Berlusconi Analyzed - Prodi Annointed - Can
The
ANNOTICO Report
[Keep in
mind that Weekly Standard is published by William Kristol,
a dedicated and devoted Neo Con, and that Berlusconi supported Bush's
imperialistic/colonialist conquest of
69-year-old
Berlusconi started his career as a door-to-door vacuum-cleaner salesman and
lounge singer in his native
Berlusconi
stepped into politics much as Ross Perot did at the same time, and appealed to
voters in the same way--as a plain-spoken outsider who understood well enough
how large organizations worked that he could strike government corruption at
its roots. Perot didn't get elected, Berlusconi did twice.
Basically, the way in which Big Business and Politics/Government work
is almost diametrically opposed, so the Biz Whiz can so easily misstep so often
that he can appear to become a Political Buffoon. Look how easily presidential
candidate Howard Dean went from Hero to Hindend, with
just one misstep.
There are
decided different European and American (which are considered provincial
and puritan) attitudes that Berlusconi plays to, and is
either misunderstood or purposely misinterpreted, but often also allows
his thoughts and actions too much freedom.
For those
who want a deeper and less superficial view, of Berlusconi, his Media, his
battles with the Judiciary, his Policies, the Facts and the Fallacies, and the
High Wire Act that Prodi must Perform,
and whether Prodi will be able to get Italy to
accept the Reforms Necessary, or by delaying the Inevitable, exacerbate the
problems, and further weaken Italy . This is a Must Read.
Yes, it is
heavy reading, and I even first got stuck on the title, that I still don't
understand, unless it is just another gratuitous slander of Italians.
BALONEY BEATS A MEATBALL
The Weekly Standard
Christopher Caldwell
Christopher Caldwell a is a senior editor atThe Weekly Standard. He is a regular contributor to the
Financial Times and Slate. His essays and reviews appear in the New York
Times, the Wall Street Journal, and the Washington Post.
SHORTLY BEFORE THEIR ELECTIONS, Italians discovered that three-quarters of the
women who perform on phone-sex lines were planning to vote for the incumbent prime minister, Silvio Berlusconi.
The source of this information was Berlusconi himself--who admitted to making
frequent use of such lines in the campaign's closing days. Berlusconi recently
chatted on TV about his facelift. He has even appeared in public in a bandana
after a hair-transplant operation. In a group photo from a summit in 2002, he
can be seen making the two-finger cuckold sign over the head of Spanish foreign
minister Josep Pique. He once commented during a
meeting with Danish premier Anders Fogh Rasmussen
that the handsome Rasmussen would make a more suitable lover for his
(Berlusconi's) wife than the mayor of
The 69-year-old Berlusconi
started his career as a door-to-door vacuum-cleaner salesman and lounge singer
in his native
Berlusconi, unlike Perot,
got elected. Although his coalition did not last a year, he returned to power
in 2001 on a raft of reformist promises resembling Newt Gingrich's Contract With America. Berlusconi proved a steady ally to the
But there has always been another superlative attached to Berlusconi. He is,
without question, a greater embarrassment to his country's social and
intellectual elites than any present-day national leader--including George W.
Bush. In
Berlusconi commissioned Bill Clinton's old pollsters--Penn, Schoen and Berland--to do an independent survey. They found the race
too close to call, tighter than one percentage point. Berlusconi explained that
the Italian people would never be so stupid (he used an Italian obscenity for
the word "stupid") as to vote against their own interests. And you
could see his point. Berlusconi was opposed by a collection of soft and hard
leftists fronted by the business professor and former premier Romano Prodi, who had spent the last half-decade in
In the end, Berlusconi was almost right. The election was a virtual tie.
Berlusconi lost to Prodi by a few thousand votes.
There were rancorous allegations of fraud, the worst of which were rejected by
the Italian Supreme Court last week. But Berlusconi has not, as of this
writing, conceded. Prodi finds himself abjectly
dependent on the hard-line Communists in his coalition (as distinct from the
post-Communists who are his coalition's mainstream). Italians find themselves
with a government far, far to the left of the one even its supporters vo! ted for. They have fallen into polarization and
anger, which can last long after such a contested election, as Americans have
discovered over the past six years.
NOW THAT BERLUSCONI has (apparently) been ousted, it is worth asking: Was his
reign a national emergency for
The first was that he was using his virtual monopoly on the country's airwaves
to subvert public discussion.
This being the case, Berlusconi's founding of non-government television made
him, objectively speaking, a hero of free speech and open debate. But once
Berlusconi got to pick the staff of the three RAI channels on top of his three
private ones, things looked different. His unprecedented choice of a political
opponent, the leftist journalist Lucia Annunziata, to
head public broadcasting won him little credit. The narrative that emerged in
But it turned out to be untrue. For one thing, the problem was not Berlusconi
as a person but an antitrust system (or lack thereof) that made it hard to
found new TV stations. Until five years ago, the left was as happy with this
system as the right. Prodi argued throughout the
campaign for selling off frequencies to new channels and making appointments
apolitically, but his own government in the late 1990s had done a particularly
egregious job of stacking the RAI with political loyalists. The best proof that
Berlusconi's control of the media neither threatened debate nor subverted
Italian democracy is in the exit polls. Those who admitted to backing
Berlusconi lagged far, far behind those who actually backed him. This would
indicate that the climate of public opinion, far from turning support for Berlusconi
into a civic duty, had turned it into an embarrassment. ! It was more chic, it
was more cool, to support the left.
The second pillar of the case against Berlusconi was that he was subverting the
independence of the judiciary. Italian justices' Clean Hands investigation,
starting in the early 1990s, sent so many top leaders in all parties to jail
for bribes that it wound up dismantling the country's party system. For
Berlusconi, this was a double-edged sword. He had come to power in the first place
because he was not mixed up in the old system of kickbacks--at least not as a
politician. But he had made his business fortune under that system, and the
judiciary was showing itself insatiable. It wanted to punish the entire old
ruling elite to which Berlusconi belonged--the business johns as well as the
political prostitutes. Some voters liked Clean Hands, since it punished
old-style political graft. Many others didn't like it, since, as Lord Acton
might say, a judiciary that is fully "independent"--subject to no
political control-! -can be as absolutely corrupt as any other possessor of
absolute power. The Italian political system (much like the American one since
Watergate) had grown dangerously complacent about using judicial proceedings to
overturn democratic verdicts.
The electoral system (again, like
It is true that Berlusconi squandered much of his political capital on keeping
himself out of prison, and warped the legislative system to do so, stacking the
Chamber of Deputies and the ! Senate with his personal
lawyers. Berlusconi, though, was not without evidence that he was the
target of undemocratic "red magistrates." Several of his judicial
tormentors wound up running for election as part of Prodi's
coalition. Most were in the post-Communist Democrats of the Left party (DS),
but one, Antonio Di Pietro, headed a party called the Italy of Values,
dedicated to the destruction of Berlusconi and asking Italians the question:
Where is the Outrage?
Berlusconi in the end was rejected by a far narrower percentage than any pundit
had predicted, and not for any of the reasons pundits had said he ought to be.
Rather, he lost on one stupid mistake. In this election, the government decided
to give the vote to the 2.6 million Italians living abroad. The assumption
(wild, in retrospect) was that most Italians overseas were still churchgoing
cobblers in
IN RETROSPECT, the turning point of the campaign probably came in March, when
the new governor of the Bank of Italy, Mario Draghi,
released his first economic bulletins. Draghi, a
former vice cha! irman of
Goldman Sachs, is one of the best free market economists in
It is not easy to see, though, what Berlusconi could have done to arrest this
economic decline. He promised five reforms in his Contract with the Italians:
cut crime, lower taxes, increase pensions, embark on a huge program of public
works, create jobs. He had done most of these, had even given
And that was perhaps the strangest aspect of the elections. Prodi
announced that
TO ASK AN IMPERTINENT QUESTION, is zero percent growth in
Immigration and Islam made little impact on the campaign, except in one spectacular
incident. Roberto Calderoli, a jowly minister from
the right-wing regional party the Northern League, who had once addressed a
Palestinian-Italian journalist as "that suntanned lady over there,"
unbuttoned his shirt during a television interview to reveal a T-shirt
featuring those Muhammad cartoons published in
The absence of immigration from the campaign may be a tribute to the way the
last two governments--Berlusconi's and that of the post-Communist Massimo D'Alema--have handled the issue, through a rising but
relatively orderly set of laws imposing quotas. But it is surprising
nonetheless.
But
Under such circumstances, a new kind of left-right polarization is emerging,
although not yet with such clarity as to replace the obsolescent 20th-century
one over which the recent elections were fought. On one hand, Italian cultural
conservatism is becoming more voca! l. One Christian Democrat in the Berlusconi government
provoked a European diplomatic incident when he opined that "Nazi laws and
Hitler's ideas are being reborn in the
Even more interesting are the intellectuals who are beginning to discuss
whether Catholics and non-religious people can unite to defend Western identity
(or maybe just to figure out what it is). Right now, the leaders of the group
are mostly secular, although Pope Benedict XVI converges with their thinking
more than did John Paul II, who was more focused on interreligious
dialogue. Despite their secularism, a name given them by the Riformista newspaper--i teocon, "the theocons"--has
stuck, perhaps because it combines theology with neoconservatism,
b! oth less than popular in
Italian intellectual circles. One group of theocons
surrounds the president of the Italian senate, Marcello Pera,
and finds its most sophisticated exponent in the philosopher Gaetano Quagliarello. Another
carries on a running debate in the eight-page daily broadsheet Il Foglio, owned by Berlusconi's wife, edited by a Russophone ex-Communist intellectual, and probably the most
sophisticated (certainly the drollest) newspaper in Europe. The misnamed theocons are where most of the action is in Italian
intellectual life, but they have been roundly calumniated in much of the press,
and even by members of the Berlusconi government, including the interior
minister Giuseppe Pisanu.
MEANWHILE, the left-leaning cognoscenti who were so keen to unload Berlusconi
have a new problem. It is that they hold their leader, the old-fashioned
Catholic industrial-policy expert Prodi, in extremely
low esteem. Yet Prodi is desperately necessary to his
coalition. He is ! necessary
because he is willing to play the role of fig leaf for leftists. The center of
gravity in the Prodi
government is the Democrats of the Left (DS). Although directly descended from
the former Italian Communist party (PCI), the DS is always described as part of
the center-left. This is a stretch. True, the PCI did reinvent themselves as
social democrats in 1991, and were also the most moderate of the Western Communist
parties during the Cold War.
But it won't do to exaggerate: Somewhere between a fifth and a quarter of the
DS's elected representatives--a group called the correntone,
or big current--think the whole move towards social democracy was a big mistake.
Correntone followers will happily work with the two
unrepentant, hard-line Communist parties in the Prodi coalition. Both are chic and growing. They are
Communist Refoundation, led by the eloquent and
gentlemanly Fausto Bertinotti;
and the Italian Communists, led by Oliviero Diliberto. The parties are dis! tinguished primarily by their
willingness to burn American flags at rallies for Hezbollah and Hamas. Bertinotti's followers say
no, Diliberto's say yes. This means that roughly a
third of Prodi's ruling coalition will consist of
hard-line smash-it-with-a-lead-pipe-and-light-it-on-fire Communists and antiglobalists. Their position is considerably strengthened
by their proven willingness to undermine Prodi. It
was Bertinotti's defection from an earlier left-wing
coalition that led to the collapse of Prodi's
premiership a decade ago.
This is not to say none of Prodi's followers are
centrists--only that they are swamped by tendencies with which they have
nothing in common. The Margherita party, Prodi's center of power, is one half of
On Saturday, March 11, thousands of antiglobalists
poured into the streets of
BERLUSCONI'S OPPONENTS were never able to decide whether to paint him as a
threatening tyrant or an embarrassing buffoon. If anything, the latter was
closer to the mark. In the end, he was only a brilliant entrepreneur with a
strong interest in politics whose ideas--many of them quite good--proved less
workable than he had thought, and whose personality proved less refreshing on
the hustings than it did in the boardroom.
Maybe Berlusconi had climbed too far in his personal life to take
In a country ! known for
rough-and-tumble campaigns, Berlusconi's was pussyfooting and hyper-scrupulous.
To take one example, the devout Catholic Prodi lost
no opportunity to declare his common values with the Catholic middle class. The
Catholic pacifist group Pax Christi even sent notes
to Berlusconi's Forza supporters implying that it was
unchristian to vote for the right. The problem for Prodi
was that much of his coalition was agitating strongly for gay marriage, and Refoundation was even running a drag queen named Vladimir Luxuria on its list. Prodi had
tried to pacify everyone with a promise of civil unions. But Benedict XVI had
termed this "the legislation of evil." It may be possible to
reconcile civil unions and Catholic devotion if you're a Jesuit, but not if
you're a politician. In an American campaign, no opponent Prodi
faced would have let go of this issue until he had sawed the Prodi branch off the
What is interesting about the c! oming
Prodi administration is that there is nothing in its
election manifesto that can serve as a basis for government. The European
Union, whose constitutional and regulatory agenda Prodi hopes to make his own, may be vivid in Prodi's mind. (He described his victory as "a
profoundly European result," whatever that means.) But for most Europeans
it is a mirage, a failed experiment. So what will Prodi
do? He could rule according to the wishes of his leftmost coalition
partners--already the powerful CGIL union is clamoring for a scrapping of
virtually all recent economic reforms--but it is unlikely the centrist parties
in his coalition will consent to that.
The only alternative model that presents itself is that of Spanish leader Josй Luis Rodrнguez Zapatero, who was, for the Italian left, the patron saint
of the election. The DS leader Massimo D'Alema
mentioned him, and admiring books on the Spanish leader filled the bookstores.
If Zapatero proves the model, the likely r! esult will be a combination of
"neutralism" (meaning abandonment of the war on terror and, most
certainly, of the war in
Christopher Caldwell is a senior editor at The Weekly Standard.
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