The man is fantastically corrupt, and has managed to do an awful lot to erode Italy’s civil society - much of the press is either owned by him or his cronies, for example. He’s also managed to create a legislative majority that can be counted upon to adjust statutes of limitations in order to preclude criminal prosecution for his various indiscretions while in office. Berlusconi seems far worse for Italian democracy than Bush the Second was for American democracy - for all his faults, Bush seemed to genuinely believe in multi-party democracy, competitive elections, and the ideas that he should be vulnerable both to political criticism and electoral defeat. I’m not sure that can be said of Berlusconi.
So what happens when he finally, mercifully, leaves office? Can Italy bounce back from this, or is the likeliest course a series of similarly sleazy PMs? Or something even worse - could the Northern League take real power?
Agreed. We could have a discussion about which parts of the opposition are worse, but clearly more than a few are - the Northern League might be the scariest, but not the only one.
And to me, that’s part of the problem - not just that Berlusconi has ruled in an illiberal, undemocratic way himself, but that he may have so eroded Italian political culture that illiberal, undemocratic groups enjoy real advantages in the future.
(Note: When I’m talking about “liberalism,” I’m referring to respect for the rule of law and human rights generally, not “liberalism” in the American political sense, nor in the economic laissez-fair sense. Clear as mud, right?)
ETA: I should also note that liberalism and democracy are separate issues - usually taken together, but it’s entirely possible to have an illiberal democrat or a liberal autocrat.
I’m only vaguely aware of the history, but wasn’t Italian political culture famously disfunctional before Berlusconi? Indeed I assumed that was why the put up with Berlusconi, he at least provided a stable gov’t capable of lasting more then a few months.
Governments have become more stable in the last generation or so. That doesn’t mean they have been any less corrupt, however.
I really don’t know how to quantify this, except to note that searching for Italian political scandals turns up some real beauts, at high levels of government and industry, often involving massive amounts of money. The scandals that animate American political discussion are for much smaller stakes, in general.
I dunno but an amazing proportion of the Italian youth I know are radical communists or fascists - they’ve never seen a democratic system that wasn’t a joke
Silvio Berlusconi has been, and still is to some extend, very much liked by the Italian population. For some quite rational reasons. That is the reason that he was elected. How is that not democracy? His various indiscretions with girls and jokes and what not, that seem to concern the anglo-sphere media so much, has not been very important for the Italian voters. And not especially important in a bad way either. It would be a plus in my book too.
Berlusconi’s act, that is tailoring Italy’s laws to protect his ass, and “prostitute parties” with minors are far from being noticed and despised only in the anglo-sphere. He’s a bad joke in, at the very least, all of Western Europe.
Controlling most TV networks and the message they broadcast is pretty much the opposite of democracy in action.
Italy has never quite ironed out this issue. Other countries have state run broadcasting - and in many of these admirable efforts have been made to make programming apolitical, or at least nonpartisan. This wasn’t done in Italy.
At the outset, the main TV network, now RAI 1, had its programming controlled by the Christian Democrats, who blatantly skewed programming to show them in a good light. Rather than remedy this situation, the Socialists merely reciprocated when they were given control of the programming of RAI 2, and the Communists followed likewise with RAI 3. This arrangement lasted until the 1980s, near as I can figure.
What magnifies this situation now is that Berlusconi is a media magnate, controlling many of the private networks in competition with RAI. This doesn’t change the fact that other politicians have monkeyed around with RAI over the years pretty blatantly. See again the aforementioned Craxi.
Which was how German Fascisim came about. The political life of the nation split into two extremes as a reaction to the economic/political situation and the powers that be picked what they saw as the lesser of two evils.
Not that I see this happening in Italy, but it makes you think.
