Italy held a nationwide day of mourning for Silvio Berlusconi, the billionaire media mogul who was Italy’s longest-serving prime minister since Mussolini, after his demise this week. Thousands turned out for his state funeral – however the nation is much from united on the person who remade Italian politics in his personal picture.
The one factor most would agree on is the size of Berlusconi’s affect on Italy.
“I was born in 1984, so I’m the generation that grew up with Berlusconi,” says Davide Vampa, now a senior lecturer in politics at Aston University in Birmingham within the UK.
For Italians, he compares the shock of Berlusconi’s demise to British individuals studying that the Queen had died.
“I think all Italian millennials can define ourselves as a kind of Berlusconi generation, even those who didn’t vote for him,” he says. “We were socialised politically in the era of Berlusconi.”
That period did not finish with Berlusconi’s demise on Monday on the age of 86, nor was it confined to politics.
Age of individualism
Before he based his personal social gathering, Forza Italia (“Go Italy”), earlier than he grew to become prime minister or shaped the right-wing coalition in energy right now, earlier than the trials for tax fraud and corruption and paying minors for intercourse, Berlusconi was the person who introduced business TV to Italy.
“His three private television channels were central to shaping the culture in the Nineties and the Noughties, through all sorts of cultural products from Japanese cartoons and rowdy talk shows and very vulgar TV guests to variety shows with show girls in skimpy dresses,” says Paolo Gerbaudo, an Italian sociologist and political theorist on the Scuola Normale Superiore in Pisa and King’s College London.
Over the Seventies and ’80s, Berlusconi constructed a tv empire devoted to leisure.
“He was appealing to Italians’ unconfessed desires, in a country that was still very Catholic and very conservative,” Gerbaudo says. “He was speaking to this emerging extreme individualism that carried an element of hedonism, an element of desire – for sex, for money, for power, for cars, for a luxurious lifestyle, villas and so on and so forth.”
He carried that individualism by means of to his politics. Invoking the small-state, low-tax, free-market reforms that Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan had delivered to Britain and the United States the last decade prior, Berlusconi first ran promising to liberalise Italy’s financial system – which was floundering within the early Nineteen Nineties after its post-war increase.
At the identical time, an unlimited corruption scandal had tainted the standard events that had ruled Italy for the reason that finish of World War II, and Berlusconi pitched himself as a clear break. He based his social gathering in December 1993; by March 1994, after months of TV spots on his channels, it had received a common election.
Politics as enterprise
Berlusconi would not go on to enact lots of the reforms he had promised throughout his three stints as prime minister between 1994 and 2011.
The insurance policies he pursued – cuts in taxes, amnesties for evaders – had been those that benefited his enterprise pursuits, explains Gerbaudo, who describes Berlusconi as “first and foremost an entrepreneur”.
“His party was basically his company. He transformed a wing of his company into a political party,” he says.
His politics had been opportunist, agrees Vampa, primarily designed to maintain him in energy. “Essentially Berlusconi used different issues just to advance his own political career and be more appealing to Italian voters, in a very effective way,” he says.
Untethered from ideology, he was free to undertake generally contradictory positions relying on the temper of the second. These ranged, over time, from railing towards immigration to promising to refund property tax and providing pet house owners free visits to the vet.
And it labored: even after he was pressured to resign in 2011 on the peak of a monetary disaster he had failed to handle, then convicted of tax fraud two years later and briefly banned from public workplace, he continued to wield affect as the top of his social gathering and a kingmaker on the centre-right.
The proper reborn
The centre-right, in actual fact, was certainly one of Berlusconi’s most important contributions to Italian politics: as he favored to say himself, “we invented it”.
Right from the beginning, he did away with the cordon sanitaire that had stored events with ties to fascism out of the mainstream for the reason that finish of World War II. Turning to the fringes for help, he positioned himself on the centre and shaped electoral alliances with events additional – in some circumstances, a lot additional – to the suitable.
Ultimately the events that he invited into energy would go on to overhaul his personal, with first the hard-right League after which the post-fascist Brothers of Italy successful extra votes than Berlusconi’s Forza Italia in Italy’s final two elections.
But present prime minister Giorgia Meloni, Italy’s most right-wing chief for the reason that fall of fascism and his one-time protegee, may hardly have gotten there with out him. As Berlusconi bragged in 2019: “We brought [the League and the fascists] into government … We legitimised them.”
A populist pioneer
With his unabashed narcissism and casually offensive “gaffes”, Berlusconi may as soon as have been seen as a uniquely Italian punchline. But subsequent developments have demonstrated that he was neither.
Vampa calls him a “proto-populist”: one of many first leaders in trendy Europe to show that character may very well be extra interesting than insurance policies, and scandals may very well be dismissed by complaining of persecution by a vengeful institution.
“Many politicians, especially on the right, learned many lessons about the fact that these days power is media power, that if you want to obtain consensus you need to control the media,” notes Gerbaudo.
“And he always managed to win with a smile. He showed that people hate sanctimony and a certain kind of moralism that the left threw at him more than corruption and theft.”
He factors to Donald Trump as the obvious instance: “He really learned many lessons from Berlusconi about the power of celebrity [and] the use of very cynical imagery as a way to appeal to a disillusioned citizenry.”
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Boris Johnson – like Berlusconi, comfortable to play the clown when it serves – additionally borrowed from his playbook, whereas Vladimir Putin, a private good friend of the Italian’s, is equally adept at distorting the narrative.
The king is useless, lengthy dwell the king
Back in Italy, he leaves behind him a polarised political system and a fractured opposition that has struggled to outline what it stands for, aside from “not Berlusconi”.
But maybe his most pervasive legacy for the “Berlusconi generation”, tons of of 1000’s of whom have left Italy within the 30 years since he took energy, is deep frustration with Italian politics and public life extra broadly.
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“His language and policies, many would say, damaged the democratic fabric of Italian society,” says Vampa. “Many people didn’t agree with his politics or his views, and many would argue that his actions actually damaged Italy, its democracy, its economy, and the role that minorities and women play in Italian society.”
Gerbaudo goes additional: “Instead of correcting the ills or the deviations of a given society as statesmen are supposed to do, he did the exact opposite – he cultivated Italians’ vices, Italian distortions, leading to the very decline in society that we face today,” he laments.
Not everybody feels the identical, as evidenced by the crowds of 1000’s lining the streets of Milan to wave him off.
Italian journalist Daniele de Luca did not help Berlusconi, solely the soccer membership he helped make one of many wealthiest and most profitable in Europe, AC Milan. But he advised RFI what he believes lay on the coronary heart of his attraction.
“He was the man who convinced Italians that there could be a monarch, a king,” he says. “That’s a typically Italian attitude, to see in a single person the saviour of the country, a hero. And he exacerbated that tendency and paved the way for there to be one person in charge.”
By constructing a complete motion in his personal picture, Berlusconi left it with out an apparent successor. That doesn’t suggest it dies out with him.
As de Luca places it: “Today lots of people are saying, ‘OK, Berlusconi is dead – but Berlusconi is inside of us.'”
Originally revealed on RFI