Newsgroup: it.politica.internazionale
Titolo: (New York Review of Books) "With Berlusconi in the Soup"

http://tinyurl.com/ykxelz2
With Berlusconi in the Soup
By Ingrid D. Rowland
It is a measure of the ineptitude—or is it a death wish?—of Italy's
major opposition party, the Partito Democratico (Democratic Party), that
it has spent the entire season of Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi's
discontent wrangling over the election of its own party secretary—only
to be caught, on the eve of the October 25 vote (its winner was Pier
Luigi Bersani, a sensible former minister in several left-wing
administrations), by a veritable Vesuvius of erupting bimbos. The day
before, Piero Marrazzo, the Democratic governor of the region of Lazio
(approximately equivalent to a state in the US, and the region that
contains Rome), confessed to having been blackmailed by a gang of four
corrupt carabinieri who had tracked his wild times with transgendered
Brazilian prostitutes (filming an encounter with a certain "Natalie").
His sexual tastes were of no juridical importance, but the same could
not be said about his use of an official car for these appointments, or
his payment of outrageous sums of money (whose?) for ministrations laced
with cocaine and silicone curves. He resigned on October 27.
Ironically, Marrazzo, a former television host (which may have helped
him meet his pneumatic Brazilian friends), now finds that his most
fervent defenders come from the ranks of Berlusconi's majority party,
the Popolo della Libertà (Freedom People), which is anxious to protect
its own paladin from the consequences of his even more publicized
amorous excesses. Members of Freedom People of late have been
outspokenly solicitous of other people's "privacy"—that is, their
appetite for kinky sex.
Perhaps the most interesting aspect of this never-ending tale of Homo
politicus and the Seven Deadly Sins is the reaction of the women
involved, which bears no resemblance to the grim stoicism of their
American counterparts, the betrayed wives who stand with dismal
regularity hand in hand with their lawfully wedded philanderers while
looking as visibly agonized as Saint Sebastian shot full of arrows.
Veronica Lario, Berlusconi's wife, responded to her husband's
shenanigans by announcing her filing for divorce in the pages of the
opposition newspaper La Repubblica; for his part, the father-in-law of
former Governor Marrazzo has been enthusiastically denouncing his
son-in-law, not without reason, as a jerk. In any event, wherever Italy
goes these days, the Democratic Party in its present form is unlikely to
be leading the way.
There is no question, however, that Italy is moving into a new
situation. Ever since Veronica Lario gave up on her marriage, Berlusconi
has had an increasingly hard time finding his bearings nationally,
internationally, and personally (of course, the real situation may well
be the other way around: the astute Signora Lario may have recognized
that her husband was losing self-control and addressed him by the only
means he understands—the press). Berlusconi, for his part, is back in
the soup of his corruption scandals since a decision by the Italian
Supreme Court left him open again to prosecution while in office, and he
has let it slip that he no longer enjoys his job. That disillusionment
shows; his public persona has taken on a sharp edge that was never this
evident before, and he has been seeking comfort too often in the company
of dictators like Vladimir Putin and Muammar Qaddafi.
Tellingly, too, the prime minister's potential successors are measuring
their reach: the list includes Gianfranco Fini, current president of the
Chamber of Deputies (the lower house of the Italian parliament), far and
away the most capable politician in circulation, and, somewhat
surprisingly, Giulio Tremonti, Berlusconi's minister of finance, who has
apparently come to envision himself as the possible prime minister of a
"technical government"like those headed in the 1990s by the left-wing
Carlo Azeglio Ciampi (who went on to be a much-loved president of Italy)
and Giuliano Amato.
Tremonti has power, certainly; he holds the national purse strings.
Fini, in turn, benefits from a remarkable political instinct that has
led him to move from his original power base, the neo-Fascist (and now
long-defunct) Italian Social Movement (MSI), to his present position as
an increasingly popular moderate.
The left can match Tremonti's economic expertise with Tommaso
Padoa-Schioppa, who served as minister of finance under the last
government of Romano Prodi; but there is no one capable of matching
Fini's finesse, least of all Walter Veltroni, the founder and first
secretary of the Democratic Party (and former mayor of Rome), who was
sidelined since spring when a rapid-fire series of political blunders
stripped the would-be emperor of his new clothes. (The election of
Bersani to the position of party secretary is another slap to Veltroni,
who preferred a different candidate, a former Christian Democrat.)
To their misfortune, moreover, the Democrats have shown themselves fully
as susceptible to the siren songs of lust and greed as Berlusconi's
Freedom People, especially in southern Italy, where the same procurer
seems to have been furnishing women to Berlusconi and to Democratic
higher-ups in the regions of Apulia and of Campania, whose president,
Antonio Bassolino, is a former Neapolitan mayor, Democrat, and erstwhile
shining hope of Naples.
Bassolino made the same unforgivable mistake in Naples as Veltroni did
in Rome—trying to hold national office and function as mayor at the same
time. Both have paid dearly for their hubris, though not as dearly as
the citizens they failed to serve. In the meantime, Naples and Campania
continue to suffer in the criminal grip of the Camorra, unforgettably
exposed by Roberto Saviano's book Gomorra and Matteo Garrone's film of
the same name.
The world economic crisis has shortened Italians' patience with
corruption in general, but especially with a political class whose
privileges by definition include exemption from Italy's high taxes.
Politicians, Democrats and Freedom People alike, are more likely than
not to be identified as members of a single category, damningly defined
in 2007 by writers Gian Antonio Stella and Sergio Rizzo as "the
Caste,"Brahmins who live above the law, oblivious to the real feelings
of the people around them.
These days, neither Democrats nor Freedom People look any better than
their predecessors; the only question, as the respected commentator
Eugenio Scalfari wrote in La Repubblica recently, is whether they will
be replaced by a democracy or an authoritarian state. Berlusconi may
dream of supreme authority, but it is unlikely now that he can really
take it in hand. He has a great deal of control over Italy, but that
control is threatened by forces outside Italy's party system.
For there are two other players to be reckoned with in the present
Italian drama. One is Pope Benedict XVI, who knows that Berlusconi is
more likely than any of his successors to drive through legislation that
puts sharp restrictions on living wills—what in Italy is called a
"biological testament."Recently, the Church has strenuously opposed any
interruption of artificial life support for patients who included
Piergiorgio Welby, an articulate man in the final stages of muscular
dystrophy, and Eluana Englaro, a young woman who spent seventeen years
in an irreversible coma. On several other issues, as well, ranging from
abortion to religious instruction in public schools, the Italian Council
of Bishops has tried to exercise increased authority in the nation's
political life.
The Council of Bishops has reproved Berlusconi for irresponsible
behavior—meaning his parties with underage girls and professional
escorts—but this prime minister, with substantial control over both
houses of parliament, remains useful for the current Church agendas in
spite of his personal foibles. Present usefulness, however, is nothing
like carte blanche. Berlusconi is on probation with Pope Benedict, who
has always been, and remains, a born tactician—as the Church of England
discovered in late October when he suddenly announced new procedures for
admitting Anglicans into the Catholic fold (much to the surprise of the
Archbishop of Canterbury).
The other player is Rupert Murdoch. Berlusconi, though he was—and still
is—a powerful media tycoon, is not unique in that category, or in the
scope of his ambitions. Murdoch, who shares Berlusconi's varieties of
cunning, if not his cruise-ship charm, and who has not complicated his
life by running for political office, is gradually assembling a share of
Italy's media market, although Berlusconi has tried with a certain
degree of success to keep him out. But Murdoch is not about to give up
the struggle now, not when tabloid journalists have been offered such a
banquet of Italian gossip to feast upon, much of it, until recently, at
the prime minister's expense.
Nor can Berlusconi trust nature, to judge by the recent mudslides in
Sicily, not when Italy stands at the junction of two tectonic plates,
and at a time when Italians worry that global warming may be responsible
for strange weather and violent, tropical-style storms (to say nothing
of the threat that rising seas pose to Venice). To be sure, nature
played into his hands with the April earthquake in L'Aquila, a beautiful
town in Abruzzo, a region of hardy, industrious mountain people where
the prime minister could touch down easily by helicopter from Rome to
offer personal comfort—and indeed accessibility has been one of
Berlusconi's strongest assets throughout his political career.
The mudslides of October happened on precipitous volcanic hillsides
developed against every law of gravity by unscrupulous builders, and in
a region where the population, from long negative experience, is
suspicious of any government. In Sicily, Berlusconi was received by
victims of the mudslides as if he were part of the problem; as indeed he
has been, by repeatedly favoring legislation that has dropped sanctions
against just the kinds of illegal construction that slid down the hills
around Messina—itself the site of one of the world's most devastating
earthquakes, which may have killed as many as two hundred thousand
people in 1908. Surely the houses that came down in the recent mudslides
would do no better against seismic shock.
It was a Sicilian, after all, Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa, who
distilled the paradox of modern Italy: "If we want everything to stay as
it is, everything has to change!" ("Se vogliamo che tutto rimanga come
è, bisogna che tutto cambi!") In the land of Julius Caesar—a brilliant
politician who nonetheless mismeasured, fatally, the temper of the Roman
Senate—it is hard to fathom why, as political animals, we can never seem
to ingest the most basic laws of cause and effect. For in the end, Piero
Marrazzo's sad, sordid story redounds as much against Silvio Berlusconi
and every other member of the Caste as it does in the prime minister's
favor. In any event, among Italian politicians, the one who best rewards
watching these days is Gianfranco Fini, whose moves, wherever they take
him, are premeditated and intelligent.
Besides, Berlusconi is no longer the politician who most inspires
Italians of every political stripe, despite what his polls continue to
tell him. That politician exists, but his name is Barack Obama, a man
whose health plan poses no threat in a country long used to socialized
medicine, and whose message of change resonates in this tired, cynical
country with at least as much force as it has in the United States.
—November 4, 2009

 By Ingrid D. Rowland
molto bello, grazie