The New York Review of Books

Lorber Films

Poster for Erik Gandini’s documentary on Italy, Videocracy, 2009

In the past year, Italy’s political life has come to resemble some strange cross between a Mexican soap opera and Suetonius’ description of the imperial excesses of the Caesars. First there were the revelations of Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi’s peculiar relationship with Noemi Letizia, a teenage girl from Naples who called him “Papi,” prompting speculation about whether she was his illegitimate daughter or an underage lover. “I wish she was his daughter!” Berlusconi’s wife, Veronica Lario, commented; she asked publicly for a divorce, saying that she could no longer stay with a man who “frequented minors” and “was not well.”

Next there were the photographs of the bacchanalia with topless girls and pantless politicians at Berlusconi’s pleasure palace villa in Sardinia, recalling images of Tiberius at Capri. Finally, there was the case of the call girls attending Berlusconi’s parties at the presidential palace in Rome, many of them paid by a Southern Italian businessman interested in winning government contracts for his health care business.

Berlusconi’s bizarre behavior kept spilling over into international relations, leading to numerous embarrassing episodes. Seemingly jealous of Barack Obama’s star power, he referred to the newly elected US president as “tall, handsome, and suntanned,” and then, in explaining why he would not attend Obama’s inauguration, he said that he was a star, “not an extra.” After meeting Michelle Obama, he remarked that she, too, was suntanned.

At the same time, as if in the third ring of the circus, there were Berlusconi’s continuing legal troubles, a sixteen-year saga that has left a long trail of evidence of corruption, bribery, and contacts with organized crime. Last October, Italy’s highest court rejected a law that Berlusconi had passed granting himself immunity from all prosecution while he is in office. This meant he was again a defendant in a case in which his former British attorney, David Mills, had already been convicted of taking a $600,000 bribe from Berlusconi’s company to keep his name out of a series of other corruption investigations.

Berlusconi’s critics called on him to resign and, using the Internet, organized a mass protest in Rome on December 5 called “No Berlusconi Day,” which, despite the notable absence of Italy’s main opposition party, drew an estimated 350,000 Italians. Berlusconi proclaimed, with typical exaggeration, that Italy was on the point of civil war. And just when everyone thought it couldn’t get weirder, on December 13 a man with a history of mental illness struck him in the face with a stone replica of the Milan cathedral during a political rally in the city, breaking his nose and two teeth.

Within hours, his political associates—Maurizio Gasparri and Fabrizio Cicchitto, leaders of Berlusconi’s coalition in the Italian Senate and Chamber of Deputies—mounted a ferocious offensive, insisting that while the prime minister’s attacker may have been a mentally disturbed man acting alone, the “moral” sponsors of the attack were the newspapers and magazines and journalists who had created the “climate of hatred” around Berlusconi. The “party of hatred” was said to include journalists who published malicious gossip about his personal life, criticized his multiple conflicts of interest, wrote about the Mills case, and pointed out Berlusconi’s suspected ties to organized crime. Also at fault were the 350,000 demonstrators who had participated in “No Berlusconi Day” and the social networks of the Internet, which Berlusconi’s supporters in parliament have been trying to regulate, without success.

Taking advantage of a surge of sympathy, Berlusconi set back to work on a new law that would immediately eliminate the two criminal cases pending against him—the Mills case and another charging that his TV company, Mediaset, used offshore accounts to inflate the prices it paid for movie rights in order to cheat the Italian treasury of millions of dollars it would otherwise have owed. To avoid the suspicion that the law grants special status to Berlusconi, it is written so that it will absolve many other white-collar criminals and could eliminate as many as 80,000 to 100,000 criminal cases. By some counts, Berlusconi has passed eighteen laws that appear to have been written specifically to meet his own personal needs, but this time, neither Berlusconi nor his allies make much of a pretense that there is some larger public principle involved. It is government for and by one person.

A politician in most other democratic countries would have been destroyed by any one of these scandals, let alone several that have occurred in relentless sequence over a matter of months, and yet Berlusconi’s power has never been seriously in question. What are we to make of this bizarre situation?

Berlusconi’s persistent success—at least if measured by poll numbers—needs explaining. Is he simply a bizarre Italian anomaly in which sexist macho men and successful businessmen and swindlers are admired rather than vilified? Are the Berlusconi sex scandals merely froth and tabloid gossip, a kind of opera buffa that doesn’t stop his supporters from preferring him to a weak, divided, and inept center-left? Could the Berlusconi soap opera actually be a part of his appeal, a fusion of politics and entertainment prefigured by the kind of silly, salacious, and very popular TV programs that made his fortune? What if ratings and audience have replaced concrete accomplishments as the measure of political success?

Berlusconi has transformed the political life of a major nation into a kind of reality TV show in which he is star, producer, and network owner: he is the ultimate “Survivor,” who will lie and cheat to kick others off the island as well as “The Bachelor,” distributing roses to a group of beautiful young women. Consider that Berlusconi’s approval ratings are consistently higher than Barack Obama’s. As The Daily Beast pointed out recently, Obama’s TV ratings and poll numbers have gone down in lockstep as his health care legislation has been weakened and unemployment has remained high: “The fact is he had 49.5 million listeners to [his] first speech on the economy. On Medicare, he had 24 million. He’s lost his audience…. He has plunged in the polls.” Berlusconi, facing public scandals similar to those of Tiger Woods and John Edwards, has kept his audience.

Berlusconi has understood that contemporary politics is a permanent campaign. In the old days, a US president campaigned for six months and governed for three and a half years. Obama rather quaintly followed this old-fashioned model, working largely behind the scenes to promote health care and other legislation, while the Republicans held the stage, claiming that the Democratic plan imposed “death panels” and socialized medicine. Berlusconi would never have let that happen.

Several new books—together with the documentary film Videocracy—have come out in Italy describing the Berlusconi scandals of the last year (both sexual and legal) as well as offering some interpretations of Berlusconi’s staying power. What becomes clear is that the sex scandals are, in some sense, a natural progression of the extreme “personalization” of power that he has embodied. Berlusconi came to power soon after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the ideologies that dominated Italian politics for most of the twentieth century. In Italy, political parties represented classes and major social groups. If you were a worker you voted for the Italian Communist Party; if you were a farmer or a small businessman you probably voted for the Christian Democratic Party. Political leaders—and their personal qualities—were not of supreme importance. During the cold war, the Christian Democrats along with four smaller satellite parties governed undisturbed for forty-five years in order to keep the Communists out of power. When the cold war ended, the corruption and inefficiency of one-party rule suddenly became intolerable and the governing Christian Democratic coalition disappeared almost overnight, leaving a majority of the Italian electorate unrepresented.

Berlusconi filled this void with extraordinary ability, understanding that his media empire—including the three largest private television networks—was the strongest institution left standing, and that his personal popularity and name recognition could be translated into political assets in an age in which celebrity mattered more than ideology. Instead of social and economic background, television preferences—which channels a person watches and for how long—are now the best predictor of a voter’s political preferences.

Berlusconi has personalized politics in a way new to Italy. Even in local races in which he is not a candidate, his face appears on most campaign posters. He has broken down the traditional boundaries between private and public by bringing into parliament members of his personal entourage—TV starlets, his personal lawyers, his personal doctor, accountants and executives from his companies, and scores of journalists and TV personalities, all of whom owe almost everything to him. He helped change the election rules so that voters do not get to choose among the candidates proposed by the parties. There is no question of primaries or intraparty polls. Instead the party secretary decides who will run where. This way everyone serves at the boss’s pleasure and individual politicians cannot claim special power to attract votes on their own. Under Berlusconi, politicians with a strong base of support in their home region have been replaced by personalities with quite different kinds of appeal: TV celebrities who can raise the profile of the party, friends and associates of the party secretary—and, increasingly, pretty girls with barely any political background.

The film Videocracy—a documentary made by Italian-Swedish director Erik Gandini—shows that the introduction of sex into TV was central to Berlusconi’s rise from the beginning. Post–World War II Italian culture was quite prudish—dominated by the Catholic Church and the austere Italian Communist Party. Berlusconi’s commercial TV, which began in the 1970s, flooded the TV screens and the minds of nearly sixty million Italians with a parade of scantily clad or seminude young women, the so-called veline, or showgirls, who appeared, silent but sexy, on either side of the male TV host. The film describes quite effectively how simply being on television—even when they are treated as a mute object or a sex toy—has become an ultimate aspiration among two generations of Italians.

One of the most telling moments in the story of Noemi Letizia, the Neapolitan teenager whose ill-defined personal relationship with Berlusconi—as described in Papi: Uno Scandalo Politico by the journalists Peter Gomez, Marco Lillo, and Marco Travaglio—set off the initial sex scandal, came when she told an interviewer: “I dream of being a ‘showgirl,’” and went on: “I am also interested in politics. I’m ready to take advantage of any opportunity at any of the 360 degrees of the circle.” When asked whether she might run for office in regional elections, she replied: “I’d rather have a place in parliament. Papi Silvio will decide.” In the world of Noemi Letizia—and of Berlusconi—being a showgirl and being a member of parliament are simply different ways of getting ahead and becoming famous.

Berlusconi did indeed bring several former showgirls into parliament in the 2008 elections. Two of them were made government ministers, one of equal opportunity, the other of tourism. Both had appeared, as starlets, on Berlusconi entertainment shows. A series of wiretapped conversations made during a criminal investigation was said to reveal that Berlusconi had a sexual relationship with some of these women but prosecutors destroyed numerous taped conversations of a “purely personal” nature because they had no bearing on the investigation. Wiretaps that have been made public show Berlusconi using the state television system as a kind of casting couch, getting auditions for le mie fanciulle (my girls) in order to “lift the morale of the boss.” In another instance, he worked extremely hard to get an acting part for the girlfriend of a senator of the center-left, hoping to use this as leverage to get the senator to switch sides and bring down the government of Romano Prodi, which was in power at the time.