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[fpb]

In the last few weeks, Italy has seen an important set of local elections - including the governments of the largest cities, Milan and Naples - and a set of national referenda. The results seem to have marked the moment when the long-expected collapse of Berlusconi and his party begin. All the referenda were lost, some humiliatingly: the referendum against nuclear energy had a 95% majority. Milan and Naples both fell to the opposition. Losing Milan, Berlusconi's own city, to a dim-witted left-wing Catholic who thinks that what the city needs most is a new giant mosque is beyond belief, and nobody can doubt that they have done it to themselves.

First, there is the leader's behaviour. Berlusconi's finger has been firmly on the self-destruct button for a few years now; I think, since his wife left him. Sex parties and the building of a genuine "stable" of available young women with their own flats are not what Italians expect of each other, let alone of their leaders. It's got to the point where it's not even funny, not even worth leering at. Nobody admires a man in his seventies who dyes his hair and pays teen-age Moroccan prostitutes. The fact that some of them have then proceeded to turn up in Parliament, in the local administrations (including the former jewel in the crown, Milan) and even in Goverment (four or five cabinet ministers of the female persuasion are more than suspect of having been part of Berlusconi's stable) does not help; the definition "mignottocrazia" ("whoreocracy") was swiftly coined and widely accepted. And then there are his endless feuds and insults - never resolved, never allowed to die down, never left alone, everlasting raised to poison the public mood. Who would think, now, that a few decades ago one of the defining characteristics of Italy was the widespread sense of humour, often bursting into the most fantastic and absurd practical jokes, carried out for the pure joy of carriying them out? Now everyone is grim, everyone is angry, everyone nurses a grudge. Berlusconi has managed to infect the whole nation with his own pathology; and his men complain that their opponents have it in for them. Who taught them?

He has forgotten why people voted for him: to have a stable government capable of making decisions and dealing with problems. The rubbish in Naples, cleared away in the early weeks of his government, is back, and nobody seems interested in making it an emergency this time. Promised reforms flop about weakly in Parliament like beached whales. At a time when the whole world is threatened by economic crisis, the main order of bsiness in Italian politics is the endless exchange of insults and accusations between the leader and all is critics.

God help poor Italy, because the scattered and hallucinating left is not fit to govern an ice cream shop, let alone a great city like Milan, and the right is swiftly falling into the same disarray, with poisonous elements from the former Fascist party (e.g. Gasparri) making life toxic for everyone else. It seems clear, for instance, that Milan Mayor Moratti's ruinous strategy of smearing her rival Pisapia with terrorist associations without leaving him room to reply - which backfired badly - must have been the result of some Fascist mind among her handlers; people who don't understand how free people think and act.

Comments

[elegant-bonfire.livejournal.com]

Coincidentally, I just read this a few days ago:
http://www.vanityfair.com/politics/features/2011/07/silvio-berlusconi-201107

Seems to back up what you're saying in this post.

[elegant-bonfire.livejournal.com]

Just saw this on the links in the site too:
http://www.vanityfair.com/online/daily/2011/06/palin-email-keller.html

Comments that I read are not as much of a clusterfuck as one might expect.

[fpb.livejournal.com]

I'm afraid that's actually mostly the usual bullshit. The journalist recycles the usual uncomprehending stuff about Berlusconi owning this, that and the other, without giving any evidence that the media do much to support him. He does not mention that the two largest papers, the leading secular weekly, and the leading Catholic weekly, are all at open war with him; that most of the state broadcaster RAI is in open or covert opposition; and that even his own TV stations harbour instances of definite rebelliousness. The writer writes from the viewpoint of an American journalist, where it is obvious that if you work for NBC, or the NYT, or the WaPo, you will share the policies of its owners and leaders; but in Italy things are different. There is more diversity of views in one Italian TV station than in the whole American overground media, let alone the British, and Berlusconi himself never seriously tried to impose the kind of conformity one meets at the BBC or for that matter at Fox TV. He knows it would be bad for business, and besides he has a curious personal dislike for sacking people.

He is also completely out of his depth in the matter of Berlusconi's judicial troubles. This is a matter of an actual clash of constitutional powers with overtones of party struggles, since the Italian judiciary and the whole legal profession have been heavily colonized by the left since the sixties. They did not even try to disguise it: there is an association of judges - judges, mind you, not even lawyers - which is called Magistratura Democratica and was a branch of the former Communist Party. And because of the immense bulk and complexity of Italian law, there is never a shortage of anything to charge any citizen with if a magistrate so wants. Berlusconi's electors are firmly of the opinion - and not without reason - that the famous twenty prosecutions were all politically motivated frame-ups, and a lot of them will have horror stories to tell you about things that happened to them or to their friends. The whole aspect of corporate clash between the judiciary and the executive, which parallels quite closely the issues American conservatives have with "activist judges", has wholly escaped the author.

That is not to say that Barlusconi is a gentleman or even a decent human being. It is that the journalists - fed by their Italian colleagues, who are practically all anti-Berlusconi - simply don't see what is plain before their eyes. Berlusconi has lost elections, twice, which, if Italy were the place this silly and common-minded journo thinks it is, would be unimaginable. Berlusconi's media tyranny is an invention of the Italian media, and I am not, repeat not, exaggerating. I repeat: the two leading newspapers - La Repubblica, of the left, and Il Corriere della Sera, centre-left - and the two leading weeklies - L'Espresso, secular left, and Famiglia Cristiana, Catholic left - are at open war with him and have been so since he got into politics, or indeed before. Most of the Catholic hierarchy, beginning with the Archbishop of Milan, detests him; the Archbishop of Milan has publicly celebrated the victory of the left in his city. Berlusconi's own newspaper, Il Giornale, sells less than a third than either of its rivals; his weekly, Panorama, is a pale shadow of L'Espresso and not even comparable to the mighty Famiglia Cristiana, with its million or more sales per week. There is no media tyranny.

The only reason why Berlusconi used to win elections - and the reason why his moral and mental decline is so significant - is that his opponents were a mess. The Italian left led the country to paralysis and disgrace; Berlusconi's governments, until recently, had some sense of direction. Now even that has gone, and, that being the case, there is really no reason to distinguish between government and opposition.

[elegant-bonfire.livejournal.com]

Hm. I'd thought that the article might be a little more accurate as one of the co-writers actually is an Italian journalist...so much for that....

Although it's a relief to know that he's not as universally loved(?) as some of the writers make him out to be.