular American soaps such as Dallas, which Italian 
viewers, raised on RAI's relentless stodge, gleefully embraced, as well as 
some spectacularly successful home-grown innovations such as quiz shows in 
which the attractive young female competitors who lost ended up on stage 
naked.
A well-known public figure in Italy who asked to remain anonymous says that 
while she was no friend of Berlusconi, one had to acknowledge that he had 
the popular touch, which she identifies as the key factor in his volcanic 
political rise. 'His vulgarity is the nation's vulgarity,' she says. 'The 
left rages against him, but in large measure out of frustration, because the 
terrible truth of which Berlusconi reminds them is that they have lost touch 
with the people, they have become elitist. Berlusconi knows much better than 
any left-wing intellectual what ordinary Italians want to see on television. 
He knows that what they really want to see is naked women.' In fact, 
Berlusconi spotted his second wife, Veronica in 1990, performing in a play 
described at the time by an Italian newspaper (perhaps one of Berlusconi's) 
as 'a topless classic'.
Others in the media world may be accused of dumbing down. Berlusconi does 
not need to dumb down. He does not patronise the masses; he does not talk 
down to them. He is, for better or for worse, one of them. As a pure-hearted 
journalist of the left lamented: 'When Berlusconi makes what many of us take 
to be disgusting, outrageous comments he is really giving voice to the views 
of the 20m Italians who voted for him. When he says - as he did after 11 
September - that Muslims are an inferior culture; when he says Mussolini was 
not so bad; when he says Europe should be declared a Christian area; when he 
makes jokes comparing German politicians to Nazi prison-camp commanders - 
when he says all of these things he is simply expressing the ignorant, 
superficial, narrow, incurious about the outside world views of many, many 
Italians.'
And not just Italians, the journalist - a much-travelled man - might well 
have added. Berlusconi, unlike other politicians who paint pictures of the 
world as they would like it to be, relates to the world as it is. 
Specifically to his Italian world. 'He is a delinquent,' says the well-known 
public figure who does not want to be quoted by name. 'But then, so are the 
people who vote for him. They all cheat on their taxes, they all flout the 
rules and defraud the system in one way or another.'
The various charges brought against Berlusconi, courtesy of a chart 
published in The Economist, are these: illegal financing of political 
parties, tax fraud, false accounting, bribing financial police and bribing 
judges. One way or another, despite nine separate trials, he has managed to 
wriggle his way out of trouble. Either he has found succour in the statute 
of limitations or in amendments to laws that he himself, as prime minister, 
has championed. Only one case is pending. It concerns the alleged bribery of 
judges in a matter involving the sale of a state-owned biscuit company.
'Berlusconi is a man with a lot of skeletons in his cupboard,' says Giuliano 
Ferrara, a minister in Berlusconi's first government and, to this day, one 
of his closest confidants. 'But it is also true that the public prosecutors 
are very biased against him.' They were biased against him, or legitimately 
gunning for him (depending on your point of view) in part because of his 
close friendship with former Socialist Party prime minister Bettino Craxi, a 
man identified by a sort of moral revolution that swept the Italian 
judiciary in the early Nineties - Mani Pulite, or Clean Hands, they called 
it - as the epitome of the corruption at the heart of the Italian political 
system.
Craxi, who was godfather to one of Berlusconi's daughters, is credited with 
having whipped a decree through the Italian parliament in 1984 that allowed 
Berlusconi's Mediaset to go fully national. When Mani Pulite struck - 
indicting 900 politicians, civil servants and businessmen - Craxi, the 
judges' most treasured prize, fled to Tunisia, where he died in exile.
Craxi was Berlusconi's most valued political patron. Indeed, it was Craxi 
who bestowed on Berlusconi the honorific title of 'Cavaliere', Italy's 
republican equivalent of a knighthood. It was the least of the favours Craxi 
did him. No one would try to pretend that Craxi did not contribute 
significantly to building the Berlusconi fortune. Certainly not Ferrara, who 
meets with Berlusconi at least once a week and is today the editor of Il 
Foglio, a newspaper owned by the Berlusconi family. 'We all know we live in 
a country where fortunes can only be built on political grounds, on the back 
of alliances,' Ferrara says. 'Berlusconi, as a very successful TV 
businessman, was very well connected politically, and friends with Craxi. 
When Craxi was made the great scapegoat, Berlusconi felt he was next. And 
that is initially why he got into power. He had to do it to save himself.'
Until the legal waters started rising up to his neck, going into politics 
was the last thing on Berlusconi's mind. As Brunetta, Berlusconi's 
'professore' at Forza Italia says, 'When I first met him in the early 
Nineties it was clear that he was a businessman through and through, with no 
interest in politics whatsoever.' It is, once again, a tribute to 
Berlusconi's talent that he identified the problem - 'I am in legal trouble 
because I have no more political patrons left' - then identified the 
solution - 'The only thing for it is for me to become my own political 
patron' - and then set about with extraordinary vigour and single-mindedness 
to found a political party, lead it and, in barely two months, become prime 
minister of Italy.
The coalition on which his first government was built fell apart after eight 
months, but while he had to wait until May 2001 to resume the prime 
ministership, his power as head of what remained during this time - Italy's 
biggest parliamentary party - remained considerable, allowing him, for 
example, to protect himself against attempts to encroach on his virtual 
monopoly of private TV. But his primary purpose in holding political power, 
as Ferrara points out, was to shield himself from the law. Whereupon he set 
about decriminalising several of the offences of which he was accused. Most 
spectacularly, last year his government passed a law that provided 
Berlusconi and five other high-ranking members of government with immunity 
against prosecution so long as they held office.
'Similar immunity laws are in place in France and Spain,' Ferrara shrugs. 
'As for some of the other laws, they helped him, but they were valid for 
all.' The abolition of inheritance tax, one of his first measures on coming 
to office, was a case in point. It pleased all those who voted for him, but, 
Berlusconi being the richest man in Italy, it pleased his family best of 
all. He has passed laws that have given his companies huge tax write-offs. 
Last month, the Italian president, Carlo Azeglio Ciampi, shocked Berlusconi 
by refusing to sign a bill that would have further relaxed limits on media 
ownership as well as protect one of his family's TV stations, which under 
the present law is threatened by closure.
A setback, this, but not a disaster. A few days later Berlusconi's cabinet 
issued a decree providing Mediaset channel Rete 4 with the cover required to 
continue operating. As for the controversial bill, which would allow 
Berlusconi not only to consolidate his TV interests but expand his interests 
in print, the president will be obliged to sign it if the Italian parliament 
approves it a second time. Berlusconi's deputy prime minister, Gianfranco 
Fini, said he was convinced the bill would be returned to Ciampi for rubber 
stamping; whereupon - at least, this is the word in journalistic circles - 
Berlusconi will be free to pursue his ultimate aim, to acquire Italy's most 
respected and venerable newspaper, Corriere della Sera.
All of which suggests that if Italy were not already a member of the 
European Union it would struggle, so long as Berlusconi were in power, to 
meet the democratic criteria necessary to be admitted. Indeed, the European 
parliament, alarmed by Berlusconi's conflicts of interest, ordered an 
inquiry in October into freedom of expression in Italy. Furio Colombo has no 
doubt as to what the inquiry's findings should be. 'Berlusconi being prime 
minister represents an immense act of intimidation against all journalists, 
most of whom in Italy want eventually to go into television, because 
everybody knows that what you write and say may impact on your career.' Just 
in case anyone should have failed to get the message, Berlusconi has seen to 
it that examples are made of journalists who go beyond what he considers to 
be the boundaries of acceptable criticism.
The most celebrated case was that of Enzo Biagi, the most respected of 
Italian TV journalists. On the eve of the 2001 election, Biagi interviewed 
Roberto Benigni, the great Italian comic actor, star of the Oscar-winning 
film Life is Beautiful. As Colombo remembers it, Biagi asked Benigni what he 
thought of Berlusconi, whereupon Benigni started laughing, and laughing, and 
laughing in a manner so madly infectious that Biagi could not help but join 
in. Nor could Biagi restrain himself when Benigni set off on one of his 
trademark stream-of-consciousness monologues.
'Who is Berlusconi?' began Benigni. 'He is someone who always wants to be in 
on the act. He wants to be everywhere. He wants to be the star. There's a 
meeting, he talks. He goes to a wedding, he wants to be the bridegroom. He 
goes to a funeral, he wants to be the deceased.'
Biagi cracked up. The programme he was presenting, a five-minute interview 
and commentary programme called Il Fatto (The Event), had been broadcast 
since 1995. Despite Benigni's jokes, Berlusconi won the election, but he 
never forgave Biagi, claiming he had deliberately sought to turn voters 
against him. A year later, in April 2002, while on an official visit to 
Bulgaria, Berlusconi took his revenge. Publicly accusing Biagi and another 
RAI journalist of putting public television 'to criminal use', he urged 
RAI's management to take measures to prevent such abuses from happening 
again. Within two months Biagi and Il Fatto had been taken off the air, and 
were never to reappear on RAI again.
Even Berlusconi's best friends thought that this was too much. Ferrara wrote 
a column in his paper accusing him of abusing his power. Colombo goes a lot 
further. Claiming that RAI's subservience to Berlusconi effectively gives 
him control of 90 per cent of Italian TV, Colombo says Berlusconi exercises 
the most sinister influence over Italians' thought processes. 'He controls 
information so that people think what he wants them to think. Mussolini used 
tanks. Berlusconi uses his control of the media.'
You have to wonder, though. While there may be much truth in the contention 
that in the Italian media arena Berlusconi fills the role both of player and 
referee, is it also true to say that Italians are so easily manipulated, so 
gullible? After all, if there is one group of people in the world who were 
most definitely not born yesterday, it is the Italians. The really 
interesting thing, surely, is not that people vote for Berlusconi in such 
huge numbers because they have been reduced to sheep, but that they do so in 
the full possession of their faculties. It is not as if the opposition 
parties made some sort of a perverse pact to remain silent on Berlusconi's 
sins during the election campaign. On the contrary. 'He won the elections,' 
says Ferrara, 'despite the Italian public knowing everything about his 
conflicts of interest and his judicial problems.'
They know, as Benigni reminded them, and as Ferrara cheerfully admits, that 
Berlusconi is a 'megalomaniac' (though, as Ferrara maintains, a pleasingly 
self-deprecating one in private). They know he is - again, in Ferrara's 
term - a 'gaffeur'. They know, from his cheesy love songs, that he is 
something of a clown. They know he is corrupt, because they know you cannot 
make that much money in business in Italy without being corrupt. They know, 
to borrow John Dryden's description of a contemporary 17th-century 
politician, that 'in the course of one revolving moon, he was chymist [sic], 
fiddler, statesman and buffoon'. And yet 20m Italians have voted for him - 
twice. And may do so again. For all the belly-aching of the Italian left, 
and of The Economist, and of right-thinking politicians in Germany, Finland 
and Sweden, there is nothing resembling a national clamour for his removal 
from office. No riots, no street demonstrations. And while half of Italy may 
be against him, as half of America is against George Bush, there is no 
reason to believe he will not be elected again next time, should he still 
feel the legal pressure to stand.
So what is it all about? Could it be that Berlusconi has some redeeming 
features? Those who know him, like Brunetta, say that he is cheerfully 
egalitarian in his treatment of people, be they his chefs, secretaries or 
cabinet ministers. They say he works hard, that he exudes an all-American 
optimism in everything he does, that he is not the paranoid tycoon type, 
rather he is a team man who likes to make people around him rich, so long as 
they work for the furtherance of his glory. He is also, his advisers insist, 
a remarkably good listener, who takes notes as they talk. And, obviously, he 
is a mightily astute self-made man.
One of Berlusconi's greatest attributes, as far as the general public is 
concerned, may be his bare-faced honesty. As Ferrara says, no one will ever 
accuse him of being a natural-born politician, a man who chooses his words 
carefully, who knows how to be economical with the truth.
Tana de Zulueta, a senator of the Democratic Left party and one of 
Berlusconi's most vociferous critics, says that his gaffes in the Rome press 
conference with Putin provided further evidence of 'his diabolical mixture 
of ignorance - he does not read the dossiers because he is simply not 
interested in the business of government - and his slightly demented 
exhibitionist streak.' And, yes indeed, he may be a mildly bonkers 
egomaniac, he may be the single most corrupt politician in Europe, but he 
has never purported to be a whiter-than-white Tony Blair type. During the 
day of that famous session at the European parliament when he compared the 
German politician to a Nazi, he let slip a quite remarkable little nugget. 
Pressed by a critic who suggested that back home he was passing laws that 
served his own interests, Berlusconi indignantly replied that out of 350 
laws his government had proposed, 'only three' had been 'in a certain sense' 
for his own benefit. Terribly shocking, this, to Protestant European 
sensibilities, of course, but is it really much worse than President Bush 
passing laws that cut taxes for his rich election campaign donors, that do 
favours to his old buddies in the oil industry?
Take another example, Berlusconi's response to the question why his 
government supported the war in Iraq. None of the convoluted arguments 
employed by Mr Blair; no sexing up of dossiers; no claims that Italy was 
under imminent threat of nuclear attack. As Brunetta says of him, he is a 
simplifier who cuts straight to the point. I supported the war in Iraq 
because that is what the Americans wanted me to do, is what he says. More 
specifically, this is what he told The Spectator in an interview in the 
summer: 'If a brother goes into a certain business and for three months I 
say, "I beg you not to do it", and when he does it - well, he is my brother, 
and I support him, even if not to the point of paying for all his losses! 
And I have done the same thing with the US. We are alive today because of 
the US and it was the US who liberated us from Nazism and Communism and 
supported our economic growth.'
In other words, Berlusconi is America's poodle. Unlike others, he does not 
pretend that he isn't. Whatever else you may say about him, he is not a 
hypocrite. He does mention the war; he says what he really thinks about 
Muslims and Christians (one wonders if Bush does). He is so sensationally 
uninhibited, in fact, that he makes no bones about repeating the widespread 
rumour that his topless actress wife, Veronica Lario, is having an affair 
with Massimo Cacciari, a Marxist philosopher and former mayor of Venice. 
Thus it was that a year ago he introduced the Danish prime minister, who was 
visiting Rome, as 'Anders Rasmussen, the best-looking prime minister in 
Europe', remarking that he and Veronica really ought to meet. Rasmussen, 
after all, was so much better looking than Cacciari.
If Italians vote for him it must be, in the end, because they like him. 
Because they see much of themselves in him. His disregard for the rules; the 
importance he attaches to cutting a bella figura; his unabashed cynicism (as 
per his relationship with the transparently amoral Putin); and a sense, 
detectable too from a distance that, like most Italians, he sucked in an 
understanding of life's comic futility with his mother's milk.
If every day on your way to work you drive - or in previous centuries, rode 
or walked - past the Colosseum, past that monumental ruin of an empire that 
once bestrode the known world, then it is impossible not to be possessed of 
a keen sense of irony; of an understanding that everything passes, nothing 
lasts and there is nothing new under the sun. A point Ferrara makes is that 
Italians have nothing remotely equivalent to the veneration Americans feel 
for the White House, the British (or at least a good number of them) for the 
monarchy, the Spanish for the hidalgo concept of nobility. Nothing beyond 
the inner circle of family and close friends is sacred.
Foreigners visiting Italy can sense it in the languid condescension with 
which they are regarded by the natives, the world-weary amusement. Which is 
hardly surprising if, never mind the rise and fall of the Roman empire, your 
country has been subjected to pillage, slaughter and rape for one generation 
after the next for 16 centuries. The inevitable outcome is that you attach 
no faith to your country's rulers. They have never protected you from the 
barbarian hordes. You try, in fact, to keep government as far removed from 
your life as possible, because insofar as they have been able to, they have 
pillaged you, too. 'Piove; governo ladro,' the Italians say. 'It rains; the 
government steals.' So what else is new? At least Berlusconi does not 
seriously try to make out that he is somehow different, that he is possessed 
of a superior virtue. To play the fool: that is OK. We all get the joke. And 
even if sometimes it is not very funny, if there is something a little 
operatically embarrassing about him, what does it matter, really?
Central government in Italy feels far away. If Berlusconi makes a fool of 
himself, it is his business; it is not as if anyone imagines he is the 
incarnation of the Italian people. People vote for him - insofar as they 
think about it very much, which most Italians do not - because they admire 
his success and because he is like many of them, only more so. He is not 
just Italian, he is Italianissimo. Some may think, as he does of the 
Muslims, that the Berlusconi phenomenon reveals Italy to be an inferior 
civilisation. Some will say the precise opposite. Either way, don't expect 
the man on the Colosseum omnibus to be particularly fussed.


E HANNO RAGIONE:
- Feste in cui si canta e si balla? Sai che scandalo.
- Qualche ragazza in topless al mare in Agosto nella villa sarda del
Premier?
Basta andare in spiaggia a Rimini.
- Una nottata passata con una "signora" consenziente da parte di un adulto
di
fatto separato dalla moglie da alcuni anni?
Chi � senza peccato scagli la prima pietra.
- La foto di un bacio lesbico sullo sfondo di Villa Certosa?
Questo dimostra che Berlusconi non ha pregiudizi.
Cosa doveva fare, cacciare le poverette?
E i diritti degli omosessuali, dove li mettiamo?