di Christian Rocca
Silvio Berlusconi's opponents cannot admit that his success may be due not to sinister trickery, but to his greater popularity
The attempt to engage the foreign press in the bipartisan circus of Italian politics is not new. It dates back to 1994, when the same newspapers that are around today, showing the same superficiality and inaccuracy, warned that fascism might rise again in Italy. The pattern was fed by a vicious circle: the foreign press copied the Italian press, which in turn drew on and emphasised the foreign press.
More recent, and exclusively Italian, is the attempt to explain that there is virtually no democracy in our country, or that, where it exists, the electorate is "no longer capable of making spontaneous judgments", as the editor of La Repubblica, Ezio Mauro, declared.
Many would like to export this "made in Italy" idea, which has already gained the support of influential personalities such as Professor Giovanni Sartori. The challenge lies in trying to answer, especially after the victory of Berlusconi's People of Freedom (PDL) party in 2008, an obvious question: if Berlusconi is so evil, why does he win?
Sartori tried patiently to explain it in the first programme, broadcast straight after the 2008 elections, of the talk show Annozero, which was also attended by Antonio Di Pietro, Marco Travaglio and myself. The reasons for the poll results had to be analysed, but Di Pietro immediately began to talk about the television channel Retequattro. That was the root of the problem, he argued, because the real keystone of each Berlusconi victory had always been a lack of resolution of his conflict of interests; the ability to subjugate and corrupt people's minds through possession of 90% of the mass media – a percentage shot out absolutely at random.
The fact that he has also lost several rounds of voting (he was defeated in all local elections from 2001 to 2006), means nothing, but might lead one to wonder: to what extent would he have lost if he had not owned and controlled the mass media? Owning and controlling them does not automatically mean winning in elections. "If you gave me the television networks, I would lose all the same," Sartori has said. So, it is true, Italians have voted for Berlusconi: but this would mean either that they are stupid – the possibility "cannot be excluded", Sartori said – or that a mantle of misinformation hangs over the country. This anti-democratic mantle, which is worsening day by day, is the main cause of Berlusconi's high and worrying popularity rate. And Di Pietro has just taken upon himself the task of denouncing all this to the foreign press.
In practice, this view tries to force the public to decode the Berlusconian spontaneity and directness that so many Italians seem undoubtedly to appreciate. The purpose is to convince the public that Berlusconi's image conceals something else that is continuously escaping their notice. Consequently, there is a tendency to detect undemocratic intrigues relating to the manipulation of the media and to the corruption of conscience, or even to actual corruption or bribery. The marketing of these possibilities in articles and books (Beppe Grillo and Marco Travaglio have created a small industry in this connection) unavoidably implies Italian people's gullibility. Berlusconi is only credited with a certain skill in making them fall for it. In other words, he is a salesman, and the people, according to Grillo and Travaglio, are merely a target. This is what they claim, but it goes without saying that no reliable data support their thesis. For example, the opinion-poll experts Renato Mannheimer and Nando Pagnoncelli explain that about 80% of voters hold political opinions that they are unwilling to change: leaving 15-20% of voters who are prepared to change their mind from time to time.
The view of Sartori and others therefore excludes the possibility that there may be an embryo of bipartisanship, thanks to which, some day, 15-20% of people who have voted Berlusconi will decide to vote for another candidate. In other words, the long association between Berlusconi and the Italian people is described as the result of the convincing abilities of the former over the latter, and is disconnected from any hypothesis that voters may have simply preferred Berlusconi to another candidate. Veltroni, for instance. Or even Di Pietro.
Obviously, the theory I have tried to describe can be rendered in different ways. One of them is surely the following: Di Pietro's supporters maintain there is no democracy because they are hardly democratic themselves.
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