Silvo Berlusconi: not so much Il Duce, more like the gaffer

To much of the world, Silvio Berlusconi is a buffoon. His remark this week that those left homeless by the Abruzzo earthquake should take a break at beaches on the Adriatic coast or think of themselves as on a “camping holiday” is only the latest in a long series of crass and insensitive gaffes that make people wonder why on earth Italians elected him (and not once but three times).

“Of course, their current lodgings are a bit temporary but they should see it like a weekend of camping,” Berlusconi told a German television station, referring to the sfolliati — the “evacuated”. “Fantastic,” a French colleague said as we crunched over the rubble of the ghost town that is L’Aquila. “Every time Silvio opens his mouth he puts his foot in it.”

That is not how it looks in Italy. “Most Italians think ‘he’s one of us’, says Beppe Severgnini, the author of La Bella Figura, a Field Guide to the Italian Mind. “He loves his football, his friends and his food. He praises the Church in the morning, family values in the afternoon and hangs around with pretty girls at night. All at 72, which is quite an achievement.

“He is fun and has no doubts about himself — he is the José Mourinho of Italians politics. On the Left most policitians are boring, they say things they don’t do and do things they don’t say.”

True, many Italians — not only on the Left — detest the man and find his image abroad exruciatingly embarrassing, together with his facelifts and hair transplants. When Times Online listed his gaffes this week, for every Italian reader who posted a defence of Berlusconi there was another expressing his or her dismay.

“What disgusts me is that more than half of Italians keep voting for him,” wrote one. “I am personally ashamed that he represents me in front of the world.”

At a tent city set up on a sports field in L’Aquila, Luisa Nuvoloni, who was sharing a tent with her husband, a retired teacher, their two sons, her brother and sister-in-law, and an elderly couple whom she had previously never met, told me sarcastically to “give Berlusconi my compliments. We are freezing cold at night, we have no electricity, and we are left in the dark because you can’t use candles under canvas. We put on all the clothes we have at night to keep warm”.

Yet even La Repubblica, which leans to the Left (and is seen by many as the real opposition to Berlusconi’s often authoritarian and near-xenophobic centre-right Government) has this week portrayed a statesmanlike, almost heroic Berlusconi, jaw thrust foward as he surveys the destruction from the air, comforts the victims and tours the tent cities and debris of L’Aquila in a safety helmet, vowing that “no one will be let alone, no one will be forgotten”.

You had to look hard to find any mention of the “camping gaffe” in yesterday’s Italian press. Even the left-wing L’Unita reported it as foreign press comment, adding that Palazzo Chigi (the Prime Minister’s office) had issued a note reproving The Times for not reporting that Berlusconi’s remarks to the homeless had been greeted with “applause and gratitude”.

He cancelled a summit in Moscow to take charge; and the emergency housing operation, mounted by the Civil Protection Department and the Red Cross with the aid of volunteers and charities, has been remarkably efficient. In one particularly dramatic image, RAI, the Italian state television station, showed a clearly overcome Berlusconi embracing an elderly woman as she sobbed in his arms, declaring: “Silvio, Silvio, you must do something! We have lost everything! Silvio, you must help us!”

This is not Berlusconi the clown — “the joker in the pack”, as one British newspaper described him during the recent G20 summit in London, to the fury of Palazzo Chigi — but Berlusconi the Father of the Nation, who is serving his third term as premier and hopes one day to be head of state.

So why the discrepancy? The list of “gaffes” is certainly impressive (and a gift to journalists). To take only the recent ones, he described Barack Obama as “suntanned”, later compounding the offence by saying that he himself was “paler” than the new US President. At the G20 summit he boisterously shouted a greeting to President Obama during the “family photocall”, prompting the Queen to turn round in apparent annoyance and ask: “Why does he have to shout?” (Buckingham Palace later insisted that the Queen had not been offended).

At the subsequent Nato summit, Berlusconi was accused of turning his back on Angela Merkel, the German Chancellor, and talking on his mobile phone (typical Italian) as the Nato leaders gathered for a group photograph on a bridge over the Rhine. He explained that he had been talking to his Turkish counterpart, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, to convince him to drop Ankara’s objections to the Danish leader Anders Fogh Rasmussen as Nato Secretary-General.

At an EU meeting in 2002 he made a cuckold sign behind the back of the Spanish Foreign Minister. During the 2006 Italian election he claimed that the Italian Left was still “communist” (he is anachronistically obsessed with reds under the bed), remarking that in Mao’s China “they did not eat children, but had them boiled to fertilise the fields”. He also said that only “dickheads” voted for the Left. In 2003, when Italy held the EU presidency, he told a left-wing German Euro MP in Strasbourg that he was perfect for the part of a Kapo (concentration camp guard) in a war film. And he once observed that Benito Mussolini, Italy’s Fascist dictator, “never killed anyone, he only sent people on vacation in internal exile”.

After 9/11 he declared that Western civilisation was superior to Islam, which remained “firmly entrenched where it was 1400 years ago”. There was the time when he declared himself to be “the Jesus Christ of politics — I sacrifice myself for everyone”.

Then there is his unconscious sexism. His wife, the former actress Veronica Lario, demanded (and received) a public apology after he told Mara Carfagna, a former topless model and showgirl, that “If I weren’t already married I would marry you straight away” (La Carfagna is now a minister in his Cabinet).

He once told American businessmen: “Italy is a great country to invest in — we have beautiful secretaries, superb girls” and recently caused caused outrage by saying that although he was considering deploying 30,000 troops to Italy’s cities, there would never be enough soldiers to protect Italy’s many “beautiful girls” from rape.

His reaction to the scorn and incredulity that greets these “gaffes” is incomprehension. His “camping holiday” remarks were wilfully misunderstood, he said this week — he was only trying to cheer people up and did not want “an atmosphere of pessimism, negativity, disease and death” in the places where survivors were being sheltered. His remarks, he says, are maliciously “taken out of context”.

He claims — and probably believes, or has convinced himself — that he entered politics not to promote his business interests and save himself from corruption allegations, as his critics say, but out of patriotism to “save Italy from the Left”.

When I once showed him a cartoon lampooning him in an Italian newspaper, he said — with tears in his eyes: “Why do they mock me like this? I work tirelessly for this country. I hardly sleep.” On another occasion he remarked: “I don’t need power. I have houses all over the world, stupendous boats, beautiful planes, a beautiful wife, a beautiful family. I am making a sacrifice.”

This wounded pride can turn nasty: 85 per cent of the Italian press is left-wing, he once said, and the magistrates who prosecute him for corruption are mentally ill and “a cancer that we have to treat”. After the row over his gaffes with the Queen and Angela Merkel, he told journalists to “go to hell”, saying that he was considering taking “hard measures” against the Italian media.

For some, this is the dangerous side of Berlusconi’s populism. For Massimo Gramellini of La Stampa, Berlusconi’s earthquake performance, while it has put the Opposition on the back foot, is something of “a pose among the ruins. The emergency has revitalised him with the fury of a thousand facelifts”. His management of the disaster relief is theatrical, “issuing orders to ministers live on TV chat shows and presenting himself as a man of providence”.

He never considers that it is he, and not the media, that damages Italy’s image. For the National Press Federation secretary, Franco Siddi, Berlusconi’s threats to the media are sinister. After all, says the Left, this is a man who owns Italy’s three main commercial TV channels and indirectly controls state television as Prime Minister. Those who satirise him, such as the comedienne Sabina Guzzanti (see box, right), are taken off the air.

Italy, says Enzo Mauro, the Editor of La Repubblica, is the only Western country where the Prime Minister is also a media tycoon. Berlusconi has used his power to give himself immunity from prosecution and often governs by decree, brushing aside Parliament in a manner that (together with his populism, charm and love of theatrics) reminds some of Mussolini, albeit in different times.

And yet, says Nando Pagnoncelli, a political analyst, while Berlusconi may be regarded as an embarrassment by his political opponents, his clowning and sense of humour are “endearing to the Right” — and others. Most Italians, says Severgnini, “don’t care about his problems with the law or conflict of interest. The word ‘accountability’ cannot be translated into Italian”.

Most Italians “think Berlusconi just speaks his mind — and they don’t care if foreigners are puzzled, or worse,” he says. “My opinion is different: many of Berlusconi’s gaffes are unforgivable, and he fails to take into account their impact abroad. But speaking aloud in front Her Majesty (“Mr Obamaaaaaaaaaaaa! I’m Mister Berlusconi!”) — that was a lovely Borat moment, harmless and mostly funny.”

Berlusconi, he concludes, “is popular. A mixture of Juan Perón and Frank Sinatra. Never a dull moment”.

Banned: the comic who tried to mock Berlusconi

In the month before the 2006 Italian general election, Silvio Berlusconi was an eclectic presence on the country’s airwaves. One day he would drop in on a talk show unannounced, the next he would spend half an hour chatting about football on one of his television networks. The Italian Prime Minister found time to appear on a traffic news radio show, and even tore up his schedule to feature in a documentary celebrating his career.

A less obvious presence in the country’s media at the time was any kind of satirist. Three years earlier, Sabina Guzzanti — dressed as Berlusconi — had launched a six-part political comedy show on state-owned Rai TV. “Italy ranks 53rd in a

worldwide index of media freedom, after Benin, Ghana and Bolivia,” she told viewers. “Did you hear anything about it in the news bulletins? No. But then again, if you had, we would not rank 53rd, would we?” She ended the episode by saying: “See you next Sunday. Perhaps.”

That qualifier proved prescient — despite a petition from 100 centre-left MPs defending her, the remaining

five episodes of her show were never aired. Critics explained that satire should be used to make a politician likeable, and not as a political weapon. Guzzanti’s television career was effectively over.

Since then, however, she has become a consistently reliable irritant to the ageing media tycoon. Banned from the mainstream media, she produced a documentary — Viva Zapatero — exploring the reasons behind the 2003 decision. She has even appeared in a sketch with Rory Bremner, playing Berlusconi to his Tony Blair.

Guzzanti is not the only satirist to suffer for her art. Daniele Luttazzi found himself marginalised after Berlusconi criticised him in 2002. He responded with a stage show entitled: “Bin Laden can be on TV, but I can’t.”