By Tony Barber
Published: June 27 2003 17:54


A Sunday in spring: Italy is as close to paradise as this fallen world offers. Active Italians cycle in the countryside; families, fewer and smaller than in the decades after the war, take the children to the beach. The dwindling observants go to church. The gourmets linger over lunch. And those who cannot get to paradise spend hours in the purgatory of a traffic jam, as they return home from a weekend trip.

On this Sunday, in the spacious grounds of his villa outside Milan, a bald, rather slightly built 66-year-old billionaire in a business suit is telling these indifferent Italians that their freedom, the liberty of Italy itself, is in the balance.

Silvio Berlusconi is not a passionate public speaker, nor does his oratory glitter with memorable turns of phrase. He sincerely admires the United States and its greatest presidents, but he echoes neither the humane, principled language of Abraham Lincoln nor the intimate, reassuring tones of Franklin Roosevelt. Indeed, for a politician who portrays himself as a relentless moderniser and mould-breaker, his rhetoric on this day seems peculiarly stale, better suited to the frozen Cold War conditions of the 1950s or early 1980s than to the unpredictable world of the early 21st century.

"Nazism and communism still have a strong appeal," he says firmly, confidently, but not stridently. "The one unleashed ferocious instincts in mankind with concentration camps. The other has presented itself as a utopia, as a good thing, as the realisation on earth of that heavenly Jerusalem where everything is right." Carving the air with his right hand, he declares that communism remains a direct threat in Italy because it exerts a "perverse fascination" over some people, "even though it has been the most criminal enterprise in the history of mankind because, wherever it has come to power, it has spread terror, misery, destruction and death".

His audience is youthful: immaculately dressed young men and women who rustle in their seats as Berlusconi describes them as "apostles, missionaries, warriors for freedom". What can they make of it all? Few seem to be more than 30 years old. When the Berlin Wall came down, they would have been in their mid-teens. Are they not aware of the relentless decline of the organised working class in Italy, as in the rest of the western world? Don't they know that, between 1948 and 2003, the Italian left has achieved precisely one clear election victory at national level? Have they not gathered that, in a series of convulsions, Italy's powerful Communist Party shed any pretensions to revolution by the 1980s, leaving the diehards in small rump parties with no more than 10 per cent of the vote? Did they not notice that revolution or dictatorship was the last thing on the minds of the three centre-left coalition governments that ruled from 1996 to 2001?

For Berlusconi's purposes, it matters little. The occasion of his speech is, as the organisers have billed it, a "festival of liberty" - an election rally for his ruling Forza Italia party. Next weekend millions of Italians are to vote in regional and municipal polls, and the party activists need a pep talk, buzzwords, an identifiable enemy, not a nuanced analysis of Italian political conditions.

The slogan of Forza Italia's youth wing is "Young People for Freedom". Young party members are encouraged to campaign against repression in Burma and Cuba - a country Berlusconi damns in his speech. Sitting in neat rows, wearing identical men's blue blazers or ladies' suits, the well-groomed rank and file of Forza Italia are gathered at Berlusconi's villa like an army of company salespeople. Youth, health, white-toothed smiles, motivation, optimism - these images are as important a component of the rally as Berlusconi's speech: live pictures are being transmitted by satellite to Forza Italia meetings in 126 cities and towns up and down Italy.

For the same reason, what matters about his 45-minute performance is not so much how he projects himself to the audience at his villa, but how the giant screen behind him, one quarter of which is filled with the Forza Italia flag, projects him and his happy supporters to the bigger audience nationwide. It is packaged politics, politics as advertising. We are familiar with that in other democracies. But Berlusconi's version is distinctive. He is reputed to be a master of the televisual medium, possibly the cleverest exponent of "politics as a TV message" in Europe. But on this serene Sunday in May, the blazers and the toothpaste smiles and the glossy giant screen seem to jar with his old-fashioned exhortation to a crusade against communism. As if to illustrate the point, a technical hitch momentarily causes a sound failure. He flashes a smile: out comes one of his stage props - rueful self-deprecation. "For a moment, the left achieved their dream, a leader who works himself up as much as he likes but can't get his message to the people."

Jokes are one of Berlusconi's specialities. There is a story he tells about himself - against himself, one might say - that explains much about why he wins the hearts of some Italians, infuriates others and causes foreign politicians to shake their heads in a sort of smiling, half-nervous disbelief.

At a dinner of world leaders in 1994, during Berlusconi's first stint as prime minister, Boris Yeltsin, the Russian president, was complaining about the failure of the Conference on Security and Co-operation in Europe (CSCE) to help the Kremlin solve the Chechnya crisis. Carl Bildt, the Swedish leader, turned to Berlusconi and suggested that, since Italy held the CSCE chairmanship, he should explain things to Yeltsin. Plucking up his courage, Berlusconi proceeded to talk in statesman-like fashion for 25 minutes about Chechnya, Europe's future and war.

Suitably impressed, Francois Mitterrand, the French president, told Berlusconi: "Fine, we'll leave it in your hands." When the meal was over, Berlusconi went up to Felipe Gonzalez, the Spanish leader, and asked him: "What is the CSCE, anyway?"

According to Berlusconi himself, Gonzalez started laughing uncontrollably. "He couldn't stop and he ended up sitting on the ground for so long that I had to pick him up," he recalls. (It has to be said that few of Berlusconi's fellow leaders would have been able adequately to describe the rather peculiar talk-shop that was an attempt to create a peace-keeping forum for post-Soviet Europe.)

May 22, 2003. It is past 11 o'clock on Thursday night, and the local elections are less than three days away. RaiUno, part of Italy's state-run television and radio company, is broadcasting Porta a Porta (Door to Door), its premium TV current affairs talk show. Berlusconi is the star guest of Bruno Vespa, the presenter. The style of the show, and Vespa's behaviour towards the prime minister, say much about the causes and the depth of anger on the part of Berlusconi's critics, when they talk of the conflict of interest between his dual role as head of Italy's government and head of a business empire that controls the lion's share of Italian commercial TV. He exercises direct or indirect influence over six of Italy's seven national TV channels. Three are part of his Mediaset group, which he still controls - Canale 5, Italia 1 and Rete Quattro. Add to these the three state channels - RaiUno, RaiDue and RaiTre - in which the government of the day cannot but take a close interest. Taken together, these six have about 90 per cent of the TV market.

The charge of conflicts of interest is a serious one, unmatched in any other democratic state, the cause of acute discomfort among those elsewhere on the European right who wish to see Berlusconi as an ally. But this is not, for all that, anything remotely like a totalitarian state. The news programmes of the three RAI channels are not tame vehicles for government propaganda. RaiUno is usually well-balanced. RaiDue's coverage is often seen as pro-government in tone, but RaiTre's news programmes tend to be more favourable to the centre-left opposition. The president of Rai, appointed in March, is Lucia Annunziata, a former director of news at RaiTre. An independent-minded journalist, she heads a five-strong board of directors, whose four other members are considered closer to the centre-right.

The politicisation of Rai is not a Berlusconi innovation. It happened during what is often called Italy's First Republic, the period from the end of the war until 1992-94, when the post-1945 edifice came crashing down amid a torrent of revelations about corruption in politics, business and public administration. Sharing out Rai's channels was part of a pervasive spoils system, designed to parcel out influence among the First Republic's political parties. RaiUno was allocated to the Christian Democrats, RaiDue to the Socialists and RaiTre to the Communist Party. It is no longer as clear-cut: the Christian Democrats do not exist as a party, and the Socialists have all but disappeared. But the legacy of diversity lingers: Rai news is in no sense Berlusconi news.

News programmes, however, are one thing. The Porta a Porta show and the smirking Mr Vespa are quite another. Against the background of the stirring theme tune of Gone With The Wind, Vespa gives Berlusconi an effusive welcome and guides him to a plain interviewee's chair. He does an introduction, then invites him to seat himself at a large, cherrywood, prime ministerial desk at the centre of the stage. At the same desk on the same TV show with Vespa in May 2001, just before the elections that swept him to power, Berlusconi signed a so-called "Contract with the Italian People", promising tax cuts, more jobs, more public works, an increase in minimum pensions and more security against crime. If he did not fulfil at least four of these promises during a five-year term as prime minister, he announced at this desk, then he would not seek re-election.

For the benefit of viewers, Vespa replays a tape of this two-year-old scene of political theatre. Then, hovering at the desk, he asks Berlusconi how he has fared, allowing him to speak for as long as 15 minutes at a time and reel off his government's achievements. The show is at risk of becoming boring when Vespa arrives at the issue that has hung over Berlusconi since he came to power: his trial in Milan, where he is accused of bribing judges in 1985 to influence the outcome of a takeover battle involving SME, then a state-owned food company.

"Prime minister, talking of justice, let's quickly move on," he says. "Can you exclude that some person in your circle corrupted one of the 15 magistrates who are involved in the SME trial?" It is a bizarre formulation, one that does not even make it clear that Berlusconi himself is on trial. The fog thickens when the prime minister answers Vespa with yet another of his jokes: "Do you want to be beaten up now, or shall I wait for you outside?"

Berlusconi eventually gets round to ruling out the possibility that he will be convicted. He announces that he wants a parliamentary inquiry into the SME deal, and repeats his familiar charge that leftwing magistrates are out to topple his government.

A case can perhaps be made that, in some countries, politicians are subjected on TV to a sneery, suspicious, attack-dog style of interviewing that is not just disrespectful but, in the long run, corrodes popular trust in democratically elected leaders. But the Porta a Porta show swings startlingly in the other direction. It amounts to a 90-minute election slot for Berlusconi, broadcast on a state-controlled television channel.

The deference shown to Berlusconi by Vespa is the subject of a front-page cartoon in the next morning's Corriere della Sera, Italy's most influential newspaper. Under the caption "L'Ospite" (which means both "host" and "guest"), Giannelli, the cartoonist, shows a cheery Berlusconi handing his hat and umbrella to Vespa, who is saying: "Welcome, prime minister, consider yourself at home."

Corriere della Sera, with a circulation of 700,000, is Italy's largest and most independent newspaper. La Repubblica, at 650,000, is the next biggest and supports the centre-left. The Berlusconi family's papers include Il Giornale, owned by his brother Paolo, with a circulation of 230,000, and Il Foglio, owned by his wife Veronica, with a mere 10,000. Besides these, there are Il Sole 24 Ore, owned by Confindustria, the industrialists' association, and La Stampa, owned by the Agnelli family: each has sales of more than 400,000.

Though its circulation is tiny, Il Foglio merits attention, not least because Giuliano Ferrara, its fleshy and flashy editor, has positioned himself as the emblematic modern Italian intellectual: a former communist who moved to the Socialist party, he eventually joined forces with Berlusconi in a kind of Damascene conversion to the new right. And yet Il Foglio is no simple Berlusconi mouthpiece: when he chooses, Ferrara can direct withering fire at government policies.

Corriere della Sera is the paper to watch, however, because in a country with a long tradition of making journalism the handmaiden of political or economic interest groups, the Milan daily is the freest spirit. Its lese majeste, and its measured but insistent criticism of the prime minister, have not gone unnoticed. On the night of Thursday, May 29, Ferruccio de Bortoli, Corriere's editor for six years, handed in his resignation, touching off a strike by the paper's journalists, who suspected government pressure had forced the change.

Corriere had criticised the government's economic policies and its pro-US stance in the Iraq war. It had also provided detailed coverage of the court cases involving Berlusconi and several of his associates - such as Cesare Previti, his former personal lawyer, who was sentenced to 11 years in prison for corruption in April (he maintains his innocence). That coverage brought frequent calls of complaint from Berlusconi supporters, and some Corriere reporters covering these cases were threatened with legal action. De Bortoli said in February: "We have not minced our words when it's come to the prime minister's conflict of interests. Pressure has been applied."

Businessmen in Milan have long suspected that Berlusconi would like to expand his media empire to include Corriere. Only last year Salvatore Ligresti, a financier and Berlusconi associate, tried to enter the group of shareholders who control the paper. These include Fiat, Italy's largest private sector employer, now mired in financial trouble, and Mediobanca, once Italy's most influential investment bank. Yet Ligresti's attempt failed and, as a replacement for de Bortoli, Corriere's owners chose Stefano Folli, one of Italy's most respected political columnists. The paper's journalists have expressed solid support for Folli, hoping he will be strong enough to defend Corriere's integrity.

The Berlusconi-inspired casualties at Rai have been clearer, though even here his victories have not been total. Consider the case of Michele Santoro. His popular satirical programme Sciuscia on RaiDue was dropped from TV schedules last year, as was a similar programme presented on RaiUno by Enzo Biagi, after Berlusconi attacked both men. "Public television, which is funded by everyone's money, was put to criminal use by Santoro [and] Biagi... I think it is the duty of Rai's new management to stop that happening again," he told a news conference while on an official visit to Bulgaria in April 2002.

The main "crime" of Biagi, 82, the doyen of Italian journalists, was to broadcast a show just before the 2001 elections in which Roberto Begnini, the comic actor and director (of, most recently, La Vita e Bella and Pinocchio), poked fun at Berlusconi. For his part, Santoro had never disguised his leftist views. Yet if Berlusconi was hoping to purge state television of leftwing satire, he may not have succeeded. In early June, a Rome labour court judge ordered Rai to put Santoro back on TV with a weekly show lasting at least 90 minutes.

His staff, not surprisingly, do not share the view of Berlusconi as a power-hungry leader, deploying his political and business clout to blunt attacks on himself in the media and in the courts. In his offices on the Via del Plebiscito, a stone's throw from parliament in central Rome, Paolo Bonaiuti is wearing a patient expression that suggests he has been asked hundreds of times before about Berlusconi's personality.

Bonaiuti is a member of Forza Italia, representing a Tuscan constituency in parliament. He is also the prime minister's official spokesman - no easy job, given his master's fondness for spontaneous comments (in September 2001, after the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, Berlusconi caused an uproar by proclaiming western culture superior to Islam).

"He's been working hard ever since I've known him," Bonaiuti says. "If he goes to bed early, it's 12.30 or 1am. Otherwise, it's 2 or 3am. Then he gets up early and reads the newspapers. On Sundays, he may not work in the morning, but he does in the afternoon... He is still working with the same people that he was 20 or 30 years ago - drivers, secretaries and so on."

Bonaiuti warms to his theme. "Switch on the television on any night of the year, and watch all the evening news programmes and the talk shows. I ask you, do you believe there is a lack of information or a lack of points of view? And then in the morning you can buy any newspapers you want, and come to the same conclusion." He leans forward. "Very softly, I ask you, how, how, how can anyone say this is not true?"

Berlusconi must indeed put in many tedious hours. He inherits the burden of most post-war Italian prime ministers: leading a delicately balanced, sometimes quarrelsome coalition, while being restricted to a limited range of executive powers under the terms of Italy's constitution. His four-party government brings together right-wingers (some with neo-fascist roots) in the Alleanza Nazionale, northern Italian populists in the Lega Nord and Catholic centrists in the Democratic Union of the Centre, as well as his own Forza Italia loyalists. Simply holding the coalition together is a large task, before beginning that of government. "The man who is always able to find a balance in the coalition is Berlusconi. He is not a man of extremes. He always tries to resolve issues without having a conflict and without harming anyone," one aide says.

Gianfranco Fini, deputy prime minister and leader of the right-wing Alleanza Nazionale, more or less agrees. A suave politician who cultivates the image of being above coalition squabbles, Fini won the upper hand in the early 1990s over those in his movement who were nostalgic for Italy's fascist past. In the 2001 elections, the Alleanza emerged as the second largest political force on the Italian right. "It is ridiculous to say we are the prime minister's hostages," he says. "One cannot at one and the same time accuse Berlusconi of being an absolute leader, and then oppose the fact that the coalition has stayed together because of this leadership. He is the only one capable of keeping together a coalition made up of differences."

Berlusconi was less skilled at coalition management in 1994, when his first government collapsed after seven months, thanks partly to the withdrawal of Umberto Bossi's Northern League. By all accounts, he has proved more adept this time round. For a man who has spent most of his adult life as a business executive, accustomed to issuing commands and seeing them executed, it is noticeable how, in his second spell in government, he has striven to acquire exactly the skills required of the old First Republic politicians.

"It is Berlusconi's government, that's clear. But it is also a coalition government, and managing an Italian coalition is a full-time job," says one foreign ambassador in Rome.

Italian politics is rough and tumble: the verbal assaults are not all one-way. A list compiled in the prime minister's offices cites 14 examples of over-the-top insults made by politicians of the left in the month between April 17 and May 19, 2003: "Berlusconi is like an old comedian who tells dirty jokes", "There's something desperate and perverted in what is by now the prime minister's daily delirium", "Silvio Berlusconi is behaving like an extremist who is creating danger for our institutions and Italian society" and so on.

Berlusconi's strategists - able and articulate men who never let their guard down - attribute such attacks to the left's fury that Berlusconi, who did not enter politics until 1993-94, should have created Italy's largest political party with a marketing strategy drawn straight from the worlds of business and sport ("Forza Italia!" - literally "Force, Italy", usually rendered as "Let's Go, Italy!" - was the chant of the national football team's fans). "The left was disappointed in 1994 and 2001," says one Berlusconi aide, referring to his two election victories. "It thought it could be continuously in power until 2020... We have witnessed a radicalisation of the left. This has made the left's language more inflammatory. If, once a week, Berlusconi answers back, how can he answer back in a mild way?"

10 June, 2003. The election results are out, and it is bad news for Berlusconi. Partly because of internal squabbles, the centre-right parties have lost control of the province of Rome and the north-eastern region of Friuli-Venezia-Giulia - the two big prizes up for grabs. The satellite-linked Forza Italia rallies, the Porta a Porta interview, the attacks on communism and a bent judiciary - voters just don't seem to have bought it. Does this mean Italy's centre-left can regain power in the next national elections, due by May 2006? Will the Berlusconi "mediocracy" eventually seem nothing more than a strange interlude in Italian history?

At his party headquarters near the Trevi Fountain in Rome, Francesco Rutelli, leader of the moderate centre-left Margherita group, is animated by the thought that Italy's political tide is turning. Tall, gentle, wry in humour, for two years he has battled to overcome deep divisions among the Italian opposition. Not only is the Margherita group distinct from the Democrats of the Left (the DS, an outgrowth of the old communists), but the DS is far from internally united. Meanwhile, all traditional left-of-centre politicians have been challenged by self-styled spontaneous citizens' movements, which lack leaders as such but whose best-known figures include Nanni Moretti, the film director.

The movements' accusation against the traditional left is that it has failed to galvanise public opinion against the Berlusconi government. But in the light of the regional and local election results, the charge looks less convincing.

"After their victory in 2001, the centre-right could have governed as a moderate coalition," says Rutelli, who was the centre-left's candidate for prime minister in 2001. "Instead, they have been a sectarian coalition. They could have been the new Christian Democrats. They had a majority in parliament, strong support from the entrepreneurial world and an opposition with big problems.

"But while we quietly rebuilt our coalition, they didn't rule the country. They didn't deliver anything. Berlusconi is not in government. Every day he goes off somewhere with improvisations like 'Russia should be in the EU', 'judges are communists', 'the left loves Castro and Kim Il Sung'. These are very unusual issues for the people. Italy is a mature country. We are no longer in 1948." (In that year, the Christian Democrats, backed by the Vatican and the US, defeated the Communist Party in an election campaign that portrayed Italian mothers and children as innocents about to be eaten by Stalin's wolves.)

In Rutelli's view, Berlusconi and his allies are a classic example of a political force that needs an enemy, be it communists or biased judges, or even biased communist judges, to define itself against.

Even if Berlusconi loses power in the next elections, Rutelli says Italy's institutions and political culture have suffered damage over the past two years. "Berlusconi really thinks that if you have a one-seat advantage in parliament, you have the right to control judges, independent sources of authority, information. But an ordinary liberal democracy asks people to be respectful of institutions as belonging to everyone, not to treat them as their personal arena."

As for the SME trial, Rutelli, like many politicians on both left and right, senses that it will all lead nowhere. A bill giving the prime minister immunity to prosecution was passed in parliament on June 18, in effect freezing the trial, two weeks before Berlusconi takes over the presidency of the European Union, on Tuesday. Berlusconi has deployed his parliamentary majority to pass a law tailored to his particular circumstances.

"The damage is done because people will perceive that there are different versions of justice for powerful people and for ordinary people," Rutelli concludes.

Back in July 1993, Berlusconi's closest associates gathered at his Milan villa to discuss whether, at the age of 56, he should launch a political career. Several were against it, but he went ahead. Announcing his move six months later, in a video distributed to RAI and his own TV channels, he said: "Italy needs people of a certain experience, with their heads firmly on their shoulders, able to give the country a helping hand... I tell you that we can, I tell you that we must, create for ourselves and for our children a new Italian miracle."

In 1994, as Italy's discredited post-war political parties fell apart, Berlusconi did seem to offer something new - a new beginning, a new type of party, a new, sometimes unsettling, style of leadership. He was an enormously successful businessman: the politicians had been nothing but politicians, and had failed at that. He was dynamic: they were grey and ageing.

Newness was his theme once more in 2001: newness, and a pitch that equated his business success with political ability. The centre-left government, see-sawing between liberal Christian Democrats and still hard-line communists, had run through three prime ministers and had applied the politics of austerity to ensure Italy entered the eurozone. Berlusconi - indefatigable, amiable and rich - swept back, his House of Freedoms coalition winning absolute majorities in the lower house of parliament and the senate.

But these past two years are taking a toll. The charges and allegations against him, of which the SME trial in Milan is but one, refuse to go away and are causing international disquiet. The opposition, split and without one clear leader as it is, may be coming back. Berlusconi's use of his majority to pass laws that directly benefit himself leaves some of his coalition allies visibly uncomfortable. Conflicts of interests in his dual role as dominant broadcaster and dominant politician loom as large as ever. His charm and bonhomie sometimes seem thin. He has been unable to charm away Italy's chronic problems of state: an enormous public debt, a struggle to maintain international competitiveness, an inefficient state administration, and one of the lowest economic growth rates in the European Union.

Ironically - given the charges of near-dictatorship that have been levelled against him - part of his problem stems from a lack of power. Italy has a political, economic and legal system in which executive authority, far from being concentrated in the prime minister's hands, is dispersed far and wide: among the ruling coalition's different parties, between the two houses of parliament, at the offices of Italy's head of state, in the Italian and European Union bureaucracy, among leading industrialists, among trade unions and in the judiciary. Berlusconi is not Benito Mussolini. In fact, the deliberate dispersal of power effected after the war to stop a second Mussolini constrains the executive still. Increasingly, Berlusconi has found himself bound by these formidable institutional constraints, which have countered the power of his business and media interests and seem likely to last long after he bids farewell to politics.

Now that Italy is assuming the presidency of the EU, Berlusconi wants the member states to agree to a new constitution, so that a new treaty can again take the name of Rome. It is a monumental test for a man who is still a relative political amateur, and who is accustomed to depending on charm, instinct and great wealth to see him through. His opponents think he will prove a national embarrassment. His supporters believe he will rise to the occasion, and that he, and only he, can release the Forza in Italia.

Tony Barber is the FT's Rome bureau chief