2023-06-13 21:54:57
No Italian politician of the last 30 years has had the influence of Silvio Berlusconi inside and outside his country, turned into reference figure of ultra-conservative populism long before such a political current proliferated in Europe and Donald Trump came to the White House. ‘Il Cavaliere’ was the fastest and most successfully able to take advantage of the collapse of the party system that emerged in Italy at the end of the Second World War. Much of the political universe that today supports the Government of Georgia Meloni is a direct consequence of his legacywhere the intensive use of politics as spectaclehe media control –first television, then also social networks–, the superabundance of resources through a great personal fortune and the effective use of great coups to captivate public opinion.
The birth of Come on Italy it served Berlusconi to have a power machine that would allow him to group the dispersed forces of the right. After its temporary disappearance from the scene, the progressive erosion of the center-left vote and the crises unleashed by the heirs of the Communist Party, plus the brilliant appearance and now in clear decline of the 5 Star Movement, a limited success anti-establishment populism unable to manage its contradictions gave it a second chance. This time as a component of a consolidated space after the appearance of The league and the rise of Brothers of Italy, heir party of post-fascism that in its day represented the Italian Social Movement. It matters little that Forza Italia currently lacks the institutional presence that it had in the past because what is really relevant is that it has managed to make it take root in the political space that it now governs a way of understanding politics in which everything is relativized: the collusion of public and private interest, the meddling of organized crime in the different rungs of the Administration, structural corruption and many other characteristic features of a political model within which Berlusconi swam like a fish in water. In the model forged by the prime minister with the longest years in office since Benito Mussolini, there is a toxicity ingredienta formula to take advantage of primary feelings, the objective of embodying and exalting the most topical and simplistic features of the Italian way of being, as Umberto Eco wrote in his day.
Esa tampering with the role of politicsin which the figure of Antonio Tajani to succeed Berlusconi at the helm of Forza Italia stands out, represents a real danger for democratic culture in Europe. The best measure of such risk is the praise that Vladimir Putin has dedicated to Berlusconi, but also the demonstrated ability of the extreme right to contaminate political behavior. It is enough to remember the times in which the former prime minister questioned the work of the judges, whom he came to accuse of carrying out a coup when they disqualified him in 2013 for tax fraud. More or less the same thing that Trump is doing now, in the wake of Berlusconi, claiming to be the victim of a witch hunt, and mobilizing crowds. That is also part of the inheritance that she leaves behind.
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