Berlusconi’s Shadow

Anthony McIntyre 🔖Overt corruption has long been endemic to Italian politics.

To many in the country it just seemed a way to get business done although it showered its preferential treatment on big business and its friends in the Mafia more than anybody else. With the death of the corrupt scandalocrat Silvio Berlusconi, his life and times have reemerged, causing me to pick up a book I had read shortly after it first appeared in 2004.

The decade in which David Lane published Berlusconi’s Shadow, saw the richest man in Italy at the height of his powers. In the ten-year period from 2001 he was Italy’s Prime Minister for eight of them, making him the longest serving leader of the Italian Republic. Berlusconi even bought himself a football club, AC Milan, pioneering the way for sheiks, oil barons and oligarchs to move into the world of soccer, colonising Chelsea, Manchester City and Newcastle United. Dirty money bought the right to host the Qatar World Cup finals, consigning to their doom thousands of migrant workers along the way. In 2007 Berlusconi held aloft the Champions' League trophy after Milan beat Liverpool in that year's final. Hard to swallow for the citizens of Merseyside who had quite the experience of being on the receiving end of bent officialdom.

Lane quickly gets into his stride in conveying to the reader that Berlusconi while foreign to anything resembling justice, democracy and transparency was a man very much made in Italy, moulded by the country’s corrupt political and business culture. The Prime Minister from 1983-87, Bettino Craxi of the Italian Socialist Party, was immersed in corruption scandals, having come to office promising decisionismo as a means to eradicate the scourge. He died in Tunisia, a fugitive from the Italian judicial system which in absentia had sentenced him to ten years in prison. His behaviour helped coin the term Craxism, a pejorative used to label corruption.

To such an extent is corruption embedded in the DNA of Italian political culture that Berlusconi was given a state funeral, something he had as much ethical right to as Jimmy Saville. Tony Blair obviously knew this but it did not prevent him from joining fellow war monger Vladimir Putin in lavishing praise on the deceased icon of the right.

Lane easily depicts Berlusconi as an apple that did not drop far from the poisoned tree. From the political right he presented himself as the person most able to confront the country’s Left, something made relatively easy by the the Communists and Socialists having their noses firmly stuck in the trough of corruption too.When the man from Milan – or Bribesville as it became known – assumed the office of Prime Minister in 1994 he brought into government the heirs of Mussolini’s fascists, a political strain that the Italian body politic had kept marginalised in the post World War 2 era. Europe now sees how that has worked out, with Giorgia Meloni's far right Brothers Of Italy currently the party of government.

From early on the signs were ominous, when a group of intellectuals, amongst them Umberto Eco, went public to challenge the attempt by the Berlusconi government to vet history books.

Worse was to come. The country’s billionaire prime minister who was able to "control virtually all the country's television" and bribe its judges and officials was shown to have links to the Mafia. Prosecutors went after him on numerous occasions but reasons of state were a get out clause. He used political schedules to avoid accountability, running down the clock until the statute of limitations kicked in, allowing him to evade justice. Italian society’s fight against the Mafia was sabotaged by Berlusconi who throughout his terms in office refused to give the justice system the powers it needed to crack the nut. These powers were not withheld out of any sense of fidelity to civil liberties, but to protect cronyism. Rather than go to war against the Mafia Berlusconi turned his guns on the magistrates. They were pilloried, smeared, obstructed, underfunded. Many of them were murdered, effectively abandoned by the multi-billionaire politician.

On almost every page crime and corruption taunt the reader, the menace of the Mafia never far away.
Sometimes a polemic, at others a plea for decency, Berlusconi’s Shadow is a salutary warning to those who believe that money cannot buy power or that those in power can protect society from those with money.

David Lane, 2004, Berlusconi’s Shadow: Crime, Justice And The Pursuit Of Power. Allen Lane. ISBN 0-713-99787-7.

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