Ciao, Silvio

The Age of Bunga

A true grotesque...

My first reaction to the death of Silvio Berlusconi was to make a joke. There was never quite any way to take him seriously: Something about his vulgarity, his clownishness, and the cheerful shamelessness of his corruption made one inclined to laugh. In his later years, with the apparent assistance of plastic surgery and botox, the sleazy smile became fixed into a permanent rictus, the entire massive head looked like one of those rubber parody masks of politicians. During a recent election, when he showed up to a polling place, a man was caught on camera asking a friend sotto voce, “Is that really him or is it a mask?” It was a good question.

Berlusconi invited you to laugh—with him or at him—it didn’t matter as long as you were having fun—to enjoy the spectacle in all its obscenity. It was central to his success and his apparently supernatural ability to dodge convictions and survive politically. He could appear harmless, charming, not worth getting so worked up about. His whole thing said, “Relax!” and then maybe put his hand where you didn’t particularly want it. And once you stop to reflect it all appears a little less funny.

When you add up all the shambolic cabinets, Berlusconi was unified Italy’s longest ruling leader after Mussolini and Giovanni Giolitti. There’s an argument to be made that, as fellow creator of modern Italy, he also comes in third just behind them. It feels perverse to use the world “statesman,” but he was the ultimate pervert statesman: instead of building the foundation of national unity and strength, he ably and consistently undermined it. The entire trajectory of post-Cold War Italy is defined by his politics.

Yet another funny thing: this subject of 35 criminal investigations was elected on a wave of anti-corruption sentiment. In 1992, it was revealed that essentially the entire Italian political system was on the take. Dubbed Tangentopoli—roughly, “Bribesville”—the ensuing scandal resulted in such a profound shake up of the system that it’s customary to speak of a “Second” Italian Republic forming in its wake. About a third of the deputies in parliament ended up under investigation. Bettino Craxi, the former Socialist prime minister, fled the country. Electoral support for the five party coalition that spanned center-left and center-right, with the Socialists and Christian Democrats as its major pillars, collapsed. At first, it seemed like the successor to the Communists, the Democratic Party of the Left, would reap the whirlwind and become the go-to protest vote against the corrupt system. Enter media mogul Silvio Berlusconi. Somehow his close association with Craxi, which had allowed him to consolidate his media empire, didn’t matter. He built a political movement through directly owning the press and T.V. stations and employed a postmodern form of red-baiting: yes, the corruption was bad, but the prosecutions were also part of a Communist plot to take over the government.

Still, Berlusconi could not do it without allies. And what allies he chose. The entire basis of Italian political culture since the war was that all the major parties had an antifascist pedigree. Movimento Sociale Italiano, the party formed by former Mussolini acolytes, sulked on the margins for a generation. But being outside of the system, they were also outside of Tangentopoli and presented themselves now as a party of good government. Berlusconi included MSI in his new Forza Italia coalition. As David Broder writes in his recent book Mussolini’s Grandchildren:

“In 1994 we decided to enter the field with the Right, that is, with the Lega and with the fascists.’ Speaking a quarter-century after he formed his first government, Berlusconi boasted that he had ‘invented the centre-right’ – a combination of forces which had never previously ruled postwar Italy. The ‘five parties who governed Italy since the beginning of the Republic kept the Lega and Fascism out of the so-called constitutional arch: they never let them enter the government’. But ‘in ’94 we brought them in: it was us who legitimized them, us who constitutionalized them!

Classic Berlusconi. He just admits it! He let the Fascists in. No wonder the Meloni government declared a national day of mourning for Silvio: they have every reason to be very grateful.

The points of comparison between Trump and Berlusconi are obvious and have been remarked upon at length elsewhere. But it’s worth thinking about the importance of the far right to both their coalitions. Both of them, with gleeful irresponsibility, opportunism, and nihilism, opened the door to a type of politics that had been taboo since the war. After they are dead and gone, we may have a lot less occasion to laugh.