Berlusconi the laughing Cavalier

ROME - While the marriage of Tessa Jowell and David Mills was heading for separation last week, the Prime Minister of Italy was addressing a joint session of Congress in Washington DC. The standing ovation began before Silvio Berlusconi had even opened his mouth.

This man, whose alleged dealings with Mills has given the British Government a nasty wobble, is a figure the outside world finds it hard to take seriously. Maybe it is time we started.

In his eulogy, US President George W. Bush said Berlusconi, campaigning for re-election next month, had brought Italy stability. He was not wrong. The man they call Il Cavaliere has ruled since June 2001.

In the six years before that, four prime ministers took their turn at the helm.

The improbable Berlusconi seems to have hit on a cure for Italy's persistent post-war malaise of weak, fleeting, wrangling coalitions. And although he is behind in the polls, he has been gaining ground on the centre-left for months. Few would be surprised - though many would be horrified - if he were to win next month's election.

But if he does, it will be a far more stunning success than that of 2001. Back then, he was relatively untried; he could plausibly present himself as the man of the future, a businessman of astonishing prowess and achievement who could help the good times roll for the Italian economy.

He was the incarnation of a certain kind of national hope - vulgar, greedy, selfish, certainly, but a hope all the same.

Five years on, Italy has the weakest economy in western Europe, a dream in tatters. Why on earth would anyone vote for this 69-year-old again, this busted flush?

He has enriched himself, he has sapped the strength of state broadcaster RAI, the only rival to his media empire, and changed the rules to allow himself even greater domination of the media.

But what has he done for the country?

It is easy to find working people ready to bore your socks off with tales of Il Cavaliere's self-sacrifice, his devotion to the job, his genius. Making the most of his ownership of three television channels, Berlusconi has taken advantage of Italy's weakness for simply drawn, boldly assertive heroes and exploited the widespread boredom with traditionally dull politics.

You need politics, he suggests, but instead of an intellectual talking incomprehensible cant there should be a simple man just like you, ambitious, energetic, determined but normal, prone to making off-colour jokes and naff remarks, with a sex drive and a touching belief in his own unlikely sexual charisma.

A man like you, but one who has entered a world of dreams where you can own AC Milan, one of the nation's best football teams, huge yachts, villas dotting the world, every conceivable luxury. And yet a man so simply moral at heart, so good, that he continues to work like a dog for Italy.

This is the narrative Berlusconi spun at the election of 2001 in a book, An Italian Life, distributed to homes all over the country. It has spun ever since.

Any mere mortal who compared himself with Jesus Christ and Napoleon would be carted away. When Silvio does it, it is good old Silvio, knocking the self-important bores out of the headlines, making the cuckold sign behind the heads of colleagues in photos, comparing that rude German MEP with a concentration camp kapo: Silvio, a human in a world of monsters.

"If something is not on television it doesn't exist!" he once said to a colleague. "Not a product, or a politician, or an idea."

Italians watch more television than any other Europeans, and the diet of "le reve, le rire, le risque" (the dream, the laughter, the risk) as French media mogul Bernard Tapie used to put it, is as relentless as ever.

It is Berlusconi's handiwork - the state channels merely mimic his programming - and enables the uncritical retailing of his bare-faced lies, his claim, for example, to have accomplished all his Administration's goals, to have done more in five years than all other governments did in 50.

"To Berlusconi," writes author Alexander Stille, "what matters is not what happened but what people think happened."

In a survey of women voters in 2001, 75 per cent of those who watched four or more hours of television per day voted for Berlusconi, 35 per cent more than those who watched two hours or less.

But we run the risk of claiming he has mesmerised his nation, robbed them of their wits and turned them into automatons. If they vote him in again, image will have played a large part, but so will reality.

Berlusconi's most impressive achievement is to have entrenched the rule of anti-law. Italy's state mechanisms are ferociously, mindlessly bureaucratic and bizarrely incompetent.

Any routine task is beset with a forest of rules and obligations, and yet it takes only guile, know-how and connections to get things done without the state being wiser.

A reforming government would set as its urgent priority the modernisation of state apparatus, so they were efficient and more responsive to the citizens' needs. It would do the same with the justice system, designed by a malevolent surrealist.

Berlusconi has always been on the side of the artful dodgers, dedicated to making the life of the tax evader, the mafioso and other assorted criminals less stressful and more profitable. One of his first legislative acts was to decriminalise false accounting. He made money laundering harder to trace. He offered amnesties to tax dodgers and illegal builders.

He relentlessly insulted the judiciary, and helped defendants move their trials to other cities if they proved the judge was biased against them.

One of his most recent acts was to slash the length of white-collar trials, so thousands of people accused of such crimes, himself foremost, would dodge justice.

Despite all the hoopla of the Jowell affair, it is highly unlikely that either Berlusconi or David Mills will ever be found either guilty or not guilty of the crimes of which they are accused.

Those will simply be "extinguished".

Berlusconi has achieved a sort of revolution. His critics blame him for enacting laws to his own advantage, but this has not damaged him electorally because millions of ordinary Italians are equally gleeful at seeing the state become more cumbersome, more indulgent, less vigilant, less capable of fulfilling its duties.

If re-elected, he promises to bring his "reform" of the justice system to a conclusion, its total emasculation.

BIG BUSINESS

Berlusconi's interests cover television, press, publicity, football and politics.

* Mediaset - three TV channels attracting half of national viewers.

* Publitalia - the leading Italian advertising and PR agency.

* Arnoldo Mondadori - the largest Italian publishing house, whose publications include the most popular news magazine in Italy, Panorama.

* Newspapers - His brother controls Il Giornale, and his wife Il Foglio, both right-wing, pro-Berlusconi papers.

* Football - Berlusconi bought AC Milan, one of Italy's biggest teams, in the 1990s before entering politics.

* Politics - The Forza Italia (Go Italy!) party was founded only two months before gaining 21pc of the vote in 1994 elections. Berlusconi was made PM but lasted only a few months. His next tip at the job came in 2001.

- INDEPENDENT