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Desmond O'Grady

Silvio Berlusconi: Television, Power and Patrimony

Paul Ginsborg

Verso $270

Berlusconi's Shadow: Crime, Justice and the Pursuit of Power

by David Lane

Penguin $330

Is Italy's prime minister, Silvio Berlusconi, a threat to democracy, a Mussolini-in-the-making? Both these books pose the question.

Among the reasons are that, despite his pre-electoral promise to divest himself of his three national commercial television stations, he has not done so. As prime minister he can influence the three state channels so he has a virtual monopoly of television, particularly as one of his companies controls most television advertising.

Another reason is that his government has introduced laws to protect him in various trials on charges of business misdemeanours before he entered politics, and even of bribing judges.

A third reason is that because he is the richest Italian, with multiple business interests apart from television, many government measures are liable to charges of conflict of interest. Moreover, he is heedless of institutional niceties in his attempt to reshape Italy.

Both authors also ask how such a man ever  became prime minister. Initially a Milanese builder, with the help of the then prime minister, Bettino Craxi, he obtained a near-monopoly of commercial television once it was authorised. When Craxi and other politicians were swept aside because guilty of corruption, it seemed the communists would come to power. But Berlusconi created a party based on his businesses and formed a coalition which, surprisingly, won the 1994 elections. The coalition fell apart after seven months but he put it together again to win in 2001.

Lane, of The Economist, emphasises Berlusconi's alleged links with the mafia and deplores his criticism of the magistrates who investigated him.  He implies Italians must be particularly cynical or stupid to have voted for Berlusconi.

Exuberant Berlusconi has  an elephantine ego but Italians chose him because they hoped he would continue his run of successes (which include those of his  football club AC Milan) as prime minister, modernising and enriching Italy. They saw him as a more exciting prospect than the austere and divided Centre-Left. They wanted Berlusconi also because he presented himself as someone from outside politics.

Three years on, they are awaking from the dream he sold them. He has delivered on few of his promises. He has made the labour laws less rigid, introduced pension reform and a controversial version of federalism. He says he is about to reduce taxes and reform the justice system. Italy continues to be ever less competitive and has scant innovation or research. Berlusconi has found it much more difficult to govern than to run a business.

Ginsborg,  an Englishman who at Florence University teaches contemporary Italian history and has written several books about it, is more nuanced, more concise and more attentive to the social factors behind Berlusconi's success. He treats Berlusconi as but one example of the worldwide melding of personality politics, great wealth and media control which pose problems for democracies.



Biography