WHEN THE MEDIA tycoon Silvio Berlusconi rants and raves against communists, as he is still wont to do, I never really believe him. The thing about Mr B is that the first time I met him, eyeball to eyeball, in the spring of 1988, he was busy promoting the details of a deal that his Programma Italia advertising company had just made with the Soviet Union.
In those days before the fall of the Berlin Wall, six years prior to his own entry into politics, real live Soviet Union communists (a much more worrying lot than the harmless domestic Italian brand) were not ideological enemies; rather they were potential paying clients. The Rome daily La Repubblicacalled this bit of business "a very good deal" that in time would see "Berlusconi's wallet make considerable gains".
Like many others, I have never been convinced that Silvio Berlusconi has a true political creed or ideology. He is a salesman, and a rather good one, too. His only true credo is money – how to make it and how to keep it. As long as the Soviets (or indeed anyone else) paid up, they were just fine.
What was absolutely clear about Berlusconi on that day 23 years ago was his supreme self-confidence. His upmarket sales patter, his charm, his energy, his ability to communicate and to convince, not to mention his command of his subject, were all impressive. In those days, too, he made more headlines for his brilliantly successful and innovative ownership of the crack football club AC Milan than for anything else.
My next close encounter with Berlusconi revealed a rather different side of the man. This came at a famous news conference at the Foreign Press Club in Rome in November 1993, on the eve of his much-anticipated entry into politics. He had come to tell us that, if he had a vote in the forthcoming mayoral electoral contest in the city, he would use it in favour of Gianfranco Fini, then leader of the ex-fascist MSI. Now, ironically, Fini is a bitter enemy.
In those days Berlusconi was a political novice, and he unwisely got into an angry exchange of opinions with some militantly polemical left-wing Italian journalists. This provided a rare revealing moment. As he venomously hissed “shame on you” at the reporters, the smiling, suntanned mask slipped, revealing that he could be quick-tempered and, if necessary, ruthless.
That far-off news conference also told us something else, namely that this was a man who did not like to be contradicted.
At that time, Berlusconi the politician was convincing. He more than successfully sold himself as the decent, conservative, self-made family man and millionaire who, for the good of the country, would step into politics to keep Italy out of the hands of those dirty communists. In the process, too, he would use his business acumen to modernise and improve Italy. He was the fresh, clean face of politics after the era in the 1990s when the pervasive corruption of the system was exposed, also known as the Tangentopoli (loosely translated as Bribesville) years.
We knew then, as we know now, that this was nonsense. Instead of modernising Italy, Berlusconi has presided, on and off, over 17 years of cultural and economic stagnation. There was never anything either fresh or squeaky-clean about him. He was, after all, someone who owed the survival of his television empire to his close friendship with the late, disgraced, socialist prime minister Bettino Craxi.
Millions of Italians chose to overlook this. I recall being criticised in the letters pages of this newspaper back in March 1994 when I had the temerity to ask just what, precisely, Italians understood by the word democracy, if a majority of them had the nerve to elect a media tycoon of Berlusconi’s type as prime minister. The question is still pertinent today.
As the years passed, another surprising aspect of Berlusconi emerged, as his ebullient self-confidence eventually led to reality problems. Consider this observation by him, admittedly during an election campaign, in March 2001: “There is simply no one on the world scene who can be compared to me. None of them have my past, my personal history . . . My ability is beyond discussion.”
Throughout the past 17 years Berlusconi has often touched on this theme. On a chatshow on his own Canale 5, he once compared himself favourably to Napoleon. Later he said that he was only joking (subsequent denials of his more outrageous statements have become a regular occurrence), but a year later he observed on television: "When I took charge of Italy the country counted for nothing on the international scene . . . but now it has an international gloss and carries a lot of weight in certain situations." Perhaps even more astonishing is this comment in Corriere della Serain 2006: "I've never made money out of politics. If anything, it has cost me."
Most economists would have difficulty with that assertion. La Repubblicacalculated this week that when Berlusconi entered politics, in 1994, the family holding company, Fininvest, had €162 million liquidity in the banks. Today, it has seven times that figure, at €1.2 billion.
The uncomfortable suspicion remains that Berlusconi, in the words of the former investigating magistrate Antonio Di Pietro, entered politics only to save his crumbling media empire and to keep himself out of prison. That, rather than a hatred of communism, may well have been his prime motivation.
In that sense, too, his political career has been a spectacular success. As for good government, international relations and meaningful reforms, well . . .
