From Salesman to Statesman: The Postmodern Populism of Silvio Berlusconi

What are we to make of Silvio Berlusconi, Italy's longest-serving postwar Prime Minister, richest man and media entrepreneur? Many see his rise to power as carrying dangerous implications for Western democracy. Some compare his unrivalled personal power to that of a latter-day Peron. It was The Economist, not previously noted for radical campaigns, which launched the most in-depth inquiry into his activities, declaring him 'Unfit to Govern' during the 2001 election campaign and later compiling an extensive list of his alleged financial irregularities. Others, like the American journalist Joe Klein, apparently seduced by the 'great seducer', regard him as little more than a lovable rogue who, harangued by the Neanderthal left, was merely trying to follow sensible economic policies. As for Italians themselves, there seems to be an enormous gulf of the kind that has long divided Italy. Some regard him with a mixture of horror and ridicule; others, seemingly indifferent to his activities, shrug their shoulders and talk of their admiration for the way he has 'beaten the system'. Few admit to having voted for him.

Berlusconi has certainly wielded more power than any Italian leader since Mussolini. His second spell in office, which began in May 2001, saw unprecedented conflicts with the judiciary, the President of the Republic and what remains of public broadcasting in Italy, while his 'personal dominion' seems more reminiscent of those found in some Latin American regimes than modern Western democracies. Yet the rise of Berlusconi has a peculiarly Italian context, one which says much about Italy's recent history, political crises, decay of public life, failures of the left and new economic elites. It is partly also a Milanese phenomenon, with its roots in the development of Milanese capitalism in the 1980s and partly framed by the fallout of the Tangentopoli crisis, which first broke in that city. The status of Berlusconi as an 'anti-politician', who often projects himself and his party (founded with the help of his business associates and built on a network of football clubs) above the organisational, structural and democratic norms of modern political parties, is crucial to understanding the nature of his power and the image he invokes. As such, while there may well be wider significance to be drawn from Berlusconi's brand of populism for the future of politics more widely, it is conceivable only through an analysis of the particular nature of Italy's crisis.

For this reason we cannot ignore the very unusual and uniquely Italian nature of Berlusconi's allies in the House of Liberties, without which he would never have prospered. The Northern League and National Alliance are no more 'normal' than Berlusconi's Forza Italia. One party, rooted in Italy's prosperous north-eastern region, wants regional autonomy – even, at one point in the 1990s, complete independence – and is habitually hostile to Rome; the other, the heir to Mussolini's Fascists, is profoundly nationalist and centralist, with much of its core support in the South. The personal ambitions of the two leaders, Umberto Bossi and Gianfranco Fini, combined with their evident dislike of each other, was destined to make Berlusconi's reign a troubled and volatile one.

Crucially, however, these new parties of the Italian right represented a major historical break with the past. While a small rump of the old Christian Democrats has remained in the form of the UDC, a usually more circumspect part of the House of Liberties, the vacuum left by the DC, which ruled for almost the entire postwar period until its collapse in the early 1990s, has been filled by three parties that were not born out of the anti-Fascist moment of postwar reconstruction. They played no part in the construction of the 'constitutional arch' that, reflecting the anti-Fascist political consensus, shaped the first Italian Republic after 1945.

As a consequence these parties have a more ambiguous relationship to the past, which was used initially to great advantage. Berlusconi himself orchestrated this shift well, presenting himself as a 'new' type of leader and not a professional politician or someone linked to the failures of the old political class. We will see that this carefully cultivated image of himself as a new political actor is a myth. Yet myths often worked for Silvio Berlusconi. They helped him come to power and more than once have rescued him from tight corners. They are central to his particular approach to politics, defined in these pages as postmodern populism.

POSTMODERN POPULISM

Postmodern populism, Berlusconi's mode of governance, helps explain his capacity to exercise power through the global media, his contempt for the conventional norms of politics and his particular way of communicating with his electorate, which also doubles as his media audience. As a phenomenon it had its roots in the crisis of ideological politics that characterised the late 1980s and early 1990s when firstly the Italian Communist Party, the biggest of its kind in Western Europe, turned itself into the Left Democrats following the end of Communism. Then, more dramatically, following the public revelations of its role in the Tangentopoli scandal (namely the systematic corruption in which 'kickbacks' and percentage cuts were taken by politicians in exchange for the distribution of contracts to businesses), the ruling Christian Democrats collapsed. As a result, the Christian Democratic-Communist polarity which shaped the ideological contours of postwar Italian politics came to an end. The old partitocrazia was over and an opening beckoned for new political forces.

The collapse of Italy's dominant ideological framework was only part of the story however. The decline of mass political parties and Fordist forms of work preceded this crisis and were behind widespread socioeconomic shifts in most European countries. In Italy, the link between left-wing politics and its industrial support in manufacturing, which had been particularly strong, now began to fragment. This was particularly notable in the northern industrial cities, where shifting political allegiances provided the Northern League in particular with important political gains. Several writers have noted the populist turn in Italian politics at this time, as voters looked for new and often immediate solutions to this moment of crisis.

The populist appeal of Forza Italia, however, was as a uniquely postmodern political organisation....