Silvio Berlusconi: how does he do it?

With every breaking scandal, Italian prime minister Silvio Berlusconi wins over more of his countrymen's hearts and votes



To most of us it seems extraordinary that Silvio Berlusconi is still prime minister of Italy. There can't be many politicians who could survive the sort of scandals he's been through: accusations of perjury, perverting the course of justice, proximity to the Mafia, accusations of membership of a sinister masonic lodge, of tax evasion and of corrupting public officials. And now, on top of all that, it has been discovered that he's been enjoying Dionysian parties with dozens of young girls at both of his Sardinian and Roman villas.

This time he doesn't even deny the central allegations. Not surprisingly, perhaps, since there's overwhelming evidence of what went on: there are photographs of topless girls in G-strings lounging around his villa, there are wiretaps of businessmen lining up escort girls for Silvio's parties. One escort has revealed she was given only half her "appearance fee" because she didn't stay the night (she didn't make that mistake again). The question isn't did he or didn't he, but simply: how on earth does he get away with it? How is it that a country we think of as a close neighbour, which we all think we know so well, has such a different morality to ours?

The answer lies largely in the fact that Italians suffer from scandal-fatigue. Ever since the First Republic was swept away under a tsunami of corruption allegations in the early Nineties, the country has been awash with scandal. It's as if there's no normality left against which to judge wrongdoing.

Open any Italian newspaper and you're likely to see pages and pages of breathtaking allegations and furious denials. On any day you choose you'll be able to read the leaked details of an ongoing investigation, astonishing wiretap intercepts and interviews with "key witnesses". It might be about the implosion of Parmalat, the dairy company, or about Luciano Moggi's machinations with Serie A referees, or about the murky security sector within Telecom Italia. There are so many scandals that public discourse is often little more than mud-slinging, and after a while people don't notice the real dirt anymore. As my Venetian uncle-in-law memorably told me years ago: "It's not that mud doesn't stick; it's that there's so much of it that it doesn't matter if it does."

There's also the fact that some Italians have a slightly different attitude towards fidelity. It may be because Catholicism is so voluptuous and forgiving compared with our austere puritanism; or else because the women, and men, seem so irresistibly attractive; or maybe it's because so many television shows have men of retirement age surrounded by showgirls in bikinis ... Whatever the reason, there's little outrage about an old, married man flirting with teenage wenches.

If anything there's envy of, and admiration for, his harem. It's telling that Berlusconi's line of defence last week wasn't Bill Clinton's outright denial: "I did not have sex with that woman." Instead, using a defence that would only work in a country where the male conqueror is more admired than the faithful husband, he simply said he hadn't paid for the sex because that would detract from the thrill of the conquest.

If anything, Berlusconi's libidinous exploits appear to enable the electorate to identify with him more closely. They make him appear a man of the people. Before Berlusconi's entry into Italian politics, the country's parliament was largely dominated by elderly grey men who were measured and refined, but also distant, aloof and superior. Berlusconi, by contrast, has always presented himself as a uomo qualunque, an Ordinary Joe. People seem to admire him for his refusal to watch his step, for the fact that he can never be anything other than a bull in a china shop.

We foreigners find his show-boating and back-slapping and gestures and jokes rather cringey, but in Italy they all make him seem somehow normal, part not of a snooty elite but of the people, part of the sacred popolo. He is, says the propaganda, a man just like you, a simple man who loves money and sex.

The difference is, of course, that he has a lot more of both. But even the fact that he's a billionaire doesn't seem to alienate the voters. Paradoxically, many people believe that his vast wealth means that he can't be bought or corrupted. Indeed, whenever he's been accused of corruption, the accusation hasn't been that he's had his fingers in the till but precisely the opposite, that he was buying people rather than being bought. It's a subtle difference and it enables him to present himself as a man making financial sacrifices for the good of the country. You might not believe it, and I certainly don't, but millions of voting Italians clearly do.

And even if they didn't, there's the vexed question of whom else they would vote for. With Berlusconi you know, for better or for worse, what you're getting. If you vote for the Left, you've no idea what or whom you'll end up with. In the 10 years since I first moved to Italy, the Left has been led by, off the top of my head, Prodi, D'Alema, Amato, Rutelli, Fassino, Prodi again, Veltroni, Franceschini … and now they're about to start the electoral process for a new leader. There's something about the Left that is still reminiscent of the old-fashioned trasformismo, of the musical chairs of politics where everyone swaps places but no chair is ever taken away. It's the same merry-go-round of familiar faces, most of them decent enough but shockingly dull and very uninspiring. Next to Berlusconi, they seem short of red blood cells, short of chutzpah and charisma and cunning.

And it's cunning, of course, for which Berlusconi is truly admired. Being furbo – cunning or sly – isn't a slur in Italy; it's a sign that you can outsmart the rest, that you're clever enough to get away with it. Every time Berlusconi survives a scandal, his stock rises yet higher because people are in awe of how he does it. He's like Houdini, calmly shrugging off the shackles that magistrates and journalists and opposition politicians keep trying to put him in.

That admiration for his escapism suggests there's something about the moral geography in Italy that is simply different to our own. It's summed up in one of the adjectives most often applied to Berlusconi: spregiudicato. It's one of those words that is almost impossible to translate because it seems to have two contradictory meanings: both unconventional and unscrupulous. It implies someone who's without prejudice, a person who thinks for himself, a daring maverick. But it also means someone who disregards the rules, someone who rides roughshod over manners and etiquette and the accepted way of doing things. It sounds more of a criticism put like that, but in Italy the word is usually a compliment, especially when applied to
the prime minister.

Funnily enough, that moral chasm between Italy and the rest of the world also helps Berlusconi maintain his grip on power. The more he's criticised abroad (and, let's be fair, barely a day goes by without some foreign publication putting the boot into the Italian electorate and their chosen leader), the more he plays the patriotic card. While the opposition quotes eagerly from the "authoritative" publication, Berlusconi accuses them of betrayal and portrays himself – another role with which so many identify – as the down-trodden victim, the hard-done-by Italian of old whom all foreigners love to hate. A lot of Italians are fed up of finger-wagging moralists from northern Europe telling them whom they should elect and, I suspect, vote Berlusconi almost as a declaration of independence. After centuries of being ruled by foreign powers – the papal states, the Habsburgs, the Bourbons and so on – they're determined that foreigners should keep out of their affairs. Especially the many affairs of their Prime Minister.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/italy/5664474/Silvio-Berlusconi-how-does-he-do-it.html