Berlusconi's path to power prison

Silvio Berlusconi

ROME - There are no names listed on the ballot papers that Italians will be marking today, apart from those of the parties - 40 in all - fighting to rule the country.

But no one is in any doubt that this is judgment day on one person: Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi.

Polling continues tomorrow, and after the polls close it will become clear whether Italy's richest man wins a new mandate or loses everything: the power and prestige of high office, his monopoly control of Italian television and, conceivably, his freedom.

If he wins, he will consolidate his power and move to protect himself permanently from the law. He has vowed to break the magistrates who have been on his tail for more than a decade.

Italy has a prosecuting system that enjoys remarkable freedom from political control and a feisty sense of the importance of its independence. A top priority for Berlusconi will be to castrate those turbulent prosecutors.

Over the past five years he has devoted most of his political energy to getting laws passed to protect himself: to allow trials to be transferred to more indulgent judiciaries, to give himself immunity from prosecution, to protect his media empire from assault on the grounds of its being a monopoly, and to forestall "conflict of interest" attacks on his position as media tycoon and Prime Minister.

He has passed these ad personam laws without betraying any sense that he was making indecent use of Parliament: For Silvio Berlusconi, l'etat, c'est moi (I am the state).

"Berlusconi," wrote one former editor, "seems devoted to the task of making the entire nation part of his clan."

If he loses, however, his choices will be far more limited. He has made it clear that he has no intention of going into exile or dropping out of politics. If his Forza Italia is once again the predominant party on the centre-right, he will insist on being leader of the opposition and will not give the new government a moment's rest.

Through his media assets he will ferociously harangue the Government and attempt to whip up mass protests against any assault on his concentration of media power.

He is a master of this. In 1984, during his early years as a media mogul, judges tried to close down his nationwide television network, which was operating in a legal vacuum. Yanking popular programmes such as Dallas and General Hospital from the screens, he gave the impression that this was the work of the judges, provoking an inundation of angry phone calls.
Berlusconi has a deep understanding of the value of political power. When he decided, against the advice of his advisers, to throw himself into politics in 1993, criminal cases against him were piling up. His empire was in debt and facing the threat of bankruptcy. Two months after announcing his intentions on his three TV stations, he was Prime Minister. The machinery - political, judicial and economic - that had threatened to destroy him was in his hands.

Seven months later, his coalition collapsed after a key ally rebelled against his autocratic style. In the following six years of centre-left rule, Berlusconi could have faced the dismantling of his empire and disgrace in the courts. Luckily for him, his adversaries on the left arrogantly believed that he was finished. They treated him as a partner and passed a law that had the effect of spinning out trials, giving him a better chance of seeing the cases against him killed off by the statute of limitations (as many of them were).

The centre-left did not bother to enact a law to bar a monopolistic media tycoon from returning to power. So it was with his empire intact that Berlusconi rampaged back to power in the 2001 election, his centre-right coalition gaining a crushing majority.

Massimo D'Alema, the former Prime Minister blamed for failing to take action to hamstring Berlusconi in the 1990s, has vowed not to make the same mistake next time.

D'Alema - president of the Left Democrats, the biggest opposition party - has promised that the centre-left under Romano Prodi would pass a law requiring a Prime Minister to put his commercial interests into a blind trust, as is done in the United States.

"We don't want revenge," he said, but Berlusconi's monopoly "is a democratic anomaly that one cannot find in any other country in the world."

The centre-left is also determined to abolish Berlusconi's latest legal reform, which halves the time allowed for white-collar criminal cases to negotiate all three levels of the court system before they are annulled by the statute of limitations.

The two cases before the courts in which Berlusconi is accused of corruption and other offences could be taken all the way to the highest court of appeal. And then the man who today is still Italy's Prime Minister, along with his close associates Marcello dell'Utri (sentenced to nine years in jail for Mafia offences) and Cesare Previti (five years for corruption) could actually find himself behind bars.

- INDEPENDENT