If Silvio Berlusconi is voted out of office next weekend it won't be because of moral or ethical considerations but because most Italians feel worse off than they were five years ago, writes Paddy Agnew
The scene is set in a makeshift office somewhere in Italy. Entrepreneur Silvio Berlusconi sits at his desk, talking on the phone. After a few moments, he puts down the phone and walks over to the window. Suddenly, the office ceiling caves in as a huge, trunk-size briefcase crashes onto his desk, smashing the furniture and bursting open, with thousands of lire notes floating up into the air.
The above scene is a key moment in the controversial film, Il Caimano (literally, the cayman or crocodile), released last week and directed by Cannes Palme d'Or winning director, Nanni Moretti. In its eloquent, introspective way, this is a film about Silvio Berlusconi and his impact, first as a media tycoon and then as a politician, on the past 30 years of public life in Italy.
The huge briefcase of money that crashes through the ceiling is an obvious reference to what the prime minister's critics consider one of the "mysteries" of modern Italy. Namely, from where exactly did he get the money to launch his construction empire in the 1960s? The film provides no answer.
In another sense, the briefcase also symbolises Berlusconi's presence on the stage of contemporary Italian public life. He clattered onto that stage with explosive impact 12 years ago when, in just three months, he founded his centre-right Forza Italia party and immediately won the 1994 general election.
Since then, if you live in Italy it has been hard to avoid him. Now, as Italy prepares to go to the polls in the general election (tomorrow week and Monday), it has become even harder. With all due respect to Berlusconi's main rival, former European Commission president and centre-left leader Romano Prodi, it has been the controversial figure of Berlusconi who, for better or for worse, has dominated a bitter, ill-tempered, high-decibel campaign.
Ranked by Forbes magazine the 25th richest man in the world, Berlusconi is not only Italy's prime minister, he is also its wealthiest citizen. He is the head of a $12 billion (€9.9 billion) business empire that comprises advertising, banking, film, insurance and publishing interests as well as the Mediaset media empire which controls Italy's three biggest commercial TV channels, Rete 4, Canale 5 and Italia 1, which between them claim approximately 45 per cent national audience share.
Throughout the past five years of his centre-right government, Berlusconi has regularly splashed media waves far beyond his native Milan. Whether he is addressing the European Parliament, making Nazi jibes at German MEP Martin Schulz (Strasbourg, July 2003), or in court defending himself against the charges of bribing judges (SME trial, June 2003) he has rarely been out of the limelight.
On the international stage, his decision to give Italian moral and military support to the US-led invasion of, and subsequent war in Iraq prompted tensions both with senior European Union allies and within Italy where public opinion was, and is, overwhelmingly opposed both to the invasion and the war.
For much of the last decade, too, Berlusconi's judicial problems have cast a less than flattering light on his native land. He has been charged with (but not convicted of) corruption, bribery of judges, bribery of tax inspectors, false accounting, tax evasion and illegal party financing in at least 13 different judicial investigations. His first government in 1994 was brought down when he was served with a judicial warrant while chairing an international convention on organised crime in Naples. For his part, Berlusconi has always argued he has been the victim of a political witchhunt, orchestrated by left-wing magistrates.
THOSE JUDICIAL PROBLEMS, too, have come back to haunt him during this campaign. For a start, last month Milan investigators called for the Italian prime minister and UK-based lawyer David Mills, husband of British culture secretary Tessa Jowell, to be indicted on charges that Berlusconi had paid Mills $600,000 (€496,000) in return for favourable testimony in two of the above trials. (Mills was instrumental in setting up a number of off-shore companies for Berlusconi's Fininvest Holding company in the 1980s and 1990s). Then, this week saw the publication of the motivazioni (the judge's written explanation for a sentence) relative to the so-called SME trial in which Berlusconi's former lawyer, Cesare Previti, was convicted of bribing a judge on behalf of Fininvest. Explaining why they had confirmed Previti's 2003 conviction, the appeal court judges said that it was "absolutely certain" that the sum of $434,000 (€359,000) had been transferred in 1991 from Fininvest to the bank account of Rome judge Renato Squillante via another account held by Previti.
By way of reward for his efforts, Previti is a "safe seat" candidate for Berlusconi's Forza Italia party in these elections. Likewise, in the past Berlusconi remained loyal to another close ally and longtime business associate, MEP Marcello Dell'Utri, who in December 2004 received a nine-year sentence for Mafia association.
No one in Italian public life is as effective as the prime minister when he directs his charismatic smile and energetic sales patter to TV audiences. To maintain his bright, winning image, he has undergone a minor facelift and a hair implant in the past two years, essentially with the current campaign in mind and in an attempt to belie the fact that he turns 70 this year.
However, even the indefatigable Berlusconi looked tired and has (occasionally) stopped smiling in recent weeks. Opinion polls throughout the campaign suggested his centre-right, "House of Freedom" coalition trails the centre-left "Union" by 4 to 5 per cent.
So, have Italians finally woken up to the undemocratic implications of Berlusconi's blatant conflict of interest in his twin roles of prime minister and the country's wealthiest and most powerful industrialist? Have Italians finally decided that all those court cases might not, after all, be the invention of "leftist judges"? Are they fed up with his uncritical support for the Bush regime? Are they fed up with his negative impact on Italy's international credibility? Do they agree with the opinion of the Guardian Weekly which recently called Berlusconi the "most dangerous political phenomenon in Europe", lamenting a "serious erosion of the quality of Italian democracy and the tone of public life"?
Perhaps some Italians are, but these are not the reasons why a majority of Italy's 47.2 million strong electorate may vote him out of office next weekend.
Berlusconi's judicial track record has featured as a campaign issue only when he brings it up himself in order to decry "judges who guarantee impunity to their own faction" and who are "used to eliminate a political opponent". Likewise, foreign policy and conflicts of interest have been marginal issues.
Leaving aside the shouting (and there has been a lot) and Berlusconi's theatrical moments - he stormed out of one TV studio in a temper while he also lost his cool with the Confederation of Industry (telling industrialists that they have a "duty" to be optimistic and that an industrialist who votes for the left is "off his head") - the campaign has been dominated by bread and butter, economic issues.
If and when Berlusconi is voted out of office, it will be not because of moral or ethical considerations but rather because a majority of Italians feel they are worse off now than they were five years ago. While Berlusconi has tried to heat up the campaign, evoking a series of scary monsters ranging from reds under the bed to increased taxation under a centre-left government, his opponent, Romano Prodi, has quietly marched on, trying to talk up his government programme.
Last Sunday, for example, Berlusconi presided over a wildly enthusiastic Forza Italia convention in Naples, attended by more than 4,000 people. He worked up the faithful by telling them that at the time of Mao, Chinese communists "boiled children". (The Chinese embassy in Rome expressed its "strong indignation".) He also called Prodi "a bum who thinks he's important".
Throughout the campaign, too, Berlusconi has touched on an obvious Prodi weakness, namely that the centre-left leader does not have his own party but rather finds himself at the head of a motley band of 57 varieties of Italian political thought, ranging from hard-line communists in Rifondazione Communista to ex-Christian Democrats in the Margherita party. Prodi, he says, is destined to repeat his experience as prime minister from 1996 to 1998 when he was unceremoniously heaved out the window by his leftist partners, just as soon as he had gained Italy's admission to the start-up of the euro.
As for Italy's economic crisis, he replies: what crisis? That has been "created by the centre-left and their newspapers who hope to use it to get into power". The newspapers in question, by the way, were five of Italy's leading and most authoritative dailies. Unlike the centre-left, which has produced a lengthy government programme, Berlusconi offered the electorate the "continuation of our government programme". Wherever he goes, he spells out the achievements of his five years in office.
TAXATION LEVELS HAVE been reduced, cities are safer, pensions are worth more, unemployment levels are down, increased funds have been invested in the underdeveloped south, while Italy has benefited from "36 Major Reforms" relative to taxation, pensions, education, research, immigration, the police forces, the fight against the Mafia, labour market flexibility, first-time house buyers, smoking in public places and other issues.
Wherever he goes, too, Berlusconi regularly offers himself as the best reason to vote for the right. Earlier in the campaign, he suggested that in European history "only Napoleon did more than me", while in February he applauded himself for his patience, commenting: "I am the Jesus Christ of politics, a patient victim. I put up with everything. I sacrifice myself for everyone". For his part, Prodi has studiously avoided getting involved in any exchange of insults.
Unlike Berlusconi, whose campaign rotates around conventions and TV appearances, Prodi has travelled up and down the peninsula on his election lorry, holding meetings. Using a quiet, old-fashioned approach, he insists on talking issues not personalities. Above all, he hammers home his message that Italy, under Berlusconi, has plunged into economic, spiritual and cultural crisis as well as losing international credibility.
Comparing Italy in 2001 and Italy today, his "Olive Tree" or Ulivo party programme highlights the following - Italy's share of world markets has gone from 4 per cent to 2.9 per cent; a trade surplus of €9.2 billion has shrunk to a deficit of €10.36 billion; Italy has slipped from 24th to 47th position in the competitivity standings; direct and indirect taxation has risen from €359.18 billion to €399 billion; unemployment in the south has gone from plus 2.3 per cent in 2001 to minus 0.3 per cent in 2004; rents have risen by 9 to 14 per cent between 2001 and 2004; 51.4 per cent of Italians now say they are unable to save, while in 2001 the figure was 38 per cent; tourist visitor figures are down from 35.76 million in 2001 to 34.43 million in 2005; 2.16 million crimes were reported in 2001 as opposed to 2.4 million in 2004.
Prodi also highlights 15 laws approved by the Berlusconi government in the past five years which directly favoured Berlusconi himself - either with regard to his judicial problems (he attempted to grant himself impunity while in office, with legislation that was later rejected by the Constitutional Court) or his business interests (he saved his own channel Rete 4 from being taken off the air thanks to the so-called Gasparri Law).
Prodi does not say it, but the implication is there. Namely that under Berlusconi, Italy has once again become the Sick Man of Europe. When Italians go to the polls next week looking for a cure, they may well reject the Great Communicator in favour of the Quiet Man. That could be a wise choice.
Ballot: Poll positions
Among many controversial laws introduced by the Berlusconi government was a reform of the electoral system. In effect, this reform abolished the 75 per cent first-past-the-post, single seat constituency system used since 1994, replacing it with 100 per cent proportional representation. This means Italy has been divided into huge constituencies, 27 for the Lower House and 20 for the Senate. Lazio 1 constituency, for example, has an electorate of three million who will elect 40 deputies.
No names appear on the ballot sheet, with voters being asked instead to vote for a party symbol. Even if party lists may be found outside the polling station, this system means that, in effect, the voter does not know to whom his or her vote has gone, only to which party.
To win a seat, a party linked to a coalition needs a minimum of 2 per cent of the vote, while a party running on its own needs 4 per cent and a coalition (there are only two, centre-left and centre-right) needs 10 per cent.