The resurrection of Silvio Berlusconi

By Gwynne Dyer

LONDON (JP): "There is no one in Italy or the world who can match me for my talents or personal background," said Silvio Berlusconi, candidate for prime minister of Italy in the elections on May 13, as he mailed off an estimated 20 million copies of his 128-page biography to every household in Italy. It featured 250 photographs showing Berlusconi kissing babies, picking flowers, and hobnobbing with celebrities ranging from former British prime minister Margaret Thatcher (his idol) to actor Sylvester Stallone.

A press-run of 20 million would stretch the resources of even an American presidential candidate, but it was no problem for Berlusconi, who owns the publishing house, Mondadori. He is, indeed, Italy's richest man, and 23rd richest in the world. If that doesn't qualify him to run the country, what could?

A good question actually, for there is little else that qualifies him to run the place. He began his climb to wealth with property deals in his native Milan that were widely believed to prosper because of his close contacts in the city's ruling (and deeply corrupt) Socialist Party.

Later acquisitions were often linked to his membership in the notorious P-2 ("Propaganda Due"), a shady Masonic lodge for high- fliers that was the nest where many spectacularly crooked deals were hatched. And the television networks that turned him into a billionaire flourished under the patronage of Bettino Craxi, a former Socialist prime minister who was later sentenced to nine years' jail for corruption but fled to Tunisia and died in exile.

Berlusconi no longer hangs around with Socialists now. He is the White Knight of the Right, come to revive and purify Italy with the cleansing power of business competence and free-market ideology. But the perception of corruption and insider privilege lingers: a recent cover story in Britain's influential Economist magazine bluntly concluded that he was "unfit to lead Italy", citing accusations of "money-laundering, complicity in murder; connections with the Mafia; tax evasion and the bribing of politicians, judges and the tax police ."

Italians know all this. They would have to be brain-dead not to. Yet in the latest opinion poll, Berlusconi's right-wing coalition was leading the ruling Olive Tree coalition of left-of- center parties by 47.5 percent to 43 percent. What would make a people as clever and critical as the Italians fall for a transparently obvious crook in an expensive suit?

One reason is his television stations. His Fininvest holding company owns all three of Italy's major private networks, which promote him relentlessly and shamelessly. One Sunday evening recently, for example, one of his networks ran an hour-long Berlusconi campaign speech without cuts or interruptions even for commercials.

Another reason is the Olive Tree coalition, an ill-assorted alliance of Catholic center-leftists, reformed Communists, Greens, and other odds and ends whose only uniting principle is that they are all to the left of Berlusconi's Forza Italia and its neo-fascist and crypto-racist allies in Giancarlo Fini's National Alliance and Umberto Bossi's Northern League. In its five years in power, the Olive Tree has chewed up and spat out three prime ministers because of its constant in-fighting.

It has actually accomplished some significant things nevertheless, including Italy's entry into the euro, Europe's new common currency, major reforms in the education system and the bloated government bureaucracy, and even a constitutional reform giving the over-centralized country a much more federal structure. Its leader, new former Rome mayor Francesco Rutelli, is a fresh figure who enjoys great personal popularity. All that is overshadowed, however, by the memory of the Olive Tree's constant internal warfare.

Perhaps the main reason for Berlusconi's remarkable comeback (he was briefly prime minister of a similar coalition in 1994, but had to resign to face corruption charges) is that the Italians have got bored with the reform process. When it first began in 1992 with a welter of corruption trials, it was an exhilarating process that seemed to promise a new, clean, modern Italy, but all that is over now.

The revelations of brazenly corrupt funding for all the major political parties known as "Tangentopoli" (Bribe City) swept away the old political establishment. Senior politicians were arrested or fled, bankers committed suicide, and the dominant political parties of the old system, the Christian Democrats and the Socialists, simply collapsed. But gradually the enthusiasm for cleaning out the Augean stables ebbed, and the old ways crept back.

Prosecutors requested 3,165 trials, but only a third were ever held. There were 582 convictions, but after all the deals and appeals fewer than ten people actually ended up in jail. And now some of the most tainted figures from the old regime are regular guests on the TV talk shows, popular precisely because of their flamboyantly corrupt past.

"All the signs are of an increase in corruption," Milan's chief prosecutor Gerardo D'Ambrosio told "Corriere della Sera" recently. "Experience has created antibodies. Today the corrupt know how to cover their tracks."

So Berlusconi and his unappetizing allies may actually win Sunday's election, but what does that actually mean for Italy? Probably less than it seems to, for Italians have raised the skill of ignoring their governments and flourishing in spite of them to a fine art. And besides, he might still lose, for another art they have perfected (and in which they stand as a model to us all) is the habit of deliberately lying to opinion pollsters.