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02-05-2009, 02:18
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All hail Berlusconi, the emperor – but where will his power end?
Prime minister's stranglehold on Italy has made him the most popular leader since Mussolini, raising fears over democracy
John Hooper in Rome
guardian.co.uk, Friday 1 May 2009 21.20 BST
Article history
When, earlier this week– in her latest, excruciatingly public quarrel with her husband – Silvio Berlusconi's wife, Veronica Lario, referred to him as an "emperor", she was doing more than just sniping at his conceit. She was echoing what is fast becoming the dominant theme in Italian politics – the rightwing media tycoon's burgeoning power and fears he is drifting into using it in undemocratic ways.
Such concerns are scarcely new. But next week, when the 72-year-old Berlusconi marks the first anniversary of his return to office, he will be celebrating an accumulation of influence and popularity no other leader of Italy has enjoyed since the fall of its fascist dictator, Benito Mussolini.
Few would quibble with the judgment of Massimo Giannini, the author of a recently published book on Berlusconi that, in the last 12 months, Berlusconi has "definitively recaptured Italy". Italy's ebullient, perma-tanned prime minister has an outright majority in parliament and a unified party behind him. His poll ratings are enough to bring tears of frustration to the eyes of other recession-battered leaders. And his grip on the Italian media is stronger than ever.
Of the seven main national television channels, three are answerable to him as the principal shareholder and another three, run by Italy's public broadcasting service, RAI, are indirectly answerable to him as prime minister. In the latest Freedom House report on the international media, Italy was downgraded from "free" to "partly free", putting it on a par with countries such as Albania and Ukraine.
Lario is not alone in fretting over where all this could lead. Gianfranco Fini, one of two deputy prime ministers in Berlusconi's last government, from 2001 to 2006, warned earlier this year of the dangers of "Caesar-ism".
Three separate processes have been at work over the past 12 months.
One is the homogenisation of Berlusconi's government. It no longer has to depend for its survival on a party of mutinous rightwing Christian Democrats, who walked out of Berlusconi's coalition before the last election. In March, the two biggest remaining groups – Berlusconi's Forza Italia party and the National Alliance, which grew out of Italy's neo-fascist movement – merged to form the so-called Freedom People. In a country used to governments lasting months, or even weeks, the present one is universally expected to see out its full five-year term.
A second factor has been the retreat of opposition in all forms. Faced with the prospect of Berlusconi leading the country until 2013 (by which time he will have governed Italy for 11 of the previous 19 years), it is as if many of his critics had resigned themselves to his ascendancy.
One after another, centres of resistance to his influence on society – in the universities, the unions and politics – have imploded. When, in 2003, Berlusconi first tried to pass a law securing himself immunity from prosecution, there was uproar and it was later revoked by Italy's highest court. Last year, his new justice minister tabled a modified version and pushed it quickly through parliament and on to the statute book against a background of little more than token indignation.
Leftwing students staged noisy protests last year against cuts in the education budget. But in November's elections for student representatives at Italy's biggest university, La Sapienza in Rome, three of the five seats in the senate went to candidates backed by government parties.
Several formerly leftwing intellectuals have declared a newfound admiration for Berlusconi. The writer Alessandro Baricco astonished a TV interviewer by calling the PM "someone who has great fascination for the future" and a "mental openness capable of imagining projects that surprise us every time".
The trade unions, whose general strike 14 years ago helped to bring down Berlusconi's first government, are split. Last December's "general strike", in protest at the government's response to the global economic crisis, was backed by only one of three main trade union federations and was generally judged a flop.
More conspicuous than anything, though, has been the collapse of Italy's parliamentary opposition. Its leader, Walter Veltroni, was discredited when his plan to collaborate with Berlusconi on a programme of reforms in the national interest was torpedoed by the victorious incoming prime minister. After a disastrous showing in a regional ballot on Sardinia in February, in which his Democratic party won just 24% of the vote, he resigned.
All of that points to a third factor at work since last May – the growth in Berlusconi's popularity. "I'm at 75.1%", he declared yesterday. "The polls I know about say Obama is at 59%. So mine is an outright record." The survey he cited was conveniently unpublished. But even the most recent published poll, prepared for the centre-left newspaper La Repubblica, gave him an approval rating of 56%.
Some of the billionaire TV proprietor's critics see it is the unavoidable consequence of his power to influence what Italians think.
"Berlusconi's television channels have moved not just votes, but the entire nation," the film director Nanni Moretti argued recently. "The majority of people, and not just those on the right, now consider it normal that one man should have a monopoly of TV, be a politician and even head of the government. That is his triumph."
For Pierluigi Battista, deputy editor of the Corriere della Sera newspaper, Berlusconi's media influence has become an excuse for the Italian left's own shortcomings.
"I'm reminded of what Brecht said: 'If the people are against us, we shall change the people'. When the left won [in 2006], all this rhetoric about Berlusconi and his media power mysteriously stopped," said Battista. "Now, for the first time, we have a government that can move swiftly – not because it is made up of people who are more intelligent but because they have more support and can thus pursue their aims with greater determination."
Certainly, an important reason for its popularity has been its response to voters' concerns about law and order. Polls reveal an abnormally high level of fear among today's Italians – fear of crime, fear of immigrants and fear of the consequences of globalisation.
Although key aspects of its programme have been ruled unacceptable by the European commission in Brussels, the government has implemented a law-and-order crackdown, elements of which go far beyond what is considered acceptable in other parts of Europe. Roma camps up and down the country have been demolished and the Gypsies have been fingerprinted (a plan to fingerprint their children was dropped following protests).
Parliament is poised to approve a law to legalise vigilante patrols and extend to six months the period during which asylum seekers could be held in special "identification and expulsion centres". It also contained a provision encouraging doctors and nurses to report suspected illegal immigrants to the police, but that was dropped after protests. The way to tackle illegal immigration, the interior minister, Roberto Maroni, recently declared, was to be "nasty".
No one has disappeared in mysterious circumstances since Berlusconi returned to power. None of his critics has been jailed or exiled. He has not closed a newspaper or TV station. He has not threatened parliament. But he has created a new party in which he has untrammelled powers.
At its founding conference last month, he was acclaimed, not elected by the delegates. Berlusconi has repeatedly mocked and defied the judiciary. He has twice referred to certain judges as a "cancer" and, in January, his cabinet approved a decree that would have overturned a decision of Italy's highest court had not the president, Giorgio Napolitano, refused to sign it.
In the name of efficient government, Berlusconi has frequently used procedural measures to curb parliamentary debate.
Pier Ferdinando Casini, who preceded Fini as speaker of the lower house, has complained of the "systematic representation of parliament as a bunch of loafers, a useless entity."
Most worryingly of all for his critics, Berlusconi has made it clear he intends to reform the constitution to create a directly elected president with much broader powers. On more than one occasion, he has said he sees no reason to get opposition backing for the changes. It has long been reported that Berlusconi hopes to stand for the presidency after stepping down as prime minister.
Battista believes the concerns surrounding Berlusconi's ambitions are misplaced. He says the US and France both have presidential systems, yet neither country's democratic credentials are questioned.
"It is Italy's past that creates this spectre," he says. Its disastrous experience of fascist dictatorship led to the introduction of electoral and constitutional arrangements intended to ensure that power was fragmented.
La Repubblica's Massimo Giannini argues that Italy "is too disenchanted to fall under a true 'regime' in which the fundamental liberties are trampled". In any case, it belongs to a European Union "in which relapses into the abyss of 20th century tyranny would not be permitted".
Nevertheless, the country that Berlusconi governs is fast becoming one marked by "the absence of autonomous powers that balance the overweening power of the executive," Giannini said.
Italy, he believes, risks joining the ranks of what the international relations guru, Fareed Zakaria, has dubbed "illiberal democracies".
It is unquestionably true that several of the international statesman with whom Berlusconi has established a special rapport govern countries that could qualify as such. One is Russia's Vladimir Putin. Another is the Turkish prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan.
In October, after a visit to central Asia, Italy's prime minister added to the list a less well-known name. He told a meeting of the Italian national retailers association that they should "all go to Kazakhstan on holiday" because "there's a gentleman there who is my friend. Not by coincidence, [he] has 91% of the vote and has done extraordinary things".
The man he was referring to was Kazakhstan's president, Nursultan Nazarbayev, who has been accused of, among other things, rigging elections, intimidating opponents, concentrating power in the hands of his family and altering the constitution to ensure he remains in office, which he has done for the last 19 years.
Questo articolo è fantastico. :sofico:
:stordita:
All hail Berlusconi, the emperor – but where will his power end?
Prime minister's stranglehold on Italy has made him the most popular leader since Mussolini, raising fears over democracy
John Hooper in Rome
guardian.co.uk, Friday 1 May 2009 21.20 BST
Article history
When, earlier this week– in her latest, excruciatingly public quarrel with her husband – Silvio Berlusconi's wife, Veronica Lario, referred to him as an "emperor", she was doing more than just sniping at his conceit. She was echoing what is fast becoming the dominant theme in Italian politics – the rightwing media tycoon's burgeoning power and fears he is drifting into using it in undemocratic ways.
Such concerns are scarcely new. But next week, when the 72-year-old Berlusconi marks the first anniversary of his return to office, he will be celebrating an accumulation of influence and popularity no other leader of Italy has enjoyed since the fall of its fascist dictator, Benito Mussolini.
Few would quibble with the judgment of Massimo Giannini, the author of a recently published book on Berlusconi that, in the last 12 months, Berlusconi has "definitively recaptured Italy". Italy's ebullient, perma-tanned prime minister has an outright majority in parliament and a unified party behind him. His poll ratings are enough to bring tears of frustration to the eyes of other recession-battered leaders. And his grip on the Italian media is stronger than ever.
Of the seven main national television channels, three are answerable to him as the principal shareholder and another three, run by Italy's public broadcasting service, RAI, are indirectly answerable to him as prime minister. In the latest Freedom House report on the international media, Italy was downgraded from "free" to "partly free", putting it on a par with countries such as Albania and Ukraine.
Lario is not alone in fretting over where all this could lead. Gianfranco Fini, one of two deputy prime ministers in Berlusconi's last government, from 2001 to 2006, warned earlier this year of the dangers of "Caesar-ism".
Three separate processes have been at work over the past 12 months.
One is the homogenisation of Berlusconi's government. It no longer has to depend for its survival on a party of mutinous rightwing Christian Democrats, who walked out of Berlusconi's coalition before the last election. In March, the two biggest remaining groups – Berlusconi's Forza Italia party and the National Alliance, which grew out of Italy's neo-fascist movement – merged to form the so-called Freedom People. In a country used to governments lasting months, or even weeks, the present one is universally expected to see out its full five-year term.
A second factor has been the retreat of opposition in all forms. Faced with the prospect of Berlusconi leading the country until 2013 (by which time he will have governed Italy for 11 of the previous 19 years), it is as if many of his critics had resigned themselves to his ascendancy.
One after another, centres of resistance to his influence on society – in the universities, the unions and politics – have imploded. When, in 2003, Berlusconi first tried to pass a law securing himself immunity from prosecution, there was uproar and it was later revoked by Italy's highest court. Last year, his new justice minister tabled a modified version and pushed it quickly through parliament and on to the statute book against a background of little more than token indignation.
Leftwing students staged noisy protests last year against cuts in the education budget. But in November's elections for student representatives at Italy's biggest university, La Sapienza in Rome, three of the five seats in the senate went to candidates backed by government parties.
Several formerly leftwing intellectuals have declared a newfound admiration for Berlusconi. The writer Alessandro Baricco astonished a TV interviewer by calling the PM "someone who has great fascination for the future" and a "mental openness capable of imagining projects that surprise us every time".
The trade unions, whose general strike 14 years ago helped to bring down Berlusconi's first government, are split. Last December's "general strike", in protest at the government's response to the global economic crisis, was backed by only one of three main trade union federations and was generally judged a flop.
More conspicuous than anything, though, has been the collapse of Italy's parliamentary opposition. Its leader, Walter Veltroni, was discredited when his plan to collaborate with Berlusconi on a programme of reforms in the national interest was torpedoed by the victorious incoming prime minister. After a disastrous showing in a regional ballot on Sardinia in February, in which his Democratic party won just 24% of the vote, he resigned.
All of that points to a third factor at work since last May – the growth in Berlusconi's popularity. "I'm at 75.1%", he declared yesterday. "The polls I know about say Obama is at 59%. So mine is an outright record." The survey he cited was conveniently unpublished. But even the most recent published poll, prepared for the centre-left newspaper La Repubblica, gave him an approval rating of 56%.
Some of the billionaire TV proprietor's critics see it is the unavoidable consequence of his power to influence what Italians think.
"Berlusconi's television channels have moved not just votes, but the entire nation," the film director Nanni Moretti argued recently. "The majority of people, and not just those on the right, now consider it normal that one man should have a monopoly of TV, be a politician and even head of the government. That is his triumph."
For Pierluigi Battista, deputy editor of the Corriere della Sera newspaper, Berlusconi's media influence has become an excuse for the Italian left's own shortcomings.
"I'm reminded of what Brecht said: 'If the people are against us, we shall change the people'. When the left won [in 2006], all this rhetoric about Berlusconi and his media power mysteriously stopped," said Battista. "Now, for the first time, we have a government that can move swiftly – not because it is made up of people who are more intelligent but because they have more support and can thus pursue their aims with greater determination."
Certainly, an important reason for its popularity has been its response to voters' concerns about law and order. Polls reveal an abnormally high level of fear among today's Italians – fear of crime, fear of immigrants and fear of the consequences of globalisation.
Although key aspects of its programme have been ruled unacceptable by the European commission in Brussels, the government has implemented a law-and-order crackdown, elements of which go far beyond what is considered acceptable in other parts of Europe. Roma camps up and down the country have been demolished and the Gypsies have been fingerprinted (a plan to fingerprint their children was dropped following protests).
Parliament is poised to approve a law to legalise vigilante patrols and extend to six months the period during which asylum seekers could be held in special "identification and expulsion centres". It also contained a provision encouraging doctors and nurses to report suspected illegal immigrants to the police, but that was dropped after protests. The way to tackle illegal immigration, the interior minister, Roberto Maroni, recently declared, was to be "nasty".
No one has disappeared in mysterious circumstances since Berlusconi returned to power. None of his critics has been jailed or exiled. He has not closed a newspaper or TV station. He has not threatened parliament. But he has created a new party in which he has untrammelled powers.
At its founding conference last month, he was acclaimed, not elected by the delegates. Berlusconi has repeatedly mocked and defied the judiciary. He has twice referred to certain judges as a "cancer" and, in January, his cabinet approved a decree that would have overturned a decision of Italy's highest court had not the president, Giorgio Napolitano, refused to sign it.
In the name of efficient government, Berlusconi has frequently used procedural measures to curb parliamentary debate.
Pier Ferdinando Casini, who preceded Fini as speaker of the lower house, has complained of the "systematic representation of parliament as a bunch of loafers, a useless entity."
Most worryingly of all for his critics, Berlusconi has made it clear he intends to reform the constitution to create a directly elected president with much broader powers. On more than one occasion, he has said he sees no reason to get opposition backing for the changes. It has long been reported that Berlusconi hopes to stand for the presidency after stepping down as prime minister.
Battista believes the concerns surrounding Berlusconi's ambitions are misplaced. He says the US and France both have presidential systems, yet neither country's democratic credentials are questioned.
"It is Italy's past that creates this spectre," he says. Its disastrous experience of fascist dictatorship led to the introduction of electoral and constitutional arrangements intended to ensure that power was fragmented.
La Repubblica's Massimo Giannini argues that Italy "is too disenchanted to fall under a true 'regime' in which the fundamental liberties are trampled". In any case, it belongs to a European Union "in which relapses into the abyss of 20th century tyranny would not be permitted".
Nevertheless, the country that Berlusconi governs is fast becoming one marked by "the absence of autonomous powers that balance the overweening power of the executive," Giannini said.
Italy, he believes, risks joining the ranks of what the international relations guru, Fareed Zakaria, has dubbed "illiberal democracies".
It is unquestionably true that several of the international statesman with whom Berlusconi has established a special rapport govern countries that could qualify as such. One is Russia's Vladimir Putin. Another is the Turkish prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan.
In October, after a visit to central Asia, Italy's prime minister added to the list a less well-known name. He told a meeting of the Italian national retailers association that they should "all go to Kazakhstan on holiday" because "there's a gentleman there who is my friend. Not by coincidence, [he] has 91% of the vote and has done extraordinary things".
The man he was referring to was Kazakhstan's president, Nursultan Nazarbayev, who has been accused of, among other things, rigging elections, intimidating opponents, concentrating power in the hands of his family and altering the constitution to ensure he remains in office, which he has done for the last 19 years.
Questo articolo è fantastico. :sofico:
:stordita: