Berlusconi's legacy lives on in populists like Donald Trump, says Italian sociologist
Paolo Gerbaudo remembers the late Italian PM as someone who preyed on and exploited cynicism
Silvio Berlusconi may be dead, but his legacy lives on in other brash and populist political leaders, says an Italian sociologist.
Berlusconi, a billionaire media mogul and Italy's longest-serving prime minister, has died at the age of 86 after being hospitalized for chronic leukemia.
Many in Italy are mourning the man who Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni called courageous, determined, and "one of the most influential men in the history of Italy." His supporters gathered outside his villa in Arcore on Monday, leaving cards and signs that read: "Thank you, Silvio" and "Goodbye, president."
"He was great, great. He was, he is and he will always be with me," supporter Maria Luiusa, who was among the mourners, said.
But the controversial leader's critics say he was self-serving and dangerous, pointing to a political career that teemed with corruption and scandal, and allegations of sexual misconduct.
Paolo Gerbaudo says Berlusconi rose to power by tapping into the darkest aspects of Italian culture, and making them worse. He is a sociologist at Scuola Normale Superiore in Pisa, Italy, and King's College in London, and the author of The Great Recoil: Politics after Populism and Pandemic. He wrote an opinion piece for the Guardian titled: "Silvio Berlusconi May be Gone, but Trump's Still Here. The Rotten Populist Legacy is Everywhere."
Here is part of his conversation with As It Happens host Nil Köksal.
If you had to describe Silvio Berlusconi in just a few words … how would you sum it all up?
Berlusconi was a man who was able to exploit cynicism [and] disillusion as political resources, [and] distrust in institutions as something that would allow for new right-wing politics
He managed to use this disillusion to paradoxically create yet more disillusion.
If we rewind and go back to 1994 when he first arrived on Italy's political scene, what did you make of him back then?
I was personally appalled.
I was very young at the time. I was 15 years old. And I was speaking with friends and relatives on both sides of the aisle.
Old traditional leftists then and right-wingers were appalled at this character, because he was corrupt, he was sleazy, he had no qualms basically breaking the law and he would ... even celebrate that. That was what was morally appalling for many people.
And he was clearly changing something in the Italian mind, in the Italian public imagination. He was bringing in extreme individualism.
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Did you or the people you were talking to back then ever imagine, then, that he would still be a political player up until his death almost 30 years later?
I think nobody expected Berlusconi to survive just so many downturns. He didn't really deliver. I mean, even his supporters, I think, would find very few policies that are more memorable or that changed Italy in the long term.
Yet, somehow, he always managed to re-emerge, partly because he controlled the entire media system directly or indirectly. And he actually showed more than any other politician ... the incredible power of news media by shaping political reality and also guiding political reality towards a certain end.
He faced many charges over the years, some for corruption, some related to alleged sexual misconduct. But he bounced back time and time again. So was it more than just having that hold on media?
Yes, of course. He was indicted. He was under investigation many times. Only on one occasion they eventually managed to prosecute him.
He really weaponized the faulty Italian judicial system in his favour, where if you have good lawyers, you can basically [keep] the ball rolling until the point where they cannot prosecute you anymore.
Women, of course, are not a monolith. But I wonder what his political success and what we've seen in terms of his public behaviour and the allegations against him, what has all of that meant for women in Italy?
Actually, he was strong in female electorates, especially in certain sections. For example, house makers ... an audience that was watching a lot of Berlusconi TV programs.
On the one hand, he managed to kind of speak, obviously, to men, to their hidden desires and in support of their machismo, their attitude towards women. And on the other hand, he also managed to speak to a section of women that perhaps did not identify themselves with feminism.
He really managed to create a mass culture where both the kind of male and female roles were geared towards this hyper-individualist culture and ultimately hyper-conservative culture.
Do you feel that there was anything positive that was accomplished during [his career]?
He banned smoking from bars.
You've also said that his legacy, his political legacy, extends far beyond Italy's borders — that he became a role model or a template of sorts for other politicians that we've seen. Who, in particular, are you thinking of when you talk about that template?
Donald Trump embodies Berlusconi's understanding that, these days, power is worn ... maintained on the media.
Trump owes so much to his media celebrity persona, The Apprentice and so on ... because in an era of individualism and distrust, ultimately you tend to trust the people you see a lot on the screen ... [and] today also on social media. You create an effective bond with someone you don't know, yet somehow you feel you know. And both Berlusconi and Trump use that very skilful.
Also [they both practice] this double discourse. On the one hand, always deny wrongdoing....On the other, that kind of winking at a certain kind of clever section ... of the electorate ... hinting to the fact that they were not as candid.
So there is a strange thing at play there, a sort of suspicion of the other that then turns into an acceptance that all human beings are evil, therefore, the ones that are more [blatantly] so, or admit to being like that, in a way, are superior to others and, therefore, are more trustworthy.
This is what I was referring to when I was saying that he's a politician that preys on disillusion, and creates more disillusion in the process.
If we're talking about Donald Trump, in particular, there are certainly legal troubles there that he is facing. And there are those who believe that that might derail his political future, his latest bid to get re-elected. What would you say to people who think that?
Trump, Berlusconi, and others, what they manage to do is to turn prosecutions, turn investigations, into a sort of martyrdom, into a situation where they say that they are being victimized. Berlusconi even said that he suffered more persecution than Jesus Christ.
Those trying to counter these kinds of populist leaders such as Silvio Berlusconi, what lessons should they take away?
One is to accept that politics these days, most politics, is a bit of a theatre kind of business, and where you need to take seriously people's need to link effectively to leaders.
So, ultimately, it boils down to creating alternatives that are attractive and that have real content and that promise something better in the future. If that fails, what you are left with is people like Berlusconi.
Interview produced by Kate Swoger.
