The New Old World (52 page)

Still, by the end of 1993, the political landscape had been scythed so clean of rivals or opponents that the party seemed on the brink of power, if only by elimination of alternatives. A coalition built around the PDS had just elected the mayors of Rome, Naples, Venice, Trieste, Palermo. New electoral rules it had helped to design, in which most parliamentary seats would be decided on a first-past-the-post system, were in place. The Left looked poised for its first victory since the war. Instead came a thief in the night. In the last week of January 1994, Silvio Berlusconi, proprietor of Italy's largest media empire, announced that he would lead a Pole of Liberty to save the country from the clutches of the PDS-led cartel. Within days, he had launched a political movement, named after the chant of national football fans—‘
Forza Italia!
'—and
organized by the executives of his holding company Fininvest,
¹¹
and had forged alliances with Bossi's Lega in the north and Fini's Alleanza Nazionale in the south, to form a common front against the danger of a Red government. Two months later the Pole of Liberty swept to power with a clear majority. The Italian Left had been swiftly and completely outflanked in the competition to be the standard-bearer of a Second Republic by a coalition of the Right.

Amidst the rhetoric on all sides of the need for a new political start, there was some ironic logic to this outcome. The victorious triumvirate of Berlusconi, Bossi and Fini were fresh forces on the Italian political scene, in a way that the PDS and its associates, most of them fixtures of the First Republic, were not. Economically, Berlusconi owed his economic fortune to favours received from the old order. Genealogically, Fini came out of the Fascist tradition loyal to the Republic of Salò. But as major political actors, they were unknown quantities and could project an aura of novelty more easily. As for Bossi, he was the great, genuine interloper of the late eighties and early nineties. Berlusconi's feat in uniting these disparate forces, virtually overnight, was remarkable. Bossi's Lega, based on local manufacturers and shopkeepers in the smaller towns of the north, was raucously hostile to Roman bureaucracy and southern clientelism—the electoral strongholds of Fini's Alleanza. The former standing for radical devolution and deregulation, the latter for social protection and statist centralization, each detested the other.

Forza Italia, the first party in the world to be mounted as if it were a company, would have been impossible without Berlusconi's personal wealth and control of television air-time. But the key to its political success lay in his ability to mediate these two natural enemies into flanking allies, at opposite ends of the peninsula where they did not compete with each other. The Left lost because it showed no comparable capacity for aggregation. The coalition of the Right took some 43 per cent of the vote; the Left 34 per cent; what remained of a Catholic Centre—closer in outlook to the latter than the former—16 per cent.
¹²
Under proportional
representation, there would have been a Centre-Left government. But, under a first-past-the-post system, tempered only with a residual element of PR, the lack of an electoral bloc between Left and Centre ensured defeat for both. The PDS had been hoist by the petard of its support for Segni's referendum.

Robbed of victory at the last minute, the Left took defeat hard. How could the Italian people have voted for such a dubious figure as Berlusconi? Dismay was not confined to the PDS and its penumbra. It was shared by wide sectors of the Italian establishment: the industrialists Agnelli at the head of Fiat, and De Benedetti of Olivetti—each with influential mouthpieces in the press,
La Stampa
and
La Repubblica
; Scalfaro, the president of the Republic; technocrats in the central bank; many magistrates and most intellectuals; enlightened Catholic opinion. Abroad the
Financial Times
and
Economist
made their disapproval of Berlusconi known early on, and have not relented to this day. The Left thus had a broad sounding-board when, after the initial shock of its setback in March 1994, it started to launch bitter attacks on the legitimacy of Italy's new prime minister. Two fundamental, inter-related charges could be laid against him. Berlusconi's control of the bulk of private television, not to speak of his press and publishing outlets, was incompatible with high public office—leading not only to obvious conflicts of economic interest, but violating a political separation of powers essential to any democracy. Moreover, there was good reason to suspect that he had amassed the extraordinary wealth that allowed him to build up his media empire by every kind of corruption. His propaganda to the contrary, the country's new ruler embodied the worst of the old order: a combination of impropriety and illegality that would be a standing danger to any free society. Roughly speaking, this continues to be the prevailing foreign view of Berlusconi.

Of its factual validity, there can be little question. The son of a minor bank official, Berlusconi made his first fortune as a suburban developer in Milan, before moving into commercial television in the mid-seventies. The city was the political base of Craxi, the strongman of the PSI, who was determined to break the Christian Democrats' priority of power and prebends at the top levels of the Italian state. The DC had long relied on extensive corruption to finance its machine, but its political force
rested on its mass base as a Catholic party, linked to the Church. The PSI, lacking any comparable roots in society, was forced to resort much more comprehensively to extortion to make up for its popular deficit—and by increasing competition for the spoils, sharply upped the stakes of corruption. Under Craxi, a generation of political streetfighters had clawed their way to control of the party, liquidating all its old leaders and traditions—where their opposite numbers in the PCI rose by obedience and conformity within a bureaucracy that put a premium on caution, evasion and anonymity. Adept at adroit manoeuvres and rapid tactical turns, the PSI grouping often showed a capacity for political initiative that left a lamely defensive PCI standing. But it was a machine that required constant financial lubrication. By the time Craxi achieved his goal of becoming premier, the speculative boom of the mid-eighties was fostering a climate of ostentatious consumption, in which earlier restraints on the political class were anyway dissolving. The PSI now set the tone for government, the DC following suit. In 1987 the ‘super-bribe' dished out between the ruling parties for the creation of the petrochemical complex Enimont came to $100 million alone.
¹³

Berlusconi's career tracked this structural change in the last decades of the First Republic. His first real-estate deals depended on planning permission from the PSI-dominated city council of Milan. When he moved into television, he already enjoyed a close friendship with Craxi, who in due course became godfather to one of his children and witness at his second wedding. As the PSI moved towards joint power with the DC in the political system, so Berlusconi's television empire grew. When Craxi became prime minister in 1983, Berlusconi already controlled—in defiance of the Constitutional Court—two nation-wide channels. Finally provoked into action by his acquisition of a third, praetors blacked out all three stations one night in October 1984. Craxi immediately issued a decree allowing them to return to the air, and when Parliament declared it unconstitutional, rammed through a law temporarily confirming it. Six years later, legislation specifically tailored to ratify Berlusconi's control of 80 per cent of the country's commercial television—the so-called Legge Mammi—was forced on Parliament by Andreotti, under PSI pressure, at the
cost of a vote of confidence that split his own party.
¹⁴
Obviously, it was unlikely such extraordinary state favours were granted to a single businessman without any considerations in exchange.

Eventually Berlusconi's empire came to include not only his television stations and hugely profitable advertising agency, but some of Italy's most prestigious publishing houses, its most popular retail chain, and the country's most successful football club. But from the start there was another side to Berlusconi, closer in self-image to Reagan than Murdoch. As a young man, he had been a crooner on Adriatic cruise-ships, warbling into the microphone with Fedele Confalonieri—later his tough chief executive in Fininvest—tinkling on a white piano at his side. He wanted not just to accumulate companies and dominate markets, but to charm and impress audiences as well. Vain of his looks—there is an almost naive touch of the bounder, in the sleek face and over-large smile—Berlusconi has always sought glamour and popularity, attributes more of the stage than the board-room. The trade-mark of his conversation is the
barzelletta
—the kind of ‘funny story' of which Reagan was a tireless fund, somewhat more off-colour. Such vulgarity is not the least of the reasons why Berlusconi is so detested by many Italians. But this is the culture of his television stations, with their high ratings, and was no handicap when he entered the political arena. The educated might grit their teeth as he became premier, but large numbers of voters were attuned to this style.

In office, however, Berlusconi's lack of any previous political experience soon told. Rather than displaying any resolute autocratic drive, he was curiously hesitant and indecisive, quickly backing down when his first initiatives—attempts at an amnesty for Tangentopoli offences, and scaling back of pensions—ran into strong opposition. But his tenure was in any case short-lived. In the months leading up to the election, the Milan magistrates had started public investigations against a whole series of leading Italian industrialists—among others, the bosses of Fiat, Olivetti and Ferruzzi—but had not yet reached Berlusconi. Once he was prime minister, however, they went into top gear. The Milan pool of magistrates, the posse of Mani Pulite, the ‘Clean Hands' that had cracked open Tangentopoli, was not a neutral or apolitical force. Italian prosecutors and judges—it is a peculiarity of the
system that there is no career division between them—are a highly politicized body, in which tacit party affiliations and overt professional factions are taken for granted. The Milan pool was no exception. It was by no means ideologically homogeneous (one prominent member was close to the PDS, another to Fini's AN
¹⁵
) but it was united in hostility to the venality of the First Republic. The dismay felt by the Left at the way Berlusconi had usurped the promise of a cleaner democracy was one thing. The anger of the prosecutors in Milan was a more serious matter. In late November a phone call from the head of the Milan pool tipped off Scalfaro, president of the Republic, that an
avviso di garanzia
was about to be issued against the prime minister on suspicion of corruption. Berlusconi was just preparing to leave for Naples, where he was due to preside over a World Ministerial Conference on Organized Transnational Crime. The next day, the humiliating notice was served on him in full session in Naples.

Amid the uproar that followed, a second trap was sprung. Since its defeat in the spring, the PDS had acquired a new leader. In his early forties, Massimo D'Alema was cast more in the mould of the PSI's Young Guard under Craxi, skilled in the arts of ambush and volte-face, than of his slow-moving forebears in the PCI. Behind the scenes he had been working on Bossi, feeding his jealousy of Berlusconi, who had upstaged his revolt against the old order, and the class dislike of the rough-neck for the magnate. By December D'Alema had achieved his aim. The Lega, which held a third of the seats in the ruling coalition, suddenly announced it was pulling out of the government. Berlusconi had lost his majority and was forced to resign. The first government of the Second Republic had lasted just nine months—below the average even for the First.

According to the doctrine that all major parties now swore by, political transparency required the calling of new elections. Since 1992 no vice of the First Republic had been more unanimously decried than the practice of constantly shifting alliances in Parliament to form new cabinets, without resort to the consent of the voters. In the Second Republic, so this doctrine went, voters who cast their ballots for a ticket could be assured that their intentions would not be turned upside down by opportunist switches of allegiance in the Chamber of Deputies. Bossi owed most of his parliamentary delegation to voters who had chosen the Pole of Liberty rather than the Lega, in constituencies where
Forza Italia had stood down for his party. When Bossi abruptly switched sides, Berlusconi thus had reason to feel betrayed, and to demand fresh elections to determine where the democratic will lay. Dissolution of the Chamber was the prerogative of the president, whose constitutional role was supposed to be
supra partes
. Scalfaro, however, fearing Berlusconi might be returned to office if voters were allowed to express their feelings too soon, spatchcocked together another cabinet under the banker Lamberto Dini. His more than willing collaborator was D'Alema, who—in keeping with the habits of the First Republic, and entirely contrary to the professed principles of the Second—orchestrated Centre-Left support for the government, in order to gain time and prepare conditions for a more favourable electoral result down the line. Bossi's truculently xenophobic party, the PDS leader explained, was really ‘a rib of the Left'.
¹⁶
In due course Dini himself—another defector from Berlusconi's team—was transmuted into a pillar of the Centre-Left coalition.

In this paradoxical outcome of the first test of the new order lies a clue to the genetic code of Italian political culture. Critical to it is a notion that has no corresponding term in other European languages:
spregiudicato
. Literally, this just means ‘unprejudiced'—a term of praise in Italy, as it is elsewhere. Such was the original eighteenthcentury meaning of the word, when it had a strong Enlightenment connotation, which it preserves to this day. The first entry in any Italian dictionary defines it as: ‘independence of mind, freedom from partiality or preconception'. In the course of the nineteenth century, however, the word came to acquire a second meaning, which the same dictionaries render as: ‘lack of scruples, want of restraint, effrontery'. Today—this is the crucial point—the two meanings have virtually fused. For other Europeans, the ‘unprejudiced' and the ‘unscrupulous' are moral opposites. But for the Italians
spregiudicatezza
signifies, indivisibly, both admirable open-mindedness and regrettable ruthlessness. In theory, context indicates which applies. In practice, common usage erodes the distinction between them. The connotation of
spregiudicato
is now generally laudatory, even when its referent is the second rather than the first. The tacit, everyday force of the term becomes: aren't scruples merely prejudices? An occasional hint along these
lines can be found in the libertine literature of pre-Revolutionary France, when characters were described as
sans préjugés
, signifying lack of sexual inhibition. In contemporary Italy, however, the elision is systematic and its principal employment has become the field of power.