Little big man
Silvio Berlusconi was an overlong interlude
In common with monarchs and movie stars, Silvio Berlusconi was old, famous, and colourful enough to qualify for the oven-ready obituary. Within hours of the death of the three-term Italian prime minister, defrosted tales of cruise-ship crooning, “bunga-bunga” parties, and a string of evaded prosecutions filled the internet he tried so hard to underdevelop at home.
The homages weren’t wrong to highlight trivia. Berlusconi was a little politician made big by the country he governed and the trend he set for rich businessmen – Petro Poroshenko and Sebastián Piñera – to parachute into office without an agenda beyond self-interest or mob-pleasing – Andrej Babiš and, obviously, Donald Trump.
Like Trump, Berlusconi’s initial wealth came from property before he used political connections – mostly on the centre-left – to branch out into television and branding. He too created a political movement attached to the traditional right but with no ideology beyond reflexive hostility to the left and a base with eyes for no one but the Dear Leader. In contrast to Trump, Berlusconi was a happy culture warrior. The Cavaliere laughed his way through politics. Trump can switch on his wedding-photo rictus for cameras but, at heart, he’s an Eighties business-world sociopath complete with power ties and metacarpal-crushing handshakes. For the Orange Man, to laugh is to surrender to the laugh-maker. Not so Silvio.
Italian commentators have tried their best to big up the little man as the embodiment of the Second Republic (1994-) just as seven-time prime minister Giulio Andreotti personified the first (1948-1994). Admittedly, Berlusconi has been, so far, the second republic’s longest-serving premier – on and off from 1994 to 2011. But that was 12 years ago. In office, he achieved nothing, held back the necessary creative destruction of the mani pulite years, and squandered the euro dividend. Even as the leader of the right, he peaked at the 2013 election and he was soon upstaged by his junior partners. First came Matteo Salvini in 2018 and then – agonisingly for the old smoothie – Giorgia Meloni, who stayed out of Mario Draghi’s pandemic-era majority and reaped the benefits by assuming the premiership last year.
Second best
Berlusconi’s explosion into politics in was undeniably impressive. He’d been a comfortable beneficiary of the First Republic – the postwar regime notorious for its revolving-door conservative-led governments whose primary mandate was to keep Europe’s biggest communist party out of power. In this world where political patronage was critical to business success, Berlusconi attached himself to Bettino Craxi, the socialist leader and prime minister from 1983-1987. When an economic and budgetary crisis struck and coincided with a campaign of corruption inquiries by investigating magistrates, the first republic collapsed and Craxi himself fled to Tunisia to avoid prosecution.
With a new electoral law threatening to bring the communists to power for the first time (albeit in a rebranded and more moderate form), Berlusconi spotted an opportunity. The socialist-aligned businessman launched Forza Italia in January 1994 as an anti-communist and anti-magistrate movement and, just three months later, he moved into the prime minister’s office in Palazzo Chigi. But he couldn’t have done it alone. To secure power, he built a coalition with the chauvinistic Lega Nord and the Alleanza Nazionale (AN) – the successor to the neo-fascist MSI created in 1946 by grieving followers of Benito Mussolini. Forza was an empty shell beyond its two founding anti-principles but these two parties brought their programmes and prejudices to government. Lega leader Umberto Bossi especially imported his base – northern small businesses interested only in tax cuts and public-spending reductions that didn’t affect them – and his friend Giulio Tremonti as finance minister.
Over three terms, Tremonti and Berlusconi could occasionally be yin to each other’s yang but they were mostly just Oliver and Barbara Rose. Early Tremonti combined the Lega’s love of low taxes and autonomy for Lombardy and Veneto with advocacy for “liberal revolution” and Forza membership. Middle Tremonti prioritised appeasing the bond market with tax increases and spending cuts and euro-friendly rhetoric. Late Tremonti joined the Lega and flirted with its eurosceptical wing.
The king is dead, long live the queen
Between them, the prime and finance minister exhausted Berluconism – budgetary looseness disguised as fiscal conservativism, a blind eye to structural tax evasion, and legislation drafted to please the Lega base and Fininvest – between 2011-2013. Salvinism took Berlusconi’s swagger and idealisation of Vladimir Putin and reclaimed his pre-2011 euroscepticism but soon ran aground due to his excessive love of social media and Italians’ liking for euro-denominated assets.
As prime minister leading a post-facist party, Meloni is trying something genuinely new. If she is even half as politically skilful as she looks, Meloni could do what Berlusconi failed to do: unite the right in a way that appeals to significant parts of the Lega base, pro-European conservatives, and even some of the centrists disillusioned by the failure of the Terzo Polo under Carlo Calenda and Matteo Renzi. Berlusconi’s and Salvini’s playboy dilettantism, Putinism, and flirtation with a return to the lira are out. Meloni has dragged the Italian political class back to NATO and, by her own rhetoric and through poaching the Lega’s leading Draghist (Giancarlo Giorgetti) for the finance ministry, she has – for now anyway – tamed the eurosceptical beast.
But this is not pure defence. Meloni isn’t just returning the Italian right to the western camp and abandoning her socially conservative credo. As veteran centre-left politician Vincenzo Visco said in my latest In The Room podcast, Meloni is trying to create a new western alliance led by the US, the UK, Italy, and Poland. Pre-Draghi Meloni wanted an alliance with Viktor Orbán’s Hungary and Marine Le Pen’s France. By 2022 and especially after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, she had thought again. Reassuring markets that she wasn’t Salvini gave her scope to pursue a socially conservative domestic agenda – one that could borrow from Orbán without the Putinism - while she built an alliance of governments rather than oppositions.
As part of this repositioning, Meloni would love to launch a friendly takeover of the bereaved and directionless Forza by her Fratelli d’Italia (FdI). With Salvini’s Lega now polling at just 7% and the combined FdI and Forza vote over 40%, Meloni has a perfect moment to unite the right around fiscal and social conservatism at home and neoconservatism abroad. As a member of the European People’s Party, Forza tied to FdI would send a signal of moderation and pro-EU bona fides.