(no subject)
Jul. 8th, 2009 09:21 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
fpbIf you lived outside Italy and paid attention to the press - especially the bizarre alliance of Rupert Murdoch's group and Spain's Zapaterista daily El Pais - you would come to some pretty odd conclusions. You would be hearing that Berlusconi is holed beneath the waterline, that his survival is a question of weeks rather than months, that a sex scandal is about to blow him away (dirty pun intended and enjoyed). And because foreign newspapers rarely report the results of local elections, you would not notice that, in fact, Berlusconi has just won both the European and the local elections, and that the opposition is in such straits that they are congratulating themselves merely on not actually having been blasted away from their historical strongholds.
The truth is that Berlusconi is growing stronger, not weaker. And, contrary to popular legend, that is certainly not because he controls the media. The dominant Catholic weekly Famiglia Cristiana, which is probably the best-selling weekly in Italy, is at open war with him. So is the powerful and prestigious publisher Carlo de Benedetti, who owns the leading anti-Catholic newspaper La Repubblica and the prestigious left-wing weekly L'Espresso. So, more mildly but unmistakeably, is the other leading daily, Il Corriere della Sera. So is half the Vatican, including the official newspaper, Osservatore Romano. So, above all, is Rupert Murdoch, whose Sky-TV broadcaster is making a committed and well-financed attempt to smash into the Italian market. The State broadcaster RAI is at best neutral, and, like most state broadcasters (think of the BBC and of PBS), is institutionally left-wing. On balance, the majority of the media are against him. Only his own personal daily, Il Giornale, which is outsold two to one by both Repubblica and Corriere, can be said to be unreservedly supportive. The comparisons with Putin's murderous control of Russia's media that have been made are wholly out of place; and I speak as someone who does not like Berlusconi - but who, unlike foreign journalists, actually has a clue.
Any notion of Berlusconi going is wishful thinking. First, his opponents are in tatters. The Prodi government, in which I myself had placed some hopes, has been an unmitigated disaster. It was not only ineffective; a good third of it was made of lunatic extremists such as the Green Pecoraro Scanio, who were positively hostile to the public good. As Minister for the Environment, Pecoraro Scanio would not allow incinerators in Naples even when the city was drowning in garbage; and, mind you, this was a matter of public order as well as of public health, since the camorra was known to be profiting on the situation. Thus the extreme of PC and of crime support each other. The crossed vetoes between the comparatively responsible majority of the majority, and the large and unmanageable rump of Greens, Communists, and other irresponsibles, meant that the government was wholly paralyzed. Their final suicide was all of a piece: instead of supporting the competent and decent Catholic Justice Minister, Clemente Mastella, who had been at the receiving end of a wholly motiveless prosecution, they attacked him and his party, as if the destruction of an ally were an advantage. Some of these people are constitutionally incapable of being in government, of taking responsibility, of becoming involved in actual constructive work; I really think they would be happier in an everlasting opposition, yelling at whoever is actually in charge. Irresponsibility and infantilism are at any rate a common and unfortunate strand of the modern Italian character. Even among the rest, the majority simply feels that they would rather be in opposition long-term than having to do deals with left-wing Catholics; they feel that their repulsive and misguided ideals - which recently have come to include not only abortion but euthanasia - would be compromised in any such alliance. So they dream of a wonderful day in the future when they will not have to submit to the iron law that says that there is no governing Italy without Catholics. After all, all these men are historicists, and believe in their heart of hearts that history will justify them and condemn the reactionary Catholics. That history might be doing something altogether different does not even begin to cross their minds.
But if the opposition has shrunk, Berlusconi has grown. We still know all his faults - his vulgarianism, his self-pity, his complete lack of class and taste. He no longer issues threats that he would never be able to implement, but he still whines about opposition and still blusters and brags in an unconvincing manner - but one which, coming from the Prime Minister, has both the shame of lack of dignity and the concern of possible assaults on freedom. He still tampers with the law and does so inefficiently; he still takes the occasional fighting posture - which always backfires, because a tough guy he is not. In truth, the fundamental freedoms have not suffered under him; to the contrary, some of his laws against the excesses of judicial power may have increased them - whether or not that was his intention.
Having said all that, I am one of a fairly large slice of the population who are finding themselves thinking and saying - as I, my brother, my best friend, and my father all said to each other in a conversation not so long ago - that we could still go further and fare worse. When all is said and done, the man has brought together a cohesive political movement whose leading figures have got useful training in local government (which is very important in Italy, and getting more important by the day). There is a significant difference between Berlusconi's party (which has united with Fini's former Nationalists) and the opposition: the most respected mayors and governors from the opposition are most often in revolt against their own party leaderships (the leading example being Venice's famous and popular philosopher mayor, Professor Massimo Cacciari), Berlusconi's mayors and governors seem happy in theirs.
Above all, Berlusconi is proving increasingly effective. The obscenity of the Naples rubbish collecting crisis is a case in point. As soon as he was elected, Berlusconi took the matter in hand. He actually moved the Government to Naples, which I and many others saw as gesture politics; but gesture politics or not, he managed in a few weeks to get rid of a disgrace that had shamed Italy across the world and seemed impenetrable to the previous government. And since then, in spite of occasional warnings, it has not come back. Likewise, the high-speed train connection between Turin and Lyon, which had been held up from the beginning to the end of the Prodi administration, was settled virtually overnight.
As an organizer, as a manager, Berlusconi compares very favourably to all his opponents. Those who mock his promise to have all the dwelling houses in earthquake-stricken L'Aquila habitable by the winter forget that, even before he got into broadcasting - let alone politics - he was a successful building entrepreneur, whose luxury developments around Milan are popular to this day. When it comes to brick and mortar, and to getting things projected and planned and done, the man knows what he is about.
Which is why the new front of the media war against him is so bizarre. The Guardian, comfort provider for the Politically Correct left and occasional licker of terrorist boots, has published a truly extraordinary report that claimed that the run-up to the L'Aquila Group-of-8 summit had been so mismanaged that the Americans had had to step in and take control, and that there was talk among G8 members of expelling Italy and taking in Spain instead.
This strikes me as a combination of slander, wishful thinking, and projection. Berlusconi is in many ways an ingenue on the international stage, and has been used pretty ruthlessly by disagreeable customers such as Gheddafi and Putin. But he is not inexperienced at organizing such get-togethers - he managed two previous G8 meetings without complaints - and neither are the personnel of the Italian ministries, who do the actual arrangements. As for membership of the Group of 8, Italy could not imaginably be replaced by Spain - a smaller economy in an even deeper crisis - without serious trouble. The scandal alone, and the public humiliation of a major ally, makes the very notion unthinkable. In these international clubs, countries may be let in, but are never, except for the gravest reasons, let out. And even granting, which I do not grant for a minute, that the L'Aquila conference had been mismanaged, that is not remotely enough for such an international scandal.
What follows is supposition, but I will try to explain why it seems likely to me. I very much doubt that the Grauniad would have published so sensational and slanderous a story without some credible source somewhere; and I think the story itself tells us where to look for the source. To have any credibility in the eyes of a cautious British journalist, ever in fear of libel suits, the source must be an insider, someone who has something to do with international relationships and at least one of the countries concerned - a diplomat or a high bureaucrat. Now, any German, French, Russian, or even Spanish functionary with a grudge against Italy and/or Berlusconi, would not have said that it was the Americans who "took the initiative" in redirecting the "mismanaged" conference. A Japanese theoretically might, but then, why would they? It is a Briton or an American (the underlying anti-Italian prejudice and arrogance suggests Britain more than America) who spoke to Britain's banner left-wing newspaper; and that being the case, one can see the outlines both of a motive and of a plan. The three countries involved - Britain and America as the likely sources, Spain as the intended beneficiary - are the only three Western countries where the "progressive" left still holds power. Elsewhere the drift is inexorably towards a conservative, especially a morally conservative position. Well, you cannot expect the left to like it, can you? And then we have the phenomenon of Berlusconi Derangement Syndrome. The man is so obviously flawed, and his flaws are all so close to the surface, that nobody abroad - especially no political opponent - can imagine how he gets away with it. The Guardian's source must have regarded him as a ridiculously easy mark. He seems half a joke and half a rogue, the kind of man any self-respecting democracy would not even consider for a leader. How does he keep winning?
Well, self-respecting democracies have elected bad jokes before - Richard Nixon, Jimmy Carter, Harold Wilson, Jacques Chirac; or had them very near power, as with Franz Josef Strauss, who, like the German jokes of legend, was not really very funny. The reasons for Berlusconi's success I have already outlined; he is efficient in office; and he has a solid party. Having to choose against an opposition that proved to be and have neither, the Italian public has been choosing him by an increasing margin. However, Berlusconi Derangement Syndrome has not gone away. Those who are not, like me, resigned to the man, have grown increasingly bitter and bile-ridden. Berlusconi cannot go anywhere - even visit the site of a disaster such as the recent Viareggio railway explosion - without meeting a small horde of screaming protesters; protesting, indeed, at nothing in particular, merely at the fact that he is there. Even his performing the most normal and expected duties of a head of government, such as inspecting disaster sites and declaring disaster area status, becomes in their eyes a reason to hate the man.
Obviously, this tends to create an unwholesome atmosphere of wishful thinking grounded in rejection. It cannot really be that the majority of the Italian public have used their own heads to vote Berlusconi in; it cannot really be that he has solid support and will either last out the legislature or die in office. Opposition politicians such as Massimo D'Alema mutter darkly about "earthquakes" to come in the next few weeks. Newspapers seize on sex affairs whose outlines they barely understand in the bizarre hope - let us call things by their name - that a party they regard as a criminal association within the meaning of the act, that has been created and led from its inception by Berlusconi and nobody else, and that has been loyal to its leader through thick and thin, could be induced to jettison him - after a series of victorious elections - for no better reason than that he was having his second divorce and had had sex with a prostitute.
The expectation is obviously absurd, but there is a reason behind it. The campaign against Berlusconi, and especially the sex allegations, have been led by foreign newspapers; Spain's El Pais, the mouthpiece of the Zapaterista government's notorious hatred of Berlusconi, which has led even ministers of the Spanish crown to attack him and Italy by name; and the Murdoch group in Britain, which is driven by its owner's private business grudge against Berlusconi. Politically and personally, Berlusconi and Murdoch are two peas in a pod, except that Murdoch is ruthless, while Berlusconi is merely efficient. One could easily imagine Murdoch having someone murdered, and indeed he has featured as a Bond villain once (Tomorrow Never Dies), whereas Berlusconi has a notorious dislike for firing anyone (one of the reasons why his occasional bluster and threats are so unconvincing). Nonetheless, their paths to media success have been exactly similar. However, when Murdoch set his Sky-TV to invade Italy, Berlusconi struck back by removing some legal incentives and making Murdoch's operations expensive and difficult. For this reason, and for no better one - Murdoch is not the kind of man to be bothered by political ideologies or ethical scruples - Murdoch has declared war on Berlusconi.
However, like his allies of convenience at El Pais, he is fighting the wrong war on the wrong ground. Being foreign, they do not really understand the country, and rely for their work on received information and outdated prejudices. First, Murdoch is obviously relying on Berlusconi's enemies to point his hired killers, sorry, journalists, in the right direction; and, as I pointed out, these men's sight is distorted by Berlusconi Derangement Syndrome. Second and more important, he and El Pais both suffer from outdated cliches about Italian politics, as that Italian governments fall every six months. They faithfully expect that some party or faction will arise to stab Berlusconi in the back as used to be regularly the case. They simply do not appreciate the meaning of the increasing length of Italian governments since 1994, let alone the significance of the electoral success of Berlusconi's united party. And as a part of that, they have pushed a sex-scandal agenda that might perhaps have flummoxed a British or American politician, but that means little to an Italian mentality - except for those minds that are already so twisted by BDS that they will cling to any hope to see their enemy destroyed.
The foreign press may not realize it, but the so-called sex scandal is dead already. Berlusconi killed it dead with less than ten words, giving politicians from Bill Clinton to Mark Sanford a lesson. He just said: "That is the way that I am, and I am not going to change". No lies; no apologies; no public confessional; no rivers of verbiage. Above all, no handle by which opposition fine talkers can twist the thread of a bit of private bad behaviour into a noose. We have elected this man knowing full that he is flawed (and that he had a divorce behind him already). He reminded us of it. Nothing has changed - except that Mr.Murdoch's rags and El Pais have spent a lot of money on a number of "exclusives" and possibly shifted a few copies. Berlusconi is still firmly in charge. By acting on an outdated notion (the supposed fragility of Italian governments), in a way unsuited to the nation (Italian politicians are not ruined by sex scandals), and against the wrong man, this curious coalition has insured its own political defeat.
As for the British or American source of the Guardian story, the meme is the same. Its hope was that raising an international stink would make Berlusconi's position so fragile as to break his party; it had not taken the solidity of the Italian right into consideration. And in this case, the contempt for Italy as a country as well as Berlusconi as a man is so evident and obvious as to be self-defeating. You cannot defeat an enemy you despise, because if you despise him, you will not pay attention to what he does - only to your own contemptous notions of him. Berlusconi's victories are not a matter of chance. They are the current stages of a life of unbroken success. Whatever he has set his hand to, from his youth, has prospered. He has been one of Italy's most successful builders, and his buildings are solid and enduring. He bought the Milan football team when it was in the dumps, near-ruined by internal feuds and financial scandals, and turned it in a few years into one of the world's greatest sides. He entered the field of TV and mass media from outside, with no experience, and defeated the houses of Rusconi and Mondadori, who had dominated it for decades (he ended up taking over Mondadori altogether). Finally, he entered politics after the downfall of his friend Craxi, and managed what Craxi had never achieved: a realignment of Italian politics and the formation of a majority, election-winning party. Sure, he is crude, vulgar, often embarrassing. But these are surface things, as opposed to his proven ability to set up organizations that - whether in the construction industry, in football, in the media business, or in politics - work. Anyone who wants to fight him had better understand that.
The truth is that Berlusconi is growing stronger, not weaker. And, contrary to popular legend, that is certainly not because he controls the media. The dominant Catholic weekly Famiglia Cristiana, which is probably the best-selling weekly in Italy, is at open war with him. So is the powerful and prestigious publisher Carlo de Benedetti, who owns the leading anti-Catholic newspaper La Repubblica and the prestigious left-wing weekly L'Espresso. So, more mildly but unmistakeably, is the other leading daily, Il Corriere della Sera. So is half the Vatican, including the official newspaper, Osservatore Romano. So, above all, is Rupert Murdoch, whose Sky-TV broadcaster is making a committed and well-financed attempt to smash into the Italian market. The State broadcaster RAI is at best neutral, and, like most state broadcasters (think of the BBC and of PBS), is institutionally left-wing. On balance, the majority of the media are against him. Only his own personal daily, Il Giornale, which is outsold two to one by both Repubblica and Corriere, can be said to be unreservedly supportive. The comparisons with Putin's murderous control of Russia's media that have been made are wholly out of place; and I speak as someone who does not like Berlusconi - but who, unlike foreign journalists, actually has a clue.
Any notion of Berlusconi going is wishful thinking. First, his opponents are in tatters. The Prodi government, in which I myself had placed some hopes, has been an unmitigated disaster. It was not only ineffective; a good third of it was made of lunatic extremists such as the Green Pecoraro Scanio, who were positively hostile to the public good. As Minister for the Environment, Pecoraro Scanio would not allow incinerators in Naples even when the city was drowning in garbage; and, mind you, this was a matter of public order as well as of public health, since the camorra was known to be profiting on the situation. Thus the extreme of PC and of crime support each other. The crossed vetoes between the comparatively responsible majority of the majority, and the large and unmanageable rump of Greens, Communists, and other irresponsibles, meant that the government was wholly paralyzed. Their final suicide was all of a piece: instead of supporting the competent and decent Catholic Justice Minister, Clemente Mastella, who had been at the receiving end of a wholly motiveless prosecution, they attacked him and his party, as if the destruction of an ally were an advantage. Some of these people are constitutionally incapable of being in government, of taking responsibility, of becoming involved in actual constructive work; I really think they would be happier in an everlasting opposition, yelling at whoever is actually in charge. Irresponsibility and infantilism are at any rate a common and unfortunate strand of the modern Italian character. Even among the rest, the majority simply feels that they would rather be in opposition long-term than having to do deals with left-wing Catholics; they feel that their repulsive and misguided ideals - which recently have come to include not only abortion but euthanasia - would be compromised in any such alliance. So they dream of a wonderful day in the future when they will not have to submit to the iron law that says that there is no governing Italy without Catholics. After all, all these men are historicists, and believe in their heart of hearts that history will justify them and condemn the reactionary Catholics. That history might be doing something altogether different does not even begin to cross their minds.
But if the opposition has shrunk, Berlusconi has grown. We still know all his faults - his vulgarianism, his self-pity, his complete lack of class and taste. He no longer issues threats that he would never be able to implement, but he still whines about opposition and still blusters and brags in an unconvincing manner - but one which, coming from the Prime Minister, has both the shame of lack of dignity and the concern of possible assaults on freedom. He still tampers with the law and does so inefficiently; he still takes the occasional fighting posture - which always backfires, because a tough guy he is not. In truth, the fundamental freedoms have not suffered under him; to the contrary, some of his laws against the excesses of judicial power may have increased them - whether or not that was his intention.
Having said all that, I am one of a fairly large slice of the population who are finding themselves thinking and saying - as I, my brother, my best friend, and my father all said to each other in a conversation not so long ago - that we could still go further and fare worse. When all is said and done, the man has brought together a cohesive political movement whose leading figures have got useful training in local government (which is very important in Italy, and getting more important by the day). There is a significant difference between Berlusconi's party (which has united with Fini's former Nationalists) and the opposition: the most respected mayors and governors from the opposition are most often in revolt against their own party leaderships (the leading example being Venice's famous and popular philosopher mayor, Professor Massimo Cacciari), Berlusconi's mayors and governors seem happy in theirs.
Above all, Berlusconi is proving increasingly effective. The obscenity of the Naples rubbish collecting crisis is a case in point. As soon as he was elected, Berlusconi took the matter in hand. He actually moved the Government to Naples, which I and many others saw as gesture politics; but gesture politics or not, he managed in a few weeks to get rid of a disgrace that had shamed Italy across the world and seemed impenetrable to the previous government. And since then, in spite of occasional warnings, it has not come back. Likewise, the high-speed train connection between Turin and Lyon, which had been held up from the beginning to the end of the Prodi administration, was settled virtually overnight.
As an organizer, as a manager, Berlusconi compares very favourably to all his opponents. Those who mock his promise to have all the dwelling houses in earthquake-stricken L'Aquila habitable by the winter forget that, even before he got into broadcasting - let alone politics - he was a successful building entrepreneur, whose luxury developments around Milan are popular to this day. When it comes to brick and mortar, and to getting things projected and planned and done, the man knows what he is about.
Which is why the new front of the media war against him is so bizarre. The Guardian, comfort provider for the Politically Correct left and occasional licker of terrorist boots, has published a truly extraordinary report that claimed that the run-up to the L'Aquila Group-of-8 summit had been so mismanaged that the Americans had had to step in and take control, and that there was talk among G8 members of expelling Italy and taking in Spain instead.
This strikes me as a combination of slander, wishful thinking, and projection. Berlusconi is in many ways an ingenue on the international stage, and has been used pretty ruthlessly by disagreeable customers such as Gheddafi and Putin. But he is not inexperienced at organizing such get-togethers - he managed two previous G8 meetings without complaints - and neither are the personnel of the Italian ministries, who do the actual arrangements. As for membership of the Group of 8, Italy could not imaginably be replaced by Spain - a smaller economy in an even deeper crisis - without serious trouble. The scandal alone, and the public humiliation of a major ally, makes the very notion unthinkable. In these international clubs, countries may be let in, but are never, except for the gravest reasons, let out. And even granting, which I do not grant for a minute, that the L'Aquila conference had been mismanaged, that is not remotely enough for such an international scandal.
What follows is supposition, but I will try to explain why it seems likely to me. I very much doubt that the Grauniad would have published so sensational and slanderous a story without some credible source somewhere; and I think the story itself tells us where to look for the source. To have any credibility in the eyes of a cautious British journalist, ever in fear of libel suits, the source must be an insider, someone who has something to do with international relationships and at least one of the countries concerned - a diplomat or a high bureaucrat. Now, any German, French, Russian, or even Spanish functionary with a grudge against Italy and/or Berlusconi, would not have said that it was the Americans who "took the initiative" in redirecting the "mismanaged" conference. A Japanese theoretically might, but then, why would they? It is a Briton or an American (the underlying anti-Italian prejudice and arrogance suggests Britain more than America) who spoke to Britain's banner left-wing newspaper; and that being the case, one can see the outlines both of a motive and of a plan. The three countries involved - Britain and America as the likely sources, Spain as the intended beneficiary - are the only three Western countries where the "progressive" left still holds power. Elsewhere the drift is inexorably towards a conservative, especially a morally conservative position. Well, you cannot expect the left to like it, can you? And then we have the phenomenon of Berlusconi Derangement Syndrome. The man is so obviously flawed, and his flaws are all so close to the surface, that nobody abroad - especially no political opponent - can imagine how he gets away with it. The Guardian's source must have regarded him as a ridiculously easy mark. He seems half a joke and half a rogue, the kind of man any self-respecting democracy would not even consider for a leader. How does he keep winning?
Well, self-respecting democracies have elected bad jokes before - Richard Nixon, Jimmy Carter, Harold Wilson, Jacques Chirac; or had them very near power, as with Franz Josef Strauss, who, like the German jokes of legend, was not really very funny. The reasons for Berlusconi's success I have already outlined; he is efficient in office; and he has a solid party. Having to choose against an opposition that proved to be and have neither, the Italian public has been choosing him by an increasing margin. However, Berlusconi Derangement Syndrome has not gone away. Those who are not, like me, resigned to the man, have grown increasingly bitter and bile-ridden. Berlusconi cannot go anywhere - even visit the site of a disaster such as the recent Viareggio railway explosion - without meeting a small horde of screaming protesters; protesting, indeed, at nothing in particular, merely at the fact that he is there. Even his performing the most normal and expected duties of a head of government, such as inspecting disaster sites and declaring disaster area status, becomes in their eyes a reason to hate the man.
Obviously, this tends to create an unwholesome atmosphere of wishful thinking grounded in rejection. It cannot really be that the majority of the Italian public have used their own heads to vote Berlusconi in; it cannot really be that he has solid support and will either last out the legislature or die in office. Opposition politicians such as Massimo D'Alema mutter darkly about "earthquakes" to come in the next few weeks. Newspapers seize on sex affairs whose outlines they barely understand in the bizarre hope - let us call things by their name - that a party they regard as a criminal association within the meaning of the act, that has been created and led from its inception by Berlusconi and nobody else, and that has been loyal to its leader through thick and thin, could be induced to jettison him - after a series of victorious elections - for no better reason than that he was having his second divorce and had had sex with a prostitute.
The expectation is obviously absurd, but there is a reason behind it. The campaign against Berlusconi, and especially the sex allegations, have been led by foreign newspapers; Spain's El Pais, the mouthpiece of the Zapaterista government's notorious hatred of Berlusconi, which has led even ministers of the Spanish crown to attack him and Italy by name; and the Murdoch group in Britain, which is driven by its owner's private business grudge against Berlusconi. Politically and personally, Berlusconi and Murdoch are two peas in a pod, except that Murdoch is ruthless, while Berlusconi is merely efficient. One could easily imagine Murdoch having someone murdered, and indeed he has featured as a Bond villain once (Tomorrow Never Dies), whereas Berlusconi has a notorious dislike for firing anyone (one of the reasons why his occasional bluster and threats are so unconvincing). Nonetheless, their paths to media success have been exactly similar. However, when Murdoch set his Sky-TV to invade Italy, Berlusconi struck back by removing some legal incentives and making Murdoch's operations expensive and difficult. For this reason, and for no better one - Murdoch is not the kind of man to be bothered by political ideologies or ethical scruples - Murdoch has declared war on Berlusconi.
However, like his allies of convenience at El Pais, he is fighting the wrong war on the wrong ground. Being foreign, they do not really understand the country, and rely for their work on received information and outdated prejudices. First, Murdoch is obviously relying on Berlusconi's enemies to point his hired killers, sorry, journalists, in the right direction; and, as I pointed out, these men's sight is distorted by Berlusconi Derangement Syndrome. Second and more important, he and El Pais both suffer from outdated cliches about Italian politics, as that Italian governments fall every six months. They faithfully expect that some party or faction will arise to stab Berlusconi in the back as used to be regularly the case. They simply do not appreciate the meaning of the increasing length of Italian governments since 1994, let alone the significance of the electoral success of Berlusconi's united party. And as a part of that, they have pushed a sex-scandal agenda that might perhaps have flummoxed a British or American politician, but that means little to an Italian mentality - except for those minds that are already so twisted by BDS that they will cling to any hope to see their enemy destroyed.
The foreign press may not realize it, but the so-called sex scandal is dead already. Berlusconi killed it dead with less than ten words, giving politicians from Bill Clinton to Mark Sanford a lesson. He just said: "That is the way that I am, and I am not going to change". No lies; no apologies; no public confessional; no rivers of verbiage. Above all, no handle by which opposition fine talkers can twist the thread of a bit of private bad behaviour into a noose. We have elected this man knowing full that he is flawed (and that he had a divorce behind him already). He reminded us of it. Nothing has changed - except that Mr.Murdoch's rags and El Pais have spent a lot of money on a number of "exclusives" and possibly shifted a few copies. Berlusconi is still firmly in charge. By acting on an outdated notion (the supposed fragility of Italian governments), in a way unsuited to the nation (Italian politicians are not ruined by sex scandals), and against the wrong man, this curious coalition has insured its own political defeat.
As for the British or American source of the Guardian story, the meme is the same. Its hope was that raising an international stink would make Berlusconi's position so fragile as to break his party; it had not taken the solidity of the Italian right into consideration. And in this case, the contempt for Italy as a country as well as Berlusconi as a man is so evident and obvious as to be self-defeating. You cannot defeat an enemy you despise, because if you despise him, you will not pay attention to what he does - only to your own contemptous notions of him. Berlusconi's victories are not a matter of chance. They are the current stages of a life of unbroken success. Whatever he has set his hand to, from his youth, has prospered. He has been one of Italy's most successful builders, and his buildings are solid and enduring. He bought the Milan football team when it was in the dumps, near-ruined by internal feuds and financial scandals, and turned it in a few years into one of the world's greatest sides. He entered the field of TV and mass media from outside, with no experience, and defeated the houses of Rusconi and Mondadori, who had dominated it for decades (he ended up taking over Mondadori altogether). Finally, he entered politics after the downfall of his friend Craxi, and managed what Craxi had never achieved: a realignment of Italian politics and the formation of a majority, election-winning party. Sure, he is crude, vulgar, often embarrassing. But these are surface things, as opposed to his proven ability to set up organizations that - whether in the construction industry, in football, in the media business, or in politics - work. Anyone who wants to fight him had better understand that.
