Silvio Berlusconi is the great illusionist of our age. Political obituaries painted him as a “colourful playboy”. Yet if an African leader had a similar record, commentators would label him a dangerous demagogue: the classic “big man” seeking power for his own profit and gratification. But being Italy’s richest man, controlling much of its media, meant that he could create his own cover story.
The first fabrication, repeated ad nauseum, is that Berlusconi was a “self-made man”. Not true. His father, Luigi, was a director of a small Milan bank described by Michele Sindona, the notorious Mafia (and Vatican) financier, as “the Mafia’s bank in northern Italy”. Sindona knew all the Mafia’s financial secrets. He was later poisoned by a cyanide-laced espresso in a Milan prison.
When Berlusconi decided to become a building entrepreneur in his 20s, with no track record, he managed to raise huge sums with the help of his father through the Banca Rasini. This money arrived circuitously, via Switzerland, from the Israeli Discount Bank – later investigated, as was the Banca Rasini, for alleged laundering of Mafia drug money. At that point, however, it was discovered that all records up to the time of the retirement of Berlusconi’s father had disappeared.
Silvio Berlusconi has certainly associated with Mafia figures. His close friend and collaborator, Marcello Dell’Utri, was sentenced in 2004 for association with the mafia. Earlier, as his wealth grew, Berlusconi had hired as his bodyguard and general factotum a tough Sicilian, Vittorio Mangano. Yet only two months before he was blown up by a Mafia bomb in 1992, Judge Paolo Borsellino described Mangano as the link between the Sicilian Mafia and its offshoots in Northern Italy. Berlusconi denied knowing about Mangano’s Mafia links, even though Mangano dined with the Berlusconi family and entertained Mafia friends in his apartment at his boss’s sumptuous villa just north of Milan.
Berlusconi burst on the Italian political scene in 1994. At the time, just as Italy is now, his financial empire was over-extended and on the verge of bankruptcy. Magistrates were investigating his political links and financial affairs. As always, he simply re-invented himself. In just three months, Berlusconi created a political party, Forza Italia, and became Prime Minister for the first time. He was to be elected Prime Minister twice more, becoming the longest-serving post-war Italian leader.
To gain power, however, he had to negotiate two seedy partnerships. The Northern League is a virulently xenophobic regional party which claims it would like to secede from the poorer south. Its crassly populist leader, Umberto Bossi, refers to Africans as “Bingo Bongos”. Meanwhile, the Allianza Nazionale, Berlusconi’s other former ally, represented the remnants of Italy’s neo-fascists. Even so, as the great illusionist bowed out, commentators all over the world continued to talk of his “colourful” ways and playboy style. There has been no mention of the way in which his right-wing administration whipped up anxiety about foreigners, Africans and gypsies. This led to vicious vigilante attacks. In an ominous echo of laws passed by Benito Mussolini – about whom Berlusconi has made extenuating excuses – his government also began finger-printing on the basis of race, intending to create a register of all Roma and Sinti people, even those of Italian nationality.
Silvio Berlusconi’s bizarre political adventure bequeaths a bitter legacy. His country is left dramatically poorer, financially and culturally, while he, personally, emerges far richer. As one Italian MP told the BBC on the night of his resignation: “Berlusconi kidnapped the Italian state and devoted 17 years to enforcing his own interests – immunity from prosecution and abolishing laws regarding his many conflicts of interest rather than solving Italy’s social or economic problems.”
The Italian billionaire has been indicted for bribery, corruption, tax evasion, false accounting, money laundering, illegal financing of political parties and connections with the Mafia. Berlusconi has employed as many as 80 lawyers at a time. His highly effective tactic is to string cases out, fighting every technicality, until the charges fall away due to the expiry of the statute of limitations. Berlusconi has spent much of his time in power passing laws designed to get him off the legal hook.
In 1984, the tycoon fought a titanic battle to take over Italy’s largest publishing company. The final decision came down to a court case. His right hand man, Cesare Previti, simply solved the problem by bribing the judge. Many years later, the Italian Supreme Court sentenced Previti to prison, but acquitted his boss, by then Prime Minister, ruling that he was “unaware” that his most senior associate had used a sizeable sum of company money to bribe a judge.
Berlusconi shot to power by convincing Italians that he was a brilliant businessman who could also turn around his country’s economic fortunes. Instead, he leaves Italy debt-ridden. Part of the problem is that he failed to tackle Italy’s major structural problem.
That is the split between the rich north and the much poorer south, from Rome to Sicily. This could be said to be a collision between two cultures: a slower, time-honoured, rural-based tradition coming up against the more impersonal and efficient industrialised world. It is a divergence which is reflected in the wider European Union. Northern Europeans flock to the Mediterranean on holiday not only for the sun, but for the more measured and human-centred way of life. The two styles, however, are hard to integrate. Compared to France or Germany, say, Greece, Portugal and Spain are caught in this social imbalance and find themselves falling back economically. Italy has now joined those other southern European nations in dire economic crisis.
Berlusconi did nothing to bridge that divide in his own country. Indeed he made it much worse by associating with northern separatists. Crude, provincial and brash, he first convinced his countrymen, and later the world, that he was something he was not. But then this is a man who sports high-stacked heels, bad hair weaves, plastic surgery and a kitschy tan: an incredible confidence trick.
