Silvio Berlusconi (1936–2023)
Why on earth did they vote for him?
This is a bonus post to end the week. Over the weekend, I’ll write about the signs that may be pointing towards a change of government for NZ – though this won’t be a prediction!
I’d love feedback about the kinds of things you’d like me to write more about after the election. Would you like more international and historical explainers and commentaries like the one below? Leave a comment.
Italy’s longest-serving post-war prime minister, Silvio Berlusconi, passed away this week.
Berlusconi was a media magnate who owned most of Italian TV, formed a pop-up party called Forza Italia (Go Italy!) using his media empire to promote it, and then enjoyed three separate terms as PM, the first in 1994–95. At the time of his death, he was a sitting member of the European parliament and the Italian senate, while supporting the current far-right prime minister Giorgia Meloni and her Brothers of Italy party. He’s been saluted by Vladimir Putin as ‘a true friend’.
They say don’t speak ill of the dead, but it’s hard not to describe Berlusconi as vulgar, offensive and dishonest. He wasn’t above changing the law to evade accountability, although he was eventually convicted of tax fraud. One correspondent described him as ‘proto-Trumpian’, but I’d say it’s the other way around: Trump is post-Berlusconian. The two have a lot in common, but Berlusconi was smarter than Trump. He was slicker at lying and bolder in his transgressions.
Not exactly a Caesar, Berlusconi offered televised circuses but not much bread.
‘Just don’t vote for him’, many Italians would say; but many did anyway.
Understanding Berlusconi’s popular appeal contributes to understanding what’s up with our systems of representation and how leaders like him succeed within them.
Rejection by those who uphold Europe’s values of liberal democracy actually helped Berlusconi to rise in politics. He extolled entrepreneurial liberty, controlled a large section of the media, and used them to defy the norms of European politics. Not only did he break the rules of the system that sustained him, he changed its rules, when he could, to suit himself.
The fascist dictator Benito Mussolini, whom Berlusconi once praised, took it a whole lot further, but both men arose from within liberal parliamentary politics – and then did inestimable damage to the very institutions that had nurtured them.
Berlusconi brazened his way through, and electoral support continued at levels sufficient to keep him in the game.
People might vote for such a leader if they’d always wanted to stick it to traditional political parties and aimed to upset an inefficient and corrupt bureaucratic system. Silvio acted out their wet dreams in broad daylight: he was a mega-rich media mogul who surrounded himself with beautiful young women and owned the AC Milan football club. What’s not to like?
Whatever moral offences Berlusconi caused, he kept his head up and kept acting the maestro. The mainstream media would talk about his ‘gaffes’, for example when he described Barack Obama as ‘bronzato’ (tanned), but his supporters probably saw those as goals – or they just didn’t care.
Berlusconi’s rise was a direct outcome of the destruction of traditional political parties and the crisis of political trust in Italy in the early 1990s, which prefigured a lot that’s gone on around the world since. His political ‘success’ was a perverse result of systemic corruption and unstable government. Addio, Silvio!
In the same week, Donald Trump was arraigned in court on charges relating to classified documents, and Boris Johnson resigned from parliament following a damning privileges committee inquiry. I daresay they’ll both continue to emulate Berlusconi, bucking the system until they die.
Meanwhile, Berlusconi was given full honours in Milan Cathedral with crowds outside remembering ‘a great man’ who, they believed, had brought the country together. But one woman wore a T-shirt saying ‘I’m not in mourning’, in defiance of the official three days’ observance. Since then, the news in Italy has turned back to calcio (football) and on to how Berlusconi’s billions will get divided up. And, on the back of the emotion, Forza Italia got a boost in the polls, up to 9.5%.
Read on if you want some background on Italian politics.
Political parties were essential instruments in Italy’s post-War, post-Fascism reconstruction. Its governing coalitions don’t normally last long, however, and they often change between elections. There were 65 governments between 1946 and June 2018, although the ministers were often recycled, so that a change of government was sometimes more like a major cabinet reshuffle. Gianfranco Pasquino, a leading political scientist, argues that Italian ‘party government’ descended into ‘partyocracy’, or ‘a situation in which all parties collude in sharing available state resources (“spoils”) and take hold of them for the benefit of their organizations, leaders, followers and voters’.*
The main post-War left (Communist) and conservative (Christian-democratic) parties were demolished in the crisis of 1992–94, partly due to the collapse of the Soviet Union (in the former case) and to the exposure of systemic corruption in the infamous ‘Bribesville’ scandals (in the latter). Since then, political parties have risen and fallen at a surprising rate.
The crisis of political trust aided the populist parties, notably Berlusconi’s Forza Italia, the far-right Lega and the 5-Star Movement (M5S). The latter is an online deliberative forum that initially claimed not to be a political party and that encouraged direct participation by members through its ‘Rousseau’ platform. In the 2018 election, the Lega benefited from anti-immigrant cultural backlash and the M5S from those suffering under poor economic performance, and together they formed a short-lived coalition government. This disbanded after 18 months, when the M5S and the centre-left Democratic Party formed an alternative coalition government, shutting out the Lega.
In 2019 the 5 Star Movement pushed for a referendum as part of a coalition deal with the Democratic Party. This proposed to reduce the members in the Chamber of Deputies from 630 to 400 and in the Senate from 315 to 200. Seventy percent voted in favour, thinking this would reduce fiscal costs and improve efficiency in legislative processes. The flip-side was that the remaining representatives’ workloads would increase (or less would get done), their collective capacity to scrutinise legislation and policy would decline accordingly, and citizens would find it harder to gain access to them, as there’d be more citizens per representative. Reducing the legislature could also shift the balance of power to the executive branch and the bureaucracy. The reform did nothing to improve accountability or responsiveness, then. Like Brexit, ‘a profound constitutional change of dubious credibility was brought about by voters driven by feelings verging on outrage and despair’, as James Newell put it. Reducing representation worked as revenge against the political class but didn’t improve the ‘governability’ of a diverse and unruly society nor boost political trust. On this occasion, the people approved a proposal of doubtful efficacy in a mood of anti-establishment resentment.
Tainted by their participation in coalition governments, the opinion polling of both the M5S and the Lega steadily fell. Meanwhile, the far-right Fratelli d’Italia (FdI, or Brothers of Italy) was rising. FdI went from 4.4 percent of the vote in 2018 to 26 percent in 2022, and its leader Giorgia Meloni became Italy’s first woman prime minister, leading a right-wing coalition with the Lega and Forza Italia. Three parties that had originally positioned themselves as ‘disruptive outsiders’ were now ‘insiders’ and collaborators in government.
FdI has neo-fascist roots: after the 1994 shake-up of political parties, ‘reconstructed’ neo-fascists formed the Alleanza Nazionale which became defunct by 2008 and was succeeded by Fratelli d’Italia. But voters saw Meloni as untainted (as FdI hadn’t supported previous governments) and they liked her conservative nationalism, Catholic values and ‘confederalist’ approach to the EU that defends national sovereignty. Meloni proposed blockading refugees and migrants from North Africa and an ‘Italians first’ policy in social services. FdI thus belongs to the family of Europe’s populist radical right parties. It’s nationalistic and pro-family, but not programmatically fascist.
The Italian constitution forbids the reorganisation of the Fascist Party in any form, and many other clauses are contrary to the fascist corporatist form of government. But FdI exemplifies a wider trend in which authoritarian leaders rise by targeting minorities (Africans and Muslims in this case) and promising to restore national pride.
*Pasquino, Gianfranco. 2020. Italian Democracy: How It Works. London: Routledge