The Berlusconi obituary for everyone out of the loop
It may be that the most important lesson of European 21st Century history so far is that democracy is not a room, with nations being in or out of it, but rather a ladder, and that countries are endlessly going up and down on its many rungs. The European Union is, of course, a highly complicated organ of multiple democracies, while countries like Russia, Turkey and Hungary experienced a democratic backsliding which currently has them all on different rungs of the ladder (and all pretty low).
With yesterday’s passing at age 86 of Silvio Berlusconi, such a lesson becomes inescapable for those who wish to make sense of modern Italy. The billionaire, populist, entrepreneur and politician leaves much for the books of history — and yet a true understanding of his legacy calls for a different approach than that of traditional history.
Although the man was politically active and influential practically until the moment of his death, the true ‘Berlusconi era’ started with his first election in 1994 and lasted until his resignation as prime minister in 2011. It was far from a period of continuous rule like that of an Angela Merkel. In fact, Berlusconi was in government for nine of those seventeen years, specifically 1994–95, 2001–06, and 2008–11.
As anyone who lived in Italy at the time can tell you, it was anything but a ‘normal’ time for politics, assuming such a thing exists at all. Berlusconi was more than just the prime minister of the country, and he was more than just the richest man. He also owned half of Italy’s major television networks (the other half were state-owned, ergo also under Berlusconi’s influence), the country’s largest publishing group (Mondadori), one major newspaper (Il Giornale), and one of Italy’s largest football clubs (A.C. Milan). The man had direct or indirect control over politics, information, culture, and seemingly limitless wealth.
The result was a nation the political state of which became — and for almost twenty years remained — remarkably difficult to define. In certain ways, Italy had all the traits of a healthy democracy — in certain other ways, it would not be inappropriate to describe it as a ‘soft regime’, in which all forms of culture inescapably answered to the man at the top. If someone in those years had stepped into an Italian bar, they would have heard all the jokes and complaints against the government that are typical of a free society; if they had stepped outside that same bar, they might have seen every street plastered with gigantic, propagandistic posters featuring Berlusconi’s face.
Traditional history is ill-equipped to capture the ambivalence, the vaguely surreal atmosphere of Italy between 1994 and 2011. Instead, such a history is more likely to evaluate Berlusconi based on his economic record, which we can consider quickly. Berlusconi first accrued his enormous personal fortune by a combination of undeniable entrepreneurial genius (real estate, then television networks, then finance) and a great deal of shady, illicit connections, linking him even to the Mafia. From very early on the shady nature of his business put him at loggerheads with the Italian justice system, and many have speculated that his decision to enter politics was borne of an idea to protect himself from the law by becoming the law. Once actually elected, however, Berlusconi’s miraculous ability to manage his own pockets failed to translate into an ability to manage the pockets of Italians. He did not curb Italy’s gargantuan public debt, he did not stimulate the country’s moribund productivity, and he came woefully unprepared to important economic exams like the introduction of the new currency, the 2008 financial meltdown, or the euro crisis of the early 2010s. Indeed it was precisely Berlusconi’s flagrant economic mismanagement that tore his final government apart and forced him to resign.
It’s important to point out that Berlusconi was not responsible for Italy’s structural afflictions. Well before 1994, the country had unsustainably high levels of public debt, declining productivity, an incipient demographic crisis, rampant organized crime and frightful corruption. But it must also be said that Berlusconi did little or nothing to tackle these issues, and in some cases (corruption in particular) he was in fact very much a part of the problem.
The picture of Berlusconi that emerges through the lens of traditional history is that of a statesman who was given a mess of a country and basically just sat on its problems, being too preoccupied with keeping his fractious coalitions in power while using government muscle to safeguard his private affairs. Look at him this way, and Berlusconi doesn’t seem that important after all.
And yet the true legacy that Berlusconi leaves is not in the Italian institutions, nor in the country’s economy, nor in its infrastructure — it is in Italian culture as a whole, and here the footprint that his soft regime leaves behind is immense, vastly greater than that of any modern politician I can think of in their respective country (short of actual dictators). I will elaborate.
The politics of Berlusconi, for all that the man styled and expressed himself very clearly as a moderate, were in fact predicated on a ferocious divisiveness, on demonizing all opponents as ‘communists’ and ‘enemies of democracy’. This is a classic regime narrative, but here it was being pushed in the language of a democrat. Deciphering this contradiction would reveal much about the true character of Berlusconi; it may have been simple hypocrisy, of course, but I think the truth is a little more subtle.
Berlusconi was as much of a natural businessman as he was naturally remote from being a statesman, and therefore, for most of his time in politics, simply out of his depth. My conjecture is that he genuinely loved democracy, even wished to go down as one of its greatest champions. But he seemed to have no understanding of the delicate checks and balances that make democracy work (why can’t a guy own a country’s channels of information and be prime minister?), of the propriety required for public offices (why can’t a guy have himself a night with a prostitute between one reform and another?), of the appropriate language to do politics (why did people get so angry when he joked about Barack Obama’s skin colour?). He certainly showed little sense of responsibility, clogging up a justice system in desperate need of reform only so that he could block his own trials from going ahead.
The result was that Italy was led a couple of rungs down on the democracy ladder by the same guy who thought he was leading her up. Consider the above-mentioned divisiveness of his politics. Berlusconi preferred to be soft-spoken when he donned his institutional hat (less so when he told jokes, admittedly), but like many who play with political fire, he seemed blind to the question of how it would spread. What sort of people are likely to embrace a regime narrative in which politics becomes war and dissidents become the enemy? Would these people also embrace the polite argumentative style that Berlusconi was so fond of? Nope! Instead, the ever-enthusiastic prime minister raised to prominence the biggest, crassest, most obscene, most vulgar loudmouths that Italian politics has known in a century — people like Vittorio Sgarbi, Umberto Bossi, Ignazio La Russa, Mario Borghezio, Alessandra Mussolini, as well as the current prime minister herself, Giorgia Meloni. Political debates on Italian TV picked up so much screaming and swearing that they became more PG-rated than Dario Argento’s horror movies.
As is so often in politics, the way that people behaved at the top became the way that people behaved at the bottom. Berlusconi’s era acted directly on the Italian language by changing the rules of what can and can not be said. When your prime minister tells obscene, sexist and literally blasphemous jokes in the middle of official duties, what’s stopping you from doing the same with your neighbour? This effect was, of course, first felt and then amplified beyond measure in the country’s information channels. Italian TV, in the style of its patron, became the most unapologetically sexist and chauvinistic in Western Europe, filling itself everywhere with bro humour and ‘veline’ (dancing, scantily-clad women).
Not all of the effects on Italian culture percolated from Berlusconi’s language. Some were derived from his personal example. The faith that Italians had in their institutions had already been dealt a serious blow by the mani pulite scandal of the early 1990s, but it was definitively eradicated after two decades of Berlusconi flaunting his own corruption with impunity. Some of the scandals he was involved in seemed like the stuff of satire, or of petty lords in medieval times; at one point it was revealed that he oversaw the systematic traffic of under-aged prostitutes to set up orgies in his villa.
By the end of the Berlusconi era, Italian culture had ossified around the notion that politics was radioactive. Any form of proximity to it denoted corruption, any form of interest in it denoted stupidity, and any form of belief in it deserved to be not just dismissed but publicly ridiculed. Aristotle said that an apolitical man can only be a god or a beast, and Italy was filling itself with apolitical men and women who certainly did not come across as gods.
The mounting anger, disillusionment and sense of impotence felt by Italians eventually led to the very first chapter in the great international populist surge of the 2010s. As Berlusconi sank into his many years, growing weaker and smaller, parties like the Movimento 5 Stelle and Matteo Salvini’s Lega Nord blazed their way to power on a platform of raw anti-establishment anger. Italian history had moved on to its next phase, preceding what would soon be the history of the entire West.
And yet even as Berlusconi steps out of our young 21st Century, we may borrow Christopher Wren’s epitaph and say si monumentum requiris, circumspice — if you seek the man’s monument, look around, in this case not at the schools and the churches, but at Italian culture as a whole. Look at an electorate among the most cynical and disenchanted in Europe, in which over a third of the citizens never even show up to vote. Look at the ludicrous quacks featured next to the genuine experts on national TV, telling us that Putin was forced to invade Ukraine by the baddies at NATO. Listen to the people on the streets whispering to each other that vaccines are part of an underground scheme by the Illuminati, that banks don’t serve any function in society, that the European Union is secretly controlled by France and Germany, that George Soros has a plan to replace white Italians with African immigrants. Listen to what has become the true voice of this nation, from our intellectuals on their armchairs joking that they fantasize about running Greta Thunberg over with a car to our crowds in the ports screaming at Carola Rackete that she should get raped by the refugees whose lives she saved, and see what sort of discourse, what sort of language, what sort of people the Berlusconi era has left behind.
Silvio Berlusconi, peculiar child of genius and idiocy, had neither the dark ambition to take Italy all the way down the ladder of democracy, nor the lucidity to lift her upward. He left his nation with the economy of a first-world country but a culture that lagged decades behind that, and this will be his true legacy. Perhaps traditional history, comparing him to contemporaries like Vladimir Putin or Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, will write of him more kindly. But as someone who experienced Italy’s decades-long descent into squalor and vulgarity first-hand, I’ve long been out of cookies. I will remember this man by the epithet that some perceptive street kid once scrawled on a wall: Berlusconi stupratore di cervelli, Berlusconi rapist of brains.