What Silvio Berlusconi represents in Italian politics

Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi has never been known for his subtlety. Facing trials for bribery and tax evasion, Berlusconi and his People of Freedom party recently attempted to pass a law granting judicial immunity to the four highest officials of the state, including the prime minister himself. On Oct. 7, the Constitutional Court of Italy rejected the law and declared it in violation of a constitutional provision granting citizens “equality under the law.”

The decision underscored the extent to which politics in Italy has degenerated into a spectacle of Berlusconi’s legal battles. In televised remarks after the decision, Berlusconi dismissed the Court as a “political organ” and defended himself as the choice of most Italians. “Long live Italy, long live Berlusconi,” he declared.

But Berlusconi is neither Italy’s savior, as he often presents himself, nor the sole author of its problems, as his opposition frequently implies. He is better understood as both a reflection and occasional perpetuator of the problems and defects of Italian politics. Since his return to the helm in 2008, perhaps his greatest accomplishment is that he has managed to hold onto power. The public’s deference to Berlusconi, despite the litany of scandals associated with him, is based on his ability to take advantage of major structural problems in Italian politics and culture, such as strong public mistrust of the government, popular dissatisfaction with taxes, and the lack of organized opposition on the Left.

An Anti-Political Culture

Even after the unification of the Italian peninsula in the middle of the nineteenth century, Italy never developed a tremendously cohesive national political culture. This lack of affinity for politics was crucial to Berlusconi’s rise when he entered politics in the early 1990s, and remains important today. As a wealthy entrepreneur and media tycoon, Berlusconi was able to present himself as an outsider at a time when the government in Rome was particularly unpopular.

When he entered the political fray in 1994 as the leader of a center-right coalition, the electorate saw Berlusconi as a bearer of change who could shake up the corrupt political system because of his different background. He was not a “politician by profession,” unlike his opponents. He spoke of reform and opening a new chapter in Italian politics. “The old Italian political class has been surpassed by facts and overwhelmed by events,” Berlusconi declared. “Now more than ever Italy needs … creativity and innovation. What I want to offer is a force made by completely new men.” His victory in the 1994 elections showed that his anti-government rhetoric had connected with many Italians.

Berlusconi has incarnated Italians’ perennial distrust of the centralized government and state authority in general. Gianfranco Pasquino, political science professor at the University of Bologna, told the HPR, “Italian society has a very strong anti-political spirit, on which Berlusconi relies greatly. What we feel attached to is only family, not any other part of the community in which we live.” According to a recent poll conducted by the Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera, 70 percent of Italians “completely distrust” the operations of the parliament and government.

Although Berlusconi is now Italy’s longest-serving prime minister, having served earlier terms from 1994 to 1995 and 2001 to 2006, supporters still see him as battling entrenched political insiders, leftist judges who rule from what he calls “red courts,” and “red-toga-wearing” prosecutors. When Berlusconi returned to power in 2008, he also denounced the ruling “bureaucratic elite,” and gained popular approval that shielded him from allegations that he was tailoring laws to his private advantage.

Lax on Taxes

Stemming in part from this characteristic mistrust of the Italian government is popular hatred of taxation, which Berlusconi has exploited to build support. While few nations may enjoy paying taxes, in Italy a common joke is that tax evasion is the national sport. Berlusconi incorporated low taxes and low penalties for evasion into his campaigns, saying that he would never “put his hands in the pockets of Italians.”

Antonio Mingardi, director of the Italian think tank Bruno Leoni, told the HPR that with Berlusconi’s entrance into politics, “taxation was a central issue in an electoral campaign for the first time.” Berlusconi has garnered votes in elections, Pasquino argued, “mainly because of tax benefits.” Berlusconi’s relatively soft stance on dodging taxes may have helped him in recent elections, especially after the opposition attempted to crack down on the underground economy. Tax evasion is more common in Italy than in any other European country, with the untaxed economy accounting for about 27 percent of GDP. The Italian research institute Eurispes estimates that the shadow economy is equal to the combined GDPs of Finland, Portugal, Romania, and Hungary.

Berlusconi’s center-left predecessor, Romano Prodi, found it difficult to rope in this hidden economy in part because Berlusconi had previously granted “tax amnesties,” which encouraged taxpayers to believe that they could cheat with impunity. Berlusconi also failed to cut spending, leading to large deficits. Alberto Alesina, professor of economics at Harvard, told the HPR, “Especially in a country with huge public debt like Italy, reducing public expenditure is vital in order to reduce taxes. And actually, during Berlusconi’s previous rule, public expenditures rose a lot.”

A Lack of Substantive Opposition

More than anything else, however, Berlusconi and his center-right coalition has survived because of the lack of organized opposition on the Left. Among the defects of Italian politics, Pasquino argued, is a dearth of competitiveness. “The great incapacity of the Left to put its act together,” Pasquino said, has allowed Berlusconi to ignore substantive policy issues. “Whenever the opposition is weak or not well structured, he has in front of him open grassland on which he can do whatever he wants.” The Italian left wing has historically been highly fragmented among different parties and ideologies, including Communists, socialists, Christian Democrats, and left-libertarians.

The opposition, moreover, has centered its attack on Berlusconi’s personal life, rather than building a viable coalition based on political issues. As Mingardi explained, “There have been 15 years of para-political opposition to Berlusconi, concerning his legal problems, various sex scandals, and cronyism, but very little confrontation on the policy level. This type of opposition simply created a void of prospects on the Left.”

From Reformer to Defendant

Berlusconi is not personally responsible for all of these problems, but he has done little to embody his original image as a reformer. The embattled prime minister has also perpetuated a lack of faith in national institutions with his constant condemnations of the judicial system, his allegations of left-wing conspiracy, and his lax policy on taxes. His influence has weakened with the judicial defeat in October, but he remains a striking embodiment of many of Italy’s longstanding political problems.

The economic crisis the world is currently experiencing has been the worst since the Great Depression. In such a period, nothing could be easier than pointing out market failures and the inefficiencies of deregulated capitalism. Indeed, it should be the perfect setting for an increase in state control, welfare, and redistributionist policies. In the United States, this took the form of the election of a liberal president. But in Europe, the equivalents of American liberals-that is, Socialists and Social Democrats-are losing ground everywhere.

Why is this happening? While the right is trying to find new strategies and new ideas to tackle the new problems presented by the crisis, socialist and social democratic parties grow more and more attached to their traditional core values. Not only has this kind of left-wing conservatism accounted for the decline of socialist parties in Europe to date, it is likely to cause them to lose even more ground in the future. Indeed, given their philosophical foundation in the vein of Hegel and by Marx, perhaps the socialist parties of today are simply no longer fulfilling the role for which they were born.

A quick look at all major left parties in the most influential countries of the European Union proves the strength of this trend. In France, the country with the strongest tradition of state influence in public life, the Socialist Party is at its historical ebb. In Germany, the Social Democratic Party experienced more than a ten percent reduction in vote share in the last election, while all other parties gained ground at its expense. The UK’s relatively benign Labour Party was surpassed for the first time in history by the Liberal Democrats in the 2008 local elections, compounding the broad defeat it suffered against Tories in the London mayoral election. And notwithstanding the scandals of its leader, Italian right-wing party The People of Freedom has won a parliamentary majority whose size is unusual in Italian republican history, while the left-wing Democratic Party endured a change in leadership after several regional defeats.

To understand why this decline occurred, we must consider the case of left parties that do not identify as socialist as well as that of right-wing parties. In both cases, promotion of change and of new ideas unchained to old ideological diktats lead to a positive response in their elections, whereas the traditionalism of socialist parties proved itself to be a detriment. In contrast to the socialist parties, which in the last elections of the European Parliament lost nine percentage points in share of the vote, ranking last in performance, the Greens had the best performance with over 25% gain in seats. Green parties are relatively new compared to socialist parties-and their support of environmentalism, nonviolence, grass-root democracy, and social responsibility reflect ideas that started only in the ’80s as a response to the problems that the increasing industrialization and globalization of the present world.

As for right-wing parties, what unites all cases at a national level is the quite surprising shift they have made towards advocating very different from what was previously considered “conservative.” Recently, President Nicolas Sarkozy of France even claimed, “Laissez-faire capitalism is finished”-a line one might expect from a socialist leader during a time where the deregulated market economy is showing its weaknesses, but Sarkozy heads one of the biggest right-wing parties in Europe. In Italy, new economic policies are more in line with Sarkozy’s philosophy than the ruling party’s official conservative credo. The government’s new self-proclaimed mission is to help those citizens worst affected by the financial crisis-and thus, as Minister of the Economy Giulio Tremonti put it, it is willing to be called left-winged “if being left-winged means being next to the poor people who suffer the crisis.”

Why is the ideological answer of the left-which was, after all, “right all along”-insufficient? As Michele Salvati, the ideological co-founder of the Italian Democratic Party, argues, “The left has adapted to the economic system created by the right and by capitalism and lost its old specificity of being against this whole system.” Thus, it is intrinsically difficult-though not impossible-for left parties to present a sufficiently strong ideological alternative to right wing parties on economical issues. Since “the left has been ‘capitalized’, homogenizing to the market system in force,” And when a crisis like the current one comes along, such adaptation that previously permitted left-wing parties to survive now restricts them to a turf on which they are at inherent disadvantage. The only way to survive as viable political players, then, is to continue to innovate upon capitalism and present alternatives to the failing status quo-which, this time around, the Socialist left has not done.

Given this passive adaptation of the left to the economic model shaped by free-market capitalism, it becomes clear that both the rise of the Greens at an European level and the successes of the right at a national level are due to the fact that they presented a new approach to the problems brought up by the crisis, promoting a change in their parties that led to a positive response in the electorate. In fact, Salvati admits that “the right has now the same credibility going against laissez-faire capitalism than the left has,” so when Socialist and Social-Democratic parties tried to face this period of instability sticking even more to their traditional core values, ideas and policies, the outcome couldn’t be but negative. Because their rhetoric remained focused upon the past and on the implications of the failure of capitalism rather than proactive prescriptions to fix it, the Socialists thus sabotaged their chance at political advantage.

And in a deeper sense, socialist parties that lost their progressive, innovative edge were also deprived of their original revolutionary mantle, so critical to their utility since their birth. The term “left” was coined during the French revolution to describe those who sat in the left part of the Parliament, who advocated a republic instead of monarchy, secularization in the Enlightenment’s philosophical tradition, and a general resettling of class benefits and of wealth distribution. That single word, Left, represented the advocates of change against the status-quo: the aristocracy and the high hierarchies of the church. Within that tradition, socialism was deeply influenced by G.W. Hegel and Karl Marx, who saw history progressing through conflicts between Thesis-a status quo-and its Antithesis-or opposition. Through revolution, progress; from its very birth, Socialism very birth has been inseparably connected to the fact that the ideology of the Left should be an agent of change, of challenge and of new ideas against previous ones.

Given the role of socialist ideology in the past, it is particularly tragic that the Socialist parties of today have lost this role and acquired one which is its direct opposite: defending their past vision of the world without changing it through new ideas. As it is, right-wing parties are instead acting as the real promoters of change towards a new together with the new forces rising in the left. Unless Socialist parties strive to create a new a competing brand of ideas and reassert their true revolutionary, they will remain stuck on the wrong side of history-that of a narrow and conservative vision of politics.