Carry on like this, and you’ll see. Are Italians beginning to feel the same way about their billionaire bull-in-a-china-shop leader? Last week’s confrontation–over whom to name as Finance minister, a job to which Berlusconi had conveniently assigned himself temporarily–was a sign that his coalition partners, smelling blood, could push the government to its breaking point. The Italian economy, which 20 years ago was bigger than Britain’s, is today one of Western Europe’s shakiest. The country’s pension crisis is a ticking time bomb. Popular opposition to the war in Iraq continues to dog Berlusconi, who backed U.S. President George W. Bush unreservedly. Last year, in a series of trademark gaffes, he transformed Italy’s turn at the six-month rotating European Union presidency from a chance to shine into a debacle. Even Berlusconi’s wife, Veronica Lario, is giving him grief. Says Maria Latella, who wrote Lario’s just-published and less-than-flattering authorized biography of her husband: “You only have to see his favorite villa, which is like Disneyland, to realize this is not a man ready to confront reality.”
If only it were so simple. Berlusconi’s staunchest critics would love to see the back of him, especially those in the media and business elites over whom he has ridden roughshod for years. Yet make no mistake: Il Cavaliere still cuts a commanding figure in Italy. Though slumping in the polls, he retains extraordinary personal appeal (magnified by a media industry largely under his control) as a swashbuckling capitalist who talks straight. What’s more, though torn by infighting, his center-right coalition faces no credible opposition. “He is losing his touch,” says Andrea Romano of Italianieuropei, a center-left think tank. “[But] we are weak.”
These days, that may be Berlusconi’s best hope for survival. “This government will progressively fade away, but with no trauma,” predicts Massimo Franco, a columnist for Corriere della Sera. Berlusconi may tough it out until his electoral mandate expires in 2006, thanks largely to his control over Italy’s media–as he so pointedly noted to Follini. Small wonder that the newspaper La Repubblica likens the country to a “banana democracy” in the hands of a media dictator. Berlusconi’s own media company Mediaset and the state broadcaster RAI, which the prime minister controls, together monopolize 90 percent of the total audience. He owns the country’s biggest ad agency, the biggest publishing house, the biggest film-distribution business, two national newspapers, 50 magazines and several Internet service providers. A cartoonist once caricatured Berlusconi as saying: “I was democratically elected. But I deserve much, much better.”
The question is whether Italians deserve better. Berlusconi’s government is the country’s 59th since World War II and, after just three years, the longest-serving. “Italy may not deserve Berlusconi, but Berlusconi is a byproduct of what Italy has done for a long time,” says a senior public figure who’s tangled with Berlusconi–which is to mix business and politics in often unsavory ways. When the prime minister founded his party, Forza Italia, ahead of elections in 1994, one of his companies, Fininvest, was debt-ridden, and courts in Milan and Palermo were looking into still-unproven allegations of corruption and mafia ties. Asked why he was running, Berlusconi replied: to protect himself. “They want me to go bankrupt and end up in jail.”
Forza was a creature of his ad agency, Publitalia, which built the party from scratch in two months. It got 50 Publitalia employees elected to Parliament in March 1994. That first government lasted only seven months, but Berlusconi and Forza were back in power again in 2001. His government has been, in many ways, a success. He’s chopped away at bureaucratic deadwood in the central government, eliminated many redundant departments and cut red tape that had long made doing business in Italy a nightmare. But too often, say critics, he has simply promoted his own interests. A recent law he got through Parliament allows him to own three channels (the Constitutional Court had ruled that any one owner could own no more than two). Another decriminalized balance-sheet fraud–a jarring note, coming as it did amid the Parmalat scandal and Berlusconi’s own legal troubles.
For the longest time, Italian voters seemed happy to let Berlusconi be Berlusconi. Piove; governo ladro, Italians say: it rains; the government steals. “Morality and politics don’t hit many buttons for Italians,” says Simon Parker, coeditor of “The New Italian Republic.” But lately the mood has been changing. During a spontaneous walk through Rome recently, Berlusconi was booed–for the first time. On recent nights, crowds have been gathering outside the Palazzo Chigi, his official residence, to whistle at the spectacle of Berlusconi’s government in crisis.
The quarrel over the Finance minister’s job was one sign of Berlusconi’s new vulnerability. (He thought he’d defused the issue last Friday by naming Domenico Siniscalco, the government’s treasury chief, to the post, but then Umberto Rossi of the Northern League party threatened to quit the coalition.) Another sign came when Follini’s UDC party voted with the opposition last week to shake up the RAI board on the ground that it had been favoring the P.M. It was the first time in two decades that Berlusconi, in government or out, had lost a parliamentary battle over television.
The real crisis for Berlusconi, and for Italy, is the economy. It grew just 0.3 percent last year. A Fitch Ratings analysis predicts 1 percent growth this year. Two weeks ago Italy dodged one bullet, narrowly avoiding EU sanctions over its massive debt (106 percent of GDP), but not another, a downgrading of its long-term debt rating by Standard & Poor’s. “I’m pessimistic,” says a diplomat in Rome. Italians want the same standards of welfare as in France and Germany, he says, but can’t afford them. “People thought Berlusconi would be the new Thatcher, but he hasn’t driven through the reforms he promised. Instead, he’s just defended his own interests and so opened himself up to criticism.”
Not to worry, says Berlusconi. He did not become Italy’s richest man–worth some $10 billion–without grit. “Only the exercise of industrial quantities of patience has allowed us to keep the government united,” he said last week. Unfortunately for Berlusconi, Italians seem to be running out of that commodity when it comes to him.
