Newsgroup: it.politica
Titolo: Silvio Berlusconi: culture bites politics

Silvio Berlusconi: culture bites politics
A successful, intimidating prime minister has moulded Italy’s public
life in his own image. A fearful, supine opposition is paralysed by
his achievement. But there is one source of hope, says Geoff
Andrews.
(About the author :Geoff Andrews is staff tutor in politics at the
Open University and is also an associate editor of Soundings.)
It has been clear for a long time that Silvio Berlusconi is a leader
very far from the classic professional politician of the western
liberal-democratic mould. Rather, Italy’s premier is a postmodern
populist who employs a highly personalised style of leadership in
which television plays a central part.
His rule during three periods in office (1994-95, 2001-06, 2008-) has
been a celebration of image and power fuelled by a constant appeal to
the gut instincts of the people. His wealth is at once the source of
his route to power, a measure of his invincibility, and a constant
reminder to Italians of his entrepreneurial success and ability to get
things done.
In all this, Berlusconi draws a winning symbolic contrast with the
older type of political leader - locked in the world of newspaper
columns and council-chamber meetings. driven to explain policy by
reference to ideology, constrained (however grudgingly) by claims of
accountability and transparency. No wonder Italy’s official opposition
is afraid of him.
Indeed, Berlusconi’s current period in office (since his victory in
the elections of April 2008) has seen fear acquire increasing
political importance. The prime minister regularly uses his media
influence to remove dissidents from the main public-broadcasting
channels; assails his opponents as communists or conspirators;
harasses his critics with legal writs; denounces judges (whom he sees
as his main adversaries); and even speaks out against the president of
the republic.
This aggressive stance has paralysed Italy’s official opposition. Its
main representative, the Partito Democratico (Democratic Party) -
itself relatively new, but led by ex-communists and ex-Christian
Democrats shaped by the political failures of an earlier era - has
been unable either to confront the source of Silvio Berlusconi’s
political power during its brief period in government or to begin to
construct a plausible vision of a post-Berlusconi world. Italy’s
opposition has yet answer the big questions surrounding Italy’s future
in any credible way.
The overall result is that a kind of fatalism now pervades Italian
public life. Almost every week brings fresh allegations about
Berlusconi’s behaviour (of mafia associations or corruption scandals,
for example), which are widely reported in a foreign media fixated on
the idea of “Berlusconi in crisis”; yet these continue to have little
effect on those that matter - the Italian people. In another notable
departure from the norms of everyday European politics, many Italians
even perceive the prime minister’s human frailties (as others see
them) as virtues of his leadership. An almost incredible aspect of
this bizarre political situation is that amid a morass of condemnation
and vitriol, Berlusconi - one of the wealthiest and most powerful
figures in modern Europe - has been able successfully to present
himself as a victim.
The artists’ answer
This questions that arise from this situation are obvious: how can it
be understood, and - if the leader is so commanding and the opposition
so stultified - where will real challenge come from?
Italy’s artists offer answers to both. The filmmaker Erik Gandini has
created an extraordinary social document called Videocracy which in
effect argues that Silvio Berlusconi has (mainly through the vehicle
of television) initiated a cultural revolution that has moulded
Italians in his own image. In this perspective Berlusconismo’s
drenching celebrity culture has a sinister twist - consolidating the
leader’s almost unassailable personal power by creating a public
culture in his own image. As a result what the Italian think-tank
Vision refers to as the “B-factor” continues to dominate Italy and set
the terms of political debate.
Italy’s public broadcaster RAI banned trailers for Gandini’s film
being shown, part of a now familiar pattern of threats and censorship
in response to artists’ interventions. The same scorn was poured on
Sabina Guzzanti’s new film Draquila: L’Italia Che Trema (Draquila:
Italy Trembles), which the Italian culture minister Sandro Bondi
dismissed as a “propaganda film..that insults the truth and the
Italian people”. The film, whose title combines Dracula and L’Aquila
(the Abruzzo town devastated by an earthquake in April 2009 which
killed almost 300 people and made 60,000 homeless), is a courageous
attempt to address the plight of these citizens who feel abandoned by
their government. Guzzanti, one of Italy’s leading satirists, has
through this work engaged directly with citizens and local movements,
such as the “Yes We Camp” group I met when I visited L’Aquila (see
“Italy and the G8: voices from L’Aquila”, 10 July 2009). Draquila won
a standing ovation at the 2010 Cannes film festival.
An earlier example of an artistic effort to make sense of Italy’s
predicament under Berlusconi is Nanni Moretti’s Il Caimano, released
just before the 2006 election. Moretti had already played a major role
in civil-society movements such as the girotondi, which campaigned
against Berlusconi’s conflicts of interests in the absence of any
leadership from the official opposition. “With these leaders we will
never win”, he famously told a crowd in Piazza Navona in Rome in 2002,
with the centre-left functionaries behind him – largely the same crowd
which leads the Democratic Party today.
More recently, the comic blogger Beppe Grillo - a constant critic of
the corrupt nature of Italy’s political class - has moved from
marginal dissident to serious political opponent; in the regional
elections of March 2010 his Movimento a 5 Stelle (Five-Star Movement)
captured half a million votes. His challenge extends beyond Berlusconi
to the timid and compromised politicians of the official opposition,
among which only Antonio Di Pietro’s Italia dei Valori (Italy of
Values) Party offers an exception. Beppe Grillo’s imaginative use of
new media has helped him to establish an extraordinary political
network.
On their own, these “cultural critics” cannot end Berlusconismo and
change Italy. But in two ways they can provide a new opposition and
revitalise Italy’s public life. First, they use a language which
enables them to reach beyond the restrictions of the orthodox
politicians and can help galvanise rather than alienate other
dissentingl voices in civil society. Second, they interrogate in a
courageous and creative way the darker sides of the Berlusconi
phenomenon.
Above all, they understand the nature of Silvio Berlusconi’s power as
well as its limits. They do not retreat from difficult questions. They
have gone where the official opposition has feared to tread.
They provide hope, if not yet a vision, of a different Italy.

 Silvio Berlusconi: culture bites politics
Socmel Ernesto..... e paga le tasse!!
--
15/4/2001 Io non riconoscerò certo a un delinquente alcuna autorità. 
Per le tasse cercherò di fare come lui: una mazzetta a qualcuno e via! 
E.
(Cit- Ernesto Ciancialesto)