Berlusconi's Italy: Mapping Contemporary Italian Politics

1. Introduction: Berlusconi’s Italy

1 Introduction: Berlusconi’s Italy I must obey. His art is of such pow’r. Caliban, referring to Prospero, the unjustly deposed Duke of Milan. —William Shakespeare, TheTempest (act 1, scene 2 In our country we have never been truly liberated from the need for a great commander to whom we entrust our lives and free ourselves from the weight and responsibility of choices. —Tonino Perna, Destra e Sinistra nell’Europa del XXI secolo (Milan:Altreconomia, 2006, p. 11). July 9, 2006, must have been a day of mixed emotions for Silvio Berlusconi, the former Italian prime minister. The Italian team had won soccer’s World Cup with a victory over France, but Berlusconi could not politically bask in the glory of the team to which he had tied his political career. Not only had he named the political party he invented in 1994 to serve his political ambitions after the chant for the national team, Forza Italia, his supporters had also acquired the nickname gli azzurri (the blues) after the pet name for the players on the national soccer squad. Since 1994, the story of Italian politics has been dominated by the larger-than-life figure of Berlusconi. When the corruption scandals and investigations of the early 1990s brought down the major parties of government in Italy, Berlusconi made himself a major actor in the emerging new system by organizing a new party and setting about creating a center-right constellation of parties that had never previously existed in Italian politics. He did so partly by mobilizing his own immense resources as Italy’s major media baron and by adopting an array of symbols, not the least of which was his involvement in Italian soccer as owner of AC Milan and his connections through that to the national team, to appeal to an Italian electorate disenchanted with old-style politicians and their political parties. However, above all, Berlusconi has provided a political magnet for those Italians less concerned with the normative propriety or probity of national politics, precisely the problem unearthed by the corruption scandals of the early 1990s, and looking to government pragmatically as a solution/barrier to resolving their private problems (see, e.g., Berselli and Cartocci 2006). From this viewpoint, Berlusconi’s own career is a metaphor for what some Italians have been looking for in political leadership. What many foreign commentators, most famously the Economist magazine,on a number of different occasions over the years,deemed as Berlusconi’s “unfitness” to rule Italy, his conflicts of interest in particular, seemed to some voters as indicating a sagacia (astuteness) and fortuna favorevole (good fortune) that they hoped might rub off on them. Leadership versus “Followership” Berlusconi’s media ownership and performance as a businessmanpolitician has come to dominate many accounts, both popular and academic, of Italian politics since the break-up of the old system in 1992 (see, e.g., Novelli 1995; McCarthy 1996; Zolo 1999; Ginsborg 2004a; Andrews 2005; Venturino 2005; Campus 2006a; Stille 2006; Lazar 2007). We refer to many of these accounts more specifically in Chapters 2 and 4. Berlusconi is often seen as the master shaman or trickster of contemporary Italy, manipulating his way to the top through mafia methods (and real Mafia connections) and then by appealing to the crassest and most vulgar aspects of Italian society. We explicitly acknowledge his importance as the organizer and salesman of the Italian center-right by titling this book the way we have. But,in our view,“Berlusconi’s Italy” has only been partially of his making. Some of the thrust of this book lies in showing how he has clearly recognized and shrewdly navigated politically around the socioeconomic and ideological cleavages of Italian society. But we give much more attention than is typical to these cleavages and how they operate electorally. Berlusconi may have proved necessary to 2 C H A P T E R 1 the past fifteen years of Italian politics, but it is clear that his role alone is insufficient in adequately explaining what has happened. Italy is famously divided geographically along economic and sociocultural lines. It has long had a “southern question,” the problem of the South’s lower level of economic development compared to the North (e.g., Valussi 1987; Barbagallo 1994). More recently, with the growth of the Northern League and its campaign against “Roman” rule because of putative...