While his passing has been often reported, he just keeps on keeping on. 

Anyone queueing for the Uffizi this month, sipping Brunello on a Chiantishire veranda or trying to spot George Clooney around Lake Como may notice that Italy is having another of its periodic political crises. There have been many, but this one, observers are saying, could signal the end of the extraordinary political career of Silvio Berlusconi. 

Last week, the Italian prime minister survived an effective confidence vote in parliament only because rebels in his coalition chose to abstain rather than vote against him. The 73-year-old lothario and billionaire is, as usual, also at the centre of a circus of sex scandals and investigating magistrates. His popularity ratings are plunging and he is in the midst of a messy divorce from a second wife 19 years his junior.

Could it be that "Il Cavaliere "   the man who has changed the face of his country during his three stints as prime minister, who over decades has completed the populist reinvention of the media, whose name is synonymous with alleged scandal and international clowning " has finally lost his touch? What on earth will Italy, and the rest of us, do without this larger-than-life character, this cheerful chauvinist and shameless wielder of power? 

But disappointing as it will be to his opponents, we probably haven't heard the last tactless reference to Barack Obama's suntan yet. Mr Berlusconi has been written off so many times before that it would be foolish to think he has no way back. Stefano Folli, a well-known Italian political analyst, said this week: "These are the spasms of the end of a regime." But spasms can last for years. They can also be treated.

Aside from his extensive media, publishing, financial services, football and theatrical interests, Mr Berlusconi is still prime minister. He will probably cease to be so only if there are elections and he goes on to lose them. The president of Italy, Giorgio Napolitano, is the only person who can dissolve parliament or call for an interim government in the absence of an effective coalition.

But Mr Napolitano looked at the government collapsing around him last week and promptly went on holiday to the Aeolian island of Stromboli. It might have been his scheduled departure date. Or Mr Napolitano might have been sending a message that he doesn't want to think about it now and won't be back for a while. The Italian parliament itself will not be functioning again properly until the second week of September.

Mr Berlusconi changed Italy's electoral laws the last time he was prime minister. The largest party or coalition in the lower house is granted enough bonus seats to form a working majority. It is entirely possible, therefore, that he will win the next poll and form a more solid government.

The Italian people have ridden to Il Cavaliere's rescue before. There is a solid third of voters who believe his enduring explanation for his troubles - that he is the victim of a Left-wing conspiracy of magistrates and the media. And they love his boorishness. Note that his current troubles have very little to do with months of gossiping prostitutes, one of whom publicly praised his sexual stamina. 

James Walston, professor of politics at the American University of Rome, says: "His image endears him to large numbers of Italians who not only forgive him his crude jokes, his verbal and physical groping of young women and his plastic surgery, but they admire him for it."

All that said, there is no doubt that Mr Berlusconi's aura has dimmed. La Stampa, the Turin newspaper, wrote recently that he was no longer seen as so "omnipotent, untouchable, magical". "Silvio Berlusconi himself," the paper went on, "is reduced to being a politician like all the others."

The crisis is down to a rare miscalculation. Gianfranco Fini, the former neo-fascist now remade as a Centre-Right leader, has been Mr Berlusconi's main ally for years. But Mr Fini has grown impatient with Mr Berlusconi's authoritarian style. The ice started cracking in April, when the two men literally pointed and shouted at each other between dais and stall seats at a party conference.

Mr Berlusconi has also had difficulties with his finance minister over the need to rein in the budget, and failed to appoint for months a replacement for an industry minister who had been hounded out amid scandal. Critically, he has vacillated. The prime minister, who has faced numerous probes for corruption, tax evasion and fraud, has in the past ignored any uproar while seeming selfishly to use parliament and the legislature to further the causes of his business and his associates.

This year, though, amid opposition from Mr Fini, he has backed down on wanting to jail journalists who are leaked information by magistrates. Mr Berlusconi also had to row back from one of his worst stunts yet: a bid to allow ministers to dodge court appearances by pleading that they were too busy on government business; he then gave a newly fabricated ministerial job to a former business associate under investigation, who promptly said he was unable to attend court. That tried the patience of even Berlusconi's most devoted supporters. The minister quit and stood trial.

For once, some of the dirt is sticking. It is hard to say why: partly it must be Mr Berlusconi's age " he has looked weary at times" and partly it is because his rivals can sense the approach of a new era and the need to be assertive. Mr Walston says: "Whatever happens, we have entered a new and declining phase of 'Berlusconi-ism'."

Mr Berlusconi has brought profound changes to Italy. He has presided over the near death of quality television in favour of female flesh and game shows, particularly as the early success of his channels compelled state television to follow suit. He has curtailed, as part of that process, the advancement of women, when feminism was strong in the Seventies. 

He has made politics far more personality-driven, too, giving political parties names in tune with football crowds and populist ideals, such as "Come on Italy", "House of Freedoms" and "People of Liberty". And Mr Berlusconi's goofing on the world stage " apparently irritating the Queen in London by yelling out Mr Obama's name repeatedly, or leaping out from behind a lamppost to surprise Angela Merkel " has hurt the image of his country, diminishing the standing of its officials abroad.

Yet snobbish derision of Mr Berlusconi does not amount to much in Italy. It is Italians who have returned him three times as prime minister. It is Italians who enjoy or ignore the pervasive portrayal of women as sexual objects. And it would be risible to call the country with the world's greatest assembly of art and architecture, with its deep love of opera, a cultural wasteland ? educated Italians who might disapprove simply choose not to read newspapers or watch Mr Berlusconi's television stations.

In politics he may turn out to be a failure. When he entered the fray in 1993, Mr Berlusconi promised more decisive and stronger government after years of faceless, corrupt, Centrist coalitions. But now Mr Fini may be forming a new Centrist grouping that would fragment again the Left and Right. The historian and commentator Ernesto Galli Della Loggia wrote in Corriere della Sera this week: "After Berlusconi,? there are no more political parties. There is nothing, only one large parliamentary swamp."

But here, too, Mr Berlusconi may have another plan. Mr Napolitano's term as president expires in 2013. His successor, who crucially has immunity from prosecution, is elected by members of parliament. Who is to say that a new Berlusconi-led government won't see its prime minister give up the job to become president in mid-term? The fact that previous presidents have chosen to be ceremonial heads of state does not guarantee that Mr Berlusconi would do the same. 

He could, quite possibly, remain the dominant political force in Italy for another decade. As Mr Walston puts it: "[Only] God almighty or [Mr Berlusconi's] physician have a better idea of when he will leave." 

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/italy/
7934027/Dont-write-off-Silvio-Berlusconi-just-yet.html
 

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[Formerly Italy at St Louis]